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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Paul Peterson

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

My take is threefold. (An earlier version of this originally appeared as an Ed Week commentary, but I thought it worth sharing a tweaked version here.)

First, claims that teachers are, in Duncan’s words, “desperately underpaid,” are a familiar refrain. Yet, given that we’ve steadily boosted staffing and after-inflation spending in recent decades to little obvious effect, and that states and districts are wrestling with structural shortfalls, it’s healthy to question such orthodoxies. Biggs and Richwine remind us that the costs of teacher benefits dramatically inflate the cost of compensation, even if the results aren’t always obvious when scanning a paycheck. Recall, for example, that University of Arkansas economist Bob Costrell pointed out during the Wisconsin collective bargaining fight earlier this year that the average Milwaukee teacher earned a salary of $56,500 but, due to benefits, actually cost the district $100,005 in total compensation. This ought to be of particular concern to educators eager to see more of their compensation show up in their pay stubs. In light of that, I’m disappointed (if not surprised) that most of the responses I’ve seen to Biggs and Richwine have been ad hominem, with Duncan declaring in the Huffington Post that the study “insults teachers and demeans the profession.”

Second, their analysis is intriguing, but it rests upon assumptions and data which deserve to be carefully scrutinized. For instance, Biggs and Richwine rely upon SAT and GRE scores to measure cognitive ability. It’s fair to ask both how good those metrics are and how much they may say about teaching ability. And it’s worth noting that their cognition data are nearly two decades old; if the makeup of the teaching force has changed significantly in that time, it would obviously change the outcomes. Similarly, the job-security and benefits data don’t reflect more recent developments or the fact that teaching positions may be less secure going forward; it will be interesting to see how such changes might impact the underlying data. At the same time, it’s important to note that Biggs and Richwine penned for the HuffPo what I thought was a pretty compelling response to the two methodological criticisms that Duncan had raised.

Third, I ultimately think the are-teachers-overpaid-or-underpaid question is just not that interesting or helpful to those of us in the fields of schooling and education. It’s a useful question for policymakers who must decide how to allocate dollars for highways, health care, and schooling, but for those of us working in the K-12 arena, the more relevant question is: How do we most wisely spend the dollars we have?

For what it’s worth, I’m firmly convinced that, today, some teachers are underpaid and others are overpaid. When I am asked the long-standing question about whether teachers are underpaid or overpaid, my consistent refrain is, “Yes.” I’m much more interested in the broader issue of how we can rethink the profession, make fuller use of talented teachers, and wisely spend the dollars we do have than in debating what the “right” wage level should be.

Under today’s step-and-lane pay scales, the primary way we determine how much teachers are worth is how long they’ve taught and how many graduate credits they’ve accumulated. Now, there’s nothing innately wrong with step-and-lane compensation. Indeed, when introduced in the early 20th century, it was a sensible response to reflexive, sweeping discrimination under which women were routinely paid half as much as their male counterparts. When a captive market of women had few options except to teach, the benefits of this more equitable system outweighed its defects.

Today, however, the world has changed. Whereas limited professional options meant that more than half of women graduating from college became teachers in mid-20th-century America, the figure today is closer to 15 percent. At the start of the 21st century, new college graduates–both men and women–are much less likely to stick to a job for long stretches, the competition for college-educated talent has intensified, and we are becoming better able to track educational outlays and outcomes. All this adds up to a new environment in which step-and-lane industrial-era pay is ill-suited to attracting and retaining talent. The consequence of treating different employees similarly, despite their varying work ethics and skills, has become a growing burden.

As school systems wrestle with tough fiscal decisions, it’s vital to understand that one-size-fits-all pay is insensitive to questions of productivity. Although the term “productivity” is typically regarded as a four-letter word in K-12 conversations, teacher productivity means nothing more than how much good a given teacher can do. If one teacher is regarded by colleagues as a far more valued mentor than another, or helps students master skills much more rapidly than another, it’s axiomatic that one teacher is more productive than the other. Yet, step-and-lane pay makes no allowance for such differences.

Today, we’re paying the most productive employees too little, paying their less productive colleagues too much, or, most times, a little of each. In a world of scarce talent and limited resources, this is a problem. School systems casually operate on the implicit assumption that most teachers are similarly adept at everything. In a routine day, a 4th grade teacher who is a terrific English language arts instructor might teach reading for just 90 minutes. This is an extravagant waste of talent, especially when one can stroll down the hallway and see a less adept colleague offering 90 minutes of pedestrian reading instruction.

One approach to using talent more wisely might entail overhauling teacher schedules and student assignment so that an exceptional 4th grade English language arts instructor would teach many more students. Colleagues, in turn, would shoulder that teacher’s other instructional responsibilities. An essential component of such rethinking is to adjust compensation to recognize the importance of their various roles.

After all, we pay thoracic surgeons much more than we do pediatric nurses–not because we think they’re better people or because they have lower patient-mortality rates, but because their positions require more sophisticated skills and more intensive training and because surgeons are harder to replace. Salary should be a tool for solving problems by finding smarter ways to attract, nurture, and use talent; it should not be an obstacle to doing so.

Almost any effort to really rethink staffing and pay entails some educators earning more–probably, a lot more–and other educators earning less. That sounds about right. The real question isn’t whether we should pay all teachers more or less; it’s how to pay the right teachers more, in a way that serves students and maximizes the bang we get for the educational buck.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Schools will not need as many conventional teachers as they did yesterday, but those they need will be able to tap top-notch technology and instructional support teams to achieve excellence at scale. They’ll get paid more, too, potentially a lot more. And all this can be done within tight budgets so long as education systems judiciously blend technology and people.

Digital learning has the potential to transform the teaching profession in three major ways:

• Extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students.
• Attracting and retaining more excellent teachers.
• Boosting effectiveness and job options for average teachers.

Extending the reach of the best. In the digital future, teacher effectiveness will matter even more than it does today. As digital learning spreads, students worldwide will gain access to core knowledge and skills instruction. What will increasingly differentiate outcomes for schools, states, and nations is how well responsible adults carry out the more complex instructional tasks: motivating students to go the extra mile, teaching them time management, addressing social and emotional issues that affect their learning, and diagnosing problems and making the right changes when learning stalls.

The top 20 or 25 percent of teachers already meet these challenges. But in traditional classrooms, they only reach 20 to 25 percent of students. That’s where digital learning can help.

Digital technology, along with changes in teacher roles and schedules, should make it possible for top teachers to assume responsibility for all students, not just 20 or 25 percent of them

For example, by replacing 25 – 50 percent of teaching in some subjects, digital instruction can free excellent teachers’ time, enabling them to take responsibility for more students – keeping similar class sizes and gaining planning time. These “time-technology swaps” are already used in top-performing schools that combine digital learning with excellent teachers to boost results.

Digital tools can also connect excellent teachers working live with students across the hall, state, or nation – using web cameras and email. Shy instructional masters can help design smart software to personalize learning. Star performing content masters can go viral on digital video, and someday holograms, to millions of students anywhere, who with excellent teachers can convert that access into stellar learning.

Attracting and retaining the best. Digital learning will also transform career opportunities for excellent teachers. As they reach more students, they should earn more out of the per-pupil funds generated by the expanded number of students. The chance of enhanced advancement and pay will, in turn, make the profession a more attractive long-term career for top performers, wooing unfulfilled engineers and lawyers into a better life.

-Bryan Hassel and Emily Asycue Hassel

This blog entry also appears on Flypaper. It is based on “Teachers the Age of Digital Instruction,” a paper published this week by the Fordham Institute as part of its Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning series.

As a “practitioner” of sorts, I’ve wondered the same thing for 15 years. The K–12 school sector generates little empirical research of any sort. And of this small amount, most is targeted to policymakers and superintendents, and concerns such matters as the effects of class size reduction, charter school attendance, or a merit-pay program for teachers. Why is there virtually no empirical education research meant to be consumed by the nation’s 3 million teachers, answering their questions?

Those 3 million teachers generate about 2 billion hour-long classes per year. We do not know empirically which “teacher moves,” actions that are decided by individual teachers in their classrooms, are most effective at getting students to learn. Why doesn’t this kind of research get done?

Mr. Gates has part of the answer. Money. For 2011, the Microsoft R&D budget is $9.6 billion, out of total revenue in the $60 billion range. The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) represents only a fraction of total education research, but its budget gives some perspective: IES spends about $200 million on research compared to more than $600 billion of total K–12 spending. So, 15 percent to upgrade Microsoft, 0.03 percent to upgrade our nation’s schools. And while Microsoft’s research is targeted to the bottom line ($8.6 billion is on cloud computing, the profit center of the future), IES spends almost nothing examining the most important aspect of schools: the decisions and actions that individual teachers control or make.

One IES project is the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), established in 2002 to provide “a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education.” The WWC web site lists topic areas like beginning reading, adolescent literacy, high school math, and the like. For each topic, WWC researchers summarize and evaluate the rigor of published studies of products and interventions. One might find on the WWC site evidence on the relative effectiveness of middle-school math curricula or of strategies to encourage girls in science, for example.

But there is almost nothing examining the thousands of moves teachers must decide on and execute every school day. Should I ask for raised hands, or cold-call? Should I give a warning or a detention? Do I require this student to attend my afterschool help session, or make it optional? Should I spend 10 minutes grading each five-paragraph essay, 20 minutes, or just not pay attention to time and work on each until it “feels” done?

And the WWC’s few reviews of research on teacher moves aren’t particularly helpful. A 63-page brief on the best teaching techniques identifies precisely two with “strong evidence”: giving lots of quizzes and asking deep questions. An 87-page guide on reducing misbehavior has five areas of general advice that “research supports,” but no concrete moves for teachers to implement. It reads, “[Teachers should] consider parents, school personnel, and behavioral experts as allies who can provide new insights, strategies, and support.” What does not exist are experiments with results like this: “A randomized trial found that a home visit prior to the beginning of a school year, combined with phone calls to parents within 5 hours of an infraction, results in a 15 percent drop in the same misbehavior on the next day.” If that existed, perhaps teachers would be more amenable to proposals like home visits.

By contrast, a fair number of medical journals get delivered to my house. They’re for my wife, an oncologist. They’re practical. In each issue, she learns something along these lines: “When a patient has this type of breast cancer, I currently do X. This study suggests I should do Y.” There is a bit on medical policy, but most of the information is meant for individual doctors in their day-to-day work.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t conduct research on education policy. My own work has certainly benefited from it. For example, the quasi-experimental study by economists Tom Kane and Josh Angrist on Boston charter schools, which compared the winners and losers of charter admission lotteries, helped change the Massachusetts law that had blocked the creation of new charters. The change enabled me to help launch a new charter school, MATCH Community Day. My point is simply that relative to education policy research, there is very, very little rigorous research on teacher moves. Why? Gates knows it’s more than a lack of raw cash; it’s also about someone taking responsibility for this work. “Who thinks of it [empirical research on teachers] as their business?” he asked. “The 50 states don’t think of it that way, and schools of education are not about [this type of] research.”

I agree, but I contend there are a number of other barriers. The first is a lack of demand.

The Demand Side

Why aren’t teachers clamoring for published research? One reason is that researchers generally examine the wrong dependent variable. Researchers care about next August (when test scores come in, because they can show achievement gains). Teachers care about that, too, but they care more about solving today’s problems (see sidebar, page 26).

A second issue is that researchers don’t worry about teacher time. Education researchers often put forward strategies that make teachers’ lives harder, not easier. Have you ever tried to “differentiate instruction”? When policy experts give a lecture or speak publicly, do they create five different iterations for their varied audience? Probably not.

The return on investment for teacher time and the opportunity cost of spending it one way rather than another is rarely taken into account. In what other, valuable ways could teachers be spending the time taken up with building “differentiation” into a lesson plan? They could phone parents, tutor kids after school, grade papers, or analyze data. Much research implies that teachers should spend more time doing X while not indicating where they should spend less time.

Teachers don’t trust research, and understandably so. There’s a lot of shoddy research that supports fads. Experienced teachers remember that “this year’s method” directly contradicts the approach from three years ago. So they’d rather go it alone. Newer teachers pick up on the skepticism about research from the veterans.

Unlike medical research, teacher research rarely examines possible side effects, and whether they are short-term aggravations or can be expected to persist. Imagine that a teacher reads an article arguing that students benefit from being asked “higher-order questions.” She begins doing that. Some students, surprised at this new rigor, are frustrated. Some students throw up their hands and give up. Misbehavior ensues.

Student frustration is probably a fairly predictable short-term side effect of asking higher-order questions. If she isn’t being properly warned, a teacher might quickly abandon this technique.

For all these reasons, the 3 million teachers aren’t forming picket lines to demand research.

Do We Know What Works?

Neither policy camp, reformers nor traditionalists, care much about research into teacher moves, either. Some traditionalists see teaching as an art, one that cannot be subjugated to quantitative analysis (“every teacher is different”). Others aren’t averse to research; they simply don’t see it as a priority. They’d prefer that limited resources be used to fight poverty, not to improve students’ day-to-day classroom experiences.

Meanwhile, some reformers argue “we already know what works,” and we just need to scale it.

As part of the “reformer” community, I find this troubling. From charter opponents like Diane Ravitch to supporters like education secretary Arne Duncan, there’s agreement that “some charter schools work.” Furthermore, there’s strong evidence that the charters that succeed tend to be “No Excuses” schools. So do we know what works?

I’m the founder of one of those charter schools; our high-school students have the highest value-added gains of all 340 public high schools in Massachusetts. I’m also the founder of a small teacher residency program that supplies teachers to schools like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program). Many of us would agree to a very different proposition: We know teacher moves “that work” to some extent, enough to create very large achievement gains, but we don’t know teacher moves well enough to get our college graduation rate near where we’d like it to be. Nor do we know how to help teachers do these moves more efficiently, so that their jobs are sustainable.

Without a massive uptick in our knowledge of teacher moves, we’ll continue on the current reform path. That path is a limited replication of No Excuses schools that rely on a very unusual labor pool (young, often work 60+ hours per week, often from top universities); the creation of many more charters that, on average, aren’t different in performance from district schools; districts adopting “lite” versions of No Excuses models while pruning small numbers of very low performing teachers; and some amount of shift to online learning. Peering into that future, I don’t see how we’ll generate a breakthrough.

Bridging the Divide

The final barrier to research on teacher moves is the divide between practitioners and researchers. My analogy is a 5th-grade dance. Boys stand on one side. Girls stand on the other. There is very little actual dancing. In this case, teachers are off to one side, and quantitatively oriented researchers are on the other.

After a while, the boys go into the hallway and talk about video games. Similarly, quantitative researchers find the transaction costs of setting up experiments are too high and give up on doing research about teacher actions. They take their problem-solving marbles and find other data sets to crunch.

Girls see that the boys aren’t around anymore. So they dance with each other. Teachers and school leaders, if they like to learn, do so through observation of and conversation regarding perceived “best practices.” There aren’t many practitioners who care about rigorous empirical research.

With all these barriers, is there much hope? There’s not going to be a pot of gold in this funding environment. If research on teacher moves matters, we need to be more creative about catalyzing the low-hanging fruit. That would mean identifying practitioners who are unusually interested in randomized research, and connecting them with doctoral students who are unusually interested in teachers and teaching.

What does it look like when practitioners and researchers dance together? Here is one example.

In July 2010, I asked Harvard economist Roland Fryer for some help. My research question was fairly simple: Do teacher phone calls to parents “work”?

In our school, teachers proactively phone parents. Typically, the parents have not been heavily involved in their children’s previous schools. We believe that phone calls to parents help teachers generate improved decorum, effort, and ultimately learning from students. (Sometimes the calls to parents are supplemented with teacher calls to students) These parent relationships seem to be linked to very high parent-satisfaction ratings, and in turn we have thought those were related to our high test-score growth. Truth be told, however, we just don’t know whether this is a productive use of teachers’ time.

Fryer enlisted two doctoral students, Shaun Dougherty and Matt Kraft, from the Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. These two did an amazing job, operating skillfully within our school to do the randomized study. From their findings:

“On average, teacher-family communication increased homework completion rates by 6 percentage points and decreased instances in which teachers had to redirect students’ attention to the task at hand by 32%.”

This collaboration worked for several reasons. First, we have a teacher residency embedded in our charter school, so I had 24 student teachers who could be fairly easily randomized during the summer school session. Second, a professor I trusted chose the graduate students who would conduct the research. These guys were, in my view, dispassionate. I’ve tried to work before with grad students who have strong preexisting beliefs about what they’ll find (typically with a “progressive” lens), and it was difficult to gain real knowledge. (Researchers often feel the same way about practitioners, that we’re searching for marketing, not truth). Also, Fryer paid them a stipend; in my experience, graduate students working for free, and only for credit of some sort, don’t always follow through.

The cost of the two graduate students was not the only expense. In our experiment, at any given time, there were 16 classrooms in action. The researchers needed to hire 16 observers to carefully code student behavior for a few weeks. The total bill was around $10,000. Kraft and Dougherty found a Harvard grant of $1,000. The rest I needed to pay.

Once we’d designed the experiment, I needed to explain it to my team: the principals of our high school and middle school, and the student teachers who were involved. These are people I know well, and they generally trust me. Still, this buy-in phase required expending both time and “relationship capital,” a resource that gets spent down and must be built back up over time. Using student teachers was also of benefit. It would have been tough to randomize our regular teachers. Their belief in the efficacy of parent communication is so strong I suspect many would have doubted the value of changing their normal routines.

There were other costs to the experiment. The head of our teacher-prep program spent many hours handling the experiment’s complex logistics, including a permission slip for parent consent. He could have spent those hours coaching these student teachers, which is the main task I was paying him to do.

All of these issues reflect transaction costs: finding the right people and then doing the right study well takes time, effort, and money.

Researching Teacher Moves

Think of the Human Genome Project. When the project started, scientists didn’t know how many genes there were; now they believe the number is 20,000 to 25,000.

We don’t know how many teacher moves there are. The number is certainly high but not infinite, maybe 200, 2,000, nobody knows. Presumably, there are some unusually high-yield teacher moves across all contexts, some moves that are high yield but only in specific situations or contexts, and other less powerful moves. There is undoubtedly lots of interaction effect among many moves. Mapping all of this might be called the Teaching Move Genome Project, and at the beginning it would be a scary undertaking.

Absent this work, what do we have? Perceived best practices, often buttressed by observation or nonrandomized studies. In his best-selling book Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov describes 49 teaching moves he has observed in the nation’s top charter schools. At the University of Michigan, Deborah Ball and her colleagues are close to unveiling a list of 88 math teacher moves. Lee Canter’s Assertive Discipline and Jon Saphier’s Skillful Teacher discuss scores of moves, like the “10-2” rule (have kids summarize for 2 minutes in small groups after 10 minutes of teacher-led instruction), much of it supported by nonrandomized research. On the basis of its observations of effective teachers, Teach For America (TFA) promotes 6 teacher behaviors and 28 component parts, like “plan purposefully” or “set big goals”; none are specific moves.

What would a series of randomized trials look like? Let’s apply it to Lemov’s 49. Imagine a group of trials that would ask the questions, Do all of the moves work? Are any particularly successful? How does the degree of teacher buy-in interact with effectiveness? What are the “costs” of these moves?

An example from Lemov is “Right Is Right.” The idea is that when a kid gives an answer that is mostly right, the teacher should hold out until it’s 100 percent correct. Lemov describes various tactics the teacher can use to elicit the 100 percent right answer from the student (or first from another student, before having the original student repeat or extend the correct answer).

The obvious cost of implementing this move is time. These back-and-forths add up to lost minutes each period when other topics are not being discussed. A less skillful teacher might be drawn into a protracted discussion, when her next best alternative (simply announce the 100 percent right answer, and move on) might work better. We just don’t know.

Back in 2003, education researchers David Cohen, Stephen Raudenbush, and Deborah Ball argued that “one could make accurate causal inference about instructional effects only by reconceiving and then redesigning instruction as a regime, or system, and comparing it with different systems.” That suggests “a narrower role for survey research than has recently been the case in education, and a larger role for experimental and quasi-experimental research. But if such studies offer a better grip on causality, they are more difficult to design, instrument, and carry out, and more costly.”

Still, we need a better grip on causality. So who would undertake this cost?

A Proposal

Once again borrowing some terminology from medicine, I propose a typology of trials, delineating phases in a continuum.

Phase 1 trials would be small, nongeneralizable empirical studies of teacher moves. These could be randomized, single-subject, or regression discontinuity, but the dependent variable would not be year-end test scores. Instead, we’d look for next-day or next-week outcomes: measurable effects on student behavior, effort, or short-term learning.

Who would decide what moves to test? Some would be proposed by established authors and thinkers in the teaching field. Some would come from the nation’s 3 million schoolteachers, possibly with crowd sourcing to identify the most-promising ideas. Some would come from academic researchers, particularly those from other fields, like psychology, who may offer unusual insights. But for the next level, testing competing ideas, I’d suggest we draw heavily on teacher opinion, particularly a group of teachers selected for their stated willingness to try new methods (if they are supported by research).

Phase 2 trials would test promising teacher practice from Phase 1 on a larger, more varied teacher pool to see if the next-day outcomes held up, probably across different types of schools. Again, the dependent variable is short-term student response.

Phase 3 trials would be randomized trials in which teachers combine multiple moves that emerge from Phase 2. In the end, our bottom line is student learning, and Phase 3 trials are combinations of moves that are measured to see if they bolster year-end student learning gains.

Medical researchers have found that treating some illnesses requires a drug “cocktail,” that is, no one medicine by itself works as well as the combination of several. The same approach might work in education: it could be that individual teacher moves by themselves cannot create measurable year-end achievement gains in students, but combining many together can.

My proposal is that each of the nation’s 1,200-plus schools of education and teacher prep programs conduct one randomized trial on a teacher move each year: Phase 1, Phase 2, or Phase 3. They’d do that by recruiting alumni into a network of experienced teachers willing to participate. The advantage is that once you pay the one-time transaction costs of finding these teachers, the ongoing expenditures related to persuading them to participate, and securing permission from families and principals, decline.

Once that network existed, it would function like a laboratory. Various Phase 1 experiments could be run through it, with small numbers of teachers at first, so that many experiments could be run concurrently. Larger numbers of teachers would be included in more promising Phase 2 validation experiments. Of course, there would be selection bias in terms of which teachers are willing to be participate in this sort of work, and other imperfections. But in the end, experiments could build on proven results from previous ones. Multiple ed schools would combine their networks for Phase 3 trials.

By itself, no single experiment would be that important. Instead, it would be like cancer research: thousands of people each trying to answer small questions in a very rigorous way…which would add up to promising treatments.

The goal is an affordable system for conducting teacher research that teachers would actually consume, that would address both the implementation challenges and the high transaction costs for researchers and practitioners in creating such research. Until that exists, I’ll see you at the 5th-grade dance.

Michael Goldstein is the founder of MATCH Charter School and MATCH Teacher Residency, in Boston.

On student/teacher engagement:

The part that is often missed when discussing these concepts is that it’s a strategy for learning that humanizes the classroom. Building and growing teacher-student relationships is essential to improving student learning outcomes. When a teacher has the opportunity to speak to each student and assess their progress every day, students feel that learning matters. They feel challenged and supported. Again, it’s not about the technology or the devices, it about shifting our pedagogy to put each student first.

I use this tool for all the reasons stated and more, particularly the opportunity to spend more class time addressing the higher order thinking skills. Could it be that this is the point that critics are missing? The term ‘ flipped classroom’ places too much emphasis on a tool used by students to prepare for class and clouds the fact that teachers are developing fuller, richer learning cycles with their new time. Let’s call it the ‘flip-tool’ and start to write more about the consequences that is the rich learning cycles we have been able to develop for our classrooms.

On technology and ensuring equal access:

I have vids on flash drives and DVDs for kids w/ no internet access/digital tools.

[Teachers] don’t need the internet to do this! They can create videos, and save them on students’ machines quickly and easily. That way students just watch them from the computer without having to worry about connecting to the internet. We’ve also been able to repurpose old laptops for just this use. Since all the computers need to do is play a few videos, old laptops are perfect for this task.

On managing time and motivating students to do at-home activities:

The flipped class allows for learners to customize when and where they learn. I have plenty that spend class time learning and practicing, and at home, they don’t worry about chemistry. There is no such thing as “homework” anymore. If they work, they can use class time to front-load and account for their work life. We went through how to budget time and use the resources so they don’t overwhelm themselves through the year…. Most of what my kids (and many flipped kids) do is use the videos as A) remediation if they need it, or B) pre-learning for use in class the next day. The videos I put out are less than 10-minutes in length, so the time at home is considerably LESS than a “normal” homework assignment. Plus, they aren’t sitting at home struggling with a worksheet or book assignment, so their mental stress is also alleviated to a degree with a flip.

one of the most surprising things I learned when a colleague and I went to using videos to deliver most of the “content” of our class was that when forced to boil down the content to the most important concepts in order to create the videos, we ended up with a total of 8 videos of about 10-15 minutes each for our 10 week course in microbiology. In the past, we wold have spent FAR more time delivering the same content in class. Now, class time is spent exploring the content in context, the students are in the lab more often and the class time is a far more collaborative endeavor for the students. We have been able to do more higher-order thinking projects with the “found” time. Also, the students really like being able to control the pace of the delivery of the content in the videos. We provide them with sheets to take notes on while watching the videos so it is not simply a passive activity. Flipping has definitely resulted in more engaging and enjoyable class time for the students and the teachers.

Finally, as chemistry teacher Aaron Sams explains, it’s important to emphasize that there’s no single model, with most teachers figuring this out, adapting, and improving their practice as they go.

Is there a bolder alternative that might actually induce our nation to achieve widespread learning excellence?

Here’s a simple idea: put excellent teachers, the top 20 to 25 percent who achieve well over today’s “year of learning progress,” in charge of every child’s learning—consistently. Even with solid teachers who achieve a full year of progress, students who enter school behind stay behind, and those in the middle do not leap ahead. Moreover, the current teacher pool feeds the anemic principal pipeline, meaning excellent teachers are often pulled from instruction—or forced to work under inadequate leaders.

In our recent report, Seizing Opportunity at the Top, we suggest three major ways to generate the significant will needed to put excellent teachers in charge of every child’s learning. We must, at the federal or state level:

• Limit who can teach to top high school graduates, with further screening for behavioral competencies of excellent teachers;
• Offer large financial incentives from regular funding streams, for districts, schools, and teachers when they produce high-growth learning, up to and far beyond standards; and/or
• Create a new civil right to excellent teachers, one that parents and students can enforce legally when a child is behind standards, not making a full year of progress annually, or has not had an excellent teacher in a subject for two years running.

The only way to implement any of these reforms successfully, within budget and at scale, is to help excellent teachers increase their productivity: swap portions of excellent teachers’ time with digital instruction so they can teach more classes with similar or even smaller group sizes; let them delegate nonessential tasks to other adults; use digital tools to save time on instructional monitoring and planning; put them in charge of other teachers; and let the willing have more students to nurture under their strong wings. Find more discussion of these options in Opportunity at the Top and 3X for All. This is not new: Other excellent professionals, whose jobs and pay aren’t frozen into molds, started making these changes for themselves a half-century ago, developing differentiated teams and using technology to save time and eliminate error from routine work, leaving the best free to do the most complex tasks.

Public Impact, with help from teachers and others, will soon begin releasing designs that clarify how to make these changes in schools, within budget, and pay excellent teachers more for the additional children they reach. “How to” models will help, but without major policy changes to induce the will, all evidence is that schools simply won’t budge—not even the ones that already can (e.g., charter schools).

ESEA could help. At a minimum, it could:

• Require states to identify excellent teachers immediately (even if full-blown evaluation systems take longer to develop);
• Require reporting of the percentage of students reached by teachers at each effectiveness level, not just the percentage of teachers at different effectiveness levels—rewarding places that put excellent teachers in charge of more students, directly or through managed teams; and
• Make federal funding contingent on clearing barriers that keep excellent teachers from reaching more students, such as limits on their pay, class sizes, and non-teaching staff who could monitor digital instruction.

Seizing Opportunity at the Top lists the basic policies that states must change. Absent will-inducing provisions, though, even ESEA and basic state policy changes combined will be inadequate.

Policy and political leaders at all levels: We must stop haggling over how to pack our saddlebags while other nations board helicopters. Our nation needs us to step up. We need major action to induce the will to put excellent teachers in charge of every child’s learning.

- Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel, Public Impact

My classmates complained that her class was too hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Public School Teacher is not for the faint of heart.  Rather, it is a comprehensive report on the state of the teaching profession in the United States based on a 5-year study by the National Education Association.  It is steeped in useful data, rational commentary and thoughtful analysis.  Of course, like John Merrow, I found some of the reportage more illuminating than others.  But the authors included in this compendium are all distinguished in their fields, and not one can be dismissed as an educational lightweight.  As an historian, I was particularly pleased to see how the editor saw fit to include an historical review of the period since the 1950s, mentioning, among other things, Arthur Bestor’s great book, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools, the influence of Sputnik, and (a little later) the Great Society legislation, to underscore the national commitment to education for everyone.

What the book does not do, however, is to introduce many new approaches to the challenges the profession faces.  Of course, as with so many other arenas, America finds itself hard put to keep up with some other countries’ success at significantly raising the levels of academic achievement on the part of the high school graduate.  Indeed, the high school graduation rate, we are reminded, remains stuck at about 75%.  Despite the influence of the unions (the NEA should be commended for the thoroughness of the research on which the book is based), teacher remuneration continues to lag behind other more prestigious professions.  While student-teacher ratios are strikingly reduced from past years, the hoped-for improvement in academic achievement associated with more intimate circumstances has not occurred.  The majority of teachers are still given to teaching behind closed doors. Only the few dare to work cooperatively with their peers on any kind of systematic basis. The unintended consequences associated with No Child Left Behind may be ameliorated in the near future, but rational student and teacher evaluation appear to be as elusive as ever.  The standards movement, which appeared to be so promising in its inception in the 1980s, seems to have lost its impetus, resulting in too much attention to English, mathematics and science, and too little to the other subjects in the basic curriculum, a point stressed by two prominent education theorists, Diane Ravitch and Linda Darling-Hammond.  Finally, the concern about outcomes translates into a surfeit of standardized tests, many of which are rather remotely connected with what has been taught.

All these issues and many others are reviewed in the book, which makes the volume an extremely valuable primer when it comes to discussing the status quo.  However, in terms of the future, perhaps inevitably notions are more speculative.  True, the book heralds the recent alliance between NCATE and TEAC.  True, it suggests that there is a growing consensus in the field at large about the need for a radical reappraisal of what should constitute teacher education and teach licensing, Katherine Neville’s comments notwithstanding.  True, it argues that more and more teachers are losing their technophobia.

All in all, this book should serve as a splendid resource for the foreseeable future.  There is little of consequence that is not reviewed.  In other words, this is not bedtime reading.  It is a serious book of reference dealing with an extraordinarily important aspect of school reform.

-A. Graham Down

They’re wrong—fortunately. The new Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup survey makes clear that most adults value their children’s teachers. Seventy-one percent say they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools” and 67 percent say they would like to have one of their own children become a public-school teacher.

That’s tons more positive than the public’s view of schools in general: Just 17 percent give A or B grades to them (though Americans continue to give high marks to their own children’s schools—and this figure, say the pollsters, is rising).

Respondents were also asked to grade the teachers, principals, and school board in their own community. Here again, teachers fared best: Sixty-nine percent of respondents would award their town’s teachers either an A or a B versus 54 percent for principals, and a meager 37 percent for the school board. (This widening recognition of the governance failings of our public-school systems is, in its way, heartening.) Parents—interestingly—rank the worst: A discouraging 36 percent of respondents would give their communities’ parents top marks for “bringing up their children.”

So whence cometh the perceived public ire?  PDK and Gallup lift the lid a bit: Forty-seven percent of survey respondents feel that unionization (of teachers) has hurt “the quality of public education in the United States” compared with 26 percent who say it has helped. (Are you paying attention, Randi and Dennis? Your organizations don’t have a lot of fans. Even school boards fare better!)

Some aspects of school teaching seem permanent, even eternal, but in many ways teaching today has changed from my own student days and it’s likely to be even more different tomorrow.

In the last half-century, unionization has flooded the schools (and is now slowly starting to ebb—or be pushed back). Possibly more important, though, has been the sheer growth in the number of public-school teachers. In the 1950s, the crude ratio of students to teachers across American K-12 education was 27:1. Today it’s 14:1. That doesn’t mean everybody’s classes are smaller but it does mean that we now employ an enormous number of teachers—in the ballpark of 3.5 million—and essentially all the extra money we’ve put into public education has gone to pay for their salaries and benefits. That’s why teacher pay has simply kept pace with the cost of living and why these levels of compensation in much of the U.S. today aren’t sufficient to attract and keep a great many of our ablest college graduates. (Mercifully, they attract and keep some!) If today’s ratio were still 27:1, today’s school budgets would be sufficient to pay an average teacher salary north of $100,000.

As for what will be different in the teachers’ world tomorrow, five developments need to be noted and taken seriously.

First, technology is going to have a major impact, both on what happens within traditional schools and classrooms and, more broadly, on what we mean by “school” and where and when learning occurs. Most likely, it will mean that we need fewer flesh-and-blood teachers sitting in the classroom with Johnnie and Susie—though we may need more aides and tutors and such to provide face-to-face explanations, pats on the back, and (when needed) stern looks and reminders to remain on task. (Expect a paper soon from our “Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning” series on the specifics of these shifts.)

Second, school budgets are going to be flat (or falling) for the foreseeable future—and looming deficits in retirement and pension funds almost certainly mean that the take-home pay of practicing  teachers will see no real-dollar growth and could well decline. (The only rational antidote to that is, in fact, employing fewer individuals and paying them better.)

Third, there’s a revolution underway in teacher evaluation and many of the HR practices associated with it, including retention, tenure, compensation, promotions, and layoffs. It’s rocky, to be sure, but we’re gradually coming to gauge teachers more by what their students learn and less by the credentials that they carry. (And this isn’t just a cause trumpeted by wonks and reform junkies. Per yesterday’s poll, 74 percent of adult Americans say that it’s important to incorporate student test-score data into teacher evaluations.)

Fourth, big changes are brewing in teacher preparation and licensure as ed schools come under fire, as “alternate routes” proliferate, as programs like Teach For America get greater traction, and as more attention is paid to what a teacher knows about her subject than to what pedagogy courses she took in college.

Fifth, though the system hasn’t quite made this adjustment yet, we’re seeing that a non-trivial fraction of teachers are people who want to do this work for a time, before or after they do something else, rather than make a lifelong career of it. We’ll likely evolve a set of arrangements that capitalizes on the short-termers as well as the classroom careerists.

As we contemplate this future, it will surely help if teachers themselves, with or (more likely) without their unions’ help, prove willing to experiment, to grow, to listen, and to learn. And it will help if all the rest of us—even the curmudgeonly crew at Fordham—pause to thank today’s hardworking educators for selfless, challenging, and not very well compensated work on which our kids’ future and our country’s prospects depend so heavily.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Teacher benefits, once a sleepy question primarily of interest to actuaries, have become a flash point in the education debate. With individual states on the hook for tens or hundreds of millions in unfunded pension and health insurance obligations, state leaders are trying to determine the severity of the situation and the appropriate response. In this forum, Robert Costrell of the University of Arkansas and Mike Podgursky of the University of Missouri argue that the situation is critical, but offer an opportunity for overdue reform, while Christian Weller of the University of Massachusetts-Boston argues that measured steps will put teacher pensions on sound footing.

Education Next: How bad is the teacher pension crisis?

Christian Weller: The states’ fiscal crisis necessitates that they address pension underfunding. Underfunding means that pension assets are lower than liabilities, or those benefits promised to beneficiaries. The underfunding often seems staggering. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, for instance, estimated the gap at more than $700 billion in 2009. The aggregate underfunding reflects the money that states will need to come up with over several decades. But the CRR also estimates that an additional 2 percent of payroll would cover the expected shortfall, making the problem manageable without ruining governments.

Christian Weller

States can take a balanced approach to managing pension underfunding that fits their particular circumstances. Thirty-nine states reduced benefits, increased contributions, or both between 2001 and 2009, according to the Pew Center on the States. The exact combination of benefit and tax changes depends on several factors, including public employees’ Social Security coverage, current benefits and contributions, and states’ human resource needs. States still want to make sure that their benefits allow them to hire the most-effective employees.

Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky:

Indeed, educator pension systems are becoming increasingly expensive and, in many states, are seriously underfunded (see “Teacher Retirement Benefits,” research, Spring 2009). One major source of this problem is the massive increase in benefits from several decades of legislative enhancements. The key to understanding this is the concept of “pension wealth,” the current dollar value of the expected stream of future benefits, in other words, the cash value of a retiree’s annuity. Pension wealth encompasses both the annual pension payment and, importantly, the number of years it is collected.

The two solid curves in Figure 1 show pension wealth for a typical Missouri teacher in 1975 and today. Each curve is calculated under the current salary schedule for teachers in the state capital, so the growth represents only pension rule changes. The bottom curve shows that under 1975 rules a teacher entering at age 25 would have accrued just under $400,000 in pension wealth by age 55. Today, the same teacher would have accrued pension wealth of just under $900,000 by the same age. Not surprisingly, these enhancements have come at a substantial cost: Combined contributions for teachers and districts increased from 16 to 29 percent of salary over this period. However, even this is inadequate; the portion of salary required to pay for pension wealth accruals of current teachers and to pay off the unfunded liability is 31.3 percent.

EN: What steps should states take to address the crisis?

RC & MP: Given concerns about cost and long-term sustainability, a number of states have cut benefits, usually for new teachers, and others are considering doing so. However, in making these changes, policymakers should carefully consider their labor market effects. Some of the proposed cuts reproduce, and even exacerbate, undesirable features of current systems. These shortcomings stem from a fundamental flaw: the failure to tie benefits to contributions. Thus the fix must expose and eliminate the gaps between the two. Below are three recommendations for reforming teacher pensions:

Robert Costrell

1. Report the gaps between contributions and pension wealth. In many respects, current defined benefit (DB) pension plans for teachers are opaque. Teachers rarely know what their plan is worth. By contrast, holders of 403(b) or 401(k) accounts typically know exactly what their account is worth at any point in time. To provide the same transparency for teachers, plans should not only disclose the projected annual pension payment, they should also report pension wealth. For comparison, the plan should disclose the cumulative value of contributions, both the employee’s and the employer’s, along with accumulated returns. In this way, each educator could see how the value of her accrued benefits compares with the value of the contributions. In the typical teacher pension plan, these are going to be very different numbers. Early in a teacher’s career, the value of the contributions will far exceed pension wealth, whereas for more senior teachers, the reverse is true. The dotted line in Figure 1 illustrates this point. It represents the cumulative value of contributions that is fiscally equivalent to the current pension plan, showing that the cumulative value of pension contributions exceeds pension wealth until age 50. However, between ages 50 and 62 pension wealth is typically well in excess of contributions. Not surprisingly, this is when the vast majority of full-career teachers choose to retire.

Michael Podgursky

2. Close the gaps between contributions and pension wealth. To make pensions more equitable and effective tools for staffing schools, we propose that retirement benefits paid to any teacher should be tied to the lifetime contributions made by or for that teacher. If $300,000 has been contributed on behalf of a teacher (including accumulated returns), then the cash value of an annuity provided to this teacher should also be $300,000.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, this fundamental principle is routinely violated in teacher plans. The gap (positive or negative) between the value of benefits and contributions is rarely considered in plan design. Instead, legislatures tinker with complex and arbitrary pension rules, such as the calculation of final average salary (how many years included, what counts as “salary”), the annual service “multiplier,” and the eligibility rules to receive the pension (“rule of 80,” “25-and-out,” etc.). Since these benefit rules are not tied to contributions, legislatures have, over the years, enhanced them, without regard to equity or efficiency, and often without adequate funding. These complex rules also encourage “gaming” by educators and districts in order to increase the gap between benefits and contributions.

Our analysis shows that current systems typically result in very large implicit transfers from young teachers working short spells to “long termers,” who work full careers in the same system (see “Golden Handcuffs,” research, Winter 2010). In our view, a teacher who works 10 years or 30 years should accrue pension wealth roughly equivalent to total pension contributions (with accumulated returns). Thus, in Figure 1, the pension wealth curve would coincide with the contributions curve depicted, for a fiscally equivalent plan, or with a lower curve if costs are to be reduced.

In addition to improving equity, tying benefits to contributions would have important workforce benefits. First, it would provide rational incentives for retirement versus continued work. Each year, an educator would accrue pension wealth in a smooth and transparent way, providing a steady addition to the annual salary she is earning. This would generate neutral incentives to work or retire based on individual preferences and effectiveness. That is not the case with current systems. In our own work, we have shown sharp “peaks and valleys” in pension wealth accrual, which distort incentives for retirement (see “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys,” features, Winter 2008). Some years (e.g., at 25 or 30 years of service) yield increases in pension wealth that are several times the teacher’s salary. This provides a huge incentive to stay on the job until that pension “spike,” regardless of classroom effectiveness. There is no economic rationale for favoring one year of work over another in this way. Nor should an additional year of work reduce pension wealth (net of employee contributions), as is the case in current teacher plans after a certain point, often at relatively young ages. This penalizes good teachers who wish to stay.

Tying benefits to contributions would also eliminate the massive penalties for mobility in current systems. It is well understood in the private sector that in order to recruit and retain talented young employees it is necessary to provide portable retirement benefits. This is accomplished by defined contribution (DC) or cash balance (CB) plans that vest immediately or nearly so. Current teacher plans typically have 5- and even 10-year vesting. Our research finds that even for vested educators, the loss in pension wealth for those who split a teaching career between two traditional plans is massive. In a system where benefits are tied to the cumulative value of contributions, it does not matter whether contributions have all been made in one or many jobs: Penalties for mobility are eliminated.

3. There is more than one way to do it right—and to do it wrong. We favor CB plans. These are a form of defined benefit plans that generate individual retirement accounts in bookkeeping form within the pension fund. They are funded by contributions from employer and employee just like most current teacher plans and carry an investment return guaranteed by the employer. Such plans resemble a DC plan, but without transferring investment risk or asset management to the teacher. They are transparent, offer smooth wealth accrual, and are readily turned into annuities at retirement, like traditional teacher plans. However, no one year of retirement is favored over any other. Large private employers such as IBM have converted to such plans, as have a few public employers. The TIAA guaranteed-return plans that are common in higher education are similar in operation. They have provided retirement security for generations of college professors, who often spread careers over multiple institutions.

By contrast, Illinois is a cautionary example of how not to reform teacher pensions. Illinois recently implemented a two-tiered plan, placing teachers hired after January 1, 2011, in the second tier. Tier 2 teachers make identical contributions (9.4 percent) as their Tier 1 colleagues, but take a drastic cut in pension wealth accrual over their work lives, as shown in Figure 2. The Tier 2 plan retains the same basic structure while raising the retirement age. This exacerbates the back-loading and mobility penalties, and widens the gaps between benefits and contributions. A new teacher entering the Illinois plan at age 25 will accrue no pension wealth, net of employee contributions, until age 51. This is not an attractive offer for young, mobile teachers. Indeed, the Tier 2 package is not actually a net “benefit” for entering teachers, since the teacher contributions are nearly double the cost of the average benefit they accrue; the rest is basically a tax to pay for benefits accrued but not funded, by previous cohorts of teachers.

As states grapple with the current pension crisis, a window of opportunity is open to implement more modern and strategic plans, or to make matters worse. Fundamental reforms are needed to fix these broken systems. Systems should first be required to report the gaps between benefits and contributions for all members. Then, as a matter of equity and efficiency, the plans should be restructured to close these gaps by tying benefits to contributions. This would give young teachers their fair share of the retirement benefit pie and rationalize the retirement incentives for all teachers.

CW: States can take a number of steps to alleviate the pension crisis:

1. Spread the pain of addressing underfunding, if adjustments are unavoidable. Changes to pension plans generally only apply to new hires. State constitutions and courts typically hold already-earned benefits and future not-yet-earned benefits for existing employees and beneficiaries inviolate. This protection is also occasionally applied to employee contributions. Governments cannot reduce benefits and raise contributions for current employees, even if they want to. Hence, adjustments fall disproportionately on new hires.

Private-sector pension benefits also enjoy substantial protections, but to a lesser degree than public-sector benefits. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 protects from reductions benefits that have already been earned, but it does not protect future benefits not yet earned. Private-sector employers can thus lower future benefits when a crisis requires a drastic change.

States should change their public benefit protections to permit adjustments to be distributed across a broader range of employees, if such adjustments become necessary. States could guarantee already-earned benefits but not those not yet earned, as the private sector does. States could also ease older employees’ distress about potential benefit changes by allowing future benefit reductions only for employees under a certain age.

There are several advantages to this approach: Current beneficiaries would remain fully protected, already-earned benefits could not be taken away, and older employees would receive the retirement benefits that they had earned. Arbitrary divisions in younger employees’ compensation arising from whether they were hired before or after the benefit change went into effect would also be eliminated.

2. Prevent underfunding in the future. The current underfunding resulted from massive stock and real-estate market declines. Public pensions were prudently managed before the crisis, as Jeff Wenger and Christian Weller have demonstrated elsewhere.

But many governments did not contribute as much as necessary to their pension funds, making them vulnerable in a crisis. The problems of pensions are more a result of low employer contributions than poor pension management. Governments often avoided paying the full amount of what was necessary to cover benefits earned in a given year. Even in 2011, Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) considers the state’s contributions to its pension plan an optional expense. Governments, as employers, have exacerbated, and continue to exacerbate, their pension plans’ financial challenges.

One solution is to make governments pay the necessary amount to their pension plans. States could set a floor under employer pension contributions. The employer contributions could never fall to zero, commonly known as “taking a contribution holiday,” and employer contributions could never fall below the “floor” rate. DB pensions would receive money more regularly than is currently the case and thus underfunding would become less likely, particularly during a crisis.

If they set a floor for employer pension contributions, states would simultaneously have to change the rules that govern pension funding. Strong financial market performance could easily translate into overfunded pensions, which is desirable, since it means that DB pensions are prepared for a rainy day, such as the recent crisis. But overfunded plans could feed appetites for benefit improvements or contribution cuts, unless the law states that better benefits and lower contributions could only be considered if a DB pension has a minimum buffer for emergencies. Weller and Baker (2005) suggest a buffer of 20 percent of liabilities, which could be even smaller for state DB pension plans, since states cannot go bankrupt.

3. Beware of unintended consequences with alternative benefits. The wrong changes could have serious adverse effects. This would be the case if states also changed their retirement plans from DB pensions to an alternative design, particularly defined contribution (DC) savings accounts such as 403(b) plans, but also a cash balance plan. Cash balance plans look like DC plans to employees but operate like a DB pension for employers. Employers offer a guaranteed rate of return on current and past contributions to a cash balance plan and take the risk of higher contributions if the actual rate of return falls below the promised one.

Alternative benefits are less efficient than DB pensions. First, the average teacher effectiveness will likely decrease, as much higher employee turnover will easily offset any potential effectiveness gains. Second, alternative benefits come with substantial costs.

One unproven assertion about alternative benefits is that they would result in greater teacher effectiveness. Alternative retirement benefits are attractive to their proponents because these benefits would offer more compensation earlier in a teacher’s career and promote turnover later in a teacher’s career relative to a DB pension. Higher compensation earlier would attract to the profession people who could potentially become more-effective teachers, while fewer financial incentives to stay would supposedly lead ineffective teachers to leave earlier than they otherwise would.

The literature on teacher effectiveness and employee turnover associated with benefits shows that average teacher effectiveness will likely decline with alternative benefits. Higher early compensation will offer only a small incentive for promising though untested teachers to enter the profession. And the link between teacher pay and student achievement has been shown to be tentative at best. Since a benefit change would only marginally increase beginning teachers’ compensation, any initial bump in overall instructional effectiveness would be both fleeting and faint, if it exists at all. Any small initial improvement in teacher effectiveness will be quickly offset by higher turnover among more-experienced teachers. Experienced teachers who leave will be replaced by inexperienced teachers, who will need time to build their classroom skills. Small turnover increases can quickly offset small productivity gains to ultimately lower average teacher quality. The literature, in fact, shows that we can expect substantial increases in turnover with a switch to DC and cash balance plans from DB pensions so that higher turnover will eliminate any possible gains from higher initial compensation. We estimate, for instance, that the chance of worsening teacher effectiveness is about 60 percent with a cash balance plan and 70 percent with a DC plan under optimistic assumptions that favor alternative benefit designs based on the existing long-standing literature on pensions and turnover and the much smaller literature on initial compensation and teacher effectiveness.

