How Not to Retain Teachers

From MSU,

Contrary to popular opinion, unruly students are not driving out teachers in droves from America’s urban school districts. Instead, teachers are quitting due to frustration with standardized testing, declining pay and benefits and lack of voice in what they teach....

Alyssa Hadley Dunn, assistant professor of teacher education, conducted in-depth interviews with urban secondary teachers before they quit successful careers in teaching. In a pair of studies, Dunn found that despite working in a profession they love, the teachers became demoralized by a culture of high-stakes testing in which their evaluations are tied to student scores and teachers have little say in the curriculum....

“As previous research has shown, it is not, contrary to popular opinion, students who drive teachers out of the classroom,” Dunn said.

But the negative factors – including lack of quality instruction time and low salaries – outweighed the positive aspects of teaching and led the teachers to quit. The average U.S. teacher salary decreased 1.3 percent between 2000 and 2013 – to $56,383, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Further, the United States ranked 22 out of 27 participating countries in a 2011 study of teacher salaries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In addition, lack of support contributed to teachers’ decision to quit. Dunn said teachers need more than professional development – they also need personal support, even if that’s a colleague or an organized group to talk to about the pressures they face.

As should be obvious, you're not going to attract new, highly qualified students into teaching programs if these trends continue. You'll get some students who really want to be teachers despite the declining compensation and status of the job, but on the whole you're likely to see a less qualified pool of students entering teaching schools.

Year-Round Schools Are Not a Magic Answer

Recently on Real Time, The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis couldn't resist taking a dig at teachers and unions,

What about the teacher's unions, who wanna... the teacher's unions who insist on this 19th century educational process, I mean, we take summers off because that's when people used to farm and stuff, 'cause they, 'cause the teachers want to go on vacation.

The statement itself is far from a monument to good logic, but more than that, given how short the statement is, it's remarkable for its inaccuracy.

What about the teacher's unions, who wanna... the teacher's unions who insist on this 19th century educational process...

Teacher's unions? As Lewis should know, not every state has teacher's unions, and the states that ban teacher unions have terrible educational records. Although teacher's unions can complicate some experiments, due to such factors as contractually negotiated rules about the treatment of teachers and assignments to schools, many public schools have experimented with different educational models - open schools, Montessori, extra school hours, year-round school, and the like. It's not the teacher's unions that have been attempting to dictate and micromanage the classroom, or impose more and more standardized tests with higher and higher stakes, the sort of approaches that stifle classroom innovation and entrench the "19th century educational process". If administrators come up with innovations that they believe will move their schools out of the "19th century educational process", they are free to propose those ideas to teacher's unions and, to the extent that a collective bargaining agreement interferes with their proposals, negotiate for changes in the contract. Where would Lewis suggest that I look for these reform ideas that are being stifled by teacher's unions? When I try to find proposed innovations in pedagogy from school administrators, the silence is deafening - and I seem to instead find administrators trying to force schools that aren't following the standard model to get back with the program.

...this 19th century educational process, I mean, we take summers off because that's when people used to farm and stuff...

It's somewhat amazing to me that Lewis can both recognize that what is often referenced as the "factory school" model is a "19th century educational process" and then attribute it to farming - As if we used to be a fully industrialized society until the "agricultural revolution" pushed us into agriculture. Lewis might look at major cities within the United States, where even in the 19th century few to no students would have been involved in agriculture, and ask himself, "Why would those nations and cities have adopted an agricultural calendar?" As for agriculture, does Lewis truly believe that the summers were the busy season for 19th century farms? Plant in the spring, harvest in the fall, and... what am I missing? And why do most other nations, including those with little connection with agriculture, offer summer recesses.

As it turns out, the summer recess is a product of industrialization. Once you move significantly past the one room schoolhouse, schools needed to start standardizing grades and admission dates. Urban schools evolved from a year-round schedule (because factory workers didn't want to have to worry about child care) to one that better facilitated the administration of schools and the standardization of educational materials, textbooks and curricula across a district. As should be no surprise, prior to this "19th century educational process", schools in agricultural areas would often have breaks in spring and fall instead of the summer.

...'cause they, 'cause the teachers want to go on vacation.

