One of the more critical conversations occurred on Sunday to kick off the week. The topic, ironically enough though, was about a meeting that happens rarely in education.

Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer at Kaplan, organized a panel discussion at the AERA meeting about why learning scientists and educational entrepreneurs don’t connect that much. I, along with Dick Clark of USC, Kenneth Koedinger, co-director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, Michael Moe of GSV Capital , Stacey Childress of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Nadya Dabby from the U.S. Department of Education, discussed not only how these conversations don’t happen, but the fundamental reasons why they don’t.

Saxberg and many others have noted that, all too often, products and services in the education market are not informed by what we know about learning. As a result, these new offerings tend to start at ground zero and do not take advantage of what’s become, over the past couple of decades in particular, a sizeable literature about how people learn and how to design optimal learning experiences.

Although learning scientists have far more to learn—and some of the biggest advances I believe will occur in the field instead of the lab given the rise of adaptive learning products—not having products informed by what’s known about learning as a starting point is often a big miss for students. Yet we see it all the time.

To take a notable example, people from the biggest of the massive open online course platforms, Coursera, often talk about how exciting it is that they can do A-B testing to learn what works. With the massive user base they have and the big data they are able to collect, there is indeed a huge potential for breakthroughs. What sort of A-B testing are they doing though? One professor, for example, tested whether showing his face during a lesson led to improved learning. What’s sad about that is that the research to answer these sorts of questions is already well established.

From a higher level, it often seems that the best business plans in education have the least interesting learning science behind them, and the worst business plans in education have the most interesting learning science behind them. On the panel, Koedinger, a co-founder of Carnegie Learning, confirmed the point when he talked about how once he and his team had brought their research-informed product to market, the majority of the market incentives encouraged them not to improve the product along its ability to help students learn.

This points to the first of the three ideas I offered in my opening remarks as to why educational entrepreneurs and learning scientists don’t talk all that much: In public education, the incentives don’t encourage educational entrepreneurs to seek out what’s known from learning science. The products that win in the marketplace aren’t necessarily those that are the best for learning, as the policies in public K-12 education in particular are focused heavily on input-based metrics that encourage compliance, but not student learning growth. As a result, seeking out what’s known about how students learn and improving products accordingly isn’t necessarily rewarded. To change this, we need to fix the demand-side problem. Moving from a policy environment that rewards inputs like seat time to one that values student outcomes in a competency-based learning environment is critical to create smarter demand.

Second, entrepreneurs sometimes suffer from the “We went to school, therefore we are experts” mentality—when in fact, what we think we know about how learning works from our experiences is often incorrect. Because entrepreneurs have this notion, they either think they can extrapolate to solve system-wide problems for which they don’t have a solid understanding of causality or they can utilize a lean startup approach and figure it out on the ground. There is a lot to be said for leveraging a lean startup—or discovery-driven—approach. But in a discovery-driven process, the goal is to identify assumptions, test them and gain knowledge as fast and cheaply as possible. Leveraging good research that has already created a knowledge base does just that. Ignoring it is a mistake.

Finally, researchers have a long way to go to help solve the problem. The catalog of sessions at AERA was the weight of a phonebook. Outside of asking Saxberg what sessions would be useful, I had no hope of navigating it. We need more education research about things that actually matter in the field and are relevant for teachers and students. We need more translation of good research into the popular domain to help people understand more widely what is the good research and what does it say. Today every company seems to have a research study that they bring to districts validating what they do. How to clarify what’s good? And we need faster research that takes advantage of the massive amounts of data we can generate about education through digital learning.

In the panel conversation, the lack of good networks, better use of the emerging edtech incubators, the structure of federal research funding, the lag-time between learning and tangible results, and other things surfaced as additional facets of the problem. In seeking to fix this, I’m curious though: what else have you observed as something that holds this back? Students await the answer.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

In a new Public Impact policy brief, A Better Blend: A Vision for Boosting Student Outcomes with Digital Learning, which we co-authored with Joe Ableidinger and Jiye Grace Han, we explain how schools can use blended learning to drive improvements in the quality of digital instruction, transform teaching into a highly paid, opportunity-rich career that extends the reach of excellent teachers to all students and teaching peers, and improve student learning at large scale. We call this a “better blend”: combining high-quality digital learning and excellent teaching.

The Promise of Blended Learning …

The potential of blended learning to improve student achievement arises from two benefits of blended models that build on each other. One is the power of digital instruction to personalize learning. The other is the capacity of blended models to let schools reach more students with excellent teachers who ensure that students achieve ambitious, personally fulfilling goals.

… Is Not a Guarantee

Technology in our classrooms is nothing new. At various points in the past century, leaders have hyped new technologies in schools, which have generally failed to meet the lofty expectations. Even blended models and other recent digital-learning initiatives have yielded mixed results. And other promising, recent reforms have shown that a lack of focus on teacher quality typically leads to disappointment.

Today’s blended models will likely fall short as well, unless they include excellent teachers playing instructional and team leadership roles that maximize technology’s impact in tandem with their own.

How Schools and Policymakers Can Create a Better Blend, Right Now

For a better blend of technology and teachers, schools must first focus on implementation to combine excellent technology and teaching. It would be easy to move toward blended learning while leaving students’ access to great teachers exactly as it is today. Instead, schools should shift to blended learning while enhancing teaching effectiveness, through:

• Selectivity: Hiring selectively based on indicators predictive of outstanding teaching
• Reach: Extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, directly and through team leadership
• Freed Time: Scheduling to give teachers time to collaborate, develop, and analyze student learning data during school hours
• Accountability: Giving excellent teachers credit and accountability for the growth of all students under their purview, including those taught by the teachers on teams that they lead
• Authority: Vesting excellent teachers with control of the digital content they use, allowing them to continuously drive improvements in instructional materials in ways never possible previously
• Rewards: Investing savings in paying teachers far more for achieving excellence with more students, making stronger recruitment and enhanced selectivity possible.

Then, to achieve excellent learning at scale, state policymakers must change state policy to enable and incentivize a better blend in large numbers of schools, through:

• Funding that is flexible and weighted by student need, so that schools may invest in the people and technology that best advance their students’ learning
• People policies that let schools hire, develop, deploy, pay, advance, and retain excellent teachers and collaborative teaching teams to reach every student with excellent teachers
• Accountability, using increasingly better measures, that drives teaching and technology excellence and improvement, so that excellent teachers and their teams get credit for using blended learning to help more students, and schools have powerful incentives for a better blend
• Technology and student data that are available for all students, allowing differentiated instruction for all students without regard to their economic circumstances
• Timing and scalability, including implementing a better blend from the start in new and turnaround-attempt schools—when schools often have more freedoms to implement new staffing models that do not over-rely on the limited supply of outstanding school leaders. This also includes helping new schools develop systems for scale, and giving excellent new schools incentives to grow.

Digital learning may be life-changing for students and career-boosting for teachers, but only if schools and policymakers commit to a better blend.

–Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

This blog post first appeared at EdTech Digest.

They do two things really, really well. First, they take part in on-the-ground, let’s-solve-this-problem human-capital activities. In partner cities across the nation, they train and certify teachers, develop and implement new evaluation systems, help administrators improve observations, and much more.

Chances are, if you’re hearing about interesting, innovative teacher or leader work in an urban area, TNTP is involved.

The second is that they put out these superb little reports. They’re always short and punchy, visually pleasing, terribly informative, and, in one way or another, unexpected. Teacher Evaluation 2.0 was a valuable how-to guide for discriminating policymakers, The Irreplaceables was a teacher-retention wake-up call, and, of course, The Widget Effect was a game-changer.

The organization is at its influential-powerful best when it combines its smarts and muscle—when it can use its research and analysis to inform the field and then help implement the change. For example, TNTP’s findings on the appalling state of teacher evaluations helped shape the Race to the Top application, precipitated a wave of state-level statutory changes, and kicked off some of TNTP’s most meaningful partnerships with states and districts.

Leap Year, the organization’s latest offering, follows in this fine research-meets-practice tradition.

It looks under the hood of the first year of teaching. The conventional wisdom holds that all teachers are lousy out of the gates, so we treat the rookie season, says the report, “like a warm-up lap.”

But there’s much more to this story.

Using its “Assessment of Classroom Effectiveness” (ACE) tool, a multiple-measures evaluation system designed specifically for new teachers, TNTP assessed new educators via observations, student surveys, growth data, and principal ratings.

Among the lessons learned: Not all teachers struggle from the start; in fact, nearly 25 percent score in the top two categories (out of five) in their first observation.

Similarly, while most teachers improve throughout their first year (.2 points on a five-point scale for each observation), many do not. One-quarter of those later denied certification started off poorly and actually got worse over the year.

In fact, just like a charter school’s early performance can accurately predict its later performance, a teacher’s first-year performance tells us a great deal about his/her ability to improve. Teachers who received certification after their first year had an average score of 3.14 on their first observations; those denied certification scored around 2.50, on average, on that first observation.

In fact, writes the report, “Teachers who are performing poorly in their first year rarely show dramatic improvement in their second year.” This includes even those teachers who—thought to have potential despite early struggles—were given a second year (an “extension plan”) to earn certification.

“After more than a year in the classroom, not a single extension-plan teacher earned an observation score in the (top two) categories.”

There are plenty more fascinating tidbits throughout the report; you’ll learn about training and norming observers, using student surveys, adjusting for the inflation of principal ratings, and cultivating early skill sets in teachers.

But probably my favorite new fact relates to improving observations. It turns out that more observations aren’t the key; more observers are. “When assessing tradeoffs between adding observers and adding observations, the evidence is fairly clear—adding observers gives the greater boost to reliability. Giving teachers three different observers, instead of the same observer for each round, significantly increases the reliability of observations.”

The only complaint I had with the report is actually a complaint about an element of the underlying system, specifically, the names of the five rating categories—in order: “Ineffective, Minimally Effective, Developing, Proficient, and Skillful.”

Give 100 reasonable people those names and ask them the best, second-best, etc., I would happily gamble that less than half would choose this exact order.

Complaining about the discrepancy between a classification title and its content may seem like semantics, but it’s more than that. We have such troubled evaluation systems, I believe, partly because we still don’t have honest conversations about effectiveness. By muddying what’s meant with these indecipherable category names, we contribute to the problem.

But this is a minor matter when compared to the serious strengths of the report.

What’s most exciting is that, unlike evaluation and tenure reform, which required new laws in most states, most state departments of education can singlehandedly (or with their state boards) alter certification rules through regulation.

That means an enterprising state chief could swiftly turn this report’s findings into policy. Don’t approve prep programs graduating candidates unprepared for that critical first year; make sure early professional development builds foundational skills; prioritize additional observers over additional observations; and make permanent certification contingent on proof of success.

I’m all but certain a number of states will take this report’s lessons to heart, and once again it will be said that TNTP influenced for the better our educator policies and practices.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

First, great teaching will matter more, not less, in the digital age. As we’ve written here and here, digital learning has the potential to level the educational playing field on learning the basics. As digital content gets better and better, students around the globe will be able to learn basic content and practice skills through this new medium.

In that flat world, what will differentiate outcomes is how motivated students are to undertake the work of learning; how well they tackle the inevitable barriers to achievement, including social and emotional challenges; and whether they move beyond the basics and engage in the higher-order learning that’s increasingly important for college, careers, and life. And how well that happens for students will depend on what it’s always hinged on: the effectiveness of the adults in their lives. For most students—and for nearly all whose parents struggled in school—the adults who tip the balance are teachers.

Second, digital learning has the potential to extend the reach of the nation’s excellent teachers to far more students than they can teach today. By adopting new school models that change teachers’ roles and use digital learning to save teachers’ time, schools can put great teachers in charge of more students’ learning and turbocharge the development and performance of all teachers working in teams. And they can pay teachers more, sustainably, for reaching more students. Like it has in other professions, technology can give teachers unprecedented career advancement and earning opportunities while boosting performance.

This won’t happen automatically. Schools could just replace teachers with laptops. They could use savings from digital learning for something other than paying teachers more. They could use saved time for something other than helping more students and developing excellent teaching teams. But if they do, the nation will miss out on the enormous opportunity created by digital learning: the opportunity to give all students access to excellent teachers, while transforming teaching into a high-paying, high-impact profession.

-Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

I taught the usual load minus three hours allotted for attending seminars. I was also expected to mark papers, prepare to teach classes, and observe fellow teachers on a regular basis while concocting elaborate lesson plans for 10 observed teaching visits. I was initially undaunted and looked forward to becoming an expert in my craft.

The first step involved constructing lesson plans, an exact science in NRW, down to the verbs that are permitted when describing pupil progress in the space of a single lesson (“students are able to summarize, to analyze,” etc.). Germans are great fans of the scientific method and enjoy being able to measure and quantify things, a laudable trait. But is it ever possible to prove that all pupils have learned in a given hour what the teacher set out to teach? In this unexpectedly Kafkaesque world, I was stymied as to how one might go about doing this. This led to the first furrow in my brow.

Next we learned the desired lesson format. One should begin each lesson not by asking to see homework but with introductory material, such as a video clip designed to jump-start class discussion. The material should lead the students to state the aim of that day’s lesson themselves, an interesting reversal of those dinosaur days in which the teacher would write the aim on the blackboard. I frequently spent 10 minutes trying to get my students to intuit the question I’d had in mind. Was this really time well spent, I wondered? Furrow number two made its appearance.

Once the question of the day is sorted out, the class discusses how to go about answering it. Students, rather than the teacher, decide whether a debate, role play, mind map, or some other method best suits the topic at hand. Furrow number three was born.

Students then work in groups, jointly preparing their results. I hated group work when I was in school, as I knew who would take responsibility for completing the assignment. Mandatory here, group work is intended to build social skills.

After the presentation phase, members of the class summarize what has been accomplished (“What have we learned today that we didn’t know before?”) and apply the results to an analogous situation, a step referred to as “transfer.”

At this juncture, the teacher may assign a thoughtful homework assignment that encourages in-depth transfer while not overburdening the students. Enter furrow number four.

Despite my confusion about what was expected of me, I looked forward to my first observed teaching visit, in which the class was to compare and contrast speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. My students picked out themes and metaphors and persuasive techniques like nobody’s business. At the end of the hour, I floated out of the room, expecting to hear high praise. The wise reader will have a sense of foreboding at this point.

The observer quickly cut to the chase: “So what would you say the students did during this lesson they hadn’t done before?”

“Um,” I stammered. “They read and analyzed speeches by two important civil rights activists.”

“Am I to assume, then, that they were unable to read before?”

“No, of course not.” I regrouped. “They did a close text analysis and compared and contrasted the use of rhetorical devices in the texts.”

“Were the students unfamiliar with such devices before?”

“Well, no, we had previously worked on alliteration, metaphors, and similes,” I admitted meekly.

“So what is it you would say was actually learned by your students in the past hour?”

I stared at him. Technically, applying what one has already learned did not qualify, so I bowed my head in resignation and understood. My students had learned nothing from me. Nothing at all.

Tamara Braunstein is an educator and writer from Brooklyn, New York, who (usually!) embraces intercultural exchange, having taught high school in Senegal and Germany.

Parts of this story have been told before, starting with TNTP’s 2009 Widget Effect report and since replicated in Florida and Tennessee. Beyond adding another state to the list, my paper uses a unique dataset to add some new elements to the story. For example, my paper is the first to include not just teachers but also principals, superintendents, and support staff like librarians and janitors. The data show that districts have trouble evaluating their employees across the board, not just teachers.

In addition, I had access to the actual words and terms that districts use to label their performance categories. It turns out that, like Eskimos with snow, Washington school districts can only talk about what they can see. They have about twice as many terms for positive than negative performance, because they almost never see poor performance. Districts struggle even to create labels for poor performance, let alone to place an individual employee in one of the low-performing categories.

As I articulate in the piece, if an employer can’t differentiate between their employees, they’re likely to treat them all as interchangeable widgets when it comes time to decide on how to help them improve, how much to pay them, or which ones should be retained.

If there’s one strain of criticism to this argument, it comes from hypothetical questions about how many ineffective employees we should expect schools to identify. Recent pieces, from Aaron Pallas and Matthew Di Carlo and The New York Times’ Jenny Anderson, explore this issue.

I have three basic responses. One, I mostly think this question is just an abstraction at this point. School districts across the country are still primarily relying on either/or evaluation systems where all employees are rated satisfactory or unsatisfactory. And, even the places that have implemented new evaluation systems, like Florida and Tennessee, still identify 97 or 98 percent of teachers as satisfactory. Unless you think 1-2 percent of employees is the right number of low performers (which American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten implies in the Times piece), we have work to do.

Two, it’s unfortunate that we aren’t asking the opposite question: How many truly excellent teachers are there? How many teachers and principals should receive extra compensation, be protected from layoffs, be given additional responsibilities, and encouraged to stay on the job? There are two ends to every distribution, but we seem to pay an inordinate amount of attention to the negative side.

Three, there is no “right” answer to this question. It should ultimately be decided by value judgments made by local communities, which should reflect their unique needs. If student performance was low and flat in certain schools, especially compared to similar students in other schools, that community might want to hold more adults accountable. If students at a particular school achieve at high levels and show strong growth, that school probably doesn’t have the same urgency around identifying poor performers.

Dana Goldstein points out that New York City has had this particular fight before, but in most districts the distribution of evaluation ratings isn’t public information, so communities by and large haven’t had this discussion yet. Until they do, and until we start seeing something approaching real differentiation, the question about the “right” number is premature.

Washington has enacted a series of legislative and regulatory reforms improving district evaluation systems. They’ve mandated that districts use four-level rating evaluation systems instead of simple either/or determinations that most districts had been using. And they’ve introduced new elements like requiring districts to use a high-quality evaluation rubric and to factor in student growth into their ratings of teachers and principals. While these are undoubtedly positive steps, the lessons of other states suggest that merely tweaking old evaluation systems is not sufficient to change a culture that doesn’t value performance.

Read the full report here.

-Chad Aldeman

Chad Aldeman is a senior policy analyst at Bellwether Education Partners.

A version of this blog entry originally appeared on The Quick and The Ed.

As schools across the country adopt blended-learning models, a few clear trends are settling in, and, at the same time, some groups—like the Next Generation Learning Challenges—continue to help schools push the design envelope on what’s possible for students.

First, many schools are embarking upon a variety of design processes, RFPs from vendors and the like only to arrive at the same cluster of solutions centered around the basic models of blended learning we identified here. There is nothing wrong with that per se. Entering into a design process, for example, can help gain buy in from teachers and others in the community for adopting blended learning, which is still radically different from traditional schooling. Adopting what are becoming tried-and-true blended-learning models (yes, I know it still may be too soon to use that phrase for blended learning, but I just did it) to individualize learning for students and improve teachers’ lives is better than remaining stuck in a failed factory-based model of schooling, even if the model is not the most innovative thing ever that pushes the blended-learning field forward for students. Some standardization around a select few models—and a branding of those models—will likely be necessary ultimately to scale the practice nationwide.

The downside is that the process to arrive there can waste a lot of time and energy in reinventing the wheel, when, depending on the problem a school is trying to solve, the level of freedom it has to solve it, and the type of team it deploys to attack it, there is some predictability to the blended-learning model it is likely to adopt. Heather Staker and I are working on a white paper that will have more to say on this topic soon. But by way of an example, elementary schools are most likely to adopt Station-Rotation models or, in some cases, what some call the “Rocketship” model—which tends to be a Lab-Rotation model that emulates the basics of what Rocketship Education, a blended-learning network of charter schools, does today.

Depending on the model adopted or the framing of the problem, there is also some predictability to the groups schools might then work with to implement a solution—a further suggestion that schools ought to cut to the chase and foundations and others fostering the ecosystem should help them there. If a school plans to use a Station-Rotation model for math with one curriculum provider, for example, it will likely contract with one math vendor that provides supplemental math content—like Dreambox Learning or ST Math—or use a free solution like the Khan Academy. If it wants to work with multiple content providers on the other hand, there is a good bet it might work with a company like Education Elements, which is emerging as a leader in helping schools move to blended-learning models and offering a single sign-on software solution for schools so they can easily work with multiple content vendors. Although the company helps schools enter into a design process to rethink the use of time, teacher roles, and so forth, the basic model that most schools using Education Elements adopt tends to be pretty consistent.

At the same time, we are seeing the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), a non-profit partnership, continue to push people’s imagination of what blended-learning models might ultimately look like. I’ve written previously about its role in creating proof points capable of scaling for the field that help propel the education system more toward a fully competency-based, student-centric one, and now NGLC is at it again (full disclosure: I serve as a reviewer for their grants).

On the heels of its last effort to seed 20 new secondary school models, NGLC’s Wave IV $12 million grant program has two components to it. First, it will award 20 $450,000 grants (including matching funds) to districts, charter management organizations, or partnerships to launch new blended-learning breakthrough models, and 30 $100,000 grants to planners who are at an earlier stage in developing these kinds of models. The first grant cycle deadline is April 22, and the second is December 2. Applicants can apply on behalf of a brand-new school, a restart of a persistently failing one, or a complete redesign of an existing, higher-performing school.

There are important strands in this effort. First, despite what we’re starting to see in the field as some consistent models of blended learning that can bolster student learning, we’ve yet to see anyone create “the solution”—and we’re unlikely to ever see that I suspect. Although we have a few models that have been able to personalize learning and do a better job of instituting mastery-based learning for students, no one has figured out how to do it at scale per se yet, and there is still plenty of room for growth in student outcomes. Continued innovation in education will always be critical. A major problem today is how hard it is to innovate in education, so having groups continue to push the envelope is critical. It’s why the Silicon Schools Fund, where I’m a board member, is also playing an important role.

Second, NGLC isn’t just focused on creating great one-off proof points; it’s focused on creating next-gen schools that can scale. Too often success in education doesn’t scale. By focusing not just on the learning model at hand for students in these schools but also their business and scaling models, NGLC seeks to remedy that.

Ideally, in a few years time NGLC will have seeded a series of new schooling models that other schools themselves can adopt, in much the same way an increasing number of schools are now adopting models that have proven to be successful in the field. If that happens, scale may occur in ways we can’t predict—and may look more like an awakening to the power of putting students at the center of their learning.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

For more on preschool, please read “What Happened When Kindergarten Went Universal,” by Elizabeth Cascio, Ed Next, Spring 2010, and “The Preschool Picture,” by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Ed Next, Fall 2009.

—Education Next

Behind the Headline
Gifted Students Have ‘Special Needs’ Too
Ed Next blog | 1/4/13

In Slate, Sarah Garland writes about efforts to make gifted classes more inclusive. Chester E. Finn, Jr. has written extensively about the failure of our education system to offer gifted children the education they need, most recently in “Gifted Students Have ‘Special Needs’ Too”

See also “Young, Gifted and Neglected” by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and “Exam Schools from the Inside,” by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Jessica Hockett.

-Education Next

Behind the Headline
The Lucy Calkins Project
Education Next | Summer 2007

In New York City, the Education Department is dropping its longtime literacy curriculum as part of a shift to the new Common Core standards. As Robert Pondiscio explains in the NY Daily News, the city will drop the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, a “balanced literacy” curriculum developed by Lucy Calkins.  Lucy Calkins’ approach to literacy was dissected by Barbara Feinberg in the Summer 2007 issue of Ed Next.

-Education Next

—Education Next

Because, at least when it comes to education policy, just about everything he wants the federal government to do involves things that can’t be done successfully from Washington but that well-led states can and should do: raise academic standards, evaluate teachers, give kids choices, and more.

His latest passion in this realm is “quality early childhood education for all.” And as post–State of the Union specifics seep from the White House, we see more clearly what he has in mind: a multi-pronged endeavor, including home visits by nurses, programs for poor kids from birth to age three (“Early Head Start”), more Head Start (mostly for three-year-olds), lots more state-sponsored preschool for four-year-olds (subsidized up to twice the poverty line), and full-day Kindergarten for all.

All are plausible undertakings by states. Only one, however, could be satisfactorily carried out by Uncle Sam: a thorough and much-needed makeover of the five-decade-old Head Start program. But that isn’t likely to happen. The retrograde Head Start lobby is too strong, and the program’s iconic status means it’s easy to resist fundamental changes in it.

Yet Head Start is by far the largest extant preschool program in the land—serving about a million kids, well targeted at low-income families, and costing about $10,000 per child. The problem is that every program evaluation over many years has reached the same sorry conclusion: Head Start is fine and dandy as a provider of child care, social services, decent food, and some dental and health care, but it’s a total washout in terms of school readiness. Whatever limited cognitive gains its participants show after their year in the program vanish soon after (or even before) they enter school.

Yes, we can blame elementary schools for failing to capture those gains, but as Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution points out, the main culprit is Head Start itself, which doesn’t try very hard for cognitive gains and which has defenders who stoutly resist even viewing it as an education program. (That’s why it’s housed in the Department of Health and Human Services.)

To its credit, the Obama Administration has pushed to reform Head Start (as did several prior presidents), but with very limited success. The fact is that big federal programs, once entrenched, are exceptionally hard to change. Head Start should be turned over to the states—where, with governors like Barack Obama, it might be merged into states’ own efforts to provide preschooling to those who need it.

But states face mighty challenges of their own on this front. Besides cost, two are paramount.

First, the early-childhood-education crowd cannot agree on what “quality” means in preschool education. What it should mean is evidence of school readiness and a preschool operator’s success in getting kids to meet curricular standards that mesh with the state’s Kindergarten standards. What “quality” usually ends up being defined as, however—and the White House documents half-slip into this trap—is a bunch of “inputs” related to class size, room size, teacher credentials and such.

Second, the politically appealing impulse to promise “universal” preschool education is in direct conflict with who actually needs it and isn’t getting it today. The overwhelming majority of American four-year-olds already participate in some form of preschool—and more than 40 percent enjoy the publicly financed kind. Universalizing access to public preschool, besides being very expensive for taxpayers, amounts to a huge windfall for public schools (and their teacher unions), as well as for middle class families and communities that have already found ways of obtaining it for their kids. And it’s invariably a low-intensity program that doesn’t deliver the degree of help and duration that might put the neediest youngsters onto a more level education playing field. (Essentially all the evidence of lasting gains—and long-term savings—from preschool comes from a few very pricey and intensive boutique-style programs targeted on small numbers of exceptionally disadvantaged children.)

These are tough nuts for states to crack, but the federal government can resolve neither. In a time of tight budgets and staggering debt, Uncle Sam can’t do much on the cost front, either.

Well-led states can make some headway. Oklahoma (mentioned by the president) hasn’t done badly. Neither has Florida, despite its risky embrace of “universalism”. Washington can surely jawbone—Arne Duncan is far better at this than Kathleen Sebelius—and may deploy some modest incentive dollars for states to match. But if Mr. Obama really wants to make a difference on the preschool front, he should first clean up the Head Start mess, then go back to Illinois and straighten out his own state’s policies and programs.

A version of this article also appeared on The Corner.

Behind the Headline
No Substitute for a Teacher
Education Next | Spring 2013

New data from the U.S. Department of Education suggest that teacher absenteeism is becoming a serious problem, with about one in three teachers missing more than 10 days of school each year. June Kronholz takes a close look at the problem, and at the quality of teaching that takes place when teachers are absent, in a new article for Education Next.

-Education Next

That’s why I was so impressed with (and proud of) the recent memo sent out by my former colleagues.

I’ve said many times before that educator evaluation policy got far ahead of the practice. This memo shows that the NJDOE has been assiduous in trying to bridge that gap.

The graphic on page 3 shows how they’ve used multiple sources to continuously inform their work. The timeline on the final page shows how they’ve choreographed the various activities over a long stretch of time to ensure that the work progresses—but prudently.

The heart of the memo is a summary of what they’ve learned from these various sources to date and how the department is responding to the lessons.