Teacher turnover can be expected to increase with alternative benefits because employees will understand that their economic security is less well protected with a DC or cash balance plan than with a DB pension. National opinion polls routinely find very strong support for DB pensions, as individuals who do not like risk prefer to have some income guarantees for themselves and their families when they retire, become disabled, or pass away. Fewer income guarantees, or insurance, lead people to leave employment more quickly than they otherwise would. Thus, under these circumstances, teacher turnover would increase and average teacher effectiveness would fall.

Private-sector employers without DB pensions often use other tools to mirror the human resource effects, i.e., long tenure of skilled workers, of DB pensions, exactly because they are worried about turnover. Employers in the field of information technology, especially, offer, for instance, stock options and stock grants to recruit and retain skilled workers for long periods of time. States simply cannot offer these benefits and hence have no way to lower turnover among effective employees.

Alternative benefits also cost more. First, DB pensions would have to operate with a finite investment horizon, increasingly moving money to secure, low-return assets so that lower investment earnings would lend less of a helping hand to pay for benefits. Second, employers may have to cover any underfunding more quickly for closed plans than for ongoing ones, raising employer contributions. Third, higher turnover increases cost due to more recruitment and training of new hires. Fourth, there are substantial transition costs. Older employees will continue to earn DB pensions, they will earn more benefits as they stay longer on the job, and there will be more long-term employees under the DB pension, raising the cost per employee of the DB pension. New employees, in comparison, would be more prevalent in the new plan, earn initially higher benefits than with a DB pension, and thus raise costs relative to a DB pension. These transition costs would last for about four decades and could average 1 percent of payroll for many years, even if the costs of retirement benefits are the same before and after the transition. Fifth, DC plans offer fewer insurance benefits than DB pensions. The insurance exists largely because employees who happen to live through a prolonged period of prosperity share some of their gains with less fortunate employees. Researchers at the National Institute on Retirement Security estimated in 2008 that the loss of insurance features meant that each dollar invested in a DC plan generated 46 percent less in retirement benefits than a dollar invested in a DB pension. Finally, there are higher administrative costs due to a large number of small accounts, especially in DC plans, and increased movement of money between retirement plans.

The two states that have switched from DB pensions to DC plans, West Virginia and Alaska, had severe cases of buyers’ remorse. West Virginia eventually switched back to a DB plan for their teachers in 2008, and Alaska’s policymakers have been investigating the possibility of making a similar reversal.

The lessons from the evidence are clear: States can manage the financial challenges of their pension plans. The proposal to use the current crisis as an opportunity to switch retirement plans, though, will leave states with a much less efficient compensation system. The average effectiveness of teachers will likely drop, and costs will go up substantially. States will be better off managing the financial problems of their DB pensions by putting mechanisms in place that will prevent future underfunding instead of engaging in costly retirement-plan experiments that offer no benefits.

EN: What, then, are the main areas of disagreement?

RC & MP: We disagree on structure. We argue that benefits should be tied to contributions. Professor Weller believes this would have adverse consequences.

Weller assumes a shift to CB or DC would raise annual exits at all ages by a hefty rate, between 22 and 220 percent, according to his recent but as yet unpublished paper on which his efficiency claim is based. Thus, the share of novice teachers in the workforce would rise and average effectiveness would fall. However, the 22 percent estimate is drawn from a 1993 paper by Allen, Clark, and McDermed that compares private-sector workers “covered by a company retirement plan” to those who were not covered by any plan, so there are no implications for CB or DC. The 220 percent assumption is drawn from a 1996 paper by Even and MacPherson that actually shows no difference in quit rates between DB and DC.

Economic theory suggests mixed effects of CB on teacher quit rates, raising them for mid-career teachers who would otherwise hang on for early retirement and lowering them for late-career teachers, otherwise driven out by negative accrual. It might also lower quit rates for young teachers, since they accrue more pension wealth under CB than under current plans. This mixed pattern is supported by Costrell and McGee’s findings, in their 2010 peer-reviewed econometric study of teacher response to pension wealth accrual. Their simulation of a shift to CB, based on their behavioral estimates, found a slight rise in average teacher tenure, not a large fall.

Turning to transition costs, Weller claims that new plans raise costs on old plans by forcing changes in investment strategy or amortization schedules. However, pension plans often introduce new “tiers” without these effects, as new and old funds are commingled. Introducing CB as a new tier would be no different.

Weller’s simulation of transition costs, also from his unpublished paper, makes a different argument. He claims costs will rise for decades because entering cohorts have a different time pattern of pension wealth accrual than previous cohorts. But the time pattern is irrelevant here. Each cohort’s cost is the present value of its lifetime accruals, however they are distributed. Costs cannot rise unless some cohort enjoys higher benefits and, hence, higher lifetime accruals of pension wealth. Yet Weller assumes each cohort accrues the same pension wealth—10.25 percent of the cohort’s lifetime payroll. That is the cohort’s “normal cost,” the contributions required to fund the cohort’s lifetime benefits and accruals. The system’s required contributions are a blend of each cohort’s normal costs, but these are the same, 10.25 percent for each cohort. Thus, the system’s contributions are unchanged, and there are no transition costs.

Costs and contributions would fall if benefits were cut, as Weller recommends. Indeed, they would fall more quickly under his reasonable proposal to cut normal costs of current teachers, as a matter of equity between generations. However, we also favor equity for mobile young teachers, who will continue to receive benefits worth far less than contributions, absent fundamental reform.

CW: The evidence shows that defined benefit pensions work for education. Professors Costrell and Podgursky do not address the fact that both employers and employees prefer defined benefit pensions over other retirement benefits.

The vast majority of states underwent pension reforms in the past decade to address the financial challenges of pension underfunding and none abandoned their defined benefit pensions. And private-sector employers in key growth industries, such as information technology and banking, offer either defined benefit pensions or other forms of deferred compensation, such as stock options, to their employees to mimic the retention benefits of pensions when pensions are absent. A substantial literature both develops the theory and shows the supporting evidence for the efficacy of deferred compensation as a retention and recruitment tool for skilled employees. There is a clear economic rationale for deferred compensation, since it allows employers to recoup the investments made in hiring and training skilled employees, such as teachers.

Teachers equally prefer pensions. Opinion polls routinely show a preference for defined benefit pensions, even among younger employees. And when teachers (and other public employees) have been given a choice between defined benefit pensions and defined contribution plans, the vast majority typically chooses the defined benefit pension plan. The evidence contradicts Professors Costrell and Podgursky’s key assertion that alternative plans that offer more immediate compensation are more attractive to younger teachers.

Finally, transition costs from a defined benefit pension to a cash balance plan would quickly drain public coffers. There would be a growing concentration of more-experienced teachers under the defined benefit pension that favors more-experienced teachers and a high concentration of inexperienced teachers under a cash balance plan that favors inexperienced teachers. A long-standing literature has regularly shown that DB pensions substantially reduce turnover compared to other retirement benefits, suggesting that a benefit switch will increase turnover.

The increase in turnover will raise costs and pose the threat of lower average effectiveness, as my own simulations for a switch from DB pensions to cash balance plans show. The costs are predictable and substantial, while any benefits are highly uncertain and likely nonexistent.

Which is why I can’t understand why the organization continues to be so wrong about one of the most consequential developments in education today: The National Council on Teacher Quality’s review of education schools nationwide.

First there was Chad Adelman (since promoted to the U.S. Department of Education), who complained that NCTQ’s study wasn’t focused enough on outcomes:

Absent some objective outcome measures, NCTQ will only be assessing inputs to teacher quality…. There will be no mechanism to determine if all of the box-checking that NCTQ will be assessing has actually produced effective teachers.

You don’t say! As Chad acknowledges, NCTQ has been at the forefront of the push for states to collect value-added data linking ed schools with their graduates’ results in the classroom. A handful of states are starting to do that. But what about the other 45+ states? Should NCTQ sit on its hands until the data become available? Isn’t Chad’s argument just one for giving the ed schools a pass?

Then, last week, Sarah Rosenberg asked whether “anyone at home” really cares about this “report card.”

NCTQ and its supporters believe that clear standards and transparent evaluation will encourage schools to improve their teacher preparation programs and, in turn, their ratings.  For that theory of change to work, a school’s rating must trigger market response: A school of education that receives a high rating should see more students apply as well as more districts interested in partnering with the school and hiring its graduates.  The extent to which NCTQ’s national ratings matter will depend on whether districts and prospective teachers make decisions based on the ratings. The local nature of teacher labor markets makes it unlikely that this will happen in many parts of the country—will anyone in Weldon, NC really care that their one nearby school of education was rated poorly?

Sarah goes on to acknowledge that the “market response” may work OK in urban areas with multiple ed schools—districts may eschew the lousy ones. But since most suburban and rural districts hire from nearby colleges, this market mechanism won’t mean a thing in much of the country.

Maybe. But NCTQ is after much more than just a market response. The study is often billed as the “Flexner Report” for education—referring to a study of medical schools 100 years ago that led to the shuttering of hundreds of them. Yes, I am sure NCTQ wants the “average” ed school to get better. But more than anything else it wants the abysmal ed schools to go out of business. And that will take action by the states—action that is a whole lot more likely if NCTQ calls them out publicly.

So Education Sector, how about a little less skepticism, and a little more love, for one of the gutsiest projects in education reform history?

-Mike Petrilli

If principals have the authority to dismiss teachers, will they dismiss the less effective ones, or will they instead make perverse decisions by letting the good teachers go? Evidence from low-stakes surveys suggests that principals are able to identify the most and least effective teachers in their schools, as measured by their impact on student achievement (see “When Principals Rate Teachers,” research, Spring 2006). But would that ability influence their dismissal decisions?

On this topic, debate has been vigorous but research almost nil, in good part because teachers with tenure are not easily dismissed and principals take on that task only if they have a strong backbone or face an extremely urgent situation, or both. In some instances, however, principals have considerable latitude when it comes to dismissing teachers who have not been in service long enough to have earned tenure.

One such situation developed in Chicago in July 2004 when the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective-bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary (nontenured) teachers beginning in the 2004–05 school year for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for dismissals in other districts. Since CPS provided information that allowed me to link information on CPS teacher dismissals to several measures of teacher performance, I was able to study whether principals exercise their authority wisely. The procedures were fairly straightforward. By comparing the characteristics of dismissed versus nondismissed probationary teachers within the same school and year, I was able to determine just how much weight school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics, including their performance in the classroom.

I find that principals in Chicago do exercise their authority in  sensible ways. Principals are more likely to dismiss teachers who are frequently absent and who have previously received poor evaluations. They dismiss elementary school teachers who are less effective in raising student achievement. Principals are also less likely to dismiss teachers who attended competitive undergraduate colleges. It is interesting to note that dismissed teachers who were subsequently hired by a different school are much more likely than other first-year teachers in their new school to be dismissed again.

These results suggest that other school districts could possibly improve student achievement if they adopted policies similar to those applied in Chicago. To be clear, however, the analysis presented in this paper does not seek to evaluate the educational impact of this new policy. Instead, it uses the existence of the policy, in conjunction with detailed data on teachers and principals, to provide descriptive evidence on the relationship between the exercise of dismissal authority and teacher effectiveness.

Teacher Dismissals in Chicago

As in many public school districts, teacher layoffs and dismissals in CPS are highly regulated. Prior to 2004, virtually no teachers—not even probationary teachers—were dismissed for cause in CPS. Of course, it is likely that some teachers who switched schools or left CPS entirely were informally “counseled out” by school administrators. But it was impossible to distinguish these “involuntary” separations from truly voluntary attrition.

This situation changed with the signing of a new collective-bargaining agreement in 2004. Each February, principals are able to log into a district computer system that has a list of all of the probationary teachers in their school (i.e., those who have been teaching for fewer than five consecutive years during the period of my analysis). The principal can then check one of two boxes: renew or nonrenew. Although principals are required to provide district officials with at least one reason for the nonrenewal decision, they are not required to justify or explain their decision and they do not need to provide teachers with this reason. If a principal chooses nonrenew, the teacher may reapply to positions in other Chicago public schools. However, nonrenewed teachers are not guaranteed another job in CPS. The ease with which administrators can dismiss a probationary teacher, with a simple “click” of a button, is noteworthy. This policy change made Chicago the only large school district in the country to provide principals with this degree of flexibility over personnel decisions. Already since the conclusion of the analysis period for this study (2005 through 2007), this flexibility has diminished in several ways. For example, the probationary period has been reduced from 4 to 3 years, and principals who choose to nonrenew a teacher now must have conducted at least one formal observation of the teacher prior to nonrenewal.

Data

The data for my study of this policy change come from several sources. Teacher personnel files provide information on teacher background, current assignment, and, for probationary teachers, whether or not they were renewed. I supplement this with information on school demographics, principal characteristics from personnel files, and student test-score information.

I examine dismissal among probationary teachers in CPS in three consecutive school years: 2004–05, 2005–06, and 2006–07. The sample excludes individuals who were employed by the central office, including speech pathologists, nurses, counselors, and teachers working in administrative or professional development capacities. Moreover, I exclude teachers in a handful of “alternative” schools that serve severely disabled students or other special populations, as well as teachers on leave or who were employed less than half time. For a small number of teachers who taught subjects such as art or music in multiple schools, I include only the observation in the school that is listed as their “primary” appointment. The final sample consists of 16,246 elementary school teachers and 7,764 high school teachers spread across 588 schools.

Measures of Teacher Quality

This analysis incorporates three proxies for teacher performance. First, I use teacher absences because they are well measured, are easy to interpret, and impose substantial nonfinancial and financial costs on the school. The second measure is the formal performance rating that the principal gave the teacher in prior years. Traditionally, principals rate teachers every one to three years (depending on the tenure status of the teacher) on a four-point scale that indicates superior, excellent, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory performance. While there are no high stakes associated with these ratings (virtually no teachers receive an unsatisfactory rating), there is considerable variation across teachers in the top rating categories, and they arguably provide a sense of how the principal views the teacher. The third measure is a value-added estimate of teacher effectiveness. This measure is meant to capture the extent to which each teacher contributes to student achievement growth from one year to the next, as measured by the standardized tests taken by students in CPS. While this is an objective and direct measure of one important dimension of teacher effectiveness, only a fraction of teachers work in grades and subjects in which students take standardized tests. It is not possible to calculate value-added measures for many teachers in our sample, including teachers in grade 2 or below, most teachers in grades 10 or above, and any teacher in a noncore subject. Unlike some school districts, Chicago traditionally has not maintained reliable data linking teachers to classrooms, particularly at the elementary level. Working with CPS officials, however, I was able to obtain such links for a limited sample of teachers and years, thus allowing me to create value-added measures for part of my sample.

Methods

The primary goal of my analysis is to determine which teacher, principal, and school characteristics are associated with the likelihood that a teacher will be dismissed. I first compare the probability that a teacher is dismissed across schools and years in order to discern any differences related to school characteristics. Then to examine the influence of teacher characteristics on the likelihood of dismissal, I compare teachers within the same year and school to account for unobserved school-level factors that might be correlated with teacher characteristics and the probability of dismissal.

A concern with this approach is that if the analysis fails to include a teacher characteristic that a) principals consider in the dismissal decision and b) is correlated with one of the included variables, the estimate for the included characteristic may be biased. One potentially important variant of this concern involves the supply of teachers. If it is more difficult to find qualified teachers in certain subjects or grade levels, then the principal may be less likely to dismiss teachers in these areas. To the extent that teachers in harder-to-staff areas are concentrated among particular demographic groups, or tend to graduate from particular institutions, the results for these teacher characteristics could be misleading. Also, schools fund teachers from a variety of revenue streams, and it may be difficult for principals to reallocate positions across funds. For this reason, if a school experiences a decline in a particular revenue fund, the principal may be more inclined to dismiss teachers funded by this source.

To address these concerns, I account in all analyses for the teacher’s program area (for example, regular education grades 1 to 3, regular education grades 4 to 8, secondary math, secondary science, bilingual education, vocational education, etc.) and for the revenue source from which each teacher position is funded.

Of course, it is still possible that my results concerning specific teacher characteristics suffer from a standard omitted variable bias. For example, it may be the case that high rates of absenteeism are associated with a bad attitude or shirking in other dimensions, and it is these factors, rather than the absences per se, that the principal is reacting to in dismissing teachers with more absences. In this case, one may not be able to say anything definitive about principal views regarding teacher absenteeism itself, but rather about behaviors and characteristics associated with absenteeism, all of which presumably speak to performance in some form or another.

Dismissal Policy Impact

Each year under the new policy, roughly 11 percent of probationary teachers were dismissed, despite the fact that more than one-third of schools did not dismiss any teachers. The numbers of teachers who were nonrenewed in any given year likely overstates the impact of the policy because a number of young teachers would likely have left CPS in the absence of the policy, either voluntarily or due to subtle “encouragement” on the part of the principals. If the dismissal policy merely formalized previously informal dismissals, however, then one would not necessarily expect to find a substantial change in separations.

Comparing dismissal rates before and after implementation of the new policy provides insight on this issue. In the three years prior to the introduction of the policy, roughly 10 to 15 percent of first-year probationary teachers left CPS and an additional 4 percent moved to a different CPS school. In the years after the policy was in place, the corresponding rates were roughly 18 and 10 percent, respectively. Comparing the year immediately prior to establishment of the policy (2004) with the first two years of the policy’s implementation (2005 and 2006), it appears that the separation rate increased by roughly 9 percentage points (see Figure 1). In contrast, there was virtually no change among more-experienced teachers (i.e., those with 6 to 15 years of experience), who were not subject to the policy. The dismissal policy therefore appears to have had at least a modest impact on the number of teacher separations, although the impact is not as large as the overall nonrenewal numbers would suggest.

It is worth noting that more than half of the dismissed teachers were rehired the following year by another school in the district. For example, 50.6 percent and 56.4 percent of first-year probationary elementary and high school teachers, respectively, who were dismissed in spring 2005 were rehired by a CPS school in the fall. At least some of the dismissals under the policy were the result of position cuts, in which case the teacher’s former principal may have provided the teacher with a good recommendation; it is therefore not surprising that some fraction of dismissed teachers were rehired. It is also likely that some fraction of teachers dismissed due to poor performance were also rehired by other CPS schools.

Which school and principal characteristics are related to dismissal? In both elementary and secondary schools, principals in the district’s larger schools dismissed a smaller fraction of probationary teachers. In elementary schools, higher student achievement at the school is associated with a smaller fraction of probationary teachers being dismissed. Among high schools, however, schools with higher-achieving students dismissed a larger fraction of their probationary teachers. Principals who attended more competitive colleges and principals who were older dismissed a smaller proportion of teachers in both elementary and high schools. Male high-school principals dismissed a significantly smaller percentage of their teachers, while principal gender did not play as important a role at the elementary level. Finally, principals new to the building dismissed a substantially larger fraction of teachers in elementary schools, but not in high schools.

Teacher Characteristics

Turning to the characteristics of individual teachers, I find that prior-year principal evaluations and current-year teacher absences both influence the likelihood of dismissal (see Figure 2). Teachers who were rated satisfactory in the prior academic year were 22.1 percentage points more likely to be nonrenewed than teachers in the same school who were rated superior. Teachers rated excellent were 4.3 percentage points more likely to be dismissed than those rated superior. Given an average dismissal rate of roughly 11 percent, these results suggest that teacher performance as reflected in prior evaluations is strongly associated with dismissal. Teachers who were absent 11 to 20 times between September and March of the current year were also 11.3 percentage points more likely to be nonrenewed than their colleagues who were never absent. Teachers absent 6 to 10 days were 3.5 percentage points more likely to be dismissed.

The results also indicate that principals value teachers with stronger educational backgrounds as measured by college quality. For example, a teacher who attended a highly competitive college (with a Barron’s ranking of four) is nearly 3 percentage points (roughly 15 percent) less likely to be dismissed than a teacher who attended a least-competitive (unrated) college. On the other hand, on average, principals do not seem to value certification exam performance or advanced degrees, at least after taking into account the other available measures of teacher performance.

Interestingly, probationary teachers who were dismissed from another school in the prior year, and rehired by the current school, are substantially more likely to be dismissed a second time. For example, elementary school teachers who were dismissed from another school in the prior year were 4.9 percentage points (about 45 percent) more likely to be let go relative to first-year teachers in the school. In high school, previously dismissed teachers were 13.4 percentage points (more than 130 percent) more likely to be dismissed than first-year teachers. These results suggest that many of the initial nonrenewal decisions were not idiosyncratic, stemming from a particularly bad match, or based on temporary difficulties experienced by the teacher. Rather, they suggest that, at least in many cases, the initial nonrenewal decision reflected a concern with the teacher’s general productivity.

These results provide evidence that principals consider some measures of teacher performance and qualifications in making their dismissal decisions. To the extent that one views student achievement as the primary outcome of interest, however, one should directly assess how a teacher’s ability to improve student achievement influences the likelihood of dismissal. I provide some evidence on this issue by focusing on the relationship between teacher value-added and dismissal for the subsample of 803 elementary school and 1,134 high school teachers for which value-added measures are available.

For elementary schools, a one-standard-deviation increase in teacher value-added is associated with a 7.1-percentage-point (over 100 percent) decrease in the likelihood of dismissal (see Figure 3). In contrast, I find that teacher value-added has zero association with dismissal among the sample of 9th-grade core-subject teachers in high schools. One possible reason for the difference across grade levels is that the assessment used for the 9th-grade value-added measure is the PLAN test, which is given in the fall of a student’s 10th-grade year. PLAN is developed by ACT and is not tightly linked to any particular curriculum. Hence, because of both the timing of the exam and its content, the 9th-grade value-added measures may not capture teacher effectiveness as well as the elementary value-added measures.

Do Principals Discriminate?

One potential concern about policies like Chicago’s that provide principals with greater discretion in personnel decisions is that principals would dismiss teachers capriciously or on the basis of criteria unrelated to performance. Indeed, I find that several teacher demographics, including age, gender, and race, are associated with the likelihood of dismissal, even after controlling for the measures of teacher performance and qualifications described above. Principals are 3.8 percentage points more likely to dismiss male teachers than female teachers, an effect of more than 25 percent given the baseline dismissal rate of 10 to 12 percent. Principals are considerably more likely to dismiss older teachers. For example, teachers 36 to 50 years of age are 4 percentage points (33 percent) more likely to be dismissed than teachers age 22 to 28. The relatively small number of probationary teachers over age 50 is 10 percentage points (nearly 100 percent) more likely to face dismissal than their youngest counterparts. And black teachers are 2.1 percentage points less likely to be dismissed than their colleagues.

While these results raise some concerns, it would be incorrect to conclude on the basis of this evidence alone that principals in Chicago were acting in a discriminatory manner. The analysis reported here cannot control for many direct measures of teacher qualities that principals could legitimately consider in making a dismissal decision (e.g., energy, enthusiasm, ability to relate to children, familiarity with the best instructional practices). Moreover, the sample selection introduced by nonrandom hiring may lead to biased estimates of the relationship between dismissal and any easily observable, predetermined teacher characteristic such as age or gender. If, for example, male teachers were less productive on average than female teachers (or even if the principal believed this to be the case), then the marginal male teacher who was hired must be more attractive on some other, likely unobservable, dimension relative to the marginal female teacher hired.

In order to shed light on the issue of principal discrimination, I examine whether principals are more likely to dismiss teachers of a different gender, age, or race from their own. Although principals are no more likely to dismiss a teacher of the opposite gender, they are somewhat more likely to dismiss teachers of a different race. While these patterns could indicate discrimination, it is possible that they are explained by other factors. Given the widespread belief that same-race role models are crucial for low-income students, it would not be surprising if principals took into account the composition of their student body when making dismissal decisions. Indeed, insofar as prior research has demonstrated that, all else equal, students learn more when taught by a teacher of the same race, this might be a legitimate determination on the part of the principal. My results provide support for this hypothesis. I find that as the fraction of students in the school that share the race of the teacher rises, the likelihood that the teacher will be dismissed declines. Specifically, an increase of 50 percentage points in the fraction of students who share the teacher’s race decreases the likelihood that the teacher will be dismissed by slightly more than 1 percentage point, or 10 percent. More importantly, the evidence that principals are more likely to dismiss a teacher of a different race becomes statistically insignificant after controlling for this variable.

Finally, I find evidence that younger principals are more likely to dismiss older teachers than they are to dismiss younger teachers. There are no obvious explanations for this pattern, although one might speculate that younger principals may value different characteristics in a teacher than older principals. Regardless, this pattern does seem to warrant further exploration.

Conclusions

By comparing the characteristics of dismissed versus nondismissed probationary teachers within the same school and year, the analysis presented above provides a unique source of evidence on which teacher characteristics principals value most highly. I find that principals do consider teacher performance in determining which teachers to dismiss. Principals are significantly more likely to dismiss teachers who are frequently absent and who have received unsatisfactory evaluations in the past. Perhaps most telling, elementary school teachers who were dismissed had significantly lower impacts on student achievement in prior years than their peers who were not dismissed.

These results suggest that reforms along the lines of the Chicago policy could improve student achievement by providing principals with the tools to manage the quality of personnel in their classrooms. It should be noted, however, that many principals—including those in some of the worst-performing schools in the district—did not dismiss any teachers despite the new policy. The apparent reluctance of some Chicago principals to utilize the additional flexibility granted under the new contract may indicate that issues such as teacher supply and/or social norms governing employment relations are more important factors than policymakers have realized.

Brian Jacob is professor of education policy and economics at the University of Michigan. This article is based on a study that is forthcoming in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Calls to reform teacher layoff policies have begun to appear with regularity in newspaper editorials, policy briefs, and statehouses—and for good reason. A growing body of research confirms that teacher quality is the most influential in-school factor driv­ing student achievement. That being the case, teacher dismissal policies and procedures can have profound implications for how much students learn.

Newly available data on “reduction-in-force” (RIF) notices received by teachers in Washington State shed light on the consequences of existing layoff policies for student achievement as well as the consequences of adopting alternatives. Our analysis of these data provides strong evidence that seniority plays an out­sized role in determining which teachers are targeted for layoffs, likely in part because collective bargaining agreements ordinarily require that the teachers last hired are the first to be fired. Those in subject areas with teacher shortages, such as mathematics and sci­ence, are less likely than other teachers to receive a lay­off notice, suggesting that districts have some degree of flexibility in their dismissal procedures. However, were districts to adopt policies that allowed admin­istrators to dismiss teachers according to their effec­tiveness rather than their seniority, they could lay off fewer teachers, achieve the same budgetary savings, and increase the overall efficacy of their teaching force.

Seniority-Based Layoff Policies

In the overwhelming majority of school-district collective bargaining agreements, “last in, first out” provisions make seniority the determining factor in which teachers are laid off. All of the 75 largest school districts in the nation use seniority as a factor in layoff decisions, and seniority is the sole factor determining the order of layoffs in more than 70 percent of these districts.

The situation in Washington State—the focus of this study—looks similar. A review of the collective bargaining agreements operating in Washington’s 10 largest school districts shows that all use seniority as a basis for determining layoffs, and 8 of these districts use seniority as the only determinant of which teachers get laid off.

There are notable examples of districts that do not rely solely on seniority. In 2004, the Chi­cago Public Schools changed its policies to allow principals’ evaluations of untenured teachers to influence layoff decisions (see “Principled Principals” research). And the Los Angeles Unified School District recently agreed to limit the use of seniority in layoff determinations as part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Over the past two years, more than a dozen states have sought to change laws that make seniority the determining factor in layoff decisions; so far, Florida, Idaho, Utah, and Ohio have succeeded.

Driving these changes is a belief that seniority-based layoff policies may have negative consequences for student achieve­ment. First, to achieve a targeted budget reduction, school districts need to lay off a greater number of junior teachers than senior teachers (as junior teachers have lower salaries), meaning that a seniority-based layoff policy will cause class sizes to rise more than they would under an alternate arrange­ment. Second, the most-senior teachers may not be the most effective teachers. With a seniority-based layoff policy, school systems may be forced to cut some of their most promising new talent rather than dismiss more-senior teachers, who may not be terribly effective in raising student achievement. A final way in which seniority-based systems may have consequences for student achievement is that strict adherence to seniority would require at least some districts to lay off teachers in subject areas with teacher shortages, such as math and special education.

Beyond the effects of seniority-based layoffs on the teacher workforce as a whole are potential distributional conse­quences. In many districts, schools with high proportions of at-risk students tend to employ the most first- and second-year teachers. Under a seniority-based layoff policy, these schools stand to lose the largest share of their teachers.

Data

This study relies on a unique dataset from Washington State that links teachers to their schools and, in some cases, to their students; the dataset also includes information on those teachers who received RIF notices in the 2008–09 and 2009–10 school years. In the 2008–09 school year, 2,144 employees received a layoff notice and in 2009–10, some 450 employees received a notice.

Employees who received these notices can be linked with administrative records of their credentials, school assignments, academic degrees, and compensation. The administrative database we used provides a record of employees working in Washington State’s school districts and includes information such as their places of employ­ment, experience and degree, gender and race, and annual compensation levels.

We restrict our analysis to employees who were in a teach­ing position the year they received a layoff notice. Our final sample includes 1,717 teachers who received a layoff notice in 2008–09 and 407 teachers who received one in 2009–10, with 130 teachers who received a layoff notice in both school years. Overall, about 2 percent of teachers in the state received a layoff notice in either year. It is important to stress that not all these teachers were ultimately laid off, largely due to the influx of federal stimulus money. Of the 1,717 teach­ers who received a RIF notice in 2008-09, for example, 1,457 returned to the same district in 2009-10. We still focus on all RIF notices because they indicate the teachers who were targeted for layoffs, and thus tell us about the likely effects of the system that governs layoffs.

The database does not include a direct measure of a teach­er’s seniority in the current district, so we estimate seniority based on how many years the teacher has been employed by the same district. The credentials data include where each teacher was trained and in what areas each teacher holds endorsements. We create a measure of the selectivity of each teacher’s college and code each endorsement a teacher holds in any of 10 subject areas.

Information about the schools in which teachers are employed comes from two sources. Washington State Report Card data provide measures of racial composition, student-teacher ratios, the percentages of students enrolled in the free or reduced-price meals program, total enrollment, and the percentage of students who passed the reading and math Washington Assessment of Student Learning exams in each teacher’s school. We use the Common Core of Data to iden­tify teachers in urban areas, the grade level of each teacher’s school, and the per-pupil expenditure on instruction by each teacher’s district.

We can also link a subset of teachers to their students’ test-score performance, which allows us to use value-added models to estimate their teaching effectiveness. Our data on student achievement come from the Washington State Assessment of Student Learning, a statewide test given annually in 3rd through 8th grade as well as in 10th grade. The student database also includes information on race and ethnicity, free or reduced-price meal eligibility, and status in the following programs: Learning Assistance Program reading/math, Title I reading/math, Title I Migrant, Gifted/Highly Capable, State Transitional Bilingual Program, and Special Education.

Methods

We first examine the simple associations between the various teacher and school characteristics listed above and the likelihood of receiving a layoff notice. In order to provide a more detailed picture of the factors that are associated with teacher layoff notices, we then examine the effects of each of these various factors on the prob­ability that a teacher received a layoff notice, while con­trolling for the others. Of course, these relationships are correlations only and in theory may not represent causal relationships. However, we are confident that, despite the nonexperimental nature of this study, its findings none­theless provide an accurate picture of the causal impact of, for instance, a teacher’s credential on the likelihood of receiving a layoff notice.

The teacher characteristics that we examine include senior­ity in district, degree level (master’s or higher vs. bachelor’s), gender, race, college selectivity, and endorsement area. The school characteristics include whether it is in an urban area, grade level (e.g., high school), the number of students enrolled, student-teacher ratio, the percentage of students who are eli­gible for the free or reduced-price lunch program, the percent­age of minority students, and measures of student achievement in reading and math. In addition, we control for district-level characteristics, including total enrollment, per-pupil expendi­tures, and percentage of funding that comes from local, state, and federal sources.

These analyses identify the teacher, school, and district characteristics that are associated with layoff notices, but perhaps of greater interest is the relative effectiveness of teachers who receive layoff notices. For the subset of teach­ers who can be linked to students, we are able to estimate value-added measures of classroom performance for each teacher in each year. These indicate how well a teacher’s students did relative to other teachers’ students, controlling for prior student achievement and for student and fam­ily background characteristics (for example, age, race and ethnicity, disability, free or reduced-price lunch status, and parental education level).

Who Gets RIFed?

Not surprisingly, we find that most of the teachers receiving layoff notices are relatively junior. Approximately 60 percent of teachers receiving layoff notices have two or fewer years of experience, and approximately 80 percent have two or fewer years of seniority within their current district. It is interesting to note, however, that some teachers who receive layoff notices are well into their careers, implying that at least some districts in the state are making judgments about which teachers should be laid off based on criteria other than seniority.

Teachers who received layoff notices are also far less likely to hold an advanced degree. Consequently, there is an aver­age difference of about $15,000 in salary between teachers who did and did not receive notices. Had all 1,717 teachers who received layoff notices in 2008–09 actually been laid off, the salary savings in the state would have been $5,521,238. As noted earlier, one of the prevail­ing critiques of seniority-based layoffs is that it is necessary to lay off more teachers in order to attain a specified budget objective than it would be if districts used alternative criteria. If teach­ers were laid off at random (so that the laid-off teachers made the average salary in their dis­trict), we estimate that it would only be neces­sary to lay off 1,349 teachers in order to attain the same budgetary savings. This is roughly 20 percent less than the actual number of teachers who received layoff notices.

According to the 2006 report “Educator Supply and Demand in Washington State,” there are 14 endorsement areas for which there are “high degrees of shortage,” all of which fall into math, science, or special education. We classify any teacher with an endorsement in one of these areas accordingly. There is some evidence to suggest that school districts are choosing to retain teachers in subject areas with teacher shortages, with 13.3 per­cent of teachers that received layoff notices falling into such a category compared to 15.1 percent of teachers who did not receive a notice.

Teachers receiving a notice tended to be in smaller schools, but were not, in general, more likely to be teaching in schools with high proportions of minority students or lower test-score levels. However, school-level measures can mask a significant degree of teacher sorting across classrooms within schools. For the subset of teachers who can be linked to their students, we find that teachers who received a layoff notice are more likely to be teaching poor, non-white, and lower-scoring students than other teachers.

We next examine our value-added measures of teacher effectiveness and find that teachers who received layoff notices were about 5 percent of a standard deviation less effective on average than the average teacher who did not receive a notice. This result is not surprising given that teach­ers who received layoff notices included many first- and second-year teachers, and numerous studies show that, on average, effectiveness improves substantially over a teacher’s first few years of teaching.

Explaining RIFs

Our analysis of multiple factors indicates that, as expected, seniority plays an important role in determining whether teachers receive a layoff notice. We find additional evi­dence that districts are choosing to retain teachers thought to have advanced or atypical skills. On average, teachers with a master’s degree or an endorsement in a subject area with teacher shortages are about 0.6 percentage points less likely to receive a RIF notice. Conversely, teachers with endorsements in health, physical education, or the arts are far more likely to receive a layoff notice. Finally, we find evidence that school districts behave strategically by retaining teachers who have endorsements in multiple areas and therefore provide flexibility in terms of the classes they can teach. Perhaps surprisingly, controlling for district and school characteristics does not noticeably change the results reported above, and few of the school-level vari­ables identifying student demographics are predictors of which teachers receive layoff notices.

Finally, we ran our analysis including value-added measures of teacher effective­ness for the subset of teachers we are able to link to individual students. It is first worth noting that the inclusion of the teacher effec­tiveness measures does little to change the estimated effects of the teacher, school, and district characteristics discussed above. More importantly, the effects of the value-added measures (based on both math and read­ing scores) are close to zero, suggesting that effectiveness plays little or no role in deter­mining which teachers are targeted for lay­offs. And, these results were robust to a vari­ety of different ways of measuring teacher value added. In other words, the fact that teachers who received layoff notices were, on average, somewhat less effective than their peers is an artifact of the relationship between effectiveness and seniority.

Policy Implications

Our findings largely comport with what one would expect given seniority provisions in collective bargaining agree­ments. The surprise is that factors other than seniority do appear to influence which teachers are targeted for layoffs.

To get a more concrete sense of the extent to which various factors play into the targeting of teachers for layoffs, we ran simulations based on the effects calculated by our statistical model. First, we calculate the expected probability of a teacher with each combination of endorsement area and seniority level receiving a layoff notice. Although a teacher’s endorse­ment area does affect the likelihood of being laid off, the effect is far smaller than the influence of seniority. For instance, we estimate the probability that a first-year special education teacher receives a layoff notice is 6.2 percent, compared to 17 percent for a first-year health/physical education teacher. This difference is statistically significant, but it pales in com­parison to the difference in probability for a first-year teacher compared to a teacher with 12 or more years of seniority: The estimated probability of a teacher with 12 or more years of seniority receiving a layoff notice is less than one-quarter of 1 percent for every endorsement area (see Figure 1).

Next we examine the implications of employing an effec­tiveness-based layoff policy rather than the seniority-driven system currently in place. First, we calculate a value-added measure of effectiveness that com­bines data from all available years and both sub­jects (averaging math and reading). Teachers in each school district are then ranked accord­ing to this value-added score. Finally, starting with the least effective teachers in each district and moving up the effectiveness ladder, enough teachers are assigned to a hypothetical layoff pool to achieve a budgetary savings for each district that is at least as great as the budgetary savings each district would have seen had all the teachers who received a layoff notice in 2008–09 actually been laid off.

The overlap between the subgroup of teach­ers who received a layoff notice and the sub­group of teachers who received one in our simu­lation is relatively small—only 23 teachers (or 16 percent of the teachers for whom we could estimate value-added who received a layoff notice). Moreover, because the teachers who received layoff notices in our simulation were more senior (and had higher salaries) than the teachers who actually received layoff notices, the simulation results in far fewer layoffs. We calcu­late that districts would only have to lay off 132 teachers under an effectiveness-based system in order to achieve the same budgetary savings they would achieve with 145 layoff notices under today’s seniority-driven system, a difference of about 10 percent.

As expected, there are large differences in classroom effec­tiveness between teachers who actually received layoff notices and those who would have received them in our effectiveness-based simulation. The two groups differ by about 20 percent of a standard deviation in students’ math and reading achieve­ment (see Figure 2). The magnitude of the difference is strik­ing, roughly equivalent to having a teacher who is at the 16th percentile of effectiveness rather than at the 50th percentile. This difference corresponds to roughly 2.5 to 3.5 months of student learning.

Since there is little overlap between the samples under these different scenarios, we investigate the likelihood that different types of students might be disproportion­ally affected by one type of layoff system. For the subset of teachers who can be linked to student-level data, we consider the characteristics of the students whose teachers received a layoff notice under the actual system and in our simulation. We find that the probability that students in a particular subgroup have a teacher who received a layoff notice varies considerably from one subgroup to the next. In particular, black students are far more likely than other students to have been in a classroom of a teacher who received a layoff notice. The effectiveness-based layoffs result in fewer layoff notices and are much more equita­bly distributed across student subgroups; black students in particular are only marginally more likely to have been in a classroom with a teacher who received a layoff notice under this system.

Districts across the country are rethinking layoff strate­gies. This is sensible, because although the simplicity and transparency of a seniority-based system certainly has advantages, it is hard to argue that it is in the best interest of students. The effectiveness-based system in our simulation would result in a very different group of teachers targeted for layoffs than does the current system and in layoffs that affect different segments of the student population. Most importantly, the differences in the effectiveness of teach­ers laid off under each type of system have implications for student achievement.

Dan Goldhaber is director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington Bothell and a co-editor of Education Finance and Policy. Roddy Theobald is a researcher at the Center for Education Data and Research and doctoral student in statistics at the University of Washington.

The working paper on which this article is based is available here.

So, if we believe these OECD numbers (which the WSJ apparently did in this blog post), U.S. teachers work 15.3% more hours per year than do their colleagues in other developed countries.

But if you believe the OECD comparison I have a lovely bridge to sell to you.  According to the report’s methodological appendix, the method by which the U.S. information was collected was different (and clearly less reliable)  than how it was collected from all of the other countries.  In every country except the U.S. the hours worked was derived from teacher contracts or laws.  But in the U.S. the information was drawn from self-reported responses to a survey of teachers.  (See p. 75 of the appendix).

A valid comparison would require that the information be collected in similar ways across all countries — either we rely upon self-reports in surveys of teachers for all countries or we rely on contractual hours for everyone.  But using self-reports for the U.S. and contractual hours for everyone else produces obvious distortions.  People may be inclined to exaggerate the hours they work in a survey.  And the definition of time worked is ambiguous.  If I think about my students while I am brushing my teeth or running on the treadmill am I working during that time?

We have good reason to suspect that the self-reports from U.S. teachers are over-stated.  If teachers really worked 1,913 hours over 180 days, as the report claims, they would be working 10.63 hours per day.  And the numbers I’ve provided are just for primary school students.  For high schools, the OECD report claims U.S. teachers are working 1,998 hours over 180 days, which works out to 11.1 hours per day.  I know some teachers are very conscientious and work long hours but I simply do not believe that the average high school teacher is working 11.1 hours per day.

I know this might invite the wrath of Diane Ravitch’s Army of Angry Teachers, but I suspect that the average hours worked by U.S. teachers is significantly less than the OECD says (and the WSJ repeats).  And I know that the comparison between U.S. and other countries is flawed by collecting the information from self-reports in the U.S. but from contracts everywhere else.

-Jay P. Greene

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

In recent years, a consensus has emerged among researchers that teacher quality matters enormously for student performance. Students taught by more-effective teachers learn substantially more over the course of the year than students taught by less-effective teachers. Yet little is known about what makes for a more-effective teacher.

Most research on teacher effectiveness has focused on teacher attributes, finding that readily measurable characteristics such as experience, certification, and graduate degrees generally have little impact on student achievement. Relatively few rigorous studies look inside the classroom to see what kinds of teaching styles are the most effective. We tackle this underexplored area by investigating the relative effects of two teacher practices—lecture-style presentations and in-class problem solving—on the achievement of middle-school students in math and science.

Ever since John Dewey explored hands-on learning at the University of Chicago Laboratory School more than a century ago, lecture-style presentations have been criticized as old-fashioned and ineffective. It is said, for example, that lectures presume that all students learn at the same pace and fail to provide instructors with feedback about which aspects of a lesson students have mastered. Students’ attention may wander during lectures, and they may more easily forget information they encountered in this passive manner. Lectures also emphasize learning by listening, which may disadvantage students who favor other learning styles.

Alternative instructional practices based on active and problem-oriented learning presumably do not suffer from these disadvantages. But they may have their own shortcomings. Learning by problem-solving may be less efficient, as discovery and problem-solving often take more time than mastering information received from an authority figure. And incorrect or misleading information may be conveyed in conversations among students in middle schools.

Nonetheless, a number of small-scale studies have identified positive impacts of interactive teaching styles on student learning. As a consequence, prominent organizations such as the National Research Council and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, since at least 1980, have called for teachers to engage students in constructing their own new knowledge through more hands-on learning and group work. By the mid-1990s, in a study for the National Institute for Science Education, Iris Weiss could identify “some encouraging signs. The majority of elementary, middle, and high school science and mathematics classes worked in small groups at least once a week, and roughly one in four classes did so every day. Moreover, the use of hands-on activities had increased since the mid-1980s.” Even so, more than a decade later, traditional lecture and textbook methodologies continue to be a significant component of science and mathematics instruction in U.S. middle schools. A rigorous, large-scale study has yet to resolve a question that has divided pedagogical thinking for generations.

In our study, we examine whether student achievement in the United States is affected by the share of teaching time devoted to lecture-style presentations as distinct from problem-solving activities. Employing information on in-class time use provided by a nationally representative sample of U.S. teachers in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), we estimate the impact of teaching practices on student achievement by looking at the differential effects on the same student of two different teachers, using two different teaching strategies. We find that teaching style matters for student achievement, but in the opposite direction than anticipated by conventional wisdom: an emphasis on lecture-style presentations (rather than problem-solving activities) is associated with an increase—not a decrease—in student achievement. This result implies that a shift to problem-solving instruction is more likely to adversely affect student learning than to improve it.

Data and Methodology

Our research draws on data from the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The TIMSS data comprise information on students in two grades in a number of countries, but we utilize only information on 8th-grade students in the United States. Our sample includes 6,310 students in 205 schools with 639 teachers (303 math teachers and 355 science teachers, of which 19 teach both subjects). In addition to test scores in math and science, the TIMSS data include background information on students’ home and family life as well as data on teacher characteristics, qualifications, and classroom practices. School principals provide information on school characteristics.

Most important for our purpose, teachers were asked what proportion of time in a typical week students spent on each of eight in-class activities. The overall time in class apportioned to three of these activities—listening to lecture-style presentation, working on problems with the teacher’s guidance, and working on problems without guidance—likely provides a good proxy for the time in class in which students are taught new material. We divided the amount of time spent listening to lecture-style presentations by the total amount of time spent on each of these three activities to generate a single measure of how much time the teacher devoted to lecturing relative to how much time was devoted to problem-solving activities.

A change in our measure of teaching style can be interpreted as a shift from spending time on one practice to spending time on the other, holding constant the total time spent on both practices. For example, an increase of 0.1 indicates that 10 percentage points of total time devoted to teaching new material are shifted from teaching based on problem solving to giving lecture-style presentations. We combined the other teaching activities (besides lecturing and problem solving) into a separate measure of the share of total teaching time devoted to other activities and control for this measure throughout our analysis. We also control for the total number of minutes per week that the teacher reported teaching the math or science class, as more total instructional time could have an independent effect on student learning.

Although it is difficult to determine from the TIMSS data exactly how much time is spent on lecturing as distinct from problem-solving activities, it appears that teachers generally follow the advice given by progressive educators. On average, they allocate twice as much time to problem-solving activities as to direct instruction. Specifically, teachers devote about 40 percent of class time to problem-solving activities (with or without teacher guidance); during roughly 20 percent of class time, students listen to the initial presentation of material to be learned. The remainder of the class time is allocated to such tasks as class management, reviewing homework, re-teaching the material, and clarifying content (see Figure 1).

Teachers who spent more time lecturing were more likely to be male and under age 50. Interestingly, they were also less likely to have the maximum number of years of teacher training registered by the background survey or to have taken pedagogical or content knowledge classes in the prior two years (see Figure 2).

A key challenge in studying the effects of teaching practices is that teachers may adjust their methods in response to the ability or behavior of their students. If teachers tend to rely more on lectures when assigned more capable or attentive students, this would generate a positive relationship between the amount of time spent lecturing and student achievement, even in the absence of a true causal effect. Similarly, there could be unobserved differences between students whose teachers rely more and less heavily on lecturing if, for example, teachers in schools serving low-income students adopt different practices than teachers in other types of schools.

To address these concerns, we exploit the fact that the TIMSS study tested each student in both mathematics and science. This allows us to compare the math and science test scores of individual students whose teacher in one subject tended to emphasize a different teaching style than their teacher in the other subject. In other words, we ask, if a given student’s math teacher spent more (or less) time lecturing than his or her science teacher, does the student perform better or worse on the math test than on the science test?

Results

Contrary to contemporary pedagogical thinking, we find that students score higher on standardized tests in the subject in which their teachers spent more time on lecture-style presentations than in the subject in which the teacher devoted more time to problem-solving activities. For both math and science, a shift of 10 percentage points of time from problem solving to lecture-style presentations (e.g., increasing the share of time spent lecturing from 20 to 30 percent) is associated with an increase in student test scores of 1 percent of a standard deviation. Another way to state the same finding is that students learn less in the classes in which their teachers spend more time on in-class problem solving.

Importantly, the strength of the relationship increases when we restrict our analysis to the roughly one-third of students in the TIMSS sample who had the exact same peers in both their math and science classes. Among this group of students, a shift of 10 percentage points of time from problem solving to lecturing is associated with an increase in test scores of almost 4 percent of a standard deviation—or between one and two months’ worth of learning in a typical school year (see Figure 3). This pattern increases our confidence that the overall result does not reflect differences in the peer composition of students’ math or science classes. In fact, it suggests that peer effects may actually be leading us to understate the strength of the relationship between lecturing and student learning.

