Only Half the Story from Dr. Kerchner
Kerchner: Imagine teachers as free agents before adopting pay for performance
In an interesting piece of commentary, Dr. Kerchner argues that the push for pay for performance in education might have the same impact as free agency in baseball. He raises the possibility of teachers unions functioning as “agents” for the best teachers, distorting salary schedules and teacher distribution as teachers are lured to the best, most financially rewarding jobs.
His analysis reminded me of a Star Trek episode where the crew is transported into an alternate dimension where everything is the opposite of reality. In the alternate universe, the Stark Trek Enterprise is feared for its brutality and its crew and captain are evil and greedy.
In order for Dr. Kerchner’s analysis to be accurate, we would actually have to live in an alternate universe where school systems recognized teacher talent as a valuable commodity, the primary function of unions was support and create great teachers instead of defending the worst and ensuring that everyone was paid based on seniority.
Currently, we have shortage fields such as math, science and special education where districts, no matter how willing they are to pay extra for high need teachers, can’t do it because of local teacher’s contracts and the blinding intransigence of our statewide teacher’s unions to consider differntial pay for skills (much less pay for talent). As a special education teacher, I used to get recruitment flyers in the mail from other districts who had a shortage of special educators. But the incentives they offered were never all that great.
Teachers with hard to find skills and those who are exceptional at improving student performance should be rewarded to for their work. There are a hell of lot more of them than top tier professors or baseball players. Many of them work wonders in difficult circumstances while the burned out or incompetent teacher down the hall gets paid a lot more because of how many years they’ve been teaching.
That’s the reality of our current system. The scenario Dr. Kerchner describes could only exist in an alternative universe.
2011 – Challenges and Hopes
2011 promises to be an interesting year. Jerry Brown is the Governor. Tom Torlakson is the SPI. There are new members of the education committees in both the Assembly and Senate. There are new players in the education landscape such as the recently established non-profit known as CORE, composed of seven of the more forward thinking, high-profile districts in the state. And there is a giant budget deficit with no prospect of a federal bail out (with Republicans now in charge of the House). In fact, the talk coming from the Republicans is about cutting the education budget, not adding to it.
Brown is expected to propose more cuts to K-12 and higher education when he comes out with his January budget. And with the loss of two years of federal funds to plug holes, a lot of districts will be in deep doo-doo (as a former President used to say).
The Governor is likely to put two options on the table to fix this problem for districts – more categorical flexibility – and a ballot initiative to raise taxes to bolster public education. The question that needs to be asked about both options is this – who benefits from them? If the answer is students, then I’m all for both. But if the answer is the adults that are dependent on school systems serving as glorified jobs programs with terrible results for students, than the answer is no. Categorical flexibility is great when it’s used in districts with leadership focused on improving student performance. But that’s not always the case. More dollars for public education is great if it’s used to help struggling students and retain vital progams. But not if its used to support underfunded pensions or unsustainable salary and benefit levels. The bottom line is dollars for the students first. They are the future of California.
Selling the Same Old Snake Oil: CTA Lauds QEIA, Despite Enormous Expense and Marginal Impact
Drug companies often hire researchers to evaluate the prescription medicines they’ve designed. Without fail, the studies reveal—surprise!—that the drugs work. Then, when they want the public to pay top dollar for a product, the drug companies dig up wise-looking doctors in lab coats who tout the “research-based” benefits in television commercials.
Last week, we learned that the California Teacher’s Association (CTA) has taken a page from the drug companies’ book. First, they asked a research firm to evaluate the nearly $3 billion education reform program that they helped design, promote and turn into law – the 2006 Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA). Then, when the researchers discovered that the program “worked,” CTA ran commercials on the radio touting its benefits.
Not surprisingly, the reforms included in QEIA are the same ones CTA has been promoting for years: reducing class sizes, expanding professional development, and adding staff. According to the commercials, these are the education reforms the state should be investing in.
Before buying these lines, we took a closer look at their claims.