I can almost imagine young Matt Lewis, teary-eyed at the thought of leaving his school for a couple of months, and absolutely perplexed by the joy of his peers at having the summer off. I nonetheless suspect that he may have noticed that it was not only teachers who were happy to get a couple of months off during the summer. As much as parents can find it difficult to arrange for day camps during the summer break, it's also nice to have a period of time when you can schedule a vacation without having to worry about the kids missing school.

Lewis is implying that the biggest problem with our (non-)farm based school calendar is the summer vacation, and that year-round schooling would be a miracle cure for all that ails public education but for those pesky teacher's unions. (He is apparently not aware that the summer camp industry has lobbied hard, for decades, against year-round schooling.) But look around: Where can I find any people or groups who are actively trying to make schools run year-round? When I look at charter schools, I see some that have expanded the number of classroom hours, but even KIPP schools take a summer recess. When I look at private schools, those who are most beholden to the wishes of parents, I again see them offering a summer recess. When I look at international schools in the southern hemisphere, where the public schools have a summer recess over our winter months, I find that many follow the schedule of the northern nations from which their students hail. As previously mentioned, states that ban teacher's unions have summer vacations. Very few people are actively seeking to change the status quo, so there's virtually nothing for teacher's unions to oppose.

Why don't more schools follow a year-round calendar? From an educational standpoint, the first question is whether that "year-round calendar" will involve more days of classroom instruction or if it will instead mean having more frequent, longer holidays during non-summer months and a shorter recess in the summer. As it turns out, kids backslide over any holiday. While there's going to be more backsliding over a long holiday than over a short holiday, the important consideration is the cumulative effect, as well as how much classroom time it takes to bring students back up to speed after a holiday. Were Lewis to investigate, he would find that experiments with year-round schooling have not improved student performance, with the most likely explanation being that the cumulative effect of longer vacations spread throughout the year roughly equals the impact of the longer summer break. Year-round schools also report higher problems with absenteeism - a problem that echoes some of the concerns that led to the "19th century educational process" in the first place, as absenteeism was higher prior to the standardization of the school year.

If you shift the subject to "more classroom hours", that's really not a discussion of summer vacations - it's a discussion of how many days per year and hours per day a student should spend in school. Programs like KIPP and similar experiments by public schools suggest that, particularly with a vulnerable student population, more hours in school will boost performance. The picture gets more complicated, though, when you start looking at pedagogy, or looking beyond those disadvantaged populations, and you find that there are nations with high performing students who receive no more hours of classroom instruction, and perhaps less classroom instruction, than students in a typical U.S. school.

When you increase the number of hours of classroom instruction, or expand the number of days in the school year, costs go up. And no, contrary to Lewis's suggestion it's not about greedy teachers who insist upon getting a pay increase merely because we want them to work more days and hours (can you imagine such a thing?), but it also means that you must provide support staff, transportation, utilities and supplies, and administration for those extra hours and days of education. If you want to expand school into the summer months you may have to add air conditioning, as well as construct shaded areas in playgrounds while installing additional water fountains. School administrators often schedule building maintenance over the summer, and having students present complicates scheduling as well as creating issues with exposure to construction areas, building materials, paint fumes, and the like.

In short, Lewis is wrong that the primary impediment to year-round schooling is teacher's unions, is wrong that we have summer holidays because of an agricultural calendar, and is wrong in his implication that year-round schooling would remedy the problems with our nation's schools. He's correct that teachers like their summer vacations, but... who doesn't? At the end, is that what we're really talking about - jealousy that teaching is one of the few professions in this nation that enjoys a significant amount of vacation time? If not, assuming that they see their public role as involving more than just teacher-bashing, people like Lewis should learn the facts before they attempt to influence the debate.

Illogical Attacks on Teacher Compensation

I recognize that criticizing a Wall Street Journal editorial content constitutes going after some of the lowest of the low-hanging fruit, but this one exemplifies the point I attempted to make the other day about school quality:

Invest in education? Federal per-pupil spending rose by an inflation-adjusted 375% between 1970 and 2010, yet test scores in math, science and reading remained essentially flat over the same period. Moreover, much of that money has been directed at increasing the size of the education workforce. Over the past 40 years, public school employment has grown 11 times faster than student enrollment, according to federal data compiled by Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute.