I may be biased, but this is—in my opinion—top-notch, grown-up policymaking by a state department of education: Take a broad policy directive, start a pilot, develop multiple external assessors, integrate this work with mid-stream RTTT-3 funds and a new tenure law, make course corrections, act with transparency about findings, and push on.

I would commend this memo to just about anyone in our field, but particularly groups like TNTP that do this work day in and day out, officials at USED interested in witnessing the difficulty of bringing an Administration priority to life, the Gates Foundation MET team (who I’ve been pestering about next steps), academics who study policy implementation, and anyone else with an interest in today’s work on educator effectiveness.

Finally, I’m including a few links to somewhat unflattering news articles associated with the memo’s release. These should serve as lessons to those who want to do serious policymaking. Do your job thoughtfully and well, and take pride in that—but know that the aspects likeliest to be covered will be those that generate the most heat, not the most light.

My congratulations to my superior former boss Commissioner Chris Cerf, my amazing former colleague Chief Talent Officer Pete Shulman, and their colleagues.

When people look back on this era of ed reform, I’m sure they will remember the big pieces of legislation and the political fights. That’s wonderful theatre for sure.

But the day-to-day work to animate cold words in a statute book is what matters most.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

This surely is a key question that will come up this spring in statehouses across the nation as they face another tough budget year. District officials, if they are wise, will not just rely on the same old belt-tightening maneuvers. Indeed, perhaps the only viable option is seriously addressing policies toward educator salaries.

To put the issue in perspective, let’s start with some basic history about the budgetary picture for schools. The recession of 2008 was a rude shock to state and local governments, and especially to schools. Coming off a century of continuous growth in spending per pupil, districts were slow to adjust to the possibility that the revenue collapse might actually put them on a more perilous spending path.

Initially, they were saved from tough decisions. The federal government, faced with a weakened overall economy, charged in to make up for fiscal shortfalls of school districts through a stimulus package designed to get the macroeconomy moving again. This package provided a bridge that kept spending in most states from falling at the pace of lost revenues.

In the 2009-10 school year (the latest with available data), when the stimulus was in full swing, the overall story was still not rosy. State and local revenues per pupil fell in real terms in 39 states. When federal stimulus dollars were added, overall real spending per pupil still declined in 23 states.

Moreover, the stimulus package was explicitly a temporary fix that was designed to end quickly—and it did. To the extent that they thought about it, most states and districts implicitly presumed that, as the stimulus funds were phased out, their own funds would return, and that they could then resume on their prior path. For that reason, in many states, the initial response after the stimulus money stopped flowing was largely to try to do what had been done before the recession and to wait out the storm.

The shock came after the stimulus went away. Even as state revenues began to recover, school spending generally did not return to its previous trajectory.

In reality, state and local revenues continue to be slow to recover, and states have found themselves facing deficits (many of which are illegal, according to state constitutions). Given overall state demands, a number of states are dealing with deficits by allowing school spending to fall. Moreover, most projections suggest that general fiscal pressures on schools are likely to last for some time.

A first response has been to resist any spending decreases, generally arguing that schools should be exempt from fiscal shocks. For some, this resistance has included going to court (e.g., in New Jersey and Kansas) to argue that reduced funding violates established state constitutional requirements for providing students with an adequate education. Nonetheless, a majority of the states have simply fought out their funding battles in their legislatures—with few states returning to the spending growth of the past.

This leads back to the simple question: Isn’t it possible that forced spending reductions will make the education system more efficient? Since there is spending in many districts that is not contributing much to student learning, can’t we simply squeeze out this inefficiency by cutting the funding to schools?

Although we do not have a definitive answer to that question, my response is most likely no.

If school districts had a line item in their budgets for “waste, fraud, and abuse,” we could just reduce that to deal with the budget pressures. Unfortunately, we do not find such itemized inefficiency.

It is possible, as the Council of the Great City Schools has convincingly done, to document wide differences in costs of various management functions, ranging from finance operations and procurement, to safety and security, to transportation. Many of these differences are large enough to explore further, but acting on them is unlikely to solve long-term fiscal problems, since each is a relatively small budget item.

The big money still resides in instructional personnel, meaning mainly administrators and teachers. Salary and benefits funding for instructional employees represents the largest spending area in the typical district, bringing to mind the old Willie Sutton adage about robbing banks “because that’s where the money is.” The case for inspecting this spending, however, runs much deeper.

First, as is widely recognized, teachers and principals have the largest impact on student performance, implying leverage on the achievement side of the efficiency equation. Second, numerous studies have shown that teacher pay based on degrees and experience is unrelated to teacher effectiveness, implying leverage on the cost side of the efficiency equation. Addressing issues of inefficiency almost certainly demands addressing the fact that salaries, and by implication, total compensation paid by schools, are unrelated to student outcomes.

Dealing with either side of this efficiency equation has no historic precedent, and districts are unlikely to focus on these issues just because funding is cut. Partly because of existing state labor and education laws, these issues are often simply not on the table even in times of fiscal stress. Yet, that is not the full story, because even when these constraints are not binding, we see little systematic movement toward rationalizing instructional spending and performance.

A number of states have moved forward by at least eliminating pure LIFO—last in, first out—rules for reductions in the teaching force, which are designed to protect more-experienced teachers during layoffs. Wisconsin got the bulk of the publicity for its work on this front, but Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, and others have also opened the way for decisions more closely related to teacher performance. These states have taken the first necessary steps of reducing teacher-tenure guarantees and calling for better evaluations of teachers and administrators.

These actions, however, will probably be insufficient. There is considerable inertia in local districts. There are contracts that restrict action. There is resistance from teachers’ unions. There is little experience or political will to change.

And there is the final defense of the status quo: “Surely reform would cost money, and we do not have it.” But, yes, districts do have it. They are currently spending money in ways unrelated to achievement, and reform means ending that, not just adding on to what was done before.

The only way that efficiency will be significantly improved is by strengthening the relationship between salaries and performance. Currently, we dramatically underpay our best teachers while dramatically overpaying our worst. Efficient policies imply paying significantly more to the best teachers—not just giving small, temporary bonuses for student achievement—to keep them in the classroom longer. Additionally, it probably also means having them teach more students, because dealing with tighter budgets and paying significantly higher salaries will most likely require slightly larger class sizes. At the other end of the performance spectrum, we cannot reduce the pay of the worst teachers enough, and we simply must move them out of the classroom. The impact of the small numbers of unacceptably ineffective teachers is disproportionately large and represents a huge drain on both achievement and finances.

These are not things that happen easily or automatically. As we embark on a new budget season, we should not delude ourselves that just cutting school budgets will lead districts to a new, more efficient place. Left to their own devices, districts are much more likely to do what they have always done, but on a somewhat restricted scale. This path will lead neither to more efficiency nor to better results—and in fact could significantly harm students.

Improving outcomes—either with fewer or more resources—requires significant change. It will be virtually impossible to get such change without active state policies that push for the alignment of salary budgets with classroom performance.

Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His writings can be found at hanushek.stanford.edu.

This blog entry was first published in Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 20, Pages 28-29, 31

“It was the first time I had ever received a grade lower than a B, and it was upsetting,” admits Mercado, a biochemistry and cell biology major at the University of California, San Diego. The first in her family to attend a four-year college, Mercado was a strong student dating all the way back to her days in middle school at San Diego’s KIPP Adelante Preparatory Academy. Perhaps as a result, she was “a little more cocky than I should have been” when arriving on campus for freshman year. Like many freshmen, Mercado experienced the distraction of being on her own for the first time, which took a toll on her grades. Holding down a job while taking more classes than she could handle didn’t help. “It all came crashing down on top of me,” Mercado says. Freshman year was “a big dose of reality,” she says.

Here’s another one: statistically speaking, Mercado might have been voted “Least Likely to Succeed” at birth. Low-income black and Hispanic students are by far the least likely U.S. students to graduate from high school and attend a four-year college. Those who are accepted to college are least likely to stick around and earn a degree. For each one who earns a bachelor’s degree, 11 fall short somewhere along the line, giving students like Mercado a mere 8 percent chance of graduating from college.

Mercado persists. Reenergized after a summer internship with the KIPP Foundation in Chicago, she is back on campus for the fall semester of 2012. She credits the habits of mind and encouragement she received in middle school, and the contacts she maintains five years later with KIPP teachers and administrators, for propelling her forward. “This year I’m coming in with a clear head. I’m more focused on my classes and what I want to accomplish. I’m going to do better,” she says. Her delivery communicates not hope or aspiration but conviction. “Nothing is going to keep me from graduating,” she insists, adding for emphasis, “nothing.”

Mercado’s story—both her struggle and her determination— will be repeated over the next several years on college campuses across the U.S. At one level, she’s just one more kid trying to pass biology, graduate, and make something of herself. But as the product of a KIPP school, Mercado is at the vanguard of a rapidly growing class of students whose success or failure could make or break the reputation of a closely watched group of charter schools and the sometimes-controversial, muscular brand of education they have pioneered. In 2015, more than 10,000 students from KIPP and other major charter-school highfliers will be on college campuses across the United States.

The Coming KIPP Bubble

You can’t play the ingenue forever.

For much of its brief history, there has been something of a halo over the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Founded in Houston in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, a pair of Teach For America corps members, KIPP now has more than 100 schools in 20 states and Washington, D.C. It is the largest and best known of a class of charter-management organizations (CMOs) that includes Achievement First, YES Prep, Uncommon Schools, Mastery, Aspire, and others. This group shares a set of familiar characteristics: more and longer school days, with a college preparatory curriculum for all students; strict behavioral and disciplinary codes; and a strong focus on building a common, high-intensity school culture. Classrooms and halls are awash in motivational quotations and college banners, typically from the alma maters of the inevitably young, hard-charging teachers who staff the schools. The signature feature is high behavioral and academic expectations for all students, the vast majority of whom are low-income, urban black and Hispanic kids. It’s this last feature that led KIPP and the others to be branded “No Excuses” schools, a label not universally embraced within the category.

The reputation of the No Excuses model is complicated and often divisive among professional educators. Outside the education bubble in the broader public mind, however, these high-flying charters are much-adored, attractive young upstarts, and the antidote to the dark, dispiriting “dropout factories” of media caricature. For years, a central motif of the feel-good narrative surrounding No Excuses charter schools has been their college acceptance rates. Houston-based YES Prep, for example, has made much of the fact that 100 percent of their graduating seniors have been accepted to college; more than 90 percent are the first in their family to attend a four-year college. The original cohort of KIPP students attended college at more than double the rate of their demographic peers: bracing, affirming, “It’s Being Done” data points to warm the gap-closing hearts of ed reform hawks.

The April 2011 release of KIPP’s College Completion Report changed the No Excuses narrative almost instantly from “college acceptance” to “college completion.” A bold and laudable exercise in transparency, the report gave ammunition to KIPP’s boosters and critics alike. Thirty-three percent of the earliest cohorts of KIPP middle-school students were found to have graduated college within six years, four times the average rate of students from underserved communities and slightly higher than the figure (31 percent) for all U.S. students. It was a clear and unambiguous accomplishment. Yet two out of three former KIPP students were failing to reach the bar, however audacious, that KIPP itself had established as “the essential stepping stone to rewarding work, a steady income, self-sufficiency and success.” The affirming image of smiling, cap-and-gown–bedecked ghetto kids graduating high school and heading off to college and bright horizons beyond lost a bit of its luster.

KIPP has held fast to the idea that college is indispensable. The goal remains to see 75 percent of graduates earn a four-year college degree, comparable to the rate at which top-income-quartile students graduate. The bar has been set not by its critics but by KIPP itself: if KIPP and other No Excuses schools are to fulfill their promise as game changers in American education, and rewrite the script on reaching and teaching underserved kids, their graduates must not merely be accepted to college; they must demonstrate success once they get there.

KIPP has identified a number of factors it believes are critical to raising its students’ college-completion rates, including enhanced academic preparedness; a set of “character strengths,” like “grit,” self-control, and optimism; matching each student with the right college; social and academic integration once they arrive on campus; and college affordability. The organization is making an increasingly aggressive effort to exercise some measure of control over each of these factors through partnerships with at least 20 colleges nationwide designed to create a pipeline to four-year colleges able to offer the greatest possible commitment and support to KIPP alumni.

While there is broad general agreement on what makes “first-generation” college-goers stay in school and take a degree, less clear is what it takes to create those characteristics and conditions in the first place, and how much accountability for college completion should be attributed to a student’s K–12 education, his or her college, and the students themselves. KIPP’s rapidly growing “KIPP Through College” program offers support programs and services stretching from middle school through college and beyond, including high school and college placement, financial literacy, mentorships, college and career advisement, and one-to-one support from some of the 100 full-time KIPP staff doing college counseling and support work throughout its network.

KIPP’s recipe for getting students “to and through college” is about to be put to the test, if not quite at scale then in unprecedented numbers. In the 2012–13 school year, just over 1,000 former KIPP students are in college. Three years from now that figure will explode, with 10,000 KIPP alumni on America’s campuses. KIPP chief executive officer Richard Barth takes care to manage expectations for how this “KIPP bubble” cohort will perform. The 75 percent figure is a “long-term play” and does not apply yet. Fifty percent is “an aspiration.” Regardless, by staking their reputations on college completion, KIPP and other No Excuses schools are rapidly approaching something of a “put up or shut up” moment. The attempt to write the playbook on what it takes to get first-generation low-income black and Hispanic kids into the world with college degrees in hand will offer something of a referendum on KIPP and the No Excuses model.

“All Hands on Deck”

To see KIPP’s effort to steer its alumni to “right match” colleges, visit Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Marshall College (F&M). A private liberal arts college with 2,200 undergraduate students, F&M was the first college to enter into a formal partnership with KIPP aimed at improving college persistence and graduation rates of KIPP alumni. In 2011, the school launched “F&M College Prep” and welcomed 23 KIPP students to the precollege summer-immersion program. The following year, the program tripled in size, adding students from Uncommon Schools, Mastery Charter Schools, Achievement First, and others. The three-week program is intended to give rising seniors from these schools their first taste of college life. Students take two classes a day taught by F&M professors, and attend workshops on college admissions, financial aid, and other topics—all intended to demystify college life.

The students from KIPP and the other schools “leave F&M and go into their senior year thinking, ‘I can go to college. It’s gonna be tough, but it’ll be fine. I know what my resources are. I know how to talk to professors and upperclassmen. I know how to navigate the system,’” says Shawn Jenkins, who runs F&M College Prep as special assistant to the dean of the college for strategic projects.

F&M’s approach to retaining and graduating minority students is modeled directly on the work of the Posse Foundation, a New York City–based nonprofit that sends group of students, a posse, to college together to act as a support system for one another. According to the Education Trust, F&M graduates more than 87 percent of its students within six years, but only 70 percent of its black and Hispanic undergraduates. F&M staff had long observed that students who came to the Lancaster campus through Posse tended to graduate at a much higher rate than other minority students. Jenkins states the challenge succinctly: “How do we create a support structure that can mimic the same outcomes for KIPP students, for Mastery students, for Cristo Rey students?”

Once admitted to F&M, students from KIPP and other “first gens” are placed into a newly created mentoring program, based on the Posse approach. Students meet in groups of 8 to 10 with a campus-based mentor one to two hours each week. The mentor, who is the students’ academic advisor, also meets one-on-one with each student at least every other week.

It is not an easy or natural transition to college for the students urban charters serve. Feeling comfortable enough to go to professors’ office hours and not feeling out of place among other students are challenges to be overcome. “If students become academically integrated and socially integrated, their probabilities of being retained and graduated go up enormously,” observes Kent Trachte, dean of the college.

Jenkins, himself an F&M alum (Class of 2010) and former Posse Scholar, describes the college’s approach as “all hands on deck.” But when it works, it is nearly invisible to the students. Indeed, Jenkins only recently came to see and appreciate “the intentionality” that made possible his own journey from a Harlem public school to a top liberal arts college and a career as a young college administrator. “I had no idea. I didn’t know that when the doors were closed, people were sitting around talking about strategies to engage me to do better. That’s what we’re doing. There are certain students who need a little more attention,” he says.

KIPP’s partnership with Franklin & Marshall has clear benefits to all parties. A high percentage of F&M College Prep participants apply to the school, thus creating a pipeline of highly qualified, diverse students. KIPP sends its graduates to the kind of small private college that is statistically most likely to be successful with first-generation students. The students themselves get a “high-touch” approach from professors and advisors, keeping them in place and on track. F&M president Dan Porterfield knows them by name.

The 20 partnerships KIPP has entered into with colleges, including the University of Houston, Tulane, Morehouse, Spelman, Syracuse, Duke, and New York City’s Hunter College, will improve KIPP’s graduation rates by 7 to 8 percent “even if we did nothing else,” says Barth. In a parallel effort, F&M convened a group of a dozen liberal arts colleges and CMOs that will form “the nucleus for a larger effort to connect some of the leading high performing charters to some of the leading liberal arts colleges,” promises Trachte. Founding members of the coalition include Dickinson, Gettysburg, Bard, and Trinity.

No Excuses 2.0

No Excuses schools as a class have advanced our understanding of what it takes to get kids to college. The unresolved question is whether the students have what it takes to thrive once they get there. That question has some within charter networks openly questioning elements of the No Excuses orthodoxy.

At KIPP, at least part of the answer is more KIPP. “We’ve made a commitment to start earlier with our kids and stay longer,” says Barth. As KIPP has expanded from 2 schools to more than 100, it has broadened its focus to include elementary and high schools. “Fifth to eighth grade, it’s amazing what we’ve done,” he says, “but we see the impact of being able to have them starting in kindergarten.”

As of 2011, KIPP students’ average SAT score was 1426; the average ACT score was 20. For the colleges KIPP is targeting for its alumni, “a 20 ACT ain’t gonna cut it,” Barth candidly admits. Increasing a student’s odds of admission inevitably leads to a hard look at “backward mapping” curriculum and formative experiences from the earliest moment. “This is high stakes,” says Barth. “As a 2nd-grade teacher, you are making this happen. What happens in your year ties to where they’re going to be [in college]…everyone owns this chain. Everyone has a link.”

Within the No Excuses world, a strong case can be made that YES Prep graduates are as academically ready for college as anybody. In 2011, the average SAT combined score for YES Prep African American students in reading, writing, and mathematics was 1556, far above the national average of 1273 for African Americans, and significantly higher than the 1500 national average for all students. Every student is required to take and pass at least one AP class in high school; most take two or more. Less than 5 percent of YES Prep grads require remediation in college. Getting admitted to a four-year college is a graduation requirement at YES Prep, which, like KIPP, has been admirably transparent about its college-completion rate, currently at 41 percent within six years.

“It wasn’t the academic piece that was holding our kids back,” notes senior director of college initiatives at YES Prep Donald Kamentz. “What we found hands down was it was the noncognitive piece—that tenacity, that grit—that allowed kids to harness those skills and persist when they faced difficulty.” Kamentz and Laura Keane of Mastery Charter Schools have been at the center of an effort, along with Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, to design and test interventions aimed at enhancing student perseverance and improving college enrollment and graduation outcomes. Kamentz cites the work of Stanford University’s Carol Dweck as a key: students must be able to develop a “growth mindset” that creates motivation and productivity rather than seeing intelligence as fixed and immutable. “If they can work through that, their persistence through and graduation from college is off the charts,” he observes.

This is not an entirely new development at No Excuses schools. Nearly fetishized, “grit” is as much a part of the culture of KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and the rest as the college banners and teachers reminding students to “correct your SLANT” (Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod if you understand, and Track the teacher). The idea that character traits like perseverance, zest, and optimism have more to do with long-term success than even academics gained mainstream traction with the recent publication of Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed. Within No Excuses schools, some are starting to question some of their fundamental assumptions about what makes kids successful. When asked, Barth does not disagree with the observation that KIPP is “doubling down on grit.”

“What we’ve found with the ‘whatever it takes’ or ‘no excuses’ mentality is that it was very teacher-driven and less student-driven,” says Kametz, acknowledging this is a controversial line of thought in his own halls. A typical No Excuses approach might involve giving demerits or detention for missed assignments or turning in work that’s not “neat and complete.” Kamentz questions whether this tough-love approach helps create the self-advocacy in students they will need to be successful in college. “It’s the largest gaping hole with our kids in college,” he says. “They will constantly say, ‘You structured my life so much that I had to do very little thinking and structuring myself.’”

“Academic preparation is absolutely foundational,” says Jeremy Chiappetta, executive director of Blackstone Valley Prep in Cumberland, Rhode Island. “But what education looks like, to be truly prepared for college, probably is not the routinized learning that makes many of these schools, including us, really successful on standardized tests. I don’t think that’s the academic rigor that any of us want for college prep. I think it’s much deeper, much bigger,” he says.

Kamentz concedes that much more is known about what successful college students should look like than how to create them. “It’s the inevitable practitioner question,” he says. “I know all this stuff. Now what do I do?” Michael Goldstein, founder of Boston’s Match School agrees. “We don’t really know of many interventions that change grit significantly. It may be harder to change grit than other things like knowledge,” he observes.

In Loco Helicopter Parentis

Not every college is prepared, interested, or has the resources to go the extra mile for low-income kids of color. The idea that once you arrive at college that you’re here and should make your own way and figure it out “is still the dominant culture,” says Barth, who compares colleges to joining a gym: “You get the money, and if the kids leave, they don’t take the money with them.” At present, he believes, the U.S. higher-education system simply isn’t designed for the kinds of students KIPP and other No Excuses charters serve.

There is also at least a bit of cognitive dissonance that must be acknowledged: if KIPP and others are successful in turning out academically prepared, resilient, and optimistic graduates, shouldn’t they need less support, not more, on college campuses? If students need an army of college advisors and KIPP staff to act in loco helicopter parentis, just how gritty can they be?

Barth sees no disconnect. If KIPP kids get “X” support on their journeys to and through college, he says, “middle-class kids get 50X,” much of it simply baked into their lives in the form of educated parents who are not intimidated by college and financial aid applications. College tours, SAT test-prep help, and tutors? Been there, done that. There are siblings, relatives, and even consultants to advise kids on where to apply and what classes to take. The safety net is deep and broad. Perhaps most importantly, there is a baseline expectation among the children of the well-off and well-educated: they grew up simply assuming they would go to college. Middle-class kids, says Barth, get all this “without consciousness of it. It just gets done.”

Back at UC San Diego, Rebecca Mercado acknowledges she was embarrassed to tell anyone she was struggling in school. “I felt that my teachers and even people from KIPP might be disappointed that I had allowed my grades to slip as much as they had.” So just how hard has college been? After some mild prodding, Mercado sheepishly confesses her freshman-year GPA: 2.4. But this year it will be a 3.5 she insists. It’s hard not to be convinced by the self-assured, confident-sounding college sophomore. Her commitment is admirable, earnest, and understandable. Gritty.

And if she struggles, there are any number of people who will be there to lend an ear, give advice, or point to resources. And why not? A lot of people, many of whom she’s never met, have as much riding on Mercado’s success as she does.

Maybe even more.

Robert Pondiscio is a former South Bronx 5th-grade teacher and executive director of CitizenshipFirst.

Instead, he became a substitute teacher.

In the college town where he was living, an astonishing 47 percent of the school district’s 721 teachers were absent more than 10 days during the school year, according to data the district reported to the U.S. Department of Education for a 2009–10 study. That number rose to 61 percent in an elementary school with one of the district’s highest percentages of black, Hispanic, and low-income children.

Even at that, the district’s absences don’t appear to be record setting. U.S. teachers take off an average of 9.4 days (roughly 1 day per month) each during a typical 180-day school year. By that estimate, the average child has substitute teachers for more than six months of his school career.

Those absences provided full-time employment for my son. With a month-old bachelor’s degree, he taught history and Spanish, his majors; calculus and literature; 2nd and 4th grades (after his second day on the job, the district asked him to take the 2nd-grade class for the rest of the year); tennis (no, he doesn’t play); and gym to a class of severely disabled high schoolers. Once, he worked as a secretary at the alternative school; none of the four teachers assigned to the school showed up that day.

The district didn’t pay much: $60 a day. But it also didn’t ask much in the way of credentials: no teaching certification, teacher education classes, or training beyond a three-hour orientation that focused mainly on administrative details like time sheets. That isn’t unusual either: in some of the country’s larger school districts—including Maryland’s Baltimore County, Florida’s Hillsborough County, Georgia’s Cobb County, and Colorado’s Jefferson County—substitutes need only a high-school GED.

My son taught a high-school unit on World War II, his intellectual passion. But most often, teachers left behind worksheets, quizzes, and videos for him to monitor, amounting to what University of Washington professor Marguerite Roza calls “a lost day for most kids, regardless of the qualifications of the sub.” Indeed, many schools are looking for someone just to keep order rather than to teach differential equations.

“A lot of times, principals are just praying for basic safety,” said Raegen T. Miller, who has studied teacher absenteeism as associate director of education research at the Center for American Progress and as part of a Harvard University team.

No problem there: my son is, after all, a Marine.

Counting the Days

The education department reported after the 2003–04 school year that 5.3 percent of U.S. teachers are absent on any given day, and that’s still the number most researchers use. But districts account for absences differently: some would count the tennis coach absent if he left his gym classes in the hands of a sub to attend an out-of-town tournament with his team; others wouldn’t. Some count professional development days when subs are hired to take the class; others don’t.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employs a weekly absence measure and reports that in 2011, nationwide, 3 percent of the workforce worked less than a 35-hour workweek because of absences. Among public-sector workers, rates were 3.9 for federal workers, 4.2 for state, and 3.6 for employees of local governments.

Geoffrey Smith, who studies substitute-teacher management and founded the Substitute Teaching Institute at Utah State University, says, “A lot doesn’t get called in.” Each of Utah’s 42 school districts counts teacher absences differently, he told me, which means there’s little consistency in the data. Still, he said his surveys suggest that between 8 and 10 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, and there’s some anecdotal evidence on his side.

Last summer, for example, the Camden, New Jersey, school board outsourced its substitute hiring to a private vendor because the job was so onerous: between teachers calling in sick or on leave, the district needed to find subs for up to 40 percent of its teachers each day, it told the local newspaper. In a 2011 report for the Providence, Rhode Island, school board, researchers at Brown University’s Urban Education and Policy program found that the district’s 1,321 teachers took off an average of 21 days each per school year.

In the education department’s 2009–10 report—assembled by its Office for Civil Rights from surveys of 57,000 schools—on average, half the teachers in the 208 Rhode Island schools surveyed were absent more than 10 days during the year, surpassing teacher absences in Hawaii, Arkansas, Oregon, and New Mexico by only a whisker. Nationally, 36 percent of teachers were absent that often. And even in Utah, which reported the lowest absence rates to the department, 20 percent of teachers took off more than 10 days each school year.

Who are those teachers? Harvard researchers Raegen Miller, Richard Murnane, and John Willett studied a district they identified only as large, urban, and northern. Duke University researchers Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Jacob Vigdor analyzed data from North Carolina schools. Both studies concluded that teachers in bigger schools were absent more often than those in smaller schools. Elementary-school teachers took off more time than did those in high school. Tenured teachers took off 3.7 more days than did those without tenure.

Teachers in traditional districts seem to take off more than those in charters. Using the education department’s Office for Civil Rights data, Miller estimates that about 37 percent of teachers are absent more than 10 days at district elementary and middle schools compared to 22 percent at charters.

Female teachers under age 35 averaged 3.2 more absences each school year than did men. Teachers who had a master’s degree or graduated from a competitive college took less time than those who didn’t. And teachers in low-income schools were absent more often than those serving higher-income families. One in 4 middle schools in the Duke study were among those with the highest absence rates, but that dropped to 1 in 12 among middle schools serving the district’s most affluent students.

Teachers argue that they’re absent as often as they are because they’re subject to all kinds of infections from sniffly-nosed youngsters and to intense stress in tough schools. Teaching—and particularly elementary-school teaching—is still a majority-female occupation, and child care still falls overwhelmingly on mothers, they add. When a teacher’s child is out with the flu, she may have little choice but to stay home, too.