Do certain types of students benefit more from lectures than others? We find suggestive evidence that the relationship between lecture-style teaching and achievement is strongest among higher-achieving and more-advantaged students. For example, the positive effect is largest for students who report having more than one bookcase in the home, a rough indicator of the quality of their home environment. There is no evidence, however, that lower-achieving students or students from less-advantaged backgrounds learn less when their teachers emphasize lectures.

These patterns are consistent with the findings of a 1997 study by Dominic Brewer and Dan Goldhaber, which found that more in-class problem solving for American 10th-grade students in math is related to lower test scores on a standardized test. Because our results are based on comparisons of the same student in two different classes, however, they are less subject to the concern that teachers adjust their practices based on the students to which they are assigned. Furthermore, the other commonly investigated teacher characteristics (e.g., gender, experience, and credentials) do not show significant effects on student achievement in our analysis. This is in line with previous findings in the literature and underscores the importance of the statistical relationship between more lecture-style teaching and student achievement.

While the richness of the TIMSS data enables us to control for an unusually large set of teacher characteristics, our results could still be biased if teachers with different effectiveness levels are more likely to choose different teaching styles. For example, if more-effective teachers tend to spend more time lecturing because they are good at it and enjoy it, then our results could show a positive effect of lecture-style presentations, even if those teachers would have been even more effective had they devoted more time on problem-solving activities. Given the pedagogical emphasis on the use of problem-solving activities, it seems unlikely that the very best teachers would be using the less-effective teaching style (the only alternative explanation for our finding).

Still, it is important to keep in mind that our results are limited to student achievement as measured by the 2003 TIMSS test scores in 8th-grade math and science in the United States. Different results might be found for different subjects, grades, or tests. Depending on the teacher, the students, the content taught, or other factors, problem-solving activities could turn out to be the more effective style. Even though lecture-style teaching seems to be a more effective method in middle-school math and science, that does not mean it would be the preferable approach to elementary-school reading.

Also, our findings are based on student performance on the TIMSS math and science exams, which are designed to measure mastery of factual knowledge of the curricula that schools expect students to learn. Other tests intended to measure problem-solving ability and the competence to apply mathematical and scientific concepts in real-world settings (such as the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] administered by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) might yield different results. Unfortunately, we are unable to ascertain whether this might be the case, as PISA did not ask teachers about their pedagogical approach.

Finally, our information on teaching practices, which is based on in-class time use reported by teachers, does not allow us to distinguish between different implementations of teaching practices. In other words, a certain teaching technique may be very effective if implemented in the optimal way. But the strength of our approach is that it examines which teaching style turns out to be effective, on average, for teachers in general. Optimal teaching methods that cannot be executed by teachers in general may do more harm than good.

Conclusion

Given the limitations of the data, our finding that spending increased time on lecture-style teaching improves student test scores results should not be translated into a call for more lecture-style teaching in general. But the results do suggest that traditional lecture-style teaching in U.S. middle schools is less of a problem than is often believed.

Newer teaching methods might be beneficial for student achievement if implemented in the proper way, but our findings imply that simply inducing teachers to shift time in class from lecture-style presentations to problem solving without ensuring effective implementation is unlikely to raise overall student achievement in math and science. On the contrary, our results indicate that there might even be an adverse impact on student learning.

Guido Schwerdt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University and a researcher at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany. Amelie C. Wuppermann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mainz, Germany.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

While much of the debate around Teach For America (TFA) in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of its nontraditional recruits in the classroom, the real story is the degree to which TFA has succeeded in producing dynamic, impassioned, and entrepreneurial education leaders. From its inception as Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis project at Princeton more than two decades ago, TFA has sought to bring more teaching talent to some of the nation’s most disadvantaged communities and create a corps of change agents like Rhee, Feinberg, Levin, and Johnston. How well has TFA fared on that second score? Here, in a new line of research, we seek to answer that question.

Since its founding in 1989, TFA has placed more than 24,000 high-achieving college graduates in some of America’s neediest schools. This has produced an alumni network populated by impassioned former educators. TFA aims, proclaims the web site, to turn these alumni into “lifelong leaders for fundamental change, regardless of their professional sector.” Its efforts include keeping close connections with alumni and providing a variety of opportunities to volunteer at schools, join education-oriented political campaigns, advocate, and connect with a wide-reaching education network.

To date, the vast majority of research on TFA has focused on the classroom effectiveness of corps members and how long they remain in classrooms. Very little is known about TFA corps members who leave teaching but stay involved in education reform more broadly. In a recent study of TFA alumni, Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt (2009) argue that corps members are more likely to remain in education, whether in administration, educational policy work, or charter school management, than those who opt not to enter TFA or drop out of the program. This suggests that TFA has a lasting influence on corps members’ careers, but does not address the question of whether these individuals become the kind of change agents envisioned in TFA’s mission of eliminating “educational inequity by enlisting our nation’s most promising future leaders.”

We pursue that question here, as part of a larger analysis of organizations that successfully “spawn” education entrepreneurs. Examining the work histories of founders and top management team (TMT) members at nationally prominent entrepreneurial education organizations, we find that TFA appears more frequently in the professional backgrounds of these proven entrepreneurial leaders than does any other source in our sample. We don’t know whether it is the TFA experience, the criteria by which TFA selects its corps members, or institutional relationships that account for this. However, the research does find that TFA is producing a large number of entrepreneurial leaders. How and why this is so, and what might be learned from TFA’s success, are questions that deserve careful scrutiny.

Entrepreneurs Needed

The education sector has long struggled to attract and retain high-quality professionals. At the same time, stubborn achievement gaps, increased competition among school providers, and a heightened focus on performance have created an appetite for creative problem solving and scalable, transformational initiatives. In a world of online learning, school turnarounds, Race to the Top, and the Investing in Innovation Fund, there is room for leaders who are able to lever change by creating and expanding organizations of all kinds. Turning these opportunities into results requires people able to create and lead new, high-quality ventures.

With the proliferation of teacher residency and principal leadership programs, education has seen many efforts to recruit, develop, and retain quality teachers and administrators in recent years. However, there are fewer organizations aimed at developing leaders to direct reform initiatives outside the classroom or the schoolhouse. TFA is one among a small cadre of organizations that currently includes New Leaders for New Schools, Education Pioneers, and Teach Plus. TFA is particularly notable for its efforts on this score, as it engages former corps members through “Alumni Summits” and initiatives to advance alumni in positions of leadership as nonprofit board members, public officials, and leaders at the school and classroom level. It also supports alumni through partnerships with graduate schools and employers to help them transition to the next steps in their careers.

Recently, TFA started a new program, the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, which explicitly promotes innovation and entrepreneurship in the education sector. The program facilitates connections between alumni interested in starting education ventures with established social entrepreneurs. The initiative supports TFA alumni who are applying for fellowships such as Echoing Green and the Mind Trust, provides tools for developing fundraising plans and grant proposals, and publishes a newsletter that includes information about funding opportunities and management strategies.

Today, there is a sizable network of TFA alumni who have become education entrepreneurs. We have already mentioned KIPP Academy cofounders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who started a single charter school in 1994 that has evolved into one of the most well-known charter organizations in the U.S., with 99 schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia. TFA alum Chris Barbic founded YES Prep Public Schools, which has grown to serve 4,200 students at eight campuses throughout Houston. Sarah Usdin began New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) in 2006, after Hurricane Katrina devastated public schooling in that city. Before heading up the D.C. school system, Michelle Rhee established The New Teacher Project. Accounts sometimes suggest that these individuals are intriguing outliers. Our research suggests that they are evidence of TFA’s success at recruiting and creating change agents.

Research Methods

The methods used in this study mirror those applied in research on entrepreneurial spawning in other sectors, such as biotechnology. We first identified a group of entrepreneurial organizations within the education sector and traced their founders’ and TMT members’ work histories. We then identified organizations that appeared multiple times as previous employers across the sample and, hence, could be considered “spawners” of entrepreneurial leaders.

To create our list of entrepreneurial education organizations, we limited our search to nonprofit and for-profit organizations that were founded after 1989, TFA’s inaugural year; that focused on domestic, K–12 public education reform; and that could be considered nationally prominent. We drew on three distinct sources to identify organizations for our sample. The first was an electronic survey of 14 widely recognized experts in public school innovation. We asked participants, “From your perspective, what are the top 15 U.S. entrepreneurial education organizations that have emerged in the sector since 1989?” All 14 participants responded, and we identified 16 organizations that more than one respondent identified as a top organization. Next, we identified organizations supported by a donor clearinghouse of venture philanthropies and foundations whose mission is to support social entrepreneurship in K–12 public education across the nation. Finally, we conducted publication searches in popular and academic media using Lexis Nexus and Google Scholar. The searches were conducted in November 2009 and used the following search terms: Education, Entrepreneur*, Organization, and K–12.

These methods yielded a comprehensive list of 49 organizations; many are charter management organizations, some recruit and/or train human capital, and others offer supplemental resources to the public education sector, such as software technologies for data management and assessment or afterschool programs (see sidebar).

We then constructed a database of the work histories of the 49 organizations’ leadership members, comprising 71 founders and cofounders and 320 TMT members. We make the distinction between founders and other management team members in the event that there are noteworthy differences between those who start organizations and those hired to manage daily functioning, growth, and stability. Often, the organizations in our sample publicly listed the founders and members of the management team, along with their work and educational histories. When these data were ambiguous or not publicly available, we called the organizations to request the information.

We term the organizations that appear in founders’ and TMT members’ work histories “originating organizations.” To ascertain which originating organizations were the most prolific spawners of entrepreneurs, we identified those that had at one time employed a founding member of at least 2 of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations in our sample.

Entrepreneurship and TFA

Of all the originating organizations that appeared in work histories, TFA appeared the most frequently. Let’s look first at the 71 founders or cofounders of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations. TFA appeared in the work history of at least one founder of seven of these organizations, or about 15 percent. The next most-represented originating organizations—the San Francisco Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, AmeriCorps, the White House Fellows program, McKinsey & Company, and the United States Department of Education—each appeared in the work history of a founder of two (or about 4 percent) of these organizations. In other words, the drop-off from TFA to these other large and/or esteemed organizations is stark indeed.

To get a sense of whether TFA’s outsized success is simply the result of its size or TFA is indeed punching “above its weight,” it’s worth noting the comparative size of these various ventures. TFA is today an organization with almost 10,000 employees, including 8,200 current corps members. But TFA’s size a decade ago was only about one-quarter of what it is today, meaning that the alumni pipeline is much thinner than its current size suggests. TFA estimates that it has produced more than 20,000 alumni. TFA is clearly smaller than organizations like the Chicago Public Schools, with around 41,000 employees, and McKinsey, with some 17,000 employees. TFA is dwarfed by the approximately 75,000 current AmeriCorps members and some 500,000 alumni (some AmeriCorps volunteers are also TFA corps members), but is far larger than the White House Fellows program, with 13 current fellows and some 600 alumni. In short, TFA has fared impressively for its relative size.

While many founders have participated in TFA, there is little evidence of their having had other work or internship experiences in common. One reason for this homogeneity may be that approximately 23 percent of the founders had only one job prior to starting their own venture. A lack of experience created fewer opportunities to build professional networks, making the large number of TFA alumni among founders all the more salient.

TFA stands out in the work histories of the TMT members at the 49 organizations on our list as well (see Figure 1). Fourteen of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations had at least one TMT member who was once a TFA corps member or employee, and 10 of these organizations had at least one member who had been a TFA corps member and worked for TFA national. Compare this to the next three highest-ranked originating organizations: 10 entrepreneurial organizations had at least one TMT member who had been employed by the New York City Public Schools, nine entrepreneurial organizations employed KIPP alumni, and the work histories of seven entrepreneurial organizations’ TMT members included Andersen Consulting.

A Look at the Spawners

Only two of the originating organizations that spawned at least two founders, the White House Fellows program and McKinsey & Company, operate outside the public education sector. McKinsey, a management consulting firm, is the only private institution on the list. When it came to spawning TMT members, McKinsey was joined by its consulting brethren Andersen and Deloitte. For TMT members, consulting was a common professional experience with about 10 percent of all TMT members having this practice in their backgrounds.

It is interesting to consider why experience in the consulting industry is not unusual in the career histories of TMT members. Members of top management teams, including chief finance officers, chief operating officers, and even those leading growth and marketing divisions, face complex challenges. Consultants are commonly hired to solve problems in these functional units in both the private and public sectors. Perhaps their skills translate well in the entrepreneurial world. Former consultants may be particularly adept at addressing tough management issues in entrepreneurial organizations in the education sector, where challenges arise both internally and externally, due to the complicated political and financial dynamics of meeting public education needs in the U.S. There may be certain functional roles on TMTs for which having a consulting background prepares leaders particularly well.

Additionally, consulting firms such as McKinsey are increasingly offering their services in the education sector. For example, McKinsey’s Social Sector Office supports an education practice that focuses on systems strategy and transformation, talent and performance management, administration and operations, and institutional strategy and innovations. Teams in McKinsey’s education practice regularly publish reports on the education sector, including a recent analysis of the economic impact of the achievement gap and strategies for attracting top undergraduates to and retaining them in the teaching profession. Such work may be exposing their employees to the overwhelming need in the education sector for solutions to challenging problems. That exposure, coupled with entrepreneurial aspects of the organizational culture, employee selection criteria, or institutional relationships may create an environment similar to TFA. Again, we cannot be sure at this stage what factors may be at play, but it is certainly an intriguing finding.

Another leading spawner of team members is KIPP. Nine organizations in the sample had at least one TMT member who had worked for KIPP’s national office or in a KIPP school. Given that KIPP was started by two TFA alumni, maintains close ties with TFA, and recruits many of its teachers from the TFA ranks, it is no surprise that five organizations in the sample had TMT members who had previously worked both for TFA and for KIPP.

Several school districts were also among the organizations that showed up most often in TMT members’ work histories. New York City appeared most often. Other districts were Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles.

Looking across all the spawning organizations, one returns to the question of why, given the many sources feeding into the education talent pipeline, TFA seems so prolific. It seems clear that explanatory factors include the criteria by which TFA recruits, the organization’s strong and purposive culture, the skills that corps members develop, and the opportunities provided to alumni. Just to take one example, by providing talented young college grads with classroom experience, TFA confers upon them a degree of credibility that opens doors that might open less readily for others. Sorting out the relevant import of these elements is far beyond the scope of our current effort, but it is an exercise well worth pursuing for those reformers eager to identify, emulate, and amplify TFA’s successes.

TFA’s Influence

Is there cause to suspect that there are any systematic differences between those education entrepreneurs who are TFA alumni and those who are not? Given their classroom experience, for instance, are TFA alumni more likely to wind up in instructional or curricular roles than are TMT members who are not TFA alumni?

To investigate this possibility, we looked at the 30 TFA alumni who are TMT members at organizations in our sample and identified the specific nature of their jobs. As seen in Figure 2, less than one-third of these TFA alumni are in administrative positions like operations or finance. Most are involved in human resources, such as hiring and training teachers or other support staff; academic affairs, such as developing curriculum for instructional programs or schools; or working to develop new schools or expand existing ones. This first cut suggests that entrepreneurial TFA alumni disproportionately take on roles more closely related to instruction and staffing. As mentioned earlier, it is not uncommon for TMT members in operations and finance to have consulting experience in their professional backgrounds.

Looking Ahead

The findings presented here on the leadership pipeline signal many avenues for productive future inquiry. First, TFA specifically sets out to recruit individuals with leadership potential. As TFA explains, it seeks college graduates who have demonstrated “past leadership and achievement…perseverance and sustained focus in the face of challenges, strong critical thinking skills…[an ability to generate] relevant solutions to problems, superior organizational ability…and superior interpersonal skills to motivate and lead others.” The TFA selection process consists of an online application, a phone interview, and a final interview, which includes multiple individual and group activities, plus a personal interview. Sorting out the impact of TFA acculturation and training from its success as a talent identifier will require additional research that examines the alumni’s career expectations and decisions over time, with an eye to their experiences during and after their corps engagement with TFA.

Second, we found that certain of TFA’s geographic regions appeared more likely to generate entrepreneurial behavior. TFA corps members with work experience in New York City and San Francisco seemed especially likely to become top managers in entrepreneurial organizations in education. Perhaps there is something distinctive about the TFA experience in these locales. Maybe, and more likely, there was something about the place at that particular time that worked in concert with the TFA experience to produce entrepreneurial leaders in a particularly effective way.

In the 1990s, when many of the entrepreneurial organizations in our list were being founded, San Francisco, and the Silicon Valley more generally, was a hotbed of entrepreneurial behavior, which included unprecedented levels of capital funding for those wanting to start their own ventures. At the same time, New York City, with its similar culture of entrepreneurialism and capital funding activity, was going through a period of political and educational reform that would lead to the era of mayoral control. This period of fl ux created opportunities for new organizations and programs to enter the education market. The combination of an entrepreneurial culture, access to funding, and openings within the education market may have made these cities particularly conducive to TFA’s mission of creating entrepreneurial leaders; indeed, the two cities were among the first to bring TFA teachers into their schools. Therefore, it may be useful to think about the TFA experience more expansively and with an eye to its place within a larger context of reform and opportunity.

Third, working for TFA at the national level appears to be a more common experience for those who end up working for an entrepreneurial organization, rather than founding one; TFA members who were founders of organizations were more likely to have been TFA corps members. This suggests that different TFA experiences may equip alumni for different roles. It raises a variety of important questions, most notably, what it is about the TFA experience that imparts to individuals the skills and desire to tackle certain challenges.

Certain kinds of organizations, such as TFA and KIPP, and professions like consulting may be especially conducive to producing educational entrepreneurs. It is worth asking whether there are particular jobs, roles, or work environments that contribute to the cultivation of entrepreneurial behavior.

Finally, our research suggests the value of rethinking how TFA and its alumni have been studied in education and also how we think about retention. Rather than assume that it is good or bad when TFA members leave classrooms or school systems, we focused on the role that TFA alumni may play in launching entrepreneurial ventures. While TFA members may not be retained as teachers, the findings suggest they may still have an impact in education, perhaps an outsized impact.

Another intriguing question is how to weigh the impact of a single Mike Feinberg, Mike Johnston, or Michelle Rhee. Is their impact equal to that of having 100 teachers stay another year? Of 1,000 teachers staying another five years? Is it worth having thousands frequently depart classrooms if it increases the likelihood that a single game-changing entrepreneur—a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates—will emerge? Conventional debates about retention and TFA teacher effects may start to seem trivial when we compare the potentially enormous impact of a few such individuals.

Monica Higgins is professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry. Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and author or editor of several books, including Education Unbound and Educational Entrepreneurship. Jennie Weiner and Wendy Robison are doctoral students in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The ubiquity of “satisfactory” ratings stands in contrast to a rapidly growing body of research that examines differences in teachers’ effectiveness at raising student achievement. In recent years, school districts and states have compiled datasets that make it possible to track the achievement of individual students from one year to the next, and to compare the progress made by similar students assigned to different teachers. Careful statistical analysis of these new datasets confirms the long-held intuition of most teachers, students, and parents: teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student achievement growth.

The quantification of differences has generated a flurry of policy proposals to promote teacher quality over the past decade, and the Obama administration’s recent Race to the Top program only accelerated interest. Yet, so far, little has changed in the way that teachers are evaluated, in the content of pre-service training, or in the types of professional development offered. A primary stumbling block has been a lack of agreement on how best to identify and measure effective teaching.

A handful of school districts and states—including Dallas, Houston, Denver, New York, and Washington, D.C.—have begun using student achievement gains as indicated by annual test scores (adjusted for prior achievement and other student characteristics) as a direct measure of individual teacher performance. These student-test-based measures are often referred to as “value-added” measures. Yet even supporters of policies that make use of value-added measures recognize the limitations of those measures. Among the limitations are, first, that these performance measures can only be generated in the handful of grades and subjects in which there is mandated annual testing. Roughly one-quarter of K–12 teachers typically teach in grades and subjects where obtaining such measures is currently possible. Second, test-based measures by themselves offer little guidance for redesigning teacher training or targeting professional development; they allow one to identify particularly effective teachers, but not to determine the specific practices responsible for their success. Third, there is the danger that a reliance on test-based measures will lead teachers to focus narrowly on test-taking skills at the cost of more valuable academic content, especially if administrators do not provide them with clear and proven ways to improve their practice.

Student-test-based measures of teacher performance are receiving increasing attention in part because there are, as yet, few complementary or alternative measures that can provide reliable and valid information on the effectiveness of a teacher’s classroom practice. The approach most commonly in use is to evaluate effectiveness through direct observation of teachers in the act of teaching. But as “The Widget Effect” reports, such evaluations are a largely perfunctory exercise.

In this article, we report a few results from an ongoing study of teacher classroom observation in the Cincinnati Public Schools. The motivating research question was whether classroom observations—when performed by trained professionals external to the school, using an extensive set of standards—could identify teaching practices likely to raise achievement.

We find that evaluations based on well-executed classroom observations do identify effective teachers and teaching practices. Teachers’ scores on the classroom observation components of Cincinnati’s evaluation system reliably predict the achievement gains made by their students in both math and reading. These findings support the idea that teacher evaluation systems need not be based on test scores alone in order to provide useful information about which teachers are most effective in raising student achievement.

The Cincinnati Evaluation System

Jointly developed by the local teachers union and district more than a decade ago, the Cincinnati Public Schools’ Teacher Evaluation System (TES) is often cited as a rare example of a high-quality evaluation program based on classroom observations. At a minimum, it is a system to which the district has devoted considerable resources. During the yearlong TES process, teachers are typically observed and scored four times: three times by a peer evaluator external to the school and once by a local school administrator. The peer evaluators are experienced classroom teachers chosen partly based on their own TES performance. They serve as full-time evaluators for three years before they return to the classroom. Both peer evaluators and administrators must complete an intensive training course and accurately score videotaped teaching examples.

The system requires that all new teachers participate in TES during their first year in the district, again to receive tenure (usually in their fourth year), and every fifth year thereafter. Teachers tenured before 2000–01 were gradually phased into the five-year rotation. Additionally, teachers may volunteer to be evaluated; most volunteers do so to post the high scores necessary to apply for selective positions in the district (for example, lead teacher or TES evaluator).

The TES scoring rubric used by the evaluators, which is based on the work of educator Charlotte Danielson, describes the practices, skills, and characteristics that effective teachers should possess and employ. We focus our analysis on the two (out of four total) domains of TES evaluations that directly address classroom practices: “Creating an Environment for Student Learning” and “Teaching for Student Learning.” (The other two TES domains assess teachers’ planning and professional contributions outside of the classroom; scores in these areas are based on lesson plans and other documents included in a portfolio reviewed by evaluators.) These two domains, with scores based on classroom observations, contain more than two dozen specific elements of practice that are grouped into eight “standards” of teaching. Table 1 provides an example of two elements that comprise one standard. For each element, the rubric provides language describing what performance looks like at each scoring level: Distinguished (a score of 4), Proficient (3), Basic (2), or Unsatisfactory (1).

Data and Methodology

Cincinnati provided us with records of each classroom observation conducted between the 2000–01 and 2008–09 school years, including the scores that evaluators assigned for each specific practice element as a result of that observation. Using these data, we calculated a score for each teacher on the eight TES “standards” by averaging the ratings assigned during the different observations of that teacher in a given year on each element included under the standard. We then collapsed these eight standard-level scores into three summary indexes that measure different aspects of a teacher’s practice:

• The first, which we call Overall Classroom Practices, is simply the teacher’s average score across all eight standards. This index captures the general importance of the full set of teaching practices measured by the evaluation.

• The second, Classroom Management vs. Instructional Practices, measures the difference in a teacher’s rating on standards that evaluate classroom management and that same teacher’s rating on standards that assess instructional practices. A teacher who is more skilled at managing the classroom environment, as compared to her ability to engage in desired instructional activities, will receive a higher score on this index than a teacher who engages in these instructional practices but who is less skilled at managing the classroom.

• The third, Questions/Discussion vs. Standards/Content, measures the difference between a teacher’s rating on a single standard that evaluates the use of questions and classroom discussion as an instructional strategy, and that same teacher’s average rating on three standards that assess teaching practices that focus on classroom management routines, on conveying standards-based instructional objectives to students, and on demonstrating content-specific knowledge in teaching these objectives.

Our main analysis below examines the degree to which these summary indices predict a teacher’s effectiveness in raising student achievement. Note, however, that we did not construct the indices based on any hypotheses of our own about which aspects of teaching practice measured by TES were most likely to influence student achievement. Rather, we used a statistical technique known as principal components analysis, which identifies the smaller number of underlying constructs that the eight different dimensions of practice are trying to capture. As it turns out, scores on these three indices explain 87 percent of the total variation in teacher performance across all eight standards.

For all teachers in our sample, the average score on the Overall Classroom Practices index was 3.21, or between the “Proficient” and “Distinguished” categories. Yet one-quarter of teachers received an overall score higher than 3.53 and one-quarter received a score lower than 2.94. In other words, despite the fact that TES evaluators tended to assign relatively high scores on average, there is a fair amount of variation from teacher to teacher that we can use to examine the relationship between TES ratings and classroom effectiveness.

In addition to TES observation results, Cincinnati provided student data for the 2003–04 through 2008–09 school years, including information on each student’s gender, race/ethnicity, English proficiency status, participation in special education or gifted and talented programs, class and teacher assignments by subject, and state test scores in math and reading. This rich dataset allows us to study students’ math and reading test-score growth from year to year in grades four through eight (where end of year and prior year tests are available), while also taking account of differences in student backgrounds.

Our primary goal was to examine the relationship between teachers’ TES ratings and their assigned students’ test-score growth. This task is complicated, however, by the possibility that factors not measured in our data, such as the level of social cohesion among the students or unmeasured differences in parental engagement, could independently affect both a TES observer’s rating and student achievement. To address this concern, we use observations of student achievement from teachers’ classes in the one or two school years prior to and following TES measurement, but we do not use student achievement gains from the year in which the observations were conducted. (If some teachers are assigned particularly engaged or cohesive classrooms year after year, the results could still be biased; this approach, however, does eliminate bias due to year-to-year differences in unmeasured classroom traits being related to classroom observation scores.)

We restrict our comparisons to teachers and students within the same schools in order to eliminate any potential influence of differences between schools on both TES ratings and student achievement. In other words, we ask whether teachers who receive higher TES ratings than other teachers in their school produce larger gains in student achievement than their same-school colleagues.

Results

We find that teachers’ classroom practices, as measured by TES scores, do predict differences in student achievement growth. Our main results, which are based on a sample of 365 teachers in reading and 200 teachers in math, indicate that improving a teacher’s Overall Classroom Practices score by one point (e.g., moving from an overall rating of “Proficient” [3] to “Distinguished” [4]) is associated with one-seventh of a standard deviation increase in reading achievement, and one-tenth of a standard deviation increase in math (see Figure 1).

The specific point system that TES uses to rate teachers as Proficient and Distinguished is somewhat arbitrary. For a better sense of the magnitude of these estimates, consider a student who begins the year at the 50th percentile and is assigned to a top-quartile teacher as measured by the Overall Classroom Practices score; by the end of the school year, that student, on average, will score about three percentile points higher in reading and about two points higher in math than a peer who began the year at the same achievement level but was assigned to a bottom-quartile teacher.

This difference might not seem large but, of course, a teacher is just one influence on student achievement scores (and classroom observations are only one way to assess the quality of a teacher’s instruction). By way of comparison, we can estimate the total effect a given teacher has on her students’ achievement growth; that total effect includes the practices measured by the TES process along with everything else a teacher does. The difference between being taught by a top-quartile total-effect teacher versus a bottom-quartile total-effect teacher would be about seven percentile points in reading and about six points in math (see Figure 2). This total-effect measure is one example of the kind of “value-added” approach taken in current policy proposals.

From these data, we can also discern relationships between more specific teaching practices and student outcomes across academic subjects (see Figure 1). Among students assigned to different teachers with the same Overall Classroom Practices score, math achievement will grow more for students whose teacher is better than his peers at classroom management (i.e., has a higher score on our Classroom Management vs. Instructional Practices measure). We also find that reading scores increase more among students whose teacher is relatively better than his peers at engaging students in questioning and discussion (i.e., has a high score on Questions/Discussion vs. Standards/Content). This does not mean, however, that students’ math achievement would rise if their teachers were to become worse at a few carefully selected instructional practices. Although this might raise their Classroom Environment vs. Instructional Practices score it would also lower the Overall Classroom Practices score, and any real teacher is the combination of these three scores.

Do these statistics provide any insight that teachers can use to focus their efforts? First, our finding that Overall Classroom Practices is the strongest predictor of student achievement in both subjects indicates that improved practice in any of the areas considered in the TES process should be encouraged. In other words, the practices captured by the TES rubric do predict better outcomes for students. If, however, teachers must choose a smaller number of practices on which to focus their improvement efforts (for example, because of limited time or professional development opportunities), our results suggest that math achievement would likely benefit most from improvements in classroom management skills before turning to instructional issues. Meanwhile, reading achievement would benefit most from time spent improving the practice of asking thought-provoking questions and engaging students in discussion.

Can we be confident that the various elements of practice measured by TES are the reasons that students assigned to highly rated teachers make larger achievement gains? Skeptical readers may worry that better teachers engage in more of the practices encouraged by TES, but that these practices are not what make the teacher more effective. To address this concern, we take advantage of the fact that some teachers were evaluated by TES multiple times. For these teachers, we can test whether improvement over time in the practices measured by TES is related to improvement in the achievement gains made by the teachers’ students. This is exactly what we find. Since this exercise compares each teacher only to his own prior performance, we can be more confident that it is differences in the use of the TES practices themselves that promote student achievement growth, not just the teachers who employ these strategies.

Conclusion

Is TES worth the considerable effort and cost? Does the intensive TES process (with its multiple observations and trained peer evaluators) produce more accurate information on teachers’ effectiveness in raising student achievement gains than do more-subjective evaluations? In fact, studies of informal surveys of principals (see “When Principals Rate Teachers,” research, Spring 2006) and teacher ratings by mentor teachers find that these more-subjective evaluation methods have similar power to detect differences in teacher effectiveness as the TES ratings. These studies may lead some to question the need for the more detailed TES process. We contend, however, that evaluations based on observations of classroom practice are valuable, even if they do not predict student achievement gains considerably better than more subjective methods like principal ratings of teachers.

The additional information the TES system provides can be used in several important ways. First, the data gleaned from the observations allow researchers to connect specific teaching practices with student achievement outcomes, providing evidence of effective teaching practices that can be widely shared.

The TES program also has the advantage of furnishing teachers and administrators with details about the specific practices that contributed to each teacher’s score. The descriptions of practices, and different performance levels for each practice, that comprise the TES rubric can help teachers and administrators map out professional development plans. A school administrator who desires to differentiate the support she provides to individual teachers would benefit from knowing the components of each teacher’s overall scores. A teacher who would like to improve his classroom management skills may find that he has scored relatively low in a particular standard, and then take steps to improve his practice in response to that information.

Finally, scoring individual practices allows for understanding of more fine-grained variations in skill among teachers with similar overall ratings. It is notable, especially given “The Widget Effect” study, that nearly 90 percent of teachers in our sample received an overall “Satisfactory” rating (i.e., “Distinguished” or “Proficient” in Cincinnati’s terms). Still, there are readily discernible differences in mastery of specific skills within that 90 percent, and those differences in skills predict differences in student achievement.

There are other aspects of the Cincinnati system that may or may not account for the results we observed. First, the observers were external to the school and, in most cases, had no personal relationship with the person they were observing. Second, the observers were trained beforehand and were required to demonstrate their ability to score some sample videos in a manner consistent with expert scores. Simply handing principals a checklist with the same set of standards may not lead to a similar outcome.

The results presented here constitute the strongest evidence to date on the relationship between teachers’ observed classroom practices and the achievement gains made by their students. The nature of the relationship between practices and achievement supports teacher evaluation and development systems that make use of multiple measures. Even if one is solely interested in raising student achievement, effectiveness measures based on classroom practice provide critical information to teachers and administrators on what actions they can take to achieve this goal.

Thomas J. Kane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Eric S. Taylor is a doctoral student at the Stanford University School of Education. John H. Tyler is associate professor of education, economics, and public policy at Brown University. Amy L. Wooten is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Reflecting equal contributions to this work, authors are listed alphabetically. This article is based in part on a larger study which is forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources.

Opinion: In an Ed Week commentary, Eric Hanushek discusses some policy implications of his findings about the impact of good and bad teachers.

According to the president in this year’s State of the Union address, this is “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” the time when we realize the urgent need to step up the performance of our education system. Only today, unlike in the 1950s, we have a clear idea of what it takes to improve achievement. The quality of the teachers in our schools is paramount: no other measured aspect of schools is nearly as important in determining student achievement. The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly.

Indeed, the magnitude of variation in the quality of teachers, even within each school, is startling. Teachers who work in a given school, and therefore teach students with similar demographic characteristics, can be responsible for increases in math and reading levels that range from a low of one-half year to a high of one and a half years of learning each academic year.

But while most parents are able to distinguish a good teacher from a bad one, few have any idea what difference it makes in the lives of their children. And researchers do not help, tending to talk in terms of standard deviations of achievement and effect sizes, phrases that simply have no meaning outside of the rarefied world of research. Here, I translate the researchers’ shorthand into concepts that might be more readily understood: the impact of teachers on the earnings of individuals and on the future of the economy as a whole.

Measuring Teachers’ Impact

Many of us have had at some point in our lives a wonderful teacher, one whose value, in retrospect, seems inestimable. We do not pretend here to know how to calculate the life-transforming effects that such teachers can have with particular students. But we can calculate more prosaic economic values related to effective teaching, by drawing on a research literature that provides surprisingly precise estimates of the impact of student achievement levels on their lifetime earnings and by combining this with estimated impacts of more-effective teachers on student achievement.

Let’s start with the researcher’s point of view. With a normal distribution of performance (the classic bell curve), a standard deviation is simply a more precise measure of how spread out the distribution is. Somebody who is one standard deviation above average would be at the 84th percentile of the distribution. If we then turn to the labor market, a student with achievement (as measured by test performance in high school) that is one standard deviation above average can later in life expect to take in 10 to 15 percent higher earnings per year.

That estimate may be deemed conservative for two reasons. First, it does not account for increases in years of education that may result from having a higher level of performance early on. Also, the estimate is based on information from people’s wages and salaries early in their careers, before they have reached their full earnings potential. Other calculations that take into account earnings throughout entire careers estimate 20 percent increases over the course of a lifetime.

Does 10 to 15 percent amount to much? For the average American entering the labor force, the value of lifetime earnings for full-time work is currently $1.16 million. Thus, an increase in the level of achievement in high school of a standard deviation yields an average increase of between $110,000 and $230,000 in lifetime earnings.

How do increases in teacher effectiveness relate to this? Obviously, teacher quality is not the only factor that affects student achievement. The student’s own motivations and support from family and peers play crucial roles as well. But researchers have worked hard to isolate the impact of teachers from these other influences. Rigorous studies consistently show that the impact of a more-effective teacher is substantial A high-performing teacher, one at the 84th percentile of all teachers, when compared with just an average teacher, produces students whose level of achievement is at least 0.2 standard deviations higher by the end of the school year. In fact, the impact of having such a teacher could plausibly be as large as 0.3 standard deviations.

Those impacts attenuate somewhat over time, however. The literature, though less than definitive, suggests that perhaps 70 percent of the gains achieved that year are retained in the long run by the student. The persistence of achievement gains is important, because the more sustained that these increases are, the greater the positive impact teachers will have on the lifetime skills and therefore the earnings of students. Put together, this evidence suggests that a teacher in the top 16 percent of effectiveness will have a positive impact (as compared to an average teacher) on longer-term student achievement that is 70 percent of the immediate gain, which as noted is at least 0.2 standard deviations.  That lower bound of the estimated effect is what we will use as we calculate the economic worth of a teacher by combining a teacher’s impact on achievement with the associated labor market returns.

Let’s start with some conservative estimates of the impact on an individual student. Take a good but not great teacher, one at the 69th percentile of all teachers rather than at the 50th percentile (that is, a teacher who is half a standard deviation above the average). She produces an increase of $10,600 on each student’s lifetime earnings. Even a modestly better than average teacher (60th percentile) raises individual earnings by $5,300, compared to what would otherwise be expected.

While those numbers are not trivial, they burgeon dramatically once we recognize that every student in the class can expect such increases in earnings. Consider, for example, a teacher with a class of 20 students. Under such circumstances, the teacher at the 60th percentile will—each year—raise students’ aggregate earnings by a total of $106,000. The impact of one at the 69th percentile (as compared to the average) is $212,000, and one at the 84th percentile will shift earnings up by more than $400,000.

But there is also symmetry to these calculations. A very low performing teacher (at the 16th percentile of effectiveness) will have a negative impact of $400,000 compared to an average teacher.

Moreover, the economic value of an effective teacher grows with larger classes, as do the economic losses of an ineffective teacher. Figure 1 illustrates the aggregate impact on students’ lifetime earnings for higher- and lower-performing teachers. As we will discuss below, these results are all very large compared with, for instance, the $52,000 annual salary U.S. teachers were paid on average in 2008.

An Alternate Thought Experiment

We can also approach this valuation calculation from the perspective of the impact of teacher effectiveness on the U.S. economy as a whole, rather than just on the future earnings of students. As noted above, student achievement, which provides a direct measure of later quality of the labor force, is strongly related to economic growth. Improving achievement leads to a better prepared workforce and to greater growth, and this growth translates into higher levels of national income.

Starting again with the estimates of the difference in effectiveness of teachers, it is possible to calculate the long-term economic impact of policies that would focus attention on the lowest-quality teachers from U.S. classrooms. Let us propose the following thought experiment: What would happen if the very lowest performing teachers could be replaced by just average teachers? Based on the estimates of variation in teacher quality identified above, Figure 2 shows the overall achievement impact through a cycle of K–12 instruction. Assuming the upper-bound estimate of teachers’ impact, U.S achievement could reach that in Canada and Finland if we replaced with average teachers the least effective 5 to 7 percent of teachers, respectively. Assuming the lower-bound estimate of teachers’ impact, U.S achievement could reach that in Canada and Finland if we replaced with average teachers the least effective 8 to 12 percent of teachers, respectively.

Here the estimated value almost loses any meaning. Closing the achievement gap with Finland would, according to historical experience, have astounding benefits, increasing the annual growth rate of the United States by 1 percent of GDP. Accumulated over the lifetime of somebody born today, this improvement in achievement would amount to nothing less than an increase in total U.S. economic output of $112 trillion in present value. (That was not a typo—$112 trillion, not billion.)

Admittedly, these estimates are subject to some uncertainty. So if you think those that are given here are too high, even though they are based on the best of contemporary research, then just cut them in half. You will still have effects on growth of one-half of 1 percent per year, which produces impacts of $56 trillion over the lifetime of today’s child. In other words, to make the very large effects disappear, you have to make either the very strong assumption that student learning has little effect on the U.S. economy or the equally strong assumption that teachers have little impact on students.

What Would It Take?

The majority of our teachers are hardworking and effective. The previous estimates point clearly to the key imperative of eliminating the drag of the bottom teachers. Here we can offer several alternatives.

One approach might be better recruitment so that ineffective or poor teachers do not make it into our schools. Or, relatedly, we could improve the training in schools of education so that the average teaching recruit is better than the typical recruit of today. Unfortunately, we have relatively few successful experiences with either approach as compared to considerable wishful thinking, particularly among school personnel.

An alternative might be to change a poor teacher into an average teacher. This approach is in fact today’s dominant strategy. Schools hope that through mentoring of incoming teachers, professional development, or completion of further graduate schooling, ineffective teachers can be transformed into acceptable (average) teachers. Again, however, the existing evidence is not very reassuring. While such efforts undoubtedly help some teachers, there is no substantial evidence that certification, in-service training, master’s degrees, or mentoring programs systematically make a difference in whether teachers are in fact effective at driving student achievement.

The final option is a clearer evaluation and retention strategy for teachers. Today, obtaining an entry job into teaching is virtually tantamount to an indefinite contract that stays in force regardless of actual effectiveness in the classroom. Yet the calculations above show the enormous value to individuals and society of “deselecting” the least effective teachers.

Is such a policy change feasible? If we contemplate asking 5 to 10 percent of teachers to find a job at which they are more effective so they can be replaced by teachers of average productivity, states and school districts would have to change their employment practices. They would need recruitment, pay, and retention policies that allow for the identification and compensation of teachers on the basis of their effectiveness with students. At a minimum, the current dysfunctional teacher-evaluation systems would need to be overhauled so that effectiveness in the classroom is clearly identified. This is not an impossible task. The teachers who are excellent would have to be paid much more, both to compensate for the new riskiness of the profession and to increase the chances of retaining these individuals in teaching. Those who are ineffective would have to be identified and replaced. Both steps would be politically challenging in a heavily unionized environment such as the one in place today.

Salary Politics

The above discussion also highlights the difficulties in recruiting high-quality teachers, due in part to the difficulties of paying them well. Collective bargaining mechanisms do not provide incentives for the best people to enter or remain in the profession and likely hold the average pay down: given the uniform salary structure, increases in salary are bound to be unrelated to increases in effectiveness, making large pay raises raises politically problematic. This is likely one of the main reasons that teacher salaries now lag those in other professions. In the 1940s, the salaries of male teachers were slightly above the average pay for all male college graduates, and female teachers had higher salaries than 70 percent of other female college graduates. Today, despite the collective bargaining process, the salaries of male teachers are at the 30th percentile of the distribution of all college graduates, and women who teach are at the 40th percentile of their college-educated peers.

Teachers’ salaries today are based on credentials and years of experience, factors that are at best weakly related to productivity. In a competitive marketplace, a firm must compensate employees according to their productivity or risk bankruptcy. Yet no school district goes out of business if it retains ineffective teachers and pays them as much as effective ones. Salaries become political footballs, and it is often awkward for politicians to explain why a large pay increase goes equally to ineffective and effective teachers.

The challenge of implementing reform of the teaching profession remains considerable. Most of the benefits of implementing the “thought experiment” explored here would be fully realized only many decades later, while the costs of economic, and especially political, reform must be paid at the beginning. These costs would be steep, as they would likely negatively affect some of the most vocal constituents in education policy: current teachers.

The magnitude of the above valuations of teacher effectiveness, however, suggest that we should be willing to consider more radical reforms than have been commonplace in recent decades. Salaries several times higher than those paid teachers today would be economically justified if teachers were compensated according to their effectiveness. But unless we can replace the current system with one that better links teacher recruitment, compensation, and retention to effectiveness, we should expect both our schools and our economy to underperform relative to their potential. The cost to the nation at a time of intensifying international competition is high indeed.

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

Let me admit to a prejudice: I have known John Merrow for more than a quarter of a century and greatly admire his single-minded interest in national school reform. Having said this, let me say that in all candor I liked the second half of this book, particularly the third section, better than the earlier chapters, which are, by the author’s own admission, recapitulations of interviews on NPR and PBS.

Not that Merrow does not cover the ground effectively. He deals with many of the hot-button issues by drawing on his own experiences as a student at the Taft School and his subsequent encounters in the less privileged world of urban education. Teacher evaluation he rightly insists is a complex issue (much more so than exclusively linking teacher education to results from standardized tests). Misassignment of teachers (i.e. teachers teaching out of their field or academic discipline) does not escape his attention. Teacher tenure and the mediocrity the tenure system Merrow rightly identifies as a significant hindrance to genuine reform. He underscores the importance of safe schools and early reading programs. He is astute in his approval of the charter school movement under certain circumstances. He contrasts school reformers like Michelle Rhee and Paul Vallas. He rightly identifies the success of Teach for America as a comment on the comparative mediocrity of so many other teachers trained in traditional teacher colleges. All this is good stuff, even if we have heard about most of it from other sources.

What is fresh, however, are his recommendations in his concluding chapter. After reminding us that two competing views are vying for national attention, “mediocre teachers are the heart of the problem” or “is it the job itself with its low pay, and even lower prestige,” he constructs a series of recommendation all of which are very much to the point.

Teaching would be a better job (1) When principals have authority over hiring their staff. (2) When teacher evaluations of students count as least as much as the score on a one-time standardized test (3) When employment contracts are not for life and employee evaluations are fair and thorough. (4) When everybody’s pay depends in part on the performance of students academically. (5) When teachers get students to ask good questions and not merely regurgitate answers to pre-constructed questions.

While all this may sound to the uninitiated as a litany of the obvious, in fact such changes would be revolutionary and are desperately needed. Thank you, John Merrow, for reminding us.

-A. Graham Down

You can find more book reviews by Graham Down here.

We found that teachers with an M. A. degree were no more effective, on average, than teachers who lacked such a degree.  Further, we found out that it did not make any difference from which public university in Florida a teacher had earned the degree.  None of them had an educational program that correlated with a teacher’s classroom effectiveness.

Yet a teacher who has taught for 10 years will earn 6.5 percent more (or about $2500), if he or she has collected that extra diploma.  Since about half the teachers have pursued that advanced degree—given the extra dollars, why not?—the state could save better than 3 percent of its teaching personnel costs by eliminating this useless feature of the teacher compensation scheme.

Even pension costs could be reduced, as teachers’ pensions are generally set at the level they earned in the last few years of teaching. For that reason, some teachers take the time to get a master’s degree just before they retire.  I do not fault the teachers, just the silly compensation system that provokes such choices.

Since the state subsidizes the master’s degree training programs by offering them to teachers at a tuition that is lower than cost, even more money can be saved. If the extra compensation for the master’s degree were eliminated, the only people pursuing such a degree would be those seriously interested in obtaining that additional education for its own sake.  Enrollments in schools of education would plummet, and the taxpayer would not have to pony up additional dollars to keep alive programs of dubious value.

Nor is the situation confined to Florida.  Most every school district pays extra for a master’s degree, and all the state-of-the-art research on this subject is finding exactly what we found in Florida.

The extra pay for the master’s degree is an accident of collective bargaining history.  At one time, high school teachers were paid more than elementary school teachers.  When collective bargaining came along, it was decided—to keep all workers on the same pay scale, a primary union objective–to pay all teachers the same, except for experience and credentials. Since high school teachers were more likely to have a master’s degree, they agreed to this arrangement.  Al Shanker led the way in New York City, as I explain in my book, Saving Schools. Subsequently, elementary school teachers, seeing the financial benefits of holding such a degree, have caught up, and they are just about as likely to hold that advanced degree as their high school counterparts.

- Paul E. Peterson

That’s because they violate the paramount principle upon which pension systems should be built: Benefits should be tied to contributions. In other words, benefits paid to any teacher should be tied to the lifetime contributions made by or for that teacher. If $300,000 has been contributed on behalf of a teacher (including accumulated returns) then the cash value of an annuity provided to this teacher should also be $300,000.

This principle is routinely violated in current defined-benefit pension systems. Our analysis, Reforming K-12 Educator Pensions: A Labor Market Perspective, shows that the current systems result in very large implicit transfers from young teachers working short teaching spells to “long termers” who spend entire careers in the same system. In our view, a teacher who works ten years or thirty years should accrue pension wealth roughly equivalent to total pension contributions (with accumulated returns).

Illinois is a cautionary example of how not to reform teacher pensions. The Land of Lincoln recently implemented a two-tiered plan, with teachers hired after January 1, 2011 in the second tier. Tier 2 teachers will make identical contributions (9.4 percent) as their Tier 1 colleagues, but will have a massive cut in pension wealth accrual over their work lives. Moreover, by our calculations, a new teacher entering the Illinois plan at age twenty-five will accrue no net pension wealth until age fifty-one. If the teacher leaves the classroom in her thirties or forties, she will walk away with nothing but her own cumulative contributions.

Tying benefits to contributions would have positive workforce consequences. First, it would provide rational incentives for retirement versus continued work. Each year, an educator would accrue pension wealth in a smooth and transparent way, providing an appropriate addition to the annual salary she is earning. This would generate neutral incentives to work or retire based on individual preferences and effectiveness.

That is not the case with current systems, where pension-wealth accrual is highly back loaded and concentrated at certain arbitrary points in teachers’ careers. Some years (e.g. at twenty-five or thirty years of service) yield increases in pension wealth that are several times the teacher’s salary. This provides a huge incentive to stay on the job until that pension “spike,” regardless of classroom effectiveness. There is no economic rationale for favoring one year of work over another in this way. Nor should an additional year of work reduce pension wealth, as is the case in current pension plans after a certain point in time, often at relatively young ages. This penalizes good teachers who wish to stay but are encouraged to retire early.

