A reader-friendly version of the study, “Great Teaching: Measuring its effects on students’ future earnings,” by Friedman, Chetty and Rockoff, appears in the Summer 2012 edition of Education Next.

Because the study generated a great deal of attention, Education Next asked four experts to comment on the study’s implications for public policy. Here are their responses:

Low-Performing Teachers Have High Costs - By Eric A. Hanushek

Profound Implications for State Policy - By Chris Cerf and Peter Shulman

More Evidence Would Be Welcome - By Dale Ballou

Implications for Policy Are Not So Clear - By Douglas Harris

HT: Jay Greene

Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff have carried out a remarkable study, but I suspect it will be misinterpreted.

The main contribution of their research is quantifying the importance of teaching. Specifically, the authors conclude that students taught by a more effective teacher will collectively earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their lifetimes, and that good teachers similarly influence college going and teenage pregnancy. Because each teacher influences thousands of students over a career, this suggests that one excellent teacher could generate enormous social and economic benefits.

I find these results plausible, though there are some real limitations. The researchers present convincing evidence that their estimates of teacher contributions to student achievement are valid and do not simply reflect differences in student background. But this type of “selection bias” could influence effects on earnings and other long-term outcomes. So, the most intriguing findings here are also still somewhat tenuous. Given the small size of the effects for each individual student, even a slight bit of selection bias could dramatically alter the estimated benefits of an individual teacher.

Perhaps the more important question is, what do the results mean for policy? Policymakers had already concluded that we need to do more to improve teaching. As a result, schools and districts around the country are now experimenting with a wide range of policies to improve teacher performance measures and use these to make high-stakes decisions such as dismissing low-performing teachers.

And here is the rub. The authors, recognizing the interest in dismissing low performers, conduct a simulation of such a policy and emphasize these results in their summary. But it would be a mistake to interpret even these careful simulation results as evidence about actual policies. The effects of actual policies never play out the way simulations suggest, because policies are rarely implemented as intended and the inevitable secondary effects are hard to predict.

There are substantial legal, political, and organizational problems associated with dismissing low performers. For example, in a simple system, many teachers would be fired unjustifiably as a result of imprecision in the performance measures—a lawsuit waiting to happen. High stakes associated with the tests will inevitably distort student scores and the assignment of students to teachers, worsening the measurement problem. A more elaborate evaluation system can address this measurement problem, but such systems are costly, and those costs are not considered here. Such an approach could also change the makeup of the profession, in both positive and negative ways.

There is good reason to think that dismissing more low-performing teachers would improve student outcomes, but the Chetty study is not designed to tell us much about that, or about any of the various policy alternatives. What it does provide is the best evidence yet that teachers matter a great deal and that we should continue looking hard for ways to improve teaching and learning in schools.

Douglas Harris is associate professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

Over the last decade, research in public education has led us to three conclusions about the teaching profession: teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student achievement; there is wide variation in teacher effectiveness; and those differences really matter for kids.

These findings should have profound implications for policymakers and practitioners. Now that we have evidence attesting to the enormous contributions of the most effective educators, if we are truly serious about improving student learning and closing the achievement gap, we must think anew about teacher recruitment, placement, evaluation, professional development, retention, and separation.

Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff have helped advance the conversation through their longitudinal study of 2.5 million students over a 20-year span. The correlation between teacher effectiveness (as demonstrated by value-added student growth measures) and student life outcomes (higher salaries, advanced degrees, neighborhoods of residence, and retirement savings) is staggering; it’s not an exaggeration to say that great teachers substantially improve students’ future quality of life and those students’ contributions to the common good. Conversely, traditional education output measures like student course completion, grades, and diplomas have a substantial degree of subjectivity across schools and districts and can potentially provide a misleading account of a student’s college and career readiness.

In New Jersey, we are assessing where our finite resources are best invested. The Chetty study contrasts the opportunity cost of providing retention incentives to effective teachers with that of investments to attract new teachers. Similar cost/benefit questions arise in relation to shaping teacher-placement strategies, developing career ladders, and providing meaningful professional development. To make informed decisions in these areas, we first need to be able to differentiate among our teachers and, ideally, identify strengths to build on and weaknesses to address. That’s why the foundation of our human-capital efforts is a new educator-evaluation framework that’s substantially based on student learning outcomes. If we are able to assess an educator’s effectiveness accurately, we can improve the array of policies and practices that influence our teachers and school leaders. The hallmark of these efforts in our state will not be based on separating ineffective teachers but rather on using evaluation results to target resources toward improving teaching practice.

