We Don't Need Educational Bells and Whistles

Among the many reasons education reform is stalled, one of the most prominent must be the appeal of adding bells and whistles to a broken-down car. A case in point is adding social media to schools. Social media plays into the myth that we can improve education by merely incorporating technology. People (somewhere, sometime) have received excellent educations for millenia even without any of what we recognize today as technology.

I once taught math to a group of multi-generational Vietnamese refugees. The experience changed my entire outlook on the subject of school finances. We sat under the trees. Everybody had a lapboard, pencils and paper I provided. I had the only textbook, a small chalkboard, chalk and eraser, all of which I also provided, and any “manipulatives” I chose to bring. Even on such a shoestring, I guarantee I delivered a high-quality education experience to all. No “technology,” not even a calculator. Amazing, huh.

Would it have been nice to have an overhead projector, or a smart board? Sure, but not necessary. How about a mimeograph machine, a xerox machine, computer printouts? Also lovely, but the students were perfectly capable of copying the problems from my little blackboard. Filmstrips, videos, DVDs? Again, nice, but not essential.

If our education system is like a car whose engine does not run, adding technology is like hoping that plugging in a GPS will somehow cause the engine to turn over. Incorporating bells and whistles like Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Second Life, whatever, will not help. The car is still going nowhere.

Analogies always break down somewhere. Our education system is not really like a single car. It is more like a bunch of scooters, some of which run nicely and some do not run at all. The kids on the scooters that run may be doing fine, but if America is to compete, all the scooters need to run nicely. Once all the scooters are running well, we can add a roof to the scooters and enhance the experience for all. Again, adding a roof to a non-running scooter will not make it run.

Before we begin spending tons of money on enhancements like technology, we need to use whatever resources we have to ensure every child is receiving a high quality education. Funny thing, money is no object, nor is it an obstacle. It is a matter of where we, as a society, place our priorities. As Suze Orman's signature line puts it, people first, then things.

Will Retired Teachers Also be Wooed?

One commentator believes that with the looming worker shortage, retired workers will be wooed to return to work.

This is not open to much question. It will happen even if the jobless recovery continues its vexing ways. That's because the people who will shape this future are already here and their numbers aren't going to change in the next 10 years. And it's because we have a pretty good idea of how many people it will take to generate the economic activity we can reasonably expect to occur.

The younger workers are, for the most part already working, Philip Moeller says. They will most likely continue working, so there will be few extra younger workers available to close the gap. Retirees aged 65 or older most likely have retired for good. So it will be the baby boomers beginning to retire now or who were forced into early retirement by a layoff or other cause who could be enticed to come back.

In a study done at Northeastern University earlier this year, Barry Bluestone and Mark Melnik say that in eight years, more than five million jobs may go begging unless there's a big boost in what's called the labor force participation rate -- the percentage of Americans who seek work. The big driver here is that the numbers of Baby Boomers leaving the work force will exceed the supply of new workers coming from younger generations.

The gap is a concern in another context: Social Security. In old news, the Social Security Administration estimates that in the near future, there will not be enough workers per retiree to pay retirees 100% of promised benefits. During the Social Security debate of the Bush administration, many opined that immigrants would fill the gap.

The authors of the study cited earlier list the top thirty jobs with shortages, called “encore” jobs. Standing at the head of the list? Teachers. If school administrators want to lure teachers back to the classroom, they will first have to address at least two issues, administrative support and credentialing.

Teachers who left the classroom, retired or not, might come back if their number one reason for leaving were addressed: lack of administrative support. Schools need to take the position that an education is not only a right, but a privilege. Administrators must remove the onus of classroom control from the teacher. Teachers should be able to send out students who clearly show by their disruptive behavior they would rather be somewhere else. Let that somewhere else be the principal's office. Teachers should not have to endure disruptive students for fear the administration will draw negative conclusions about their competence if they send students to the office.

Whoa! What if the principal's office were thus flooded with students? I once worked in a school where the administration believed it was the teacher's job to teach, not mete out “discipline.” Students found they actually did not like being out of class regardless of whether they cared about learning or not. Sitting in a chair outside the principal's office (no cell phones, etc. allowed) was way more “boring” than any teacher.

The bottom line is that responsibility for behavior must be returned to the students, especially since they often complain that they are too old to be treated as children. So-called “boredom” must never be allowed as an excuse for acting out or disrespecting the teacher.