Tying benefits to contributions would also eliminate the massive penalties for mobility in current systems. It is well understood in the private sector that in order to recruit and retain talented young employees it is necessary to provide portable retirement benefits. This is accomplished by defined-contribution (DC) or cash-balance (CB) plans that vest immediately or nearly so. Current teacher plans typically have five or even ten year vesting. But even for vested educators, our research finds that the loss in pension wealth for those who split a teaching career between two states is massive. In a system where benefits are tied to the cumulative value of contributions it does not matter whether contributions have all been made in one or many jobs: Penalties for mobility are eliminated.

We favor cash-balance plans that generate notional individual retirement accounts, with contributions from employer and employee, and an investment return guaranteed by the employer. Such plans resemble the DC design, but without transferring investment risk or asset management to the teacher. They are transparent, offer smooth wealth accrual, and are readily annuitized at retirement. Large private employers such as IBM have converted to such plans, as have a few public employers. The TIAA plans that are common in higher education are similar in operation. They have provided retirement security for generations of college professors who often spread careers over multiple institutions.

As states grapple with the current pension crisis, a window of opportunity is open to implement more modern and strategic plans, or to make matters worse. Fundamental reform—based on tying benefits to contributions—is needed to fix these broken systems.

Robert M. Costrell is the endowed chair in education accountability at the University of Arkansas’s College of Education and Health Professions. Michael Podgursky is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri, Columbia, as well as a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University. An expanded discussion of these points, with references to the research literature, may be found in the authors’ new study published by the TIAA-CREF Institute.

This article originally appeared in the March 17 edition of The Education Gadfly.

They are reaping a bitter harvest that they didn’t individually plant but their profession has planted over 50 years, going from a respected profession to a mass work force in which everyone is treated as if they are interchangeable, as in the steel mills of yesteryear.

There is a lot to the bitter harvest.  The interchangeability problem is a deep and profound one – it flies in the face of the autonomy that many teachers claim they deserve in their classrooms.  It undermines the argument – rather, calls attention to the contradiction – that making more teachers better or making better teachers will improve the system since the assembly line can operate no better or faster than its slowest worker.

In my district, it is painful to watch: hardworking, dedicated teachers paying dues to union reps to defend the rights of undedicated and ineffective teachers who defeat the value of their hard work and dedication. It is painful to read the comments to the NYT story.  Teachers feel demonized and victimized, without appreciating the fact that it is their unions which have done them ill – and it is their unions which reformers are attempting to turn around.

“This is in no way, shape or form an attack on teachers,” Tony Bennett, the superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, tells Gabriel. “It is a comprehensive effort to reform a system.”

For years the public has been led to believe – thanks, in large part, to union lobbying — that teachers were the most important part of the education process and the public has rewarded them with decent wages and benefits (wages and benefits which would be even greater if not for the assembly line problem).  But the chickens have come home to roost: if teachers are the most important part of the process, and we have been rewarding them nicely, signing on to 100-page employment contracts, dishing out wonderful lifetime benefits, why has our education system gotten so bad?

Why are teachers “expendable”? asks the Times. Teachers would do well to look at their contracts for the answer.

–Peter Meyer

As education policy churns through fad after fad, merit pay is really hot right now. The U. S. Department of Education asked states to include proposals for implementing teacher merit pay—pay based on classroom performance—in their 2010 applications for Race to the Top (RttT) monies, and many applicants promised action on this front. In Washington, D.C., former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee negotiated a strikingly original merit-pay plan, despite strong union opposition. According to the latest Education Next poll, public support for merit pay gained significant ground over the past year and now outdistances opposition by a 2:1 margin.

Replacing the standardized salary schedule, where the only factors that determine teacher salaries are the number of years on the job and academic credentials, seems a worthwhile goal. In theory, pay-for-performance plans both provide a clear monetary incentive to teachers to find the best way to motivate and instruct their students and, over the longer term, attract and retain those more-effective teachers who wish to work in a field that rewards professionals for the quality of their efforts. But enacting high-quality performance pay plans in the United States is easier said than done. Last year, the Florida legislature enacted one of the more stringent proposals any state has ever attempted—only to have the bill vetoed by Governor Charlie Crist as a way of jump-starting his ultimately doomed bid to become Florida’s first independent U.S. senator. That is not the only time a merit pay bill has seemed on the verge of success, only to founder or be undermined by the need to compromise. In general, merit pay plans are more likely to be symbolic than substantive and more likely to be promised than delivered.

Most often, they are not even promised. Even if one counts the most token of performance pay plans, they are to be found in no more than 500 school districts out of some 14,000 districts nationwide, a mere 3.5 percent of the total.

When new merit-pay plans are proposed, teachers unions often block their enactment or water down their provisions. In Cincinnati and Philadelphia, for example, merit pay policies were blocked just before they were about to be implemented. Denver’s Professional Compensation for Teachers (ProComp) plan, widely heralded as the leading national example of performance pay, awards more money for earning another degree than for demonstrated performance in the classroom. In Houston, merit was defined so broadly that it included an overwhelming majority of the teachers. In Florida, Iowa, and Texas, the legislatures have encouraged local districts to enact performance pay plans. But unions have been able to dissuade local districts from participating in the state-authorized programs. Only a handful of Florida districts participate in merit pay, for example, even though state funds cover the cost of the initiative.

A strong, well-designed merit-pay plan requires more than offering a bonus to high-performing teachers while paying the remainder according to the standard schedule. To be truly effective, pay for performance must mean in education what it does in other industries—salary increases for the successful, and salary reductions, even dismissals, for poor performers. State laws governing teacher tenure in most states make implementation of such plans unlikely.

All of this leads us to measured skepticism about the merit of merit pay, unless it is coupled with school choice innovations hefty enough to instigate sustained competition among schools and school sectors. Only then would local districts have the incentive to both lobby states for changes in state laws and to negotiate tough contracts with teacher unions. Only then would they find it important, if merely to retain their student enrollments, to structure their pay systems so as to attract top-notch employees and give them strong incentives to strive for excellent performances.

But we have covered a lot of ground very quickly. Let’s step back and consider carefully the propositions we have set forth.

Does It Work?

High-quality research on this topic within the United States is sparse and results are mixed. Matt Springer and his colleagues at Vanderbilt released a study recently on a well-designed randomized trial of a merit pay experiment in Nashville. The program involved bonuses of up to $15,000, which would presumably be large enough to affect individual incentives. Yet virtually no effect was seen on test scores (outside of 5th-grade math, an effect that disappeared for those same children the next year). That said, the Nashville study did not examine long-term effects on the composition of the teacher workforce.

The Bloomberg administration in New York City made headlines in late 2007 by announcing a pilot merit-pay initiative, the School-Wide Performance Bonus Program. The New York City Department of Education randomly assigned eligible schools to treatment or control groups, which has enabled scholars to conduct rigorous evaluations. Early results with respect to student achievement are not promising overall, although the program appears to have had a positive impact in schools with fewer teachers (see “Does Whole-School Performance Pay Improve Student Learning?” research). The researchers theorize that the group benefit feature of the merit pay program made it unlikely that it would have an impact on teacher behavior in any but the smallest schools.

The international evidence on performance pay is more encouraging, including a recent worldwide look that indicates that students learn more in countries with performance pay plans, all other known factors held constant. Ludger Woessman (see “Merit Pay International,” research) looked at 27 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and found that students in countries with some form of performance pay for teachers score about 25 percent of a standard deviation higher on the international math test than do their peers in countries without teacher performance pay.

Union Roadblocks

If merit pay seems promising (and certainly not harmful), convincing tests of its performance are difficult to undertake within the United States, simply because merit pay proposals typically end up being blocked, co-opted, or diluted by established interests. Admittedly, it is not easy to identify the various instances where merit pay has been proposed but then blocked from enactment, and therefore we cannot provide an explicit enumeration. In all likelihood, most potential proposals are never articulated, simply because likely sponsors regard the cause as hopeless. When 96.5 percent of all districts rigidly follow a standard salary schedule, it takes an energetic and devoted innovator to brave the odds and try to break from tradition nonetheless.

Still, there are several telling examples of established interests blocking merit pay proposals. Governor Mitt Romney proposed merit pay in Massachusetts back in 2005–06, as part of an education budget that included tens of millions in new spending. That proposal went down to defeat; as the Lowell Sun reported, “the Massachusetts Teachers Association [MTA] and United Teachers of Lowell opposed the idea. Catherine Boudreau, president of the MTA, called teacher bonuses ‘inequitable and divisive.’”

Philadelphia tried to institute a pilot merit-pay program in 2000, but later ditched the initiative, “calling it too expensive, too difficult to administer, and a failure at giving teachers useful feedback” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Then, in 2006, Philadelphia received a $20.5 million grant from the U.S. government to develop a merit pay program. Said the Inquirer, “At the time, the federal grant was announced with much fanfare—the union would be the district’s partner, officials said, ensuring the plan would succeed where others failed. But the deal fell apart.” The local union abandoned the program in the face of a “surprise $180 million budget deficit,” and the district gave the money to charter schools instead.

Another example comes from Cincinnati. That city’s merit-pay plan proposed in 2002 was overwhelmingly voted down by teachers (1892 to 73), even though it did not base bonuses on student test scores. As Education Week noted, the plan “was based on an extensive evaluation system, which determines whether teachers advance in five career categories…. The evaluations entail multiple classroom observations by fellow teachers and administrators and portfolios that include logs of parent contacts, lesson plans, student work, and more.” Education Week quoted a former associate superintendent of the Cincinnati schools, who blamed the proposal’s failure on the fact that it “would have applied to nearly all teachers, rather than allowing veterans the choice of opting into the new system.”

In Alabama, the state’s “Race to the Top” application originally proposed merit pay and a “new salary schedule that would give more money to math, science and special-education teachers,” but that portion of the application was deleted, reported the Press-Register (Mobile), “after Alabama Education Association leader Paul Hubbert wrote state Superintendent Joe Morton a letter…opposing them”

If special interests fail to block a merit pay program, they may still be able to make it temporary. A Little Rock, Arkansas, performance-pay program lasted only three years and was not renewed by the local school board, despite evidence of positive effects on student achievement in math, reading, and language. Similarly, the Alaska School Performance Incentive Program was canceled after three years.

Special interests are also able to repeal merit pay based on putative budgetary constraints. The state of North Carolina suspended incentive awards to high-performing schools in 2008–09 due to budget problems. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, North Carolina, suspended its bonus program due to budget difficulties as well.

Unions have been similarly successful at preventing local districts from participating in statewide programs, as the experience in Florida, Iowa, and Texas shows. Florida’s “Merit Award Program” provides state money to local school districts. According to the Florida Department of Education, “Each district will determine an amount equal to at least 5% and no more than 10% of that district’s average teacher salary to be awarded to all of the top performing personnel in the district, regardless of years of experience.” Even though this program involves free money from the state for districts to hand out to teachers, the political forces opposing merit pay were able to prevent 88 percent of Florida districts from participating in 2009.

Similarly, Iowa’s statewide Career Ladder and Pay-for-Performance grant program was passed in 2007, but only 3 Iowa districts, out of 360, bothered to apply. Only 20 percent of Texas districts opted into the District Awards for Teacher Excellence program in 2009–10. In other words, as a result of political opposition, the vast majority of school districts, even in conservative Texas, turned down extra money from the state rather than adopt merit pay.

Merit Pay in Name Only

When interest groups succeed in diluting or co-opting a merit pay plan, the plan ends up rewarding teachers mostly or entirely for inputs (e.g., professional development, graduate degrees, national certification) rather than for outputs (test scores, graduation rates, or even supervisor assessments).

One example is Arizona’s Classroom Site Fund (CSF), a mandatory statewide program that involved a couple of new taxes. Districts had to “allocate forty per cent of the monies for teacher compensation increases based on performance and employment related expenses, twenty per cent of the monies for teacher base salary increases and employment related expenses and forty per cent of the monies for maintenance and operation purposes.”

According to a 2010 report from the Arizona Auditor General, out of 222 districts receiving CSF funding, the auditor could identify only 29 “with strong performance pay plans that did a good job of linking teacher performance pay to student achievement.” The report noted that “allowing districts the freedom to determine performance pay goals can help gain district and teacher buy-in,” but that such freedom “has also led to inconsistent performance pay plans and to situations in which teachers receive similar performance pay for significantly different levels of effort and related performance results.”

One example from the auditor’s report deserves to be highlighted:

One district awarded performance pay to eligible employees if freshman students’ algebra test scores increased by at least 10 percent between a pre- and post-test. The actual increase in test scores was almost 90 percent. Since the pre-test is given to freshman students who have never been exposed to algebra and the post-test is given to them after receiving a full year of algebra instruction, it should be expected that scores would increase significantly more than 10 percent.

In other words, algebra teachers were being rewarded merely for getting students to learn 10 percent more about algebra than they knew before studying that subject at all. This is not a high hurdle to clear.

Denver’s ProComp program has been heralded as a political and policy success. Then Senator Barack Obama said, “Cities like Denver have already proven that by working with teachers, this can work, that we can find new ways to increase pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them and not just based on an arbitrary test score.” But the Denver ProComp program may be less than meets the eye. For one thing, it exempts teachers hired before January 1, 2006, from having to join, which means that the vast majority of teachers whose pay depends on seniority rather than on merit are able to keep their old pay structure in place. And if older teachers opt to enter the ProComp program, they keep their old base salary; the ProComp program merely offers them a chance for bonuses on top of that old salary.

The ProComp program also rewards the old definition of “merit” more immediately and to a greater extent than it does anything that improves student achievement. The largest monetary award is for earning a graduate degree: a $3,300 permanent salary increase plus a tuition or student loan subsidy of $1,000 per year for up to four years. By comparison, teachers receive a one-time award, not a bump up in base salary, of up to $2,403.26 if their students exceed “district expectations” for student growth.

Moreover, as Paul Teske, a principal evaluator of the ProComp program, noted in the Christian Science Monitor, bad teachers face no penalty under the ProComp or similar merit-pay programs: “I guess your salary stays low, and maybe that sends the message that you should look at another career. But ProComp doesn’t directly address that.”

The federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) provides grants to school districts that promise to develop merit pay programs “for raising student achievement and for taking positions in high-need schools.” Currently, the Department of Education’s website lists 33 TIF grantees, including some small districts and a few major city districts. But these programs may also end up being diluted or co-opted.

For example, the TIF program in Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) includes substantial bonuses for professional development, working at hard-to-staff schools or in hard-to-staff subjects, and for taking on leadership roles. To the extent the program involves student achievement, it bases awards on “student learning objectives” as “created by individual teachers, with the approval of site-based administrators”; these objectives “will be measured by a combination of existing assessment instruments, and teacher designed tools,” as well as by state standardized tests. The superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools recently announced a plan to bring performance pay to the entire district.

Perhaps it is desirable to have teachers receive more professional development, work in hard-to-staff schools or subjects, and assume leadership roles, but these are inputs, not student outcomes. The bulk of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg TIF program, like many such programs, is MPINO—merit pay in name only.

Some locales have diluted the merit pay concept by making the bonuses to teachers small and setting the bar for receiving the bonuses low, thereby converting merit pay into something approximating an across-the board pay raise.

For example, the Texas Educator Excellence Grant (TEEG) program began in 2006–07 and ended after the 2008–09 year; it was funded at approximately $100 million per year. After analysts at the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) reported no positive effects on student test scores, the Dallas Morning News declared the program a failure. NCPI report coauthor Lori Taylor speculated that “one possible cause of the program’s failure was that bonuses were relatively small and were given to most teachers at each school—about 70 percent—so that the incentive for individual teachers to push for higher scores was ‘relatively weak.’ In addition, campuses that qualified already had to be higher performers, so it was difficult to register much improvement.”

The same thing seems to be happening in Houston, where a merit pay program has existed since January 2007. The district announced financial awards totaling $40.4 million in 2010. The district’s webpage notes, “in all, 15,688 HISD employees received performance pay [in 2010], ranging from $25 to $15,530. That’s 88 percent of eligible HISD employees.”

Minnesota’s oft-heralded “Q Comp” program offers yet another example of a “merit pay” program that ends up as an across-the-board pay raise. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported, “In 22 school districts whose Q Comp practices were analyzed by the Star Tribune in 2009, more than 99 percent of teachers in the program received merit raises during the preceding school year. Only 27 of the roughly 4,200 teachers eligible did not get a pay raise.”

The New York City School-Wide Performance Bonus Program mentioned above may also have been undermined by its structure. Some 180 schools were eligible in the 2007–08 school year for a collective $14 million in bonuses, or $3,000 per union teacher, if they met test score goals established by the district. In a key factor that enabled the plan to draw union support, committees composed of a principal, a person of the principal’s choosing, and two union representatives were allowed to decide how the bonuses should be distributed at any given school. Researchers identified a number of drawbacks to the program design, including the possibility that bonuses based on school-wide improvements weaken the incentives for individual teachers to increase their efforts.

Making Merit Pay Work

The prospects for merit pay are not promising, despite both theoretical and empirical reasons for expecting that the programs would produce positive results for students. Our findings are consistent with the theory that school districts are not primarily educational institutions where policies are organized around maximizing student achievement. Instead, they are best understood, at least when it comes to compensation policies, as political entities shaped by powerful interest groups, including organized groups of employees.

Viewed in that light, it is unsurprising that public school systems have relatively little interest in authentic merit-pay programs. If some teachers could earn improvements in their wages and working conditions from their own efforts rather than from the efforts of their organized representatives or affiliated politicians, then more-effective teachers would have little reason to support the unions financially or politically. Their interests would be at odds with those of less-effective teachers. In short, the single salary schedule by which almost all public school teachers are paid is essential to the financial and political power of established interests.

One way to diminish the power of established interests and permit the adoption and implementation of merit pay is to expand choice and competition in education. If students choose their school, those schools have incentives to adopt and implement policies and practices that will improve their quality and attract students as well as the resources they generate. If merit pay systems help attract and motivate effective teachers, schools in a more competitive environment will have incentives to adopt those systems. They are more likely to design and maintain merit pay systems in a sensible way, since their revenue depends on it.

Schools that already compete for students appear more open to including merit pay in their personnel policies. According to University of Washington’s Daniel Goldhaber and his colleagues, charter schools are more likely than traditional public schools to use merit pay. Michael Podgursky, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, looked at data from the 1999–2000 Schools and Staffing Survey and found that when school administrators were asked whether they used salaries to reward “excellence,” only 6 percent of traditional public school administrators answered yes, while “the rates for charter (36 percent) and private schools (22 percent) were much higher.” Even those charter and private schools without a formal performance-pay plan are typically able to offer higher salaries to teachers they hope to retain and, as important, to readily dismiss teachers deemed ineffective.

Attaching continued employment and level of compensation to job performance is something that frequently occurs among private enterprises in competitive markets. The difficulty with merit pay in education is that it attempts to simulate a market-based practice in a nonmarket environment. None of the forces that cause organizations to seek effective merit pay systems, or to maintain and alter them effectively over time, exist in public education.

Imposing merit pay on an unwilling education system is like trying to get kids to eat their vegetables when the kids are 25 years old and stronger than their parents. No matter how nutritious green beans may be, powerful adults who don’t want to eat them can usually keep them off their plates and can almost always keep them out of their mouths.

Stuart Buck is a doctoral fellow in education reform at the University of Arkansas. Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.

That’s true, but I am now more aware of the opposite failing — believing that we can resolve all policy disputes and identify the “right way” to educate all children solely by relying on science.  Science has its limits.  Science cannot adjudicate among the competing values that might attract us to one educational approach over another.  Science usually tells us about outcomes for the typical or average student and cannot easily tell us about what is most effective for individual students with diverse needs.  Science is slow and uncertain, while policy and practice decisions have to be made right now whether a consensus of scientific evidence exists or not.  We should rely on science when we can but we also need to be humble about what science can and can’t address.

I was thinking about this while reflecting on the Gates Foundation’s Measuring Effective Teachers Project.  The project is an ambitious $45 million enterprise to improve the stability of value-added measures while identifying effective practices that contribute to higher value-added performance.  These are worthy goals.  The project intends to advance those goals by administering two standardized tests to students in 8 different school systems, surveying the students, and videotaping classroom lessons.

The idea is to see if combining information from the tests, survey, and classroom observations could produce more stable measures of teacher contributions to learning than is possible by just using the state test.  And since they are observing classrooms and surveying students, they can also identify certain teacher practices and techniques that might be associated with greater improvement.  The Gates folks are using science to improve the measures of student progress and to identify what makes a more effective teacher.

This is a great use of science, but there are limits to what we can expect.  When identifying practices that are more effective, we have to remember that this is just more effective for the typical student.  Different practices may be more effective for different students.  In principle science could help address this also, but even this study, with 3,000 teachers, is not nearly large enough to produce a fine-grained analysis of what kind of approach is most effective for many different kinds of kids.

My fear is that the researchers, their foundation-backers, and most-importantly, the policymaker and educator consumers of the research are insensitive to these limitations of science.  I fear that the project will identify the “right” way to teach and then it will be used to enforce that right way on everyone, even though it is highly likely that there are different “right” ways for different kids.

We already have a taste of this from the preliminary report that Gates issued last month.  Following its release Vicki Phillips, the head of education at the Gates Foundation, told the New York Times: “Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests.”  Science had produced its answer — teachers should stop teaching to the test, stop drill and kill, and stop test prep (which the Gates officials and reporters used as interchangeable terms).

Unfortunately, Vicki Phillips mis-read her own Foundation’s report.  On p. 34 the correlation between test prep and value-added is positive, not negative.  If the study shows any relationship between test prep and student progress, it is that test prep contributes to higher value-added.  Let’s leave aside the fact that these were simply a series of pairwise correlations and not the sort of multivariate analysis that you would expect if you were really trying to identify effective teaching practices.  Vicki Phillips was just plain wrong in what she said.  Even worse, despite having the error pointed out, neither the Gates Foundation nor the New York Times has considered it worthwhile to post a public  correction.  Science says what I say it says.

And this is the greatest danger of a lack of humility in the application of science to public policy.  Science can be corrupted so that it simply becomes a shield disguising the policy preferences of those in authority.  How many times have you heard a school official justify a particular policy by saying that it is supported by research when in fact no such research exists?  This (mis)use of science is a way for authority figures to tell their critics, “shut up!”

But even if the Gates report had conducted multivariate analyses on effective teaching practices and even if Vicki Phillips could accurately describe the results of those analyses, the Gates project of using science to identify the “best” practices is doomed to failure.  The very nature of education is that difference techniques are more effective in different kinds of situations for different kinds of kids.  Science can identify the best approach for the average student but it cannot identify the best approach for each individual student.  And if students are highly varied in their needs, which I believe they are, this is a major limitation.

But as the Gates Foundation pushes national standards with new national tests, they seem inclined to impose the “best” practices that science identified on all students.  The combination of Gates building a national infrastructure for driving educator behavior while launching a gigantic scientific effort to identify the best practices is worrisome.

There is nothing wrong with using science to inform local practice.  But science needs markets to keep it honest.  If competing educators can be informed by science, then they can pick among competing claims about what science tells us.  And they can learn from their experience whether the practices that are recommended for the typical student by science work in the particular circumstances in which they are operating.

But if the science of best educator practice is combined with a national infrastructure of standards and testing, then local actors cannot adjudicate among competing claims about what science says.  What the central authorities decide science says will be infused in the national standards and tests and all must adhere to that vision if they wish to excel along these centralized criteria.  Even if the central authority completely misunderstands what science has to say, we will all have to accept that interpretation.

I don’t mean to be overly alarmist.  Gates has a lot of sensible people working for them and there are many barriers remaining before we fully implement national standards and testing.  My concern is that the Gates Foundation is being informed by an incorrect theory of reform.  Reform does not come from science identifying the right thing to do and then a centralized authority imposing that right thing on everyone.  Progress comes from decentralized decision-makers having the freedom and motivation to choose among competing claims about what is right according to science.

- Jay P. Greene

Addendum

I just wanted to add a few thoughts to my post yesterday.  Readers may be wondering what is wrong with using science to identify the best educational practices and then implementing those best practices.  If they are best, why wouldn’t we want to do them?

Let me answer by analogy.  We could use science to identify where we could get the highest return on capital.  If science can tell us where the highest returns can be found, why would we want to let markets allocate capital and potentially make a lot of mistakes?  Government could just use science and avoid all of those errors by making sure capital went to where it could best be used.

Of course, we tried this approach in the Soviet Union and it failed miserably.  The primary problem is that science is always uncertain and susceptible to corruption.  We can run models to measure returns on capital, but we have uncertainty about the models and we have uncertainty about the future.  Markets provide a reality test to scientific models by allowing us to choose among competing models and experience the consequences of choosing wisely or not.  Science can advise us, but only choice, freedom, and experience permit us to benefit from what science has to offer.

And even more dangerous is that in the absence of choice and competition among scientific models, authorities will allow their own interests or preferences to distort what they claim science has to say.  For an excellent example of this, check out the story of Lysenko and Soviet research on genetics.  For decades Soviet science was compelled to believe that environmental influences could be inherited.

Science facilitates progress through the crucible of market tests.  Science without markets facilitates stronger authoritarianism.

The merit pay movement depends on value-added testing to make its case that teacher salaries need to be based on performance, not experience.  But the opposition to value-added testing is potent, as teacher unions have been fighting virtually any kind of  performance-based evaluations of their members. Testing has also been attacked relentlessly in education schools across the country.  Just last Thursday, I attended a seminar at Boston College where David Kirp championed his forthcoming book, Kids First. Not a person in the room could find anything good to say about using tests to hold schools or teachers accountable.  The well-known Princeton economist Jesse Rothstein has done much to advance his career by purporting to show that value-added measures get it wrong.

Given this kind of organized opposition to testing, one would expect Brookings, the very definition of a middle-of-the-road think tank, to produce a consensus document that balances the arguments carefully, saying “yes, testing has some value,” but “no, there are a lot of problems with it.”  But, on the contrary, Grover Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center at Brookings, has put a group together that not only makes a clear case for value-added measurement of teacher performance but states that case simply and persuasively.

The group admits that test-based measures of teacher effectiveness correlate, on average, for any given teacher, from one year to the next, at no better than 0.35, well below the 0.90 correlation one would in principle like to have.  But the report then points out that the “between-season correlation in batting averages for professional baseball players is 0.36.”  In the best line of the report, they say:  “Ask any manager of a baseball team whether he considers a player’s batting average from the previous year in decisions about the present year.”   If general managers, in making salary decisions, look beyond years of experience, so should school districts. Thanks, Brookings.

-Paul E. Peterson

Given today’s shrinking budgets and the tough half-decade that looms for K-12 funding, we can no longer afford to remain wedded to “this…and that” reform or to be blasé about whether we’re getting sufficient bang for our buck. However, the kind of shift in mindset that’s necessary will not happen on its own. After all, for decades, K-12 schooling has been a place where superintendents and principals earn much grief for making cuts but little recognition for smart savings or boosting cost-effectiveness. What’s needed most are politically viable proposals that make it easier for local, state, and national leaders to get serious about K-12 productivity.

This week, I’m touching upon four such ideas that I’ve written about recently for National Review and (along with my colleague Olivia Meeks) for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. Today, I want to talk about taking a first step in rethinking the utilization and compensation of teachers through a “Gold Star Teachers” initiative. (Check out the WPRI piece for a more detailed version of the proposal.)

For decades, the go-to school improvement recipe has been to reduce class size. Any challenge to this status quo encounters a buzz saw of opposition from parents and teachers who like small classes. That’s why national teacher-student ratios are down to 15:1 today. Yet the research backing across-the-board class reduction is thin, at best. International evidence shows no simple relationship between class size and student achievement. Some high-performing nations boast middle or high school class sizes of 40 to 50 students. Small classes are costly and the need to keep adding bodies forces school systems to be less selective and training to be less focused.

Given that 55% of K-12 spending funds teacher salaries and benefits, you can’t cut costs without boosting the productivity of good teachers–which requires increasing class size. But trying to sell that argument to parents or teachers is a dead end. Hence, the Gold Star program offers teachers who are at least reasonably effective the opportunity, should they so choose, to teach more kids per class and to be rewarded for taking on a larger workload. Such a state-level program would offer a chance to reshuffle the incentives and create a productivity-enhancing dynamic.

Teachers whose students post larger-than-normal gains for at least two consecutive years would be eligible to opt into the program. While I have consistently explained that value-added data systems have real limitations, they do provide a systematic way to identify teachers whose students are at least improving in math and reading at better-than-average rates. This gives some assurance that these teachers are at least reasonably effective. Participating teachers would teach up to 50% more students than normal–say, 36 students rather than 24–and would be rewarded for their increased workload. Continued participation would depend on a teacher’s students continuing to make larger-than-normal gains. Given data limitations, states would be advised to pilot such programs in grades four through eight.

While parents prefer small classes in general, small classes also frustrate parents whose children can’t get seats in the class of a heralded teacher. The Gold Star program lowers these barriers by allowing access to the most effective teachers for more kids. Given the choice between a Gold Star Teacher serving more children and the alternative, many or most parents will likely prefer the larger class. But it is essential that it be a parental choice and not an administrative fiat.

Teachers and taxpayers would also win big. On average, given current teacher salaries and benefits, increasing class size by one student saves something like $3,000; so allowing a talented teacher to instruct 36 rather than 24 saves up to $36,000. Awarding the teacher half that amount yields an $18,000 productivity bonus (a 35% bump for the median teacher). The state and district would split the other $18,000. Even on a trial basis in grades four through eight, such a program could help states shave school spending by two or three percent–tallying hundreds of millions in some cases while rewarding excellent educators.

There are obviously a slew of tough logistical and practical questions. Can one do a version of this in sparsely settled rural settings? How might this work in very small schools? How would uneven student numbers complicate the effort? And how might this play out in terms of virtual schooling? It’s not hard to imagine many other questions, besides. These are good and useful queries, and deserving of attention as state officials ask how a version of the “Gold Star” initiative might help reward productive teachers, boost cost-effectiveness, and better serve their students.

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College is a publishing phenomenon. Since its release earlier this year, it has hovered within or near the top 100 books on Amazon.com. What Lemov is selling—forty-nine nitty-gritty tips and practical tools culled from observing uber-effective teachers—is clearly in high demand. But why is it in such short supply?

Because a majority of America’s education school professors—the instructors responsible for preparing the lion’s share of our nation’s teachers—remain committed to romantic/progressivist ideals and shrug off the mission of transmitting Lemov-style tips and tools to aspiring teachers.

That’s one take-away from Fordham’s newest report, Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010. The study, authored by veteran analysts Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett, surveyed over 700 education professors across the land to determine how they view their own roles and what they think of myriad K-12 policy developments that have taken place over the last decade. It uncovers some troubling trends among the professoriate. For example:

• Only 24 percent believe it “absolutely essential” to produce “teachers who understand how to work with the state’s standards, tests and accountability systems”;
• Just 37 percent say it is “absolutely essential” to focus on developing “teachers who maintain discipline and order in the classroom”; and
• Fewer than two in five find it “absolutely essential” to “create teachers who are trained to address the challenges of high-needs students in urban districts.”

To be fair, many professors think these things are important—just not that important. What’s more important to them is forming “change agents”—new teachers who push back against school practices and resist modern reforms, reforms that have little to do with the romantic view of schooling that so many of Dewey’s descendents so ardently espouse. The professors see themselves as philosophers and evangelists, not as master craftsmen sharing tradecraft with apprentices and journeymen.

This is nothing new. Stanford University’s David Labaree, a respected historian of education, explains that, as far back as the early twentieth century, school reformers were pushing for efficiency and utility, while education professors wanted schools to help individual children blossom and develop a lifelong love of learning. Eventually the professors lost that argument and the K-12 system embraced the efficiency movement. But this outcome cast education professors as little more than vocational instructors, preparing their charges to enter a uniform teaching force and school system—one that had limited patience for the professors’ idealistic educational values.

And they didn’t much like it. As Labaree writes, theirs was now “a job, to be sure, but not much of a mission.” So the professors clung to the “individual child” ideology, no matter what the system was calling for, and no matter what children—and classroom instructors—actually needed to succeed. By assigning a higher purpose to their work—instilling in new teachers the estimable belief that every child’s path is unique—they sought to legitimize their own profession in the eyes of the public and, of course, themselves.

In 2010, the United States has grown only more practical and demanding when it comes to K-12 education. Today we find little margin for error—and less space for romanticism. That’s why real-world insights and practical tips such as Lemov’s are in such demand. That’s why “alternate routes” into classrooms are gaining popularity (despite a recent courtroom set-back. That’s also why criticism is mounting of traditional education schools and teacher-preparation programs. Americans now demand that new teachers hit the ground running—and continue running, dodging all obstacles in their path, so as to boost student achievement and help schools realize their learning objectives.

Most education professors simply aren’t there yet. But to be fair, this survey also brought modest good news—more than we found in a similar survey thirteen years ago. Today, we find a sizable minority of professors that is both critical of standard ed-school practice and also accepting of their role in preparing teachers for the real world of today’s schools. We also find “adjunct” faculty members (vs. the full-time tenured kind) to be more concerned about lesson planning and classroom management. Minority professors tend to be more focused on the challenges of high-needs students. And those with recent classroom experience of their own are more attuned to weeding out unqualified teaching candidates than those who have been out of school classrooms for twenty-plus years.

The professors are also unexpectedly reform-minded on a few issues. They favor tougher policies for awarding tenure to teachers, financial incentives for those who work in tough neighborhoods, a core curriculum that teaches the classics—even Teach For America. Most also assert that their institutions should be held accountable for the quality of the teachers they graduate and that teachers should be made to pass tests demonstrating proficiency in key subjects before they are hired. The study even identifies a faculty segment—labeled “Reformers”—that is strongly dissatisfied with the status quo and agitating for change across the board.

But there’s no widespread reform zeal, either. The ed-school professoriate is divided in its support of value-added measures to evaluate teacher effectiveness, for instance, and barely one-third want to see financial incentives for extraordinarily effective teachers.

Still and all, these campuses contain some potential allies for reformers—anti-pie-in-the-sky individuals in touch with what our next generation of teachers will need to succeed. In other words, there are cracks in the Ivory Tower—cracks that, with a little outside encouragement, might be widened.

What does this bonus do?  It induces many teachers to want to have a master’s degree.  (Over half of all teachers have an advanced degree now.)  Getting a master’s degree is frequently something done concurrently with a full time teaching job, so the last thing these teachers want is a challenging academic program that requires real work.  As a result, schools of education are willing to sell master’s degrees that require minimal effort.  Master’s degrees become a very profitable product.

Everybody is happy – except perhaps the students who see resources going to things that have no educational value.

If we cannot act on things that are so well-known and well-documented, how can we hope to do things that are more difficult and controversial?

Why does this matter? Only great teachers – those in the top quartile – achieve the student learning progress needed to close our nation’s achievement gaps and raise our bar to internationally competitive levels. Others do not.  Yet in two critical ways we fail to capitalize on the extraordinary resource of great teachers:

• We lose too many of the best teachers: Contrary to popular belief, overall teacher turnover is modest compared with other professions. The crisis arises from our failure to keep the best teachers. Approximately 64,000 top-quartile teachers leave teaching every year, diminishing more than a million children’s learning prospects each following year.
• We fail to leverage their talent for the benefit of students: The impact of great teachers who stay remains small over their careers. Only 600 students benefit from the instruction of an excellent elementary school teacher even if she stays on the job for 30 years. Our nation’s best teachers reach no more children than the very worst teachers.

If we don’t address these shortcomings, our glaring internal and international achievement gaps will persist, even if every state and district moves forward aggressively to recruit more great teachers and dismiss more ineffective ones.

If we do address them, by building a much more vibrant “opportunity culture” for America’s teachers, nearly 9 in 10 classes could be taught by great teachers in a mere half-decade.  The normal, expected experience of a student could be to have truly great teachers — the kind that today most children have only a few times in a whole school career.

Opportunity at the Top is the first in a series of reports supported by the Joyce Foundation, culminating in a set of recommendations for policymakers and educators about building an opportunity culture for America’s teachers.  Since we’re just getting started, we want to hear the best ideas about how to do that – so click the comment button!

Education Next: What is the evidence that inner-city schools are shortchanged on high-quality teachers?

Eric Hanushek: Inner-city schools and especially those serving the most disadvantaged students routinely display unacceptable achievement levels, ones that seal their students off from further education and from good jobs. Coupled with the general finding that effective teachers are the key to a high-quality school, it is natural to infer that the children most in need are systematically getting the poorest teachers.

Unfortunately, direct evidence on the distribution of teacher quality and its impact for disadvantaged students is hard to come by. Researcher Marguerite Roza and others have produced considerable evidence that teachers in schools serving the most-disadvantaged students have lower average salaries, reflecting in large part the movement of more-experienced teachers away from schools with a higher proportion of minority students and with lower-achieving students. There is also evidence that these schools tend to have more teachers with emergency credentials and without regular certification, although this appears to be declining over time. The problem is that these readily measured attributes of teachers have virtually nothing to do with teacher effectiveness.

Extensive research on teacher quality by me and others suggests that the only attribute of teacher effectiveness that stands out is being a rookie teacher. Teachers in their first three years do a less satisfactory job than they will with more experience. And this has an impact on schools serving highly disadvantaged populations, because the more-experienced teachers who leave these schools are generally replaced with new teachers. The net impact of this on disadvantaged schools is unclear, because there is also some evidence that the experienced teachers who leave these schools are on average not their most effective teachers.

Kati Haycock: No matter what measure of “quality” you look at, poor and minority students—and not just those in inner-city schools—are much less likely to be assigned better-qualified and more-effective teachers. Core academic classes in high-poverty secondary schools are twice as likely as those in low-poverty schools to be taught by a teacher with neither a major nor certification in the subject. The percentage of first-year teachers at high-minority schools is almost twice as high as the percentage of such teachers at low-minority schools. The list of disgraceful statistics goes on and on.

Even if we dismiss traditional measures as imperfect gauges of true teaching quality, new studies employing more-sophisticated measures reveal the same inequitable patterns. When the Tennessee Department of Education analyzed the state’s Value-Added Assessment System—which measures the impact of individual teachers on their students’ tested academic growth—it found that “low-income and minority children have the least access to the state’s most effective teachers and more access to the state’s least effective teachers.” Recently, researchers at the University of Virginia studying teaching practices and learning climate in more than 800 1st-grade classrooms were dismayed to find that lower-income and nonwhite students are much more likely than their counterparts to be placed in “lower overall quality classrooms.”

We also have clear evidence of just how damaging those inequities are. An analysis of data from Los Angeles found that the impact of individual teachers is so great that providing top-quartile teachers rather than bottom-quartile teachers for four years in a row would be enough to completely close the achievement gap between white and African American students. In fact, attending to this problem is the most important step policymakers can take to address the nation’s long-standing achievement gaps.

EN: Can we get higher-quality teachers to inner-city schools? What strategies are most likely to work? Regulation or incentives?

EH: Historically, the first policy response has been to try writing regulations. When these don’t work, the next response is generally to fine-tune the regulations. Developing regulations that ensure that local districts take appropriate action to deal with the teacher quality problem is not likely to be very successful. First, regulations work best when it is possible to measure precisely the underlying attributes that are important to success. Extensive research shows that commonly measured attributes of teachers, such as more than three or four years of experience, master’s degrees, and even state certification, are not related to effectiveness. In fact, all of the regulations that go into defining what is needed to be a fully credentialed teacher neither screen out bad teachers nor ensure that credentialed teachers are any more effective then uncredentialed teachers. Second, many union contracts in effect in inner cities vest rights to fill any teaching vacancies with senior teachers. New or reworked regulations would have to deal with collectively bargained teacher agreements.

An incentive approach must be the centerpiece of improving teacher quality in urban schools and in the most disadvantaged schools. It is necessary to reward success rather than try to regulate it. Unfortunately, we have little experience with how to structure incentives. Attempts to devise universal incentives from Washington or from state capitols are likely to be quite inefficient if not harmful.

Providing strong incentives is increasingly possible, however, as we develop better information linking teachers to student achievement, but incentives linked to so-called value-added measures are likely to be a small part of the overall answer. We need to refine the evaluation of teacher effectiveness, and we need to introduce the serious use of evaluations into the schools, evaluations that guide tenure, retention, and pay decisions.

Research that Steve Rivkin and I have done indicates that the largest variations in teacher quality are found within the typical school, and that quality variation between schools is considerably smaller than that found in any given school, including high-poverty schools. The policy implication of this is quite clear. It is not a matter of trying to swap all of the teachers in high-poverty schools with those in suburban schools. It is very much a matter of focusing on student achievement gains and of keeping those teachers who do a good job while eliminating those who are inept. For this, it is more a matter of will, combined with eliminating the rigidities that have been built into teachers’ contracts.

KH: We know it is possible to bring high-quality teachers into urban schools from recent efforts in New York City and other districts. The question is whether we will do what is necessary to provide low-income and minority students with the kind of powerful teaching they need and deserve. To solve the problem on a large scale, policymakers will need to think beyond simplistic, false dichotomies like “regulation or incentives” and embrace a robust combination of broad reforms coupled with targeted interventions.

First, we should press forward with efforts to provide education leaders with more sophisticated information on teacher effectiveness, to both maximize the impact of strategies that address distribution and to ensure cost efficiency. Education leaders need to be able to identify the strongest teachers in order to recruit and retain them, and assign them to the students who need their expertise the most. Similarly, they need to be able to identify weaker teachers in order to get them the support they need to join the ranks of effective teachers or to move them out of classrooms if they cannot improve. That is why the Obama administration is using the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to insist that states tear down the “walls” that prevent them from linking teacher and student data and come clean on teacher evaluation systems that rate all teachers “satisfactory.”

But it will take time to develop richer and more sophisticated measures of true effectiveness. Until then, policymakers should use a combination of the best available measures to analyze teacher distribution, report on it, and act to increase equity. A study in North Carolina found that having teachers with a combination of characteristics and credentials can more than offset the gap in annual learning gains between African American students whose parents did not go to college and white students whose parents did. We need to act on the information we have available, even while we work to create more sophisticated measures.

Next, we need new policies that empower local superintendents and principals to use that information to better recruit and distribute highly effective teachers. Districts can move up timelines for teacher resignations and transfers and give principals in hard-to-staff schools first dibs on new entrants and transfers. States and districts can establish a policy of “mutual consent” that gives principals the right to choose their own teachers. States can take actions to pump up the supply of stronger teachers by using data on the effectiveness of graduates to improve teacher training programs, expanding those that produce strong teachers and shrinking or closing those that do not. States and districts can eliminate seniority-based layoffs, which should consider effectiveness instead, and make it easier to transfer or remove ineffective teachers who cannot improve.

Finally, policymakers need to make these schools much more attractive places to work, including but not limited to improving financial compensation. Effective teachers who choose to work in the most challenging schools often sacrifice pay and professional status. State leaders should reverse that relationship, offering such teachers higher pay, visible respect, strong and supportive principals who provide effective instructional leadership, and opportunities to collaborate in meaningful ways.

EN: How can we measure teacher quality on an ongoing basis?

KH: Measures of teacher quality should be based primarily on teachers’ effectiveness in promoting student learning, but should also consider evidence of classroom teaching practices known to contribute to greater student learning. All states now have at least the raw capacity to use value-added techniques to measure teachers’ contribution to their students’ academic progress. Where those data are available, they should be front and center in efforts to measure teacher quality. But since the data rely on annual standardized assessments, such analyses will not be available for all teachers. Moreover, since value-added data by themselves do not tell much about why a teacher is more or less effective or how exactly he or she can improve, such “outcome” measures can productively be coupled with new kinds of “inputs” measures, provided the two are strongly correlated.

For example, researchers at institutions such as the University of Virginia, Stanford, and Michigan State and at programs like the Teacher Advancement Program and Teach For America have developed protocols for observing classroom practices and analyzing teaching “artifacts” that produce ratings sufficiently correlated with outcomes. Typically, they use highly specific frameworks and rubrics that describe effective teaching practices, ensure that all evaluators are trained in their use, require multiple classroom observations per year, and employ quality controls to ensure reliability across evaluators. Such systems can help administrators and teachers understand why value-added scores look the way they do and how they can be improved.

Some districts are experimenting with systems that incorporate an even broader range of measures. For example, the evaluation system currently being implemented in Washington, D.C., incorporates a schoolwide value-added measure, a gauge of how much the teacher participates in and contributes to the larger school community, and measures of student growth on instruments other than standardized tests.

EH: We have devoted a lot of research to identifying the attributes of effective teachers, attributes that might be used for hiring or for policy purposes. This research has not succeeded, leading me to agree that the best way to identify a teacher’s effectiveness is to observe her classroom performance. Most other professions are assessed by performance, including that of doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so forth. Indeed, one definition of “profession” might be an occupation in which one is willing to be judged (and rewarded) according to performance.

Research suggests that we can identify effective teachers from the value added to student achievement, although there are limits to the accuracy of doing this. Moreover, Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren, in the most recent of this research, show that principals reach many of the same conclusions about effectiveness in their evaluations; at least they seem able to distinguish effectiveness in the classroom within broad ranges, i.e., bottom, middle, or top.

The long-run hope would be that we develop both better quantitative measures of a teacher’s value added and better subjective evaluations by principals, supervisors, and peers. This approach is unlikely to satisfy a regulatory view of allocation of quality teachers, but if we are truly interested in improving student achievement, we cannot shy away from incorporating performance information of all sorts into our management decisions.

EN: All the evidence says that experience does not affect teacher quality much after the first three or four years, so should we be concerned that the more-experienced teachers leave for different locations?

EH: It is a concern if experienced teachers systematically leave the most-disadvantaged schools, because the first few years tend to be a little ragged. On the other hand, this fact by itself should not be overstated. Among all rookie teachers there is still a wide variation in skill. Take, for example, Teach For America teachers. On average, they start out looking like the typical experienced teacher from traditional training programs (even though TFA teachers will themselves improve with seasoning). More than that, the best and the worst TFA teachers or other rookies in the system are dramatically different from each other, and the difference is much larger than the performance growth typical for the first few years.

Policies that concentrate on single proxies for skill, like initial years of experience, miss the much larger differences. Yes, if we say we can do nothing about retention related to individual performance levels, it would be good to have more-experienced teachers in the disadvantaged schools. But such a focus overlooks the place where truly large changes are possible.

A policy that simply stabilized movement from these schools would not really accomplish much and might even be counterproductive if no attention were given to actual performance. On the other hand, if we made inner-city schools more attractive places to work and if we developed policies that actively reward high performance by teachers, we would probably get a bonus of lower teacher turnover in our most-disadvantaged schools.

KH: While experience in no way equals effectiveness, we still should be concerned about teacher attrition. Here’s why: high attrition rates in high-poverty schools create a “revolving door” environment with more job vacancies which, because such schools have a harder time recruiting teachers, tend to be disproportionately filled with first-year teachers. And experience does matter for inexperienced teachers. As a group, first-year teachers tend to be less effective than those with even a little more experience, and effectiveness tends to climb steeply for any given cohort of teachers until it begins to plateau after a few years. According to research by Eric Hanushek and others, disproportionate exposure to inexperienced teachers contributes to the achievement gap.

Therefore, policymakers should either seek to limit the number of rookie teachers hired to work in high-poverty and high-minority schools or ensure that beginning teachers come from programs or institutions with a proven track record of supplying teachers who are much more effective than average. Then they should track the effectiveness of beginning teachers in those schools over the first few years, offering substantial retention incentives to those who demonstrate high levels of effectiveness—not only salary incentives, but also career pathways that provide opportunities to exercise leadership while they continue to teach.

EN: If we force teachers to teach in particular schools, will they just leave for another district, or for an administrative position, or leave education altogether?

KH: We don’t know, since it’s never been tried on a large scale. More to the point, I would suggest that this is the wrong question to be asking, as nobody thinks forced reassignments are a good solution and nobody is seriously proposing it. Every once in a while, district leaders become frustrated and make noises about the possibility of forced reassignments. But no large district has done it because they know that it would be met with too much resistance and resentment.

Instead, as district leaders are discovering for themselves, a better solution lies in a creative combination of targeted incentives for teachers and policies that empower administrators and school leaders to recruit and retain effective educators.

EH: Coercion is generally costly, particularly when it violates the expectations of workers. The U.S. military found that the draft was not a good policy, even when it allowed them to get soldiers cheaply. With schools, the situation is more complicated. There are many jobs (including the all-volunteer military) where the employer can establish the right to make specific job assignments, but in general the employer must pay for that ability. Today’s urban teachers frequently have a contract that gives the more-experienced teacher certain transfer rights across schools, and changing that provision would generally require bargaining with compensation involving higher salaries or other benefits that the teachers value.