New Jersey is still in the early innings of this work. Eleven districts, through a pilot initiative, have joined with the state to create the new teacher-evaluation system. This collaboration has helped jump-start this work across the state and shed light on the many significant challenges associated with overhauling the hoary systems in place, such as measuring student achievement in “untested” grades and subjects, ensuring inter-rater agreement and accuracy of teacher practice observations, and ending the long-standing culture of “The Widget Effect.”

The primary takeaway from this critically important research, as the study authors note, is that “finding policies to raise the quality of teaching… is likely to have substantial economic and social benefits in the long run.” We agree with this conclusion, and New Jersey, like other states, must develop such policies over time through a confluence of national and local research, lessons learned from our classrooms, and an unwavering resolve to provide our students with high-quality teachers.

Chris Cerf is acting commissioner of education for the State of New Jersey. Peter Shulman is chief talent officer for the New Jersey Department of Education.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

The new study by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff  asks whether high-value-added teachers (i.e., teachers who raise student test scores) also have positive longer-term impacts on students, as reflected in college attendance, earnings, avoiding teenage pregnancy, and the quality of the neighborhood in which they reside as adults. As a step on the way, the researchers investigate whether such teachers have been properly identified, that is, are the teachers who are producing larger achievement gains from year to year, according to value-added models, actually responsible for those gains? The paper contains valuable evidence indicating that the answer is yes. First, the authors obtain data on family background from federal tax returns not normally available to researchers. This allows them to measure family characteristics (such as parental income) not typically controlled for when teacher value-added is estimated. If introducing such factors reduces the explanatory power of teacher value-added, it is an indication that the value-added estimate was inflated, and that part of what had been attributed to the teacher was in fact due to favorable family circumstances. The study authors find that including such controls does not detract from the explanatory power of estimated value-added.

The authors also investigate whether high-value-added teachers have benefited by being assigned students who would have made greater gains on standardized tests for unobserved reasons (such as family factors that cannot be gleaned even from tax returns). This is normally difficult to do, given the possible influences on the way students are assigned to teachers. The report succeeds by focusing on average test gains in grades within schools where mean value-added within a grade has been affected by the movement of teachers in and out of the grade. What matters for this analysis is not which student was assigned to which teacher within the grade, but how the movement of teachers has altered the quality of teaching in that grade as a whole. It turns out that subsequent gains within these grades are close to those what would be expected from the change in mean teacher value-added. Provided the movement of teachers in and out of a grade has not changed the makeup of students enrolled in that grade, this finding supports the conclusion that measured value-added of teachers is an unbiased predictor of future test-score gains, as there appears to be no other explanation for the resulting improvement in test scores.

When the authors examine the association between teacher value-added and outcomes in young adulthood, however, for the most part they do not undertake the same tests to ensure that these associations are not artifacts of the way students are sorted among teachers. They do not introduce controls from tax returns to see whether the explanatory power of teacher value-added for later earnings, college attendance, and other factors, falls. Nor, with the exception of college attendance, do they test for the influence of unobservable factors in the manner just described.

The omission of such tests undercuts their claim to have demonstrated that high-value-added teachers contribute to better long-term outcomes. Without the same rigorous tests, we cannot be sure that the observed association between teacher value-added and long-term outcomes was not the result of other factors (for example, efforts made by parents with the strongest parenting skills to ensure their children were assigned to the most effective instructors). It is not enough to show that omitted family characteristics have not been confounded with value-added as a predictor of future test-score gains. The factors that shape test performance are not necessarily those that influence future earnings or the avoidance of a teenage pregnancy. Character education and the values parents impart to their offspring are likely to matter for the latter in ways that they do not for cognitive functioning.

In short, the authors provide a persuasive answer to the question: does a high-value-added teacher actually raise subsequent test scores? They have not so far provided equally persuasive evidence answering the question: does a high-value-added teacher improve subsequent life outcomes?

Dale Ballou is associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University and associate director of the National Center on Performance Incentives.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

The movie Waiting for Superman chronicles the role of chance in determining the fate of a relatively small number of families trying to enroll their children in oversubscribed charter schools. Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff document the much larger problem of ineffective teachers scattered about a multitude of schools. From the viewpoint of the student, this latter issue may appear to be chance when class assignments are made, and when some get good teachers and others get ineffective ones. From the standpoint of the system, however, it is not chance but mismanagement that allows ineffective teachers to continue harming students.

