When schools are profit centers, wreckage will be the norm

(Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 12/12/10)

A recent poll of Indiana parents revealed that 80 percent are satisfied with their local schools. To listen to Gov. Daniels or Education Sup. Bennett talk about Indiana public schools, those parents must be mistaken, duped, or school teachers. This is a problem for radical education reformers. While parents might believe there are some problems with the “education system,” the vast majority are satisfied with their local schools. Those that are not, approximate the percentage of students and families underserved by our public schools. Herein lies the need to paint Indiana schools in as bad a light as possible.

Why? An easy answer is that the “take no prisoners” approach is about Gov. Daniels’ presidential aspirations and Sup. Bennett’s gubernatorial aspirations. While I think those factor somewhat into it, I think the reasons lie more in conservative ideology.

Don’t be fooled. While Gov. Daniels hasn’t pursued a socially conservative political agenda, avoiding those hot button issues has permitted him to pursue an otherwise very conservative agenda. He has cut spending, capped property taxes, privatized great swaths of government, with both positive and negative outcomes. Keep in mind that conservative ideology is about smaller government and lower taxes. The inevitable outcome of such an approach is a reduction in “public goods.” For Gov. Daniels significantly reducing the size of government requires altering the state’s relationship to education, both K-12 and higher education. States have been getting out of the higher ed business for years. Tuition rises as state support declines. If current trends continue, public universities will probably be put up for sale or lease to education management companies (think the toll road in Northern Indiana). If conservative ideology continues to prevail, the same will be true of K-12 schools.

It’s easy to see the coordinated and persistent propaganda campaign against public education beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan and his message of government is the problem, not the solution. The aim of that campaign is to undermine public support for public education.

And conservatives are impatient. NCLB and Indiana’s PL 221, brought us more school ratings. The performance standards are ultimately unreasonable eventually leading all schools to fail and/or it will lead to “cheating” and the cheating scandals will help fuel the undermining of the public’s support for public education. Yet, despite many years of annual reporting in the papers, this effort to undermine public education has not translated to great reductions in individual’s support for their local schools and transfers “out” of failing schools have not happened the way the radical conservative reformers hoped. So, in response, Indiana will assign a single letter grade to each school.

We do not give a student one letter grade for their entire academic performance. Rather they receive a grade for each subject or skill. As has been reported in these pages, sometimes schools are struggling, “failing,” in a particular area. Why not issue a more detailed report card, actually providing better information from which parents could judge their school’s performance. “Better” information does not serve the underlying goal.

The conservative vision for public schools, if not ending them, is public finance of private schools. It will start with vouchers, and then the funding for vouchers will shrink, either absolutely or relatively, private schools will charge tuition beyond the value of the vouchers and the inevitable inequities in a private school market for education will help to ensure the reproduction of current social inequalities. This is the model for public universities and what has transpired over the last 30 years. The current public school system doesn’t eliminate social inequality, it reproduces current social inequalities, but with some notable progress that is less likely under a mostly for private school system. Social inequality relative to a public good is a moral problem, but not for a private good. By decoupling education from government, the moral imperative to address social inequalities in education, which is where so much of the problems lie, is eliminated. Conservatives don’t see social inequality as a problem, it is just the inevitable outcome of the market. In fact, it is a necessity.

When schools are profit centers, there will be mom and pop versions, franchise versions, Wal Mart versions, “exclusive country club versions,” and out of business versions. Just as we see one company buyout another one and strip it of its assets, leaving wreckage in its wake, that will be a regular occurrence in a future where education is a private, rather than, public good.

Are teachers not part of the learning equation?

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 12/5/10

TERRE HAUTE — “A teacher’s influence on student achievement scores is 20 times greater than any other variable — including class size and student poverty.”

This is a quote taken from Gov. Mitch Daniels’ “Legislative Priorities” (www.in.gov/gov/files/112310slides.pdf). It didn’t read to me as something he or even one of his staffers wrote. So, I donned my sleuthing persona, and quickly found the quote repeated in many sources, the Houston Chronicle, some foundations, eventually though I traced the quote to Kati Haycock, the director of the Education Trust, an education policy advocacy group.

The Education Trust is a fairly mainstream group. They are funded by such groups as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, and others. I suspect Kati Haycock would smile at some of Indiana’s proposed education reforms and frown at others.