But other research contends that teachers’ frequent absences are driven by generous leave provisions in their contracts, which typically include time off for illness and personal choice and, in many cases, family deaths, voting, religious observation, union business, conferences, cancer screening, even driver’s license renewal. The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), which maintains a database on collective-bargaining agreements in 113 large school districts, reports that the contracts give their teachers, on average, 13.5 days of sick and personal leave per school year.

In Columbus, Ohio, the contract allows teachers 20 paid days off, in addition to school holidays and summer breaks. Teachers have 21 days in Boston, 25 days in Hartford, and up to 28 days in Newark, according to NCTQ. By contrast, only 73 percent of private-sector employers provide any sick leave in addition to paid vacation, according to the U.S. Labor Department, and they offer an average of eight sick-leave days during a 12-month work year. In New York City, even substitutes qualify for sick days, one per month.

Teachers certainly are exposed to all manner of classroom germs, but there’s also evidence that a lot of absences are discretionary. The Harvard study found that the highest percentage of absences at that northern, urban district were on Fridays, when 6.6 percent of teachers took off, providing themselves a three-day weekend. Only 4.9 percent took off Tuesdays. More than half the absences that the study examined were for “personal illness,” and more than half of those were for only a day or two. Perhaps coincidentally, the district required a doctor’s excuse for an absence of three days or more.

Substitutes typically earn less than $100 a day. But even at that, Raegen Miller puts the cost of substitute teachers at $4 billion a year, or about 1 percent of total K–12 spending. In Fairfax County, Virginia, whose 13,000 teachers are offered 11 days off a year, the district budgeted $19 million for substitutes in 2012. Cleveland, Ohio, whose teachers may take 18 days off, is budgeting $10.8 million for substitutes this year.

University of Washington’s Marguerite Roza calculated what districts would save yearly on substitute pay if teachers took leave at the same rate as other professionals, that is, 3 days during a comparable 180-day year. Her conclusion: $43 per pupil in savings, or about one-half percent of school budgets.

Cost to Learning

The costs are far more than just financial, of course. The Duke researchers found that being taught by a sub for 10 days a year has a larger effect on a child’s math score than if he’d changed schools, and about half the size of the effect of poverty. Columbia researchers Mariesa Herrmann and Jonah Rockoff concluded that the effect on learning of using a substitute for even a day is greater than the effect of replacing an average teacher with a terrible one, that is, a teacher in the 10th percentile for math instruction and the 20th percentile in English instruction.

There’s no research on how long that effect lasts. But because learning is cumulative, “you would expect that the effect would aggregate to a larger loss of achievement over an entire school career,” Mariesa Herrmann told me. In other words, “A teacher not in a classroom is a missed opportunity for learning,” says Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ.

Some of that learning loss comes from disruption to the classroom: subs don’t know the kids, the classroom routine, the school culture. They have no skin in the game, nothing to win or lose if no one learns Chaucer. Classroom management breaks down. Miller told me that even janitors know when there’s been a sub: “There’s more crap on the floor.”

Teachers often leave busywork behind, or no work at all. In math, particularly—where the roiling debate over how to teach basic computation continues—subs often are cautioned not to teach anything at all for fear of setting the class back. Given testing pressures and school-wide lesson planning, there’s little time to reteach a lesson.

Then, too, districts set fairly low standards for their subs, although the weak economy and teacher layoffs seem to be bringing more certified teachers into the sub pool. Of the 113 large districts in the NCTQ’s database, less than one-quarter require that subs hold any teaching credentials. Only 37 districts require a college degree; 1 in 11 asks for only a high-school diploma or GED.

Out of curiosity, I perused the Denver Public Schools “Substitute Teacher Handbook.” It told me subs can’t wear bedroom slippers to work, that they’re paid $90.40 a day, and that they can ask for, but shouldn’t expect, an evaluation. It didn’t say anything about their qualifications to teach.

Carrots and Sticks

With school budgets strained and learning loss evident, I wondered why districts didn’t try to claw back some of the days they’ve granted their teachers for illness and personal leave. Miller has calculated the learning loss attributable to teacher absences to be equal to about 5 percent of the achievement gap between black and white students. “If you had an intervention that would close the gap that much, it would be worth doing, wouldn’t it?” he asked.

The problem, NCTQ’s Kate Walsh told me, is that teacher quality has been ignored as a reform issue until fairly recently. Now that the focus has shifted, superintendents have so many bigger issues to confront—teacher-evaluation systems, tenure, differential pay—that “you can understand why they don’t go after this benefit,” she said.

“This is small change” to most districts, Miller added—they’re facing budget gaps way larger than that. And the issue touches such a nerve with teacher groups that “there’s profound reluctance to get into it at the bargaining table,” he said. “It’s an entitlement.”

“You should have seen the hate mail I got” after publishing a recent report on teacher absences, Roza told me.

Instead, districts have been turning to incentives to keep teachers at their desks. Almost all districts allow teachers to accumulate unused sick and personal days, and to cash them out when they retire or leave the district. The Detroit schools paid out $12.5 million for unused sick days in 2010–11, which was twice what it spent on subs. New York City employs hundreds of full-time subs who report daily to a “home” school and fill in where they’re needed. They provide some continuity for the school and soak up teachers who have been laid off by budget cuts or enrollment declines. Even so, says Columbia’s Herrmann, these “absent teacher reserves” account for only 10 to 15 percent of the teachers that New York needs every day.

But some districts, facing such huge eventual payouts, have begun capping the number of sick days teachers can accumulate, posing a use-’em-or-lose-’em dilemma for teachers. And for younger teachers, “in deciding whether to be absent, are you really thinking of your retirement?” Columbia’s Herrmann asked.

Researchers have proposed that districts pay teachers a bonus for the days they don’t take off, or give their schools the money that would have been spent on subs as a collective incentive, or set up a reward system for teachers with good attendance (the Columbia study found that only 3 percent of teachers had perfect attendance). The Duke researchers proposed increasing teacher salaries by $400 a year and then charging teachers $50 for each day they take off. They estimated that the scheme would reduce absences by about one day per teacher and largely pay for itself. (Among the arguments raised against the proposal: it would hit female teachers with children harder than it would hit men.)

Many private schools and some charters simply don’t hire subs. Colleagues fill in for absent teachers during their own nonteaching hours. That keeps the class on pace when, say, one 4th-grade social-studies teacher can fill in for another, especially since they’re likely to have drafted the lesson plan together. It also means that one teacher is imposing on another, which creates some accountability, or at least discomfort for the teacher calling in repeated excuses.

But union contracts often limit how many hours a public-school teacher must be in the classroom: that’s why a school may hire a substitute librarian rather than send everyone back to their homerooms when the full-time librarian is out. And some contracts require districts to pay their teachers to sub, usually at rates higher than they would pay a substitute. The Wichita district pays its own teachers $20 an hour; a full-day sub earns $99.

Research also shows that absences increase where districts install automated absence-management systems instead of leaving the job to school secretaries. Teachers log onto the system’s website to report they will be absent. Subs log onto the same site to choose the class they’ll teach.

But districts are adopting the systems anyway, as school support staffs are slashed and technology becomes cheaper. Among the largest of the systems, privately owned Aesop is in 3,000 districts. Aesop claims on its website that it saves districts money: its “fill rate”—that is, the number of classrooms it fills with a sub—is so high that schools don’t need to use more costly downtime teachers. The company adds that its data reports enable principals to track who’s frequently absent and “to work with teachers” who are.

But the automated systems mean that teachers no longer have to talk to the principal, and perhaps explain that they’re taking a day off for a wedding-gown fitting or an auto tune-up. The automated systems also give schools less control over who will fill their classrooms: schools still can call favorite subs, but when those aren’t available, an opening is listed on the website and anyone on an approved list, including the GED holder, can claim chemistry class.

Researchers have found that teachers are absent more often when their fellow teachers are, too. That can suggest there’s an “absence culture” in the school, as in “heck, everyone else is doing it.” It also suggests a struggling school, where teacher absences and student absences feed off one another until neither group shows up. Or it may suggest weak management and unhappy workers. “If you’ve worked in an effective organization, people show up. If you’ve worked in a dysfunctional organization, they take off,” NCTQ’s Walsh observed.

I wondered about that when I looked at the education department’s 2009 report on absenteeism and paged to high-performing Montgomery County, Maryland. The district reported that only 6.8 percent of teachers were absent 10 or more days per year at one school with a high percentage of black, Hispanic, and low-income children. But at two other schools with similar demographics, 42 percent and 19.6 percent of teachers took off that much time.

I asked the district about that. Then I asked again. As in every district I asked about teacher absenteeism, no one answered.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a regular contributor to Education Next. Her son has resumed active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps.

“No,” says a boy named Max in a black rock band T-shirt. “He was on PCP.”

A few nod their heads in agreement. They could be talking about a sophomore who got wasted over the weekend or a senior who got busted in the parking lot, by all appearances, but they’re actually discussing the president of a road-racing company, a man whose crimes had nothing to do with illegal substances. He earned the attention of these students through a poorly written letter, one that caught the eye of Ms. Andrea Bassett, an Honors English teacher at Needham High School in Massachusetts.

Max reads a printout of the letter to the other boys as if he were dropping meat into a shark tank. “‘In trying to formulate what to say in regards to yesterday’s events,’” Max quotes, “‘I realized that what I said over and over to the folks I helped get on returning shuttle buses was exactly what should be said to all.’”

“What?” someone exclaims. Everyone laughs. “He just throws in words!” Max says. He goes on to finish the opening paragraph.

“‘While it became repetitive, it was no less from the heart in any one time from the other:’”

“He ended with a colon,” says a boy who didn’t shave that morning.

“You can pretty much revise the first paragraph,” says Mike, his cheek on his hand.

A stocky kid named David chimes in. “That’s not just bad grammar,” he says, indignant. “That’s, like, bad PR.”

His comment catches the attention of Ms. Bassett, who is making rounds to each cluster of students. “David,” she says, “the life lesson here is that bad grammar is bad PR. You guys remember that.”

Ms. Bassett is the newest faculty member of the English department at Needham High, a lean, athletic blonde who chose to show this letter to her students as a good bad example. It was an apology for a poorly managed 15K, a race that Ms. Bassett herself ran, averaging a 10-minute mile. In the letter, the president of the road-racing company tried to explain how the runners had gotten misdirected and why there was no water at the finish line. Ms. Bassett thought the greater indignity was enduring an apology from a president whose prose waddled along for 40 paragraphs, weighed down with extra words and never-ending sentences.

“He would definitely fail a grammar assignment in this class,” she says, to wide classroom approval. Ms. Bassett is part of a department that has decided to take grammar seriously. Too many students were claiming that nobody had ever taught them the rules. Needham High School’s seniors, mostly from upper-middle-class families, were graduating without knowing the parts of speech or parts of a sentence. They would sometimes write “u” instead of “you” in their essays, or a lowercase “i” instead of “I.” The high school, like many others, had been suffering from a lack of standardized grammar instruction throughout the grades. Over the summer of 2011, the English department created a series of PowerPoint presentations to coordinate grammar instruction across the grades, hoping to provide their students a better, more uniform understanding of the rules. The goal was to set a baseline for Needham High students, allowing them to review old lessons and master new ones through the slides.

“They actually like it. They like something in front of them that’s task-oriented,” says Ms. Bassett. The PowerPoint slides look like blueprints, with their simple, white-on-blue form, and they lay the rules out in a straightforward way. Needham High’s teachers have been using them for more than a year, and Ms. Bassett believes that they have made a subject that was once confusing “concrete and quantifiable.”

Battling Barbarism

Sloppy English usage may seem like a modern problem, but the laxness that has led to this moment in grammar’s history bears a strong resemblance to the atmosphere in early-18thcentury England. At that time, decades had passed since the golden age of English, with its production of the King James Bible (1611) and the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Many began to fear that the language was going to the dogs.

“Our language is in a manner barbarous,” poet John Dryden complained in 1693. Theologian Thomas Stackhouse agreed. “We write by guess, more than any stated rule,” he said in 1731, “and form every man his diction, either according to his humour and caprice.”

Dryden and Stackhouse weren’t complaining about rule breakers, as Needham’s teachers do; they were complaining about a lack of rules in the first place. In the early 1700s, no English-specific grammar or dictionary existed. Writers worried that in a few generations their work would become as unintelligible as Old or Middle English was to them. As Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, put it in 1711, “Such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.”

Much of the concern sprang from the English Civil War (1642–1651). The overthrow of the monarchy and the turmoil that followed had dirtied the image of English, a green, unsure language at the time. With Oliver Cromwell leading the country and the king himself beheaded, the King’s English was in jeopardy. An expansion of printing during the war had allowed writers of less means to publish material. “Such an infusion of enthusiastic jargon prevailed in every writing, as was not shaken off in many years after,” said Swift. “To this succeeded the licentiousness which entered with the restoration, and from infecting our religion and morals fell to corrupt our language.” Religion, morals, language—they had all grown shoddy by the 1700s, many thought. The English language needed help. Fast.

Generation Gap

In the English department lounge at NHS, teachers sit at a long table, sipping on water bottles and pulling out home-packed lunches. They too believe that English needs help, and they want to fix it. Jonathan Cooke thinks the decline of grammar is a recent one. The only person with gray hair in the room, he’s a former lawyer who switched to teaching 15 years ago. He remembers a time in the early 1970s when virtually every student could identify a direct object. “I learned that all through middle school,” he says. “By the time I got to high school, it was more funky. You could take a course in just satires.”

Brent Concilio, a young, Dartmouth-educated teacher with a turkey wrap in his hand, thinks the shift in the 1960s came from the ideas of John Dewey (1859–1952), a reformer who pushed for a child-centered education. “In the interest of making English class more ‘relevant’ to students’ lives, we began having students read contemporary novels and talk about how those novels made them feel.”
“Wicked cool,” says Cooke.

“But any time you make room for something, something else has to go,” says Concilio. “And what went was the systematic teaching of grammar.”
This shift in priorities was only one of the factors in the abandonment of grammar instruction. Another factor was a public campaign against the concept of a single correct way of speaking.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1972 stated that students had a right “to their own patterns and varieties and language.” The resolution, which was adopted in 1974 by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), went so far as to say that correcting language was “immoral” because it was really an attempt by one social group to exert dominance over another. Suddenly, grammar was oppressive. It was stodgy. It was all but banished from many classrooms. The pendulum swung far away from the prescriptive, rules-oriented English once taught in schools.

After the sixties, grade-school students, by and large, didn’t learn grammar the way their parents had, and now, decades later, they don’t reinforce the rules very well with their own children. Without this reinforcement at home, much of the burden to teach students correct English lies with teachers.
The problem with that idea, of course, is that many teachers today didn’t learn much grammar when they were in school, either. “It’s now been gone for a generation,” Concilio says. “A lot of people, I think, really don’t understand the value of it.”

Rules of Order

The pushback we have seen over the past few decades could have been less severe if the architects of English grammar had set up the rules to be more respectful of actual usage. The early grammarians were reacting to disorder, though, and they weren’t afraid to leave a few people behind in their drive for structure.

One of the first of the language reformers was the writer Dr. Samuel Johnson. In 1755, he published A Dictionary of the English Language, a mammoth work of scholarship that he spent nine years writing. The dictionary was a tremendous step toward preserving the language, but Johnson complained that he had to create it with “no assistance but from general grammar,” meaning Latin grammar, because nobody had systematized the English language yet.

The call for a unique English grammar grew louder. It was the greatest void in the language, now that a dictionary had been written. Eighteenth-century scholars and politicians believed that such a grammar would dignify the language on the world stage, helping to emphasize England’s political autonomy from the European continent.

Writers were begging for standards not only for their own guidance, but for their legacies.

Robert Lowth stepped up to the challenge. Lowth, a clergyman and eventual bishop of London, believed that correct grammar was next to godliness, and that the King James Bible was the gold standard of the language. English, he said, was becoming far too loose, and it needed “stiffening up,” a claim that would resonate several centuries later with Needham High School’s English teachers.

Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, was not the first English grammar ever written, but it outsold all the others on the market. The most notable of the competing guides was a descriptive grammar by theologian and chemist Joseph Priestley (1733– 1804). Robert Lowth’s grammar proved more popular because Britain in the 18th century, still recovering from the English Civil War, wanted prescription, not description; rules, not the reality—especially not the reality of the lower classes.

The only problem was that “stiffening up” the language left English a bit too stiff. Lowth often looked to Latin for inspiration rather than to customary usage when he settled a question. For example, he frowned on the expression “It is me” because it ended in the objective case. “It is I” matched the Latin construction, and was therefore better, according to Lowth. It has remained the rule for proper usage ever since, but has always been too awkward to gain traction among most English speakers.

Lowth also disapproved of prepositions at the end of sentences. “The placing of the preposition before the relative is more graceful,” he said. The rule worked for Latin, but not so well for English speakers, whose sentences ended naturally in prepositions. Lowth at least acknowledged that this tendency was “an idiom which our language is strongly inclined to,” showing that the inclination bent strongly in his direction, too.

He called double negatives improper, and grammarian Lindley Murray (1745–1826) later proved this claim with algebra, even though Shakespeare was known to use a double negative occasionally. Lowth also preached against verbs that had merged tenses over the years. He preferred strong verbs that had a distinct past tense: drink and drank, write and wrote, for example. Verbs whose past tenses merely ended in “ed” were the result of a natural streamlining of the English language. Lowth wanted to fight against this tendency and supported usage that kept verb tenses distinct and intact, like Latin verbs, which were in no danger of merging because the language had been dead for centuries.

Lowth’s ideas pleased the class conscious because his rules were too pedantic for the lower classes to adopt. They allowed social climbers a clever way to blend in with the upper class. They fit the zeitgeist because 18th-century England, with its zeal for classical ideals of logic and reasoning, was fertile ground for anyone who wanted to explain something rationally, even something as irrational as the English language.

A Short Introduction to the English Language ran 22 editions in the 18th century and led several decades later to an important spin-off grammar by Murray, which became a staple in 19th-century schools on both sides of the Atlantic. What began as one man’s guidelines eventually became hard rules, enforceable with a switch. Even when Americans began producing their own textbooks, in the mid-19th century, they rehashed most of Lowth’s and Murray’s ideas.

To be sure, Lowth and his fellow reformers stabilized the language, but their prescriptive, top-down approach also set the stage for the instability we have now. The gap between proper written English and actual usage is wider today than Needham High School’s football field.

Today’s Torchbearers

Grammar instruction has been mocked and marginalized for decades, partly because the rules were too cold and unfeeling. Lately, the rules have been making a bit of a comeback. Educators are starting to believe that English grammar, even with its quirky rules, is far better than nothing, after they’ve seen the results of nothing. The SAT added grammar questions to its format in 2005 in response to pressure from college administrators. Parents have begun to push for more English language instruction. The NCTE has softened its position, and now we see a growing number of teachers bringing grammar, the forgotten spinster of school subjects, back to the party.

“In the work force, grammar will be as important as this training of analyzing literature,” says Ms. Bassett. “[These students] are not going to be paid in 20 years for analyzing literature.

They’re going to be paid to present something to their company.”

Her colleagues list several benefits that come from grammar instruction: clear cover letters, stronger writing skills, and an easier understanding of a foreign language, to name a few. If there is a bias toward one “correct” way of speaking, well, they want their students to learn it.

And so the legacy of the English language lies heavily with teachers like Ms. Bassett, a recent convert to grammar herself, and her students. They may go too far in their reforms, as their predecessors have, or they may achieve a balanced approach. At any rate, the appearance of today’s grammarians, in their hoodies and sneaks, bears little resemblance to that of their forerunners.

A boy named Leo, in a Red Sox cap, raises his hand to make a suggestion in Ms. Bassett’s class. “You could put an em dash here: ‘Our race director quickly came up with a contingency plan—real time, on the spot—in the horror of what could have been a disaster.’”

“Oh, my gosh, you are an em-dash king. Nicely done,” says Ms. Bassett.

David raises his hand. “This is the dumbest thing,” he says, pointing to a paragraph in the memo: “‘Finally, we start the race. What happens next defies belief, absolutely and completely!!!’ Like, why are there three exclamation points?”

“What sort of tone does it create to use three exclamation points?” asks Ms. Bassett.

“Colloquial,” a few answer back.

“Yeah,” she says. “Third grade. Like a tween looking at Justin Bieber.”

At the end of the hour, as Max, Mike, and David put their pens away and zip up their bags, Ms. Bassett warns her students that there are consequences to becoming successful and writing with poor grammar: “You’ll get ridiculed in my class.”

And in a society that has neglected grammar for so long, mockery may be just what grammar needs to come back into vogue. Only now, the ridicule is coming from the bottom up, from 17-year-olds who specialize in snark, who know the rules better than their future bosses, who write clean sentences but don’t appear very close to godliness. They may be Robert Lowth’s best hope.

Elise Hahl contributed to Choosing Motherhood (Cedar Fort, Inc., 2013) and has written for the online magazine “Outside In Literary & Travel.”

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that school district costs for teachers’ health insurance rose at an average annual rate of 4 percent above inflation from 2004 to 2012. In 2004, health insurance costs tacked 11.4 percent onto teacher earnings; in 2012, they added 15.5 percent. At roughly $560 per pupil per year, the national average masks wide variation across states, as districts in some states have relatively low insurance costs while costs borne by districts in other states are quite high. The data do not include health costs for other school employees and retirees, which can be quite substantial.

In this study, we examine BLS data to compare the costs to districts for teacher health insurance with similar costs to private-sector employers. We find that insurance costs for teachers are 26 percent higher than they are for private-sector professionals, and this is partly explained by greater unionization in the public sector. We also examine data newly available from Wisconsin to quantify the impact of that state’s recent change in collective bargaining law: we find a reduction in district costs of 13 to 19 percent, the result of lower-cost policies and higher teacher contributions.

Comparing Employer Costs

We begin with a basic, high-level question: How do employer health care costs for teachers compare with those for private-sector professionals? The most comprehensive national data published on employer costs, the BLS National Compensation Survey (NCS), provide estimates of employer insurance costs on a “per-hour-worked” basis for 180 groups of employees, broken down by occupational groups, industries, ownership (private industry or state and local government), and other characteristics. These data do not separate health from other insurance costs (life and disability) for teachers, but these other components are small (approximately 5 percent of the total), so this does not significantly affect our results.

We focus our comparisons on K–12 teachers and private-sector professionals. Using unpublished data provided to us by the BLS, we multiply the hourly employer insurance costs by the number of hours worked to obtain annual costs for each group of workers. Some 97 percent of K–12 teachers work full-time, while 83 percent of private-sector professionals do so. Because part-time workers are less likely than full-time workers to have health insurance from their employers, we adjust the private-sector comparison data to match the percentage of teachers who work full time.

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We estimate from these data that the national average of annual employer insurance costs in 2012 was $8,559 for K–12 teachers, and $6,803 for private-sector professionals. The difference between the figures has increased since 2004. Annual employer insurance costs for K–12 teachers rose 67 percent, compared to 49 percent for private professionals. The gap between employer costs was just 12 percent in 2004 but rose to 26 percent by 2012 (see Figure 1).

Our estimates for employer insurance costs average the expenditures across those employees who are covered by an employer’s plan and those who are not. Employees may not be covered either because no plan is offered (an issue for part-time employees in particular) or because the employee chooses not to participate (e.g., because coverage is available through a spouse’s employer). According to the NCS Employee Benefit Survey (EBS), 87 percent of K–12 teachers participate in a health insurance plan (medical, dental, vision, or prescription drug) through their employer, compared to 80 percent of private-sector professionals (our estimate, adjusting for the part-time percentage). Consequently, the difference between teachers and private-sector workers in employer health cost per participating employee is 16 percent ($9,838 vs. $8,492).

The EBS also collects data on premiums for medical insurance (a slightly narrower category than health insurance). The medical premiums are broken out by single and family coverage, so these data allow us to examine the cost of comparable policies. We find that for single coverage, employer costs for private-sector professionals are 82 percent of those for teachers ($4,496 vs. $5,494), but for family coverage, private-sector costs are 104 percent of those for districts ($11,116 vs. $10,728), slightly higher. This is a notable shift in the last few years. As recently as 2009, the employer cost for single coverage was $1,361 higher for teachers than for private-sector professionals, compared to $998 today, and for family coverage it was $29 higher for teachers instead of $388 lower. This suggests that some school districts have begun to adjust their policies toward private-sector norms.

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Employee Contributions and Total Premiums

The EBS data on medical insurance also include information on employee contributions. Together with employer costs, these data indicate that, for both single and family plans, total premiums are higher for teachers than they are for private-sector professionals. For single coverage, teachers pay a smaller share (13 percent) than do private professionals (19 percent). For family coverage, teachers contribute more (34 vs. 29 percent), which is enough to cover the higher cost of their plan. In other words, the total premium for teachers’ family coverage is more expensive than it is for private-sector professionals, but the share coming from teachers more than covers the difference (see Figure 2).

In addition to premiums, employees incur out-of-pocket costs, such as deductibles and co-payments. The EBS data indicate that one reason teachers’ insurance plans are more expensive is that features of the plans (such as lower deductibles) reduce out-of-pocket costs. Although it is accurate to say that teachers pay more to get more in the way of family coverage, it is more precise to state that they pay more up front in premiums and then pay less out-of-pocket.

Union vs. Nonunion Employees

The NCS data allow us to compare medical insurance coverage and premiums for union vs. nonunion workers, where union status is defined by whether the employee belongs to a collective bargaining unit. These breakouts are not available for K–12 teachers or private-sector professionals, but they are available for the state and local government (public) sector and the private sector. The comparisons are still informative because teachers’ health care costs track those of the public sector to some extent.

These data indicate that about 95 percent of union workers have access to employer-provided medical insurance in both the public and private sectors, and their participation rate is essentially the same in both sectors (78 to 79 percent). Nonunion workers are less likely than union workers to participate in a medical plan through their employer, in large part because their employer is less likely to offer them one. The difference from union workers is smaller in the public sector, however, where the nonunion participation rate is 68 percent, compared to 48 percent in the private sector.

In the public and private sectors, for both single and family coverage, the employer cost is higher for union workers than for nonunion workers. The total premium is significantly higher in all cases except for family coverage in the private sector, where it is about the same for union and nonunion workers. Finally, employee contributions are lower for union workers, except for single coverage in the public sector.

These patterns are the same for the state and local government sector vs. the private sector, with union and nonunion combined: higher employer costs, higher total premiums, and lower employee contributions, for both types of coverage. The unionization rate is higher for the public sector than for the private sector (50 percent vs. 14 percent in the EBS data), suggesting that unionization explains some portion of each of these patterns (see Figure 3).

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But these are not the patterns we observed between K–12 teachers and private-sector professionals: they are similar for single coverage but not for family coverage. Whatever impact unionization may have, there are other factors at play.

There is one state in which we have a seemingly natural experiment in changing teacher union strength: Wisconsin. If union strength results in higher employer costs, higher total premiums, and smaller employee contributions, then the removal of teacher health benefits from collective bargaining in Wisconsin might be expected to have the opposite effect: lower employer costs, lower total premiums, and larger employee contributions. This is exactly what happened.

Wisconsin Before and After Act 10

Wisconsin was the first state in the nation with public-sector collective bargaining and has long had one of the nation’s strongest teachers unions. It has also long been a state with very expensive teacher medical insurance. Average district costs in 2011 were $8,311 and $19,356 for single and family coverage, respectively. These costs were about 50 percent and 80 percent higher than the 2011 national averages for teachers, which were $5,500 and $10,723. Although Wisconsin is in a region with higher-than-average medical premiums, this geographic factor accounts for only a minor part of the gap between Wisconsin’s district costs and the national average.