Chetty et al. have produced new and elegant estimates of how teacher effectiveness relates to long-run student outcomes. As economists are prone to do, they have produced a paper that deals with a long list of technical questions that have absorbed the scientific literature on teacher effectiveness. Their work is thorough, convincing, and scientifically innovative.

The overarching idea of the paper is linking gains from having a high-value-added teacher in grades 4–8 to subsequent long-run outcomes, including college attendance, earnings, and family creation. But, from the outset, they must deal with the two primary challenges leveled at teacher value-added measures based on student test scores. First, are these  estimates biased measures of effectiveness? The answer is no. The wealth of information that Chetty et al. have about families from tax records and some clever analyses effectively rule out the possibility that conventional estimates of value-added based only on school administrative data are misleading. Second, do the effects of good teachers (or bad teachers) quickly fade away? Again, the answer is no. Even as these students leave school and enter into adult careers in their late 20s, the significant trace of their early schooling is quite discernible.

But the warranted attention to this work derives not from its technical aspects but from the policy implications of the results. The fundamental finding is that good teachers have an extraordinarily powerful impact on the future lives of their students. Symmetrically, the researchers show the lasting damage that poor teachers have on the lives of their students. This work sweeps away a variety of attempts to deflect questions about the importance of teacher quality and our ability to identify it. It also brings us back to the question of informed policy.

As the evidence on the importance of teacher quality has grown, policy discussions have actually moved. In the beginning, there were doubts about the impact of teacher quality relative to families, curriculum, or a host of other influences. Those doubts have largely receded and been replaced by questions of how policy should proceed. And here is where the additional evidence presented in the Chetty study comes into play.

Much of the discussion has centered on the political difficulties of reforming the schools by dealing with the problem of the most ineffective teachers. The unions have dug in their heels, resisting any change that does not ensure perfect identification of the worst teachers. Their resistance has resulted in many policymakers simply asserting that it is too politically costly to make active decisions about teacher effectiveness and instead looking to alternatives such as more professional development, better mentoring, or heightened requirements of certification.

Chetty et al.’s evidence shows that bad teachers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income and productivity each year that they remain in the classroom. These costs are large enough that failing to address them is simply inexcusable. It is time that we develop policies that truly are designed to help our children and not just the adults in schools today.

We have recently seen a number of brave states step out and legislate better evaluations of teachers including, when possible, the use of value-added measures. Coupled with both pay and tenure reforms, these movements show real promise and should be encouraged on a wider scale.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

In 2005, Education Next sent Mark Zanger, a restaurant critic, to Boston schools to report on the state of school lunches. Read “What’s For Lunch” to get the inside scoop. Ron Haskins wrote about the federal school lunch program in “The School Lunch Lobby: A charmed federal program that no longer just feeds the hungry,” in the same issue.

The questions addressed by the panel included:

Is digital learning education’s latest fad or its future?
What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology’s potential?
Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about?
Who will resist—and do their objections have merit?

If you missed the event, you can watch it above or read more about it here.

For more on this topic from Ed Next, please see

“Bright Spots Shine in Blended, Online Learning,” by Michael Horn

“Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?” by June Kronholz

“The Flipped Classroom,” by Bill Tucker

Is digital learning education’s latest fad or its future? What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology’s potential? Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about? Who will resist—and do their objections have merit? Fordham is bringing together experts on all aspects of education policy—from governance to finance to human capital—to examine how policymakers can make digital learning a transformative tool to improve American education…and weigh the dangers that lie ahead.

More information on the events and the panelists can be found here.

This Fordham Foundation documentary  provides a look at the challenges and successes of a rural Appalachian charter school in southeast Ohio, the Sciotoville Community School.

In the video, leaders from Rocketship and School of One discuss the advantages of digital learning while sharing their concerns about California laws and union regulations that have limited the role of online learning.

More about the book is available here.

HT: Joanne Jacobs

-Chester E. Finn, Jr., in the Fordham Institute’s Rejected Superbowl Ad “Lunchtime in America”

In this video, members of the VIVA Project Chicago Teachers Writing Collaborative talk about the empowering experience of working together and having their voices heard by the massive Chicago Public Schools system. CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard says The VIVA Project, as a neutral third party, made it possible for him to hear from teachers, the real experts on how to use time in school to better serve students.

The VIVA (Voices, Ideas, Vision, Action) Project brought Chicago teachers into the education policy discussion by providing not only a platform to share their ideas, but also guidance to build on each other’s ideas and create a report of recommendations that was ultimately shared with the Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard.

You can find out more about The Viva Project here.