Haycock is not a statistician. Among other things, she edits an in-house journal. She, I think, is making a rhetorical claim, based upon the research of William L. Sanders, who is a skilled statistician/econometrician from Tennessee, who created the Tennessee Valued Added Assessment System (TVAAS). This is an assessment and accountability system ushered into Tennessee under Gov. Lamar Alexander in the mid-1980s. In fact, the model underlying the assessment system is known as the “Sanders Model.”

Many of the claims being made by Gov. Daniels and Education Superintendent Bennett stem, I think, from Sanders’ claims. And he makes some pretty remarkable, albeit controversial, claims. Among them is that class size, heterogeneity of the classroom, social class and other commonly found influences in other research are not important. It is as though once students enter the classroom only the influence of the teacher matters. What I find interesting is that there is a lot of sophisticated research using data from Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama and Kentucky.

Tennessee may have the best data, but I can only find research using TVAAS data by Sanders. Essentially, the creator of the system is the only one who has evaluated the system. (Perhaps the databases I use, which located Sanders’ articles, just don’t find articles published by others using TVAAS data.) Maybe Tennessee won’t grant access to any other researchers? Sanders’ claims cannot be tested by other scholars if the data is not made available.

The value-added model of assessment makes sense for students. To use the same model to assess teachers raises some questions. Any occupation can be divided into quintiles based on productivity, job satisfaction or height. No matter how well the bottom quintile (20 percent) does, they are still low-performing relative to the top. And if you eliminate the bottom quintile and redistribute, there will still be a lowest quintile.

What we need to do, if we are going to adopt value-added assessment to evaluate teachers, is to establish a minimum acceptable absolute performance, not a relative one.

There are other troubling findings in this literature. There is no observable teacher characteristic that consistently correlates with student outcomes. It doesn’t matter the quality of the school a teacher attended, it doesn’t matter how well they scored on any teacher licensure exam, their own SATs, how experienced they are, whether they have a master’s degree, nothing. The idea that good teachers are born, not made, is the inevitable conclusion.

They burn out quickly, however. Research consistently shows that except for the first 10 to 15 years, a teacher’s experience is generally negatively related to student achievement, especially in math.

Superintendent Bennett uses sports metaphors all the time. The research on teacher experience and student achievement suggests this one: Teachers are like NFL quarterbacks. They improve through the first few years, hit a plateau, and then decline. Time to draft a new one.

All of Tennessee’s students take the ACT. In 2010, not one of the areas ACT covers shows Tennessee’s students exceeding national averages in readiness for college. Fewer students in Indiana take the ACT, but Indiana’s students exceed the national averages in readiness for college in each category.

There is not a lot of research on home-schooled students. What research I found shows that home-schooled students do better on standardized achievement tests than formally schooled students. Who home schools? Married couple families with one or two children, highly educated, single-earner families in the mid-$70,000s, and either Mom or Dad stay home to exclusively teach their kids. Interestingly, those parents who happen to also be certified teachers don’t do as well as the students of non-certified teachers. So maybe teachers are not the most important factor; perhaps it is parents’ emphasis on education, small class size, and highly tailored curricula.

Note: Steiger is married to a public school teacher.

Are teachers not part of learning equation?

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 12/5/10

Education reforms can't ignore family influences

(Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 11/28/2010)

The newspapers are full of coverage on education reform. In last Sunday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman went so far as to say the Department of Education was the “epicenter of national security.” His op-ed paints a dour picture of the US education system. He endorses the Obama Administration efforts to transform the US education system thereby indirectly endorsing the current efforts in Indiana. Friedmann points favorably to the educational systems in Denmark and Finland (Finland especially has a wonderful educational system). However, pointing to such “socialistic” countries isn’t much of a selling point.

Gov. Daniels’ penned an article in the November 7th Indianapolis Star. He wrote: “If there is one fact that every expert and all the data confirm, it is that the single most important predictor of a child’s academic success is the quality of the teachers he or she encounters.”

I’ll forgive Gov. Daniels for favoring politics over the known science on academic performance. The best predictor of a child’s academic performance is their parents. It is that inconvenient fact that “No Child Left Behind” treats as an excuse instead of explanation and thus ignores parental contribution (or subtraction) to a child’s academic performance.

Research on family type (a different measure than socio-economic status) shows consistent effects on child academic performance (and not just in the US). Children from larger families tend to underperform relative to children from smaller families. Children from single headed families are the most likely to underperform and that type of family is increasing across every category of socio-economic status in the US.