Which is a long way of saying, "the cost of public education has risen over time," and not much else. It certainly tells you nothing either about how many students are in a typical classroom or about how teacher pay compares to that of similarly educated professionals. The assumption appears to be that if the cost of education rises, student performance should also rise, but no support is provided for why there should be any such correlation.

For example, since the 1970's special education has become a huge budget item, and the accommodation of students with other special needs has become a requirement. My mother entered a classroom of developmentally disabled students in the 1970's, and found one student who had a normal intellect. He was blind, and the school district had no other program for him. Today that would be unthinkable - and that's a good thing. Another big cost increase is technology - schools in 1970 did not have computers or Internet. Another, the cost of employee health insurance. It's easy to find huge increases in the cost of education that no one would reasonable expect to increase overall student performance. The emphasis on completing high school results in students with lower test performance remaining in school for additional years - increasing cost while decreasing overall scores as compared to an era when the same student would have dropped out. We also need to consider whether teachers were substantially underpaid in 1970.

But the problem with the argument goes beyond the declaration, "I have two variables, and no evidence that they're related - why can't I see a correlation?" The poor reasoning is layered.

If you believe that we need better teachers, you also understand that we have to attract better candidates into the teaching profession, or at a bare minimum provide better training and support to the teachers who are in the profession. If you believe that taking away teachers' autonomy, job protections and benefits will result in a better pool of teachers, you're a fool - you're driving the people who have options away from the profession. Yet you're no less foolish if you believe that we can reinvent teacher education, attract better candidates to the profession, and retain the best teachers without spending more money. Seriously - it's either invest more in research, training, salaries and support or wave a magic wand, and our nation seems to be fresh out of magic wands.

You Want Bad Schools. Yes, You.

That, at least, is the position of the inevitable Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. Oh, sure, right now he's whining that the Obama Administration is quoting him in context, but that it shouldn't matter because teacher compensation is a state issue.

"He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers," Romney said Friday, speaking about President Obama's efforts to expand government. "Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It's time for us to cut back on government and help the American people."...

Asked about the Obama campaign's criticism by Fox News, Romney rejected their attacks.

"That's a very strange accusation. Of course, teachers and firemen and policemen are hired at the local level and also by states," Romney said. "The federal government doesn't pay for teachers, firefighters or policemen. So obviously that's completely absurd."

The real flaw in Romney's defense is that it's a cloud of smoke. The fact checkers seem to be coming back with the conclusion that Romney is wrong, given the amount of federal funding that state and local governments receive - but that's not actually the point. Romney was blessing the anti-union movement, and blessing the entire enterprise of cutting compensation and limiting or eliminating the collective bargaining rights of government employees.

And in doing so, Romney was blessing the idea that teachers are overcompensated, that public schools are adequately staffed (or overstaffed), and that's the way people want it.

You know what else? If you're a typical voter these days, he's probably right.

Unless you're a parent with kids in public schools, odds are you'd are you don't care about school funding or would just as soon see it cut. Even if you are a defender of your local schools, odds are you don't care about schools that aren't local. If you hear about problems in inner city schools, odds are you write them off to incompetence and corruption and have no interest in increasing their funding to "fix" the problems. Yes, there are exceptions, perhaps you're one of them, but if you look at the overall trend in public education and the lack of public response, it's difficult to avoid those conclusions.

As I wrote in response to Matt Miller the other day, if you believe we can't get better teachers without spending more money, we're not getting better teachers.

But We Won't Be Paying Teachers More Money

Matt Miller offers a well-intentioned thoughts on how to improve teacher quality:

What about starting salaries of $65,000 rising to $150,000 for teachers (and more for principals)?

Do we also have a shortage of principals? I recall hearing that suggestion a decade or so ago, but I've not heard anything lately. Or is the thinking here that principals have to be paid considerably more than the teachers in their schools, even if we have sufficient qualified candidates to fill open positions at present salaries?