Another important consideration is our society's current over-reliance on teacher credentialing as evidence of competence. Though research has not confirmed a correlation between credentialing and competence, the difficulty is that we have not yet figured out what constitutes competence. Given the constant calls to get rid of tenured, credentialed yet incompetent teachers, everyday experience casts doubt on correlation between competence and credentialing.

If society wants to bring back its teachers, it will have to find a way to determine a sensible alternative route to credentialing. Most credentials will have long expired, and if re-credentialing is onerous and expensive, the teacher shortage will not be filled with proven classroom veterans.

If past history is any indication, the teacher shortage will persist. I have an old Time article from 1985 worrying about the coming shortage of math and science teachers. For the last twenty-five years, warnings of shortage were sounded as cyclically as the sunrise, but nothing was done to prevent it. The shortage has arrived, and still, nothing but hand-wringing prevails.

Meanwhile, great teachers cannot get teaching jobs because our school districts do not hire experienced teachers. Too expensive, they say. What I cannot understand is why society accepts such a flimsy excuse, especially since currently, most district give credit on the wage scale for no more than five years experience. Any teacher with more than five years is actually a bargain, not “too expensive.”

Mathematica Study Undermines Teacher Merit Pay

So often when I read what passes for news in education, I find myself thinking, “No surprise there.” I am thinking of starting a No Surprise There watch. A case in point is the latest news out of Chicago.

According to the study from Mathmatica:

Preliminary results from a Chicago program containing performance-based compensation for teachers show no evidence that it has boosted student achievement on math and reading tests, compared with a group of similar, nonparticipating schools, an analysis released today concludes.

The program also failed to improve teacher retention rates. Over the two years of the study, achievement gains from the first year evaporated in the second year. Researchers and commentators speculate at least three factors account for the disappointing outcomes:

1. Reform takes time. It is unreasonable to expect stable achievement gains after only two years.
2. Schools did not adhere to a standardized implementation of the plan. Since not everybody did it the same way, the averages may be washing out positive effects in some schools.
3. The basic design of the plan needs tweaking. Perhaps higher or “more meaningfully differentiated” payouts.

It is impossible to generalize from the mere handful of studies on the efficacy of merit-based or performance-based incentives. However, many researchers have studied extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards.* The meta-conclusion is that extrinsic rewards actually undermine achievement. What works is intrinsic, not extrinsic rewards.

Hardly anyone but teachers mention what may be the most salient factor. Merit pay did not lead to achievement gains as measured by higher test scores because teachers simply do not have control over the myriad of variables that affect student achievement.

*Results of Google search on “research extrinsic rewards”

Financial Aid—Shoot for the Moon

In what is being called landmark legislation, college loans must be converted from private lenders to the federal Direct Loan Program.

Campuses across the country are gearing up to meet the July 1 deadline to revamp student-loan programs, as required in the federal Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

Direct loans should be better for students. The fees banks had received to administer the loans can instead go to expanding Pell Grants. Furthermore, the lending relationship is more stable. The student loan will not be sold to another lender.

However, to call student loans “financial aid” is a bit of a misnomer. Nevertheless, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) serves to qualify students for subsidized student loans. What high school guidance counselors know about, but we never see publicized are the lost opportunities to highly proficient and talented, but poor, students. Such students, after being accepted into a highly selective school, must await the financial aid award letter before deciding to to attend the school. Sometimes the financial aid package covers only half the cost. The aid package includes loans for both the student and the parents. The implication of the financial aid package is that it already includes the maximum loans for which they qualify. If students and parents are unable to borrow to make up the difference, then the student is effectively barred from attending the school to which they had been admitted.

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) documented the questionable practices of student loan lenders. A few years ago, Consumer Reports explained how some universities use insufficient financial aid to effectively nullify the academic acceptance of poor students. The practice has a name which I have forgotten and I have been unable to locate the original Consumer Reports article. Of course, colleges are not supposed to engage in such low-down tricks, but like any form of discrimination, it can be well nigh impossible to “prove.”

The institution a student attends is a track to future opportunities. It is not true that all a high-achieving low-income student has to do is get scholarships. If the financial aid package (scholarships, grants, loans, work-study) is insufficient, the low-income student loses access to opportunity. Frankly, loans are not financial aid, so it seems odd that students who do not qualify for financial aid do not qualify for student loans either. Students with no financial aid must go to the private loan market if they and/or their parents have insufficient funds.

But here's the thing: Many of the best schools are known for providing 100% financial aid. Harvard, for example, "guarantees to meet 100 percent of a student’s demonstrated financial need for all four college years based on information we receive from the family each year". So does the University of Southern California.