Friedmann’s article was 12 paragraphs long. He waited until the last one to mention parents. Other than the use of proxies, such as parent’s income and education, I couldn’t find any research on the “qualities” of parents that contribute to their children’s academic success. There is research on how parent’s educational goals for their children affect their children’s educational goals. Unfortunately nothing that connects any parent quality to test scores, other than the proxies of socio-economic status and family type. Talk to teachers, however, and one gets enough anecdotal evidence to suggest the need for more systematic research on the subject.

What do you think? Who is likely to perform better on standardized tests? Children who are or not read to at home? Children whose parents monitor their children’s homework and academics or not? How about the simple act of asking kids what did they learn today and not accept “nuthin” as an answer? Kids who eat breakfast in the morning or those who could eat at school, but whose parents can’t get them to school on time? Kids of parents who meet with and work with teachers when a child is struggling or those who refuse to meet with school officials, even when school officials are willing to meet outside the normal school hours? This list could go on and on, but I think the point is made.
Our leaders’ answer to this social problem is merit pay for teachers and school choice. To date, the largest experiment with merit pay for teachers is Tennessee, the results released this year, indicate merit pay (bonuses were significant averaging $9600 to $11,300) had little to no impact on children’s academic performance and what positive effects were found, diminished over time.

Just as Americans (and American children) are getting fatter and as a result diabetes is on the rise, do we conclude then that there is a problem with US doctors?

Those who are interested should find Hanushek and Rivkin’s article in the May issue of the American Economic Review. In short, they lay out very well the problems of tying value added measures of student performance to teacher pay, and examine the relationship between teacher quality and academic outcomes. And contrary to Andrea Neal’s claim in Thursday’s newspaper, Hanushek and Rivkin examine observed differences in teacher quality (GPA, their own tests scores, etc) and find no difference on student outcomes. This is not to say there are no bad teachers. According to Hanushek and Rivkin, just replacing 6-10 percent of the worst teachers and replacing them with average ones (in terms of student outcomes), would make a significant impact on our education system.
Reformers commonly say the US has a good education system for 1950. Arguably, the US had better family situations and fewer distractions for academic performance then than we do today. The education problem can’t be solved by ignoring the contributions, good and bad, of parents and families.

Note: Steiger is married to a public school teacher.

Merit pay may not bring positive results

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 21 November 2010

TERRE HAUTE — Gov. Daniels gets what he wants. He wanted to change the time in Indiana; no one talks about repeal. He wanted to lease Indiana roads for badly needed cash and he did it. He has set more land aside for conservation than probably any Indiana governor and no one criticized him. When he came into office six years ago, he faced a budget shortfall and fixed it without a tax increase (although he did suggest one, remember?). He pushed for a constitutional amendment on property tax caps and got it. And now, perhaps his final accomplishment before he sets his sights on a presidential run, is to fix Indiana schools.

His plan is simple. Use money to motivate teachers to do a better job and tie student academic performance to teacher pay and continued employment. What could be simpler?

I have seen “merit” pay up and close. I am not sure it changes anyone’s behavior. Why? Among many reasons, the amount of money is key. Gov. Daniels isn’t looking to add money to education, quite the opposite. That is why he pursues unproven educational reforms but doesn’t make full-day kindergarten, a proven means to improve student academic performance, a priority.

Pay for performance works when individuals can alter behavior that directly influences the measured outcomes. For example, sales professionals make more phone calls, contact more people, and result in more sales and more commissions. What behaviors do teachers need to do more of, or change, to increase student academic performance? Are there evidence-based practices that point the direction?

Learning theory is pretty straightforward: time on task impacts learning. So, maybe teachers will assign more homework. If the students don’t do the work (and parents complain about the amount), then student performance doesn’t improve and teachers won’t get paid for their performance.

Teachers are professionals, like lawyers, doctors, nurses, clergy, and accountants. Professional norms control their behavior. And like other professional groups, talent and skill differ across individuals. The “best” lawyers, however, are not necessarily the highest paid. Why would a highly paid lawyer accept a much lower paid position as a judge? Indeed, a judge is a civil servant while most lawyers are in private practice; they do it, in part, because of the honor.

Everyone cannot have the “best” doctor, lawyer, nurse, priest or accountant. Through training and professional norms, a minimum performance standard is established. No, such systems are not perfect and people in such professions can change, they can “burn out.” Are there bad doctors, nurses, lawyers, priests and accountants? Yes and there are “bad” teachers and there has to be a way to deal with those low performers.