What Miller is proposing is a massive increase in teacher salaries. If Miller looks at what the Republican Party is attempting to accomplish through its persistent attacks on teachers unions, as well as teacher compensation and benefits, he will find that his argument for increased teacher salaries is likely at best to be supported by only the Democratic Party. But if he looks at what his happening across the board, red state or blue, he will find that due to budget constraints teacher salaries aren't going up, teacher benefits are going down, and class sizes are getting larger. Even if we assume the necessary political will to increase teacher salaries, and even if we assume that there is a way to get the Republican Party on board, where will the money come from?

By way of example, Joanne Jacobs likes to post graphs from right-wing "school reformers" to argue that we've had massive increases in education costs over the pat four decades with only slight increases in student performance. While the argument she attempts to shorthand with the graphs is inherently (and I think intentionally) misleading, the fact is that education costs have risen significantly, and that the biggest part of that increase is in the form of increased teacher compensation - salary, benefits, and payment of pensions.

The early years are skewed by something Miller identifies, "Up through the 1970s, the quality of the teacher corps in the United States was, in effect, subsidized by discrimination", and part of the increase is attributable to teacher salaries rebounding from a prior decade of very low growth. But if the political right is already engaging in demagoguery over schools costing "too much", teacher salaries being "too high", and the like, does Miller truly believe they're going to get on board with a reform that is going to immediately add 20-30% to the cost of an average pupil's education? And can we admit up front, particularly if we don't change the scale for the Y-axis (change that scale and you can make that near flat line look like it's rocketing upward), the increased salary is not going to have a material effect on the ostensible graph of improvement in student performance?

The worst part is, I agree with Miller that present teacher salaries are not sufficient to draw additional, highly qualified students to the profession. The students currently entering teaching schools, and currently graduating from them, are the students who are attracted to the profession at present levels of compensation. I just don't see that there's any chance of significantly increasing teacher compensation in the present political or economic climate.

And federally funded “West Points” of teaching and principal training to model for the nation how it can be done?

Our nation has a lot of teacher colleges, many of which are state schools. For all of their faults, what would the federal government be bringing to the table? Is Miller speaking of stand-alone teaching schools and, if so, won't that in fact deprive student teachers of the opportunity to take challenging classes in the disciplines in which they intend to teach? If not, other than "more federal money", what will these "West Points" offer that other teaching schools do not? What secrets will the federal government uncover that are presently not known by teachers and teaching schools?

That is to say, this is an interesting proposed experiment, but I seen no reason to believe that it would be a wise or productive use of money.

And new federal cash for poor districts now doomed by our 19th-century system of local school finance, so they can compete in regional labor markets for the talent that today gravitates to higher-paying suburbs?

If Miller looks at the dollars, he will find that his concept of inner city schools "doomed" by low local property taxes are, for the most part, funded as well as their suburban counterparts, in some cases better. He will find that inner city schools that receive funding that far outstrips the national average still significantly underperform. He will find that the major differences are not in salary, but in administrative competence, quality of school facility, quality of teaching peers, and the nature of the student body - and let's not forget, unless you want to live in the inner city community you serve, more commute time - are all factors that will deter students from applying for or staying with inner city schools.

It's reasonable to point out that some highly qualified teachers choose to take a financial hit in order to teach at private schools because they find the work environment more attractive. There are teachers who choose to work in inner city schools, because they feel that's where they can make the biggest difference, and that's great. But unless you make inner city schools an attractive place to work, you're going to have to find a lot more money to attract teachers from better working environments, and even with higher salaries you may continue to struggle. Don't take it from me - take it from a recovering idealist.

And shrinking today’s 15,000 unwieldy, archaic local school districts (where we’re also an international outlier) to, say, a more manageable 60 — one in each state plus 10 big urban districts, as former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner has suggested?