In this PBS interview, the  co-chairs of the task force, Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, discuss the dangers of a poor education system.

According to Rice:

“When it comes to the very tangible assets that the United States needs to defend itself, the education of people who can be soldiers, too many people can’t qualify for military service….Then, of course, there’s the matter of the competitiveness of our economy, people who can fill the jobs and be the innovators of the future, so that the United States maintains its economic edge, and then finally the matter of our social cohesion. The United States, we’ve always been held together by the belief that it doesn’t matter where you came from. It matters where you’re going… [and] without education, we cannot maintain that cohesion.”

Of the current state of education in the nation, Rice says:

“Today, the sad fact is that, for the children who have the fewest options, the educational system is not delivering. If I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, we’ve got a real problem.”

The transcript of the interview can be found here.

Read the Council on Foreign Relations task force report here.

Deming found that high-risk middle- and high-school students who attend a school of choice are less likely to be arrested and spend less time incarcerated.

Please read “Does School Choice Reduce Crime: Evidence from North Carolina” in the Spring 2012 issue of Ed Next.

He has more to say about a larger strategy for boosting teacher quality in “An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom,” which appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Ed Next.

He also authored “Valuing Teachers: How Much is a Good Teacher Worth?” which appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next.

On Friday, March 2 from 9:00-10:30 am we’ll be watching a live webcast of the Fordham Institute’s forum on No Child Left Behind, starring Michele McNeil, Carmel Martin, Jeremy Ayers, Michael Petrilli, and moderated by Checker Finn. As described on the event page:

After a decade of living with the No Child Left Behind Act, there is wide, bipartisan consensus that this law governing so much of the federal role in education needs to change. With reauthorization still stalled in Congress, however, the Obama Administration offered states a deal—freedom from some of NCLB’s prescriptions in return for alignment with the Education Department’s current reform priorities. Already this month, eleven states were freed from some of the strictures of NCLB; dozens more must decide by February 28 whether the benefits of Duncan-style ESEA flexibility are worth it. You’re invited to join us at the Fordham Institute on March 2 as experts with varying perspectives on this issue weigh the merits of NCLB waivers, whether the Administration struck a sound balance between “flexibility” and “reform,” and what this all means for federal education policy going forward.

More information about the event and the panelists can be found on the Fordham Institute website.

An article about Teach for America from the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next looks at what TFA alumni do after they leave the program. “While much of the debate around Teach For America (TFA) in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of its nontraditional recruits in the classroom,” the authors write,  “the real story is the degree to which TFA has succeeded in producing dynamic, impassioned, and entrepreneurial education leaders.” See Creating a Corps of Change Agents” by Monica Higgins, Wendy Robison, Jennie Weiner, and Frederick Hess.

The interview with David Gergen was filmed during one of the breaks in the Education Next-PEPG conference “Learning from the International Experience,”where Gergen was moderating a panel.

You can read more about the Education Next-PEPG conference on Learning from the International Experience here.

An Ed Next article based on the conference, summarizing what the U.S. can and cannot learn from other countries, can be found here.

Education Next today published an interview by Peter Meyer with Cerf, “a guy who has an astute appreciation for the challenges of education reform, and relishes them.”

Peter Meyer has done  other feature-length interviews for Ed Next with Whitney Tilson and John White.

The 2012 election cycle is off and running, with big implications for America’s schools. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) awaits reauthorization. The Obama administration is implementing new regulations targeted at for-profit colleges. Standoffs between the GOP-controlled House and the Obama administration have yielded budget brinksmanship, while domestic spending has been squeezed by massive deficits. President Obama, following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, has aggressively championed federal education initiatives like Race to the Top and the Investing in Innovation fund. Meanwhile, the Republican primaries have been marked by candidates’ rejection of an active federal role in education, as several have pledged to “turn out the lights” at the U.S. Department of Education.

In a discussion hosted by Ed Next editor Frederick Hess, the panelists included:

PETER CUNNINGHAM, U.S. Department of Education
KATHERINE HALEY, Office of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)
ALYSON KLEIN, Education Week
JOE WILLIAMS, Democrats for Education Reform
DAVID WINSTON, The Winston Group

More information about the event is available on the AEI website.

In the Spring 2012 issue of Ed Next, June June Kronholz looks at two school districts working with Khan Academy to boost math achievement.

Additional installments of our Ed Next Book Club podcast can be heard here.

Click here for a free subscription to the Ed Next Book Club podcasts on iTunes.