Let’s start with the claim that, “for the 2009-10 school year alone, QEIA schools, on average, experienced nearly 50 percent higher growth on the California Academic Performance Index (API) than similar, non-QEIA schools.” Fifty percent seems high. But our question was: 50 percent of what? According to the report, QEIA schools made gains of 21.2 points, while the other similar schools moved 14.4 points. This difference of 6.8 points amounts to 50 percent, but given that this gain is calculated on a 1,000 point scale, 6.8 points is marginal at best. The average QEIA-funded school still needs to gain approximately 100 points in order to meet the state goal of 800.
So we looked in the report for more persuasive evidence of impact. We searched for information on how many QEIA schools had exited the final years of Program Improvement – the federal designation of a failing school. We searched for the number that had moved out of the lowest 20 percent of schools (only these schools were eligible for the program). We looked for overall state rankings and wondered how many students were passing the state tests.
Strangely, all of these critical signs of school improvement were missing. In fact, the study’s only evidence of “proven success,” was the extra 6.8 points. To satisfy our curiosity, we dug up some more data by visiting the California Department of Education website. We found that in 2009-10, close to 80 percent of QEIA sites were still in Program Improvement and more than 95 percent had yet to meet the state API target of 800. After the 2008-09 school year, 71 percent were still ranked in the bottom 20 percent of schools. On the state’s most recent exams, students in QEIA schools underperformed the state average by 20 points in English-Language Arts and by more than 10 points in math.
While we recognize this is a multi-year program, the fact still remains that these schools— which are receiving billions of dollars, are doing only marginally better than those who have not been pumped full of additional funds. As we illustrated in our May 2010 research brief, Keeping the Promise of Change: Why California’s chronically underperforming schools need bold reform, California has a long history of spending millions on school turnaround grants for marginal improvements in our state’s highest need schools.
The sad part of this is that the intended beneficiaries of those dollars, California’s mostly poor, African-American and Latino students, desperately need immediate funds to fundamentally reform their schools now. And although many local leaders and educators in the targeted school districts had ideas about how to spend school improvement dollars to significantly reform their schools, no one bothered to ask for their suggestions. Instead, QEIA was another piece of reform legislation dreamed up in the dark back rooms of Sacramento.
If asked, perhaps some of the state’s local education leaders would have taken a look at the broad evidence on the limited benefits of class size reduction and most of the other QEIA strategies—and would have instead chosen to invest in things more likely to result in long-lasting impact. Perhaps they would have recognized that the most important factor in improving a school isn’t the number of students in a classroom, but the quality of the teacher in the classroom. Then, they may have chosen to spend the dollars on evaluation systems that measure teacher effectiveness, incentives to attract the best teachers to high-need schools, support for struggling teachers, and rewards for the best teachers.
The CTA opposes any legislation that will allow us to reform the teacher evaluation system and use that information for high stakes staffing decisions. In contrast, reformers around the nation are recognizing that an effective teacher in every classroom is the most effective school reform strategy. By investing in reforms in the way we evaluate, develop, assign, support and reward our best teachers, we can expect to see gains in our neediest schools that are truly worth celebrating.
Ed Trust—West Urges New State Leaders to Prioritize Ending the Dropout Crisis; Highlights Urgent Need for Accurate Statewide Data on Full Extent of Crisis
(OAKLAND, CA) The Education Trust—West issued the following statement regarding the latest data on dropout and graduation rates:
The latest education data collected for the first time through the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS) and released yesterday by the California Department of Education (CDE) reveals that the dropout rate remains at crisis levels for the state’s Latino and African-American students.
According to the data, students of color, primarily Latino and African-American students, remain sharply overrepresented as a share of the state’s dropouts in 2008-09. Latino students, for example, who now equal half of California’s public school students, comprised 57 percent of all dropouts. Meanwhile, African-American students, who represent 7 percent of public school students, comprised 14 percent of dropouts.
Our new state leaders should be appalled by these numbers. We call on them to make a public commitment to ending this crisis once and for all by closing the opportunity and achievement gaps that are the cause of the dropout crisis.
With this new data, we are finally getting closer to telling the truth about how our schools are serving our students, especially students of color who now comprise the ‘new majority’ in our state. For years, we have not had an accurate picture of the full extent of the drop-out crisis in our state.