The current contractual arrangements are in many cases overly concerned with teachers’ rights and less concerned about student outcomes than is desirable. It would make sense to work toward more assignment flexibility by school districts. But, again, this may be lower priority than simply having more control over retention based on classroom effectiveness.

EN: If we pay teachers more to teach in inner-city schools, will that really attract the best teachers?

KH: Financial incentives can have a positive impact on teacher distribution, but how much of an impact depends on the size of the incentive and to whom it is being offered. Research from North Carolina suggests that smaller financial incentives can help retain teachers in hard-to-staff schools, but experience in places like Dallas and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system suggests that incentives need to be fairly large to convince highly effective veterans to transfer and remain there. That shouldn’t stop leaders from offering higher salaries for effective teachers who successfully take on more-challenging jobs. But the qualifiers in that sentence are important: Pay incentives should be offered only to teachers of proven effectiveness, and a portion should be in the form of bonuses contingent on continuing high performance.

Policymakers can free up resources by putting a stop to or limiting counterproductive incentives in current salary schedules. For example, they can set a ceiling on the percentage of teacher compensation districts can base on seniority, and they can stop the practice of paying teachers to earn master’s degrees, which study after study has shown to have no discernible impact on student achievement.

But higher pay alone might not be enough to solve the problem. Some districts have found that even large financial incentives, in the absence of better working conditions, fail to attract and retain strong teachers in high-need schools. The reason is simple: like any other professionals, great teachers place great value on a positive and supportive working environment characterized by strong leadership and opportunities to collaborate with colleagues.

Rather than being discouraged to know it takes more than money to attract stronger teachers to struggling schools, leaders can leverage that knowledge to devise creative solutions. For example, when recruitment bonuses failed to solve the teacher inequity problem in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, leaders came up with a comprehensive “Strategic Staffing Initiative.” The district transferred high-performing principals into targeted schools, allowed them to handpick a team of strong administrators, and gave them the opportunity to recruit up to five highly effective teachers from a roster of volunteers identified and recruited by the district. Everyone who transferred received substantial financial incentives, but, just as important, all were offered the opportunity to work with a team of teachers and administrators committed to achieving success.

EH: There is a simple economic axiom that bad teachers like more money as much as good teachers. Providing higher salaries will do little to improve the quality of urban teachers or teachers of disadvantaged students unless this is coupled with a clearer judgment about effectiveness. If the objective is raising achievement, there is no real substitute for observing achievement and taking actions based on it.

School accountability systems move in this direction when the rewards to principals and teachers are linked to the growth in student learning. At that point, higher salaries, if directed toward more effective teachers and administrators, can be effective. But if higher salaries are awarded by geography and not demonstrated effectiveness, there is little reason to expect improvement.

The central message of this discussion must be that improving student outcomes in the inner city cannot be done by proxy. We must use the direct and available information on teacher effectiveness that comes from objective achievement data and subjective evaluations for both administrators and teachers to guide rewards and management decisions. We may conclude that this is too difficult—because of union contracts, traditions, or other issues. In that case, we must be willing to live with disastrous results or, alternatively, be prepared to give parents the real opportunity to choose better schools. We have a long track record of regulating that schools should “do good”; of following the current ideas, including simply paying teachers more; and of holding out for the perfect, fully tested alternative. We are left with stagnant achievement results that are especially egregious for poor, inner-city kids. More of the same will not work.

And Edutopia believes in us.

Let politicians and pundits speak darkly of the need to weed out bad teachers. Let them hold tests and accountability over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. In Edutopia, teachers rule. We are confident and inspiring. Enlightened administrators are courageous and brave. Grateful parents swoon, while bright, cheerful students meet their academic manifest destinies as their awesome teachers reject the discredited orthodoxies of industrial-age schooling in favor of hands-on projects and authentic, real-world tasks. In the bright light of Edutopia’s soul it is always six o’clock in the morning, and you cannot wait to jump out of bed and get to school.

More seductive than a fitness magazine on New Year’s Day, Edutopia inspires me. Edutopia gets me. Edutopia sees the teacher I am capable of becoming—no, the teacher I will be—and it wants to help me. True, I haven’t helped inner-city high-school students design and build a hybrid car that runs on fuel made from soybeans like that guy in Philadelphia. OK, I haven’t nailed down donations to buy an old farm so my students can garden and read Thoreau in the bosom of nature like that teacher in Vermont. Hell, I haven’t even found the time for that cool unit where my kids create digital avatars and use them to explore body issues. But I will. Yes, in fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Right after the tests are over. It’s possible.

Edutopia comes by its name honestly. Beyond aspirational, it is teacher porn. But here’s the thing: it’s serious. The George Lucas Educational Foundation, the 19-year-old organization that runs Edutopia, has given itself a mission to “spread the word about ideal, interactive learning environments and enable others to adapt these successes locally.” Its name notwithstanding, Edutopia does not see itself as peddling pie-eyed idealism.

Many people in education were only dimly aware of Edutopia until early 2009, when the organization suddenly became more aggressive about promoting its vision and products. Driven by a ubiquitous underwriting campaign on National Public Radio (NPR), Edutopia claims 10,000 paid members and a total monthly audience of over 300,000 educators for its web site and videos, a 70 percent jump in the past year. Its six-year-old bimonthly magazine, Edutopia, reached 100,000 subscribers until the foundation decided to go online-only starting in the spring of 2010.

Its unabashed idealism and cheerful optimism make it impossible to dislike Edutopia, which bills itself somewhat grandly as “What Works in Public Education.” What’s harder to define is Edutopia’s on-the-ground impact on America’s classrooms and the efficacy of its unique, ultraprogressive ideas. Lucas’s money has purchased an impressive collection of reported articles, videos, and web pages gathered on-site at schools across the country that practice at least bits of what Edutopia preaches. Still, foundation officials are hard-pressed to identify any school that has adopted its strategies as a whole. Thus a better Edutopia tagline might be, “What We Think Would Probably Work in Public Education If Schools Would Stop Being So Old-Fashioned and Just Try It. Plus George Lucas Thinks It’s a Good Idea.”

That might not make a compelling NPR underwriting credit. But it would be more accurate.

What Works in Public Education?

For Edutopia, “What Works in Public Education” boils down to six “core principles”: comprehensive assessment, integrated studies, project-based learning, social and emotional learning, teacher development, and technology integration (see sidebar). Project learning and technology get the biggest push, but even these two favorites serve a bigger picture. “The six core principles can be summarized in six words,” says Dr. Milton Chen, senior fellow and executive director emeritus of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. “‘School life should resemble real life.’ That’s what we’d really like to see happening in schools.”

Edutopia does not consult with schools or districts. It makes no grants. It offers no professional development or teacher training. Essentially, it’s a nonprofit media company. “Working for a filmmaker, we make films,” says Chen. “And we surround those films with other kinds of information that can support learning about how these innovative classrooms came to be.” The foundation has an annual budget of $6 million and a full-time staff of 18 editors, videographers, and web producers who work out of sleek and modern offices at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, a 4,700-acre retreat in the Marin County hills near Nicasio, California.

Edutopia’s web site has more than 10,000 pages of content, plus videos, podcasts, and webinars that seek to redefine what is possible—even practical—in U.S. schools: Inner-city schools that stress empathy, collaboration, and personal responsibility. Green schools whose smaller carbon footprints reduce absenteeism and improve test scores. Schools where kids work alongside trained chefs to create school lunches made from scratch with fresh ingredients grown in once-abandoned local greenhouses. If these sound like the kinds of schools where you’d like to teach, that’s exactly the point. “The reaction we’d like people to have is to say, ‘I’d like that for my students,’” says Chen. “‘Whether I’m a superintendent or a parent, I want that kind of education for my kids.’ And then we have to answer the question, how do you do it?”

Let George Do It

George Lucas is an unlikely education philanthropist. The creator of the blockbuster Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises, Lucas’s $3 billion net worth places him in the top quartile of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, along with Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and members of the Walton family, all of whom are more closely associated with funding education initiatives than Lucas, who by all accounts was a bored, indifferent student growing up amid the farms and factories of Modesto, California.

“There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult,” he said in a 1999 interview. As a teenager, Lucas spent most of his time under the hood of a car dreaming about automobile racing. He liked photography and briefly entertained the idea of going to art school, an idea shot down by his father, a stationery store owner, who once remarked, “George never listened to me. He was his mother’s pet. George was hard to understand. He was always dreaming things up.”

A near-fatal car crash days before his high-school graduation had a profound effect on Lucas. “The idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn’t really a priority,” he said in a 2007 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school.” After dabbling in film at Modesto Junior College, Lucas won admission to the University of Southern California’s prestigious film school in 1967. USC Film School, said Lucas, “really ignited a passion in me, and it took off from there.”

And how. American Graffiti (1973) was Lucas’s second film and his first hit. That was followed by Star Wars (1977), which became the third-highest-grossing film series in history behind James Bond and Harry Potter. Waiving his director’s fee in favor of the licensing rights to the Star Wars characters earned Lucas hundreds of millions of dollars from toys, games, and action figures. His Lucasfilm studio, along with Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic digital-film effects companies made it nearly impossible to go to the multiplex without seeing Lucas’s thumbprint. At 47, the age at which Barack Obama won the White House, George Lucas took home the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in the film industry.

Clearly, boredom and daydreaming have been very, very good to George Lucas. But how did a gearhead kid with little interest in school end up making public education the object of his philanthropy? Chen describes listening to Lucas reflect on his childhood. “He said, ‘I know there are many, many students out there like me who are disengaged from school, who are kind of bored, not doing well, who in fact have skills and talents and curiosities. If harnessed they could be really great students.’”

A bit of Hollywood mythmaking could be at work here. Lucas has given mixed messages about his own public education. “Frankly, I was not very engaged in my classes,” Lucas said in an e-mail sent to me via Chen. “Occasionally, I had a teacher who would inspire me.” However, he sounded a much more generous note in accepting the Thalberg award at the Oscars in 1992, going out of his way to thank “a group of devoted individuals who, apart from my parents, have done the most to shape my life—my teachers. From kindergarten through college, their struggle—and it was a struggle—to help me grow and learn was not in vain. And it is greatly appreciated.”

Edutopia’s fixation with hands-on projects and technology is certainly consistent with Lucas’s lifelong interest in cars and computers. The source of the foundation’s other education touchstones, however, is not as easy to discern. An e-mail request for Lucas to identify his guiding lights in education went unanswered. Members of Edutopia’s National Advisory Council, which include teachers, administrators, technology experts, and ed school professors, report little influence of or even contact with Lucas. Who has his ear on “What Works”? “I have heard him talk about Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence work,” says Chen. “Also he has spoken of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.” Are Edutopia’s core principles the fully formed vision of a creative genius and polymath, self-educated in pedagogy? “Those core principles were developed in close communication with Mr. Lucas,” says Chen, who insists Lucas is “quite active” in Edutopia’s work. “Those are things that George Lucas feels are the linchpins of what he’d like to see in a modern school.”

Fair enough. But are those ideas—from wherever they sprang—any good? Are they “What Works in Public Education”?

Back to the Future

For all its earnestness, Edutopia can sometimes give the sense that it has a poor grasp of history. It is forward-looking to a fault. One senior Edutopia executive was genuinely surprised to learn that project-based learning is neither a new or revolutionary concept in education, but one that traces its roots to William Heard Kilpatrick’s 1918 essay “The Project Method.” No obscure figure, Kilpatrick was “the most influential teacher in the nation’s leading college of education,” spending nearly 30 years on the faculty of Columbia University’s Teachers College, notes education historian Diane Ravitch. In her 2000 book Left Back, Ravitch describes how progressive educators immediately hailed Kilpatrick’s work and its Edutopian call for “whole-hearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment,” as the quintessential statement of the child-centered school movement.

“Kilpatrick thought of the project as not just a method but a fundamental reinvention of education. The project was an activity undertaken by students that really interested them,” Ravitch observed. “Furthermore, it fulfilled Dewey’s demand that education should be ‘life itself’ and not merely a preparation for future living; what could be ‘a better preparation for later life than practice living it now?’”

In other words, Edutopia’s mantra—school life should resemble real life—has a century-old provenance. And while teachers are revered, “school” can be a dirty word in Edutopia. An article titled “Beats the Heck Out of School” describes a project that uses hip-hop to teach students critical thinking, technology, and business skills. “What do you think this is—school?” quips a student approvingly in another article about experimental outdoor education. Search “real life” on Edutopia’s web database and you turn up over 200 articles, videos, and blog posts. Search “hands-on” and find 400 more. Somewhere, William Heard Kilpatrick smiles quietly. Dewey, too.

“Project learning is an incredibly important tool. I think there’s ample evidence that it increases student engagement and the ability of kids to retain information,” says Nínive Clements Calegari, a member of Edutopia’s National Advisory Council and the founder of 826 Valencia, a San Francisco education nonprofit. “Every classroom should have old-fashioned multiple-choice tests and good old-fashioned lectures. But if you can engage the kids in a project that has the good tenets of project learning, the impact is more profound,” she says.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham points out that most teachers believe in project-based learning and the methods promoted by Edutopia, yet classroom observation studies show that whole-class instruction and “seat work” account for more than 90 percent of the class time of American 5th graders. If teachers agree that project-based learning equals good teaching, if it has 100 years of momentum and George Lucas’s millions pushing it, why is so little of it happening in our schools? Teachers “do not yet have widespread support from principals, districts, and states to learn how to implement it,” says Chen. Another possibility is that even those who believe in it do precious little project-based learning because it’s nearly impossible to do well. Willingham points out that teachers, like all human beings, have “cognitive limits.” We can only pay attention to a small number of the stimuli that are competing for our attention at any moment. Small groups working independently to overcome unforeseen and unpredictable obstacles make effective planning a challenge. “This doesn’t mean that students should never do projects. It means that we should be clear-eyed about the challenges that projects present, and have a plan to meet them,” says Willingham. “Project learning is great when it’s done well, but it’s very hard to pull off,” he notes.

Edutopia is on firmer ground in its technology advocacy, where there is broad agreement on the capacity of technology to transform education, even if there is little consensus on implementation. “When done well, technology can positively impact student learning outcomes. The challenge is that most school systems are not doing it well for a variety of reasons,” says Scott McLeod, an educational technology expert and associate professor at Iowa State University. “The failings have been more in the doing, not the knowing,” adds McLeod, who credits Edutopia with helping schools think through technology implementation and get it right. “They see excellent and exciting things happening in various isolated locations around the world, tell those stories, and then try to learn and extrapolate from those to schools at large,” he says.

Technology is central to the Edutopian vision, and Chen and his colleagues are unabashed enthusiasts. “Regardless of the politics of human resistance, technology continues to show often a better and less expensive way of doing things,” says Chen. “We feel that corner is being turned in education.”

To its credit, Edutopia seems not to adhere to a rigid orthodoxy in its coverage of schools. Its impressive “Schools That Work” series, in which Edutopia throws all of its multimedia resources into detailed coverage of an individual school, recently featured YES Prep, an urban charter-school network often mentioned in the same breath with KIPP, Achievement First, and other “no excuses” schools championed by advocates of test-driven education reform. The Houston-based schools have extended days, learning contracts signed by students and parents, school-issued cell phones for teachers, and classrooms bearing the names of colleges—the now-familiar features of what David Whitman dubbed “New Paternalism” schools in his 2008 book Sweating the Small Stuff (see “An Appeal to Authority,” features, Fall 2008). While Yes Prep’s fondness for project learning was highlighted, much of Edutopia’s coverage focused on how to re-create the school’s college-bound culture and tough-love discipline code.

“Story selection is driven first by our core values. For the most part we look for stories in these arenas. Second, we look for innovation and new approaches to reform so as not to become repetitive,” says Edutopia editorial director David Markus. “But in the end, it is about audience. Will the topic and our execution of our coverage plan quench their thirst for new insights and new solutions to improve the learning process?”

“Our core principles are very ambitious compared to where most schools are today,” Chen concedes. “So if a school is doing a great job on two or three of them, that’s a good candidate school for us. It’s very hard, for instance, to find a school that’s really doing the integrated studies piece well. That’s a complete change in the curriculum, certainly at the secondary level.”

Creating Edutopia in U.S. Schools

For all the True Believer energy and aggressive efforts to push an agenda, it remains difficult to discern the impact of Edutopia, either in winning converts to its vision for public education or changing the classroom practice of individual teachers. Most of its staff come from the media world and default to audience metrics as a proxy for influence. “People who use it feel connected to it and celebrated by it. It is absolutely successful for those individuals,” says Calegari, a former teacher. “When I was in the classroom I felt so isolated. It could have created a community for me of like-minded teachers,” she says.

Unlike fellow eduphilanthropists, Lucas has had little to say publicly about education reform. A private 501(c)(3), Edutopia does not lobby or explicitly advocate policy, “Our main role is to provide our media so that policymakers can be informed about and advocate for the policies behind the schools we cover,” says Chen.

Washington ed policy hands are skeptical whether Lucas’s “What Works” vision can gain the traction it needs to usher in an era of, well, Edutopia. “Gates, Walton, and Broad are driven by theories of action that emphasize structural reform” such as systems, incentives, and measures, says Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Education Sector and author of the Eduwonk.com blog. “Edutopia seems more in the camp that what we need are additions and incremental changes to the current system. They’re not nearly as disruptive.” That’s ironic, he quips, “because you have to think that Luke Skywalker would have been more with Gates, Walton, and Broad. He was all about upending an established order that didn’t work.”

Edutopia rejects the comparison. “We consider our core agenda, when implemented at scale, to be very disruptive,” says Chen, who hopes to create more demand for the ideas Edutopia promotes from teachers, principals, parents, businesses, and others. “We leave it to policy experts to create the policies needed to bring them to scale,” he says.

A former 5th-grade teacher, Robert Pondiscio writes about education at the Core Knowledge Blog.

The answer is that we can’t–not even with more effective education schools or elaborate merit pay programs or by ruthlessly dismissing ineffective teachers.

As I explain in Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, we need fewer teachers, not more, and those few teachers must reach thousands of students at a time.  Fortunately, this possibility, once remote, is now arriving with a speed as rapid as that of the avatar-laden space ship zeroing in on the planet Pandora.  As we enter the world of high-powered notebook computers, broadband internet connections, 3-dimensional curricula, open-source product development, and internet-based games, both co-operative and competitive, students will learn by accessing dynamic, interactive instructional materials that provide information to each student at the level of accomplishment he or she has reached.

Today, millions of students in brick-and-mortar classrooms are either bored because they already know the material being presented or confused because it is far beyond their contemporary level of comprehension. Teaching algebra to someone who cannot divide just doesn’t work.

Solving the teaching problem does not mean hiring millions of better teachers but finding new ways of reaching students directly.  Teachers can then be used as coaches to help students access curricula created by the world’s most brilliant pedagogues–who in some cases may turn out to be students themselves.

The Secret of TSL: ?The revolutionary discovery that raises school performance
By William G. Ouchi

When I first saw the title, never having heard of TSL, I thought this might be a late-night infomercial about a new diet supplement designed to make all students attentive. Not far into the book, I discovered that TSL was Total Student Load, which, unfortunately, did not help me very much. Then to the hypothesis on the cover: The key element of a school’s organization is the number of students that a teacher regularly sees (TSL), and if this number is small (say, 80), achievement will be high.

The hypothesis is really an assertion based on a vaguely described analysis. And while it is a discernible undercurrent throughout the book, TSL is not the volume’s central feature. The book presents a series of case studies of large, and distinctly nonrandom, districts. Within those case studies, the focus is twofold: decentralization of decisionmaking and the quality of the superintendent. The book provides an in-depth look at districts that have in one way or another followed the advice given in one of Ouchi’s previous books, about the benefits of weighted student funding, whereby schools receive funds based on the make-up of their student populations, and decentralized decisionmaking. This book includes additional observations of schools where the principles of fiscal decentralization are evident.

What is good and interesting about The Secret of TSL? Ouchi traces the evolution of district policies under several high-profile leaders—Joel Klein (New York), Arne Duncan (Chicago), Arlene Ackerman (San Francisco), Rod Paige (Houston), Randy Ward (Oakland), Pat Harvey (St. Paul)—whose stories are both compelling and informative. The perspective is that of a management professor, one trained in understanding decisionmaking styles and models and the interactions of institutions and individuals. This approach is one not commonly taken by education researchers, who more often focus on what is happening in classrooms and the interactions between students and teachers. Here, an experienced observer looks at the overall structure of how education is produced. The higher-altitude view is both useful and intriguing.

The story line that emerges, perhaps unintentionally, is that the individual leaders have very different views about how to organize and run schools. No one would accuse Randy Ward of having the same style as Arlene Ackerman, even though they were for a time separated only by the Bay Bridge. Indeed, almost as an aside to the title page, the districts that are described in detail follow very different policies that lead to wholly different TSL measures.

What does not work in the book? Well, start at the beginning. There is no sense in terming TSL a “revolutionary discovery.” While TSL is calculated in each of the case studies, there is no evidence that the measure is correlated with overall district performance or district growth in achievement. In fact, the “revolutionary discovery” looks more like a required element of a standard management book aimed at the New York Times best-seller list. In the tradition of that genre, there are two numbered lists: the “five pillars” of school empowerment and the “four freedoms.” These lists largely drop out of the sky except that some of the included items appeared in Ouchi’s earlier “revolutionary” book, Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need. In actuality, the lists are not bad: choice, school empowerment, effective principals, accountability, and weighted student funding matched with control over budget, staffing, curriculum, and scheduling. But there is little explanation about how these notions are implemented, what impact might be expected, and what the trade-offs among the elements might be. In the separate case studies, the leaders sometimes pay attention to the elements on these lists, and sometimes do not, and it is hard to see that those who heed the lists do better than those who do not.

In the end, it is difficult to tell whether the story is about some gifted leaders or about decentralized authority and specific programs. At this point, the case study methodology breaks down, because it is impossible to separate structure and institutions from personality.

But, returning to TSL, the argument is compelling in an intuitive sense. How can one expect a teacher to really get to know 150 different students during a year? How can a teacher possibly assign regular and demanding homework to such large numbers if it is necessary to review and grade all the assignments?

There are, however, some crucial issues of interpretation that beg for serious empirical analysis. For example, the discussion leaves out whether TSL is expected to have an impact while all other things are held constant, such as budget, teacher expertise, curriculum, and support services, to name a few. Or, does it enhance achievement to trade some of these attributes for a smaller TSL? It would be particularly valuable to marry these organizational views with separate analyses of teacher effectiveness. Current discussions of the importance of teacher quality for achievement generally ignore such environmental features as district management and decisionmaking. Could it be that some of the observed variation in teacher quality really reflects unmeasured differences in the organizational features that Ouchi highlights in his case studies? These are testable propositions, and ones that could provide important insights into where the revolution in student achievement is most likely to occur.

Eric Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education.

Lighting Their Fires: ?Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, ?Shook-up World

It’s likely that Rafe Esquith is the nation’s best-known teacher. He has pocketed an impressive number of awards and honors, including, even, membership in the vaunted Order of the British Empire, a nifty designation he picked up by way of directing the Hobart Shakespeareans—a troupe of young actors plucked from his 5th-grade class at Los Angeles’s Hobart Elementary School—who travel the world performing the Bard’s works. Esquith has also appeared on Oprah and been praised by the Dalai Lama.

And he has written widely—?op-eds, articles, and books. Esquith’s first volume on education, There Are No Shortcuts (2003), is somewhat self-explanatory; his second, Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire (2007), is less so. The eccentric title refers to an incident when Esquith, deeply enmeshed in a science lesson, did not realize, until his students began screaming, that he had set his hair alight with an alcohol burner. A cooler-headed Esquith later explained the book’s theme on National Public Radio: “If I could care so much I didn’t even know my hair was on fire, I was moving in the right direction as a teacher—when I realized that you have to ignore all the crap, and the children are the only thing that matter.”

Perhaps because Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire ended up a New York Times best seller, Esquith has stuck with the ignescent symbolism for his latest book, Lighting Their Fires. It’s a guide of sorts, the main point of which is that good children are made and not born. The author recounts a trip he took with five students to watch a baseball game at Dodger Stadium. They arrived early to take a tour, after which their guide breathlessly confided to Esquith that the pupils were “so confident but so sweet,” and “so beautiful” that they “glow.” Then “she paused, searching for the right adjective. ‘They’re extraordinary,’ she said in almost whispered respect.”

Esquith counters, “But here’s the secret. These students weren’t born extraordinary—they became that way.” And Lighting Their Fires tells us how they did it.

They did it, unsurprisingly, by being taught by one of the country’s most dedicated and obsessive teachers, a man who believes that low-income 5th graders for most of whom English is a second language can learn to love Shakespeare. He also believes that hard work, far more than talent or innate propensities, produces success. Before taking the kids to see the Dodgers, Esquith taught them to score games while they all watched the World Series on television, encouraged them to play baseball daily on the playground, and required them to view Ken Burns’s 181?2-hour-long documentary, Baseball, over spring break. When they attended a major-league game, they would enjoy it because they worked at enjoying it.

But there’s a difference between being a great teacher and a great author, and the examples and lessons put forth in Lighting Their Fires are soggy tinder when it comes to lighting a reader’s interest. Esquith trots out a lot of commonsense stuff. That children should learn the importance of being on time, or that they shouldn’t spend hours immobilized by television or computers, aren’t observations that will have any reasonable person shouting eureka. Policy hounds won’t find anything of substance in the book, either, and are bound to be disappointed.

Most readers of Lighting Their Fires will be disappointed, in fact. Allegedly an explanation of how to form “thoughtful and honorable people,” the book is really part self-help manual for parents and, notwithstanding its preaching about the virtue of humility, part self-aggrandizing memoir. Hobart Shakespearean that he is, Esquith skillfully plays the role of the modest, righteous, self-fulfilled, patient, and wise educator who—though surely he could work in other more-prestigious and remunerative professions—nobly remains in the classroom, quietly going about his saintly business. This is not exaggeration. Examples of Esquith’s self-absorbed, self-imposed martyrdom are ubiquitous. Consider the book’s first sentences:

It was 5:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in May at Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles, and most of the dedicated teachers and administrators had long since left campus. I wished I could have escaped with them. I was exceedingly tired. It had been a particularly long week.

In fact, it had been a long year.

Nice touch, adding that bit about “dedicated teachers and administrators”; they’re committed, of course, just not that committed. A similarly sly autolatrous tactic, plentifully deployed, is Esquith’s portrayal of just about everyone he meets as well meaning but misguided, whether it’s the Dodger Stadium tour guide who mistakenly believes that his angelic preteen coterie is “extraordinary,” or the TSA employee who can’t comprehend that his wholesome pupils would choose not to tote Game Boys onto an airplane, or the flight attendant who can’t grasp that his cherubic students won’t need DVD players for their traveling duration—that, as Esquith tells her, “they’re going to read.” (The kids are going to…read? Someone canonize this man!)

I could go on—for instance, Earnest Esquith gets himself cursed out at the baseball game by two different spectators whose obnoxious manner he publicly corrects, and he somehow validates his own actions by quoting the injunction of Anne Frank’s father to confront evil in the world—but to do so would be like electrocuting fish in a barrel. Suffice it to say that Esquith has, in Lighting Their Fires, ostensibly written a book for adults. He shouldn’t speak to them as if they were children.

Liam Julian is a Hoover Institution research fellow and managing editor of Policy Review.

“Nothing wrong with this place,” Bobby finally said, “that a busload of nuns wouldn’t solve.”

I laughed. I knew exactly what he meant. We grew up on opposite sides of the country (he in New York and I in Oregon), but we both grew up Catholic, in the ’50s, and that meant one thing if nothing else: nuns.

The guardians of moral order and academic achievement for several generations of Catholic boys and girls, these robed religious women ruled with—well, with rulers. And paddles. And, sometimes, fists. Before “tough love” there was Sister Patrick Mary or Sister Elizabeth Maureen. Before No Child Left Behind there were behinds burnished by a swift kick from a foot that emerged without warning from under several acres of robes.

Indeed, our childhood memories, different in detail, were singular in their moral clarity: we knew what a busload of nuns could do. They would march up and down the aisles. (Yes, there would be aisles, in a room filled with 30 to 50 kids—phooey on class size.) And with a glance from behind their starched white wimples, we would learn.

The problem is that there no longer are busloads of nuns; in fact, most schools would be lucky to have a Mini Cooper’s worth of such minimum-wage professional teachers. Their ranks have declined by a staggering 62 percent since 1965 (from 180,000 to 68,000). The staff composition of Catholic schools has similarly been turned on its head, from some 90 percent female religious in the ’50s to less than 5 percent today (see Figure 1). “The school system had literally been built on their backs,” reported Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland in their 1992 study Catholic Schools and the Common Good, “through the services they contributed in the form of the very low salaries that they accepted.” Consequently, costs have soared; average annual tuition has gone from next to nothing to more than $2,400 in elementary schools and almost $6,000 in high schools.

Despite a growing Catholic population (from 45 million in 1965 to almost 77 million today, making it the largest Christian denomination in the United States), Catholic school enrollment has plummeted, from 5.2 million students in nearly 13,000 schools in 1960 to 2.5 million in 9,000 schools in 1990. After a promising increase in the late 1990s, enrollment had by 2006 dropped to 2.3 million students in 7,500 schools. And the steep decline would have been even steeper if these sectarian schools had to rely on their own flock for enrollment: almost 14 percent of Catholic school enrollment is now non-Catholic, up from less than 3 percent in 1970 (see Figure 2). When Catholic schools educated 12 percent of all schoolchildren in the United States, in 1965, the proportion of Catholics in the general population was 24 percent. Catholics still make up about one-quarter of the American population, but their schools enroll less than 5 percent of all students (see Figure 3).

What happened to the Catholics? What happened to a school system that at one time educated one of every eight American children? And did it quite well.

May I Have Your Attention, Please!

As most educators know, Catholic schools work and have worked for a long time. Sociologist James Coleman and colleagues Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore, in 1982, were among the first to document Catholic schools’ academic successes, in High School Achievement: Public and Private Schools. A variety of studies since, by scholars at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard, have all supported the conclusion that Catholic schools do a better job educating children, especially the poor and minorities, than public schools.

According to the Common Good authors, Catholic high schools—and many believe that this applies to elementary schools as well—“manage simultaneously to achieve relatively high levels of student learning, distribute this learning more equitably with regard to race and class than in the public sector, and sustain high levels of teacher commitment and student engagement.” One of the keys, they concluded, is the organization of Catholic schools. Parochial schools are less likely to fall into the public-school habit of “structuring inequities”: public schools offer students the chance to take weaker academic courses while Catholic school courses are “largely determined by the school.” The irony, say Bryk et al., is that such a “constrained academic structure” contributes more to “the common school effect” than the potluck served by the public schools. Catholic schools give less weight to “background differences” of their students and thus do not allow those background differences to be “transformed into achievement differences.” Even after adjusting for student background differences, Bryk and his colleagues found significant “school effects” on academic achievement.

“You know the story about the kid whose parents got fed up with their son’s constant discipline problems in the public school?” asked James Goodness, communications director of Newark Catholic Schools, while entertaining journalists at a recent archdiocesan-sponsored luncheon. Newark, the tenth-largest parochial district in the country, closed nine elementary and two secondary schools in 2005, with a corresponding enrollment decline of 5 percent, from some 47,300 to 44,750 students. Goodness, with his story about the problem public-school boy, was explaining what made Catholic schools special. “‘That’s it!’ says the dad. ‘It’s Catholic school for you.’ They sent him. They waited. No calls from school. ‘What’s up?’ the dad finally asks. ‘The nuns been boxin’ your ears?’ ‘No,’ says the kid. ‘They didn’t have to. When I got to school, I saw this guy hanging from a cross with nails in his hands and feet and I figured they meant business.’”

What Catholic schools are very good at, it seems, is getting kids’ attention. No surprise to those of us who grew up in them. The establishment of order and discipline, in all things: We wore uniforms. We had homework. We had to eat our lunch, even the peas and carrots. My wife remembers classmates having to put a nickel in the “mission box” if they mispronounced a word—“libary” instead of library or “pitcher” instead of picture—at her Jersey City parochial grade school. Grammar counted. Posture counted. So did skirt length. It was all for the greater glory of God, of course. By reaching for God, the “all-knowing,” so the nuns said, we might know something even if our reach fell short. There were no prizes for just showing up. All of it, we knew, on some preternatural level, made us “better.” And the research seems to support that view. In fact, one of the “surprises” for the Common Good researchers, who deemed Catholic schools’ academic focus both consistent and laudable, was that the schools seemed to succeed even when the teaching and the curriculum were “ordinary.”

Such Catholic rigor was part missionary zeal—to spread “the word”—and part defense against the encroachments of an increasingly secular world. And secular, for Catholics, meant a certain slackness in moral and academic discipline. In the United States, the so-called “wall of separation” between church and state, between order and freedom, eventually forced Catholics to build their own school system, the only country in the world where they have one (see sidebar). The battles to safeguard order, and academic excellence, were fought early and often. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, Catholic school leaders refused to follow their public school counterparts into a vocational and utilitarian tracking system. “Catholic youth should not be the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water,’ but should be prepared for the professions or mercantile pursuits,” went one early protestation by the Association of Catholic Colleges.

Catholic schools toyed with progressive education models in the 1970s, but gave it up, report the authors of the Common Good, when they realized they could not be all things to all children. Catholic high schools soon “returned to conventional class-period organization, heightened academic standards and a renewed emphasis on a core of academic subjects.”

Everything but a Plague of Locusts

So, if they are so good, why are Catholic schools disappearing? And if there are so many more Catholics, why are there fewer schools? No more nuns? No more money? Charter schools? Loss of faith? Indolence? Scandal? Irrelevance? The answer seems to be all of that—and less.

“The answer is fairly simple,” says James Cultrara, director for education for the New York State Catholic Conference. “The rising cost of providing a Catholic education has made it more difficult for parents to meet those rising costs.”

The Catholic-school story has been covered, as education journalist Samuel Freedman wrote in the New York Times, “as either a sob story or a sort of natural disaster, the inevitable outcome of demographics.” But Freedman believes that “there need not have been anything inevitable about the closings,” especially since Catholic populations are increasing.

Brooklyn closed 26 elementary schools in 2005, even though its Catholic population has grown by some 600,000 since 1950. “But the other trends were unmistakable,” says Thomas Chadzutko, superintendent of the diocese’s schools, and the man who presided over the closings. “Enrollment was down and expenses up.”

If only it were that simple.

The loss of nuns has undoubtedly added to the financial burden. But demographic change, and the failure to respond to it, has created other burdens. Since the Catholic school “system” is actually a loose and quite decentralized confederation of 7,500 schools supported, for the most part, by 19,000 parishes in more than 150 dioceses, it took “the Church” some time to see the trends, much less develop new strategies to respond to them.

“We have a system of schools, not a school system,” explains Newark’s new vicar for education, Father Kevin Hanbury. “The local parishes traditionally have been responsible for the schools.” Those parishes, and their schools, feel change at the local, neighborhood level quite quickly. But it takes time for the huge, theologically monolithic, and institutionally undemocratic Church to react.

The flight from inner cities to the suburbs by working- and middle-class Americans affected Catholic schools as much as, if not more than, it did public schools. Downtown churches were suddenly filled by poor immigrants from Catholic nations (Latin America and the Caribbean) without a tradition of Catholic schools, much less a habit of paying for them. According to the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), between 2000 and 2006, nearly 600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools closed, a 7 percent decline, and nearly 290,000 students left, almost 11 percent. The largest declines were among elementary schools in 12 urban dioceses (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Boston, Newark, Detroit, and Miami), which together have lost almost 20 percent of their students (more than 136,000) in the last five years.

One factor is that the public schools in the suburbs are not like the public schools that Catholics tried to avoid in the cities. “Folks got to the suburbs and discovered that it was not only very expensive to build new schools, but that the public schools were not that bad,” says Patrick Wolf, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.

And charter schools, says Father Ronald Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) leadership program at Notre Dame, “are one of the biggest threats to Catholic schools in the inner city, hands down. How do you compete with an alternative that doesn’t cost anything?”

Ron Zimmer, of the RAND Corporation, and two colleagues studied the impact of charters in Michigan, one of the most chartered states in the nation, and determined that private schools were taking as big a hit as traditional public schools because of charters. “Private schools will lose one student for every three students gained in the charter schools,” they wrote. This had, they said, “not only…a statistically significant effect on private schools but an effect that is economically meaningful.”

And then came the sex abuse scandals. There has been nothing quite so shattering as the endless parade of headlines about priests abusing children. The Louisville Archdiocese was hit with almost 200 sex abuse suits in a single six-month period in 2003. In April of that year, the Boston Archdiocese revealed that it carried a $46 million deficit, “the largest any diocese has ever had,” according to the New York Times, because it had paid out more than $150 million in legal settlements in sex abuse cases. The crisis in Boston was heightened, said Cardinal Sean O’Malley, because parish donations fell off by several million dollars as a result of the scandal. The diocese closed more than 60 parishes, and dozens of parish schools. A Gallup survey in 2003 found that one in four Catholics withheld donations to the Church because of the scandal. Four dioceses, of the 195 administrative units in the American Catholic church—Davenport, Iowa; Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; and Tucson, Arizona—have already declared bankruptcy because of lawsuits over sex abuse. Others, like Boston, are on the brink.

Marketing for Miracles

“The world changed” was a common refrain of Catholic educators with whom I spoke over several months of research. And it was clear that they included the Catholic world in that assessment. Faith, on many levels, has been shaken. The “new reality,” says Samuel Freedman of the Times, is that Catholic schools “will have to become expert fundraisers to survive.” And marketers. And promoters. And lobbyists. And miracle workers. Catholics are scrambling to find their footing in a world of charters, vouchers, and tax credits.

The Brooklyn diocese has hired a marketing firm. In Newark one of the first things Father Kevin Hanbury did when he was made vicar of education last year, before he hired a full-time marketing director, was host a white linen luncheon for the local media. “We have a story to tell,” says Hanbury, “and we want to get it as close to page 1 as we can.” The story, as Hanbury and other Catholic leaders tell it, is that Catholic schools not only work, but they are good for America. “Many of our schools are majority non-Catholic,” says Karen Ristau, president of the NCEA. Ristau herself, a laywoman, represents a new, and some would say sobered, Church. She has an armful of academic credentials, but is also a grandmother. “We have high expectations for these little kiddos,” she says, speaking of the 2-million-plus children in the Catholic school system that NCEA represents.

After I called the Memphis diocese to inquire about Catholic schools there, a FEDEX truck was at my door the next morning, with a package of press clips, brochures, and a CD. “Let me tell you this story,” says a soft-spoken Mary McDonald, superintendent of Memphis Catholic Schools, also a grandmother. Though McDonald can now describe her first days on the job as superintendent in July of 1998 with some bemusement, when she received orders from her new boss, Bishop J. Terry Steib, to reopen already closed Catholic schools in downtown Memphis, she thought she’d been sent to hell.

Memphis was a sprawling Catholic diocese that had seen the number of its faithful increase by half, but its school enrollment decrease by almost a quarter. While there were new Catholic schools and Catholic schools with waiting lists in the suburbs, inner-city Memphis had become increasingly black and poor and non-Catholic. A half-dozen Catholic schools had closed over the previous two decades. The few schools that remained were in the death grip of aging parish populations, increased costs (the number of nuns in Memphis had dropped from 160 to 80), and dwindling enrollment.

No wonder “the Bishop’s vision,” as she calls it, sent McDonald right to the diocesan chapel and onto her knees. It didn’t seem to matter to Bishop Steib that McDonald, a teacher and school principal during her 30 years in education, had never been a superintendent. “It was daunting,” she recalls. “I just went out and started talking to anyone who would listen—and even those who didn’t want to—about the value of and need for Catholic schools.” And it didn’t matter that the people in those slums where the empty schools were weren’t Catholic, says McDonald, who often quotes a line attributed to Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C., which has become a call to arms in the new crusade to save Catholic education: “We don’t educate these children because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.”

A year after McDonald started beating the bushes of Memphis for money, on a July day in 1999, her phone rang. The call was from someone offering “a multimillion-dollar donation,” says McDonald, who told the Memphis Commercial Appeal at the time, “I know a miracle when I see one.” Though the donors—there were more than one—remain anonymous to this day, their $15 million “was earmarked for Catholic education,” says McDonald, recounting the story seven years later, as if she still can’t believe it. “And they weren’t even Catholic.”

McDonald and her staff reopened St. Augustine, a 65-year-old school that had closed in 1995, within three weeks of receiving the donation. McDonald had 20 students registered in three days. The school opened with 30 students in two kindergarten classes. The students didn’t need to have the $2,400 tuition—the donation paid for scholarships—and they didn’t need to be Catholic.

“But the schools are truly Catholic,” says McDonald. “We’re not a public school. We’re not a charter. We have the same values we’ve had for centuries—do the same things. We say prayer every day. We say the rosary at the same time every week. We have Mass for everyone.” And uniforms, of course. “Our donors believed that Catholic education could make a difference,” says McDonald, “and that Catholic schools are successful in inner cities.” Within the next six years, eight more schools reopened, adding more than 1,300 students to the Jubilee School system, the name of the new initiative. Almost 90 percent of the students lived at or below the poverty level; over 80 percent were non-Catholic.

Has all the change and consolidation affected academics? No, says McDonald. Jubilee students are reading at grade level within a year of arriving; they are then outperforming their peers on standardized TerraNova tests. So far, none of the Jubilee students are old enough to have entered high school, but McDonald is optimistic. “We have a 99.9 percent graduation rate in our six high schools. Virtually no one drops out.”

Capital Campaigns and a Voucher in Every Pot

A half-dozen years earlier in Washington, D.C., Cardinal Hickey had appointed a commission to study the problems confronting his diocese’s inner-city schools. “The commission recommended closing 12 of 16 struggling schools,” recalls Juana Brown, who was then the principal of one of those schools, Sacred Heart. Hickey issued his now-famous dictum: “Closing schools is not an option.” He ordered the group back to the drawing board.

When it returned, Hickey’s commission proposed creation of Faith in the City, an outreach and fundraising initiative that included a Center City Consortium (CCC). The task for CCC was solving the mystery of the less-than-holy trinity of modern Catholic education: financial distress, declining enrollment, and falling test scores.

This was the same mystery, on a smaller scale, that Mary McDonald was tackling in Memphis. Though details differed, the “can’t fail” spirit has marked both enterprises and made them models for Catholic school rescue and reform.

“I tried to get people to look at Memphis,” recalls George Loney, who directed Dayton’s Catholic Urban Presence program, launched in 2002 to find a solution to that city’s Catholic school crisis. Loney did help Dayton’s Catholic schools, part of the Cincinnati Archdiocese, achieve “needed economies of scale” by consolidating. And test results are good. “I just can’t get them to publicize them,” he says.

The D.C. archdiocese announced in December of 2006 that it would close—“we prefer to say consolidate,” says communications director Susan Gibbs—three elementary schools in the District. Yet the CCC schools seem to be working. Martin Davis of the Fordham Foundation writes that the 13 consortium schools achieved “remarkable growth” in grades 2 through 8 proficiency rates on the TerraNova from 2000 to 2005. “More remarkable,” writes Davis, “those growth rates include test scores from 2004–05, when 300 high-poverty children from failing District of Columbia public schools entered consortium schools through the new D.C. voucher program.”

In fact, vouchers are proving to be something of an antidote to the threat posed by charter schools. In Milwaukee, for example, according to Paul Peterson, while charters have “accelerated” the decline of private schools, vouchers seem to have “stabilized” them. Catholic schools in the city have been, since 1996, among the many private schools to benefit from the first state-supported voucher program. In 2005, each of the some 14,000 vouchers passed out in Milwaukee was worth $5,943 at any one of 117 eligible schools, 35 of them Catholic. (The 45 charters in the city, allowed since 1993, received between $7,000 and $9,000 per student.) The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel concluded in 2005 that “the principal effect of choice” in the city has been “to preserve the city’s private schools, many of them Lutheran and Catholic.”

David Prothero, associate superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, says the 6,000 Catholic-school voucher students represent nearly half of Milwaukee’s Catholic school students. “That’s significant.”

“The irony is that the research shows that private schools don’t make a big difference for high socioeconomic students,” says Patrick Wolf, author of a recent study on voucher impacts in Washington, DC. “But they do make a difference for low-income students. And they’re the ones who can’t afford them.”

“From a lawmaker’s point of view,” says Jim Cultrara, who is also co-chairman of the New York State Coalition of Independent and Religious Schools and spearheaded a serious, though unsuccessful, effort to have the New York State Legislature pass a tax credit in 2006, “it’s fiscally prudent to provide financial assistance to enroll children in independent and religious schools. It helps reduce the tax burden and alleviate overcrowding in public schools. And that’s not even counting the benefit of providing students with a quality education.”

Thus, the significance of the scholarship programs and vouchers, and the Church’s mission to the poor. The latest NCEA data show the mean tuition and per-pupil cost for Catholic elementary schools to be $2,607 and $4,268, and for high schools, $5,870 and $7,200, all below average public-school per-pupil expenditures. Thus, too, the persuasiveness of the argument that Catholic schools are a form of subsidy to the nation’s public education system. Diane Ravitch wrote, in a Daily News editorial after hearing word of the Brooklyn diocese school closings in 2005, “It will be a loss for all New York City. The Catholic schools in this city have provided genuine choice for children from low-income and working-class families for more than 150 years. What is more, they have established a solid reputation for safety, academic standards and moral values. All of this has been supplied at a nominal cost to families and at no cost to taxpayers.” The NCEA estimates the value of the Catholic school system’s annual subsidy to the nation at $19.4 billion.

Through smart financial administration and management and aggressive fundraising, many dioceses are beginning to take back some ground lost in the last several decades. Pooling resources for such things as collecting tuition, custodial contracts, and paying salaries has saved money as well as freed principals to focus on academics. Through aggressive marketing and with a corporate board of “the rich and powerful,” the D.C. consortium has raised $30 million in a capital campaign in the last five years. An annual gala fundraiser, co-sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Representative John Boehner (R-OH), last year garnered $1 million.

“Mr. Boehner has visited every one of our schools,” says Brown. “He’s 1 of 11 children and grew up Catholic and has been a tremendous booster.”

It is probably no coincidence that Kennedy and Boehner were key Capitol Hill strategists in passing the historic No Child Left Behind Act. “Catholics believed in every child learning long before NCLB,” says Juana Brown. “We have a mission to educate.”

The dust has still not settled in the Church. But the new missionaries, like Brown and McDonald, seem as holy and determined as their habited predecessors. Given the Church’s history, one would not want to bet against them, especially on the education front. Can tax credits, vouchers, and fundraisers substitute for the devotions of the faithful? Can marketing directors get those same faithful to forget about the sexual predators? These are serious and still largely unanswered questions. But there is a more vexing concern for some of us, even those of us used to imponderables such as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin: where do you find a busload of nuns?

Peter Meyer, former news editor of Life magazine, is a freelance writer.

If your health insurance is already expensive, the new law will make it more so. That is guaranteed by the 40 percent tax the Senate has imposed on all insurance above a certain minimum.

Not so for those who work for state or local government, however. If you are a public-sector employee, you will suffer no tax increase at all–no matter how costly your health insurance–if the deal made behind closed doors between Democratic leaders in Congress, the White House, and powerful union officials goes through.

A tax break for those who work for government: One needs no better demonstration of just how powerful teacher unions and the other public-sector unions have become. (The tax break also goes to anyone else who gets their health insurance via a collective bargaining contract, showing that other special interests can get deals too.)

Union power is evident at the state level as well. Teacher unions are quietly undermining charter and merit pay legislation that is supposed to help states “race to the top.” In New York, for example, they are asking that every charter school be unionized, and in Massachusetts they are limiting the increment in charter expenditures to one percent a year.

To exercise such power, a hefty cash box comes in handy.  In the attached table and figure, one can see just how much is being spent in each state by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. (You can click on the table or figure to enlarge the text.)

It seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? First, “we,” meaning the public at large, don’t usually get to decide such matters. Second, there are obvious systems of rewards for salespeople already in place, foremost among them the system of commissions, which pays salespersons for the value they directly contribute to a firm’s operation.