The Chetty study shows that over a ten year period, the payoff for the students of a very effective teacher amounts to a total of $2.5 million. The harm done by a very ineffective teacher is the same. So if we could replace a terrible teacher with a great one, it would be worth $5 million total for all those kids affected by the switch.  And losing a great teacher, only to hire a bad one, would cost the same.   That’s convincing evidence for those who want to limit the tenure of non-performing teachers while giving the excellent ones their just reward.

But unions want to protect teacher tenure and pay all teachers the same, regardless of effectiveness.  So denying the Chetty study is absolutely crucial.

Though he lacks the necessary econometric skills, Michael Winerip takes up the assignment, claiming the data on teacher effectiveness, which comes from student testing during the 1990s, is too old to tell us anything.

But to ascertain the impact of teaching on student earnings that occur much later in life, it is of course necessary to look at those educated in the 1990s.   Those students have now finished high school (or not), gone to college (or not), and entered the work force (or not).  For today’s students, no one has that information–for the obvious reason that they are still too young.

Aha! says Mr. Winerip. That is the fatal flaw. Back in the 1990s, when students took standardized tests, No Child Left Behind did not exist, so “whether those results are applicable to our post-2004 high-stakes world, we cannot tell.”

If we are to buy this argument, the data will always be too old to tell us anything.  To learn what works we have to wait twenty years, and when that data is available, it will be just too old.

But is it?  Why should we assume that the tests taken back in the 1990s were more accurate than the post-NCLB tests given in 2005, when both teachers and students took them more seriously.  Student performance is more accurately measured when students take a test seriously and when teachers make sure the students understand the testing procedures to be followed. All that is more likely when tests count for something.

So if Chetty and his colleagues could identify large impacts of effective teaching using data from the 1990s, his successors will probably find even larger impacts from more accurate information gathered in the first decade of the 21^st century.

Of course, I cannot prove that, but it is certainly more likely than Winerip’s counter-hypothesis.  While he admits the 1990s tests were accurate, he claims tests today no longer are.  Only if Winerip is willing to make the astounding claim that most teachers today are cheating deliberately and systematically does that assertion hold. Otherwise, we can characterize his argument in one word:  Silly.

- Paul Peterson

On Thursday, Jan. 5 from 8:30-10:00 am we’ll be watching a live webcast of the Fordham Institute’s forum on accountability, starring Eric Hanushek, Charles Barone, Sandy Kress, and Mark Schneider. The event is described as follows:

Ten years ago, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the law that has dominated U.S. education—and the education policy debate—for the entire decade. While lawmakers are struggling to update that measure, experts across the political spectrum are struggling to make sense of its impact and legacy. Did NCLB, and the consequential accountability movement it embodied, succeed? And with near-stagnant national test scores of late, is there reason to think that this approach to school reform is exhausted? If not “consequential accountability,” what could take the U.S. to the next level of student achievement?

More information about the event and the panelists can be found on the Fordham Institute website.

Terry Moe was interviewed by Mike Petrilli for the Education Next book club podcast here.

Research by Hanushek which appeared in Ed Next in 2008 found strong relationships between achievement on accountability-based tests and economic growth. (See: “Education and Economic Growth,” Education Next, Spring 2008)

In this video, Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution discusses the shortcomings of the NRC report with Terry Moe, also of the Hoover Institution.

The Winter 2012 issue of Education Next includes a full critique of the NRC report by Eric Hanushek, “Grinding the Antitesting Ax: More bias than evidence behind NRC panel’s conclusions”

As Hanushek explains, the NRC report neglected the scientific evidence when it concluded that NCLB and high school exit exams were not good policies.  By the NRC’s own evidence, test-based accountability is very valuable, and investing in these programs has a rate of return that dwarfs that of virtually all governmental programs.

Research by Hanushek which appeared in Ed Next in 2008 found strong relationships between achievement on accountability-based tests and economic growth. (See: “Education and Economic Growth,” Education Next, Spring 2008)

Kipp shares her experience teaching 11th and 12th grade English online while she resides with her family in rural Colorado. Though not physically in a classroom, Kipp has been able to successfully engage students through live class sessions, emails, instant messaging, and texting. Kipp used to teach in a traditional classroom setting but says that despite some of the unique challenges teaching virtually presents, she finds the online teaching experience more rewarding and in many instances more effective.

Today (Thursday), tune in to a live webcast of an all-day conference on education governance sponsored by The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress.