USC administers a robust financial aid program with a long tradition of meeting 100% of the USC-determined financial need for those undergraduate students who satisfy all eligibility requirements and deadlines.

Therefore, a high-achieving, low-income student might as well shoot for the moon, rather than economize at a school that is cheaper, but provides a lower percentage of financial aid.

Consumer Reports puts out a wonderful primer on financial aid that should be required reading for students and their parents.

Did Schools Hire Too Many Teachers?

Data from the U.S. Department of Education show that from 1999 to 2007 teachers were hired at more than twice the rate of the K-12 enrollment increases. When schools feel tremendous pressure to reform yesterday, they pick quick and dirty methods. For example, a school can look like it is raising student achievement by pushing first grade curriculum into kindergarten. See all the little kids with pencils and paper---yay, instant academic achievement.

Another easy reform instantly reduces teacher-student ratio by hiring more teachers. But if every classroom already has a teacher, where to put the extra ones. Schools responded by pulling experienced teachers out of classroom into professional development positions, and replacing them with new teachers. The rate of teacher hires far outpaced the increase in student numbers. Some schools even added teaching staff as enrollments declined.

The glut of new hires even overpowered the dreaded effect of boomer teacher retirements. Schools had anticipated a loss of one-third of the teaching force when baby boomers began to retire in 2008. Along about the time those teachers might have expected to retire, their retirement funds, if stock-based, as most are, were pummeled by the stock market. Teachers postponed retirement. As I have explained in previous articles, experienced teachers from out of district have a difficult time getting hired. No one wants someone with proven experience because it costs money.

Once in a while, a veteran gets in. For the lucky school, these veterans teachers are a bargain. Most schools give a maximum of only five years credit for experience in figuring wages. Any teacher with more than five years experience accepts a pay cut. If the teacher has twenty or more years of experience, the school gets all the proven competence for an outrageously low price. Nevertheless, in a fit of impressive shortsightedness, many schools consider that five years experience too expensive, passing over the grizzled veteran in favor of pink-cheeked new graduates.

During the hiring frenzy, schools may have hired some of these veterans. I am unaware of any demographic study, but I wonder how many got caught in the lay-off wave of 2009. You know, last in, first out. For a boomer teacher (or any boomer) to be laid off this late in their working life is disastrous. Those in their fifties may never be fully employed again. Yet Social Security benefits may be a decade or more away.

More and more school boards have noticed their hollow teaching cadres. Lots of young, inexperienced teachers, and declining numbers of mid-career and near-retirement teachers. Years and years of short range hiring policies based on minimizing salaries by sacrificing experience have produced schools without a solid core of highly experienced teachers. It is one reason why professional development contractors have secured such a foot-hold in the schools. Once the schools have signed a contract with one of these professional development outfits, they have no more money for the independent provider.

These virtually unemployable veteran teachers would be great local professional development providers. They are intimately familiar with local conditions, needs, and perceptions. They are uniquely positioned to provide customized professional development, the sort the big outfits advertise but rarely deliver.

College the New High School?

Long, long ago, American society decided that high school graduation represented the minimum amount of education to get a decent job. It used to be a person could graduate from high school and make a living. My childhood milkman (anyone remember those) graduated from high school and got a job with Foremost where he worked until he retired. He lived comfortably, bought (and paid off) a house two blocks from the nicest neighborhood in town, and saved enough to create a trust fund for his disabled daughter. He successfully kept his family smack dab within the middle class, all on “just” a milkman's salary, with just a high school education. His wife never worked outside the home.

Today, statistics show that a student with only a high school education has a slim chance of being able to support a family within the middle class. The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) recently released a report which says, among other things, that California needs educated workers and the high schools are not producing them. PPIC is calling for updates to California's Master Plan for Higher Education.

Currently the master plan establishes the top 12.5 percent of the state's high school graduates as eligible to attend the 10-campus University of California system, and the top 33 percent as eligible for the 23-campus California State University system. The PPIC projects a shortage of educated workers by 2025. High schools are not keeping up, but we have known that for a long time. Parents, teachers and guidance counselors have been advising students forever that if they want a decent job, one that will accomplish for their lives what my milkman's job accomplished for his, they had better graduate from college. High school has been insufficient for a long time.

So the PPIC proposes changing the Master Plan.

Eligibility goals for the CSU and UC systems should be gradually increased to new levels by
2025. The share of the state’s high school graduates eligible for UC should grow from the
top 12.5 percent to the top 15 percent of high school graduates. The share eligible for CSU
should grow from the top 33.3 percent to the top 40 percent.