Replace the word “salespeople” with “teachers,” however, and we move from the realm of silly questions to the arena of intense policy debate. Teachers are in most cases public employees. So we do, in theory at least, get to decide how they are paid. The commission model for teachers, variants of which have been proposed for many years, would involve compensating them for the value they provide to their school’s operation, that is, the degree to which they educate their students. Unfortunately, the amount of education a student receives in a given year is much harder to quantify than the total sales recorded by a clerk in a store. Measuring student growth has been made somewhat easier by recent advances in the tracking of student performance on standardized tests over time. But the notion of paying teachers on the basis of their ability to improve test scores, often termed “merit pay,” while earnestly debated by education policy researchers, is strongly opposed by teachers unions and is a political nonstarter in many parts of the country.

Lost in the debate over merit pay are some interesting, and to some extent disturbing, facts about the way we currently distribute compensation to teachers. Most districts reward teachers for their years of experience, advanced degrees, and in some cases special credentials such as a certificate from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). If every year of experience and every credential were strongly associated with a teacher’s ability to educate students, we could feel content that our system rewarded the ability to educate de facto. But the available evidence suggests that the connection between credentials and teaching effectiveness is very weak at best, and the connection between additional years of experience and teaching effectiveness, while substantial in the first few years in the classroom, attenuates over time. Though exact results vary from one study to the next, there is little doubt that credentials and additional years of experience (beyond the first few years) matter far less to teacher effectiveness than they do to teacher compensation as it is currently designed.

What if, rather than proposing a direct pay-for-performance system, we took the intermediate step of stopping the practice of paying rewards for credentials that have no established association with the ability to educate students? A simple case study, based on the teacher workforce in North Carolina, suggests that this policy change would return several dividends. Money currently spent on rewarding teachers for valueless credentials could be used to increase starting salaries, a policy goal espoused by nearly all interested parties, from education reformers to teachers unions. Shifting teachers’ lifetime compensation toward the beginning of their careers would make the profession more attractive to highly qualified college students. Finally, the age-earnings profile for teachers would more closely resemble the profile for other professions. Doctors and lawyers reap the full rewards of competence in their profession within 10 years of entrance. Teachers must wait three times that long, even though evidence suggests that they become fully competent in their profession just as quickly.

Pay for Effectiveness

Before we take the next step and introduce the “evidence-based” salary schedule, let’s review the basic details of teacher compensation in North Carolina. School finance is relatively centralized in North Carolina, to the extent that there is a statewide teacher salary schedule. Local districts are permitted to supplement the schedule, and almost all of them do. But the state’s salary schedule largely determines the rewards paid to teachers across the state. Moreover, the statewide schedule is typical of teacher compensation in most other public school systems nationwide.

On the North Carolina salary schedule, teachers receive rewards for experience, for attaining advanced degrees, and for becoming certified by the NBPTS. A master’s degree entitles a teacher to a permanent 10 percent increase in salary. Teachers with doctoral degrees earn a permanent 15 percent differential relative to those with bachelor’s degrees. Teachers with NBPTS certification receive a permanent 12 percent boost in salary. Finally, teachers accrue increments to their salary as they gain experience. At the top rung of the experience ladder, teachers with 27 or more years in the classroom earn 68 percent more than starting teachers with equivalent credentials.

Contrast this information with what we know about the relationship between credentials and classroom effectiveness, as measured by student test-score gains. Numerous studies, including several based on North Carolina data, show no significant relationship between advanced degrees and effectiveness, with the possible exception of high school teachers who receive advanced training in their field of specialty. An evidence-based salary schedule, accordingly, would pay no automatic premium for these degrees.

To a large extent, the jury is still out on the importance of NBPTS certification. Studies have shown that teachers nominated for this certification have a legacy of superior classroom performance, but there is less evidence that the process of certification actually improves their performance. Nonetheless, whether NBPTS certification improves teacher quality or merely identifies high-quality teachers, there is some evidence to support a premium for it. How large a premium? We’ll return to that question after discussing the returns to experience.

Teachers with more experience are automatically paid more in North Carolina, and in virtually every other public school system in the country. Research has shown that experienced teachers are more effective in the classroom. So the real-world salary schedule looks a lot like the “evidence-based” schedule, right? Not exactly. Consider the evidence in Figure 1. This chart shows two forms of returns to experience. The lighter bars track the returns paid out in the 2007–08 salary schedule, relative to the salary for starting teachers. The darker bars track the returns to experience in terms of teachers’ ability to improve test scores, based on a recent analysis of North Carolina secondary schools. The returns to experience are measured by tracking the performance of each individual teacher according to time in the profession.

These two forms of returns to experience look very different. Relative to a teacher just beginning in the profession, teachers with one or two years of experience raise test scores by an extra 5 percent of a standard deviation. They are paid, on average, 2 percent more than starting teachers. If the standard were to pay teachers an extra 1 percent of salary when they raise test scores by 2.5 percent of a standard deviation, then highly experienced teachers who post a 25 percent test-score advantage over rookies should be paid a 10 percent premium. Instead, their premium approaches 70 percent. Visually, the darker bars rise quickly at first, moving from left to right, but largely level off once a teacher has six years of experience. The salary schedule marches right along, providing continuously increasing rewards to teachers as they progress from 6 to 27 years of experience, even though their classroom effectiveness has barely improved.

The existing salary schedule rewards teachers too little for the substantial improvements they post in the first few years on the job, and too much for the later years of their career, when they show only incremental advances. An evidence-based salary schedule would alter this arrangement, focusing the rewards on the early rungs of the experience ladder.

Looking at Other Professions

Rewarding younger members of a profession for their rapid early gains in expertise is quite common outside of teaching. Consider the age-earnings profile of physicians. The opening figure shows earnings information taken from the American Community Survey of 2006. Young doctors in their late 20s and early 30s are paid relatively low salaries: 30-year-old physicians earn about one-third what their 45-year-old colleagues are being paid. But the ascent of the pay scale is rapid. Within 10 years, the 30-year-old physician can expect to reach the peak of the earnings distribution—a plateau, really, since doctors earn their high maximum salaries for a decade or more.

The picture is quite similar for lawyers. The average earnings of 25-year-old lawyers, fresh from law school, are a fraction of what 45-year-old attorneys are paid, possibly because many of the 25-year-olds are still trying to land a job. The ascent of the pay scale is once again rapid. By the age of 35, the typical young lawyer has attained a level of compensation that can be expected for the next quarter century, with a few years of extra-high earnings in the late 40s.

Contrast these market-driven age-earnings profiles with that of teachers, whose salaries are determined not so much by market forces but by collectively bargained agreements. Whereas the young lawyer can expect to reach peak earnings by age 35, and the young physician by age 40, the opening figure shows that the young teacher must wait until age 55 to attain that professional stature. What is more, the “plateau” in the young doctor or lawyer’s future is more of a true peak for teachers. Beyond the age of 55, average teacher earnings fall off rapidly, as many take early retirement once their pensions have vested.

It is true, of course, that the educational profile of the typical young doctor or lawyer is different from that of the typical beginning teacher. Teachers can usually begin work with no more than a bachelor’s degree, while doctors and lawyers must complete several more years of very costly specialized training. But the market is telling us something here: across professions, young practitioners spend a few years learning on the job; after this learning period, a 35-year-old practitioner is just as proficient as a 55-year-old. All our evidence suggests the same is true in teaching, yet the teaching profession has not established a pay schedule that reflects this basic fact.

Rational Teacher Pay

Looking at the opening figure, it is not difficult to understand why rates of exit from the teaching profession are high relative to rates in other fields. The 25-year-old teacher is not that much worse off financially than college friends who went into other professions. In addition, the teacher likely has less of a debt burden to bear. By the age of 35, however, the teacher’s compensation has declined precipitously relative to that of peers. Most economists would tell you that the teacher should have anticipated such an eventuality. But not every college student plotting out the future behaves as rationally as an economic model would presume.

So now we have some basic principles on which to build a better model: Reward characteristics associated with greater effectiveness; do not reward those that have no evidence linking them to effectiveness. To launch the system, all we need to do is pin down the increment of compensation for a given increase in effectiveness. There are several ways to do this, but let’s consider just one. Suppose that we reward a characteristic associated with an improvement in test scores of 1 percent of a standard deviation with a 1 percent increase in salary. This would make the height of the lighter bars in Figure 1 match the height of the darker bars. This rule also gives us a perspective to think about what the right increment would be for NBPTS certification. While new evidence could be helpful in determining the exact amount, it’s fairly clear that North Carolina’s 12 percent increase is larger than what evidence would support. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s set the premium at 5 percent. Here’s what would happen.

First, we would find ourselves with a fair amount of surplus cash. Although the rewards for the first few years of experience would increase, there would be dramatic decreases in the rewards for more time in the classroom. Eliminating the automatic salary increments for advanced degrees and reducing the premium for NBPTS certification would save still more.

What should be done with this extra money? One straightforward response, consistent with the goals of a wide range of advocates, would be to plow it straight back into teacher salaries, raising the base salary underlying these rewards. Increasing starting salaries in teaching has been advocated by, among others, the National Education Association, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, and the authors of a heavily publicized 2007 report by McKinsey & Company on the characteristics of the world’s most effective school systems. Using data from the actual characteristics of North Carolina public school teachers, we can simulate just how much of a boost could be applied to starting salaries using the savings associated with the evidence-based salary schedule. As shown in Figure 3, this schedule features a starting salary of $37,000, about 25 percent higher than the current low rung on the salary schedule, which is less than $30,000. As expected, the returns to experience would be concentrated in the first years on the job. After just three years in the classroom, teachers would earn salaries above $40,000. Under the current salary schedule, it takes teachers with bachelor’s degrees 13 years to reach that level.

Common-sense reforms to teacher pension systems, such as those discussed in Education Next by Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky (see “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys,” features, Winter 2008), would have a similar effect of making the returns to teaching more front-loaded. Under current pension systems, a teacher switching to a different career after five years leaves with virtually nothing in retirement savings. If school systems used modern 401(k)-style defined-contribution plans, early departing teachers could take their retirement savings with them, as many private-sector employees currently do. Old-fashioned pension plans discourage young college graduates not yet committed to a profession from giving teaching a chance.

The proposed salary schedule shown in Figure 2 is constructed to be expenditure-neutral. If we simply switched from one schedule to the other, the budgeted amount for teacher salaries would not change. A conversion to the evidence-based salary schedule could thus be seen as a means of boosting starting teacher salaries without increasing expenditures on education. Granted, the boost to starting salaries is not as great as some advocates would like—the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has called for starting salaries of $45,000—but remember that this new schedule is based on the arbitrary decision to reward credentials that improve test scores by 1 percent of a standard deviation with a 1 percent boost in salary. A further flattening of the salary schedule would permit a further increase in starting salaries, with no net growth in public expenditure.

Transition Costs

The evidence-based salary schedule is not a win-win proposition; a switch from current schedules would create clear winners and losers. Beginning teachers fare better under the new system. On the current salary schedule, a starting teacher who expects to hold nothing more than a bachelor’s degree throughout her career will receive earnings over 30 years worth $620,000 in present value terms, discounting at a 5 percent rate. On the evidence-based salary schedule, this present value increases 11 percent, to $686,000. Even a teacher entering the profession with a master’s degree is better off under the evidence-based salary schedule, even though it pays no reward for the advanced degree. This is because the benefit of front-loading the returns to experience outweighs the lost 10 percent salary increment over the long term.

Older teachers would be harmed in a direct switch from the current system to an evidence-based salary schedule. It is too late for these teachers to reap early returns to competence, and depriving them of the present system’s rich rewards for advanced degrees and experience beyond the first few years would cut directly into their expected future earnings. Teachers with bachelor’s degrees and more than 20 years in the classroom would experience an immediate pay cut. Bachelor’s degree–holding teachers with at least 17 years on the job would see a decline in the present value of future earnings, if we assume a 30-year teaching career.

Academic institutions that grant advanced degrees to teachers would also suffer under this plan. Without the promise to teachers of a guaranteed salary increment, enrollment in master’s-level programs would undoubtedly decrease. Such a shock to the system of advanced teacher education could, however, lead to improvements in program quality. If postgraduate education makes teachers more effective, they should be rewarded for it. An evidence-based salary schedule would directly reward teachers when they demonstrate evidence of greater effectiveness. Teachers would thus enroll in advanced degree programs of their own accord if those programs were known to improve effectiveness. Alternatively, individual teacher education programs could be accredited on the basis of their demonstrated ability to improve teacher effectiveness. Graduates of accredited programs could then receive guaranteed increments. An ideal evidence-based salary schedule would be flexible in light of new evidence.

Political Reality Check

Given the losses to experienced teachers, and the likely opposition of those in the business of educating teachers, is the evidence-based salary schedule a pie-in-the-sky ideal with no chance of becoming reality? Not necessarily. Entry-level teachers will find it in their best interest to choose the new system, if given a choice. The relative benefits become even more obvious if they intend to stay in the profession only a few years.

Phasing in the system, applying the evidence-based schedule to new teachers while retaining the traditional schedule for those who wish to remain on it, would shift the burden from highly experienced teachers. Of course, this burden would not disappear. It would shift to taxpayers, who would have to finance higher levels of teacher salaries until the completion of the phase-in period, perhaps 20 years or longer. The costs of paying new teachers on the evidence-based schedule while keeping existing teachers on the traditional schedule would peak after 10 years, at which point savings associated with the flattened rewards for experience would begin to outweigh the costs of higher salaries to younger teachers. In North Carolina, the long-run transition costs would amount to about $1.6 billion, half of which would be incurred in the first dozen years after the transition. That’s equivalent to a one-time charge of $180 per state resident, or roughly $12 per resident per year if financed over a 30-year period. Relative to the more than $1,000 per capita the state government spends on education each year, this is a modest sum.

There are many other solutions to the three-way negotiation problem among new teachers, experienced teachers, and taxpayers. For example, experienced teachers could be guaranteed their current salaries, plus cost-of-living adjustments, rather than the original raises on the traditional schedule or the salary declines imposed by an evidence-based schedule. The 25 percent increment to starting salaries could also be reduced, or phased in gradually.

Should a family of four be willing to pay an extra $50 per year to finance a move to an evidence-based salary system? Since taxpayers would in the end reap benefits from the move by introducing a system that attracted more qualified teachers with no additional cost after the transition period, most observers would say yes. Taxpayers nationwide pay billions of dollars each year in salary premiums to reward teachers for credentials of highly questionable value. Fifty dollars a year is a small price to pay to reallocate this money in a manner that encourages highly qualified teachers to enter the profession and stay there.

Jacob Vigdor is associate professor of public policy studies and economics at Duke University and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Debates about gender and schooling have taken a surprising turn in the past decade. After years of concern that girls were being shortchanged in male-dominated schools, especially in math and science, there has grown a rising chorus of voices worrying about whether boys are the ones in peril. With young women making up close to 60 percent of college students, critics like Richard Whitmire, former USA Today editorial writer and author of Why Boys Fail, worry that today’s schools—with their emphasis on order, sitting still, and passive learning—are much better suited to girls than to boys. Other authorities, such as Susan McGee Bailey, executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College and principal author of the 1992 AAUW report How Schools Shortchange Girls, reject such concerns and instead contend that ingrained sexism and gender roles continue to hamper K–12 schooling for both boys and girls. What does the evidence say? And what does all of this mean for policy proposals like single-sex schooling or teacher hiring? In this forum, Whitmire and Bailey sort through these questions.

Education Next: What’s the evidence that boys are doing less well in school than girls?

Richard Whitmire: Dropout and graduation rates, grades, and many test scores show boys faring poorly compared to girls (see Figure 1). But I prefer a simpler measure. Students need at least one year of post–high school study to survive in today’s marketplace, the goal wisely set this year by President Obama. In truth, they should complete two years of college. When that level of achievement is broken out by gender, men are faring badly. They go to college at lower rates and then graduate at lower rates. Let’s take Minnesota as an example. The (St. Paul) Pioneer Press just published an article on the gender gaps in that state. As of fall 2007, degrees earned by gender were bachelor’s: 58 percent female; master’s: 69 percent female; PhD: 53 percent female. Nationally, 58 percent of those earning bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of those earning associate’s degrees are female.

For the most part this is happening because K–12 schools are shortchanging boys. Far too many boys drop out before earning a high school diploma. Worse, too many boys who do make it through high school are either unprepared for or unmotivated to do college-level work.

The conventional wisdom that women need a college degree more than men was true at one time, but is no longer. Economists at both the College Board and the U.S. Department of Education agree: men and women may earn different average salaries, but they get almost exactly the same percentage bump-up in earnings for each degree earned.

Those manufacturing jobs that men could secure with only a high school degree have been slipping away for years. In the current recession, that trend picked up speed, with more than 80 percent of the layoffs involving men. Now more than ever, men and women have equal needs to earn degrees past high school, but far more women than men are getting that message.

Susan McGee Bailey: Clearly, all our students need strong preparation for the demands of a high-tech, global world, but international data such as those provided by TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) show U.S. students of both sexes performing in a mediocre fashion in comparison to their counterparts in other industrialized nations.

Focusing on the lower college completion rates for boys and blaming K–12 educators is too easy. First, the much smaller college-enrollment gap compared to the larger degree gap raises questions about college. College enrollments have been increasing for both young women and young men since the 1970s, but the increase for young women has been larger (see Figure 2a). In 1972, 53 percent of males and 46 percent of females enrolled in two- or four-year colleges immediately after graduating from high school; in 2007 the comparable figures were 66 percent of males and 68 percent of females. Women now outpace men in BA, MA, and PhD completion, but are significantly behind men in MBAs and earn law and medical degrees at slightly lower rates than men. Studies suggesting that men and women get the same benefit from a degree obscure the critical reality that women still earn less than men at every level (see Figure 2b).

During the past 20 years, discussions of educational equity have often fallen into an either/or paradigm in which one group of students has been singled out as the only group needing attention. Dropout rates illustrate the dangers of focusing too narrowly. Dropout rates have been declining for both girls and boys, with the rate of decrease greater for girls as a group. But simply looking at gender differences is not enough. Rates vary considerably by race, ethnicity, and social class, and large numbers of girls as well as boys leave school before earning a high school diploma (see Figure 3). Educators are rightly focused on ensuring high-quality instruction, developing new and improved curricular materials, and creating more engaging school environments. But educators alone cannot address the multiple factors that influence students who drop out, nor can they conduct the kinds of community outreach that can help young people find alternative routes to completing their education.

EN: Is it all boys who are struggling or particular subsets of boys (like poor minority boys)?

RW: That’s the challenge raised by those who question whether boys are in trouble: this is all about income and race, not gender, they argue. It’s true that the gender gaps are especially sharp in urban areas. In July 2009, the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University released a study that tracked the students who graduated from Boston Public Schools in 2007. The conclusion: for every 167 women in four-year colleges there were only 100 men. Is poverty the cause? The male and female students came from similar streets and neighborhoods. Is race the only issue? That’s not what the study uncovered. In fact, black females were five percentage points more likely to pursue further study after high school, including community colleges, four-year colleges, and technical or vocational schools, than white males.

Gender gaps are especially profound for poor and minority males. It’s what Chicago researcher Melissa Roderick calls the “genderization of race.” Roughly translated: you won’t solve racial learning gaps unless you tackle the gender gaps. Unfortunately, school accountability regimes such as No Child Left Behind keep educators fixated solely on learning gaps associated with race and income.

Now let’s shift to the comfortable suburban districts, where both boys and girls go on to college at a high rate. Educators there see few problems, so they rarely break out the numbers by gender. There are a few exceptions. When school officials in two districts serving wealthy families—Edina outside Minneapolis and Wilmette outside Chicago—took a hard look at their gender numbers, they found wide and growing gaps. The Wilmette data were very specific, showing girls ahead in both grades and test scores.

If nearly all the students there go to college anyway, does this matter? I argue that it does. A considerable number of those boys get into selective private colleges due to gender preferences granted males by admissions officers, a practice that is both concealed and widespread. Uncovering the preferences is relatively easy. Take the U.S. News & World Report data and sort admission rates by gender. Still skeptical? Look at the most recent freshman class and break out high school grade-point averages by gender. To win admission at many private colleges (and some publics willing to risk lawsuits), females had to be more academically adept than males.

Colleges are about to be ”called out” for these admissions preferences that discriminate against women and mask the problem of boys falling behind in school. In November, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced an investigation into the practice. Although the commission lacks the legal authority to act on the discrimination, mere exposure—triggering outrage from high school girls—may force colleges to curtail the favoritism.

What happens to these less-qualified males once they’re in college? Many continue their slack habits from high school, explaining much of the gender gap in college persistence rates, which count those who earn degrees within six years.

SMB: Race, sex, and income issues interact in complicated ways. NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) data indicate that income and race gaps are larger than gender gaps in reading and in math scores at 8th grade, and this pattern holds for other comparisons as well. In fact, socioeconomic status has long been the single best predictor of educational success.

Teachers may be encouraging all students to continue their education beyond high school, but the message may be heard differently by male and female students, and moderated by race and income. Recent data from a study we are doing here at Wellesley Centers for Women with a large, racially diverse sample of low-income students in a large urban school district found that 95 percent of students, both boys and girls, aspired to attend college when asked in 9th and 10th grade. But if their actual college enrollment rates are in line with past district figures, far fewer will enroll in college and the numbers for young men will be lower than for young women.

Higher male dropout rates are part of the problem, but the wider range of better paid jobs open to young men immediately after high school has also been influential. Enlisting in the military after high school is an option for both sexes, but more young men than young women sign up for the armed forces. Many of these recruits are attracted by the higher education benefits the military offers. They may not be rejecting postsecondary education, but rather simply choosing a different pathway.

EN: Isn’t the problem more complex: boys are learning more math and science and girls are learning more reading?

RW: When you examine state tests, which are far better than NAEP for measuring gender gaps because they test every student every year in most grades, you see that girls have pulled even with boys in math and science. In some cases, they outscore boys in those subjects. At the same time, you see wide gaps in reading and very wide gaps in writing.

Haven’t boys always lagged behind girls in literacy skills? Yes, but literacy skills never mattered so much as they do today. In 1989 the nation’s governors met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to launch the school reforms we see today. Essentially, the goal was to put as many students as possible on a college preparation track. The key tools needed to succeed in college courses, arts or sciences, are the abilities to read quickly and accurately and write with precision and accuracy. The governors were right to set that goal, and educators were right to respond by teaching those skills in kindergarten and 1st grade. The problem arose when nobody realized that boys are ill-equipped to acquire those skills that early, at least not with the teaching methods used in the past. As a result, too many boys fall behind, conclude that school is for girls, and never try to catch up. Once boys shift their attention to video games or hip-hop music, parents and educators erroneously conclude those factors trigger the problem. In fact, boys bury themselves in games after seeing few rewards for them in school.

Educators haven’t even started redesigning the early grades to help boys absorb early literacy skills. Why this is not happening is unclear. Why has the Department of Education refused to launch a single research project into boy’s academic problems? The most likely answer: at a time when men rule the White House and Wall Street, helping males, including young boys, would amount to a political correctness violation.

SMB: I differ with Richard on NAEP. NAEP tests are specifically designed to produce reliable, comparable data over time. State tests are not. And the NAEP data are clear, if not as dramatic as some selected state data: boys, on average, perform less well than girls on tests of reading and writing skills and low-income boys do less well than higher-income boys. NAEP data also show that the gaps favor boys in science and math. While smaller than those favoring girls in reading, the gaps have by no means disappeared and they grow larger as students age (see Figure 1).

Despite widespread concern about boys’ literacy skills, we rarely look seriously at the lingering gender stereotypes that play out every day in our schools, homes, and communities. As Richard indicates, gendered assumptions about literacy are at the heart of the problem, in much the same ways that gendered assumptions about science and math have inhibited girls’ persistence and achievement in these areas. It’s a “girl thing” to read; real boys don’t sit around with a book. Parenting practices contribute to this; from an early age mothers read more to their children than do fathers. In fact, as Lise Eliot delineates in her new book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain, the way people interact with babies is based on assumptions about gender differences that have little basis in biology, but are part and parcel of our earliest socialization. “Little boys need more physical activity,” “little girls are more social,” “boys are better at math than girls”—the dichotomies are endless, and they are as dangerous as they are baseless.

Girls who do what boys have traditionally done, who become astronauts, scientists, firefighters, or soldiers, are doing things that almost everyone sees as “moving up.” The reverse is not true. It is no longer legal to advertise job openings under “female” or “male” headings, but our culture still tends to classify many jobs this way. Women make up 83 percent of librarians and 92 percent of nurses; only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies are headed by female CEOs; and women hold only 17 of 100 seats in the U.S. Senate.

Gender expectations limit both boys and girls, and at this point they may constrain young boys even more than they do girls. One of the most damaging expectations is that doing well in school is for girls. Until we confront the reality that many boys fear being viewed as less than “all boy” when achieving academically, we will only be playing around the edges of the problem.

EN: Are the problems more apparent in elementary or secondary schooling? Are there particular subjects or activities where boys are faring especially well or especially poorly?

RW: In general, girls arrive in kindergarten far more ready than boys to engage the verbal-rich curriculum that awaits them. By the end of elementary school, the gaps become significant, and in middle school they widen, in part because many schools don’t teach literacy skills after 6th grade, only “literature.” In 9th grade, where poorly prepared boys first encounter the full force of the college-readiness curriculum, you can see a pileup, or bulge, as 9th-grade classes are far larger than 8th-grade classes, the result of students being retained before entering 10th grade.

Nationally, there are 113 boys in 9th grade for every 100 girls, according to the Southern Regional Education Board. Among African Americans, there are 123 boys for every 100 girls. States are discovering that 9th grade has become their biggest dropout year. By 11th grade many boys begin to revive academically, but it’s too late to recover from their poorer grades in 9th and 10th grades.

Gender gaps are not an issue that can be easily sorted out by subject. High school girls outperform boys in many of the Advanced Placement subjects, including many of the sciences. The exceptions are physics and computer science, where boys tend to do better. Skeptics of the “boy troubles” point to SAT scores, where males outperform females, without acknowledging the gender imbalances in the test-takers: far more poor and minority girls than boys take that test.

SMB: The differences between boys and girls as they enter school have been vastly exaggerated. Yes, girls, on average, are more verbally adept at age five, but this difference is not particularly large, and many young boys are as ready to read as the girls sitting next to them. Often lost in the discussion of girls’ advantages is the reality that boys outperform girls on tests of visual and spatial abilities, and do at least as well on tests of mathematical skills at this age, and these differences widen as they advance in school.

However, on measures of fine motor skills and self-control, girls usually perform better than boys, and these skills clearly contribute to early school success. Classrooms that use manipulative materials to practice spatial skills are as necessary as those that give special attention to literacy skills for students in need of help in that area. Literacy is critical and boys need encouragement and support, but this does not mean that all girls are fine readers and it certainly does not mean that gaps in science and math that show girls at a disadvantage should be dismissed. When more than 75 percent of undergraduate degrees in the highly paid fields of computer science and engineering are awarded to young men, the majority of them white, the idea that we no longer need focus on these issues for girls and for students of color does not hold up.

Looking carefully at the gendered assumptions that underlie our education system gives us a clearer picture not only of the problems confronting boys in attaining competencies in reading and writing, but of a range of school problems that include gender violence, the continuing imbalance favoring boys in school athletics, and the over-referral of boys—particularly boys of color—and the under-referral of girls, to special education programs. Each of these issues reflects assumptions about the “appropriate” roles of men and women. No discussion of educational equity can ignore the rising rates of dating violence, sexual harassment, and bullying in our schools. When young men and boys think that it is acceptable to verbally harass or physically attack girls under the guise of “manliness,” something is decidedly out of kilter. Educators must do more to help both boys and girls see beyond this dangerous construction of masculinity.

EN: Do boys learn differently than girls? Are schools better organized for the ways in which girls learn? Or is the problem something in American culture writ large?

RW: This is not an American issue. In England and Australia, the gender gap is a topic of regular newspaper stories. What’s interesting in England is the attention paid to the especially sharp decline in educational performance among white boys from blue-collar families. You can see that in this country as well, with steeply growing college-going gender gaps within that group. The issue in Australia came to a head in 2003 when the government issued a lengthy report on the topic. The conclusion: literacy skills are the culprit. Researchers in England have reached roughly the same conclusion.

In the United States the federal government has never investigated the issue, most likely because it is considered “controversial.” When the issue arises, the basic premise that boys are in trouble gets attacked by national feminist groups or professors from women’s studies departments. Their attitude is understandable: the first to point out that boys were in trouble were conservatives, who blamed the feminists for creating school environments that were hostile to boys. I find no evidence that feminists are to blame for the problem. Their only “fault” lies in continuing to deny that the problem exists.

SMB: Different children learn differently, but differences between individual boys and between individual girls are much larger than those between girls as a group and boys as a group. Expectations based on gender remain rampant in American culture, and indeed, in cultures around the world. As Richard notes, there has been significant attention paid to the boy half of gender issues in England and Australia. Researchers in England who have studied a range of sociocultural approaches to the problem of boys’ achievement report that one of the most successful involves directly addressing the “lad culture.” By helping boys who are seen as leaders in their peer group improve in school, they create a climate where other boys see academic achievement as “cool.” Exam grades for boys in schools in the study increased significantly.

Creating an environment where academic achievement is seen as something all boys, as well as all girls, should aspire to is critical. In those U.S. school systems where boys do well, this is invariably the case. The majority of these schools are in more affluent districts, where parents have college degrees and encourage their sons and their daughters to do well academically, or in less advantaged communities where the community itself has rallied behind educational goals. The culture of the school reflects the culture of the surrounding community. We need more public discussion of the value of education and its multiple individual and societal benefits. When we talk only of test scores and economic rewards, we present too narrow a view.

EN: Is it a problem that so few teachers are men?

RW: Male teachers continue to disappear from classrooms. Their numbers are at 24 percent, a record low. What’s interesting is the rapid disappearance of male teachers from the middle school classrooms. Elementary schools never had many male teachers and high schools still retain a respectable number of males. In some middle schools, however, you simply won’t find a male teacher. Combine that with the fact that middle school is the time when the gender gaps widen the most and you have an obvious culprit, right? I don’t buy it. It wouldn’t hurt to have more male teachers, especially in the middle school years, but I’m not convinced that suddenly boosting the number of male teachers would close any gender gaps.

Some researchers (see “The Why Chromosome,” research, Fall 2006) have documented modest gains made by boys taught by male teachers, but in researching my book I found that the schools that educate boys as well as girls pay little or no attention to the gender of the teacher. Rather, they pour enormous resources into how literacy is taught.

SMB: It is not surprising that there are so few male teachers. K–12 teaching remains a “woman’s job,” with a limited career path and poor pay considering the preparation required. Questions laced with homophobia about why a man would want to teach children are rampant. The more advanced the education level, the more men in the teaching ranks. At the university level the balance has shifted entirely, with women significantly underrepresented among tenured faculty. Excellent teaching is not a matter of gender, but the absence of men in K–12 classrooms sends subtle messages about what is “female” and “male,” influencing students in ways that remain largely invisible and understudied.

EN: Is single-sex education a viable strategy for addressing the problem?

SMB: Research that examines the effectiveness of single-sex K–12 education and controls for socioeconomic background and degree of parental involvement, both crucial factors in educational attainment, is woefully lacking. We must examine curricular programs and teaching practices used in successful single-sex and coed programs, the kinds of students they help most, and how these programs and practices can work for more students in a wider range of settings. An example of this approach is research showing that girls benefit from science instruction that relates the material to real-world problems—and so do boys. When evaluating single-sex education,

we must not ignore a crucial purpose of public education—developing effective citizens. We need to consider the tradeoffs we may be making in sex-segregating students, closing off opportunities for learning from and with each other.

RW: Here’s my problem with single-sex education: The Bush Department of Education flipped on the green light for public schools to carry out single-sex education, but never commissioned a single study that would instruct schools on how to do it. (I’m choosing my words carefully here: meta-analyses of single-sex education don’t guide classroom instruction.) Some states—South Carolina comes to mind, which was determined to do something for their flailing boys—gave that green light a broad embrace, unleashing several hundred programs. Unfortunately, not that many of those programs are first-rate. And if academic breakthroughs don’t materialize, those single-sex programs will be dismantled, perhaps prematurely.

EN: Are there programs that are much more effective for boys? What are the traits or approaches that they have in common?

RW: Most important is a refusal to let students slip behind. I see a lax attitude toward males, “Don’t worry, Mom, boys will be boys. Your son will catch up,” as the single biggest problem. In fact, a lot of boys never do catch up. Two of the schools I profile in Why Boys Fail weren’t even aware they were closing gender gaps; that wasn’t their goal. Their goal was to focus on literacy skills and refuse to let any child slip behind. They took great pride in their success and seemed surprised when it was pointed out they had leveled the gender gaps.

SMB: Research studies on effective schools have shown remarkably similar findings for 30 years. Schools that set high standards for all, involve parents, provide firm discipline and an orderly, encouraging environment, and where teachers are respected and engaged are more successful. Such schools do not as easily fall into the black hole of differential expectations for girls and boys, or one racial or ethnic group over another.

EN: What other options might policymakers or reformers consider?

SMB: We should take a page from the successful, ongoing efforts that address the lingering lag in girls’ and women’s participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields and leadership positions: 1) mentoring and role-modeling programs that involve more men in schools, particularly men who hold other than traditionally male jobs so that students see men in a variety of careers; 2) a national fathers’ reading campaign to engage more fathers in reading to their children; and 3) increased funding for innovative programs that engage students in literacy activities in and out of school. When “reading like a girl” is as acceptable for boys as doing science and math well is becoming for girls, we will begin to make real progress toward gender-equitable education for all our students.

RW: The U.S. Department of Education needs to launch an Australian-style investigation into the boys problem. Once the key issues are identified, follow-on research projects can target specific teaching strategies for teachers. One critical need: national research into what works and doesn’t work with single-sex education.

Not all the solutions lie within the K–12 world, however. Colleges should eliminate from high school grade-point averages the results from 9th grade—when many boys struggle to make the transition from middle school. And colleges need to step in to help make badly needed adjustments to K–12 accountability systems. State high school graduation standards don’t match college readiness requirements. Given the higher college dropout rates for men, that mismatch appears to be hurting males the most.

Look parents in the eye, added an instructor. Say, “Hi, It’s great to see you.” It’s difficult to discuss academics or ask parents to do anything for you before you get to know them.

Family Partnerships for Achievement is not a course typical of most master’s programs in education. The course was designed with one overriding goal: to prepare teachers to be effective in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). This goal drives every aspect of the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR), a district-based program for teacher training and certification that recruits highly qualified individuals to take on the unique challenges of teaching in a high-need Boston school and then guides them through a specialized course of preparation.

BTR is one of a new breed of teacher training initiatives that resemble neither traditional nor most alternative certification programs. By rethinking the relationship between training and hiring, these programs have found promising new ways to prepare educators.

Traditional teacher-training programs, which are usually completed through a college or university, are viewed by most as a vehicle to state certification: you take a standard list of courses and exit with a license to teach and, in some cases, a degree. Such programs, however, have long been derided as impractical: Future teachers learn few skills applicable to real classrooms, and the time and cost necessary to complete the training and certification can discourage people interested in the profession.

When the alternative certification movement began, with the launch of New Jersey’s Provisional Teacher Program in 1983, it famously broke the link between traditional teacher training and certification. Although certification was still the goal, the training was reduced and accelerated in the hopes of creating a “streamlined way to get ultra-talented people into the classroom quickly,” says Sandi Jacobs, vice president for policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). There are now 485 alternative certification programs across 47 states.

But in more than half the states, says recent research, so-called alternative routes to certification are all but indistinguishable from traditional programs (see “What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?” check the facts, Winter 2009). And as with traditional programs, quality varies widely. Of the alternative certification programs the NCTQ surveyed for a 2007 report, only one-third require a summer teaching practicum and one-quarter provide weekly mentoring for teachers once the school year starts. One-quarter of the programs “take virtually anybody” who applies, says Jacobs, which is alarming considering that alternative programs prepare one-fifth of new teachers nationally.

BTR is implementing a model that emphasizes training teachers on-site in actual classrooms with students and lead teachers, similar to the way medical residents grow into effective doctors by working directly with patients under the guidance of veterans. Instead of following a typical list of course and credit-hour requirements, the organization sponsoring the internship or residency-style program tailors coursework to meet the needs of the particular school or type of school in which the teacher will be employed.

Highlighted in the following pages are three such programs. They have rigorous selection processes, practical coursework, and tremendous field-based support—and each has an innovative twist.

• In 2004, San Diego–based High Tech High (HTH) became the first charter management organization (CMO) approved to certify its own teachers. The Teacher Intern Program enables HTH to hire individuals best suited for its project-based, interdisciplinary curriculum.

• The Alliance for Catholic Education’s (ACE’s) Teacher Formation program at the University of Notre Dame is the Teach For America of parochial schools. High-achieving recent college graduates make a two-year service commitment to teach in struggling Catholic schools across the southern states.

• The Boston Teacher Residency was introduced above. For an entire year before becoming teachers of record in Boston public schools, residents apprentice in the classrooms of skilled veterans, who gradually increase the residents’ teaching responsibilities.

None of these programs is meant to supplant all others. The crisis facing teacher training is that currently one model does dominate. Licensure rules in many states hamstring experimentation by requiring that teacher training programs be run by universities. Those states should revise their requirements to support models such as those profiled here and others that customize teacher training to fit the challenges of particular schools and districts.

High Tech High: Teacher Intern Program

When Anne Duffy applied to teach science at HTH in 2007, she had already completed a master’s degree in chemistry at the University of California San Diego, taught organic chemistry to undergraduates, and begun work toward a doctoral degree. She had led kindergarten and 4th- and 5th-grade science enrichment classes. Yet she was barred from working as a public school teacher because she lacked a state teaching certificate.

HTH—with its emphasis on integrating academic and technical education through project-based learning—attracts a number of people like Duffy with “deep content knowledge who had very successful academic careers and wanted to work in an urban school at a time of profound teacher shortage,” says founding principal Larry Rosenstock. And HTH was eager to employ them in the HTH “village,” which includes six schools on the original Point Loma site. But a 1999 compromise approved by the California legislature required that charter school teachers earn a credential comparable to certificates held by public school teachers, in return for lifting the cap on charters across the state. HTH fashioned a solution and, with state approval, began to certify its own teachers.

On a structural level, HTH’s Teacher Intern Program operates like other alternative certification programs. For three weeks over the summer, interns begin cost-free coursework and create a syllabus and unit of study for the beginning of the year. They participate in professional development with veteran staff at the school that hires them as official teachers of record. Interns earn the same salary and benefits as other HTH teachers. During the school year, coursework resumes in the early evening. HTH assigns each intern a mentor, who guides and supports the trainee’s development.

In their second year, interns wrap up program requirements with state-mandated teaching performance tasks called the California Teaching Performance Assessment (CA-TPA). Through four tasks—written responses to prompts and one videotaped lesson—new teachers are expected to connect state standards to effective teaching practices. After successfully completing the tasks, interns are recommended by the HTH Governing Board to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

One hundred eight staff members are engaged in official mentoring and/or adult learning at HTH, says Rob Riordan, the spirited director of instructional support for all HTH schools. Interns and mentors, who share grade level and/or content area, watch each other in action as often as possible. Mentoring, Riordan says, is an ongoing “professional development conversation” made possible, in part, by an inventive schedule. HTH built an hour-long common planning period into the beginning of every school day, before students arrive. When Rosenstock initially experimented with the sacred morning hour during his days as a principal in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he found that “there was something about first period that let [teachers] think about four years from now.” The credentialing program also takes advantage of the hour: The fall semester class called Classroom Management and Assessment, which is facilitated by the interns’ mentors, meets over six Monday mornings during the 7:15–8:15 AM block.

While the Teacher Intern Program is not a degree-granting program, HTH does offer master’s degrees through its Graduate School of Education (more on that below). In both programs, HTH values practical coursework. HTH keeps interns in classes for as little time as possible. At most universities, according to Jennifer Husbands, founding director of the HTH Graduate School of Education (GSE), one unit or credit equals 10 or 15 hours of class time and 5 hours of independent work. “We kind of flip that on its head,” she says. At HTH, one credit equals 5 hours of class time and 10 hours of independent work, or time with students. “It makes sense for an intern program” to structure coursework this way, says Husbands. “They are getting credit for their time spent teaching in the classroom.”

In a typical fall semester, interns take six classes, which sounds far too demanding, but each one differs in credits and hours. Teaching Methods, Curriculum Design, and Classroom Settings is worth three credits and meets on just four Tuesdays in October from 4:15 to 7:15 PM. Technology in Portfolio Development, one credit, takes place on a Saturday from 8 AM to 1 PM. Interns complete an accelerated course of study in one year, and program staff make sure that every aspect of a streamlined course directly relates to interns’ work with students.

Critics will point out that HTH has the rare luxury of developing a tight-knit, practical teacher preparation program in-house: It has enough talent on staff to teach the intern classes. Its mentor pool grows each year, as newer teachers gain experience with the HTH design principles.

Is the Teacher Intern Program too HTH-oriented? (The program only accepts teachers employed by HTH, although it hopes to invite outside applicants in the future.) Aren’t we looking for examples of effective alternative routes to replicate or take “to scale,” as they say?

Not really, says Rosenstock: “Let’s unscale…. When we standardize the curriculum and we standardize how teachers get prepared, we just suck the oxygen out of the system.”

The HTH GSE opened in the fall of 2007. Its mission is to prepare experienced teachers, through a master of education degree (M.Ed.) in either school leadership or teacher leadership, to spread innovation and develop high-expectations learning environments for all students. The GSE currently serves 30 master’s candidates, 20 teachers from within and 10 from outside HTH.

Graduate students take courses but spend most of their time—as in the credentialing program—putting theory to practice in the HTH community, where they work with administrators, teachers, and students. Training and empowering educators to put best practices in place as staff leaders in their home schools, says Stacey Caillier, director of the Teacher Leadership M.Ed. program, is one way HTH can “become scalable and sustainable and actually cause change.”

Alliance for Catholic Education: Teacher Formation Program

With the dishes drying and another tough day of teaching at Memphis’s inner-city Catholic schools behind them, five young teachers settled into deep couches in their living room. They gathered there most nights to “vent about the day’s ridiculousness,” joke around, or watch humorous YouTube clips—anything to “break up the monotony” of lesson planning and grading student work, said Patrick Manning.

The group had met seven months earlier, in June 2007, when they arrived at Notre Dame’s campus for an eight-week training session, the first leg of the Alliance for Catholic Education’s two-year Teacher Formation Program. ACE was founded in 1993 to attract to Catholic schools talented college graduates who did not necessarily major in education. ACE’s leaders view the program foremost as a service experience but harbor the underlying hope that graduates will continue working in education after completing their commitment, much like recruits to Teach For America. Both programs run accelerated, no-frills courses over the summer before sending new teachers to high-need classrooms. Both programs offer support through a cohort model: ACE teachers must live in small groups, whereas TFA corps members frequently room together by choice. The ACE teachers in one house are typically spread across two to four schools in the area. ACE runs 32 houses in the 14 mostly southern states the program serves.

Memphis Catholic High School employs a new batch of ACE teachers every 2 years and has for the past 10 years. The principal sends ACE a request form listing subject-matter vacancies, and ACE fills the need. Like many schools in which ACE places teachers, Memphis Catholic would struggle to replenish its highly transient staff without the program (see “Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?” features, Spring 2007). ACE characteristically sends its teachers to inner-city schools, although a few go to rural communities. Overall, 85 percent of ACE teachers serve poor students.

ACE is highly selective, accepting only one in four candidates, but acknowledges that a high GPA is not always a prerequisite for great teaching. The interview is vital to the selection process. “ACE staff spends substantial time talking to potential applicants about the program to help them discern whether ACE would be a good fit,” wrote ACE director John Staud in an email.

ACE participants earn a cost-free master of education degree from Notre Dame and are eligible for an Indiana teaching certificate upon completion of the program. Neither a master’s degree nor certification is required to teach in Catholic schools, but ACE has long believed that capability in the classroom derives from teachers’ knowledge of curriculum development, instructional strategies, and assessment tools, along with classroom-based training. The fact that the master’s degree provides a “route to public school certification,” wrote Tom Doyle, ACE’s academic director, is “a side benefit.”

As at HTH, the distribution of credit hours values teaching time over time spent in university classrooms. In the first week of summer, teachers take a course on classroom design, management, and communicating with parents. A course on the history of Catholic education is also completed in the first week and a course on technology by the second.

A two-credit summer school practicum begins after the second week and typically lasts six weeks. ACE students co-teach from 8 to 11 AM in public and Catholic school classrooms with a summer instructor and are observed and advised by a master teacher.

“Some people learned what not to do” by watching mediocre instructors, says Laura Farrell of her summer school experience. Others, like Patrick Manning and colleague Robbie Rhinesmith, were thrown into lead teaching positions and, though it initially overwhelmed them, they welcomed the challenge.

Over half of all credits are accumulated during the two summer sessions. The only coursework teachers are responsible for during the fall semester is Clinical Seminar, which is taken all four semesters. Twice a month students email reflections to one of six university faculty members who are assigned to 30 ACE students each. In their reflections, new teachers describe one of their practices, discuss why they’re using it (linking it to specific research) then use supporting evidence to explain the results of the practice and where to take it next. Students’ reflections and supervisors’ responses are automatically added to an electronic academic portfolio that can be accessed anytime.

In the second semester of year one, ACE adds an online course called Topics in Education Psychology. Students read assigned material, take online quizzes, and write summative papers, which they submit electronically for feedback, on four topics the faculty feel are relevant, such as “intelligence and assessment” or “student motivation.”

Like alternative certification programs, ACE considers the teachers’ classroom immersion their teaching practicum, granting eight credits for an ongoing class called Supervised Teaching. ACE teachers receive support from a school-based mentor assigned by their principal. In addition to advising on curriculum, behavior management, and positive family engagement, says Doyle, mentors are supposed to “introduce ACE teachers to the local culture of the city and into the school itself.”

The Memphis teachers were generally lukewarm about their mentors. High achievers expect to excel as new teachers, and several of the new teachers desired more critical feedback from their mentors. Yet ACE encourages mentors to provide a “listening ear” and to leave constructive evaluations to principals. Manning suggested that at Catholic schools teachers “wear many hats” and tight schedules get in the way of assigned mentoring.

In addition, ACE university supervisors visit their teachers once a semester for at least two periods, sandwiched by pre- and postvisit conferences, which complement the Clinical Seminar course. Four visits over two years may not seem like much, but the two-year idea exchange between an ACE teacher and a respected veteran provides far more follow-up than most other alternative certification programs.

Although ACE provides many financial benefits—including the master’s degree, room and board for two summer sessions, $400 in travel stipends each year plus airfare to and from the December retreat, and health insurance—ACE teachers are paid considerably less than a typical Catholic school salary. ACE gives them a monthly stipend of $900 to $1,100 before taxes, which is adjusted for regional cost-of-living differences. From this, teachers contribute around $300 to rent, utilities, and shared food expenses.

Notre Dame funds the program with fees that participating schools contribute in lieu of paying the ACE teachers’ salaries. Grants and donations from foundations and private benefactors support the program as well. ACE has placed nearly 1,000 teachers in Catholic schools since its inception. The program’s success has led to replication of the model in a dozen colleges and universities (see Figure 1).

Boston Teacher Residency

When Sarah Benis Scheier-Dolberg stepped out of her classroom during a history lesson at the New Mission High School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Joanna Taylor, a teaching resident, assumed control. She led the seniors through terms like “World Bank” and “International Monetary Fund.” Several students looked at her, confused.

“Who else is totally lost?” Taylor asked. Meanwhile, Benis Scheier-Dolberg reentered the classroom and saw hands rise.

“That’s okay,” said Benis Scheier-Dolberg. “Hold onto the confusion.”

The two women continued the lesson together. Taylor explained the group work assignment; Benis Scheier-Dolberg monitored student participation and fielded questions. They had been shaping the curriculum together since the beginning of the school year. By late October, at the time of this lesson, they were co-teaching easily. In mid-November, Taylor completed a week of what BTR calls “lead teaching,” during which residents teach at least one class a day by themselves. Starting in February and through the end of the year, Taylor planned and taught two of Benis Scheier-Dolberg’s classes full-time.

The collaboration between Benis Scheier-Dolberg and Taylor illustrates the core of BTR’s model: provide aspiring teachers a year of hands-on experience under the guidance of a veteran educator.

BTR was launched in 2003 by the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Plan for Excellence (BPE) in a joint response to what then-superintendent Thomas Payzant saw as impediments to the district’s success. BPS was burdened by a turnover rate for new teachers of 50 percent in the first three years and, despite an abundance of university-based teacher preparation programs in the greater Boston area, lacked teachers of color, teachers equipped for urban school challenges, and those certified in the hard-to-staff areas of math, science, and special education.