School reforms abound today, yet even the boldest and most imaginative among them have produced—at best—marginal gains in student achievement. What America needs in the twenty-first century is a far more profound version of education reform. Instead of shoveling yet more policies, programs, and practices into our current system, we must deepen our understanding of the obstacles to reform that are posed by existing structures, governance arrangements, and power relationships. Yet few education reformers—or public officials—have been willing to delve into this touchy territory.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress have teamed up to tackle these tough issues and ask how our mostly nineteenth-century system of K-12 governance might be modernized and made more receptive to the innumerable changes that have occurred—and need to occur—in the education realm.

More information is available here.

Additional installments of our Ed Next Book Club podcast can be heard here.

Additional installments of our Ed Next Book Club podcast can be heard here.

This video highlights some of the strategies being pursued by the Partnership, which include identifying students for Gifted and Talented Education (GATE), parent engagement, professional development for teachers and principals, school accountability, use of new education technologies, protecting schools from the disruption of disproportionate teacher layoffs, and fostering inviting learning environments.

More information is available at http://www.partnershipla.org

The Georgia’s governor, state charter school commissioners, and parents all react to the May 16th decision.

Visit Education Next’s Charter School and Vouchers Archive to read more opinion, research, and news pieces on charter schools.

More videos in this series by NewSchools can be found here.

Are America’s highest achieving students being left behind?

A trio of recent studies and articles raises troubling questions about America’s “Achievement-Gap Mania.” Are we leaving our highest performing students behind in the quest to raise the test scores of students at the bottom? If so, what will this mean for our future international competitiveness?

Learn about the recent studies–Fordham’s Do High Flyers Maintain their Altitude? and the George W. Bush Institute’s Global Report Card—as well as Frederick M. Hess’s new National Affairs essay, “Our Achievement-Gap Mania.” And join a conversation about whether our focus on raising the bottom is blinding us to trouble at the top.

Panelists:

• Ulrich Boser, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress
• John Cronin, Director of the Kingsbury Center for Research on Academic Growth at the Northwest Evaluation Association
• Frederick M. Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at American Enterprise Institute
• Josh McGee, Vice President for Public Accountability Initiatives at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation

Moderator:

• Chester E. Finn, Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Find more information on student achievement and the global report card here.

More information is available on the conference’s main page, here.

The study on which the Global Report Card is based, “When the Best is Mediocre: Developed countries far outperform our most affluent suburbs,” by Jay Greene and Josh McGee, will appear in the Winter 2012 issue of Ed Next and is now available online.

The rankings of 13,636 U.S. school districts can be found in the Global Report Card, available on the website of the George W. Bush Institute, where readers can see how students in each school district compare to students in 25 other nations.

A detailed explanation of the methods used to conduct the analysis is available here.

My classmates complained that her class was too hard.

One of my other instructors spent class sessions badly summarizing the readings, instigating awkward and often one-sided class discussions, or trying to explain the homework assignments and projects she thought up. When she assigned one of her own articles for us to read, it became clear that despite having completed a doctorate at our university, she could not write a coherent academic article.

Desperate for a more challenging academic experience, I increased my course load for the second semester and handpicked my instructors. I actually enjoyed most of my classes that semester, but it was at this point that I began to deeply question the university’s approach to preparing future teachers.

It baffled me, for example, that I could get a master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) after having completed only one rudimentary course in linguistics and one in English grammar. Almost all of my classmates struggled greatly in these two courses, leading me to wonder whether perhaps the admission requirements might also need refining. A class in adolescent development was useful, but the program offered no course in child development, despite the fact that my certification would be for grades K–12. It seemed that they were skimming over the important topics while bogging me down with courses in “theory and practice,” which did little to make me feel prepared to begin teaching on my own.

The focus of the third and fourth semesters was student teaching. My first placement was in high-school foreign language, for which I was also receiving certification. I was fortunate to work with a relatively strong supervising teacher; the infuriating aspect of this first placement was how I was evaluated. A supervisor from the university observed me during three lessons over the course of the semester. After each observation, she completed a write-up and made a few minimally helpful suggestions. During the final observation, she leaned over to my supervising teacher and casually asked, “So, what grade would you give her?” No criteria for evaluation, no request for a report on what I needed to work on. Fortunately, I did receive some valuable feedback from my supervising teacher that semester; I cannot say the same about my English as a Second Language student-teaching placement the following semester.

The final task I was asked to complete for the program was an “individualized project,” which sounded to me like a dumbed-down version of a thesis or capstone project. I have to confess that I took the easy way out. I knew I wasn’t going to get the kind of academic support I would need to complete an actual thesis, so I settled for designing a unit based on what I was already working on with my ESL students. After meeting with the professor a few times and receiving some vague suggestions, I handed in a project that earned me the last of a full transcript of easy As, with a friendly note on the cover and not a single comment or suggestion for how the unit could have been improved.