Of course, California should expand college eligibility. In fact, PPIC”s recommendations may not go far enough. What with college being the new high school, everyone needs to go to college. If only it were so simple. Keeping students in school another four years effectively postpones childhood, an untenable position. Even now, since the age of majority was reduced to 18 (mostly in order to classify Vietnam war soldiers as adults), college from age 18 to 23 is a strange limbo where unready children are treated as adults.

Because any decent job requires college graduation just as decent jobs used to require high school education, college must be part of public education. We, as a society, have been down this road before. There was a time when an eighth grade education was sufficient, but when the necessity for high school was recognized, high school became publicly funded. College occupies the same place now.

What happens when college graduation cannot get you a decent job, say around the year 2075? Perhaps we need to get serious about upgrading high school---and junior high---and elementary school. We need to stop doing it wrong: adopting faddish bandaid reforms, testing to the moon, or shoving curriculum down the grades.

We need to begin with recognizing that crucial academic foundations are laid in the early grades in an atmosphere of relational trust.

Meanwhile, far from increasing enrollment, UC and CSU have cut courses, laid off faculty, and raised fees. The once nearly free public universities today charge upwards of $5000/term in “fees” because they do not charge “tuition,” doncha know.

Does teacher professional development work?

Apparently not. So concludes a pair of studies, one focused on middle school mathematics, and the other on early reading.

Results after one year of providing teachers math professional development (PD) indicate no improvement on their students' math achievement when compared to teachers who did not receive the study-provided PD.

The result is surprising and disconcerting. The professional development provided by the study emphasized fractions, decimals, percents, and ratios. Education students self-report these very topics as their number one weaknesses. Nevertheless, education students are sure to graduate and enter the classroom with their weaknesses intact, even after completing the mandated mathematics coursework.

The early reading study came to a similar conclusion.

Although there were positive impacts on teacher’s knowledge of scientifically based reading instruction and on one of the three instructional practices promoted by the study PD, neither PD intervention resulted in significantly higher student test scores at the end of the one-year treatment.

Eric A. Hanushek, from Stanford University, concluded, “...you can't change ineffective teachers into effective ones.” Hilda Borko, an education professor also from Stanford, counters with, “We know teacher change takes time.”

The truth is probably a blend of both assertions. A competent, reflective teacher is quick to adopt useful new skills, approaches, or tactics. The discovery of well-designed materials and curriculum induces nearly instantaneous change. Effective teachers are always looking for new tools to add to their every growing collection. If possible, the teacher will roll out the new tool the very next day. If the teacher finds the the new tool requires a major or even minor redesign of lesson plans, materials, and handouts, well, so much for summer vacation travel plans. Being the best that they can be is a core value of effective teachers.

Both studies tested for student improvement after one year and found none. But since both studies also found that the professional development did not increase teacher math knowledge or alter teacher practices, of course there would be no gains in student test scores.

The studies noted that participating teachers were “engaged” in the professional development, thus ruling out lack of engagement as a reason for the disappointing lack of results. However, as all teachers know, teachers can fully participate in professional development workshops, and still walk out thinking, rightly or wrongly, “Well, that was a waste of time.” Engagement is one of those necessary, but not sufficient conditions.

If we agree that effective teachers will readily adopt recognizably useful skills and concepts, why is professional development looking to be yet another waste of everyone's time, effort and money? Could it be that the schools of education need to be more selective in admitting education students? As it is, once a student is admitted, a high GPA at least in education courses and graduation is all but assured. Many states grant automatic teaching credentials to graduates of state education programs. Yet the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reports that credentials make no difference.

One of the first things researchers did with the computed teachers' effects was investigate whether they were closely related to the teacher credentials upon which achievement was traditionally regressed. The answer was generally no: credentials do not explain teacher effects for the most part...differences in certification explain only a small fraction (if any) of the variation in achievement: differences among teachers with the same certification dwarf the differences associated with certification (or the lack thereof).

A study from New York found :

This evidence suggests that classroom performance during the first two years, rather than certification status, is a more reliable indicator of a teacher's future effectiveness.

Schools and universities continue to hype, and the public continues to buy, credentialing as some indication of quality.


Could it mean that society needs to demand more of its schools of education, and that in the short term, universities must be willing to forego the tuition cash cow the schools of education represent? I know that whenever I have suggested tougher requirements for student admission, the universities invariably respond that they cannot afford the loss of tuition. Thus the vicious circle never ends.