Wisconsin’s high district costs reflected both the choice of expensive plans and low teacher contributions. In 2011, teachers made no contribution at all for single coverage in 43 percent of the state’s districts, nor for family coverage in 31 percent. By comparison, the noncontributory rates in 2011 among teachers in the national data discussed above were 39 percent and 16 percent, respectively. Among private-sector professional employees, the noncontributory rates for single and family plans were lower yet, 17 percent and 9 percent.

Act 10, proposed by Governor Walker and enacted by the legislature in 2011, removed benefits from local collective bargaining, thereby giving districts greater freedom to shop for less-expensive plans and to negotiate premiums. The law also allowed districts to establish higher employee contributions. Among the provisions of Act 10 was a 12 percent floor on the employee contribution rate, which applied directly only to the state-administered plan, but now serves as a benchmark that many school districts have followed.

These changes were intended to achieve savings on district benefit costs, through adoption of plans with lower premiums and increased teacher contributions. We examine the change in medical insurance costs for the school year ending in 2012, the first to be affected by Act 10, using data from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB). These results may not represent the total impact, as not all districts have renegotiated insurance contracts. Some are under contracts with insurers predating Act 10, including those with pre–Act 10 collective bargaining agreements that have not yet expired.

Click to enlarge

We calculate estimates of yearly changes using only districts for which data are available in consecutive years. The main finding from the WASB data is a sharp drop in employer costs in 2012 after years of steady growth. District payments for their employees’ medical care increased every year from 2003 to 2011. But from 2011 to 2012, average district costs for family coverage fell by an estimated $2,010, while district costs for single coverage declined by $1,042 (see Figure 4).

These figures underestimate the district savings attributable to Act 10, since premiums were steadily rising prior to Act 10 and were expected to continue doing so. When we account for this expected growth (using average growth from 2007 to 2011), we estimate savings of $2,614 for family coverage and $1,304 for single coverage. These estimates represent declines of 13 to 19 percent from the projected district costs for 2012.

Districts saved on teacher medical insurance costs in 2012 for two reasons: reductions in total premiums and increases in the portion paid by teachers. As discussed above, Act 10 did not directly raise teacher contributions, but the 12 percent minimum it established for the state plan set a standard that districts were now free to follow. For single coverage, between 2003 and 2011 the average share of medical insurance paid by teachers drifted up slightly, from about 3 to 4 percent, followed by a jump to more than 10 percent in 2012. Similarly, for family coverage, the average teacher contribution drifted up slightly over the period, to about 5 1/2 percent, and then jumped in 2012 to more than 10 percent. These figures now place Wisconsin in the vicinity of the national average contribution rate for teachers with single coverage of 13 percent, but still far below the average for family coverage of 34 percent.

In dollar terms, teacher contributions for family coverage rose by $939 in 2012, relative to the previous trend, while total premiums for family coverage declined by $1,674. Our estimate of $2,614 for the impact of Act 10 on district costs reflects these changes. The estimated impact on total premiums accounted for two-thirds of the reduction in district costs, and the act’s impact on employee contributions comprised the other third. We find a similar breakdown for single coverage.

These data have two important limitations. First, they likely understate the share of district savings attributable to higher employee costs because some (maybe most) of the reduction in total premiums is due to a rise in employee out-of-pocket payments (such as higher deductibles). Second, these data do not tell us anything about the quantity and quality of health care provided. Efficiency may have been enhanced as employees paid more of the cost and as employers became free to shop around, but we have no hard data on this.

As a check on the WASB data, we examined data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) on districts’ fringe benefit costs for teachers. Unlike the WASB data, these data are available for all districts but do not separate out health benefits from other fringe benefits, including retirement contributions, Social Security, and life insurance. The impact of Act 10 captured by these data will therefore include not only the effect on health insurance, but also the shift of about one-half of retirement contributions from employer to employee as mandated by Act 10.

The DPI data show a steady rise in fringe benefit costs from 1998 to 2011, in both dollar amounts and as a percentage of teacher salary, with the latter measure rising from 34 percent to 51 percent over the period. After Act 10, the average benefit rate dropped 8 percentage points to 43 percent. This is still quite high by comparison with the private sector, but markedly reduced. It is likely that at least one-half and perhaps two-thirds of the $4,500  drop in district fringe-benefit costs reflects the shift in retirement contributions, but virtually all of the remainder represents the reduction in district health-benefit costs. Thus the DPI data suggest a drop of $1,500 to $2,200 in average annual district health costs per teacher.

The DPI and WASB estimates show broadly consistent evidence of a large first-year impact of Act 10 on district costs for teacher health insurance, but we can only speculate on what the future effect will be. As mentioned above, some districts have not yet been able to use their new powers because of unexpired collective bargaining contracts or insurance policies, so there are more savings to be had. Many of the underlying drivers of rising health-care costs are independent of Act 10, and over the long term these will push Wisconsin employer costs back up, but from a significantly lower starting point. Moreover, as districts gain more experience in the open health care market, unfettered by collective bargaining, it is possible that they will be able to lower the rate of growth.

It is important to note that even with the dramatic savings from Act 10, district costs and total premiums in Wisconsin are still well above the national average for teachers. Indeed, by some estimates, prior to Act 10, a number of Wisconsin districts had insurance plans that were set to trigger the federal tax on “Cadillac plans” under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, scheduled to begin for 2018. This may still be true. Thus, there will be continuing pressure to reduce costs toward the national average, especially if and when the luxury tax is implemented.

Conclusion

The national data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that annual employer insurance costs are 26 percent higher for teachers than for private-sector professionals; adjusting for higher participation rates among teachers reduces the difference to 16 percent. Direct estimates of employer costs for medical plans present a mixed picture: higher employer costs for single coverage but not for family coverage. For both categories, total medical premiums are higher for teachers than they are for private-sector professionals, but for family coverage the teachers incur the extra expenditures themselves.

Unionization is associated with higher total premiums, higher employer costs, and lower employee contributions in both the public and private sectors. This suggests that the high unionization rate among teachers plays an important role in their employers’ higher average cost. Equally important, differences in teacher union strength across states help explain the wide variation in employer and employee health-insurance costs. In some nonunion states, teacher medical benefits are not particularly generous, owing to either low-cost plans (e.g., those with high deductibles) or high teacher contributions. In Arkansas, teachers typically pay 65 or 70 percent of the premiums for family coverage (the national average is 34 percent). In other states, with strong unions, such as Wisconsin, district insurance costs can be very expensive. It is in those states that the opportunities for district cost reduction are most promising, as data from Wisconsin so clearly show.

District cost reduction would ideally derive from changes that enhance efficiency, such as greater competition for health insurance. There should be no illusions that such efficiencies will come easily. In all likelihood, a great deal of any district cost reduction will take the form of higher teacher payments toward their health care through higher contributions and increased out-of-pocket expenses. This raises the question of the role of teacher health benefits in the total compensation package. The overall size of the package will continue to be the subject of debate. It is worth briefly commenting, however, on the importance of the structure of the package.

There are three reasons that efficiency might be enhanced by reallocating some of the compensation package from employer-paid health benefits to salary. First, efficiency in health-care expenditures is more likely enhanced when employees pay for services, since price signals provide the consumer with appropriate incentives. Second, shifting compensation back to salary (in the aggregate) provides greater opportunity for districts to use salary differentials to retain and recruit higher-quality teachers. Finally, as a matter of consumer choice, not all employees may want their employers to devote, say, $20,000 out of a $70,000 compensation package to medical insurance. Take-up rates well below 100 percent suggest that many teachers ascribe less value to the medical benefits offered than they cost. Thus, both efficiency (in attracting recruits) and equity (toward non-participants) might be enhanced by such a shift. Employers can offer greater choice among health plans of varying cost, with lower subsidies, fixed in size, and higher salaries that allow employees to choose how much they want to spend on higher-cost plans. As districts under fiscal distress increasingly turn to cost-cutting measures, such potential efficiency enhancements will become all the more important.

Robert Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas and fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. Jeffery Dean is distinguished doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas. This paper is drawn from a chapter in A Bigger Bang for Education’s Bucks (George W. Bush Institute, forthcoming).

You can already find “MOOCs” (massive open online courses) on a host of websites, created and delivered by a wide array of institutions and individuals.

As I write, Coursera offers 207 courses, ranging from astronomy to public health, presented by professors at such upscale schools as CalTech, Duke, and Stanford (where, as best I can tell, all this originated—and just a few years ago). Udacity offers about twenty courses, EdX (founded by Harvard and MIT) around ten.

Providers such as these are proliferating and expanding via a hodgepodge of for- and non-profit organizations with offerings that range from free to pricey. And participation is soaring, too. Coursera claims two million course-takers worldwide—and since the courses are online, one can indeed take them anyplace, anytime.

This remarkably rapid development carries huge potential for universalizing and customizing higher education and for enormous cost savings. But it collides with age-old traditions and deeply entrenched practices regarding how one earns a college degree—and it also carries enormous risks. Who determines which students “pass” these on-line courses and what’s the evidence that they met a suitable standard of accomplishment? By what process will “credit” be assessed and assigned and how will degrees be awarded, by whom and for an accumulation of what?

A host of lesser questions arises, too, such as what’s the meaning of an online course in science that affords students no access to or experience in laboratory settings, or in art, music, and myriad “applied” subjects that cannot be fully mastered on a computer screen?

To sort some of this out, the Gates Foundation, Coursera and the American Council on Education (ACE) recently teamed up to evaluate what students deserve what sorts of “credit” for which kinds of coursework done via Coursera. The ACE already operates a “College Credit Recommendation Service” that analyzes “workplace learning” and other courses taken outside traditional postsecondary institutions and recommends to colleges which of these should count for how much of what sort of degree credit. It’s now headed toward something of the sort for MOOCs.

Which got me thinking: Why not MOOCs in K–12 education, too—for the kids, not just their teachers? Why is this not another form of on-line or blended learning with huge potential to foster equity, acceleration, individualization, choice, and much else that we prize in the elementary-secondary sector?

We already have virtual charter schools in many places and several state-provided counterparts such as the Florida Virtual School. We have online providers of specific courses (see Apex Learning, for example). Home-schoolers can access multiple options. And we have more and more schools seeking to blend on-line offerings into their brick-and-mortar classrooms.

What we don’t yet have, as far as I know, are K–12 MOOCs provided by topflight schools to students beyond their own campuses. Imagine “History at Andover,” “Pre-calculus at Dalton,” “English literature at New Trier,” “Physics at Bronx Science.” Imagine middle school health courses provided by public-health professors at Johns Hopkins or experts at the Centers for Disease Control, art classes from the Metropolitan Museum, virtual field trips to the Galapagos with the National Geographic. There’s really no limit.

I’m sure that advanced high school students around the U.S. are already availing themselves of postsecondary MOOCs. That’s really just another form of dual enrollment. But will their high schools give them credit? And if Lawrenceville Academy were to offer a nifty high-school level MOOC in, say, world geography, by what means would Bill or Belinda, students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, get credit for taking it? Yes, this could easily be managed if their school brings it “in-house,” much like an APEX course. But what if they take it outside school and then want credit toward their diploma from Montgomery County? And why shouldn’t this be possible? Ditto for the drop-out who now has a day job (or a baby) but wants to resume the accumulation of high-school credit.

Think about the reverse, too. What if a kid enrolled at pricey Sidwell Friends takes an advanced-algebra “MOOC” over the summer? It doesn’t much matter whether the course originates at MIT, Stuyvesant High School, or Singapore’s Raffles Institution. The question is whether Sidwell will give that student credit—and then give her parents a tuition reduction or shorten the time she must spend there en route to a diploma?

All of this is much easier to visualize at the high school level, of course, and undeniably more complicated with eight-year-olds. But the concept isn’t really very different. Even in the primary and middle grades, MOOCs offer potential for gifted/talented pupils, for some kids with disabilities (particularly the physical and social kind), and for specialized or hard-to-teach subjects (e.g., learning Japanese with the help of a native speaker of that language). Youngsters in rural communities might especially benefit from access via technology to courses that their schools can’t offer. So would kids living in remote places or accompanying their parents to other parts of the planet.

But must the school remain in charge of all this, or can individual pupils and families access MOOCs for which they then get credit, whether that means credit to pass from fourth to fifth grade or to graduate from high school with an honors diploma? For the latter to work, someone must “validate” that the credit is duly earned and deserves to “count.” School systems or states might do this on their own, of course, but that would lead to uneven expectations and a lot of duplicative work. What about something akin to the ACE-Gates-Coursera initiative for K–12 education? Where are you, funders and visionaries, when we need you?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

In the following essays, we identify some of the key findings from the sixth annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens interviewed during April and May of 2012 (for survey methodology, see sidebar). Highlights include

• the Republican tilt of the education views of independents

• the especially high marks that Hispanics give their public schools

• strong support among the general public for using test-score information to hold teachers accountable

• lower confidence in teachers than has previously been reported

• the public’s (and teachers’) growing uneasiness with teachers unions

• the shaky foundations of public support for increased spending

• majority support for a broad range of school choice initiatives.

In addition to the views of the public as a whole, in this year’s survey special attention is paid to Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers, all of whom were oversampled in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. And in an effort to assess the sensitivity of respondents’ opinions to information and question wording, we embedded in this survey, as we have done in previous ones, various experiments. Responses to all questions are posted on our website, educationnext.org.

Independents lean Republican in their views of teachers unions and school spending—and support private school choice.

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck and neck, the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election. And in the days leading up to the national conventions, education policy, though hardly at the top of the public agenda, did assume a more prominent role in both campaigns. Which candidate is best positioned to use education to bring undecided voters into the fold? The answer may be surprising.

Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assign him a “fair” or “poor” rating. And on the education policy issues that most clearly divide the parties—the role of teachers unions and support for school spending—the views of independents hew closer to those of Republicans than of Democrats. Moreover, independents are more supportive than members of either party of expanding private school choice for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of Governor Romney’s proposals for K–12 education reform.

Whereas 25 percent of respondents to the EdNext-PEPG survey report that they are Republicans and 34 percent say that they are Democrats, fully 41 percent claim no affiliation with either major party. Of this group, 52 percent claim that they lean Democratic, while just 40 percent lean Republican. On key education issues, however, these independents express views that better align with Republicans.

No single education issue divides Republicans and Democrats more sharply than the role of teachers unions (see Figure 1). Seventy-one percent of Republicans report that the teachers unions have a generally negative effect on schools, as compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. Though independents come down in between, a majority of them (56 percent) agree with Republicans that unions have a negative effect.

Republican and Democratic voters also diverge in their preferences on school spending and teacher salaries. Figure 2 shows that when not provided with information about current spending levels, 79 percent of Democrats say that spending on public schools in their local district should increase, as compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 57 percent support increased spending, again placing them closer to Republicans in their view of the issue. And when respondents are informed about current spending levels, the gap between Republicans and independents vanishes: 39 percent of both groups support spending increases, compared to just 51 percent of Democrats.

The same pattern holds for teacher salaries: when respondents are not provided with information about current salary levels, 60 percent of independents support increasing teacher salaries, placing them closer to Republicans (54 percent of whom support increases) than to Democrats (75 percent). Providing information on current teacher salaries in their state reduces support for salary increases among independents to 34 percent—exactly the same as among Republicans. Information also shrinks the share of Democrats supporting salary increases to 41 percent.

Governor Romney has made the expansion of school choice for disadvantaged students central to his campaign, calling for the expansion of the Washington, D.C., voucher program and for allowing low-income and special education students to use federal funds to enroll in private schools. It is perhaps surprising, then, to find that Republicans are less supportive of this concept than are Democrats (see Figure 3). Just 42 percent of Republicans express support for the idea, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Voucher support among independents appears to be as high as (or greater than) it is among Democrats, at 54 percent.

Hispanics like public schools but not all union demands in contract negotiations.

Increasingly, both the Republican and Democratic parties have sought ways to court Hispanics. Though they lean Democratic—63 percent of Hispanic adults approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president—they are not as blue as is the African American community, 92 percent of whom give Obama a thumbs-up.

Those seeking the Hispanic vote in 2012 should know that education is an issue that resonates with the Latino community. Almost 60 percent of those we surveyed say they are “very” or “quite a bit” interested in education issues, as compared to less than 40 percent of African American and white voters.

On many topics—including school vouchers, charter schools, digital learning, student and school accountability, common core standards, and teacher recruitment and retention policies—the views of Hispanic adults do not differ noticeably from those of either whites or African Americans.

But in certain domains—estimates of school costs and school quality, support for teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher pensions—the views of Hispanics differ rather substantially. Their judgment of the American school is generous, perhaps because they compare public schools in the United States to much less effective institutions in Mexico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. They also underestimate the costs of running public schools, though they revise their thinking rather substantially about the merits of spending increases once they learn the facts. They are less supportive of unions and union demands than are African Americans.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to evaluate schools (see Figure 4). When asked about the public schools in their community, no less than 55 percent give such favorable assessments. By comparison, whites and African Americans express significantly less enthusiasm about the nation’s schools. Less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans accord the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” and only around 40 percent give the schools in their community one of these two top grades.

Hispanic respondents think American students perform better academically than is actually the case. American 15-year-olds ranked no better than 25th among the 34 developed democracies participating in the latest round of international tests. Yet nearly 45 percent of Hispanics say student math performance in the United States ranks among the top 15 countries in the world in math. Only 30 percent of white and African American respondents place the United States that high.

Hispanic respondents also think the public schools cost a lot less than they actually do. While annual per-pupil expenditures run around $12,500, Hispanics, on average, estimate their cost at less than $5,000. Whites and African Americans estimate the costs to be more than $7,000.

The same goes for teacher salaries, which average about $56,000 a year. On average, Hispanics think teachers are paid little more than $25,000 a year; blacks, on average, think they are paid around $30,000 a year; and whites estimate salaries at $35,000.

When told just how much schools cost, however, Hispanic respondents adjust their thinking quite dramatically. When informed about actual per-pupil expenditures, Hispanics’ support for higher taxes to fund spending increases drops from 46 percent to 25 percent. When given the actual amount teachers receive, their support for higher salaries plummets nearly in half—from over 60 percent to little more than 30 percent.

Although learning the truth about costs and salaries has a similar impact on white opinion, African Americans remain more committed to higher spending. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans favor higher taxes, even when told how much is currently being spent, only a slight dip from the 42 percent favorable when that information is withheld. When given the facts about teacher salaries, African American support for higher salaries drops 20 percentage points—from 74 percent to 54 percent.

Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics do not appear especially sympathetic to teachers union demands in collective bargaining negotiations. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic adults think teachers should pay 20 percent of their pension and health care costs, as do 56 percent of African Americans.

By an overwhelming margin (87 percent), Hispanic respondents favor proposals to condition teacher tenure on their students’ making adequate progress on state tests. Whites and African Americans also favor such proposals but not to the same degree (75 percent and 80 percent, respectively). When it comes to whether teachers unions are playing a more positive or a more negative role in their local community, Hispanic adults come out in the middle—at 59 percent in support, they are more supportive than whites (45 percent) but less supportive than African Americans (75 percent).

Use test scores for evaluations, says the public (but not the teachers).

Teachers have long been paid primarily on the basis of their academic credentials and years of experience, creating in most parts of the country a lockstep pay scale that does not account for a teacher’s classroom performance. This approach is often justified on the grounds that it precludes favoritism on the part of principals, school board members, and other administrative officials.

As teacher effectiveness has become an increasingly visible policy issue, standard approaches to salary and tenure decisions are undergoing substantial change. More than 20 states now require that student test-score gains be used in key personnel decisions, often including tenure and salary determinations. Four states go so far as to prohibit a teacher from receiving a top rating if students do not exceed a certain level of accomplishment, while another 10 require that achievement gains constitute at least 50 percent of each teacher’s evaluation.

Is the public onboard with these changes? And what do teachers think about them? To find out, we randomly divided those interviewed into two groups (see Figure 5). The first group was given a stark choice: How much weight should be given to test scores and how much should be given to principal recommendations?

Given this simple dichotomy, the public says test-score gains should be given more than half the weight (62 percent) in making salary and tenure decisions. Teachers, by contrast, are prepared to place only a quarter of the weight (24 percent) on this information, with the other three-fourths of the weight being given to principal recommendations.

The second half of the sample was asked a more complex question, which required giving weights to test scores and evaluations from four different sources: principals, parents, students, and fellow teachers.

When the question was posed this way, the public and the teachers once again disagree. The public would place about one-third of the weight (32 percent) on test scores, but teachers would assign them less than one-fifth (19 percent). Conversely, teachers would give principal recommendations nearly half the weight (44 percent), while the public would give their recommendations less than one-quarter (23 percent).

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are unenthusiastic about being evaluated by their fellow teachers. Like the rest of the public, they divide up the remaining weight more or less equally among the three remaining sources of evidence (students, parents, and fellow teachers).

An even bigger gap between teachers and the public emerges on the desirability of releasing information about teacher performance to the public at large. In both New York City and Los Angeles, newspapers have published such information, provoking an outcry among teachers, who felt their privacy had been invaded. When we asked respondents about this as a general practice, 78 percent of the public expresses support, compared to just 33 percent of teachers (see Figure 6).

When given the option of expressing neutrality on the issue (as another randomly chosen half of the sample was), 60 percent of the public still says it supports the publication of information about teacher performance, while only 13 percent is opposed, the remaining 27 percent taking the neutral position. Teacher opinion is almost the mirror image. Fifty-four percent oppose making information on test-score impacts publicly available, 30 percent express support, with the remaining 16 percent not taking a clear position either way.

Are teachers unions undermining teacher popularity?

Teachers have long held a cherished place in American popular culture. In such films as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society, Hollywood has highlighted the power of teachers to utterly transform the lives of their students.

But is this now changing? Are Waiting for Superman, Bad Teacher, and Won’t Back Down (forthcoming “A Takeover Tale,” cultured, Winter 2013) harbingers of a new, more skeptical depiction of teachers? At first, it would seem that public trust in teachers is widespread. When we asked half of the respondents in our survey whether they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” no less than 72 percent say “yes” (see Figure 7). This is almost exactly what Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), a publication sympathetic to teachers unions, found in its 2012 poll and about the same as in PDK polls in previous years.

When we expand the possible response categories, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Only 4 percent of the American public has “complete” trust and confidence in teachers, and just 38 percent has “a lot” of trust and confidence in them. Meanwhile, 49 percent has “some” trust and confidence, and 9 percent has “little” trust and confidence. In other words, 58 percent of those surveyed express less than “a lot of trust and confidence” in the teaching force.

Since this is the first time the public has been asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories, we cannot document any trends over time. But we do know that public opinion toward teachers unions—and teachers’ opinions of them, too—has turned in a negative direction. The portion who thinks that teachers unions have had a positive effect on their local schools has dropped by 7 percentage points over the past year. Among teachers, the downward shift is no less than 16 percentage points.

In this year’s survey, as we have done in the past, we asked the following question: “Some people say teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What is your opinion? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive view on your local schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Respondents could choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.

In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40 percent of respondents took the neutral position, saying that unions had neither a positive nor a negative impact. The remainder were divided almost evenly, with the negative share just barely exceeding the positive.

This year, however, the teachers unions lost ground. While 41 percent of the public still takes the neutral position, the portion with a positive view of unions dropped 7 percentage points in the last year, from 29 percent to 22 percent.

The drop is even greater, in both magnitude and significance, among our nationally representative sample of teachers. At a time when, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has lost 150,000 members over the past two years, and projects to lose 200,000 more members by 2014, teacher discontent appears to be rising. Whereas 58 percent of teachers had a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43 percent do so in 2012. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled during this period, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

But when that same question was posed in either/or terms to the public as a whole, respondents split down the middle: 51 percent say unions had a negative impact, while 49 percent say their effect was positive. Teachers, meanwhile, offered a more positive assessment. When forced to choose between just two options, 71 percent of teachers claim that unions are a force for good, whereas 29 percent see them as a stumbling block to reform.

Support for school spending is shaky.

With the U.S. economy trying to crawl back to recovery, an unemployment rate above 8 percent, and state and local governments facing the prospect of insolvency, many school districts have found it necessary to cut expenditures and personnel. In California, the cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have declared bankruptcy. In Michigan, the financially bankrupt Muskegon schools have been handed over to a for-profit charter organization. Cuts in arts programs and extracurricular activities are becoming commonplace. Nationwide, the number of school employees has drifted downward by as much as 5 percent in the past few years.

Still, the American public continues to support increasing spending on local public schools. Or at least it appears to do so (see Figure 8). Sixty-three percent of the general public says it prefers an increase in school expenditures in the local district, well up from levels in 2007 when only 51 percent of the public called for expenditure increases. Not surprisingly, teachers are even more enthusiastic about increasing expenditures, 68 percent of whom like the idea.

When one investigates the issue just a bit further, however, fractures can be detected in the public’s willingness to spend more on public schools. Though most Americans still offer their support for spending increases in the abstract, their enthusiasm ebbs rather substantially when the taxes needed to pay for the increased expenditures are broached and when information about actual expenditures and salaries is provided.

Part of the explanation for this is the widespread ignorance on the part of the general public about just how much already is spent on public schools. When asked to estimate per-pupil expenditure in their district, Americans guess that expenditures are about $6,500 annually, when in fact they are around $12,500. That is only a slightly better set of estimates than the ones given in 2009, when Americans thought $4,231 was being spent per pupil and the reality was closer to $10,000 (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009).

When respondents are told the correct figure, support for spending on public schools shifts sharply downward. Support for increased spending on our standard question drops by 20 percentage points, a much bigger drop than what was observed in 2009, when support for increased spending fell only 8 percentage points (from 46 percent to 38 percent).

In another sign of less-than-wholehearted support for an education spending spree, only 35 percent of the public says taxes should increase to fund the schools. Support drops by another 11 percentage points—to just 24 percent—when those interviewed were first told how much was currently being spent.

Teachers, who stand to benefit from increased expenditure, remain committed to more spending when told the realities of the expenditure situation in their district. Their support slips only 8 percentage points from the high of 68 percent when no information is supplied about current expenditures. But even teachers are 17 percentage points less likely to support higher taxes to fund increases in education spending.

When the subject turns from per-pupil expenditures to teacher salaries, the same pattern emerges (see Figure 9). When asked without any accompanying information, nearly two out of three Americans think that teacher salaries should go up. Among teachers, support for a salary boost registers at no less than 85 percent.

As they do on per-pupil expenditures, however, Americans hold markedly inaccurate views about actual teacher salaries. When asked to hazard a guess, Americans estimate that public school teachers in their states receive, on average, about $36,000 in salary annually. The true figure, even without accounting for benefits, pensions, and the like, sits at about $56,000 nationwide.

Support for higher salaries plummets, however, when Americans are told how much teachers actually make in their states. Of those given the facts, only 36 percent favor an increase, which amounts to a whopping 28-percentage-point decline from the 64 percent favoring an increase when no information is supplied.

When teachers were given accurate information about salary levels in their state, their support slips by only 10 percentage points, probably because they are thinking about their own paycheck. Also, they have a better sense of teacher salaries in their state than the public has, estimating them to be about $44,000 annually.

Is public support for charters really that much higher than for vouchers and tax credits?

As a policy reform, school choice shows no signs of slowing. The number of states with school-voucher and tax-credit programs has escalated since 2010, the number of students attending charter schools climbs steadily year by year, and new technologies for online learning are being promoted by a cascade of new entrepreneurs.

The contours of elite debate about school choice, however, are not replicated in the larger public. While charter schools and digital learning are thought to be the safest choice options for political elites to promote, tax credits are even more popular than charters, and vouchers, the most controversial proposal, also command the support of half the population when the idea is posed in an inviting way.

Vouchers and tax credits. When it comes to school vouchers, apparent levels of public support turn on the wording of the question. For the past two years, PDK has asked whether respondents “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Even with the rather loaded “at public expense” phrasing, PDK reported that support shifted upward from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2012.

If one asks the question in a more inviting manner, as we have, support jumps further still (see Figure 10). Told about a proposal “that would give low-income 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,” 50 percent of the American public comes out in support and 50 percent expresses opposition.