While the CDE has been using student-level data to calculate dropout and graduation rates for the last three years, this marks the first year these data were collected through CALPADS. By next year, CALPADS is set to provide the most accurate student-level graduation and dropout rates the state has ever had in place.
Without a statewide system, it is impossible to track students from one district to another or effectively target student recovery efforts. Without the real facts, it is impossible to hold leaders accountable for poor results.
In school districts around the state, 9th grade classes are invariably larger than 12th grade classes, sometimes three or four times as large. District and state leaders often argue students have left their districts and likely enrolled in another high school. This excuse allows local education leaders to often downplay the severity of the drop in enrollment from 9th to 12th grade.
To better illustrate the point, look at four randomly selected districts across the state. In 2006-07, McClatchy High School in Sacramento City Unified had 656 freshmen. In 2009-10, four years later, there were only 488 seniors. At Skyline High School in Oakland Unified, there were 625 students enrolled in 9th grade in 2006-07. In 2009-10, there were only 426 enrolled in 12th grade. Two of the starkest examples are Sunnyside High School in Fresno Unified and Fremont High School in Los Angeles Unified. In 2006-07, Sunnyside High School had 1,139 9th graders. In 2009-10, the number of 12th graders stood at 673. At Fremont High School, the number went from 1,781 students enrolled in 9th grade in 2006-07 to 470 enrolled in 12th grade in 2009-10.
Without a statewide education data system, we will never know the truth about the full extent of dropout crisis in our state. We will never be able to identify the sources of the dropout crisis in our school districts. We will forever allow districts to pass the buck on responsibility for meeting the educational needs of our highest-need and most vulnerable students without accurate information.
For this reason alone, the veto of CALPADS funding by the Governor was short-sighted and counter-productive. Quite fundamentally, without accurate data to identify the extent and the source of a problem, our efforts to find solutions cannot be measured and our limited education resources cannot be directed where they are most needed. CALPADS moves us in the direction of implementing the statewide data system that will provide policymakers, educators, and communities in every school district with the timely, meaningful, actionable data that they need to fix achievement and opportunity gaps that undermine the dreams of so many of California’s students.
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About The Education Trust—West
The Education Trust—West works for the high academic achievement of all students at all levels, kindergarten through college, and to forever close the achievement gaps separating low-income students and students of color from other youth. Our basic tenet is this— All children will learn at high levels when they are taught to high levels.
The Broken Promises of For-Profit Colleges
(OAKLAND, CA) The Education Trust—West issued the following statement regarding the release of a new report on for-profit colleges and universities by its national office, The Education Trust:
In California, for-profit institutions are growing at a rapid rate in a time when state support for higher education is declining. In opening their doors to—and often directly targeting—disadvantaged students, these schools offer the promise of college and career opportunities. But how effectively are they fulfilling students’ dreams of a great career, and at what cost?
In The Education Trust’s newly released report entitled, ‘Subprime Opportunity: The Unfulfilled Promise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities,’ the sharp increase in enrollment at for-profit universities is clearly presented. The number of students enrolled nationwide in for-profit colleges has increased 236 percent over the past 10 years.
For-profits serve a large proportion of students from California’s underserved communities and communities of color. In 2008, 29 percent of students in California for-profits were from low-income backgrounds, and 31 percent were African-American, Latino, or Native American. While for-profit institutions have the potential to provide more access to higher education, the report illustrates a crisis in lost opportunities. For-profit graduation rates are appallingly low. Only 27 percent of first-time bachelor’s degree-seeking students in California, who enroll full-time in for-profit institutions actually graduated after six years.
Students at for-profits often incur debts that can burden them and their families for decades, regardless of whether they graduate. While for-profit institutions insist that their low graduation rates are a function of the populations they serve, this report highlights the fact that some non-profit institutions with similar admissions policies and comparable percentages of low-income students are able to graduate their students at higher rates.
In addition, not only can tuition be higher at for-profit institutions, but the out-of-pocket cost for students after receiving grant aid can be higher than private, non-profit colleges and universities. As a result, students can incur huge, often lifelong debts that they are unable to repay.