“We must break the cycle in which we find ourselves,” said William H. Schmidt...“A weak K-12 mathematics curriculum in the U.S., taught by teachers with an inadequate mathematics background, produces high school graduates who are at a disadvantage. When some of these students become future teachers and are not given a strong background in mathematics during teacher preparation, the cycle continues,”

Professor Schmidt was referring to the results of an international study on the preparedness of mathematics teachers, a study he supervised. Research is showing that when entry level pay for teachers is raised, the quality of education applicants increases. Perhaps society needs to agree to pay teachers more. One mechanism is a ballot referendum for higher taxes to pay teachers. Oh, that bad word—taxes.

The results of these studies raise many questions, and surely one is the reasonableness of expecting significant student improvement after just one year. Even if an effective teacher instantly adopts an improved practice, is a year long enough to effect student outcomes? Maybe, as excellent tutors have experienced. When a teacher fills a student's gap in “profound understanding of fundamental mathematics (Liping Ma),” the improvement in math scores can be dramatic.

In fact, teachers generally do not wait for annual bubble tests to decide if a new tool is worth keeping. They look for immediate effects based on criteria residing in their own head and nowhere else. If efficacy is not quickly apparent, teachers will abandon a new practice as quickly as they took it up. A school year is short, not long. Teachers do not have time to spin their wheels.

Once a student decides school is “doing time” or a particular subject is beyond them, once a student shuts down, it is very difficult, even for the best teachers, to reawaken wonder, interest, curiosity and the ability to persevere through a challenge.

All the foregoing being said, any analysis of the effectiveness on professional development suffers from the scarcity of rigorous studies of professional development efficacy.

The most recent review of studies of the impact of teacher PD on student achievement revealed a total of nine studies that have rigorous designs—randomized control trials (RCTs) or certain quasi-experimental designs (QEDs)—that allow causal inferences to be made (Yoon et al. 2007).*

Even fewer studies have examined the ways teachers incorporate and evaluate what they learn from professional development.

What surprised me most was the observation of teacher instructional practices:

To measure instructional practice for treatment and control teachers, one classroom observation was conducted for each teacher after the treatment teachers in that district had had at least 5 of the 8 scheduled days of institutes and seminars. The observations produced three primary measures of instructional practice, which documented the frequency with which the teacher employed several key behaviors encouraged by the PD program.13 The first measure, Teacher elicits student thinking, encompassed such behaviors as asking other students whether they agree or disagree with
a particular student’s response and also included behaviors elicited from the students such as offering additional justifications or strategies. The second measure, Teacher uses representations, counted the number of times the teacher displayed and explained a visual representation of mathematics, such as number lines or ratio tables, as well as the number of different types of representations the teacher used. The third measure, Teacher focuses on mathematical reasoning, counted the number of times that the teacher asked questions such as Why does this procedure work? Why does my answer make sense? or Why isn’t 3/4 a reasonable answer to this problem?

On average, teachers elicit student thinking about 3 times per class period, use representations twice and focus on math reasoning once. Me, I do all that all day long, so it seems to me that the problem with math education is far more fundamental than the study was designed to evaluate.

Generally speaking, middle school teachers are classified as secondary teachers and are expected to have a bachelors degree in the subject area they teach. Because of teacher supply and demographic issues, teachers are often assigned subjects outside their field. Even so, the percentage of studied teachers with a math or math related degree barely crested double digits. On a baseline test of the math covered in the professional development, the studied teachers “had a 55% chance of getting the right answer,” compared to 93% chance for the professional development facilitators. The average seventh- grade student of these teachers scored in the 19th percentile on a test of fractions.

Middle school math is a classic illustration of the old canard, the blind leading the blind. Math instruction at the elementary level, where fractions are introduced, is even worse. On the other hand, “more qualified teachers had a tendency to gravitate to schools that served students from more privileged backgrounds.” **

I am not saying that ALL PD is worthless and I have written about effective PD. Nor am I saying that these two studies are the be all and end all.

I am pointing out flaws in the study and flaws in the conclusions. I am saying that perhaps the designers of the study misunderstand how teachers adopt and/or reject what they learn from PD. Perhaps the designers did not adequately account for a host of other variables.

I am saying that what passes for improvement in eliciting student thinking is not much, just one more question in the class period.

I am also implying that student test scores do not necessarily measure of success of PD.



*Yoon, K.S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W.-Y., Scarloss, B., and Shapley, K. Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement (Issues & Answers Report, No. 033). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest, 2007.

**J.E. Rockoff, "The Impact of Individual Teachers on Student Achievement: Evidence from Panel Data," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, May 2004.