Still, support for vouchers does not match public willingness to back tax credits, even though most economists think the difference between vouchers and tax credits more a matter of style than substance. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of the public favors a “tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” We find little evidence that support for tax credits has changed significantly since 2011.

Charters. Figure 11 shows that when given a choice of supporting or opposing charter schools, 62 percent of the public says it favors ”the formation of charter schools,” nearly identical to what PDK finds (66 percent favoring ”the idea of charter schools”). Support for charters, however, is softer than it might seem. When respondents are given the opportunity to take a neutral position that neither supports nor opposes charters, no less than 41 percent choose that option. Among the remainder, the split is nearly three to one in favor of charters.

Meanwhile, public knowledge about charters remains as impoverished as ever. As our survey did two years ago, we asked respondents a variety of factual questions: whether charter schools can hold religious services, charge tuition, receive more or less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, and are legally obligated to admit students randomly when oversubscribed. We found little change in the level of public information over the past two years. Large percentages of respondents still say they don’t know the answers to these questions. Among those who hazard a guess, they are as likely to give the wrong answer as the correct one. Although teachers do a better job of accurately identifying the characteristics of charter schools, even a majority of teachers get many of the answers wrong or say they don’t know.

Online education. As major universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others—are joining community colleges and state universities in a nationwide dash toward online learning in higher education, many states are exploring ways of incorporating new digital technologies into secondary schools.

A substantial share of both the public and the teaching force seems ready to consider the expansion of online learning. When asked if high school students should be allowed to take “approved classes either online or in school,” opinion splits down the middle, with a bare majority (53 percent to 47 percent) favoring the idea. Teachers are more enthusiastic, among whom no less than 61 percent feel students should be given an online option.

The public, however, is not equally enthusiastic about all uses of the online tool, nor is support for the idea gaining strength. The most popular uses are for rural education and advanced course taking. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed think students in rural areas should have online opportunities, with only 14 percent opposing the idea. That is down modestly from the 64 percent who supported this use in 2008. Similar percentages of support and opposition are expressed for advanced courses taken online for college credit. But once again, levels of support have slipped since 2008 (from 68 percent to 57 percent in 2012).

Less popular are online courses for dropouts and home schoolers. Only 44 percent favor, and 30 percent oppose, using public funding to help dropouts take courses online. Many home schoolers find online courses to be a valuable tool, but the public remains dubious. Only 28 percent favors public funding for such uses, and 38 percent opposes it. Those percentages have not changed materially since 2008.

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.

It was the complaint of yet another school trying to build a blended-learning model that utilizes multiple providers.

“The software content providers are proprietary. It’s impossible to get data out of them. And when we do, the data doesn’t connect easily to the standards and the data from other providers.”

So went the grumbling from another blended-learning school.

What strikes me as most noteworthy about these comments, however, is just how un-noteworthy this state of the industry is in any industry.

At the outset of any industry, the technology tends to be immature and not yet good enough for the majority of users. In order to maximize the performance of the products and services and have any hope of them getting adopted, organizations need to integrate vertically and create interdependent architectures that tightly weave different components together to optimize performance, in terms of functionality and reliability.

As Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor observe in The Innovator’s Solution, “by definition, these products are proprietary because each company will develop its own interdependent design to optimize performance in a different way.” The result of a proprietary, interdependent solution, however, is that customization is prohibitively expensive, because to customize, the company needs to re-architect the entire product.

But as an industry matures, the technology improves. It ceases to be “not good enough” for most users and begins to overshoot what most users need in terms of raw functionality and reliability.

As this happens, customers begin to prioritize new dimensions of performance. With functionality and reliability assured, they prize flexibility and customization, which proprietary products cannot supply.

The new solutions that arise to offer these customized solutions have a modular architecture—where different components fit and work together in well-understood and highly defined ways. Standards arise that specify the fit and function of all elements so completely that it doesn’t matter who makes the components or subsystems, as long as they meet the specifications. Modular architectures optimize flexibility, but because they require tight specification, it limits the freedom that engineers have to push the boundaries in terms of raw functionality.

These two states—interdependence versus modularity—exist on a continuum, but it seems to me that we may be at a crossroads right now in the blended-learning world between the two.

On the one hand, several blended-learning programs are continuing to use curriculum from one online provider, and although it doesn’t give them the customization they may prefer ideally, its simplicity and reliability are worth the tradeoff. Carpe Diem schools and the Flex Academies exemplify this–and neither seems to be complaining nearly as much about the technology.

On the other hand, increasing numbers of schools are adopting blended-learning models that have each student working with multiple software providers within one subject. But from their complaints, they appear to be pushing the industry toward modularity perhaps a bit before it is ready to shift and are therefore dealing with the corresponding headaches of a still immature technology.

At least one blended-learning school, Summit Public Schools, is partnering to build its own solution to the problem and use content from different sources to support the new competency-based learning model it is developing, which seems like a smart backward integration. Those demanding customized solutions seem to be running into headwinds. The fact that each of the schools has a unique model with different needs and requirements exacerbates the problem, as firm standards around which to coalesce just don’t exist yet.

Furthermore, some approaches to solving the problem seem unlikely to bear fruit. Standards are almost never negotiated among companies with proprietary architectures in an industry because the negotiations occur within a context where the representatives have the mindset of representing their proprietary architecture and trying not to get gored by the process. Much more likely it seems in the blended-learning world will be the emergence of a platform—like Khan Academy—on which lots of users write content that use the standards of the platform, as opposed to forcing a retro-fitting. The standards will emerge in de facto fashion, as schools vote with their feet—or clicks.

We’ll of course see how it ultimately plays out. For now though, the grumbling around the online-learning technology not being quite good enough is likely to be a refrain that we all ought to get used to hearing for at least a couple more years.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry originally appeared on Forbes.com

Students need a learning environment that encourages success, but how can a teacher create such a place? In thinking about this question, I explored how the physical layout of my classroom, our academic schedule, and my behavior in class affected my students’ ability to succeed. I also investigated how teachers around me set their students up for success or failure.

Just as a store owner must lay out his store for maximum sales, a teacher must set up her classroom as an effective learning environment. The structure may vary with the teacher’s style of teaching and her students’ needs. A teacher who typically introduces a lesson and then instructs the students to work individually might arrange desks in a “U” shape. The teacher can present a topic with minimal distractions and easily monitor students while they work independently. Students with diverse academic abilities might warrant “clustered” or “grouped” seating instead. Seating students in heterogeneous groups maximizes the learning environment: weaker students see how stronger students learn and approach problems, while stronger students gain a deeper understanding of the subject by teaching it to others, creating a “technical success.”

It is important to think not only about where students’ desks are located, but also about what’s on top of them. Does one student always color on his desk? Maybe he focuses better while doodling. I can help him out by covering his desk with oversized paper and replacing it when necessary. Who knows, maybe he will grow up to be a famous illustrator.

Classroom practices should provide students with the path of least resistance to academic success. Facilitating students’ cooperation, independence, and ability to focus is the key. Consider common technical failures in the classroom, such as asking students to “think hard” right after lunch or recess or to listen quietly when they have a lot of energy. A teacher faced with these challenges can allow students to read independently or write in a journal after lunch or play an educational game that the students can get excited about.

A teacher concerned about students who finish assignments early can create a “must do/may do” chart. This chart can be student-specific or for the whole class, but the idea is that students complete “must do” activities before beginning those in the “may do” column. Students take responsibility for their own learning and time management. Most important, it prevents the technical failure of students who complete their work early and sit idle or, worse, distract students who are still working.

Imagine that we are reviewing last night’s homework assignment and I ask, “Who has the answer to problem number two?” Several hands go up. I call on a student, who asks to go to the bathroom, effectively stopping the lesson. Or I call on one student for the answer and several others shout out, “He stole my answer!” These students may be left so frustrated that they find it difficult to focus. To avoid these technical failures, at the beginning of the year I teach my students a few basic signs in American Sign Language (ASL). If students want to go to the bathroom, they show me the sign, and I silently respond with “yes” or “no.” Likewise, students sign “me too” when they weren’t called on but want to demonstrate that they knew the answer. I acknowledge them verbally or with a thumbs-up. As a result, these students feel good. The use of ASL effectively eliminates student-initiated distractions, a clear technical success.

Rebecca Friedman teaches elementary-school and college students in Baltimore, Maryland. Chavi Abramson studies education at Thomas Edison University.

Quite a lot I believe.

A couple weekends ago I had the privilege of presenting at TEDx Manhattan Beach where I heard another presenter, Dr. John Ratey, speak about the importance of physical exercise in increasing brain plasticity and boosting student learning. His book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, details the connection.

Although I normally write about digital learning’s potential to transform our education, as a Crossfit enthusiast myself, I believe in the importance of living a healthy life with physical exercise.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the rise of online learning is that a student’s schooling will be spent primarily in front of a computer, with a student clicking away relentlessly as though she were playing eight hours of video games a day.

This couldn’t be further from the truth, however, if the rise of online learning fulfills its potential and creates a truly student-centric education system—which should be the ultimate goal.

As I’ve traveled around the country observing blended-learning schools, the ones I’ve been most struck by are those that give individual students the proper flexibility so that they can have the right experience they need when they need it to boost their success—both in that moment and in life. In the future of education, digital learning should be the platform that facilitates each student having a customized learning experience for her distinct learning needs—whether that experience is online or offline.

Carpe Diem Collegiate Middle and High School, one of my favorite blended-learning models, has no physical education class. Instead the school has what might be described as a fitness center with an on-site trainer who works with each student not on random mandatory athletic units but instead on a tailored program for how to live a healthy life. When students are growing antsy at their desks and need to get some physical exercise to let off some steam and reboot for more learning, they have the autonomy to go to the gym and work out.

The Silicon Valley Flex Academy, which has several elements of what I think the future of schooling will look like, is located across the parking lot from a Crossfit gym. The school has contemplated a formal partnership with the Crossfit affiliate to offer the students a Crossfit for Kids program, which, in my opinion, would be far superior to the gym classes offered at most schools.

My biggest personal surprise in online learning came several years ago when I learned that one of the more popular classes that the Florida Virtual School offers is online physical education. I struggled to imagine what this might mean, but what I ultimately learned is that the class involves a teacher working with each individual student on her daily fitness routine (from running to lifting to playing team sports) to realize her fitness goals and live a healthy life. Recalling my own experience in middle school PE, I could see the immediate benefits of having this sort of an experience instead of an awkward communal one that teaches a student virtually nothing about living a healthy life—and may even discourage that by creating negative associations with physical exercise.

It’s not just physical exercise that should see a healthier balance with the rise of digital learning, but lots of activities. Many schools are increasingly using blended learning to free teachers up to spend more time working with students in project-based learning. I’ve been struck by how much students collaborate with each other naturally—often peer tutoring each other—in the blended-learning schools I’ve visited. Whereas “socialization” often appears to me to be a negative thing in many schools, in blended-learning schools the social interactions appear to me to be far healthier and around helping each student improve. I don’t have hard data on this, but it’s my observation that this is one of the exciting—and often unintended—effects of using a blended-learning model.

To this end, when many people think about full-time virtual schools, one of their biggest fears is about students in their younger years. They ask how could students possibly have a fully online experience when they are so young. What are the downsides of spending so much time in front of a computer? The answer is that in the programs of which I’m aware, most of the learning for students in the younger years is actually offline—with books and manipulatives. The online learning mostly serves as the platform that helps the student’s family communicate with the student’s teacher and individualizes the learning, in addition to providing some exercises and games to build some basic skills.

In an age where the arts, athletics, and other so-called extracurricular activities are increasingly on the chopping block in public schools, digital learning ought to change the equation. Various blended-learning models, for example, should create more flexibility and free up more funds so that schools can offer an array of experiences, including physical exercise.

According to Ratey’s research, that’s something we can’t afford to lose if we’re serious about boosting student achievement. Student-centric digital learning provides a means to make sure that it doesn’t fall by the wayside.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

Silly question—it might seem. How could someone be expected to teach piano if they do not know how to play themselves? Yet that is what the public schools are about to ask of teachers more generally. In two years, most public schools will administer new student assessments in reading and math, pegged to the higher academic standards of the Common Core. Although performance standards—how high a student must score to be proficient—are still being set, the bar will likely be at the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) “proficient” level. This will be a huge challenge for students, particularly in high school, as NAEP proficiency is the equivalent of an SAT score in verbal and math of nearly 1200—or 200 points higher than the average student taking the SAT today achieves.

The Common Core standards will be an even greater challenge for America’s teachers. The average SAT score of public elementary teachers today is less than 1000; for secondary teachers a bit higher. In effect, our public schools are asking teachers to help students reach standards that are far above the standards that they have achieved  themselves. A 200 point gap on the SAT scale is huge; statistically, it amounts to two standard deviations. It’s like saying that teachers achieving at the 50th percentile need to help students achieve at the 90th percentile—like asking ordinary pianists to train virtuosos.

Of course, America has many brilliant teachers. And aptitude is but one measure of teaching ability. Lots of teachers will be able to help their students achieve the new higher standards. But numerous teachers are also below average in both aptitude and teaching ability. So, the general point holds: America has not built a teaching force anywhere near the standards that are being set for tomorrow’s students. Our presidential candidates are fond of saying that the U.S. will be number one in the world in education—that our students will achieve with the best in the world. That will never happen if our teachers are not also the best in the world.

In my new book, I make precisely this argument—and suggest how we can do better. The Best Teachers in the World: Why We Don’t Have Them and How We Could observes, as is now customary, that nothing is more important for student achievement than teacher quality. The quality of a nation’s schools cannot rise above the quality of its teachers. The book argues—and this is far from customary—that the nation is just not serious about teacher quality. Our current policies have not a prayer of producing the best teachers in the world. We spend the most per pupil on public education in the world, but over 20 nations compensate teachers more highly. We draw teaching candidates on average from the least able high school graduates. We train teachers in non-selective colleges and universities. We do not recognize merit on the job. These are not practices that attract and retain the best and the brightest in teaching.

Doing better will require much more than currently favored reforms. New teacher evaluation systems, the bipartisan rage today, are a step in the right direction, but a small step. We can’t evaluate and fire our way to a great teaching pool. We must elevate the status of the profession, the attractiveness of the work, and the compensation for doing it. We need to recognize that quality teaching is intellectual demanding, requiring deep academic knowledge, research-based training, and rigorously guided practice. Teaching must uphold standards commensurate with those we aim to hold for our students.

But these are all just platitudes—and familiar ones—if not backed by measures that can truly move the profession. The book makes three recommendations: a much smaller, selective, intellectually engaged, and better compensated teaching force supported by technology; an open, transparent, and accountable system of preparation and professional development that drives out inferior providers and rewards success; and increased responsibility for teacher development in the hands of principals, who may be the strongest determinant of teacher quality on the job. These reforms are decidedly not more of the same. Each would be devastating to some element of the status quo. Each will be fought tooth and nail by vested interests. So be it. Our willingness as a nation to fight for the best teachers in the world is the best measure of our commitment to the future achievement of our children.

-John Chubb

Many parts of the schooling model are also still evolving as the school learns what does and does not work. Uncertainty exists, and teachers are both teaching amidst the uncertainty and helping to create and refine the school model itself on the fly. Because new innovations rarely emerge fully baked and launch with perfect success, this is both natural and good.

One of the school leader’s questions in this first-year of operations was whether he had hired the right teachers—and what profile of a teacher would be right for the model. His early hypothesis was that the right teachers would have the same profile and skills as those who were successful in other “No Excuses” charter schools, but he said he wasn’t sure if he should be looking for other attributes as well.

I suspect that his initial hypothesis has some merit, but I think one of the theories that we call the “Schools of Experience” could be helpful in refining it further.

As Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon recount in How Will You Measure Your Life, most companies that hire assume implicitly that there are some innate talents that candidates either have or don’t have that can predict success. In essence, employers list the skills correlated with success and search for those candidates with them. The surest sign of this talent they think is in the resume: if a candidate shows success after success, she must just have the “right stuff” to be successful in any job. If this were true, however, then why do we so often see executives with a successful track record in one company fail in another?

Morgan McCall, a professor at the University of Southern California, developed a different view that moves beyond the skills correlated with success to a circumstance-based theory. His model asks whether someone has actually wrestled with a problem similar to the one she will need to wrestle with in the new job. In essence, it looks to see if potential employees have taken different “courses” in their “schools of experience” that will prepare them to tackle and succeed in the new job.

As Christensen et al write, “McCall’s thinking is not based on the idea that great leaders are born ready to go. Rather, their abilities are developed and shaped by experiences in life. A challenging job, a failure in leading a project, an assignment in a new area of the company—all those things become ‘courses’ in the school of experience. The skills that leaders have—or lack—depend heavily on which ‘courses,’ so to speak, they have and have not taken along the way.”

Through the lens of McCall’s theory, the job when hiring shifts from identifying candidates with stellar resumes to asking whether the potential employees have had the right experiences that prepare them to be successful in the job.

An example helps make the pitfalls of the first approach and the merits of the second clearer. When launching an internal startup, many established companies will bring on board star performers from the parent company—people with stellar resumes. But often these people will not have had any experience in launching a new venture. None have had to adjust a strategy when the first one didn’t work because they were in a company with established processes and a successful strategy. Staffing the new venture with some people who have had the right schools of experience increases the odds of success.

Turning back to the blended-learning school at hand, the school is a startup in which there aren’t existing processes to get things done and people are inventing the school’s culture as they teach. This suggests another criteria for the school leader to be including as he hires teachers: looking for people who have had experience in uncertain situations where there were not firm rules to follow—and they had to create and establish new processes and tweak them as they went along. High flyers who have high expectations for students but who have never been in an organization with an emergent strategy might not be ideal off the bat. Of course, as the school evolves and is hopefully successful, processes will emerge that define how to do things and what the school’s culture is. As this happens, the ideal schools of experience a candidate will need will change as well.

This lesson is not just for this particular school leader. As innovation increases in education in the years ahead, the way we prepare some teachers may need to change as well. Some will need a new “course” to prepare them to succeed in the new and uncertain schooling models being developed and tweaked in the years ahead. The life courses that allow entrepreneurs to succeed may also be important for teachers.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

In 1970 many disabled and mentally handicapped students were denied access to public education. Today these students are guaranteed a public education until the age of 22. Also in 1970, about 5% of the U.S. population was foreign born, compared with about 20% today. Many of these children enter the education system with limited English skills and are provided services to improve their mastery of English. Such services were unheard of in many parts of the country even 20 years ago.

It is obvious from these statistics that many more special-education teachers and English-language specialists are counted in the teaching profession now as compared to 1970. Mr. Greene claims that math and reading scores of 17-year-olds are unchanged since 1970. I would submit that the teaching resources devoted to students, excluding teachers of special education and limited-English speakers, is close to unchanged since 1970.

There is a plausibility to this argument, but special education and ELL can neither account for the 50% increase in teachers nor can they be ignored when considering the stagnation in student achievement. Special education teachers constitute about 14% of the teaching work force and disabled students constitute about 13% of the student population. So, if we imagine, as the letter writer does, that many of these disabled students were denied access to public education, then the addition of teachers was roughly commensurate with the addition of disabled students. Excluding all disabled students and teachers, the reduction in student-teacher ratios between 1970 and 2012 would still have been roughly from 22 to 15. If you wanted to use as the starting point 1980, 5 years after the start of federally mandated special education, the ratio still drops from 18.6 to 15.2.

But of course not all disabled students were denied access to schools before federal legislation. Outside of the most severely disabled, the bulk of students now classified as disabled would have been present in school in 1970; they just weren’t being served very well. So, if we added a large number of special education teachers to better educate students who were always present but who we now consider disabled, it should have resulted in much better outcomes for those students. But overall outcomes are flat.

There is a disturbing habit among people who make the argument represented in the WSJ letter to act as if special education is a black hole from which no progress can or should be expected. Yes, they say, we hired more teachers, but that was for more special education students and you couldn’t expect that to result in any progress. But this is entirely wrong. Special education can and should result in greater academic achievement, so even teachers added in that category should be contributing to better aggregate outcomes.

All of these arguments also hold true for ELL except that ELL is much smaller and involves fewer teachers than special education. A critic could note that the world has given the US public education system more ELL students because of higher immigration, although the same cannot really be said of special education. Other than the exclusion of severely disabled students, whose numbers are quite small, the distribution of disabilities in the public school student population should be roughly the same today as it was back then given that most disabilities are genetic in their origin. It’s just that we didn’t serve many of those students well in the past and therefore should expect that achievement should be rising as we devote more resources to them. More teachers should be producing more achievement.

And yes, more ELL students might require more teachers to produce the same achievement. But in other ways our student population has become easier to educate. Unless students have become significantly more difficult to educate across all dimensions, it’s not possible to explain away the facts that we have 50% more teachers without any meaningful improvement in outcomes.

Several years ago Greg Forster and I addressed this in our Teachability Index, in which we tracked 16 indicators of the advantages or disadvantaged that students bring to school and found that overall students are somewhat less challenging to educate now than they used to be. And for a forthcoming book I have updated and improved upon that analysis and still find that students are somewhat easier to educate, so it should not require many more teachers to get the same results.

We can’t blame special ed and ELL to account for the lack of productivity in education as we’ve hired more teachers. The problem is that we’ve ignored the trade-offs between teacher quantity and teacher quality.

-Jay Greene

In the largest study of instructional practice ever undertaken, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project is searching for tools to save the world from perfunctory teacher evaluations. In our first report (released in December 2010), we described the potential usefulness of student surveys for providing feedback to teachers. For our second report, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) scored 7,500 lesson videos for 1,333 teachers in six school districts using five different classroom-observation instruments. We compared those data against student achievement gains on state tests, gains on supplemental tests, and surveys from more than 44,500 students.

So far, the evidence reveals that my son’s strategy when choosing a team of superheroes makes sense for teacher evaluation systems as well: rather than rely on any single indicator, schools should try to see effective teaching from multiple angles.

Achievement Gains and Predictive Power

A teacher’s track record of producing student achievement gains does one thing better than any other measure (even if it does so imperfectly): it signals whether a teacher is likely to achieve similar success with another group of students. Not surprisingly, this is particularly true when the outcomes are being measured with the same test. In comparison to classrooms of students elsewhere with similar baseline achievement and demographics, a teacher’s achievement gain in one year is correlated at a rate of .48 in math and .36 in English language arts (ELA), with the average growth of students in another year. Such volatility notwithstanding, a track record of achievement gains is a more reliable predictor of the gains of future students than classroom observations or student surveys.

Unfortunately, state tests do not measure every outcome parents and taxpayers (and students) expect from schools, and cost is a factor in determining what gets measured. Given the higher cost of scoring constructed-response items, many states rely heavily on multiple-choice items to measure student achievement. The shallowness of the items on the test does not necessarily translate into shallow teaching. (For example, although spelling can be tested with low-cost items, a language teacher may find it useful to briefly summarize the reach of the Roman Empire while explaining the appearance of many Latin roots in the English language. A conceptual understanding can provide a framework for learning the fact-based knowledge examined on state tests.) In our study, the teachers with larger gains on low-cost state math tests also had students with larger gains on the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics, a more-expensive-to-score test designed to measure students’ conceptual understanding of mathematics.

Our results did raise concerns about current state tests in English language arts, however. Current state ELA assessments overwhelmingly consist of short reading passages, followed by multiple-choice questions that probe reading comprehension. Teachers’ average student-achievement gains based on such tests are more volatile from year to year (which translates to lower reliability) and are only weakly related to other measures, such as classroom observations and student surveys.

We supplemented the state tests with an assessment requiring students to read a passage and then write short-answer responses to questions about the passage. The achievement gains based on that measure were more reliable measures of a teacher’s practice (less variable across different classes taught by the same teacher) and were more closely related to other measures, such as classroom observations and student surveys. In order to provide clearer feedback on teacher effectiveness, states should hasten efforts to add writing prompts to their literacy assessments.

We expect schools to do more than raise achievement on tests, however. Parents hope their children will learn other skills that lead to success later in life, such as an ability to work in teams and persistence. Just because these skills are hard to measure and are not captured directly on any state test need not imply that effective teachers are ignoring them. Indeed, building student persistence may be an effective strategy for raising achievement on state tests. Recent evidence suggests that the teachers with larger student-achievement gains on state tests also seem to have students with greater long-term career success. As Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff reported recently (see “Great Teaching,” research, Summer 2012), being assigned to a teacher with a track record of student achievement gains is associated with higher earnings and rates of college going.

In sum, the “superpower” of the student achievement–gain, or growth, measure is its ability to “foresee” the achievement gains of future students and future earnings of students. But, like my son’s flawed heroes, it also has drawbacks. One key weakness of the student achievement–gain measure is the limited number of grades and subjects for which assessment data are currently available. In many school districts, fewer than one-quarter of teachers work in grades and subjects where student achievement gains are tracked with state assessments.

In addition, student achievement gains provide few clues for what a teacher might do to improve her practice. A performance-evaluation system should support growth and development not just facilitate accountability. Teachers need to be able to see their own strengths and weaknesses clearly and recognize where they need to hone their skills. That is not information a value-added measure can provide.

Classroom Practice

One way to develop such feedback is by means of classroom observation by a trained adult. Over the years, education researchers have proposed a number of instruments for assessing classroom instruction. To test these approaches, the Educational Testing Service trained more than 900 observers to score 7,500 lesson videos using different classroom-observation instruments. Depending on the instrument, observers received 17 to 25 hours of initial training. At the end of the training, observers were required to score a set of prescored videos. If the discrepancy between their scores and the master scores was too large, they were prevented from participating. (Across all the instruments, 23 percent of trained raters were disqualified because they could not apply the standards accurately.)

Every video was rated at least three times: once using the Framework for Teaching, developed by Charlotte Danielson; once using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), developed by Bob Pianta and Bridget Hamre at the University of Virginia; and a third time using a subject-specific instrument. The math lessons were scored using the Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI), developed by Heather Hill at Harvard. The ELA videos were scored on the Protocol for Language Arts Teacher Observation (PLATO), developed by Pam Grossman at Stanford. Finally, the National Math and Science Initiative scored a set of 1,000 math lessons, using the Uteach Observation Protocol.

I’m often asked, “Do you really think you can quantify the ‘art’ of teaching?” I argue that is not the right question. Of course, it is impossible to codify all the nuances that go into great teaching. But an instrument need not capture all the dimensions of great teaching in order to be useful. Each of the classroom-observation instruments proposes an incomplete but discrete set of competencies for effective teaching and provides a description of differing performance levels for each competency. The instruments’ usefulness depends not on their completeness but on the demonstrated association between the few discrete competencies and student outcomes.

For example, one of the competencies highlighted by the Framework for Teaching is questioning skill. A teacher would receive an “unsatisfactory” score if she asked a series of yes/no questions, posed in rapid succession, to the same small group of students. A teacher would receive an “advanced” score on questioning skill if she asked students to explain their thinking, if the questions involved many students in class, and if the students began asking questions of each other. Depending on the instrument, observers tracked 6 to 22 different competencies, including “behavior management,” “time management,” and “engaging students in learning.”

The goal of classroom observations is to help teachers improve practice, and thereby improve student outcomes. A classroom-observation system that bears no relationship to student outcomes will be of no use in improving them. As a result, we tested the relationship between classroom observations and a teacher’s average student-achievement gains. All five of the instruments yielded scores that were related to student achievement gains, in the classroom of students where the teacher was observed as well as in other classrooms of students taught by the same teacher.

In theory, classroom observations allow teachers to be more discerning about their own practice, and their improved practice will yield improved student outcomes. This is as yet a “potential superpower” of classroom observations, since there’s not a lot of evidence that providing such feedback leads to improved student outcomes.