When I directed the Sociology Research Lab, I compensated callers two different ways. One paid them for performance, the other was to pay by the hour. When callers were compensated based solely on performance, I found I had a lot of “cheating.” Callers would pretend to call and just answer the questions themselves. It was easy to spot these and remove those interviews from the data set. Others, who were paid by the hour, didn’t cheat. Some were phenomenal. They completed interviews at two to three times the rate of others. I established a reasonable quota of completed interviews per hour. Those who couldn’t make that quota usually quit. A few I had to let go because they were “too expensive.”

I used the first system to train and to gauge the work ethics and habits of callers. The “good” ones were invited to move to an hourly pay system. This system worked because I could establish and easily measure outcomes and establish standards.

How many points on standardized tests should be adequate to keep a new teacher employed? If those benchmarks are not reasonable or if they are vague or unstated, those who are subject to them will not have confidence in them, “cheating” will occur, and cynicism will grow.

I applaud Gov. Daniels for trying to fix education. I suggest he change the teacher retirement system so that burned-out teachers don’t feel handcuffed to a system that only rewards extremely long service. Push for full-day kindergarten. And quit bashing teachers or the most idealistic will instead choose sales, instead of teaching. Continued bashing of teachers will stigmatize the profession and eventually those who make the best teachers will turn away.



Editor’s note: Steiger is married to a public school teacher.

Simplistic Slogans Don't Solve Complex Problems

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, Halloween 2010

TERRE HAUTE — All indications point to another power shift Tuesday, with Republicans, with intense and enthusiastic Tea Party support, gaining power in all sectors of government. Whether they gain control of Congress or the Indiana House of Representatives remains to be seen.

The Tea Party stands for smaller government and cutting taxes. There isn’t much to their specifics, but some candidates trying to ride the movement’s intense emotions have put out some specific plans. But it is the button-down Cato Institute which has, from what I can find, provided the most specific plan to cut government spending, downsize government, and, hence, cut taxes.

Of course, many angry Tea Partiers no doubt distrust the scholarly Cato Institute. It is, after all, a policy think tank. One of those organizations full of pointy-headed intellectual types who rely more on dispassionate analysis and data than over-the-top rhetoric and promises that cannot be fulfilled — as one candidate for Congress promises (“I will repeal Obamacare”).

The Tea Party and, from what I can tell, every Republican candidate, promises to cut taxes and reduce spending. Let’s examine the Cato Institute’s “downsizing the federal government” plan (www.downsizinggovernment.org). To be fair, CI’s overall plan is not finished. It has not addressed defense spending, homeland security, justice, veterans affairs and a couple of others.

Americans want immediate gratification, not plans that fix things down the road. Let’s not look at promises and impacts down the road. Let’s examine the immediate effects, beginning with the Department of Agriculture. According to CI, Agriculture spends $142 billion a year and employs 96,000. CI suggests cutting Agriculture by $108 billion, or 76 percent. CI details the programmatic cuts and discusses the good this will do later (“lower food prices for everyone”). CI doesn’t talk about what a 76-percent cut to spending would do to employment at Agriculture. Here, I’ll just use a proportionate cut: 73,014 added to the ranks of the unemployed.

The Department of Commerce spends $17 billion a year and employs 53,000 workers. CI proposes a 12-percent cut; adding 6,235 more people to the unemployment lines.

The Department of Energy will spend $38 billion in 2010 and employs 16,000 workers and oversees 100,000 contract workers in 21 national labs and other facilities across the nation. CI proposes cutting it by 29 percent translating, using 116,000 as the base, to 33,578 more unemployed.

The Department of Education will spend $107 billion this year and employs 4,100.  I’m surprised its total elimination was not called for as so many among the Tea Party do. Nevertheless, it survives with a 78-percent cut, but 2,988 workers don’t. 

The Department of Health and Human Services will spend $869 billion this year and employs 65,000. Cut it by just 9 percent and only 6,058 lose their jobs.

Housing and Urban Development will spend $63 billion this year and employs 9,500. Cut it all, says CI, a 100-percent cut and 9,500 more to the ranks of those who don’t pay taxes.

This year, $91 billion is the Department of Transportation’s budget. And 58,000 folks are on its payroll. I’m not sure why it gets to survive, but a 93-percent spending cut will leave only 5, 825 workers with a job there.