“Given the expanding role of for-profits and their poor results, it is clear that they need greater oversight,” stated Arun Ramanathan, Executive Director of The Education Trust—West, a statewide education advocacy organization that works to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement for students of color and students in poverty. “The harsh reality behind many of the television commercials touting the benefits of for-profits is the individual broken dreams of thousands of California students. We owe our students a real chance at higher education and the great careers that will fulfill their dreams and re-invigorate California’s economy.”
When Minorities are the Majority
For the first time, Latino students are a majority of the state’s student population. Numbering more than 3.2 million, the Latino student population of California is larger than the individual student populations of every state in the Union except Texas. And when Latino students are combined with Asian, African American, Pacific Islander and mixed-race students, the “minority” students in California make up 73 percent of all students.
Clearly, when it comes to our public schools, the old notions of majority and minority have been turned upside down. One would imagine that this demographic shift would be accompanied by a similarly dramatic shift in the perspective of the policymakers in charge of our public schools. Unfortunately, our political and educational systems have a long way to go before they catch up with the needs of the new majority.
Too many California students fall through gaping holes in our college and career pipeline. On average, only six of 10 African American and Latino students graduate from high school. Last year, there were more Latino 12th-grade dropouts than Latino freshmen on a UC or CSU campus. For those African American and Latino students who get into our California State University system, less than four of 10 graduate in six years.
There are no silver bullets for this systemic breakdown of lost opportunities. California is at a generational crossroads, in which the old majority-minority paradigm and attendant deficit view of communities of color is not merely offensive, it’s downright dangerous. This isn’t a “minority” issue; it’s about the future of our state. Once the Baby Boomers retire in California, who will take their place? Where will the college graduates and highly trained workers who will fuel the next generation of California’s growth come from, if not the extraordinary mix of students in our schools?
The true heroes of California’s public schools are the children and their parents who desperately want a better future. What they need are courageous political leaders willing to grasp the scope of our demographic change and capitalize on the benefits of our students’ linguistic and cultural diversity in an increasingly globalized world. We need leaders willing to construct education policies aimed at both taking advantage of those strengths and making the hard budget and programmatic choices necessary to fund our children’s needs.
This means breaking free from the orthodoxy of both political parties – with public-employee unions on the left and taxpayer associations on the right, and shutting down the sideshow debates over charter schools or math pedagogy. It means finding Democrats willing to stand up to those teacher unions focused on meeting the demands of their longest-tenured members and Republicans willing to stand up to taxpayer associations that refuse to fund the educational needs of the new majority.
It means finding politicians of all stripes willing to focus on investing in the future of California instead of refighting the issues of the past.
Let’s stop calling them leadership until they show some
A pox on them all.
What is the legacy of our glorious political leadership over the last 5 years? A $25 billion dollar deficit, a broken college and career pipeline, a lot of talk about how they’re looking out for the future of the state and slapping themselves on the back. The solution has to be bi-partisan. It has to be informed by an analysis of what works and what isn’t. It should take look at structural issues that cause variations in funding and inefficiencies and must also consider the need for additional revenue. What’s is clear is that this cycle of lunacy cannot continue.
November 12, 2010 at 12:49 am arunramanathan Leave a comment
From Inputs to Outputs – It’s About time
Given my general flailing efforts at providing regular content for this blog, our wonderful staff is stepping up to the plate (it is October). This post is courtesy of our Senior Policy Analyst – Heather Barondess.
As we noted in an earlier post, we sponsored a conference on data last week in partnership with Children Now, Silicon Valley Education Foundation, and the Silver Giving Foundation. This was the first meeting about data that we held with a group of partners (known as the Information Alliance for Education). And yet, this conference was notably different than others of its kind: it signaled a shift in the way we in California think about education data, from “inputs” to “outputs,” using data as a tool to close achievement gaps.
Since 1997 or so, the discussion about longitudinal education data in California has been focused exclusively on “inputs”—developing and implementing the infrastructure of the data systems, ensuring the collection and management of quality data. And while there is clearly a tremendous amount of work to do on that front, as anyone familiar with the disaster we call CALPADS implementation knows well, the inputs are merely a means to an end. The end, of course, is the “outputs”—timely, meaningful, actionable data that educators can use to inform their practice and that and policymakers can use to make decisions about California’s public education system. Perhaps part of the reason that CALPADS development and implementation has been such a struggle is that the system is utterly disconnected from the people who want and need to use it to improve student achievement.