The poor track record of professional-development interventions provides ample reason for caution. Yet there is some reason for optimism. Eric Taylor and John Tyler report that midcareer teachers in Cincinnati saw significant improvements in student outcomes in the years during and after intensive observations (see “Can Teacher Evaluation Improve Teaching?” research, forthcoming Fall 2012). In fact, the gains in student outcomes were similar in magnitude to those seen during the first three years of teaching. It may be that professional growth must begin with an individualized (and honest) assessment of a teacher’s strengths and weaknesses. We need better evidence in the coming years on the types of feedback and support that lead to improved student outcomes.

There are some downsides to classroom observations. First, if they are the sole basis for a teacher evaluation (as is true in many systems now), they may stifle innovation, forcing teachers to conform to particular notions of “effective practice.” Second, each of the instruments requires judgment on the part of observers. Even with trained raters, we saw considerable differences in rater scores on any given lesson. Moreover, possibly because different content requires teachers to exhibit different skills, a teacher’s practice seems to vary from lesson to lesson. Even with trained raters, we had to score four lessons, each by a different observer, and average those scores to get a reliable measure of a teacher’s practice. Given the high opportunity cost of a principal’s time, or the salaries of professional peer observers, classroom observations are the costliest source of feedback.

Student Surveys

Student evaluations are ubiquitous in higher education, where they are often the only form of feedback on instruction. (Student achievement gains and classroom observations are rarely used at the college level.) The MET project investigated the usefulness of student evaluations in 4th-grade through 9th-grade classrooms.

To collect student feedback, the project administered the Tripod survey, developed by Ronald Ferguson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Rather than being a popularity contest, the Tripod survey asks students to provide feedback on specific aspects of their classroom experiences. For example, students report their level of agreement to statements such as, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” “Our class stays busy and does not waste time,” and “Everybody knows what they should be doing and learning in this class.” While administering the survey, we took steps to protect students’ confidentiality, such as providing students with thick paper envelopes for submitting paper-based surveys or secure passwords to submit web-based surveys.

We learned several important lessons: First, students perceive clear differences among teachers. For example, in a quarter of classrooms, less than 36 percent of students agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and does not waste time.” In another quarter of classrooms, more than 69 percent of students agreed.

Second, when teachers taught multiple sections of students, student feedback was often consistent. The between-classroom correlation in Tripod scores was .66. This is higher than we saw with the achievement gains measure. Attaining a comparable level of consistency with classroom observations required scoring four different lessons, each by a different observer. We had to average over multiple observations by multiple observers to generate reliable scores. Even if the typical student is less discerning than a trained adult, the ability to average over many students (rather than one or two adults), and having students experience 180 days of instruction (rather than observe two or three lessons), obviously improves reliability.

Third, the student responses were more correlated with teachers’ student-achievement gains in math and ELA than the observation scores were. (Just as we did with classroom observations, to avoid generating a spurious correlation between student survey responses and achievement scores for the same group of students, we estimated the correlation across different classrooms of students taught by the same teacher.) In other words, student responses were not only consistent across classrooms, they were predictive of student achievement gains across classrooms.

For those many states and districts that are struggling to find ways to measure performance in non-tested grades and subjects, well-designed student surveys should be an attractive option for supplementing classroom observations. They are also among the least costly of the measures.

The Case for Multiple Measures

As with superheroes, all the measures are flawed in some way. Test-based student-achievement gains have predictive power but provide little insight into a teacher’s particular strengths and weaknesses. Classroom observations require multiple observations by multiple observers in order to provide a reliable image of a teacher’s practice. The student surveys, while being the most consistent of the three across different classrooms taught by the same teacher, were less predictive of student achievement gains than the achievement-gain measures themselves.

Fortunately, the evaluation methods are stronger as a team than as individuals. First, combining them generates less volatility from course section to section or year to year, and greater predictive power. Figure 1 compares the three different methods (classroom observations, student surveys, and student achievement gains) on reliability and predictive power. On the horizontal axis is the reliability of each method. (We report reliability as the correlation in scores from classroom to classroom taught by the same teacher.) On the vertical axis is predictive power, or correlation with a teacher’s average student-achievement gain working with a different group of students in 2009–10. Both predictive power and reliability are desirable traits, so values in the upper-right-hand corner of the graph are more desirable. The student achievement–gain measure is most highly correlated with student achievement gains but has lower reliability than student surveys. Student surveys have the highest reliability but are less correlated with student achievement gains. Classroom observations, based on the Framework for Teaching, are less reliable and less correlated with achievement gains.

Figure 1 also reports two different combinations of the three measures: an “equally weighted” combination (standardizing each of the measures to have equal means and variances and then applying a weight of .33 to each) and a “criterion-weighted” combination. (To generate the weights, we regressed a teacher’s average student-achievement gain in one class against the three different measures from another class, resulting in weights of .758, .200, and .042 on value-added, student survey, and classroom observation, respectively). The “criterion-weighted” measure offers more of the two desirable properties—predictive power and reliability—than any of the measures alone. (Even though classroom observations do not add much predictive power, it is hoped that classroom observations excel on a third dimension, not captured in the graph: the ability to diagnose specific strengths and weaknesses.) The next MET project report will explore weighting strategies in depth (see sidebar, page 40).

A second reason to combine the measures is to reduce the risk of unintended consequences, to lessen the likelihood of manipulation or “gaming.” Whenever one places all the stakes on any single measure, the risk of distortion and abuse goes up. For instance, if all the weight were placed on student test scores, then the risk of narrowing of the curriculum or cheating would rise. If all the weight were placed on student surveys (as happens in higher education), then instructors would be tempted to pander to students and students might be more drawn to play pranks on their teachers. If all the weight were placed on classroom observations, then instructors would be tempted to go through the motions of effective practice on the day of an observation but not on other days.

The use of multiple measures not only spreads the risk but also provides opportunities to detect manipulation or gaming. For example, if a teacher is spending a disproportionate amount of class time drilling children for the state assessments, a school system can protect itself by adding a question on test-preparation activities to the student survey. If a teacher behaves unusually on the day of the observation, then the student surveys and achievement gains may tell a different story.

There is a third reason to collect multiple measures: conflicting messages from the multiple sources of information send a signal to supervisors that they should take a close look at what’s going on in the classroom. Suppose a teacher is employing unconventional teaching methods that don’t correspond to the classroom-observation instrument being used in a state or district. If the teacher is getting exemplary student-achievement gains and student survey reports, a school leader should give the teacher the leeway to use a different instructional style. Likewise, if a teacher is performing well on the classroom observations and student surveys but had lower-than-expected student-achievement gains, a school leader might give the teacher the benefit of the doubt for another year and hope that student achievement gains will rise.

Implication for Practice

The MET findings have a number of implications for ongoing efforts to provide more meaningful feedback to teachers:

The main reason to conduct classroom observations is to generate actionable feedback for improving practice. Therefore, the standards need to be clear and the observers should not only be trained, they should demonstrate their understanding of the standards by replicating the ratings given by master scorers. School systems could certify raters using prescored lesson videos, such as we did in our project. They should also conduct multiple observations by more than one rater, and audit a subset of observations to track reliability.

Student surveys are an inexpensive way to add predictive power and reliability to evaluation systems. They could be particularly useful to supplement classroom observations in the grades and subjects where student achievement gains are not available. Although our results suggested such measures could be reliable and predictive, even with students as young as 4th grade, more work needs to be done to evaluate their usefulness in younger grades. To reduce the risk of pressure from teachers or peer pressure from fellow students, it is important that schools take steps to ensure the anonymity of individual student responses.

When it comes to measuring teachers’ effectiveness, the state ELA assessments are less reliable and less related to other measures of practice than state math assessments (or the assessment of students’ short-answer writing responses we used to supplement the state tests). The implementation of new literacy assessments in line with the Common Core state standards may help. In the interim, schools might adapt their classroom observations and student surveys to look for evidence of student writing or add questions to the student survey asking students to describe the quality of feedback they receive on their writing.

None of the data collected for MET were used for high-stakes personnel decisions. It may be that the measurement properties of student surveys, or classroom observations, or achievement gains could be distorted when stakes are attached. If principals inflate (or lower) their scores, or if students use the student surveys to play pranks, such changes should become evident in changing relationships among and between the measures. As a result, school systems should monitor those relationships as such systems are implemented.

Finally, we need many more studies evaluating the ways in which better feedback can be paired with targeted development investments to raise teachers’ effectiveness in improving student outcomes.

No information is perfect. But better information on teaching effectiveness should allow for improved personnel decisions and faster professional growth. We need to keep in mind the rudimentary indicators used for high-stakes decisions today: teaching experience and educational attainment. When compared with such crude indicators, the combination of student achievement gains on state tests, student surveys, and classroom observations identified teachers with better outcomes on every measure we tested: state tests and supplemental tests as well as more subjective measures, such as student-reported effort and enjoyment in class.

Thomas Kane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was formerly deputy director within the U.S. education group at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he led the Measures of Effective Teaching project. This essay draws from research done jointly with Douglas O. Staiger from Dartmouth College.

In the research reported here, we study one approach to teacher evaluation: practice-based assessment that relies on multiple, highly structured classroom observations conducted by experienced peer teachers and administrators. While this approach contrasts starkly with status quo “principal walk-through” styles of class observation, its use is on the rise in new and proposed evaluation systems in which rigorous classroom observation is often combined with other measures, such as teacher value-added based on student test scores.

Proponents of evaluation systems that include high-quality classroom observations point to their potential value for improving instruction (see “Capturing the Dimensions of Effective Teaching,” Features, Fall 2o12). Individualized, specific information about performance is especially scarce in the teaching profession, suggesting that a lack of information on how to improve could be a substantial barrier to individual improvement among teachers. Well-designed evaluation might fill that knowledge gap in several ways. First, teachers could gain information through the formal scoring and feedback routines of an evaluation program. Second, evaluation could encourage teachers to be generally more self-reflective, regardless of the evaluative criteria. Third, the evaluation process could create more opportunities for conversations with other teachers and administrators about effective practices.

In short, there are good reasons to expect that well-designed teacher-evaluation programs could have a direct and lasting effect on individual teacher performance. To our knowledge, however, ours is the first study to test this hypothesis directly. We study a sample of midcareer elementary and middle school teachers in the Cincinnati Public Schools, all of whom were evaluated in a yearlong program, based largely on classroom observation, sometime between the 2003–04 and 2009–10 school years. The specific school year of each teacher’s evaluation was determined years earlier by a district planning process. This policy-based assignment of when evaluation occurred permits a quasi-experimental analysis. We compare the achievement of individual teachers’ students before, during, and after the teacher’s evaluation year.

We find that teachers are more effective at raising student achievement during the school year when they are being evaluated than they were previously, and even more effective in the years after evaluation. A student instructed by a teacher after that teacher has been through the Cincinnati evaluation will score about 11 percent of a standard deviation (4.5 percentile points for a median student) higher in math than a similar student taught by the same teacher before the teacher was evaluated.

Our data do not allow us to identify the exact mechanisms driving these improvements. Nevertheless, the results contrast sharply with the view that the effectiveness of individual teachers is essentially fixed after the first few years on the job. Indeed, we find that postevaluation improvements in performance were largest for teachers whose performance was weakest prior to evaluation, suggesting that rigorous teacher evaluation may offer a new way to think about teacher professional development.

Evaluation in Cincinnati

The data for our analysis come from the Cincinnati Public Schools. In the 2000–01 school year, Cincinnati launched the Teacher Evaluation System (TES) in which teachers’ performance in and out of the classroom is assessed through classroom observations and a review of work products. During the yearlong TES process, teachers are typically observed in the classroom and scored four times: three times by an assigned peer evaluator—a high-performing, experienced teacher who previously taught in a different school in the district—and once by the principal or another school administrator. Teachers are informed of the week during which the first observation will occur, with all other observations unannounced. Owing mostly to cost, tenured teachers are typically evaluated only once every five years.

The evaluation measures dozens of specific skills and practices covering classroom management, instruction, content knowledge, and planning, among other topics. Evaluators use a scoring rubric based on Charlotte Danielson’s Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching, which describes performance of each skill and practice at four levels: “Distinguished,” “Proficient,” “Basic,” and “Unsatisfactory.” (See Table 1 for a sample standard.)

Both the peer evaluators and administrators complete an intensive TES training course and must accurately score videotaped teaching examples. After each classroom observation, peer evaluators and administrators provide written feedback to the teacher and meet with the teacher at least once to discuss the results. At the end of the evaluation school year, a final summative score in each of four domains of practice is calculated and presented to the evaluated teacher. Only these final scores carry explicit consequences. For beginning teachers (those evaluated in their first and fourth years), a poor evaluation could result in nonrenewal of their contract, while a successful evaluation is required before receiving tenure. For tenured teachers, evaluation scores determine eligibility for some promotions or additional tenure protection, or, in the case of very low scores, placement in a peer assistance program with a small risk of termination.

Despite the training and detailed rubric provided to evaluators, the TES program experiences some of the leniency bias typical of other teacher-evaluation programs. More than 90 percent of teachers receive final overall TES scores in the highest two categories. Leniency is much less frequent in the individual rubric items and individual observations. We hypothesize that this microlevel evaluation feedback is more important to lasting performance improvements than the final, overall TES scores.

Previous research has found that the scores produced by TES predict student achievement gains (see “Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness,” research, Summer 2011). Student math achievement was 0.09 standard deviations higher for teachers whose overall evaluation score was 1 standard deviation higher (the estimate for reading was 0.08). This relationship suggests that Cincinnati’s evaluation program provides feedback on teaching skills that are associated with larger gains in student achievement.

As mentioned above, teachers only undergo comprehensive evaluation periodically. All teachers newly hired by the district, regardless of experience, are evaluated during their first year working in Cincinnati schools. Teachers are also evaluated just prior to receiving tenure, typically their fourth year after being hired, and every fifth year after achieving tenure.

Teachers hired before the TES program began in 2000–01 were not initially evaluated until some years into the life of the program. Our analysis only includes these pre-TES hires: specifically, teachers hired by the district in the school years from 1993–94 through 1999–2000. We further focus, given available data, on those who were teaching 4th through 8th grade in the years 2003–04 through 2009–10. We limit our analysis to this sample of midcareer teachers for three reasons. First, for teachers hired before the new TES program began in 2000–01, the timing of their first TES review was determined largely by a “phase-in” schedule devised during the program’s planning stages. This schedule set the year of first evaluation based on a teacher’s year of hire, thus reducing the potential for bias that would arise if the timing of evaluation coincided with, for example, a favorable class assignment. Second, because the timing of evaluation was determined by year of hire, and not experience level, teachers in our sample were evaluated at different points in their careers. This allows us to measure the effect of evaluation on performance separate from any gains that come from increased experience. Third, the delay in first evaluation allows us to observe the achievement gains of these teachers’ students in classes the teachers taught before the TES assessment so that we can make before-and-after comparisons of the same teacher.

Additionally, our study focuses on math test scores in grades 4–8. For most other subjects and grades, student achievement measures are simply not available. Students are tested in reading, but empirical research frequently finds less teacher-driven variation in reading achievement than in math, and ultimately this is the case for the present analysis as well. While not the focus of our research, we briefly discuss reading results below.

Data provided by the Cincinnati Public Schools identify the year(s) in which a teacher was evaluated by TES, the dates when each observation occurred, and the scores. We combine these TES data with additional administrative data provided by the district that allow us to match teachers to students and student test scores. As we would expect, the 105 teachers in our analysis sample are a highly experienced group: 66.5 percent have 10 to 19 years of experience, compared to 29.3 percent for the rest of the district. Teachers in our analysis are also more likely to have a graduate degree and be certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, two characteristics correlated with experience.

Methodology

Our objective is to measure the impact of practice-based performance evaluation on teacher effectiveness. Simply comparing the test scores of students whose teachers are evaluated in a given year to the scores of other teachers’ students would produce misleading results because, among other methodological issues, less-experienced teachers are more likely to be evaluated than more-experienced teachers.

Instead, we compare the achievement of a teacher’s students during the year that she is evaluated to the achievement of the same teacher’s students in the years before and after the evaluation year. As a result, we effectively control for any characteristics of the teacher that do not change over time. In addition, we control for determinants of student achievement that may change over time, such as a teacher’s experience level, as well as for student characteristics, such as prior-year test scores, gender, racial/ethnic subgroup, special education classification, gifted classification, English proficiency classification, and whether the student was retained in the same grade.

Our approach will correctly measure the effect of evaluation on teacher effectiveness as long as the timing of a teacher’s evaluation is unrelated to any student characteristics that we have not controlled for in the analysis but that affect achievement growth. This key condition would be violated, for example, if during an evaluation year or in the years after, teachers were systematically assigned students who were better (or worse) in ways we cannot determine and control for using the available data. It would also be violated if evaluation coincided with a change in individual teacher performance unrelated to evaluation per se. Below, we discuss evidence that our results are not affected by these kinds of issues. We also find no evidence that teachers are systematically assigned students with better (or worse) observable characteristics in their evaluation year compared to prior and subsequent years.

Results

We find suggestive evidence that the effectiveness of individual teachers improves during the school year when they are evaluated. Specifically, the average teacher’s students score 0.05 standard deviations higher on end-of-year math tests during the evaluation year than in previous years, although this result is not consistently statistically significant across our different specifications.

These improvements persist and, in fact, increase in the years after evaluation (see Figure 1). We estimate that the average teacher’s students score 0.11 standard deviations higher in years after the teacher has undergone an evaluation compared to how her students scored in the years before her evaluation. To get a sense of the magnitude of this impact, consider two students taught by the same teacher in different years who both begin the year at the 50th percentile of math achievement. The student taught after the teacher went through the TES process would score about 4.5 percentile points higher at the end of the year than the student taught before the teacher went through the evaluation.

We also find evidence that the effects of going through evaluation in the TES system are not the same for all teachers. The improvement in teacher performance from before to after evaluation is larger for teachers who received relatively low TES scores, teachers whose TES scores improved the most during the TES year, and especially for teachers who were relatively ineffective in raising student test scores prior to TES. The fact that the effects were largest for teachers who, presumably, received more critical feedback and for those with the most room for improvement strengthens our confidence in the causal interpretation of the overall results.

Our findings remain similar when we make changes to our methodological choices, such as varying the way we control for teacher experience, not controlling for teacher experience, and not controlling for student characteristics. We also examine whether our results could be biased by a preexisting upward trend in each teacher’s performance unrelated to experience or evaluation, and find no evidence of such a trend. Finally, we find no evidence that our results reflect teacher turnover from school to school or from grade to grade that causes them not to appear in our data in later years (for example, by moving to a nontested grade or leaving the Cincinnati Public Schools).

In contrast to the results for math achievement, we do not find any evidence that being evaluated increases the impact that teachers have on their students’ reading achievement. Many studies find less variation in teachers’ effect on reading achievement compared to teachers’ effect on math achievement, a pattern that is also evident in our data from Cincinnati. Some have hypothesized that the smaller differences in effectiveness among reading teachers could arise because students learn reading in many in- and out-of-school settings (e.g., reading with family at home) that are outside of a formal reading class. If teachers have less influence on reading achievement, then even if evaluation induces changes in teacher practices, those changes would have smaller effects on achievement growth.

Discussion

The results presented here—greater teacher performance as measured by student achievement gains in years following TES review—strongly suggest that teachers develop skills or otherwise change their behavior in a lasting manner as a result of undergoing subjective performance evaluation in the TES process. A potential explanation for these results is that teachers learn new information about their own performance during the evaluation and subsequently develop new skills. New information is potentially created by the formal scoring and feedback routines of TES, as well as increased opportunities for self-reflection and for conversations regarding effective teaching practice in the TES environment.

Moreover, two features of this study—the analysis sample of experienced teachers and Cincinnati’s use of peer evaluators—may increase the saliency of these hypothesized mechanisms. First, the teachers we study experienced their first rigorous evaluation after 8 to 17 years on the job. Thus they may have been particularly receptive to and in need of information on their performance. If, by contrast, teachers were evaluated every school year (as they are in a new but similar program in Washington, D.C.), the effect resulting from each subsequent year’s evaluation might well be smaller. Second, Cincinnati’s use of peer evaluators may result in teachers being more receptive to feedback from their subjective evaluation than they would be were the feedback to come solely from their supervising principals.

Teachers also appear to generate higher test-score gains during the year they are being evaluated, though these estimates, while consistently positive, are smaller. These improvements during the evaluation could represent the beginning of the changes seen in years following the review, or they could be the result of simple incentives to try harder during the year of evaluation, or some combination of the two.

A remaining question is whether the effects we find are small or large. A natural comparison would be to the estimated effects of different teacher professional-development programs (in-service training often delivered in formal classroom settings). Unfortunately, despite the substantial budgets allocated to such programs, there is little rigorous evidence on their effects. There are, however, other results from research on teacher effectiveness that can be used for comparison. First, the largest gains in teacher effectiveness appear to occur as teachers gain on-the-job experience in the first three to five years. Jonah Rockoff reports gains of about 0.10 student standard deviations over the first two years of teaching when effectiveness is measured by improvements in math computation skills; when using an alternative student math test measuring conceptual understanding, the gains are about half as large. Second, Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann find that having more effective teacher peers improves a teacher’s own performance; a 1-standard-deviation increase in teacher-peer quality is associated with a 0.04-standard-deviation increase in student math achievement. Compared to these two findings, the sustained effect of TES assessment is large.

But are these benefits worth the costs? The direct expenditures for the TES program are substantial, which is not surprising given its atypically intensive approach. From 2004–05 to 2009–10, the Cincinnati district budget directly allocated between $1.8 and $2.1 million per year to the TES program, or about $7,500 per teacher evaluated. More than 90 percent of this cost is associated with evaluator salaries.

A second, potentially larger “cost” of the program is the departure from the classroom of the experienced and presumably highly effective teachers selected to be peer evaluators. The students who would otherwise have been taught by the peer evaluators will likely be taught by less-effective, less-experienced teachers; in those classrooms, the students’ achievement gains will be smaller on average. (The peer evaluator may in practice be replaced by an equally effective or more effective teacher, but that teacher must herself be replaced in the classroom she left.)

While this second cost is more difficult to calculate, it is certainly offset by the larger gains made by students in the evaluated teachers’ classrooms. Those students are scoring, on average, 10 percent of a standard deviation better than they would have otherwise, and since each peer evaluator evaluates 10 to 15 teachers each year, those gains are occurring in multiple teachers’ classrooms for a number of years.

The results of our study provide evidence that subjective evaluation can improve employee performance, even after the evaluation period ends. This is particularly encouraging for the education sector. In recent years, the consensus among policymakers and researchers has been that after the first few years on the job, teacher performance, at least as measured by student test-score growth, cannot be improved. In contrast, we demonstrate that, at least in this setting, experienced teachers provided with unusually detailed information on their performance improved substantially.

American public schools have been under new pressure from regulators and constituents to improve teacher performance. To date, the discussion has focused primarily on evaluation systems as sorting mechanisms, a means to identify the lowest-performing teachers for selective termination. Our work suggests optimism that, while costly, well-structured evaluation systems can not only serve this sorting purpose but can also enhance education through improvements in teacher effectiveness. In other words, if done well, performance evaluation can be an effective form of teacher professional development.

Eric S. Taylor is a doctoral student at Stanford University. John H. Tyler is professor of education, economics, and public policy at Brown University. This article is based in part on a forthcoming study in the American Economic Review.

Over the past 10 years I have spent countless hours in the classrooms of aspiring champions – new teachers, veteran teachers, teachers working in district schools, charter schools, and private schools. When a teacher can effectively utilize all 49 of Lemov’s techniques in perfect harmony, it is feat at which to marvel. Much more commonly observed, however, is the teacher trying heroically – yet unsuccessfully – to fully engage each of his 30 students in the lesson he stayed up half the night planning. Lemov has provided us with an essential framework for instruction and classroom management. Yet the much more pressing question is how we can create the conditions that make “achieving the championship” more achievable and sustainable for all teachers. I believe that blended learning holds that promise.

Lemov organizes his 49 techniques into seven overarching themes. Because seven is easier to tackle than 49, I thought it might be an interesting exercise to examine the role that blended learning can and cannot play in helping to create more champions within each of these themes:

1. Setting High Academic Expectations. No matter how good the technology, students will always need to be surrounded by adults who set high expectations and hold them accountable for achieving at the highest possible level. Teacher need to do so, as Lemov points out, “without apology” and particularly for those students who have been led to believe either by themselves or others that success is out of reach. There are ways, however, that a blended-learning environment can make the task of setting high expectations for every student more feasible. First, online content can be structured in such a way that a student will be forced not to “opt out” until they demonstrate mastery of a concept. Second, and perhaps more critically, a teacher can spend focused time with an individual student while the rest of the class is working online. Without the pressures of engaging an entire classroom, the teacher can provide undivided attention where needed to ensure all students are meeting the high expectations that have been set.

2. Planning that Ensures Academic Achievement. The need for strong planning remains absolutely critical in a blended-learning environment. What becomes possible, however, is the shift from classroom level to individual student level planning. “Beginning with the end in mind” can focus on a particular student’s learning path; setting “manageable and measurable objectives” can be informed by real-time, student level data. The reality today is that our best teachers, particularly early in their career, spend much of their nights and weekends lesson planning. Although it may be feasible to do this through brute force at the classroom level, attempting to do so at the individual student level becomes effectively impossible. In order to create plans that differentiate for each individual student, teachers will need to depend on the growing number of resources available through online content, learning management systems, and data analysis tools. Harnessing these tools will in turn make these essential planning skills more accessible for a larger subset of teachers, allowing them to focus their time on how to best personalize the curriculum for each student rather than building each lesson from scratch.

3. Structuring and Delivering Your Lesson. One of Lemov’s techniques that’s gotten the most traction – and for good reason – is the notion of “Ratio”, the proportion of the cognitive work students do versus teachers. Although many teachers understand the importance of students doing the work, few are able to create the conditions for success within a classroom of 30 students. Most revert to the “sage on a stage” method of teaching. Making an increased “ratio” more accessible to the average teacher is perhaps one of the greatest promises of a blended-learning environment. Students are required to do their own cognitive work while engaging with the online content. Yet equally, if not more, promising are the opportunities created by the individual and small group attention that teachers can now provide to a subset of students while the others are working online. With a smaller number of students at any one time, teachers can focus on pushing the ratio of higher order thinking through Socratic seminars and other targeted strategies of instruction only possible in a small group setting.

4. Engaging Students. If they’re not engaged, students won’t learn. Many of the techniques Lemov describes depend on a heroic teacher with the personality of a “Vegas” performer. In order to keep the engagement of an entire classroom at once, teachers in a traditional setting must strike the perfect balance between being a stand up comedian and a drill sergeant. It’s a feat that few can accomplish. In contrast, a blended-learning environment can more feasibly harness student’s intrinsic motivation through online content that is differentiated and contains immediate feedback. That said, there are several critical roles that teachers must still play regardless of what can be provided online. Similar to setting high academic expectations, most students will depend on adult support to keep their engagement level high. When the going gets tough, nearly every student will be tempted at times to disengage. Teachers need to ensure that students stay focused and engaged. But again, the blended-learning environment allows teachers to target and differentiate their support in a much more manageable manner.

5. Strong Classroom Culture. Ensuring a strong classroom culture is critically important in a blended-learning environment. Tight transitions are essential and yet perhaps even harder to accomplish because of all the technology to be navigated. Many of Lemov’s techniques, such as having a strong “entry routine” remain important for teachers to master. Many of his techniques, however, are necessary only in an environment where 30 students must be streamlined into one cohesive entity; they therefore become obsolete in a blended-learning classroom. For example, “Do Now”s (a commonly used technique for keeping students on task while waiting for whole-group instruction to start) can become “Start Now”s, which allow each student to dive into their individualized content as soon as they enter the classroom. Similar to the notion of engagement, a strong classroom culture becomes that much more obtainable in an environment where students are intrinsically motivated. Rather than drilling students into compliance around the critical components of SLANT (Sit Up, Listen, Ask and Answer Questions, Nod your head, Track the Speaker), a blended-learning environment will hopefully create the conditions where students will want to be more fully present through individualized learning and targeted small-group engagement.