Consolidating school districts into larger units, or even statewide districts, is an interesting idea. It clashes with some of the deeply rooted concepts of what issues should be handled at a local level, as opposed to the state or federal level, but the amount of top-down interference with public schools is forcing a certain uniformity so the change might not be as jarring as one might think. But if you look at school districts like Detroit's, it's difficult to see how management by the state is going to have a significant impact on its problems. The state financial takeover of the schools has not transformed them, nor have the many years of additional per pupil funding pumped in by the state. I'm not going to argue that the school board from which the state assumed control was at all impressive, but at a certain level we risk doing little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

But, no... it's not going to happen. Why not? Because wealthy, well-connected parents in quality school districts are not going to go along with a realignment of their districts into statewide districts with equal funding and resources. They're not going to go along with having their children's teachers transferred to other parts of the state where there is "greater need". And if you somehow force through the change, they're going to create local charters, lobby incredibly hard for vouchers, and lobby for changes in property taxes - if that money can't go to better local schools they'll want it to go to other local needs, or to have it stay in their pockets. You can call me cynical if you want but, go ahead, convince me that I'm wrong.

Let's also not forget something that is lurking in the background: the persistent attacks on teaching as a profession, and the persistent intrusion of "teach to the test" even in good school districts, is demoralizing. If a good student is inspired to consider teaching by virtue of a salary increase that makes the classroom more attractive, that student is still going to choose a different profession if they see that they will not have any professional autonomy or discretion as teachers. Good teachers are already leaving the profession, and leaving behind a population of teachers that is less competent, less involved, less engaged. It's difficult to see how anybody wins, even the demagogues.

Special Education and Teacher Ratings

From Schools Matter, Confessions of a 'Bad' Teacher.

When is an Unlicensed, Inexperienced, Untested Rookie "Highly Qualified"?

When the organization behind that rookie's placement has immense lobbying power.

Last week, an "anomaly amendment" was inserted into Congress's Continuing Resolution (a stop-gap that allows the government to continue functioning in the absence of an official budget.) The amendment in question allows teachers who are in an alternative certification program, regardless of the amount of time they've been teaching or whether or not they've obtained licensure in their respective states, to be considered "highly qualified" under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) regulations. It comes as no surprise that the amendment received a major push from Teach for America, a program whose mission is to place inexperienced teachers, most of whom are fresh out of college, in high needs schools across the country.

Is the goal here actually to staff troubled schools with highly qualified teachers? Or is it to maximize the size and budget of organizations like Teach For America, even if it diminishes overall teacher quality? (Via Schools Matter.)

A Feel Good Story About Teachers....

... That's isn't properly supported by the data. Yes, it's nice to think that a kindergarten teacher can have a profound effect on the future incomes and success of her students, and yes there probably is some truth to it - it makes sense that your future education will build upon the foundation laid in kindergarten. It also makes sense that a more positive kindergarten experience, even if it's simply at an emotional level, will make it more likely that a child will come into future years of schooling with the expectation of further positive experiences. But...

The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?

The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.

But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.

There are two issues here. The first is that the mere fact that the statistical significance of a finding is supposedly "too big to be explained by randomness" doesn't mean that it isn't, in fact, the result of chance. A very interesting New Yorker article recently discussed a number of studies in which statistically significant results, sometimes well beyond what researchers believed could be explained by chance, were followed in subsequent studies by a regression to the mean. That is, the initial findings were outliers or were otherwise flawed. The article doesn't mention this, but sometimes data sets are analyzed by computer for hundreds or thousands of factors - and when you do that, odds are you're going to find some outliers at the p < .01 or even p < ..001 level.

Also, with due respect to Sherlock Holmes, ruling out the obvious does not necessarily mean that you are correct that only one explanation remains, or that the one explanation you identify is the solution to your puzzle. If you come up with a hypothesis that lies outside of your data, you should attempt to replicate your experiment while collecting a more complete set of data.

Even if the answer does lie with the quality of the kindergarten teacher, the questions are raised, what qualities made the difference and were they consistent between teachers? If some teachers were introducing basic math and reading concepts, while others were focusing on play and socialization, that could explain why one group performed better than the other, but that's really a question of priority as opposed to teacher quality.

When it comes to schools we're better off erring on the side of quality, top to bottom, so to the extent that "great kindergarten teachers cause significant increases in lifetime earnings" means that as a society we'll emphasize finding and retaining great kindergarten teachers, I'm all for it. But, perhaps thanks to my kindergarten teacher (although when I started school in the U.K. I didn't attend a kindergarten, as such) I don't accept "We can't figure out what else caused the difference so it must be the teachers" with sound science.