At our event last week, we highlighted educators from around the state who need and want to use data to inform their practice, and in the absence of a state system, built their own. School districts like Long Beach, San Jose, Fresno and Desert Sands, charters like Aspire and CCSA, and organizations like Cal-PASS and Teach for America showcased systems they each designed and built so that timely, meaningful, actionable data could be accessed by their educators. They are each doing some truly amazing work. But many of the over 250 attendees at the conference walked away from these presentations with similar conclusions: Why is everyone doing this on their own? In times of limited resources, isn’t this duplication of effort inefficient and wasteful? What about the school districts that can’t afford to do this? There must be a better way!
Yes, there is a better way. Our lunchtime presentation demonstrated one example—the Texas Student Data System. As was mentioned in a previous post, Texas is building a system that does everything our state should be doing. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation have partnered with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to build out the state’s decades-old data warehouse and create a system that provides educators with timely, meaningful, actionable data to improve student performance, all while easing the burden of data collection on school districts. And they are building the Texas Student Data System with “outputs” and the end-user in mind. Instead of taking a top-down, compliance-oriented approach to a statewide data system as California has done, Texas completed an extensive stakeholder engagement process so the system is perfectly connected to the people who want and need to use it to improve student outcomes.
There is still time for California to change its approach to longitudinal education data. In fact, this may be the perfect time, as Governor Schwarzenegger’s recent line-item veto of funding for the development of CALPADS threatens the completion of the project. Policymakers, advocates, educators, researchers and community members will be calling for the restoration of this funding as soon as the state legislature reconvenes, but with a renewed call to action. Yes, we absolutely need to restore funding on the inputs-side of CALPADS, because the system is a means to an end. But if the discussions had at our conference last week is any indication, an output-driven rationale may be what gets the funding needed to ultimately get data into the hands of those responsible for our students’ learning all across California.
Thoughts from PIE
Last week, I was at the meeting of Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) in Nashville. Representatives from over 20 states with active education reform efforts spent few days talking about their work and learning from each other. It’s the type of multi state collaborative work that happens so rarely in education. Too often, we spend time re-inventing the wheel when all we really need to do is borrow someone else’s wheel and decorate the rims. In states such as Illinois, Colorado, Florida, New York and Delaware, lawmakers have passed pioneering legislation to reform areas such as teacher evaluation and tenure. The take-away from this is that change is possible even in states with strong statewide unions and collective bargaining. Interestingly, most of these states are now wrestling with issues of implementation in the areas of collective bargaining, school turnaround, etc. While these states moved forward with the types of policy changes that are student-centered, Sacramento held the line or diverted itself into areas such as the parent trigger with less potential for broad-based change. The hope is that the increasing evidence and pressure from the good work other states will begin to penetrate the noggins of our leaders. There was a time when California was a reform leader. It’s far past time for that “time” to come again.
Getting Beat by Texas
Ok – the every Thursday thing didn’t work last week or the week before so no more promises. I’ll just post when I can. To round up the action from last week, on Tuesday we held a meeting in Silicon Valley at Microsoft called From Inputs to Outputs: The Power of Data and Technology to Close Achievement Gaps. The meeting was well attended and the feedback so far has been very positive. The point was to showcase the great work of school districts, charter management organizations and non-profits like Teach For America in using their data systems to improve employee performance and increase student achievement. The goal was to inform and motivate CA policymakers and thought leaders to build a statewide longitudinal data system that is useful for districts and schools – not just Sacramento. The lunch session was a fabulous presentation from the Dell Foundation on their work with the Texas Education Agency to build a data system that does everything our state should be doing. There are no excuses to be out-performed by Texas especially when so many CA organizations are doing great work and we are the center of the digital world.
Later in the week I was at PIE (Policy Innovators in Education), a meeting in Nashville of statewide Ed Reform organizations. I”ll provide a recap in my next post.