BTR set out to recruit and prepare new teachers in ways that existing programs did not, and to provide enough support to retain them. Five years later, the program supplies BPS with more teachers than any other preparation program. Although the data are fairly green—teachers from the first cohort just entered their fifth year—just under 90 percent of all graduates still teach in BPS.

BTR has bloomed from a nascent cohort of 12 residents in 2003 to nearly 500 applicants for around 75 spots in school year 2008–09. To attract the diverse teachers the district badly wants, recruitment director Monique Davis organizes information sessions at community and afterschool centers and churches and in the homes of BTR graduates. She uses historically black colleges and universities with Boston alumni clubs to advertise BTR and make connections at institutions as far as South Carolina, for example, where she visited 10 schools in four days. Her team also mails a recruitment letter to every classroom paraprofessional with a bachelor’s degree in the district. The fact that BTR achieves diversity is in itself a recruitment tool, says program director Jesse Solomon: “I think having a cohort that’s half people of color makes a difference to other people of color coming to that program.”

BTR provides residents a stipend of $11,400 during the training year and automatically loans residents the $10,000 program tuition, forgiving one-third for every year graduates teach in Boston’s public schools. Residents also receive a $4,725 Education Award from AmeriCorps upon completing the program, which many use to pay back the $4,000 in tuition costs for the University of Massachusetts master’s degree. Other perks include need-based childcare funds and health insurance.

BTR is highly selective compared to most teacher preparation programs, accepting one in six applicants. According to Solomon, the selection process has four stages. Making the four-year commitment to Boston—one resident year followed by three years of induction, assuming graduates want full tuition forgiveness—is the first stage: “They’re not right for our kids if they’re only going to teach for a year or two,” says Solomon.

The second stage involves the traditional paper trail: a resumé, essays, transcript, and recommendations. Solomon admits that BTR’s commitment to high-need areas such as math and science means rejecting many candidates with impressive grades and leadership experience. BTR shapes enrollment so that more than half of residents at the secondary level earn their certification in high-need areas.

BTR then invites promising applicants to a selection day at one of its host schools. Over the course of the day, candidates teach a five-minute lesson, go through two rounds of interviews, and complete a writing assessment and group problem-solving exercise. By the end of the day, nearly 20 different “raters,” including human resources representatives from BPS, BTR mentors, site directors, former residents, and BPE staff, have observed candidates for evidence of “leadership ability” and “persistence,” says Solomon.

The preparation year becomes the fourth stage of the selection process. During the 13-month residency, residents spend four full days a week at their host schools, primarily in the classroom of a mentor. Over two summer sessions and during the school year on Wednesday afternoons and all day Friday, residents take classes toward a master’s degree in education. Through a unique partnership with the University of Massachusetts, BTR has the flexibility to hire and oversee a range of instructors and design its own program of study.

BTR starts the initial two-month summer session with instruction on classroom management and lesson planning. Residents then break into grade-level and subject-area groups for content-specific instruction. During the school year, residents take a typical load of reflective seminars and methods courses in addition to a few innovative yearlong courses that meet less frequently and address equity and achievement in the urban school context. Ever responsive to the district’s needs, residents graduate with a head start on coursework toward a special education license in addition to earning a Massachusetts Initial Teacher License. BTR will soon offer coursework for ESL licensure as well.

Urban residencies like BTR are great, people say, but can we fund them? Solomon and Anissa Listak, executive director of the recently founded Urban Teacher Residency Institute (UTRI), insist that investing in teacher preparation up front will save the staggering sums wasted by teacher turnover. According to the UTRI, “the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future pegs the average cost to recruit, hire, and lose a teacher at $50,000.”

The urban residencies currently running in Boston, Chicago, and Denver were initially funded by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs including Martin J. Koldyke, founder of the Golden Apple Foundation in Chicago, Boston’s Strategic Grant Partners, and the Boettcher Foundation in Denver. The programs operate on budgets of various sizes. Chicago pays its residents a stipend of $32,000, while Denver residents receive $10,000. Programs also pay mentors differing amounts and employ varying numbers of support staff.

Four new programs, in New York, Chattanooga, Philadelphia, and Denver, will open in 2009. Bills pending in Congress would expand federal funds for teacher residency programs. In the long term, collecting data that could link student achievement to resident teachers will be important for sustaining interest in and support for residency models. BTR is pleased to have Harvard professor of education and economics Thomas Kane “working on a value-added model study for us,” says Solomon.

The study will help BTR improve, says Solomon, “but it also allows the district to have leverage with other teacher education programs.” In other words, a “conversation about who’s preparing teachers and how well they’re being prepared,” says Solomon, should lead to a revitalizing competition between all types of preparation programs.

Katherine Newman, a former New York City Teaching Fellow, is a writer and teacher at KIPP Academy Nashville.

The Outcomes of the document read like a parody of academic identity politics, but they stand loud and clear in black and white.  They include:

• “Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression”
• “Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege”
• “Future teachers will understand the importance of cultural identity and develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity”
• “Future teachers are able to explain how institutional racism works in schools”
• “Our future teachers will be able to construct and articulate a sophisticated and nuanced critical analysis of this story of America, for what it illuminates and what it hides or distorts.  In pursuing this analysis, students will make use of, among other concepts and theories, the following:
  • myth of meritocracy in the United States
  • historical connections between scientific racism, intelligence testing, and assumptions of fixed mental capacity
  • alternative explanations for mobility (and lack of it)
  • history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values
  • history of white racism, with special focus on current colorblind ideology”

Needless to say, this is a conception of education that requires certain ideological commitments.  It doesn’t just try to inform aspiring teachers about American history and society and their complicated racial/sexual/etc. aspects.  No, it asks aspiring teachers to adopt a simmering, resentment-ridden conception of both, and it does so by reaching into their minds and asking them to interrogate who they are and what they feel and how they act.

One of the most troubling aspects of the situation is the op-ed written in defense of the program by the Dean of the College of Education, Jean K. Quam.  It appeared in the Star-Tribune after columnist Katherine Kersten attacked it as anti-American and coercive.  While the Race, Culture, Class, Gender report demanded that future teachers adopt the “white-privilege,” “oppression and marginalization” understanding of American society, Dean Quam cast it this way,

“Kersten’s primary concern is that the initiative addresses the reality of how issues of race, class, culture and gender play out in classrooms and affect student achievement. Her position is that discussion of these issues equates to indoctrination. Our belief is that acknowledging these issues is essential to teacher and student success and that ignoring them will not make them go away.”

Note the verb here, “acknowledging.”  Would anybody believe that the “Outcomes” listed above stop at acknowledgment?  Not at all.  They don’t ask future teachers merely to acknowledge forms of racism and the like.  If they did, they would allow for teachers to ponder the notion of, say, “white privilege” and determine that it plays a negligible role in Minnesota classrooms today.  The Task Force allows no such independent conclusions.  Indeed, one of the “Assessments” of the Outcomes asks students to compose a “self-discovery paper” in which they “identify three of their personal motives (desires, needs) that are potentially beneficial and three that are potentially harmful, and discuss how they might affect their teaching.”  It is hard to imagine a more manipulative exercise.

Here’s another statement of Quam’s, this in response to Kersten’s allegation that the vision of American history is a bilious litany of racism etc.: “We do not take a narrow view of who is an American and who can achieve the dream. We expect and require that teachers of the next half-century take a broad, balanced view of that dream.”

“Broad and balanced.”  Again, who would read the report and believe that the drafters would accept a student who said, “Yes, racism is a part of our history, but it has declined in marvelous ways, and does not have a formative effect on students”?

This is to say that the head of education at the leading teacher-training university in the state has offered a misleading, dishonest version of what is going on behind closed doors on the campus.  We can conclude two things.  One, if Quam genuinely believes that the report allows for multiple understandings of American history and society, then she has spent way too much time among the hot-heated identity politicians on campus, so much so that her judgment is critically distorted.  Or two, if Quam thinks that the report does coerce students into one ideological perspective, then her aim is to provide cover for it, not recognizing that her final responsibility is not to Minnesota ed school professors but to the citizens of the State of Minnesota.

Either way, the episode signifies something rotten in the state of the ed school, and it must be opposed.

NB: In Spring 2007, Ed Next published a history of efforts to adjust teachers attitudes (“Return of the Thought Police,” by Laurie Moses Hines).

Debates over tracking reached their high point in the United States in the 1990s. An influential report published in 1998 by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation argued that the available research did not support the contention that tracking doomed impoverished students to inferior schooling, nor did it support universal adoption of the practice. Over the last decade, patterns in grouping students have changed markedly in the U.S.; high school students are no longer placed in rigidly defined general-education or noncollege tracks but have the flexibility to move between course levels for different subjects. These changes may have assuaged some critics, but the broader debate over tracking remains unsettled.

The central challenge in measuring the effect of tracking on performance is that schools that track students may be different in many respects from schools that do not. For example, they may attract a different pool of students and possibly a different pool of teachers. The ideal situation to assess the impact of tracking on test scores of different groups of students would be one in which students were assigned to tracking or nontracking schools randomly, and the performance of students could be compared across school types.

We shed light on these issues using data from Kenya. In 2005, each of 140 primary schools in western Kenya received funds from the nongovernmental organization International Child Support (ICS) Africa to hire an extra teacher. One hundred twenty-one of these schools had a single 1st-grade class and used the new teacher to split the students into two classes. In 61 randomly selected schools, students were assigned to classes based on prior achievement as measured by test scores. In the remaining 60 schools, students were randomly assigned to one of the two classes, without regard to their prior academic performance.

The results showed that all students benefited from tracking, including those who started out with low, average, and high achievement. At the tracking schools, the test scores of students who started out in the middle of their class do not seem to be affected by which section (top or bottom) the students were later assigned to. In other words, any negative effects of being with lower-achieving peers were more than offset in tracked settings by the benefit of the teacher being able to better tailor instruction to students’ needs.

Primary Education in Kenya

The Kenyan education system includes eight years of primary school and four years of secondary school. Like many other developing countries, Kenya has recently made rapid progress toward the goal of universal primary education. After the elimination of school fees in 2003, primary school enrollment rose nearly 30 percent, from 5.9 million in 2002 to 7.6 million in 2005. This is typical of what is happening in sub-Saharan Africa overall, where the number of new entrants to primary school increased by more than 30 percent between 1999 and 2004.

This progress creates its own new challenges, however. Pupil-teacher ratios have grown dramatically, particularly in lower grades. In our sample of schools in western Kenya, the median 1st-grade class in 2005 (after the introduction of free primary education, but before the class-size-reduction program we study here) had 74 students and the average class size was 83. These classes are heterogeneous in a number of ways: Students differ vastly in age, school readiness, and support at home. Many of the new students are first-generation learners and have not attended preschools, which are neither free nor compulsory in Kenya. These challenges are not unique to Kenya; they confront many developing countries where school enrollment has risen sharply in recent years. Understanding the roles of tracking and peer effects in this type of environment is thus critically important.

Our results are most likely to be directly applicable to settings where classes are large, the student population is heterogeneous, and few additional resources are available to teachers. It is unclear whether similar results would be obtained in different contexts, such as developed countries, where smaller class sizes may allow more tailored instruction even without tracking, and extra resources, such as remedial education, computer-assisted learning, and special education programs, may already provide tools to help teachers deal with different types of students.

Design of the Experiment

This study takes advantage of a class-size-reduction program and evaluation that involved primary schools in Bungoma and Butere-Mumias in Western Province, Kenya. Of 210 primary schools in these districts, 140 schools were randomly selected to participate in the Extra-Teacher Program. With funding from the World Bank, ICS Africa provided each of the 140 selected schools with funds to hire an additional 1st-grade teacher on a contractual basis starting in May 2005, the beginning of the second term of that school year. Most of the schools (121) had only one 1st-grade class, which was split into two classes when the new teacher was hired. The 19 schools that already had two or more 1st-grade classes added another class.

It is important to note that the incentives facing the newly hired teachers differed from those facing civil-service teachers already working in program schools. The new teachers had clear incentives to work hard to increase their chances of having their short-term contracts renewed and of eventually being hired as civil-service teachers—a desirable outcome in a society where government jobs are highly valued. In contrast, the difficulty of firing civil-service teachers implies that they had weak extrinsic incentives and may be more sensitive to factors affecting their intrinsic motivation.

Average class size was reduced from 84 to 46 students in the 140 schools that received funds for a new teacher. The program continued for 18 months, which included the last two terms of 2005 and the entire 2006 school year, and the same cohort of students remained enrolled in the program.

From the 121 schools that had originally only one 1st-grade class, 60 schools were randomly selected to assign students to one of the two classes by chance. We call these schools the “nontracking schools.” In the remaining 61 schools (the “tracking schools”), the children were divided into two sections according to their scores on exams administered by the school during the first term of the 2005 school year. The 50 percent of the class with the lowest exam scores were assigned to one section (the “bottom class”) and the rest were assigned to the other (the “top class”).

After students were assigned to classes, the contract teacher and the civil-service teacher were also randomly assigned to classes. In the second year of the program, all children not repeating the grade remained assigned to the same group of peers and the same teacher.

Data

Our initial sample consists of approximately 10,000 students enrolled in 1st grade in March 2005 in one of the 121 primary schools participating in the study. The outcome of interest is student academic achievement, as measured by scores on a standardized math and language test first administered in all schools 18 months after the start of the program. Trained proctors administered the test, which was then graded blindly by data processors. In each school, 60 students (30 per class) were drawn from the initial sample to participate in the tests. If a class had more than 30 students, students were randomly sampled.

The test was designed by a cognitive psychologist to measure a range of skills students may master by the end of 2nd grade. One part of the test was written and the other part oral, administered one-on-one. Students answered math and literacy questions ranging from counting and identifying letters to subtracting three-digit numbers and reading and understanding sentences.

To limit attrition from the experiment, proctors were instructed to go to the homes of sampled students who had dropped out or were absent on the day of the test and to bring them to school for the test. It was not always possible to find the child, however, and the resulting attrition rate on the test was 18 percent. However, there was no difference between tracking and nontracking schools in overall attrition rates. In total, we have postintervention test-score data for 5,796 students.

In addition, each school received unannounced visits several times during the course of the study. During these visits enumerators checked, upon arrival, whether teachers were present in school and whether they were in class and teaching, and then took a roll call of the students.

To measure whether the effects of the program persisted, the children who had been sampled for the first postintervention test were tested again in November 2007, one year after the program ended. During the 2007 school year, these students were overwhelmingly enrolled in grades for which their school had a single class, so tracking was no longer an option. Most of these students had reached 3rd grade by that time, but those repeating an earlier grade were also tested. The attrition rate for this portion of the experiment was 22 percent. Neither the proportion nor the characteristics of children who could not be tested differed between the tracking and nontracking schools.

The Impact of Tracking

We estimate the impact of tracking on student achievement by comparing the postintervention (18 months after the experiment began) test scores of students in the tracking and nontracking schools. Taking the average of students’ scores on math and literacy exams, we find that students in tracking schools scored 0.14 standard deviations higher than students in nontracking schools overall. When we adjust the comparison to take into account minor differences in student characteristics across the two groups of schools, the effect increases to 0.18 standard deviations. There was no significant difference between the impact of the program on math and literacy scores when we examined the subjects separately.

How large were these effects? A typical student with a literacy score one standard deviation above that of the average student could correctly spell 5.5 of 10 words included on the exam, while the average student could spell only two. Similarly, students with a math score one standard deviation above the average were able to perform single-digit multiplications, whereas those at the mean could not. The average effect of tracking was roughly one-fifth the size of these performance differences.

These gains persisted beyond the duration of the program (see Figure 1). When the program ended, most students had reached 3rd grade, and all but five schools had only one 3rd-grade class. The remaining students had repeated and were in 2nd grade where, once again, most schools had only one large class, since after the program ended they did not have funds for additional teachers. Even so, the test scores of students in tracking schools remained 0.16 standard deviations higher than those of students in nontracking schools overall (and 0.18 standard deviations higher with control variables). The persistence of the benefits of tracking is striking, as many evaluations find that the test-score effects of successful interventions fade over time. It seems that tracking helped students master core skills in 1st and 2nd grade that in turn helped improve their learning later on.

We also examine whether the effect of tracking differs between initially high-scoring students (who are grouped with other strong students in tracking schools) and initially low-scoring students (who are grouped with other low-scoring students in tracking schools). We find that both groups of students benefited from tracking, and by approximately the same amount. A year after the intervention ended, the effect persisted for both the top and bottom classes.

Tracking increases test scores for students taught by contract teachers. In fact, students initially scoring low who were assigned to contract teachers benefited even more from tracking than students who initially scored high. But students who initially scored low showed only a small and statistically insignificant benefit if assigned to a civil-service teacher. In contrast, tracking substantially increased scores for students who initially scored high and were assigned to a civil-service teacher. Below we discuss other evidence that tracking led civil-service teachers to increase effort when they were assigned to high-scoring students but not when assigned to low-scoring students.

Changes in Peer Achievement

Data from the tracking schools allow us to estimate the effect of being taught with a higher-achieving vs. lower-achieving peer group by comparing students with baseline test scores in the middle of the distribution. Because of the way tracking was done (splitting the grade into two classes at the median baseline test score), the two students closest to the median within each school were assigned to classes where the average prior achievement of their classmates was very different.

By comparing pairs of students right around the cutoff, we can estimate the effect of being the lowest-achieving child in the class compared to being the highest-achieving student in the class. We find that, despite the large gap in average peer achievement (1.6 standard deviations in baseline test scores) between the top and bottom classes, the students just below the cutoff have postintervention test scores similar to students just above the cutoff. Moreover, when we compare students around the cutoff at the tracking schools with students of similar ability at the nontracking schools, we find that students at the tracking schools score higher at the end of the intervention than the comparable students in the nontracking schools. These results imply that being the best student in a class of relatively weak students and being the worst student in a class of relatively strong students are both better than being the middle student in a heterogeneous class. This evidence suggests that students benefit from homogeneity because the teacher does not need to spend time addressing the needs of students performing at widely varying levels.

Learning from Peers vs. Learning from Teachers

We took a separate look at students in schools where students were not tracked but instead assigned to classes randomly. The random assignment of students and teachers within these schools made it possible to see whether and how peer achievement affected the performance of individual students when education took place in an untracked setting. We found that it did. If peer achievement was higher—0.10 standard deviations higher, to be exact—students learned 0.04 standard deviations more than they would have otherwise.

These results, taken together with those reported earlier, indicate that peer influence depends on whether or not classes are tracked. In untracked classes, where there is considerable heterogeneity of performance, students learn less if their peers are lower performing. At least in this particular setting, however, the homogeneous classes that are created by tracking seem to allow the teacher to deliver instruction at a level that reaches all students, thus offsetting the effect of having lower-performing peers. Interestingly, combining the direct effect of peer achievement with the fact that the median children in each school did not suffer from being assigned to the bottom track suggests that teachers focus their attention not on the median student in the class, but at students considerably above the median.

Why Did Tracking Work?

Two additional pieces of evidence shed light on the question of why tracking had such clear benefits. First, we look at teacher presence and effort. Do they spend more time in class and teaching? Then, we examine whether the test-score gains in tracking schools were concentrated among simpler or more complex tasks and whether this varied by students’ initial achievement levels. Our results confirm that students in tracked classes seem to have benefited from more-focused teaching and perhaps also from greater teacher effort.

Teacher absence is a major problem in Kenya, as in many developing countries. Only 59 percent of teachers were in class and teaching during unannounced visits to a comparable sample of schools that did not receive an additional teacher. Overall, teachers in tracking schools were 9.6 percentage points more likely to be found in school and teaching during random spot checks than their counterparts in nontracking schools, who were present and teaching only about half of the time. There were, however, large differences across teachers. The contract teachers were much more likely to be found in school and teaching (74 percent versus 45 percent for the civil-service teachers), and their absence rate was unaffected by tracking (see Figure 2). The civil-service teachers were 10 percentage points more likely to be in schools and teaching in tracking schools than in nontracking schools when they were assigned to the top class. This difference is statistically significant and amounts to a 25 percent increase in teaching time. However, the difference between tracking and nontracking school types was smaller and statistically insignificant for civil-service teachers assigned to the bottom classes.

These results suggest that teachers may be more motivated to teach a group of students with high initial scores than a group with low initial scores or a heterogeneous group. Recall that students assigned to the top class with a civil-service teacher benefited more from tracking than those assigned to the bottom class with a civil-service teacher. Increased teacher effort may help explain this pattern.

Another hypothesis consistent with both the tracking results and the effects from random peer assignment is that tracking by initial achievement improves student learning because it allows teachers to focus instruction. Teaching a more homogeneous group of students might allow teachers to adjust the material covered and the pace of instruction to students’ needs. For example, a teacher might begin with more basic material and instruct at a slower pace, providing more repetition and reinforcement, when students are initially less prepared. With a group of initially higher-achieving students, the teacher can increase the complexity of the tasks and pupils can learn at a faster pace. With a heterogeneous group, they may be compelled to cover both simple and advanced material, spending less time on each, which would hurt all students.

One way to examine this is to see whether children with different initial achievement levels gained from tracking differentially in terms of the difficulty of the material that they learned. While the results for language are mixed, the estimates for math suggest that, although the total effect of tracking on children in the bottom class is significantly positive for all levels of difficulty, these children gained from tracking more than other students on the easier questions and less on the more-difficult questions. Conversely, students assigned to the top class benefited less on the easier questions, and more on the more-difficult questions. In fact, they did not significantly benefit from tracking for the easier questions, but they did significantly benefit from it for the more-difficult questions. These results suggest that tracking helped by giving teachers the opportunity to focus on the competencies that children were not mastering.

Conclusion

A central challenge of education systems in developing countries—the context for which our results are most relevant—is that students in the same grades and classrooms are extremely diverse. Our results show that grouping students by preparedness or prior achievement and focusing the teaching material at the most appropriate level could potentially have large positive effects with little or no additional resource cost. One could also target more resources to the weaker group, further helping them to catch up with their more-advanced counterparts. It is often suggested that there is a trade-off between the value of targeting resources to weaker students, and the costs imposed on them by separating them from stronger students. We find no evidence for such a trade-off in this context.

Our results may also have implications for debates over school choice and voucher systems. A common criticism of such programs is that they may hurt some students if they lead to increased sorting of students by initial achievement and if all students benefit from having peers with higher initial achievement. If tracking is indeed beneficial, this is less of a concern.

Esther Duflo is professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pascaline Dupas is assistant professor of economics at University of California, Los Angeles. Michael Kremer is professor of economics at Harvard University.

Listen to the Podcast

For more on this topic, please read “Race to the Top Versus the Money Chase,” by Paul Peterson on the Ed Next blog.

Saving Jobs or Stimulating Reform? (11/24/09)
Election Postmortem (11/19/09)
Will Congress Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut? (11/4/09)
Voters Choose Neighborhood Schools over Socioeconomic Diversity (10/29/09)
The Nobel Committee Isn’t the Only One Giving Speculative Prizes (10/22/09)
Will Michelle Rhee Triumph? (10/14/09)
Will the Federal Role in Education Double? (10/8/09)
Charter Schools Narrow Achievement Gaps in New York City (10/1/09)
What Congress Is Not Working On (9/24/09)
Charter Schools, Unions, and Linking Teachers with Student Achievement Data (9/17/09)

The ongoing global financial crisis is forcing many employers, from General Motors to local general stores, to take a hard look at the costs of the compensation packages they offer employees. For public school systems, this will entail a consideration of fringe benefit costs, which in recent years have become an increasingly important component of teacher compensation. During the 2005–06 school year, the most recent year for which U.S. Department of Education data are available, the nation’s public schools spent $187 billion in salaries and $59 billion in benefits for instructional personnel. Total benefits added about 32 percent to salaries, up from 25 percent in 1999–2000. The increase reflects the well-known rise in health insurance costs, but it also appears to include growing costs of retirement benefits, which have received much less attention.

Conventional wisdom holds that teacher pensions (along with other public pensions) are more costly than private retirement benefits, for reasons dating to an earlier era of low teacher salaries over lifelong careers. In spite of dissent from this view by some researchers (see sidebar), in this case we find that conventional wisdom is right: the cost of retirement benefits for teachers is higher than for private-sector professionals.

To track changes in retirement costs and compare employer contributions to retirement for public school teachers with those for private-sector professionals, we draw on recent data from a major employer survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor. These data show that the rate of employer contributions to retirement benefits for public school teachers in 2008 is substantially higher than for private professionals: 14.6 percent of earnings for teachers vs. 10.4 percent for private professionals. Moreover, the gap has widened over the four years the data have been available. Between March 2004 and September 2008, the difference more than doubled, rising from 1.9 to 4.2 percentage points (see Figure 1).

There are several reasons one might expect employer contributions to retirement to be higher for teachers. First, nearly all teachers are covered by traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans, in which employees receive a regular retirement check based on a legislatively determined formula. These plans have, over the years, come to offer retirement at relatively young ages, at a rate that replaces a substantial portion of final salary. U.S. Department of Education data show a median retirement age for public school teachers of 58 years, compared to about 62 for the labor force as a whole. A teacher in her mid-50s who has worked for 30 years under a typical teacher pension plan will be entitled to an annuity at retirement of between 60 and 75 percent of her final salary. In nearly all plans this annuity has some sort of cost-of-living adjustment. One does not generally observe comparable retirement plans for professionals and lower-tier managers in the private sector, since most employers have replaced traditional DB plans with defined contribution (DC) or similar 401(k)-type plans, in which the employer and employee contribute to a retirement account that belongs to the employee. Nor do those traditional DB plans that remain typically reward retirement at such early ages; they more nearly resemble Social Security, where eligibility is age 62 for early retirement, and 66 and rising for normal retirement.

The Survey Data

Our analysis draws on data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS), an employer survey developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The NCS survey is designed to measure employer costs for wages and salaries and fringe benefits across a wide range of occupations and industries in the public and private sectors. Although the BLS has been reporting quarterly fringe-benefit cost data for various public and private employee groups for more than a decade, only since March 2004 has the bureau broken out these fringe-benefit cost data for public school K–12 teachers. In this article we use those data to compare retirement benefit costs for public K–12 teachers with costs for private-sector professionals. We use the most detailed available private-sector comparison group, “management, professional, and related,” a category that includes business and financial managers, operations specialists, accountants and auditors, computer programmers and analysts, engineers, lawyers, physicians, and nurses.

We measure the cost of retirement benefits as a percentage of earnings. Virtually all states specify in law that the employer will contribute a certain percentage of teacher salaries to a DB pension fund (employee contributions are similarly specified), and it is commonplace to compare such contribution rates among the states. Similarly, private-sector employers offering DC plans will typically specify their contribution as a percentage of salary (often as a match to employee contributions). Unlike some other benefits (e.g., health insurance), if salaries change, the dollar costs for retirement benefits move proportionally. On the benefit side, the DB formula ties one’s starting annuity to final average salary, while the adequacy of a DC plan is commonly thought of in terms of the salary replacement rate. Thus it is natural to specify retirement costs as a percentage of salary, both for teachers and for private-sector professionals.

In making this comparison, we must account for the fact that, while all of the private-sector professionals are covered by Social Security, a number of public school teachers are not. Some of the higher cost of employer retirement plans for teachers is offset by lower employer contributions for Social Security benefits. Thus, we should compare the contribution rates for employer-provided retirement benefits and Social Security for both groups of workers. While the BLS reports the Social Security contribution rate for private professionals, it does not report a similar rate for teachers. However, we are able to make such an adjustment by multiplying the share of teachers covered by Social Security, which the BLS estimates to be 73 percent, times the employer contribution rate (6.2 percent). This assumes that the vast majority of teachers are below the Social Security earnings cap (currently $102,000) and that the share of teachers in Social Security has been steady over the four years for which we make the comparison.

A time series with quarterly data for these benefit percentages is reported in Figure 1. Two patterns are visible. First, the contribution rate is considerably higher for public school teachers than for private professionals. In the most recent quarter for which data are reported, ending September 2008, the employer contribution rate for public K–12 teachers (14.6 percent) was 4.2 points higher than that for private-sector professionals (10.4 percent). Second, the gap is widening. While the private sector contribution rate has been relatively flat over the four years, the rate for public school teachers has markedly increased, doubling the gap between them from one-fifth to two-fifths.

In one important respect, it is likely that the BLS data underestimate the cost of retirement benefits for public school teachers. Many public school districts (and some states) provide health insurance benefits for retired public school teachers. In the course of this research we were surprised to learn that retiree health insurance benefits are not included in the BLS employment cost estimates. Since private employers have largely eliminated this benefit, this means that our estimate of the gap in retirement benefits favoring public school teachers is low, although we cannot be sure of the extent of the underestimate.

Social Security and Teachers

While the overall employer contribution rate for public school teachers is higher than for private-sector professionals, the group average may mask differences between teachers who are and are not covered by Social Security. In order to assess this point empirically, we examined directly the data on employer contributions for teacher pension funds. We find that total employer contributions for both groups of public school teachers are higher than for private-sector professionals.

Most teachers are in statewide pension funds, with a relatively small number in district funds (e.g., New York City, Denver, St. Louis). Data on employer contributions for these plans are available in annual financial reports for each fund, which are surveyed by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA).

Using data on contributions from NASRA and pension fund annual reports where necessary, and using weights based on the number of teachers employed in each state or district as reported in the NCES Common Core of Data, it is possible to compute average employer contribution rates for teachers. First we consider teachers who are in states and districts covered by Social Security. For these teachers, we calculate the weighted average employer contribution to be 9 percent of earnings. This can be compared to the estimate of employer contributions to retirement for private-sector professionals and managers, calculated from the BLS data as 4.7 percent for the comparable period (FY07). This is a 4.3 percent difference favoring public school teachers, almost double, in those states and districts where teachers are enrolled in Social Security, so the comparison is on an equal footing.

For states and districts where teachers are not in Social Security, we calculate the average employer contribution at 11.1 percent of earnings. Of course, this is considerably higher than the 4.7 percent retirement contributions for private-sector professionals, but, perhaps surprisingly, it even exceeds their employers’ combined contributions to retirement and Social Security, which averaged 10.3 percent for FY07. Thus, as Figure 2 shows, comparing teachers with professionals in private-sector employment, total employer contributions are higher for teachers whether or not they are also covered by Social Security.

Our analysis of evidence from the BLS National Compensation Survey and the NASRA Public Fund Survey shows that the employer contribution rates for public school teachers are a larger percentage of earnings than for private-sector professionals and managers, whether or not we take account of teacher coverage under Social Security. In addition, the BLS data show that the contribution rate for teachers is clearly trending upward.

Looking Ahead

What are the likely trends going forward for the cost of teacher retirement benefits? No one knows for sure, but we can identify the two key factors that will drive these costs: future developments in the benefits themselves and in their funding. The trend through much of the postwar period was to enhance the retirement formulas in various ways, including reducing the age or service requirement for full benefits. For example, just last year New York City agreed to enhance its pension formula for younger teachers. But there is evidence that benefit enhancement has generally abated in recent years. There are even a few states, including Texas, that have moved to reduce benefits for newly hired teachers. However, this is unlikely to reduce costs in the near future, since benefits for incumbent teachers are protected by law in most states.

The other factor to consider is the funding status of teacher pension plans. The vast majority of teacher pension plans are not fully funded. This means that contributions include both the “normal cost” of pension liabilities accruing to current employees and the legacy costs of amortizing unfunded liabilities accrued previously (due to a variety of reasons, including the original pay-as-you go nature of most plans, as well as unfunded benefit enhancements over the years). In theory, if the actuarial assumptions hold true going forward and no new benefits are enacted, the amortization costs will eventually disappear (after 30 years, under a typical funding schedule), in much the same way that a homeowner’s monthly expenses decline when the mortgage gets paid off.

However, the near-term prospects may be very different. For one thing, public pension funds face the possibility of important accounting changes. Unlike private pension funds, public fund actuaries have been allowed to discount future liabilities at a rate of about 8 percent, the assumed long-run market return on fund assets. Finance economists have argued that such a high discount rate is imprudent, however, and there have been signs that public accounting standards might move toward the private-sector rules, based on corporate bond and Treasury rates, which could reduce the discount rate to about 5 percent. This would dramatically raise the required amortization payments.

Finally, it bears noting that the market value of pension funds has fallen precipitously as of this writing (December 2008). Barring a major market recovery, pension funds across the country will have new, large unfunded liabilities. Under actuarial smoothing methods, these losses will be phased in, raising required amortization payments over the next few years. If the accounting rules for public funds also change, reducing the discount rate on liabilities, the employers of public school teachers, along with other public employers, will face a double hit, requiring sharp increases in contributions. By contrast, those private employers who have switched over to defined contribution plans in recent decades will be unaffected. In short, there are good reasons to believe that the contribution gap we have documented will continue to widen in coming years.

Robert M. Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. Michael Podgursky is professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

The Education Equality Project champions accountability, pay reform, and school choice, while the Broader, Bolder coalition insists we must attend to health care, preschool, and parenting skills if students are to succeed in school. The Obama administration must negotiate this split in pursuing education reform; indeed, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the only individual to serve as a founding member of both groups.

In this forum, president of Democrats for Education Reform Joe Williams speaks for the Education Equality Project and Pedro Noguera offers the Broader, Bolder perspective on improving K–12 schooling, the early record of the Obama administration, and the challenges that lie ahead.

Education Next: What principles unify the signers of the coalition [Education Equality Project or A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education]? Can you explain the key reforms the coalition is calling for?

Pedro Noguera: The basic principle underlying the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform is that efforts to raise student achievement cannot ignore the unmet social needs of children, particularly those related to concentrated poverty—inadequate health, housing, and nutrition. These conditions have a tremendous impact upon child development and learning.

Poverty does not cause academic failure, but it is a factor that profoundly influences the character of schools and student performance, in at least three broad and interrelated ways: 1) in most cases, considerably less money is spent on the education of poor children. Per-pupil spending has bearing on the quality of facilities, the availability of learning materials, and the ability of schools to attract and retain highly qualified personnel. While high levels of funding do not guarantee that children will receive a quality education, money matters, and many of the most acclaimed charter schools spend more per pupil than public schools, even though they generally serve fewer high-need students (i.e., special education or English language learners); 2) the unmet, nonacademic needs of children (social, emotional, and psychological) often have an impact on learning; 3) schools serving large numbers of poor children typically lack the resources and expertise to respond to their academic and social needs.

This does not mean that poor children cannot learn or that until we eliminate poverty and related social issues we will not be able to educate all children in this country. There are schools across the country—some are charter, some are private, and many are traditional public—that have shown us that it is possible for poor children to achieve at high levels when we respond to their needs and create conditions that are conducive to learning. However, the fact that a small number of schools have experienced a degree of success does not mean that we can simply blame other schools for their failures or ignore what is happening to children outside of school. Many, though not all, schools that succeed with poor children devise strategies to mitigate the effects of poverty with site-based social services and extended learning opportunities.

BBA advocates providing universal access to health care for children, quality early-childhood education, and expanded access to extended learning opportunities, after school and during the summer. While these measures alone will not guarantee higher student achievement or large-scale school improvement, they are essential for creating a context in which other education reforms can be effective.

Joe Williams: The Education Equality Project is a coalition of leaders (from education, civil rights, government, public policy, and business) who believe that what happens inside schools (and in the politics surrounding schooling) plays a tremendous role in shaping the achievement gap that exists in this country between the haves and the have-nots. The focus for reform, therefore, should be on what happens between teachers and students. That isn’t meant to be glib; we keep finding ourselves debating that key distinction with people who argue that the external forces in a child’s life represent obstacles too large for even great schools to overcome. While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right.

One of the beliefs that has tied together the signatories of EEP thus far is a commitment to eliminating the racial and ethnic achievement gap in this country. This is not just an education issue, but a civil rights issue. If we neglect the education needs of our children, we are depriving them of the kinds of opportunities that the American dream can offer.

The EEP has called for an effective teacher for every child (paying teachers as professionals, giving them the tools and training to do their work effectively, and making tough decisions about ineffective teachers); empowering parents by allowing them to choose the best schools for their children; holding grown-ups at all levels accountable for the education of our children; and, very important, having enough strength in our convictions to stand up to anyone who seeks to preserve a failed system.

EN: Is it fair to expect all students to meet a uniform performance baseline? Is it reasonable to hold schools and educators responsible for ensuring that students meet that bar?

JW: Yes, these expectations are fair and reasonable. The key is making sure that schools and educators have the tools to provide students with the kind of education they need to clear the bar, including resources, the ability to build teams of excellent educators, and enough flexibility at the school level to adjust the length of the school day and year (among other things). This will likely require both additional resources and smarter use of education budgets around the country. Newark mayor Cory Booker often talks about the fact that we allow time spent on education to be the constant, while achievement is the variable. We need the flexibility to flip that notion so that time is the variable and achievement is the constant.

PN: Setting high academic standards for schools and students to meet is important but relatively easy to do. The harder and more important task is to adopt and implement standards that create optimal conditions for learning. This means ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have access to high-quality schools. This is what government policy must strive to achieve. We have quality standards for airports, highways, food, drugs, and water, but no state has adopted standards for learning environments, and many poor children attend under-resourced, inferior schools.

In fact, the most troubled schools typically serve students with the greatest needs. These schools cannot solve problems related to inequality and poverty without additional support. Yet this is essentially what No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and most education reforms that preceded it have expected. Almost eight years after the enactment of NCLB, high dropout rates and low achievement are still pervasive throughout this country, particularly in schools where poor children are concentrated.

EN: Do you think the administration’s actions thus far on school choice and charter schooling have been too aggressive or not aggressive enough?

PN: School choice is an idea that should be supported in principle. It is good for parents to have a variety of schools from which to choose because not all children have the same needs or interests. The greater challenge is ensuring that there are many high-quality schools to choose from and ensuring that choice does not contribute to further segregation in schools. Unfortunately, in many communities that have enacted choice plans, well-organized and informed parents do their best to gain access to the better schools, and invariably, others are left out. Racial segregation in schools has increased in the last 20 years, and poor children have become concentrated in the worst schools. Furthermore, in most choice systems it’s not parents but schools that really do the choosing. The better schools are often able to screen out needy students and limit enrollment. Because of high demand, they can be selective about whom they choose. This often occurs even in charter schools that use lotteries to determine admission but set criteria that are difficult for low-income parents to meet. Those who are not chosen by the superior schools invariably end up in lower-quality public schools with fewer resources.

Many, but not all, charter schools have demonstrated considerable success in educating poor children. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed his support for charter schools, even though in several states, such as Texas and Arizona, the charter schools are often no better, and in some cases are worse, than the public schools. As a trustee of the State University of New York, I am proud to say that the charter schools we authorize consistently outperform similar schools in the communities where they are located. If such quality-control measures can be adopted in other communities, charter schools should be supported as a means to increase the supply of good schools available to poor children.

JW: Choice, in and of itself, won’t bring about the kind of systemic change that we need. But it is difficult to imagine how we can drive that systemic change without choice playing a role. The administration’s actions to limit the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship (K–12 vouchers), for example, were perplexing, if only because the actions were accompanied by empty rhetoric about doing what is best for children. How do we look at low-income families with a straight face and tell them they can’t send their children to better schools because it isn’t the right policy to pursue for the broader system? We need to be doing everything we can to reform the larger system, but by all means, let’s help those families who need good schools now. All of that said, President Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have provided tremendous cover for the public charter-school movement and have helped shift the focus toward identifying those schools that are doing an outstanding job of educating students and giving them the green light to bring their models to scale.

I have never believed that a voucher or a charter can teach a child to read or do math at exceptionally high levels. That stuff happens in great schools, and vouchers and charter school lotteries offer access to those schools for families who can’t afford to live in affluent neighborhoods or send their children to effective private schools. The key is ensuring that they have an abundance of great schools from which to choose. The public charter-school movement, in addressing both the supply and demand sides of this equation, has emerged as the most promising development in the broader attempt to save public education. The question is whether the charter movement will provide the political spark needed to fundamentally transform our public schools.

EN: Is basing pay on teacher performance essential to school improvement? Is it possible to craft a merit-pay plan that the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) will endorse? Are teachers unions and existing collective-bargaining agreements an impediment to school quality?

JW: I think we have gotten way too far ahead in this discussion. We are talking about merit pay and performance pay in school systems that recognize neither merit nor performance. Teachers unions are understandably squeamish about this topic because today’s testing regimens were not created to serve this purpose. Until people feel confident in the tests that we are using, it will be difficult to build compensation systems on them.

This is an issue we can’t afford to ignore, however. The unions set out to create a standard of fairness for all teachers. The end result, in many cases, is a system that doesn’t allow itself to view great teachers any differently than it does mediocre teachers. Evaluations rate teachers as merely “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” As long as excellence is irrelevant in our schools, we will continue to be stuck in this holding pattern. Wouldn’t it be something if we could strive for systems filled with “excellent” teachers, where excellence actually means something? We’re going to need a lot of help from the NEA and AFT in getting there, since they are holding the keys right now.

PN: Addressing the effectiveness of teachers must be an essential part of education reform in this country. However, judging teachers and awarding bonuses simply on the basis of test scores is problematic. We have already witnessed a large number of schools that have adopted scripted curricula and a narrow focus on test preparation as one way to raise test scores. This tendency will undoubtedly increase if teachers are evaluated exclusively on that basis. Such an approach is likely to discourage good teachers from working in high-need schools and to widen the gap between poor and affluent students. A narrow focus on raising test scores is also likely to deny poor students access to an enriched curriculum that encourages the development of higher-order thinking skills.

It makes more sense to devise incentives, including increased pay, to attract teachers with a track record of effectiveness, to high-need schools and classrooms. Such teachers can be identified through systematic evaluations carried out by principals and peers. If we could combine such a strategy with lower class sizes and extended learning opportunities after school, we could see major gains for struggling students.

In many cities, unions have resisted giving districts greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned, and in too many cases they have made it difficult to remove teachers who are ineffective and inept. Since it seems likely that teachers unions will be around for many years to come, it would be wise to find ways to collaborate with them to devise peer review programs like those that have shown promise in districts such as Toledo, Ohio, and Rochester, New York. In these districts, ineffective teachers are removed in greater numbers than in districts that rely on principal evaluation. Districts should also be encouraged to use the negotiation process to push for greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned to schools.

EN: The president has touted the $5 billion for preschool in the stimulus bill. How can we be confident that the money will fund difference-making programs?

PN: Most of the nations that outperform the United States in educational outcomes provide universal access to quality preschool. Research in child development has shown that the learning that occurs during infancy establishes a foundation for learning throughout life. It is cost effective and in our national interest to expand access to quality early-childhood education for all children.

We know two important things about early childhood education: 1) children who have access to quality programs generally outperform children who do not, and 2) the benefits of quality preschool can be further enhanced if quality of education is maintained in the K–12 system. The situation is similar for elementary schools. Throughout the country we have seen a growing number of successful primary schools and increases in test scores. However, these gains often are not sustained in middle school. This should not be used as a justification to question the value of elementary school nor should similar logic be used to limit expansion of early childhood education.

JW: If high-quality pre-K isn’t such a good idea, why are rich people in my neighborhood running around thinking that the Earth will implode (and their kid won’t get into Harvard someday) if they don’t get a slot in the most sought-after preschool programs? Providing access to high-quality preschool opportunities to the have-nots is an important part of the overall reform effort, as long as those programs successfully help students prepare for the world that awaits them in kindergarten and beyond.

Critics note that finding “high-quality” early-childhood programs, just like finding high-quality K–12 schools, is where the proposition gets iffy. My organization, Democrats for Education Reform, has been pushing to extend state charter-school laws so that charter schools can offer pre-K while being held accountable for their results. Connecting pre-K to early childhood programs that run through 3rd grade would close the gap that exists between what is taught in pre-K and what students need to be able to do in the later grades.

This is about making sure that all students are starting off on as close to a level playing field as possible, whether or not they can afford to make a $100,000 contribution to get a leg up on preschool enrollment.

EN: The Broader, Bolder Approach has made the case that school reform must attend to the “physical health, character, social development, and non-academic skills” of students. Should schools and educators be tasked with this? At what point can or should we start to hold educators responsible for student outcomes?

JW: Students clearly have needs that extend beyond merely learning to read and do math. In the most successful schools serving low-income students, we see a wide range of child development activities, including sports, dance, art, chess, and citizenship enrichment activities. The notion that these activities are distractions from academic instruction assumes this is an either/or proposition. The best schools out there today seem to nail both.

This is where issues like better use of time come into play. Many educators decided long ago (seemingly correctly) that it is not possible to meet the complex needs of their students with a school day that ends at 3 p.m. This is particularly true for students who are two and three years behind where they are supposed to be academically.

PN: It is impossible and undesirable to separate academic performance from physical health, character development, and a variety of nonacademic skills. Sick and unhealthy children generally don’t do as well in school as healthy ones, and children who have trouble getting along with others typically don’t do very well either. From their very beginning, public schools have been charged with preparing children for work and citizenship, and such preparation has never focused solely upon academic skills.

To educate the “whole child,” schools must provide students with an enriched education that includes art, music, physical education, and character development in addition to the core subjects. The fact that skills in these areas cannot be easily assessed should not trouble us since most middle-class and affluent children receive such an education already and typically no one asks for evidence that such an approach has an impact on their test scores.

The highest-performing schools never focus exclusively on student achievement. In fact, what typically distinguishes the best schools from the others is the culture—shared expectations, values, norms, and beliefs—that permeate the school environment.

EN: The president has suggested that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, especially the $5 billion in “innovation” education funds, provides an opportunity to “transform” schooling. What are a couple of developments that give you cause for optimism or pessimism? How will we know in a few years if these education funds were spent wisely?

PN: While many public schools, especially in urban areas, are in dire need of reform, I am concerned that there is a lack of clarity about why past reforms have failed and insufficient understanding about the direction change must take if we are to obtain better results. Why do we still have dropout rates of 50 percent and higher in several cities eight years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, and why are so many schools still foundering after substantial investments of public and private funds on reform? Several studies have shown that reforms have failed because we have ignored the nonacademic needs of children, because we have ignored school culture, because we have not evaluated reforms and insisted upon accountability, and because we have been too quick to pursue fads and gimmicks (small schools, technology, testing) while ignoring more substantive issues that support teaching and learning.

More funding is needed in many districts to address the lack of resources, but given the recession, we will need to rely upon better coordination between schools, nonprofits, and local government to respond to student needs. And money alone will not solve the problems facing America’s schools. We need a new vision and a new approach. A Broader, Bolder Approach offers part of the way forward. This must be combined with strategies that improve the quality of teaching and increase the accountability and responsiveness of schools to the communities they serve.

JW: The president and Secretary Duncan seem to have figured out that the leverage that comes from insisting that $5 billion be attached to innovation is tremendous. Even before a single dime was disbursed from the “Race to the Top” fund, we saw state legislatures take actions to support things like charter school expansion: Massachusetts, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Rhode Island were not exactly lining up to help charter schools until Duncan made clear that it would impact these states’ applications for federal funding. For a state like Tennessee, which risked losing $100 million in Duncan’s discretionary spending, the conversation quickly changed. A charter-school expansion bill that had been declared dead and tagged by the political coroners came back to life before our very eyes.

The challenge will come when it is time to convert the leverage Duncan has discovered into ongoing federal appropriations. This will launch a dramatic transformation of the role of the federal government in education. This is where we should be optimistic.

Politically, Duncan and Obama are going to need to tell good stories about what has been unleashed here through the stimulus package. If successful school operators like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First can get help (financially and legislatively) in bringing their models to scale, and if successful education programs can be brought to more and more students, there will be a compelling story to tell. Public education will be on its way to saving itself.

EN: What does BBA’s proposed accountability system look like? How does it differ from NCLB?

PN: The BBA proposal for accountability emphasizes qualitative and quantitative evaluations of schools. That is, rather than relying exclusively on test scores to judge schools, BBA calls for the creation of an inspectorate, similar to that used in other countries with high-performing education systems, that is comprised of experienced educators, policymakers and scholars, to evaluate schools and make recommendations about how they might be improved. Such an approach could be used to provide schools with detailed feedback on how to make better use of resources and employ strategies that will enable them to become more successful in raising achievement and overcoming obstacles to learning.