After observing and teaching in a variety of classroom settings over the course of my graduate studies, I have concluded that good teaching depends on three things: mastery of the subject, a keen understanding of how children learn, and an ability to maintain a disciplined yet positive learning environment. It is hard for me to express how disheartening it is to have spent two years and more than $80,000 in student loans on a program that did justice to none of those objectives.

The author earned a masters degree in education at a private university in the Northeast. Julia Harvey is a pseudonym.

Additional installments of our Ed Next Book Club podcast can be heard here.

“The states’ fiscal crisis necessitates that they address pension underfunding,” writes Christian Weller of the University of Massachusetts-Boston, but the problem is manageable, and states will have several decades to come up with the money.

Christian Weller

But Robert Costrell of the University of Arkansas and Michael Podgursky of the University of Missouri argue that the situation is more serious, but that it offers an opportunity for real reform. However, Costrell and Podgursky also worry that some states are responding in ways – such as reducing benefits for new teachers– that worsen the problem.

Costrell and Podgursky argue that the current system of teacher pensions has structural problems that result in a) perverse incentives for teachers to stay on the job when they are no longer effective or to quit too early, b) huge penalties for job mobility, and c) very large transfers of wealth from young teachers working short spells to long termers who work full careers in the same system.

Robert Costrell

They believe that current teacher pension plans, which are mostly defined benefit (DB) plans, should be replaced by defined contribution (DC) or cash balance (CB) plans.

They write

As states grapple with the current pension crisis, a window of opportunity is open to implement more modern and strategic plans, or to make matters worse.

Christian Weller believes that states may want to spread out the pain of addressing pension plan underfunding so that not only new teachers are affected, and that states might set a floor under employer pension contributions to prevent underfunding in the future. However, he argues that switching from defined benefit pensions to alternative benefits (DC or CB plans) would have several harmful effects.

Michael Podgursky

Weller believes that average teacher effectiveness will likely decline under alternative benefits because of higher turnover among more experienced teachers, who will no longer have the security of a defined benefit pension to help inspire their loyalty.

Weller writes that switching to alternative benefits will also be costly. He concludes

The proposal to use the current crisis as an opportunity to switch retirement plans…will leave states with a much less efficient compensation system.

Podgursky and Costrell challenge Weller’s contention that a shift in pension plans would cause average teacher effectiveness to fall.

The full debate can be found at “Fixing Teacher Pensions: Is it enough to adjust existing plans?” which will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next.

For more on teacher pensions by Michael Podgursky and Robert Costrell, please see “Golden Handcuffs: Teachers who change jobs or move pay a high price” from the Winter 2010 issue of Education Next, and “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys: The peculiar incentives of teacher pensions” from the Winter 2008 issue of Education Next.

The Education Next article on this report, “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” can be found here. A PDF of the full report, “Globally Challenged,” can be found here.

Paul Peterson is editor-in-chief of Education Next, and Eric Hanushek serves on the editorial board.  Both are  senior fellows at the Hoover Institution and members of its Koret Task Force on K-12 Education

Panelists
Frederick M. Hess, Director, Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers

Moderator
Michael J. Petrilli, Executive Vice President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

This event will be webcast. There is no need to register for the webcast – simply visit www.edexcellence.net at 10 a.m. on August 23 and watch the proceedings live.

Additional installments of our Ed Next Book Club podcast can be heard here.

Click here for a free subscription to the Ed Next Book Club podcasts on iTunes.

For more on PLCs, please see “Getting At-Risk Teens to Graduation“ by June Kronholz.

Hampton, VA Performance Learning Centers
Photos by Keith Lanpher Productions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
William G. Howell, (312) 550-3767, University of Chicago
Martin R. West, (617) 496-4803, Harvard University
Paul E. Peterson, (617) 495-7976, Harvard University
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Public and Teachers Increasingly Divided on Key Education Issues

National Survey shows increased support for vouchers, but public’s views on merit pay, charters, and other policies have not changed, though teacher opposition to reforms intensifies

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The fifth annual survey conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) and Education Next on a wide range of education issues reveals that the opinions of the public have remained largely unchanged since one year ago, despite controversies in Wisconsin, Indiana and many other states.  However, teacher opposition to many reforms has increased, placing them more at odds with views of the general public.