6. Setting and Maintaining High Behavior Expectations. Similar to academic expectations, high behavior expectations are critical regardless of the learning environment. Teachers will always need to be the owners of this within their classrooms.  A blended-learning environment, however, may make it more feasible for the average teacher to find her “strong voice” when more students are actively engaged and less interventions are required. Additionally, it’s important to reevaluate what teachers are striving for “100% compliance” around within their classrooms. For example, in a blended-learning classroom where students are engaged deeply in their individualized learning plan, the occasional side bar conversation or student listening to music while working may not be something that runs against a positive classroom culture.

7. Building Character and Trust. Together with setting high expectations, ensuring each student feels cared for and supported on his learning journey is perhaps the most critical role that a teacher needs to play. Unfortunately, however, this role often gets relegated to the bottom of the list because there is so much whole-group direct instruction and content delivery that needs to occur. Additionally, with 49 techniques to master each and every day, it becomes virtually impossible for the average teacher to preserve the “emotional constancy” that Lemov describes to be so critical. A blended environment affords teachers the opportunity to connect individually with each student and differentiate to both their academic but also, when necessary, personal and emotional needs.

Skeptics of technology-enhanced instruction are quick to assert that teaching is a craft that can never be replaced. I couldn’t agree more. The strength of Lemov’s framework is that it articulates for us exactly what that craft looks like when effectively mastered. The fact of the matter is, we simply don’t have enough – or even remotely close to enough – champion teachers in our schools today. To be clear, it’s not for lack of effort, motivation, intelligence, or passion. It’s because the job we’re expecting our teachers to accomplish is superhuman. Far from replacing our teachers, a blended-learning environment holds the potential of making the job more accessible for more individuals. It provides the opportunity to create more champions.

Allison Akhnoukh has been working in education reform for over 10 years, most recently with the KIPP Foundation supporting the growth and sustainability of the network of charter schools. While studying at Harvard Business School, she worked with Clayton Christensen on early research that led to the creation of Disrupting Class.

This article first appeared on the blog of the Innosight Institute.

Behind the Headline
Game Changer
Education Next| Fall 2012

A new education technology start-up called Hallway is being launched by students at an elite Virginia high school (TJ), reports Steven Overly in the Washington Post. It’s an online portal where students can submit questions on school subjects that their peers can answer. Students can then rate which questions and answers are most helpful. The idea grew out of Facebook groups that allowed students to communicate about assignments; the founder of the new venture says that the Facebook groups taught him that students learn best from collaborating with peers in an online environment.

An article in the Fall 2012 issue of Ed Next by Michael Horn looks at the growth of “social learning” sites like Hallway. “if you place the word ‘social’ in front of nearly anything these days, you can get a meeting in Silicon Valley,” Horn writes. (see “Game Changer”)

Another article in the Fall 2012 issue of Ed Next coincidentally looks at elite high schools like Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a selective school that the founders of Hallway attend. (see “Exam Schools from the Inside”)

-Education Next

The roadblock? A federal “maintenance of effort” (MOE) requirement in the Individuals With Disabilities Act (IDEA, the federal special-education law) that handcuffs states and districts by requiring that special-ed spending never decline from one year to the next. In times of plenty, this mandate discourages efforts to make productivity gains; when revenues shrink, it means that special-education spending will consume an ever-growing slice of school budgets.

For one brief shining moment, Secretary Duncan appeared ready to end the MOE silliness. Then he caved to the powerful special-education lobby, which refused to accept anything other than expenditures escalating into perpetuity.

While economic realities alone should be reason enough to jettison requirements that dictate a spend-spend-spend approach to special ed, a new Fordham study by Nathan Levenson provides an even more compelling reason for doing away with MOE: Spending more on special ed simply may not do much for kids.

How is this possible? While public education is never very hospitable to innovation, efficiency, or productivity boosters, special education has generally been downright hostile. Despite statutory and regulatory tweaks from time to time, our approach hasn’t really changed since the federal law was passed more than thirty-five years ago, even as so much else in K–12 education has changed in important ways. That does not, regrettably, mean our traditional approach has worked well. Indeed, change is desperately needed in this corner of the K–12 world, as any look at the (woeful) achievement data or (skyrocketing) spending data for special-needs students demonstrates. To oversimplify just a bit, general (i.e., “regular”) education is now focused on academic outcomes, but special education remains fixated on inputs, ratios, and services.

That’s a shame, since the same basic dysfunctions that ail general education afflict special education too: middling (or worse) teacher quality; an inclination to throw “more people” at any problem; a reluctance to look at cost-effectiveness; a crazy quilt of governance and decision-making authorities; a tendency to add rather than replace or redirect; and a full-on fear of results-based accountability. Yet the fates (as well as the budgets) of general and special education are joined. In many schools, the latter is the place to stick the kids who have been failed by the former—a major cause of the sky-high special-education-identification rates in many states and districts. Further, there exists in many locales the unrealistic expectation that every neighborhood (and charter) school should be able to serve every youngster with special needs at a high level.

Enter Levenson, former superintendent of the Arlington (MA) Public Schools. In his new study, Boosting the Quality and Efficiency of Special Education, he and his team identified school districts that get similar (or superior) results for special-education students as their peer districts, yet do so at significantly lower cost. They are doing right by kids and right by the bottom line. Both at once. And their practices are eminently imitate-able.

Levenson & co. also developed a national database on special-ed spending—the largest and most detailed ever built. It contains information from almost 1,500 districts, representing 30 percent of U.S. schoolchildren. The database shows that special-education spending and staffing vary wildly—much more so than it does for regular education. Principally driving this variation are huge district-to-district differences in staffing levels.

Some districts hire almost three times more special-ed teachers (per thousand students) than do others. The difference for paraprofessionals (teachers’ aides) is greater than four times. Levenson calculates that, if the high-spending districts adjusted their staffing levels in line with national norms, the country could save (or redirect) $10 billion annually. That’s not chump change! For example, it’s more than twice the total sums invested (over multiple years) in Race to the Top.

The potential for additional savings—and better services for kids—is greater still. To its discredit, longstanding federal law bars the teams that develop Individualized Education Programs for disabled pupils from considering the cost of the interventions and services that they are recommending. Untangling federal barriers to efficiency and effectiveness in special education is the job of Congress—yet no one in Washington seems the least bit interested in tackling an IDEA reauthorization anytime soon. That’s a huge mistake.

Levenson draws on his research to offer a few simple, but assuredly not simplistic, solutions. Make general education better, he says, so that fewer kids get directed into special education. Once youngsters are in special education, design interventions for them that take cost-effectiveness into account—a benefit both for the kids and for the taxpayer. Focus on recruiting better teachers, not more teachers (and aides, specialists, etc.)—for general and special education alike. And scrupulously manage their caseloads.

Districts and states should take these lessons to heart, but the simplest fix supported by Levenson’s findings must occur at the federal level: End maintenance-of-effort requirements that are both inefficient and ineffective. As special-education costs eat into general-education coffers—a trend that is almost certain to continue in the lean years ahead—we suspect that education leaders, policymakers, and taxpayers alike (maybe even the parents and teachers of children with disabilities), will feel impelled to make our perplexing and inefficient special-education system a little less so.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

According to reports, such as this one in eSchool News, the effort in Peru has largely been a flop. The initiative cost the government more than $200 million. One person quoted in the story even wonders if it may have even widened the gaps between rich and poor students in the country.

Ouch.

Yet this was entirely predictable ahead of time.

All too often advocates for education technology have extolled its benefits without recognizing that technology alone will not transform education. Technology by itself does not transform anything in any sector. What tends to matter far more is the model in which the technology is used.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative in particular gathered significant publicity and hype for its admirable goals, but people implementing it in many countries appeared not to have thought through the professional development teachers would need or, even more importantly, a redesign of the schooling model itself to leverage the considerable benefits that digital learning can deliver.

We have seen this movie before, both inside and outside education. As we wrote in Disrupting Class, for a couple decades we spent aggressively on equipping classrooms with computers in the United States—well over $60 billion by a conservative estimate—without significant gains to show for it. Like most established organizations in other sectors, the education system’s inclination when it sees a potentially disruptive technology is to cram it into its existing model to sustain what it is already doing, but not fundamentally transform that model into a student-centric one (the importance of making this transformation should be clearer in light of the ACT’s announcement today that 60 percent of 2012 high school graduates are at risk of not succeeding in college and career).

Where technology has helped transform education—in online learning (both at a distance and in blended-learning models)—it is because it has been implemented in a new learning model. Carpe Diem Schools provide a great example; their schools look nothing like a traditional school and their flagship school has achieved dramatic results for students.

The inclination to use technology as a sustaining innovation has not just been true with computers. There is a long history of schools using technologies to, in effect, sustain the chalkboard and prop up the 20^th-century factory model classroom with the teacher in front of 20 to 30 students of the same age. The recent hype over electronic white boards has been only the latest incarnation of this, as the images from my blog here make clear.

When we finally learn that technology alone won’t transform education—even as it will almost certainly be a critical ingredient in the transformation—we’ll be in a much better place. Districts spending wildly on iPads and other devices should take note. Peru can attest to that.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry originally appeared on Forbes.com

Hostetter might just as surely have been talking about Relay, which aims to transform teacher education to fit the needs of urban schools. The amazing—or at least attention-getting—improvement on the wheel is that New York–based Relay is linking the success of its students to the success of their students.

During their second year in Relay’s two-year masters-degree program, elementary-school teachers are asked to show that their own students averaged a full year’s reading growth during the school year. They must also set a reading goal for each child, perhaps two years’ growth for a child who is three years behind, for example. Students can earn credit toward an honors degree if 80 percent of the children they teach meet their individual reading goals.

To earn their degrees, elementary-school teachers are also asked to show that their students earned, on average, 70 percent mastery on a year’s worth of state or Common Core Standards in another subject, usually math. In other words, a math class would meet the goal if students’ individual mastery scores, when averaged, were 70 percent or better. Middle-school teachers use the same yardstick, but only in their specialized subject.

Relay’s cofounder and president, Norman Atkins, talks movingly about the crisis in inner-city teaching and the need to “grow a pipeline of effective teachers who can make an immediate difference.” But the true value of Relay’s model may go beyond potentially improving the teaching in the classrooms where Relay’s graduates work. Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, explained that Relay is creating a “feedback loop,” using child-level data to measure the outcomes of its teacher-training program, and using those measures to make decisions about program design. “This is how systems get better,” he told me.

Spreading accountability from the teacher back to the education school is an idea the Obama administration is also promoting in its efforts to remake teacher training. This spring, a federal panel looking at teacher-preparation programs debated, among other things, rating ed schools based on how much their teachers add to student learning. That possibility riles ed school deans, among others, but “individual accountability is coming down the pike,” says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group.

Even Relay’s admirers concede that it’s too soon to tell whether the model works. It’s operating in just two cities: New York, where it’s offering a master’s degree to 206 students this year, and Newark, New Jersey, where so far it has state approval only to offer a one-year teaching certificate and has enrolled 64. Relay’s first class won’t graduate until 2013. Philanthropies are still footing much of the bill.

Relay has hired a research director, but Atkins says it may not open itself to independent researchers for another four years. Its students—with undergraduate degrees from the likes of the University of Virginia, Lafayette, and Georgetown—are atypical for an ed school, which could complicate comparisons with other teacher programs. Above all, trying to measure student achievement and a teacher’s role in improving it is hard to do.

Still, says Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College and a member of Relay’s board, Relay is helping to reinvent teacher education. “Relay is the model,” he told me. “It is the future.”

Nuts and Bolts

During their second year in Relay’s two-year masters-degree program, elementary-school teachers are asked to show that their own students averaged a full year’s reading growth during the school year. They must also set a reading goal for each child.

If there were ever a system in need of reinvention, it would be teacher education. Decades of studies, reports, and blue-ribbon commissions have criticized ed schools for low entrance requirements, mediocre standards, an emphasis on theory over practice, and outdated curricula. “It’s an accepted truth that the field is broken,” Walsh told me. The problem with fixing it, she added, is that “nobody has known what to do.”

What Relay is doing largely breaks the mold. Its students are full-time elementary- and middle-school teachers, almost all of them fresh out of college, almost none of them with a traditional teaching degree. The program is heavy on practice and nuts-and-bolts technique. It is competency-based: students can be waived out of Designing Assessments, for example, if they can show they are already adept at writing tests.

Relay’s method flips the classroom, with an online lesson at the start of every module or teaching unit (about 40 percent of instruction is online) and in-class discussions and exercises afterward. Twice-monthly night classes, once-monthly Saturday classes, and two summer terms are taught by master teachers and charter school heavyweights. Online instructors include Lee Canter, author of Assertive Discipline, charter school founders and principals, and Relay professors and deans.

Modules vary in duration and range from the nitty-gritty of classroom management—how to arrange furniture, how to grade papers, how to deal with families, how to open and close a lesson—to big-picture subjects, including literacy instruction, writing development, learning disabilities, unit planning, and character development. For a class called Benchmarking and Tracking Progress, scheduled to last 11¼ hours, the catalog says Relay students will create a spreadsheet to track their own students’ progress against year-end goals, and use the data to customize their teaching. In a class called Behavior Management Plans, Relay students will write a set of classroom rules and learn “how to engage in the very necessary practice of correcting students when they misbehave.”

Everybody Engaged

I logged onto an online lesson for a module titled Engaging Everybody, taught by Doug Lemov, managing director of Uncommon Schools. In the 3¾-hour lesson, Lemov lectured for three or four minutes on each of four techniques that he promotes to keep youngsters involved in class, techniques he labels “wait time,” “everybody writes,” “cold call,” and “call and response.” Each of Lemov’s minilectures was followed by a few pages of online reading from his book Teach Like a Champion, and an essay question or two that students answer online (see “Tools for Teachers,” book reviews, Spring 2011). Then came several short videos showing teachers using each technique in the classroom, with Lemov noting the teachers’ use of an apt pause or effective gesture.

Ed schools typically separate lectures from experience, Arthur Levine pointed out to me; by putting lessons online, Relay can blend them. Next came practice scenarios—what do you do if only three children raise their hands to a question about angles?—online group exercises, and instructions to prepare a lesson plan that incorporates the techniques.

Evening classes are on pedagogy—how to teach—and Saturday classes are on subject matter—what to teach. At the second Engaging Everybody evening class, Relay students are expected to present a 10-minute video of themselves using the techniques in their own classrooms. A complex “rubric” describes how students will be assessed on each: on the wait-time technique, students are evaluated on whether they wait at least three seconds between posing a question and calling on a child for an answer, and whether they “strategically narrate” the wait with encouraging comments.

The classroom lessons are heavily scripted. During the first three minutes of the Engaging Everybody class, for example, the Relay students are to report on how often they’re using the four techniques. The script then lists four paragraphs of narrative and questions for the Relay professor to pose over the next four minutes. For five minutes after that, there’s a review, with 10 questions for the professor to ask, and then a suggested transition: “All right, our minds are fresh on today’s content and we’re ready to move.” Then there’s a guided 7-minute “table discussion,” 5 minutes of class discussion, 11 minutes of partner feedback, and so on.

“It is the most self-consciously designed program I’ve ever seen at a university level. Everything was thought out,” said David Steiner, dean of the Hunter College School of Education, which hosted Relay’s predecessor, Teacher U, beginning in 2008. (Teacher U’s last class of about 147 students will graduate this summer.)

Relay students “model” the kind of behavior they hope to see in their own classrooms, so their hands fly up at questions, they rush to stack chairs and pass out papers, they snap their fingers or waggle their hands to show approval. Relay’s scripts do the same kind of modeling by showing students how to effectively use their limited class time, Steiner explained.

Feedback Loop

When asked a question about reworking a question from a teachers’ guide to fit the current lesson, Mayme Hostetter, Relay’s dean, says, “Sure. No need to totally invent the wheel. Just make the wheel amazing.”

Relay’s class of first-year students had moved to the 6¾-hour Designing Assessments module when I visited in the spring. At the first of the module’s two evening classes, they had practiced writing “exit tickets,” quick quizzes to measure kids’ understanding of that day’s lesson. At the second evening class, students were to write an end-of-the-week test. Again, the script divided the evening into increments, with 45 minutes for students to practice writing test questions and the final 10 minutes for “team building.”

The Newark class, held at North Star Academy Charter School, was looser than the script suggested—and heavier on inspiration. James Verrilli, director of the Newark program and founding principal of North Star, opened with a clip from a Hollywood film about an innocent man’s decades-in-the-making escape from prison, and asked how it related to urban teaching.

The communal answer was that the escape seemed doomed—“like some people look at our kids,” one young woman said—but that perseverance and vision will yield success. “Shout-outs” followed that, with Verrilli singling out students, and students singling out each other, for exemplary work in their classrooms that week. The evening closed with an animated call-and-response reading of Relay’s creed, which ends with the lines, “We touch lives daily. We are teachers.”

In between, the discussion ranged from how to align test questions with the state standards to the layout of a test paper. There was agreement that some questions on the New Jersey tests included extraneous information that obscured the lesson. But “if the state is doing it, we don’t want our kids walking in blind,” said another young woman, who suggested that everyone write a few wordy questions for their own students to practice.

A few days earlier, I attended a Saturday class at Baruch College Campus High School. It gathered most of the Relay students working in New York City schools (mostly in charters, but a few in district schools where Teach For America has assigned them), divided them into subject specialties, and then again by elementary- and middle-school levels. Relay says 61 percent of the New York class is working toward a master’s degree in childhood education, 9 percent in middle-school math education, 5 percent in middle-school science, 3 percent in social studies, 12 percent in English, and 10 percent in general middle-school education.

In a class called Geometry, Fractions, and Measurements, Nicole Chalfoun—a former Bronx 5th-grade teacher—asked Relay students to design a “remediation strategy” for a child whose answer to the equation 2/5 + 3/8 is 5/13. “Where would you start?” she asked, as her students discussed which manipulatives would best convey to the child why uncommon denominators can’t be combined.

In Teaching Middle School Social Studies III, Ali Brown—director of history achievement for the Achievement First schools—asked her class to write an “essential question” that would frame a unit they were soon to teach on the American Revolution. “What is best going to make your kids think hard?” she asked. In an Elementary School Literacy class—the last of 10 sessions in the module—students were critiquing videos they had made of themselves teaching a reading lesson. In Teaching Middle School Math III, the morning began with a game called Buzz and a discussion of ways to modify it to include higher-level math, including calculus.

Every class meeting ends with a survey—was the lesson helpful, how could it be improved?—with comments fed back to course designers, says Hostetter.

The students I talked with—almost all of them first-year teachers—told me that Relay’s lessons were helping them plan their classes, practice their presentations, keep their kids engaged. “Everything I learn here I can use the next day,” said Milan Reed, who graduated from the University of Virginia with a major in political and social thought and now is teaching at Newark’s Spark Academy charter school.

“I get ideas, I get practice, I get feedback,” added Adam Feiler, a 2008 Georgetown graduate and Teach For America volunteer who’s teaching 4th grade at North Star’s Vailsburg Campus elementary.

Many also told me that Relay’s lessons have changed their classroom culture. “The culture went from being compliant to being invested,” said Max Silverstein, a Penn State business major now teaching in an early-childhood classroom at Newark Legacy Charter School. I heard the same thing from Alonte Johnson, a Morehouse College English major who is teaching middle-school English at Kings Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn. A few days earlier, his students designed a seating chart that paired the better and slower readers. “The environment is more interdependent instead of everyone working for me,” he said.

On a Mission

What Relay is doing largely breaks the mold. Its students are full-time elementary- and middleschool teachers, almost none of them with a traditional teaching degree.

Norman Atkins, who founded Uncommon Schools and its North Star Academy as well, said he, David Levin, cofounder of the KIPP charter schools, and Dacia Toll, founder of Achievement First schools, began talking about an education school when they found themselves competing for the same teachers. “Rather than fight over a shallow pool of talent, we were interested in what it would take to build a generation of teachers,” he told me in Relay’s spare Manhattan offices above a public library. (Levin and Toll are on the Relay board, but don’t hold executive positions in the nonprofit.)

They approached 10 college presidents looking for a partner institution, Atkins said, and Hunter’s David Steiner, himself a critic of teacher training, “was waiting for us with open arms.” Last year, seeking more autonomy, Atkins launched Relay and began phasing out Teacher U. The new school takes its name from research suggesting that a “relay” of three years of good teachers can erase the average educational disadvantage of low-income children.

The idea of holding Relay students—and before them, students at Teacher U—accountable for their students’ progress was “one of the very first things we talked about,” Atkins said. The school settled on the 70 percent average mastery floor after looking at the New York math and language tests, where proficiency generally is defined as a score of 70 percent correct answers. The 80 percent stretch goal (for the honors degree) was less data-based but is “at the nexus of ambition and feasibility,” said Brent Maddin, Relay’s provost.

Some 95 percent of Teacher U’s 2010 graduates and 98 percent of its 2011 graduates met the 70 percent targets, he said, although the graduation rate over the two-year master’s program is lower, between 70 percent and 80 percent because of attrition, Hostetter noted.

Reading progress can be assessed with any of six tests, including Fountas and Pinnell Benchmarks and Pearson’s DRA2. But subject tests don’t exist for all subjects and grades. Relay’s handbook says its students instead can use tests they acquire elsewhere or even write themselves, if the assessments show mastery of state or Common Core standards, or of standards set by charter networks or individual schools.

I asked Verrilli, head of the Newark program, how Relay could analyze achievement among youngsters taking so many different tests (a half dozen of his Newark students who are teachers in district schools are writing their own year-end assessments). It wasn’t an apples-and-oranges comparison, he said, but one between “McIntosh and Golden Delicious.” The comparison isn’t among tests, but about mastery levels, he said.

I put that to Scott Marion, associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, who told me that Relay was “dreaming” if it hoped to compare performance across schools, but he otherwise sounded supportive. “I care about the end determination: Is the teacher effective or not,” Marion said, “not ‘did these kids achieve a number’?”

Atkins is a serial social entrepreneur who also started the Robin Hood Foundation, which invests in schools and antipoverty programs in New York. His plans for Relay set a breakneck pace: Next year, he expects Relay to enroll 500 to 550 students in New York and New Jersey. It will add classes for high school teachers, including chemistry, biology, and physics. It has applied to New Jersey to begin a master’s program. And Relay expects to extend its reach further into district schools under an agreement to train up to 60 NYC Teaching Fellows in the Bronx.

Atkins said he expects Relay to be fully supported by tuition and client-school fees in three or four years. For now, philanthropies are footing about $13,000 of the $35,000 two-year tuition bill. Students pay about $4,500, with charter schools and federal grants and subsidies making up the rest. Arthur Levine, the board member, agrees with Atkins’s aim. “For innovation to survive, it has to be self-sustaining. If something’s not self-sustaining, it’s not serious,” he told me. And Relay is nothing if not serious.

“What calls us every day is the sad and tragic circumstance” of urban education, Atkins told me, and in one phrase or another, everyone at Relay says the same thing. The other thing they all told me turns on its head the notion of what makes a great teacher.

“We’re saying great teachers are made,” James Verrilli told me, “not born.”

June Kronholz is a contributing editor of Education Next and a former foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Teacher Evaluations Found to Improve Midcareer Effectiveness

When teachers in Cincinnati were evaluated rigorously, student performance on math tests improve

CAMBRIDGE, MA –A new study shows that Cincinnati’s rigorous Teacher Evaluation System (TES) has had a direct and lasting effect on midcareer teachers’ performance.  Students taught by a teacher in the years after she had been through the evaluation program scored 0.11 standard deviations higher in math, on average, than the students she taught in the years before her evaluation (as measured by end-of-year 4^th through 8^th grade state tests).  This difference is equivalent to about 3 – 4 months of additional instruction or a gain of about 4.5 percentile points for the average student.  The Cincinnati evaluation is a yearlong process and a teacher’s students also scored 0.05 standard deviations higher in the year their teacher was being evaluated, a difference of 1.5 – 2 months of additional instruction.

Researchers Eric S. Taylor and John H. Tyler note that to the best of their knowledge, their study is the first to test the hypothesis that practice-based teacher evaluation programs can help to improve teacher performance, in addition to their value in identifying teachers’ strengths or weaknesses.  Well-designed performance evaluation “can be an effective form of teacher professional development,” the authors observe.  Their analysis, “Can Teacher Evaluation Improve Teaching?” will appear in the Fall issue of Education Next and is available at www.educationnext.org.

In 2000, Cincinnati launched TES, a thorough process by which teachers’ performance is assessed through classroom observations and a review of work products.  Teachers are observed and scored four times:  three times by a peer evaluator (an experienced teacher) and once by a school administrator.  Both peer evaluators and administrators complete an intensive training course, learning to accurately score videotaped teaching examples according to a specific rubric.  TES is costly (about $7,500 per teacher evaluated, primarily for evaluators’ salaries) and its approach “contrasts starkly with status quo ‘principal walk-through’ styles of class observation,” note the authors.

Currently, all teachers newly hired by the Cincinnati school district, regardless of prior experience, take part in a TES evaluation during their first year.  In their fourth year they are evaluated again, prior to receiving tenure (assuming successful evaluations), and once every five years after achieving tenure.  For tenured teachers, evaluation scores determine eligibility for some promotions or additional tenure protection, or, in the case of very low scores, placement in a peer assistance program with a small risk of termination.

The researchers’ analysis includes only teachers hired before TES was introduced in the 2000-2001 school year and who were teaching 4^th through 8^th grade in the years 2003-04 through 2009-10.  The group evaluated included 105 experienced teachers hired by the district in the school years from 1993-94 through 1999-2000.  Evaluating this sample of teachers allowed the authors to measure the effect of evaluation on performance separate from any gains that come from increased experience, and permitted them to make comparisons of the achievement levels of a given teacher’s students both before and after the TES assessment.

The authors observe that the teachers in their study experienced their first rigorous evaluation after 8 to 17 years on the job, and may have been particularly receptive to comments from peer evaluators, rather than solely from administrators.  The TES impact was found to be largest for teachers who were the weakest prior to evaluation.  The researchers note that their findings suggest well-structured evaluation systems can be cost-effective expenditures that “not only serve (a) sorting purpose but also enhance education through improvements in teacher effectiveness.”

About the Authors

Eric S. Taylor is a doctoral student at Stanford University.  John H. Tyler is professor of education, economics, and public policy at Brown University.  This article is based in part on a forthcoming study in The American Economic Review.  The authors are available for interviews.

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 about Education Next, please visit:  www.educationnext.org.

For more information on the Program on Education Policy and Governance contact Antonio Wendland at 617-495-7976, pepg_administrator@hks.harvard.edu, or visit www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg.

When I learned that I would be a participant in the Fulbright-Hays 2011 Summer Seminar in Mexico, a five-week program run by the U.S. Department of Education, I was eager to taste the cuisine in each of the eight states on the itinerary. It never occurred to me that I’d be eating bugs—at least not on purpose.

As a high school teacher, I’d always thought of cultural differences as opportunities to broaden my perspective. Yet there’s something about having to eat the culture that makes accepting cultural differences more personal and much more challenging.

When I teach literature, I talk about the importance of perspective in interpreting novels. Our way isn’t necessarily the right way; it’s just the way we know. With that credo in mind, I lathered my worm in guacamole, closed my eyes, and swallowed.

The trip awakened me to other cultural misconceptions as well. When visiting San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, I toured San Juan Chamula, a Mayan community. Our guide, archaeologist Chip Morris, began at the graveyard, which frankly resembled the outskirts of a garbage dump. Empty plastic soda bottles littered the areas around headstones. I saw this as a sign of disrespect. Morris set me straight: in the Chamula tradition, he explained, the dead must be remembered and honored. Having graveside parties and leaving bottles show that the family is meeting its obligations.