In summary, CI proposes cutting $429 billion — an overall cut of a third.  To be fair, they don’t discuss the loss of employment in a recession with weak job growth that would result from these cuts. They don’t discuss the loss of employment at all in the plan. Those are my estimates. A $429 billion dollar cut as CI outlines, I estimate, would add 177,548 more people to the unemployed or, at current rates, a 0.1-point increase in the unemployment rate.

Keep in mind, this is not the full plan, CI stills needs to detail cuts to Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor, State, Treasury and Veterans Affairs. The total spending these departments account for is $1.2 trillion. Assuming a 33-percent reduction holds throughout the rest of the cutting, that is an additional $396 billion in cuts in spending and an estimated 163,890 increase in the ranks of the unemployed. Assuming no tax cuts, these outlined and estimated cuts would reduce the current budget deficit by 63 percent.

Conventional wisdom holds that raising taxes in a weak economy will further weaken it. What will cutting $825 billion in spending and laying off 341,438 people do to a weak economy? Simplistic slogans do not turn complex realities into simple ones.

What we know, and what we "think" we know?

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 10 October 2010

Are Jeopardy contestants more likely to be atheists? In the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s recent survey on U.S. Religious Knowledge (September 28, 2010 -- http://www.pewforum.org/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey-Who-Knows-What-About-Religion.aspx) atheists score the highest. They score the highest on “religious” knowledge but also, religion’s role in public life, and nonreligious knowledge (9 questions spanning politics, science, history and literature).

Asking “knowledge” questions is hard to do in a survey like this. Pew did it by asking respondents to think of the questions like a game show. I’ve asked questions about people’s knowledge about public policies and the criminal justice system. The results are usually disappointing (people don’t know much) and my sense is that people don’t like answering them.

The newsworthiness of these findings focuses on the irony that atheists would know more about religion than the religious. (They don’t know more about Christianity than white evangelicals and Mormons, but more than other groups.) As a sociologist, I’m not surprised by the results. Atheists could be considered to be one of the lowest status groups in society. Very few Americans will admit to much doubt about the existence of God or a higher spirit (31 percent in this survey admitted to some uncertainty but only six percent expressed a disbelief in God). Generally, lower status groups know more about the ways of higher status groups than higher status groups know about the ways of lower status groups. Christians scored, on average, lower than did Jews, Mormons (there are important theological distinctions) and atheists on questions about the Bible and Christianity, world religions, and the role of religion in public life. In a society dominated by Christianity, minority religious views have to be defended and defending one’s position sharpens one’s knowledge about both sides. Christians, despite some conservative hyperbole, don’t really have to defend their religious views the way minority religious adherents do.

Other than a sophisticated game of trivia, I’m not sure what knowing or not knowing the answers to these questions really means. Frankly, I think many of the questions are pretty arcane and irrelevant to why people engage in religious behavior. Is it more important for Christian salvation to know who Jesus is or where he was born? If Catholics don’t know what “transubstantiation” is, does that mean they are headed to hell? If a believer doesn’t know that the “golden rule” is not one of the 10 Commandments, does St. Peter cite these results and bar those who are so mistaken from the pearly gates? I think this kind of knowledge is important to scholars and intellectuals (and to wannabe Jeopardy contestants) but not that important to folks who are looking for answers to questions like “what happens to me after I die” or “why am I here?”

If we spend more time talking and thinking about what is important to us, that is, “learning,” then the Pew survey provides insights into these results. The Pew survey asked respondents how often they spoke to family and friends about science, history, politics or other current events, and religion. One reason why so many (72 percent) knew the Democrats control the House of Representatives is because 51 percent indicated talking with friends and family about politics and current events (does that include what happened last night on “Dancing with the Stars,” “American Idol,” and Jacob Lacey’s dropped interception that would have won the game for the Colts?). Forty-four percent indicated frequent discussions about religion (40 percent attend religious services once or more per week and 37 percent indicate reading scripture at least once a week outside of religious services). Hence, 46 percent knew who Martin Luther was. Only 35 percent frequently discuss history and just 25 percent frequently discuss science. Fifty-two percent expressed belief in evolution and 40 percent indicated that “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” about the same number who indicated a fundamentalist belief in the Bible (35 percent).

The point is that we “know” about things that are important to us because we talk about and do those things. I wish Pew had included a pop culture component.

Time for Final Jeopardy. The category is Pew Forum Religious Study. The answer is 68 percent. If you answered “What proportion of the Pew sample indicated being dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country right now” you are correct. Too bad Pew didn’t break down satisfaction with the way things are going by knowledge.