An article, “The Public Weighs In on School Reform,” interpreting this year’s results by William Howell, Martin West, and Paul Peterson, will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next, and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

Support for vouchers as a means to expand school choice increased by 8 percentage points between 2010 and 2011, the largest shift of public opinion over the course of the past year.  Forty-seven percent of participants who were asked if they support or oppose “a proposal to give families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition” indicated their support.  “Although public opinion on most issues has remained stable, public support for vouchers has grown noticeably,” West observes.  “Meanwhile, teacher opinion has changed in a direction opposite to that of the public on such issues as merit pay and teacher tenure.”

Public opinion on charter schools showed little change, even though the topic received substantial media attention over the past year.  Forty-three percent of the American public support charters, and among teachers, favorable views of charters increased from 39 percent in 2010 to 45 percent this year.  Only 18 percent of the public opposes charter schools.  Of those surveyed, 39 percent of the public and 18 percent of teachers took a neutral position.

Notably, 33 percent of the public thinks that teachers unions have a generally negative effect on the nation’s public schools, virtually unchanged from 31 percent and 33 percent in 2009 and 2010, respectively.  The share perceiving a positive union impact has hardly budged from 28 percent in 2010 to 29 percent in 2011; 38 percent are neutral on unions’ impact.  Teacher opinion is moving in the opposite direction:  58 percent think they have a positive impact, an increase from 51 percent the previous year.  Meanwhile the percentage of teachers saying that unions have a negative impact on the nation’s schools has dropped to 17 percent from 25 percent in 2010.

Again this year, the poll found that a near majority of the public, 47 percent, favors merit pay – paying teachers, in part, based on the academic progress of their students on state tests.  Only 27 percent oppose the idea.  “Merit pay remains anathema to teachers, however, with only 18 percent in favor, and 72 percent in opposition,” Howell points out.

On teacher tenure, the public’s opposition to it has done nothing more than tick upward from 47 percent in 2010 to 49 percent in 2011.  The poll also shows that 55 percent of the public supports the principle that if tenure is given at all, it should be based on demonstrated success in raising student performance.  Teachers, meanwhile, like tenure more than ever; 53 percent support it, up from 48 percent in 2010, and only 30 percent agree that tenure should be based on student academic progress.

The affluent – defined as college graduates who are in the top income decile in their state – are more critical of unions than is the public as a whole.  Fifty-six percent say unions have a negative impact on their schools (versus 33 percent of the public as a whole).  The affluent like their local schools better than most people do (54 percent grade them A or B versus 46 percent of the public as a whole) but they think less well of public schools nationally (only 15 percent give the nation’s schools the highest two grades) and are more in favor of reforms such as charter schools.  Teachers are much more generous in their evaluation, with 37 percent giving the nation’s schools an A or B.

On questions of school spending, respondents’ opinions depend on how much they know.  For example, 59 percent of the public says that government funding for their district’s public schools should increase.  However, when they were informed about the level of per-pupil expenditure in their community, which averaged $12,300 for the survey’s respondents, enthusiasm for increased spending dampened, with public support falling to 46 percent.

In 2011, support for digital learning among the general public was 47 percent, a modest decrease from 52 percent the year before.  Forty-nine percent of teachers support digital learning, as do 42 percent of the well-to-do.  However, Peterson noted that “when respondents are asked about their own children, high levels of support are shown, with a majority of Americans and roughly two in three teachers indicating a willingness to have one of their children take ‘some academic courses’ in high school over the internet.”

When it comes to school and student accountability, the authors observe, “the public’s appetite for standardized tests appears undiminished.”  More than two in three Americans believe that the federal government should “continue to require that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3-8 and once in high school,” which mirrors the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing mandates.  Whereas NCLB allows each state to develop its own tests for determining student proficiency, solid pluralities of all subgroups support the creation of a single national test in both reading and math.

About the Public Opinion Survey
The Education Next-PEPG survey was conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN) between April 15 and May 4, 2011.  The survey interviewed a nationally representative sample of some 2,600 American citizens.  In addition to the views of the public as a whole, special attention was given to two potentially influential types of participants in school politics:  teachers (surveyed as a separate representative group for the third year in a row) and the affluent (considered separately for the first time).  Detailed information about the survey protocols is available online at www.knowledgenetworks.com/quality/.

About the Authors
William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago.  Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.  Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit:  www.educationnext.org

Additional installments of our Ed Next Book Club podcast can be heard here.

Click here for a free subscription to the Ed Next Book Club podcasts on iTunes.