Under NCLB, schools are judged largely on the basis of test scores, and many schools have figured out that the system can be gamed simply by targeting groups of students with intensive test preparation. Schools that are faced with greater challenges are simply labeled “failing” and targeted with threats and humiliation. The underlying assumption is that the educators are lazy and that pressure can be used to force them to improve. Accountability is essential if we are going to bring about school improvement on a larger scale, but it must be accompanied by real assistance and support.

In some cases, shutting down failing schools, as Secretary Duncan has suggested, may be necessary, but we must acknowledge ahead of time that the number of failing schools is simply too great for this to be the only strategy that we use. It is more constructive and effective to find out why a school has failed and to work with educators and local stakeholders to address the causes.

EN: In the context of EEP’s proposed reforms, how will an expanded federal role make a significant difference? How should new federal funds be distributed?

JW: An expanded federal role will allow our entire nation to cut through some of the political fog that has prevented good, sound ideas about how to change our schools from getting the go-ahead to proceed as part of a major systemic reform strategy. This is about using the tremendous leverage of the federal government to force some really blunt conversations at the state and district level, the kinds of conversations that make people uncomfortable and often lead to political paralysis. We have this tendency, if policy conversations make people feel uncomfortable, to sweep important issues under the rug. This is one of the reasons so little has actually changed despite waves and waves of reforms. We have an opportunity to change that dynamic, but only if President Obama holds firm on his commitment to bring change to public education.

For more on this topic by Robert Costrell (and Michael Podgursky), please see Golden Handcuffs.

Michelle Rhee’s senior staff meeting has all the ceremony of lunchtime in the teachers’ lounge. News is exchanged. Ideas tumble around. Rhee sits at the head of the table but doesn’t run the meeting or even take the conversational lead. Staffers talk over her as often as she talks over them. If consensus is the goal, the ball is far upfield.

But then, Rhee wades in with, “Here’s what I think,” or “What I don’t want,” or “This is crap,” or “I want someone to figure this out,” or “I’m gonna tell you what we’re gonna do; we can talk about how we’re gonna do it.” And that is that. Next order of business, please.

Rhee’s style—as steely as the sound of her peekaboo high heels on a linoleum-tile hallway—has angered much of Washington, D.C., and baffled the rest since she arrived as schools chancellor in June 2007. But it is also helping her gain control of a school system that has defied management for decades: that hasn’t kept records, patched windows, met budgets, delivered books, returned phone calls, followed court orders, checked teachers’ credentials, or, for years on end, opened school on schedule in the fall.

When I asked Rhee to name her most significant achievement in her two years in Washington, her answer suggested that any progress is, so far, only incremental. “We have begun—begun—begun—to establish a culture of accountability,” she said, with a long pause between each “begun.” A teacher had recently e-mailed her about a personnel matter, she went on, and was thrilled that Rhee had replied. “It’s sorta sad because the expectations are so low. The fact that you just get a response is celebrated,” she said.

Rhee tells parents and taxpayers that they should judge her on “student performance.” Are test scores rising? Are students graduating? So far, there’s some evidence that they are, although some teachers and parents say that even that evidence is suspect.

But not much learning gets done without institutional support, and for decades in Washington, not much has. When I asked Kenneth Wong, director of Brown University’s urban-education policy program, on what measures Rhee should be judged, he answered with a long list. It included how well the schools work with other city agencies (to get sidewalks plowed in the winter, for example), how many and which colleges new teachers come from (the wider the net, the better), how quickly managers return phone calls, and whether teacher absenteeism is down. Only at the end of the list did he get to student performance. “The other stuff are the necessary conditions to get to student achievement,” he said.

That’s not particularly glamorous for a national media darling who has been celebrated on magazine covers, on Capitol Hill, and by the president, but it is a start.

Rhee tells parents and taxpayers to judge her on “student performance.”

Rock Bottom?

It’s not news that Washington’s schools are among the most woeful in the country, but even a cynic has to gasp. The mismanagement is legendary: consider the 5 million personnel records Rhee says she found piled on a storeroom floor when she took office. Marc Borbely, a former teacher, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2004 to find out how many work orders were outstanding at the central maintenance office. The answer: 25,000.

Teachers complained of out-of-control students: The city’s Ballou High School was closed for a 35-day cleanup after students stole chemistry-lab thermometers and scattered the mercury around hallways. In most school districts, mercury thermometers had been replaced years earlier.

The system churned through six superintendents in 10 years, usually after brutal head butting with the city council and community activists. That made Washington the La Brea Tar Pits of strategic plans: Each one sank into oblivion as its drafters moved on. The school funding formula changed four times under as many superintendents.

Academic measures were miserable. The 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered before Rhee’s arrival but announced five months after her term began, found that 61 percent of the city’s 4th graders had below-basic reading skills, which means they could barely read. Just 8 percent of its 8th graders were proficient—that is, at grade level—or above in math.

Scores on the district’s own tests for the 2006–07 school year, the last before Rhee’s arrival, were higher but still dismal. Just 38 percent of elementary-school children were at grade level or above in reading, and 27 percent of high schoolers were at grade level or above in math. Districtwide, fewer than 30 percent of African American students were reading at grade level, compared to 87 percent of whites, a 57-percentage-point gap.

Rhee arrived to find that all 10 of Washington’s comprehensive high schools had failed to meet federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) adequate yearly progress goals and that 48 of its 67 elementary schools were in some level of NCLB-mandated corrective action. The high-school dropout rate hovered at about 50 percent, and just 9 percent of entering 9th graders ever graduated from college.

On the SAT—a test presumably only the most ambitious students take—43 percent of district students who took the exam in 2009 scored 390 or below on the 800-point math test, which awards 200 points just for showing up. African Americans citywide averaged 773 on the 1600-point reading and math tests combined, or about 400 points less than they’d need for admission to the nearby University of Maryland.

Community pressure to “do something” about the schools’ performance had never materialized, though. Political leaders had seen no upside to taking on a school system that employs thousands of African Americans in a city where African Americans account for a majority of the population, the voter rolls, the city council, local-government posts, and union leadership. And in the weary way that people get used to dysfunction, no one else complained. Rhee says she marvels that her decision to shut down 23 failing schools in her first year drew howls of protest, while keeping failing schools open doesn’t excite anyone.

The Money Question

Washington’s business community has fussed for years about the schools because they turn out so few employable graduates and at a huge cost. The Chamber of Commerce says that only one in four jobs in the city is held by a D.C. resident now, and that 44 percent of Washingtonians don’t have even a high-school diploma.

Education expenditures can swing wildly depending on how students are counted and what spending is included in the calculation. But the U.S. Census Bureau, in a survey of education finances released in July 2009, says Washington spent $14,324 per public-school student in the 2006–07 school year, or about $6,300 more than the national average. The only states to spend more were New Jersey and New York, which have vastly larger corporate tax bases and far more upper-income taxpayers. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the federal government pays 12 percent of Washington’s education budget, a percentage largely determined by the city’s high poverty rate. That puts it well below Louisiana and Mississippi, but well above the 9 percent national average for federal support.

A simpler way of looking at it: Washington has budgeted $760 million for its traditional public schools in the fiscal year beginning October 2010. Using Rhee’s enrollment estimate of 45,000, that works out to $16,800 per student. Using the city council’s estimate of 41,500 students, it’s $18,300.

As costs have risen, enrollment has plummeted (see Figure 1). Affluent or activist parents enroll their youngsters in three or four largely autonomous elementary schools in white neighborhoods, or move to private schools, charter schools, or the suburbs. Between 2004 and 2008, Washington’s traditional public schools lost 13,500 students, while its charters gained 10,200.

What may be Washington’s last hope of stopping the slide from dismal to disastrous rests on the reform course chosen by its mayor, Adrian Fenty, an African American Democrat who has staked his political career and considerable ego on his pledge to improve the schools. After his January 2007 inauguration, Fenty courted and then summoned Rhee to Washington through her mentor, New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, even though Rhee says she initially “was not blown away” by the mayor or the job. Fenty quickly pushed through legislation that abolished the disputatious school board, won Rhee the authority to fire hundreds of central-office workers, and “has not flinched once through any of this, never,” she says.

Rhee’s Roots

Rhee speaks often about her Teach For America (TFA) tour in a Baltimore classroom between 1992 and 1995: how she struggled the first year until pairing with another teacher to team-teach a class of 2nd and 3rd graders. But Rhee’s experience a few years later with The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a better window on how she’s doing her job in Washington.

Political leaders have seen no upside to taking on a school system that employs thousands of African Americans in a city where they are a majority.

As Ariela Rozman, TNTP’s current CEO, tells it, superintendents had begun asking TFA founder Wendy Kopp for help attracting and training teachers like those Kopp was sending them. Rhee was finishing a graduate program at Harvard and had never had a management role at TFA, but Kopp tapped Rhee to head the teacher project as a spin-off in 1997. “The idea came from TFA clients, but Michelle brought the vision,” Rozman told me.

Rhee was a no-nonsense manager. She was so determined to fund The New Teacher Project out of the revenues it was generating through its training contracts with schools that she sorely underpaid her staff. For years, she resisted pressure even from Kopp to take foundation funding, said Kati Haycock, who is chair of the project’s board and president of the Education Trust. Even so, the project attracted a talented staff with high morale, little turnover, and fierce loyalty to Rhee. Richard Nyankori, who moved with Rhee to Washington from TNTP and now heads special education for the district, says Rhee teases him that he would throw himself under a bus for her, “and she’s right. I probably would.”

Rhee’s greatest success at The New Teacher Project may be how she left it. Start-ups frequently struggle when a strong-willed manager leaves: Staffers move on, backers temporize, and contracts slow as the new leader finds her footing. But Ariela Rozman says The New Teacher Project has grown since Rhee left, from 140 people and a $20 million budget to this year’s staff of 210 and budget of $32 million.

Kaya Henderson, who also moved to Washington with Rhee as her deputy chancellor, says The New Teacher Project’s management style moved with them. Policy differences are hashed out at the weekly senior staff meetings and at biweekly meetings of a strategy committee, which considers major initiatives. “We’re not going to leave the meeting until one group has convinced the other group. We all have to be good with the decision,” Henderson told me. Still, “part of being a good leader is knowing when to say ‘this is a good thing to do,’” a prerogative Rhee doesn’t shy from, Henderson added.

Rhee has pledged to stay to the end of a second Fenty term—January 2015, if he is reelected—and Henderson says “the rest of us are probably in it for the same.”

Bumpy Ride

Six weeks into the job, Rhee called her staff together with the message that “We are not here to do the bureaucracy better,” Nyankori says. Rhee told them that “that’s what all of our friends are doing in reform all around the country: They’re trying to make the trains stay on the track and go faster. We are here to derail those trains.”

If upheaval was the goal, Rhee has succeeded. Teachers say she has set black teachers against whites and young teachers against veterans with her controversial 2008 contract offer. Congressional Democrats worry that she has put them between a policy goal, school improvement, and their teachers-union allies. Education reformers are nervous that her outta-my-way approach will wound their movement if it backfires.

Almost everyone has a Rhee story. As when the chancellor closed those 23 schools and scheduled a community meeting at each one but on the same evening, so she couldn’t attend most of them. Or suggested the elected city council was irrelevant and resisted its invitations to testify. Or arrived for a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce board with—surprise!—a television news crew in tow. Chamber president Barbara Lang says Rhee never thanked the chamber for testifying in favor of Mayor Fenty’s takeover of the schools, legislation that will be pivotal to Rhee’s success.

Businesses, foundations, and civic groups that funded and ran after-school and enrichment programs were similarly dismissed. A Chamber of Commerce project that taught jobs skills to high schoolers was dropped. The World Bank had outfitted and staffed college-prep resource centers at some of the city’s toughest high schools. When Rhee put the outside groups on hold, the bank diverted its $1 million a year in youth programming to local nonprofits.

Parent groups that used to be solicited—even begged—to help make decisions about dress codes, building budgets and staffing, renovations and construction, and principal selection now find themselves shut out. “Parents feel pushed aside,” says Cathy Reilly, who started a parents’ group to exchange news about their kids’ high schools.

Rhee urges parents to e-mail her with questions, and she answers late into the night (she says she answered 99,000 e-mails her first year). But at the public meetings I attended last spring, Rhee sat alone at the front of the room, talked over parents, moved about with an ever-present photographer, and left immediately afterward in a chauffeured Chevy Tahoe.

Rhee and her loyalists say with jaw-dropping insouciance that none of that matters because, as she told me, she’s “doing what’s right for kids.”

“The conventional rules and the people who play by them don’t get much change,” says the Education Trust’s Haycock. “Hordes” of people come to their table when she and Rhee dine out together, Haycock adds, and “I have never heard anyone say anything except ‘keep on keeping on.’”

Rhee and her senior staff believe that the ed-reform stars are aligned as they never have been in Washington, and that they have the brains, focus, and work ethic to leap at the opportunity. In all of that, they’re probably right.

Rhee visits with first grader Sasha Simpson.

The Front Line

Rhee and her top aides don’t talk much about curriculum change; their focus is people. “Strong principals, strong teachers—that’s what turns schools around,” says Nyankori. “That’s why we feel so strongly about this union contract.”

The Washington Teachers Union and its parent American Federation of Teachers (AFT) feel just as strongly, of course, about a contract that undercuts such union cornerstones as tenure, seniority, and worker solidarity, and that would set a national precedent. Rhee’s proposal to pay six-figure salaries to teachers who agreed to link their paychecks to classroom outcomes: that’s the “green” option. Teachers who choose the “red” option (green, go; red, stop—get it?) would collect far-smaller pay increases, but would retain job security.

Rhee didn’t say how she would pay for the salary boosts, although she implied that foundations would pick up much of the tab. Meanwhile, foundation endowments have plunged and local tax revenues have shrunk since Rhee offered the plan in summer 2008.

AFT president Randi Weingarten, who has largely taken over the negotiations from the local union, insists that the teachers and Rhee “share the same goals, the issue in contract negotiations is how to get there.” She proposes rewarding teachers equally with school-based bonuses, a nonstarter with Rhee, who is zealous about getting rid of those she calls “bad teachers.” Stakes are so high for both sides that they appear to be working on a compromise that gives Rhee some, but by no means all of the staffing and firing flexibility she is after.

Still, Rhee has some tools that other school heads don’t have. Congress gave her the power to impose a teacher-evaluation system without negotiating its terms with the union. The new evaluations, set to begin in the 2009–10 school year, will include student test scores and five classroom observations of each teacher each year. Henderson, the deputy chancellor, has let the union know that the district will likely begin observing teachers by video, too.

And then there are some test-score gains, which Rhee is counting on to build public support for her plans and ease the doubts about her style. Two years after Rhee’s arrival, scores on district-administered tests are up: 49 percent of elementary school students were reading at grade level, a 21-percentage-point jump in two years, according to test results released in July 2009. Among secondary-school students, 40 percent were at grade level in math, up 13 points. Rising proficiency levels should win Rhee new clout in the city’s political circles, new respect among parents and civil groups, and more leverage to turn the troubled system around.

Rising proficiency levels should win Rhee new clout in the city’s political circles.

Taking Stock

Rhee’s other successes aren’t exactly the stuff of headlines. Erich Martel, who has taught social studies in the D.C. schools for 40 years, says teachers are doing more lesson prep and trying to make their classes more interesting. “There are teachers who need someone looking over their shoulder and they’re getting it,” he says.

Long-neglected school buildings are being renovated or rebuilt, which could make them more competitive with some better-housed charters. Spending on professional development has quadrupled. There are art and music classes in every school, the district says.

Rhee’s most important achievement might be in the management fixes most people can’t see. High-school transcripts, which the schools used to hold on to and sometimes alter to boost graduation rates, are being centralized and scrubbed (the audit found that one-third of students weren’t taking the classes they need to graduate). Nyankori says he has lured back 155 of the district’s 2,400 special-ed youngsters who are in private schools, at a yearly cost of $141 million, with more programs and better case management, and has set a target return date for each of the others. Quarterly diagnostic tests have been aligned with year-end assessments: Unbelievably, the two were designed by different consultants, and didn’t predict or reflect the outcome of the other.

That isn’t to say that Rhee is anywhere near achieving her often-stated goal of making Washington the best urban district in the country. Even she attributes much of the test-score gains in her two years to the district’s ability to pick what she calls “low-hanging fruit.” Saturday test-prep classes have helped borderline kids pass their year-end tests, even while thousands of other children remain far behind because of weak basic skills. Accounting changes helped boost results, too: Children who were absent on test day now are counted as no-shows; before, they were counted among those with failing scores.

The graduation rate—as opposed to the drop-out rate, which is calculated differently—was up a few percentage points in 2009 to 70 percent, the district says. But some teachers and parents attribute that to a new “credit recovery” program that lets failing students retake courses after school. Martel, the long-time social studies teacher, says credit-recovery classes ran 82 hours per quarter at his school compared to 125 hours for classes held during the school day, and that teachers were told not to give homework.

Despite the celebrity surrounding Rhee and Fenty, the traditional public schools are still bleeding students, which is perhaps the ultimate, market-driven judgment. Washington’s State Office of Education—yes, this nonstate has a state office—says enrollment in the traditional schools dropped to 45,200 in the 2008 school year from 49,500 just the year before. Charters grew to 25,700 from 22,000. Charter enrollment is even more impressive if you look at the fine print: In 2008, charters enrolled 48 percent of public-school 6th graders, up from 36 percent a year earlier.

Michael Herreld, who is president of PNC Bank’s Washington region and sits on several local school-reform committees, worries about what he calls the “disintegration” of the city’s traditional public schools if Rhee can’t stop the enrollment decline. Any urgency to fix things would wane, and so would the schools’ claim on public revenue. That would have practical consequences: Washington doesn’t have school buses, for example. If more schools are closed, youngsters could be miles from the nearest kindergarten and its free breakfast and lunch programs.

The only way to stop the attrition is to “grow good neighborhood schools,” says Nyankori. Rhee illustrated the obstacles to that when a woman asked her about her plans for math and science education during a meeting in the spring of 2009 in the city’s northwest quadrant, where most adults have at least one degree and, often, two or three. Rhee said she had ordered more computers to support math and science programs, but learned when they arrived that most schools didn’t have three-pronged electrical outlets for the computers’ three-pronged plugs. “This is the level where we are…subzero,” she said, as the audience stifled a collective eye roll.

High Stakes

Rhee seems irked that policymakers see Washington as the laboratory of the education-reform agenda. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, at the same spring meeting at which she bemoaned the lack of proper sockets. What matters is Washington’s kids, not a national agenda, she insisted.

In fact, both are at stake. Washington is a natural petri dish, whether Rhee disdains the idea or not. It’s small and deeply troubled, is a foundation darling, has creative new leadership, and is pursuing the popular academic ideas of the day. Its big charter sector almost begs researchers to compare the two systems, and it sits in the spotlight of the U.S. Capitol.

I asked Rhee to name her biggest mistake in two years and she offered this: She could have done a “better job of communicating with teachers” when she presented her contract proposal and averted some of the antagonism that dogs her relationship with them. Since then, she has met with teachers a few times a week, she said, and finds the exchanges “incredibly heartening.” There are other tiny signs that Rhee may be trying to calm the waters she has roiled. With contract talks going nowhere in the spring of 2009, she wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which she insisted that “[t]hose who categorically blame teachers for the failures of our system are simply wrong.”

Around the same time, at a banquet at the Federal City Council, a premier business and civic group, Rhee thanked a consulting group for undertaking, pro bono, the school-records audit. “It was the first time I’ve heard her thank anyone for anything,” said the head of a major nonprofit. Her staff now concedes that a Time magazine cover of Rhee—standing grim-faced in an empty classroom, holding a broom—was a mistake.

That may be about it. I asked The New Teacher Project’s Ariela Rozman if Rhee ever called to cry on her shoulder. “Michelle doesn’t cry,” Rozman said. That’s probably a good thing.

June Kronholz is a former foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and Washington-based education reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Podcast: Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky talk with Education Next.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

Teacher pensions consume a substantial portion of school budgets. If relatively generous pensions help attract effective teachers, the expense might be justified. But new evidence suggests that current pension systems, by concentrating benefits on teachers who spend their entire careers in a single state and penalizing mobile teachers, may exacerbate the challenge of attracting to teaching young workers, who change jobs and move more often than did previous generations.

The design of teacher pension plans is a timely concern: like other public pension plans, those for teachers are becoming more costly. Employer contributions to pension funds tack on a larger percentage of earnings for public school teachers than for private-sector managers and professionals, and this gap is widening (see “Teacher Retirement Benefits,” research, Spring 2009, Figure 1). Those data do not yet reflect the impact of the stock market decline since 2007: the drop in the value of pension funds means further increases in employer contributions will be required to fund promised benefits. As fiscal concerns force states to reevaluate the costs of teacher pension plans, officials might also consider the plans’ consequences for teacher quality.

In earlier work we highlighted the peculiar incentives for retirement built into these plans (see “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys,” features, Winter 2008). Most plans create large spikes in pension wealth accumulation for teachers in their 50s. These spikes act as an incentive for teachers to stay in the classroom until their pension wealth reaches its peak and then push them into retirement shortly thereafter, as pension wealth accumulation turns negative.

We now extend this line of research by focusing on the distribution of pension benefits among teachers of varying career lengths and the penalties for those who switch systems. We examine pension formulas in six state plans and develop measures of the redistribution of pension wealth from teachers who separate early to those who separate later. We compare existing defined benefit (DB) teacher pension systems to fiscally equivalent systems that treat all teachers equally and find that the former often redistribute about half the pension wealth of an entering cohort of teachers to those who separate in their mid-50s from those who leave the system earlier. We then show that this back loading produces very large losses in pension wealth for mobile teachers. Compared to a teacher who has worked 30 years in a single state system, a teacher who has put in the same years but split them between two systems will often lose well over one-half of her pension wealth. It is difficult to justify such a system of rewards and penalties on grounds related to fairness or teacher quality.

Teacher Pensions 101

Public school teachers are almost universally covered by traditional defined benefit pension systems. In such a system, the employer has an obligation to provide a regular retirement check to employees upon their retirement. Typically, a DB teacher pension plan requires that both teachers and employers make a contribution each year to a pension trust fund. The salient characteristic of a traditional DB system is that for any individual, benefits are not tied to contributions.

More specifically, once a teacher is “vested” (usually after 5 or 10 years), she becomes eligible to receive a pension upon reaching a certain age or length of service. These eligibility rules vary across states, but they typically allow a teacher to draw a pension well before age 65, especially if she has been working since her mid-20s. Benefits at retirement are usually determined by a formula that takes into account years of service and the final average salary (FAS), which is an average of the last few years of salary (typically three). In Missouri, for example, teachers eligible for normal retirement earn 2.5 percent (the “multiplier”) for each year of teaching service. Thus, a teacher with 30 years of service would earn 75 percent of the final average salary. So if the FAS were $60,000, she would receive $45,000 every year for the rest of her life. If the teacher were to separate from service prior to being eligible to receive the pension, the first payment would be deferred and the amount of the pension would be frozen until that time. Once the pension payments begin, there is typically some form of inflation adjustment, although the specifics again vary from state to state.

We examined teacher pension plans in six states. While the states were not randomly chosen (we inhabit two of them), their plans are indicative of many teacher pension plans. Because the composite effect of each system is hard to discern by simply looking at the benefit formula, we examine patterns of pension wealth accumulation by age of separation.

Calculating Pension Wealth

We use the benefit formulas of pension plans to estimate the pension wealth of individual teachers. When an individual retires under a DB plan, she is entitled to a stream of payments that has a lump-sum value that we calculate using standard actuarial methods (which take into account expected mortality patterns and adjust the sum of payments to reflect the fact that they are received over many years rather than at a single point in time).

The heavy S-shaped curve in Figure 1 depicts pension wealth (net of employee contributions) for 25-year-old entrants to the Missouri teaching force who work continuously until they leave teaching at various ages. The salary schedule assumed is that of the state capital (Jefferson City), under which teachers receive experience-based salary increases and are also paid more if they have a master’s degree. The accumulation of pension wealth is not smooth and steady, but rises with fits and starts, due to rules of eligibility for early retirement and the like. In Missouri, after vesting at five years, a teacher is eligible for a pension at age 60. Her pension wealth—the current value of those deferred benefits—grows fairly steadily until age 45. The curve becomes steeper at age 46 because of a provision that allows teachers to begin collecting a pension when their age and years of service sum to 80, which brings her pension forward to age 59 and earlier. Then there is a big jump at age 50, because the 25th year of service makes a teacher eligible for an immediate pension (albeit with a reduced multiplier). Growth in pension wealth continues to be rapid in subsequent years as the multiplier is increased to its “normal” rate of 2.5 percent. Then, following a final bump in the benefit formula’s generosity at 31 years of service (age 56), net pension wealth starts shrinking. As is evident, complex pension rules lead to pension wealth curves that are irregularly shaped and bear no resemblance to the smoothly growing cumulative value of contributions.

(Pension) Wealth Redistribution

The result of these complex pension rules is that teachers who leave the profession in their 50s receive more pension wealth (as a percentage of cumulative earnings) than those who separate earlier. To develop a measure of the resulting redistribution, we compare existing DB systems to a fiscally equivalent plan where pension wealth is neutrally distributed: a cash balance (CB) system. CB systems calculate employee retirement benefits based on the cumulative contributions, with a guaranteed rate of return. Thus, pension wealth is a fixed percentage of cumulative earnings, regardless of retirement age.

In dollar terms, pension wealth grows smoothly under a CB system. Figure 1 compares the accrual of pension wealth under Missouri’s DB plan (the S-shaped curve) with the smooth accrual under a hypothetical CB plan. This diagram readily illustrates the redistribution of pension wealth toward those who retire in their 50s from those who leave teaching earlier. Teachers who retire before age 49 in Missouri receive less pension wealth than they would under a CB plan, while teachers who retire later receive considerably more.

We have developed a numerical measurement of this redistribution. Specifically, to compare net pension wealth across different ages of separation, we measure it at a fixed point in time, and we also estimate the frequency of separations at different ages. In this fashion, we can calculate weighted averages of net pension wealth for winners, losers, and the whole cohort of 25-year-old entrants. When we compare the Missouri plan to the fiscally equivalent CB plan, we find that 46 percent of pension wealth is redistributed from those leaving teaching at an average age of 36.6 to those separating at an average age of 54.2.

We made the same calculations of the distributional impact of the DB plans in the other states. In all states, the degree of redistribution is substantial. In Massachusetts, for example, average pension wealth is low, but 61 percent of it is redistributed. The degree of redistribution is also relatively high in Ohio (49 percent) and Texas (47 percent, for new hires), while it is somewhat lower in Arkansas (39 percent) and California (36 percent). As in Missouri, the redistributive gains are concentrated among those who retire in their 50s, while the losses are dispersed among all early leavers. This pattern holds particularly true for Massachusetts, where the gains are concentrated among just one-fifth of the cohort.

To summarize, there is significant variation among states in the magnitude of the gains and losses compared to a simple CB system, but all states redistribute net pension wealth to a substantial degree to those who retire in their 50s (after about 30 years of service) from those who leave a teaching position after shorter periods. In addition to the issue of equity, this has serious implications for teacher mobility, to which we now turn.

Moving Costs

It is well understood that DB pension plans penalize mobility, yet the sources of these costs are rarely delineated or quantified in a systematic way. There are several factors that reduce pension wealth when a teacher moves. First, teachers who leave a system before they are vested have no claim on a pension. Upon termination, or shortly thereafter, any teacher contributions are returned with interest (the rate varies, and can be well below market), but the teacher does not receive employer contributions. This is a major source of loss for many young teachers, since most teacher pension systems have a vesting period of five years or longer and the vast majority of early-career teacher turnover occurs in the first five years on the job. In fact, nine states have a 10-year vesting period for teachers. With such long vesting windows, many teachers will receive no employer contributions toward retirement as a result of their work in the classroom.

Although the effects of these vesting windows are large, they are at least fairly transparent for young teachers. This information is routinely provided to those newly hired. Even for teachers who are vested, however, there remain potentially large costs from mobility, and these are less obvious. One cost comes from the fact that teacher DB pensions are all based on final average salary. When a teacher leaves the profession before normal retirement age, the value of her annuity is tied to her salary at the time of her separation. No adjustment is made for ensuing salary growth or inflation.

Other costs to mobility arise from the service eligibility rules for normal and early retirement. Teachers who separate from a plan with, say, fewer than 20 years of service will often not be able to begin collecting their pensions until much later than teachers who remain in the plan until they meet eligibility requirements. At any given age, pension wealth is therefore lower for the mobile teacher—who has left one system early and entered another system late—simply because she can expect to collect fewer pension checks. Alternatively, she may be able to draw her pension at the same time as the teacher who stays in one system, but with a penalty. Either way, the costs are substantial.

Switching Systems

Pension wealth calculations similar to those above provide a comprehensive method for evaluating the costs of mobility. Specifically, let us continue to examine the pension wealth of a hypothetical teacher who enters at age 25 and works continuously. However, now, rather than working continuously in the same system, at age 40, after 15 years in state A, she moves to state B, which has the same pension formula and same pay grid, and ultimately retires. We assume that she collects two pensions, one in each of the states in which she worked. The pure mobility cost can be thought of as the loss from moving at age 40 to an identical state, but with zero creditable service.

The hypothetical wealth trajectory described above is depicted as the dotted curve in Figure 1 for Missouri. As discussed above, the heavy solid curve illustrates net pension wealth for continuous service under the DB plan, evaluated at date of separation. The dotted segment represents the wealth trajectory for a teacher who moves after 15 years, at age 40, diverging at that point from the solid curve for the teacher who stays. For the first five years, the dotted curve is flat since the teacher must get vested in the new system. After vesting, the teacher is entitled to two pensions, one from the old job and one from the new one. However, the loss from mobility continues to widen in the following years, as the teacher who stays becomes eligible for earlier and earlier retirement, while the teacher who moves does not earn enough service credit to advance the pension from age 60.

Under a continuous career, our hypothetical teacher would obtain 30 years of service by age 55, qualifying her for “normal” retirement benefits immediately at 75 percent of final average salary. This is worth $626,088 at age 55. The split career of the mobile teacher means that she receives two annuities, each of which is for 37.5 percent of final average salary, but the FAS for the first pension is of course much lower. In addition, neither the first nor the second pension would be drawn until “normal” retirement at age 60. This means that five years of pension payments are lost. These two factors together reduce the net pension wealth to $219,163, a loss from mobility of $406,925. This is the gap between the dotted and solid curves in Figure 1 at age 55. The cost of mobility is 65 percent of pension wealth.

By contrast, under the hypothetical cash balance system, also depicted in Figure 1, there is no loss from mobility. Net pension wealth, the cumulative value of employer contributions, is a constant percentage of cumulative earnings, regardless of whether they accrue in one job or two.

Table 1 provides summary calculations of these mobility losses for all six states. A glance down the first column shows substantial mobility costs in all six states, ranging from approximately $200,000 to more than $500,000. As the table also shows, these losses are large in relative terms as well, ranging from 41 percent to 74 percent of net pension wealth for teachers who stay.

Figure 2 depicts the sources of these losses, as well as the variation across states. For each state, the full bar gives the net pension wealth of a teacher who stays in the system to age 55, and the bottom portion, in black, is that of the mobile teacher. The middle portion gives the loss from mobility due to freezing FAS on her first job. The top portion gives the mobility cost imposed by service eligibility rules. Specifically, splitting 30 years of service credit between two jobs delays the first pension draw and can also affect the replacement rate (the annual pension as a percentage of FAS).

The costs from the split in service credit are generally large and vary across states. In Missouri, Arkansas, and Ohio, these rules lead to a delay of first pension draw from age 55 to 60, while in California, the first draw is delayed to age 57. In Texas, the mobile teacher delays first draw to 63, but she gains a higher replacement rate as a result. In Massachusetts, there is no delay for first draw, but the mobile teacher sacrifices a large increase in the replacement rate that is awarded to 30-year veterans. All in all, the service eligibility rules for early retirement, pension bumps, and the like—little known to the general public (and, we suspect, to many young teachers)—can impose large costs on teachers who move.

Final Considerations

Our work offers the first detailed analysis of the distribution of net pension benefits among teachers of varying ages of separation and the corresponding costs that teacher pension systems impose on mobile teachers. We find that in a typical DB system, compared to a neutral system, half an entering cohort’s pension wealth is redistributed to teachers who separate in their 50s, from those who separate earlier. One of the main reasons is that teachers who teach into their 50s can start collecting a pension immediately, while teachers who leave earlier often must defer their pension until age 60 or later, so they collect fewer payments over their retirement.

This inequality in benefits produces very large losses in pension wealth for mobile teachers. We estimate that teachers who split a 30-year career between two pension plans often retire with less than half the pension wealth accrued by teachers who complete a similar career in a single system. Again, one of the main reasons is that teachers who split their career often cannot begin collecting pension payments as early as those who stay in one system.

Our discussion has focused on teachers. However, the problems we have identified extend to other professional staff in public schools. School administrators are always included in teacher retirement systems. The market for administrators in urban school districts is increasingly becoming national in scope, yet for mobile administrators retirement benefit systems with 5- to 10-year vesting systems can have a devastating effect on retirement savings.

The impediments to mobility—for both teachers and administrators—may be particularly problematic for charter schools. Many charter schools are part of organizations (e.g., Knowledge Is Power Program [KIPP], Edison Learning, Imagine Schools) that operate in more than one state. Edison Learning, for example, operates schools in 16 states. As these schools attempt to replicate their school models, it is valuable to them to move staff from one location to another, particularly when they start new schools, in much the same way business firms relocate managers. As we have shown, current educator retirement benefit systems make such mobility very costly in those states where charter school employees are required to participate in the state’s teacher pension plan.

Such a system of rewards and penalties is hard to justify. To appreciate the importance of mobility, consider the large differences in the growth of public school enrollment between states. The National Center for Education Statistics projects that states such as Nevada and Arizona will see enrollment growth in excess of 40 percent between 2005 and 2017. Louisiana, Vermont, and Rhode Island can expect enrollment declines of 10 percent or more over this same period. Heavily populated states such as Michigan and New York can anticipate declines of between 5 and 6 percent. In a well-functioning labor market, one would see considerable movement of workers from areas of contracting demand to areas in which demand is increasing. In the case of teaching, however, the pension systems impose large costs on those who move.

The barriers to reform are primarily political. First, states have a coordination problem. It is in no state’s individual interest to facilitate mobility out of the state; to the contrary, states are inclined to keep average pension costs down by skimping on benefits for those who depart. In addition, the distribution of benefits within states between short-term and career teachers will be governed by the relative influence of junior versus senior educators in educator groups and state politics. Influence generally increases with seniority for a variety of reasons, and these are enhanced in the case of pension politics, because the benefits of pensions are far more immediate and tangible for senior educators than for junior ones. The opaque nature of final-average-salary DB systems, with their complicated eligibility rules, only reinforces this imbalance.

All that said, these barriers are not insurmountable. Similar issues arise in higher education, and yet the benefits of academic mobility have led many state and private universities to offer more portable retirement plans. As states grapple with the pension difficulties they now face, they should consider systems with smooth wealth accrual, such as the CB plan described in this article. Another alternative to consider might be a hybrid such as TIAA-CREF, which has features of both CB and defined-contribution plans and has proven popular in higher education. Such systems are more transparent, tie benefits more closely to contributions, and do not penalize mobility or job shopping among young teachers. At a minimum, education policymakers should consider experiments that provide actuarially fair alternatives to traditional DB plans for new teaching recruits, and evaluate their utility for recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers.

Robert M. Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. Michael Podgursky is professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

Are test scores the educational outcomes that parents value most? We tackle this question by examining the types of teachers that parents request for their elementary school children. We find that, on average, parents strongly prefer teachers whom principals describe as best able to promote student satisfaction, though parents also value teacher ability to improve student academics. These aggregate effects, however, mask striking differences across schools. Parents in high-poverty schools strongly value a teacher’s ability to raise student achievement and appear indifferent to student satisfaction. In wealthier schools the results are reversed: parents most value a teacher’s ability to keep students happy.

Data

This study combines data on teacher requests (by parents) and teacher evaluations (by principals) from 12 elementary schools in a midsized school district that asked to remain anonymous, in the western United States. The students in the district are predominantly white (73 percent), but there is a reasonable degree of diversity in terms of ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Roughly 35 percent of the white students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Latino students, 84 percent of whom are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, comprise 21 percent of the student population. Achievement levels in the district nearly match the average of the nation (49th percentile on the Stanford Achievement Test).

There is no formal procedure for parents to request specific teachers in the district. Principals report that they assign students to classes with an eye toward balancing race, gender, and ability across classrooms within the same grade. Parents submit requests during the spring or summer, and principals make assignments over the summer. During our analysis period, roughly 22 percent of parents requested a teacher each year and 79 percent of teachers received at least one parental request. Parents are also able to request that their child not be placed with a particular teacher (a “negative request”). Only about 9 percent of teachers received any negative requests, and 92 percent of teachers with negative requests had at least one positive request as well. Principals report that they are generally able to honor almost all requests, giving parents an incentive to truthfully reveal their first preference.

Parents in the district appear to have strong and varied preferences for teachers. Among those teachers receiving at least one request, the average number of requests was 6.2. Whereas the teacher at the 25th percentile received only 2 requests, the teacher at the 75th percentile received 8 requests. Moreover, there are often large differences between the most-requested and least-requested teacher within the same school, grade, and year: The average difference is 7.4, and in 10 percent of grades, the difference is larger than 17.

Our data include information on requests made for the 2005–06 school year (the “request year”) in the summer of 2005 for kindergarten through 6th-grade teachers in all 12 schools in our sample, as well as information from an earlier year for two of the schools. We exclude from our analysis those teachers parents could not have plausibly requested—mainly new teachers (unless parents specifically requested the “new” teacher), who comprised about 17 percent of those teaching in the request year. Note that we include teachers who did not receive any requests, as long as they taught in the same grade and school in the request year and the prior year. Our final sample consists of 256 individual teachers. Parents who made requests chose, on average, from among approximately three different teachers.

With the assistance of the district, we linked the parental request data to administrative data on teachers and students. Because the administrative files provide only a very coarse measure of family socioeconomic status—eligibility for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program—we constructed an additional proxy for family income by matching each student’s residential address to U.S. Census data on the median household income in the student’s neighborhood.

Finally, to supplement our information on teachers, we administered a survey to all elementary school principals in February 2003 and March 2006. In these surveys, we asked principals to evaluate their teachers along a variety of dimensions, including dedication and work ethic, organization, classroom management, parent satisfaction, positive relationship with administrators, student satisfaction, role model value for students, and ability to raise math and reading achievement. The average rating was roughly 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, indicating that principals were quite lenient in their assessments. On the basis of these survey results, we created three measures: (1) the principal’s overall assessment of the teacher’s effectiveness, which is a single item from the survey; (2) the teacher’s ability to improve student academic performance, which is a simple average of the organization, classroom management, reading achievement, and math achievement survey items; and (3) the teacher’s ability to increase student satisfaction, which is a simple average of the role model and student satisfaction survey items. If a teacher was rated by the principal on both the 2003 and 2006 surveys, we use the average of the two ratings.

In previous research using the 2003 principal survey data (see “When Principals Rate Teachers,” research, Spring 2006), we found that principals in the district are usually able to identify the most and least effective teachers in their schools, as measured by their students’ academic progress. However, principals appear to be less successful in differentiating between teachers near the middle of the distribution of teacher effectiveness.

What kinds of parents make requests?

We begin by examining the characteristics of families who make requests. This is important for two reasons. First, our analysis of parent preferences will reflect only the views of those parents who actually made requests, so it is important to understand this group. Second, whether different types of families are more or less likely to make a request has important implications. If high-income parents are more likely to make a request, and such requests are for better teachers on average, then the availability of requests could exacerbate the achievement gap between students from low- and high-income families, even if all families equally value academic achievement.

In this district, families that are not eligible for the federal lunch program are about twice as likely to make a request as those that are eligible: 30 percent of families who are not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch make a request compared with only 13 percent of eligible families. Interestingly, these fractions are nearly identical across schools with very different poverty levels. Thus the socioeconomic makeup of the school does not appear to affect whether parents make a request, although the socioeconomic status of the family does.

We also conducted a more sophisticated analysis that measures the relationship between a family’s demographic characteristics (such as eligibility for free- or reduced-price lunch, median household income of the student’s residential neighborhood, race, and student prior achievement level), a school’s poverty level, and the likelihood that the parent makes a request. These results confirm that, conditional on the characteristics of the family and student, parents in high- and low-poverty schools are about equally likely to make a request. However, parents of low-income students are about 6 percentage points less likely to make a request than parents of high-income students (9 percent vs. 15 percent). Additionally, parents from high-income neighborhoods are about 4 percentage points more likely to make a request than parents from low-income neighborhoods (17 percent vs. 13 percent). Finally, Hispanic parents are significantly less likely to request a particular teacher for their child than are other families in the district.

After taking into account differences in socioeconomic status, we found that parents of higher-achieving students are more likely to make a request, which perhaps reflects greater sophistication or interest on the part of these families. The parents of a student whose performance is 1 standard deviation above the mean are about 8 percentage points more likely to make a request than the parents of an otherwise similar student whose performance is 1 standard deviation below the mean (19 percent vs. 11 percent).

What kinds of teachers do parents request?

In general, parents who make a request exhibit a strong preference for teachers who have received higher overall ratings by the school principal. However, recall that the principals’ survey responses allowed us to construct separate measures of two distinct aspects of teacher quality: the ability to improve student achievement and the ability to provide an enjoyable classroom experience for students. While positively correlated, these two factors appear to reflect distinct characteristics that vary across teachers. Overall, we find that parents value the teacher’s performance on both the student satisfaction and achievement measures, but give more weight to the satisfaction measure.

Even more interesting, however, we find stark differences across schools in the type of teachers that parents tend to request. We find that parents making requests in high-poverty schools place less value on student satisfaction than those in lower-poverty schools. Conversely, parents in high-poverty schools value a teacher’s ability to improve student achievement considerably more than parents in lower-poverty schools.

On the other hand, within a school, a family’s own socioeconomic status is uncorrelated with the type of teacher a parent requests. That is, both more- and less-advantaged parents in low-income schools tend to request teachers that are rated highly in terms of their ability to improve student achievement. In contrast, parents from all backgrounds in higher-income schools tend to request teachers who are rated more highly in terms of their ability to improve student satisfaction. When we control for the socioeconomic status of both the student and school, our findings are the same: student characteristics are not related to the type of teachers that parents prefer, while school characteristics are strongly related to parental preferences for teachers.

To quantify these differences, we used our results to simulate parent choices (see Figure 1). For the sake of simplicity, we first consider a situation in which a parent can choose between two teachers: one teacher has an average rating for both achievement and satisfaction; the other teacher has an average rating for achievement, but a high rating on the satisfaction measure (i.e., a rating 1 standard deviation above the mean). We calculate the percentage of parents with average background characteristics who would choose the high-satisfaction teacher. Next, we change one characteristic of either the parent or school and calculate how this change would affect the percent of parents who would choose the high-satisfaction teacher.

In a school where 80 percent of the children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, the parents of the average child would have a 48 percent chance of selecting the teacher with a high-satisfaction and average achievement rating over the teacher with average ratings on both satisfaction and achievement. In other words, these parents are no more likely to choose the high-satisfaction teacher than if they had randomly chosen which teacher to request. In contrast, if the child attends a school where only 20 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, there would be a 65 percent probability that their parents would select the high-satisfaction teacher. The 17 percentage point difference is large and statistically significant.

We then consider the scenario where the choice is between two teachers who have the same satisfaction rating but different achievement ratings, and see the opposite result. Parents in the lower-poverty school are no more likely than they would be by chance to select the teacher with a high achievement rating (51 percent), whereas parents in the higher-poverty school would choose the teacher with a higher achievement rating 62 percent of the time. Again, the difference of 11 percentage points is statistically significant.

As one might expect, parents of kindergarten children appear to value satisfaction more and academics less than other parents, though this difference is small and bordering on statistical insignificance. Grade level is otherwise unrelated to preferences for teacher attributes.

Parent requests and classroom effectiveness

It is important to emphasize that the results presented above reflect both what parents observe and what they value. To the extent that parents have less information on a particular teacher characteristic, our findings may underestimate parent preferences for this characteristic. In particular, one might be concerned that parents do not have accurate information on teachers’ ability to raise student achievement. For this reason, we focus primarily on information from the principal survey, which likely reflects teacher behaviors or qualities that parents might learn from observing the teacher’s classroom or speaking with friends and neighbors who have had experience with the teacher in the past.

To test the sensitivity of our results to this methodological decision, we constructed a value-added indicator that measures a teacher’s contribution to student achievement (accounting for a wide variety of student and classroom characteristics that could affect achievement independent of the teacher’s ability). We find that teachers who perform better on our value-added measure also receive more parent requests, even after controlling for the student satisfaction measure from the principal surveys. However, when we also control for the principal-reported academic measure, this relationship is no longer significant, although the relationships between parent requests and both principal-reported measures remain positive and significant. These results suggest either that the academic considerations parents value are better captured by principal ratings or that parents have difficulty observing how much value a teacher adds to reading and math test scores.

An explanation?

The results presented above suggest that parents in low-income schools strongly value student achievement and are essentially indifferent to a teacher’s ability to promote student satisfaction. The results are reversed for families in higher-income schools. At the same time, we find that parent preferences within schools are identical across several measures of family socioeconomic status. How should we interpret these results?

One possible explanation emphasizes the role of school context in the educational process, particularly the interaction between parents, schools, and students. In this view, high- and low-income parents have similar preferences for student outcomes, but face constraints that are correlated with school demographics. Because academic resources are relatively scarce in higher-poverty schools (e.g., there are more disruptive peers, lower academic expectations, fewer financial resources, and less-competent teachers), parents in these schools seek teachers skilled at improving achievement even if this comes at the cost of student satisfaction.

If this explanation were true, we would expect to find a positive association between school-level income and school-level academic inputs, and a negative association between school-level income and the differences in the value-added by teachers within the same school. The second prediction is simply a consequence of diminishing returns to academic inputs. More specifically, if the average quality of teachers in a school is already high, being assigned to one of the better teachers will have only a limited effect on student achievement.

To what extent are these predictions borne out in the data? A comparison of observable teacher characteristics across schools provides some support for the first prediction. As in most other school districts, the teachers in higher-poverty schools in our sample have fewer years of experience than their counterparts in lower-poverty schools (11.8 years vs. 14.0 years). In comparison to their counterparts, teachers in higher-poverty schools are less likely to have credits beyond a bachelor’s degree (66 percent vs. 78 percent) and are less likely to have attended the most prestigious local university (75 percent vs. 80 percent) for their undergraduate degree. In addition, the variance of our value-added measure is significantly higher within higher-poverty schools than in lower-poverty schools, even after we control for the experience level and other observable characteristics of teachers within each school, which supports the second prediction. Hence, while certainly not conclusive, the available evidence is consistent with the explanation offered above.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that what parents want from school depends on the educational context in which they find themselves. In particular, in low-income schools where academic resources are scarce, motivated parents are more likely to choose teachers based on their perceived ability to improve academic achievement. On the other hand, in higher-income schools these parents seem to respond to the relative abundance of academic resources by seeking out teachers who also increase student satisfaction. This may reflect a parental preference for their children to enjoy school, or it might reflect parental preferences for teachers who emphasize academic facets that increase student satisfaction but are not captured by standardized test scores, such as critical thinking or curiosity.

In considering the policy implications of this research, it is important to recognize that our analysis reflects parent decisions conditional on school choice. In principle, students in this district can attend any school, although in practice the vast majority of students simply attend their neighborhood school. Because the school choice decision is quite different from the teacher choice decision, our findings do not map directly onto the school choice debate. However, the results represented here do inform other policy issues. For example, they suggest that the parents of low-income, minority, and low-achieving children are much less likely to take advantage of informal opportunities to exercise choice from among teachers. This highlights the potential adverse impacts of honoring parental requests on the equitable distribution of education resources. Our results also suggest that different socioeconomic groups are likely to react quite differently to accountability policies, such as those embodied in No Child Left Behind. In more affluent schools, parents are likely to oppose measures that increase the focus on standardized test scores at the cost of student satisfaction. More generally, programs that increase the focus on basic skills or classroom management at the expense of student enjoyment or other academic facets not measured on standardized tests are likely to be unpopular in more affluent schools.

Brian Jacob is professor of education policy and economics at theGerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.Lars Lefgren is assistant professor of economics, Brigham YoungUniversity. This article summarizes research that will be publishedin a forthcoming article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.