Travel regularly yields such epiphanies.

Travel is also a great way to discover and reflect on the sometimes surprising interactions between cultures. Morris next took us into the church in the town’s central square, where we saw a significant blending of ancient Mayan practices and Catholic influences. Chickens are sacrificed, as the statues of Catholic saints look on. Posh, a homemade rum drink, is offered by families who want to invite others to witness their audible prayers. And so is Coca-Cola.

Coke as a Mayan ceremonial beverage?

It’s true. In the 1960s, Coca-Cola made local Mayan leaders partners in the distribution of their beverages. By the 1970s, community leaders agreed that Coke and other soft drinks could be substituted for posh, deemphasizing the use of alcohol during religious ceremonies. The billboard on the road coming into Chamula shows a man in traditional festival dress celebrating with a Coke. Whatever one might think about Coke—and it has a checkered record in Latin America—it has played a significant role in reducing alcohol abuse in Mayan communities.

By the end of the trip, I had even come to have a better understanding of the Mayan practice of human sacrifice. After visiting Chichén Itzá and other Mayan sites, I came to see that these sacrifices involved not only enemies, but also what was most important to the Maya. They sacrificed their bravest soldiers during wartime. They sacrificed children and women, who shed the most water in tears during times of draught. In short, they sacrificed not because life was cheap, but because it was precious and their gods deserved the best of who they were.

I choose seemingly outrageous examples because they best illustrate why teachers must travel. We rightly insist that students share different points of view, but we often don’t demand the same of ourselves. And until we are out there “eating” another culture, we might not be scrutinizing our own misconceptions about place, people, and history.

Elaine Griffin is the English Department chair at the University School of Milwaukee.

Looking to boost the numbers of students attaining a high-quality and affordable postsecondary credential, the Foundation announced $9 million worth of grants to support innovators inside and outside of the postsecondary establishment.

In secondary schools, the Foundation gave $1.2 million to the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) for its Wave III effort to fund secondary schools that use blended learning to support personalized learning for students at an affordable price that is scalable ($3.3 million of the $9 million for postsecondary actually went to NGLC as well to fund four breakthrough postsecondary models).

In my travels and conversations with people from around the country, I’m often struck by how much more K-12 public schools are seizing online learning to transform education than most people realize—or than I think statistics would even capture.

As a reviewer for the NGLC secondary school models, which seeks to not just fund those schools using online learning but those really taking their approach the extra mile with innovative, push-the-envelope student-centric designs, I have been struck further by how much blended learning has arrived. We reviewed exciting applications from charters and districts whose leaders were truly thinking outside the box in different ways. In their applications, there was an emerging familiarity with using a common language to talk about blended learning, which, given our work in defining different blended-learning models, is gratifying to see. As Andy Calkins, deputy director of NGLC said in an email to me, “These attributes [of blended learning] are starting to be commonly understood to be the hallmarks of next generation learning, at least among those keeping their eye on trends in the unfolding future of K-12 education.”

What will now be most interesting of course is seeing the actual execution of these schools’ plans—as always, the devil is in the details in education. Some of these school models open up this fall while others will open in the fall of 2013. Another question is if these models can scale. Calkins suggests that more thought and creativity is still needed here. The applicants are, in his words, creating great working models of blended learning 2.0 schools, but NGLC is more than just about creating a series of proof points, as it is focused on helping the models it funds scale aggressively.

Stay tuned to the grant winners: Academy 21 at Franklin Central Supervisory Union in Vermont, which is focused on a high-need, predominantly rural community; Cornerstone Charter Schools in Michigan, which seeks to prepare Detroit students for college and health-focused careers; Da Vinci Schools in California, which will integrate blended learning, early college, and real-world experiences with its existing project-based learning approach; Education Achievement Authority in Michigan, which, as part of the statewide turnaround authority is trying to create a student-centric system for students in Detroit; Match Education in Massachusetts, which already operates high-performing schools in Boston and will now focus on using technology to increase the effectiveness of its one-on-one tutoring; Schools for the Future in Michigan, which will serve students significantly below grade level; Summit Public Schools in California, which aims to build off its experiments in blended-learning models to launch a competency-based school; and Venture Academies in Minnesota, which is a new charter organization that will focus on accelerated college credit attainment and cultivation of entrepreneurial leadership.

In the postsecondary space, the Gates Foundation made a number of grants—both directly and through NGLC—to intriguing ventures with the potential to improve education dramatically, including some of my disruptive favorites: start-up MyCollege Foundation, which will establish a non-profit college that blends adaptive online learning solutions with other services at a low cost; University of the People, the world’s first tuition-free, non-profit, online academic institution dedicated to opening access to higher education globally; New Charter University, a competency-based university that charges only $199 per month for students seeking a degree and for which NGLC will fund a research study of its online students and a comparative one of students enrolled in a blended-learning environment delivered through a partnership with the Community College of the District of Columbia; Southern New Hampshire University, which under its President Paul LeBlanc has already created an autonomous online division and will now pioneer the “Pathways Project,” which will offer a self-paced and student-centric associates degree; and MIT, which will use the funds to create a free prototype computer science online course for edX.

As with the secondary-school models, the proof in many of these cases is yet to come, but it is exciting to see a foundation step up and take some risks to reinvent learning to create dramatically better and lower-cost learning experiences for all students.

This blog entry originally appeared on Forbes.com

From the Journal

“Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?”
By June Kronholz
(Spring 2012)

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“The Flipped Classroom”
By Bill Tucker
(Winter 2012)

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“Getting At-Risk Teens to Graduation”
By June Kronholz
(Fall 2011)

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“Future Schools”
By Jonathon Schorr and Deb McGriff
(Summer 2011)

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“Florida’s Online Option”
By Bill Tucker
(Summer 2009)

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From the Blog

“Bright Spots Shine in Blended, Online Learning”
By Michael Horn
(3/1/2012, ednext blog)

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“How Digital Learning Can and Must Help Excellent Teachers Reach More Children”
By Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel
(9/13/2011, EdNext Blog)

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“Why Digital Learning Will Liberate Teachers”
By Michael Horn
(8/10/2011, EdNext Blog)

In the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next, June Kronholz wrote about Performance Learning Centers (PLCs), high schools use blended learning to help at-risk kids recover credits and make their way to graduation.

In the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next, Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff wrote about some other schools using blended learning in “Future Schools.”

Little did they know, at the beginning of the 21^st century soldiers across the ocean would be able to read their kids a bedtime story via Skype or Facetime.  Questions would be answered with a simple Google search.  Music would be downloaded straight to your phone with the click of a button.  And kids in rural Nebraska would learn physics from engineers in Japan without leaving their 11^th grade classroom.

Most schools around the nation operate the same way today as they did a century ago.  They have the same schedule, the same classrooms, the same grade levels, the same teachers, and the same courses. With the ring of a bell, students move to the next subject, and the cycle starts all over again.

What if we were to channel our inner Hanna-Barbera, and visualize what public education should look like in the digital age?

I submit we would have an education system focused on student learning.  No arbitrary schedules or seat-time requirements.  Just learning.  Each student at his or her own pace, according to their learning style.

Interactive and adaptive learning technologies can allow students to learn in their own style and at their own pace.  This means no student gets bored and no student gets left behind.  Teachers are no longer forced to use textbooks that become outdated the moment they leave the printer.

Digital learning can provide real-time data so teachers can differentiate instruction with laser-like precision.  Data brings a level of efficiency to both teaching and learning that will improve both the experience of education as well as the outcome.

Imagine with me an education system where a student’s homework is listening to their teacher’s lecture, and class time is spent working through the military genius of Napoleon by using the latest GPS mapping software?

Or it might be a 10^th grader in his backyard, at the picnic table, diving into his chemistry lesson via his mobile tablet.  He gets so caught up in what he is learning that two hours go by before he even looks up.

It could be a 5^th grader whose classroom consists of students from several grade levels engaging in an interactive learning environment where grammar skills and concepts are practiced through gaming.  After providing an overview lesson on sentence structure and basic concepts, her teacher works with each student individually, based on their specific needs.

This modernized education system cares less about HOW she learns sentence structure as long as she learns it.

When a student masters the course concepts and skills, they have the opportunity to advance to the next level.  Some students might advance in 3 months, some in 9 months, and – potentially – some would advance after a year.  The bell would no longer control public education in our country.  The focus moves from how long it takes to master the content to simply making sure students master it – period! There would be no need for end-of-year tests, but only end-of-course tests.

What I do know is that our education system will not modernize itself without leadership.  We need state, district, and school leaders who can see this vision and have the courage to make the changes necessary to support student-centered learning.  These leaders should focus their efforts on moving to a competency-based education that requires students to demonstrate mastery of the material, ending the archaic practice of seat-time, funding education based on achievement instead of attendance, eliminating the all too common practice of restricting students to district boundaries, and removing barriers to effective, high quality instruction.

Digital learning levels the playing field. No matter where you live or what school district you are assigned to, technology provides the opportunity to access knowledge and resources students and educators need.

Ask any teacher what their students spend most of their time doing in the halls, not to mention during class, and they will tell you that their kids are always on their smartphones – for academic as well as social reasons.  We are already on the 4^th version of the iPhone, but very little thought has been given to the need for public education 2.0.

If each student was given the opportunity to learn at their own pace with an education plan customized to their individual needs, then each and every student would achieve his or her God-Given potential for learning. They would all be prepared for success in the 21^st century economy.

Hanna-Barbera had the courage to visualize 100 years into the future.  The technology is available, just waiting to be utilized. Do we have the courage to act today?

-Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush is the chairman of the Foundation for Florida’s Future and Foundation for Excellence in Education.  This blog first appeared on redefinED.

Computers, I figured, would continue to be useful to scientists and engineers and others with complex calculations to make. Cell phones would function like traditional telephones, only portable. The internet (whether or not Al Gore had anything to do with it) was for emailing and such. And “information technology” was sort of like engineering, a field for wonky college students wanting to write computer code. K-12 education might benefit marginally from bits of all this but mainly would sail on like a clipper ship of yore, powered by the same winds that had always propelled it.

Well, I was wrong. But this confession isn’t just another paean to the potential of online learning. That’s there, of course, and real. What has struck me more, however, is the number of contemporary education problems to which technology offers at least a partial solution—but only if we can picture it holistically, not simply as a tool for doing one thing or another.

Let me illustrate with five major-league challenges in today’s K-12 reform world—noting in advance that this could as easily be a list of twenty-five.

Formative and summative assessments
Old-fashioned assessments consume much valuable class-time, are either simple-minded in construction or labor intensive to evaluate, rarely work well across a broad range of students (it takes far too many questions to differentiate at the low and high ends as well as in the middle), and their turnaround is too slow to yield useful information when you really need it. (A major reason for the failure of “public school choice” under NCLB is that nobody knew for sure before August or September whether their kids had the right to change schools that year.)

Computer-adaptive assessments combined with computerized scoring, including open-response and even essay-type questions, could go a long way toward salving all those bruises.

Teacher evaluations
It’s understandable why teachers don’t want to be judged on the basis of a single year-end test or by the difference in student scores between a pair of year-end tests. It’s unfair and inadequate in a dozen ways, and even more so once you get outside the realm of English language arts and math in grades three through eight. Indeed, it’s no better than having the principal pop in for a few minutes once or twice a year.

Technology, however, makes it possible to record, retrieve, and evaluate entire portfolios of student work, daily and weekly learning outcomes, and a host of teacher practices and behaviors, all of them able to be analyzed, reviewed, and discussed at multiple points during the school year—and indeed over multiple years.

Weighted student funding (WSF)
As with most major reforms of school finance, doing WSF right entails complex formulas, oft-changing allocations of money (when a kid shifts schools, for example, or moves to the next grade, or her needs change), sophisticated building-level budgeting, and the integration of dollars from multiple sources that carry different requirements.

Technology can’t solve all those problems—deciding what weight to assign to which conditions, for example—but it can surely simplify the managing and tracking of dollars, the amalgamation of amounts from different programs, and the budget challenges that arise at every level of the system.

Quality education choices for every child
What does school choice mean in rural America? For a child who is unusually gifted in, say, physics, but also wants to play the violin? For a parent whose kid is theoretically free to change schools but who cannot access reliable information by which to evaluate the options? For a youngster who had to drop out to work at a day job or help with baby care but who wants to complete that diploma?

Technology doesn’t guarantee that good information will lead families to make educationally sound school choices but at least it removes the “How was I to know?” excuse for bad choices. It can beam lessons to kids who live on mountaintops or accompany their parents to Thailand. It can be accessed 24/7. It can augment the course offerings of brick-and-mortar schools. And it creates the possibility of changing schools just by inserting a different URL into one’s browser.

Parent engagement
How do we draw parents more deeply into the education of their daughters and sons and turn them into partners with teachers and counselors? It’s not easy—but instant, painless communication between school and home is a big help. So is the ability of Mom and Dad to access their child’s homework assignment, see her test results, retrieve a weekly report on what she did and didn’t learn, even watch her behavior in class in real time (or when convenient.)

One could indeed go on, as these examples really are just slices of the possible. Note that I didn’t even get to individualization of instruction, special ed, saving money, or myriad other potential benefits of technology when used properly in the K-12 context.

Note, though, that pulling off this kind of transformation isn’t like adding a new program to school-as-we-know-it. It’s no bandage. It’s more like heart-lung transplant surgery. Which is exactly how we tend not to think about education reform—and is exactly what engenders fear and loathing in traditional educators, whether because major surgery is just plain scary or because they’re worried about their jobs or just because they’re not too comfortable with technology themselves.

Realizing the promise of technology for American K-12 education is going to be really hard. Misused, it could even aggravate some of today’s education woes. But if we go at it comprehensively, the payoff will justify the struggle. With apologies to Ralph Tyler, it will make the change wrought by the overhead projector resemble that produced by the paperclip.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

Sure, low morale might simply reflect tough economic times; when (or if) state and local coffers finally recover, higher morale might too. But let’s be honest: The message we reformers are sending isn’t all peace, love, and happiness, and that’s probably having an impact, and not for the better.

We think many teachers are dumb (look at those SAT scores!); greedy (look at those gold-plated healthcare and pension plans!); racist (look at those achievement gaps!); lazy (look at those summers off!); ill-prepared (look at those crappy ed schools!); uncaring (look at all that bullying!); unnecessary (look at what computers can do!); and incompetent (look at those low value-added scores!). Or at least that’s how many teachers hear it, I suspect. We love teachers—we just hate everything about them.

One option, according to union leaders, Diane Ravitch, and others, is to stop pressing for reform. Stop complaining about unaffordable pensions or healthcare plans. Stop worrying about across-the-board raises. Stop measuring teachers’ contributions to student achievement gains. Stop pressing for LIFO and tenure and collective bargaining changes. Stop obsessing about online learning.

That might get us happier teachers but it won’t get us dramatically better schools.

So what’s the other option? How can we continue to make the case for reform without alienating teachers, without turning them into the enemy, the problem, the object of our disdain?

One way is to put teachers in charge of their own schools. That’s the argument Ted Kolderie and his colleagues at EducationEvolving have been making. (See this great Education Next article for an overview of teacher-led schools.) If we want teachers to feel respected and motivated, we should treat them as true professionals. Let them call the shots. Set the budget. Hire new teachers. Deal with management concerns. In all likelihood, these teacher-leaders will come to some of the same conclusions as reformers. (Such as: low performers need to go; there are trade-offs between small class sizes and more generous salaries and benefits; all teachers need their craft to be regularly evaluated against some clear and common expectations around good practice; etc.)

Another way is to champion reforms that teachers do support. For instance, make it easier for educators to discipline unruly students, or to use “ability grouping” in their classrooms instead of mandating the nearly-impossible strategy of “differentiating instruction.”  In other words, remove the obstacles (often ideological in nature) that are getting in the way of teachers achieving success in their classrooms. If we don’t want to put teachers in charge of their own schools, at least give them more control over their work, as Richard Ingersoll argues. And get their backs when they are faced with ridiculous demands from parents or others.

Another possibility: find smart ways to give teachers a “voice” that doesn’t entail subjugating them to union bosses. That’s part of the idea behind Teach Plus, the Association of American Educators, and Educators for Excellence. The other side of that coin is to get better information to rank-and-file teachers in the first place, so they aren’t learning about reform solely through the filter of union rhetoric.

None of these are perfect solutions. As long as reformers are talking about curtailing teachers’ benefits, or making their jobs less secure, or evaluating their instructional practices, there is going to be some anger and resentment. And talk about those reforms we must. Let’s just try to make some effort to heed teachers’ concerns, and inspire them to excellence, too.

-Mike Petrilli

Special thanks to Ty Eberhardt, Joanne Jacobs, Steve Farkas, Ted Kolderie, and Amber Winkler for seeding several of the ideas mentioned above.

This blog entry originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

Behind the Headline
Future Schools
Education Next | Summer 2011

In a special issue of the Washington Monthly, Bill Tucker writes about “stealth assessment,” the use of formative assessments built into the learning process which allow teachers to keep tabs on learning continuously. As he describes the process

students would spend their time in the classroom solving problems, mastering complex projects, or even conducting experiments, as many of them do now. But they’d do much of it through a technological interface: via interactive lessons and simulations, digital instruments, and, above all, games. Information about an individual student’s approach, persistence, and problem-solving strategies, in addition to their record of right and wrong answers, would be collected over time, generating much more detailed and valid evidence about a student’s skills and knowledge than a one-shot test. And all the while, these sophisticated systems would adapt, constantly updating to keep the student challenged, supported, and engaged.

Tucker notes that one glimpse of this future can be found at School of One, a personalized learning program in New York City. In the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next, Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff wrote about School of One and other schools that blend online and face-to-face learning.

The president said the study showed that we need new resources and policies to “keep good teachers on the job and reward the best ones.” But does the work of the Chetty team justify strong policy interventions? Do school board members need to peruse Education Next’s reader-friendly version of this econometric study, then take appropriate steps to replace weak teachers with high performers?

A number of commentators think not. “The differences produced by the high value-added teachers are relatively small,” Diane Ravitch tells her readers. Maria Bustillos objects to “firing ‘weaker’ teachers for the sake of a barely perceptible increase in students’ ‘lifetime income.’” Sherman Dorn says the effects are only “moderate.”

For these commentators, apparently, teachers are made of the same ticky-tacky that was used to build those identical “little boxes on the hillside” about which folksinger Malvina Reynolds crooned back in the 1960s. The people in those tickytacky houses were all made out of “ticky-tacky,” she warbled, and “they come out all the same.”

The Reynolds melody was as catchy as her words, and every adolescent was soon whistling it. But, fortunately, great teachers have always ignored such nonsense. They passionately care about the lives and education of each individual student—even when they know that the rewards come slowly.

Education is a long, measured process. Good parents start the education of their children the minute they are born, even though the payoff is years away. It is even more so with teachers, as they work with students for fewer hours a day.

Nonetheless, a top-notch teacher, as compared to a typical one, can over the course of a year raise student performance by as much as a third of a year’s worth of learning.

But despite those gains, salaries earned at age 28 are only $182 more, or 1 percent higher, for students who have experienced a year of great teaching. When the payoff is so low, why should we care whether schools keep their good teachers? Why should we bother asking bad teachers to find another job?

The answer is simple: One percent gains seem small, but they add up in the same way those saved Ben Franklin pennies do. Just 1 percent of additional income from one year in a room with a great teacher adds up to $25,000 over the typical wage earner’s lifetime. Extrapolating out to 10 years of excellent instruction, one can hazard the claim that the opportunity to enjoy consistently high-level instruction bolsters lifetime income by a quarter of a million dollars. That just about justifies the handsome tuitions charged by high-quality private schools and the large sums parents pay to buy homes in neighborhoods with outstanding schools.

And a great teacher works with not just one student but has a substantial average impact on all 28 of those in the typical class the Chetty team studied. Over the space of just 10 years, a teacher affects the lives of 280 students. On average, a great teacher has an impact that adds up to nothing short of $7 million. When the future is discounted at the standard rate, the annual value of the great teacher, relative to the typical one, drops to around a quarter of a million dollars, the number President Obama used.

Admittedly, some of these numbers are extrapolations and all are subject to error. But there is no justification for all teachers to be paid an identical salary as long as they have the same meaningless credentials and have spent the same number of years in the classroom. It’s time for school districts to stop treating teachers as if they were ticky-tacky—little boxes, sitting in the classroom, all teaching just the same.

Public Impact has published new career paths stemming from our school models that use job redesign and technology to reach more students with excellent teaching. These models enable excellent teachers to expand their positive impact on students, and many allow additional time for planning, collaboration, and development—so all teachers can improve.

Prior decades are littered with abandoned efforts to create teacher career paths. Well-intended new efforts risk falling into the same traps. To understand how our career paths are different, it helps to understand what hasn’t worked previously. The fatal flaws of most teaching career paths include:

• No pay increases. Career advancement often does not come with more pay. Or, add-on pay disappears when special money runs out. Instead of being a compliment, promotions become a reminder to our best teachers of how little their profession values their excellence.
• Financially unsustainable roles. When schools pay for advanced roles with temporary, special funding, and when new roles do not produce a sustainable financial benefit to schools, even schools that value excellence dearly cannot pay for it.
• Too few options. Narrow choices have typically been limited to instructional specialists who provide differentiation outside the classroom and “master” or “mentor” roles responsible for coaching other teachers. Coaching is an important role, as is differentiating instruction. But today, these are the only school-level advancement options in the profession, other than becoming a principal.
• Limited authority. Mentors and specialists typically have no authority. Their advice is useful only if a classroom teacher chooses to adopt their successful methods and techniques.
• Limited accountability. Mentors typically have no accountability for mentees’ success with students. Data about students whom specialists help are not tracked formally as they are for classroom teachers. So, essentially, many of the best teachers are removed from responsibility for students, rather than having enhanced responsibility.

Public Impact’s career paths, built from school models with input from many partners, address all of these flaws. What makes our career options different?

We give educators at least 15 career paths to choose from. These options allow teachers who achieve excellence to advance, earn more within regular budgets, enhance their authority within schools, and keep clear responsibility and credit for helping more students learn.

The paths include:

• Teacher-leader roles, in which excellent teachers extend their reach by leading multiple classrooms and a team of teachers—allowing teachers to develop leadership skills earlier in their careers, while helping peers improve their performance immediately.
• Specialist jobs that let elementary teachers focus on their best subjects and roles.
• Blended-learning roles that enable teachers to extend their reach by swapping enough teaching time with digital instruction to teach more students, focus on higher-order thinking skills, and increase planning and collaboration time.
• Remotely located roles that let excellent teachers teach and take responsibility for students anywhere, using new technologies like webcams that allow teachers to connect with students.
• Boundless teaching roles that let teachers create video lessons, design software, and develop curricula and assessments for limitless numbers of students.
• Team-teaching roles that allow solid and developing teachers to learn from excellent teachers, focus on their strengths, and pursue advancement, too.

New paraprofessional roles, such as tutors, learning coaches, and lab monitors, make it possible for teachers to save time and reach more students. When people in these jobs enable excellent teachers to help more students, they too can earn more.

Instead of the mixed signals of most education career paths, these send a clear, sustainable message that schools value teaching excellence and their great teachers’ positive impact on students, peers, and their profession. This is just one aspect—but a critical one—of building an Opportunity Culture for teachers.

-Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

But what has received less attention is how digital learning could have improved Jobs’s own educational experience.

In the early pages of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, however, how a different education system—a competency-based one powered by digital learning—could have helped Jobs screams from the pages.

From the book: “Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to read. This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. ‘I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble.’”

In other words, because today’s education system is a monolithic one—where students learn the same thing on the same day in the same way regardless of their individual needs—Jobs had to repeat things he already knew because that’s where the rest of the class was. Naturally he lost the zeal and motivation for school and therefore acted out, as there were few opportunities for him to realize real progress and feel successful.

“’Look, it’s not his fault,’ Paul Jobs [his father] told the teachers, his son recalled. ‘If you can’t keep him interested, it’s your fault.’”

This charge at teachers perhaps isn’t altogether fair, although it’s on to something; it really was the fault of the system itself. Most teachers have a nearly impossible task, as they are told to deliver a curriculum in the course of a year and somehow manage 20 to 30 children, who are all in different places and have different learning needs at different times.

A far better system for Jobs—and for every child—would have been a student-centric one that could naturally and affordably customize for each child’s needs.

That said, one teacher, Imogene Hill, seemed to be able to deliver the goods for Jobs in 4^th grade.  To regain his interest, she had to use a little extrinsic motivation first.

“After watching him for a couple of weeks, she figured that the best way to handle him was to bribe him. ‘After school one day, she gave me this workbook with math problems in it, and she said, ‘I want you to take it home and do this.’ And I thought ‘Are you nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of these giant lollipops that seemed as big as the world. And she said, ‘When you’re done with it, if you get it mostly right, I will give you this and five dollars. And I handed it back within two days.’”

Soon, with the chance to be successful and make progress at hand, intrinsic motivation kicked in, which appears to echo some of Harvard Professor Roland Fryer Jr.’s research findings.

“After a few months, he no longer required the bribes. ‘I just wanted to learn and to please her.’”

Jobs recounted that she became “one of the saints of my life.”

But she alone couldn’t solve the more systematic problem at hand in the education system, nor can we continue to have an education system that relies on the anomalies—superheroes who ignore the system’s bad incentives.

Isaacson’s book supplies some evidence for why.

“Near the end of fourth grade, Mrs. Hill had Jobs tested.” According to Jobs, he scored at the high school sophomore level. “Now that it was clear, not only to himself and his parents but also to his teachers, that he was intellectually special, the school made the remarkable proposal that he skip two grades and go right into seventh; it would be the easiest way to keep him challenged and stimulated. His parents decided, more sensibly, to have him skip only one grade. The transition was wrenching. He was a socially awkward loner who found himself with kids a year older.”

And herein lies a real problem. Today’s education system forces us to make cruel tradeoffs. On the one hand, we can keep children with their age-level peers and friends regardless of academic fit—which may involve social promotion regardless of whether a student has mastered a subject or holding a student back even if she is capable of taking on much more difficult concepts. On the other hand, we can hold a student back if he hasn’t mastered certain concepts, which will put him in an unfortunate social position, or, if he has mastered the concepts already, we can have him skip grade levels and meet Jobs’s social plight. Neither answer is a great one.

What a competency-based learning system powered by digital learning does is break the tradeoffs. A student can remain with her friends and peers while working on the objectives, projects, and courses most appropriate for her, regardless of what the others are doing because the online medium can naturally individualize the learning. A student moves on to a concept once she has mastered it, not when the calendar dictates that she move on. Each student owns her learning; accelerating through learning objectives isn’t hard to accommodate. The teacher is freed to add significantly more value by serving as a learning coach, mentor, and much more—including by bringing students together to have important discussions and apply their learning with other students at all levels of learning where that is appropriate.

This week I had the opportunity to visit a school, the Silicon Valley Flex Academy, that is mere miles from where Jobs grew up. It’s working to create a student-centric education system, and it breaks these tradeoffs. It’s too bad that it wasn’t around when Jobs went to school, but fortunately an increasing number of programs are bucking the system and working on doing the same.

Of course, Jobs ultimately survived the educational malpractice he faced, and he changed the world in significant ways. The curiosity was not beaten out of him—but only barely, he said. All too many children, however, don’t escape this—and it’s not just their loss. It’s ours, too.

I suspect that is one of the reasons that toward the end of his life, Jobs—along with Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and others—had set his sights on bringing some disruptive innovation to education, as Isaacson recounts. According to Jobs, “All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.”

Jobs had come around. He had realized that although technology had not improved the education system to this point, in the future, it could be a part of the answer to America’s education woes—a critical component in creating a student-centric system in which every child could realize her fullest human potential, not just the lucky ones.

- Michael Horn

This post originally appeared on Forbes