Smrekar and Goldring

I’ve been following various accounts of the MNPS rezoning trial. It seems part of the plaintiff’s strategy is to get the expert witnesses to cite the Smrekar and Goldring (two Vanderbilt profs) study about segregation in Nashville as much as possible. And then the defense responds by making sure the experts state they don’t know anything about Nashville in particular. So that leaves me wondering, why doesn’t the plaintiff get either Smrekar or Goldring to testify about their own work? They are local and are very much familiar with Nashville schools.

School choice and segregation

Nashville Jefferson has a nice summary of the first day of the MNPS rezoning trial. It seems the district is basing its defense on the fact that they gave students a choice of where to go to school. If parents choose, then the district is not responsible for any segregation that results. I’m not a lawyer and don’t pretend to know how to make effective legal arguments. But I do have some thoughts on choice and segregation.

First, the district here appears to be making the distinction between voluntary and involuntary segregation. I hope that everyone would agree that involuntary segregation is a bad thing. But voluntary segregation is trickier. If all parents have equal choices (more on this below) and the choices they make result in segregated schools, then it is not necessarily the school district’s responsibility to change that. Unless of course you believe school systems have multiple purposes. Henry Levin, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, argues that there are 4 goals for education and any system of educational choice must address trade-offs in these goals. The goals are: productive efficiency (i.e., most learning at lowest cost), freedom of choice, equity, and social cohesion. As a society we want schools that foster social cohesion and segregating schools by race works against this goal. Of course we also value freedom of choice and that freedom of choice may result in some voluntary segregation, so these goals can conflict with each other. But the answer is not to just forgo one goal for another, but to figure out a way to further one goal without inhibiting the others.

Second, let’s get back to that assumption that all parents have equal choices. If the school board wanted a student assignment plan in which the purpose was to increase choices for students/parents, they would have been hard-pressed to come up with something worse than what they approved. What we have is system of constrained choice. This choice of schools was not opened up to all students, just particular students. And those that do have choices are not free to choose from all available schools. There is a process choosing magnet schools, but that system of choice is separate from the choices available to parents at the center of this lawsuit. Telling someone they can choose but then constraining that choice results in no choice at all.

PreKindergarten Evaluations and Policy

A recent evaluation of Tennessee’s pre-kindergarten program found that students who attended pre-kindergarten had higher reading, math, and language arts scores in kindergarten than their peers who did not attend kindergarten, but similar test scores in second grade. Taking the report authors’ interpretation at face value (more on this below), it appears that our pre-kindergarten program is effective at giving students a “head start” in kindergarten, but the effects fade over time so that this head start is lost by second grade. So now the question is, what should policymakers do with these results?

Here is where good policy and good politics may collide. Pre-K is effective at getting kids ready for school. This is consistent with an entire body of research on early childhood education. What elementary schools do with these school-ready kids is an entirely different story. There is no magic bullet policy that is going to boost achievement in every grade level. Unfortunately, politicians often look for that magic bullet and are most concerned with achievement in high stakes grades (grades 3-8 under NCLB), where pre-kindergarten doesn’t seem to have an impact. Glen Casada is quoted as saying we should take the money out of pre-kindergarten and use it to improve achievement at higher grades. That policy change would be a mistake because it removes the head start we are giving at-risk kids rather than building on it.

But Casada’s statement that the money spent on pre-kindergarten is “lost” is wrong for another very important reason. As Nashville Jefferson points out, most of the effects of pre-kindergarten focus on non-cognitive outcomes, such as reduced crime, reduced time spent in special education, and greater earnings. Even in the well-regarded Perry Preschool Program, achievement effects diminished over time while pre-kindergarten continued to have an effect on long-term non-cognitive outcomes. It is too early to assess some of these long-term outcomes, but the next report on pre-kindergarten should make some attempt to assess non-achievement outcomes. The first cohort of students who participated in this pre-kindergarten program are now in 10^th grade. We should be able to know something about whether pre-kindergarten is related to students requiring special education services or not being retained in grade. Special education and retention in grade are costly education services. If pre-kindergarten has an effect on these outcomes, the money invested may give great returns.

Finally, a word about whether we should the authors’ interpretation of the results at face value. The authors used growth curve modeling, but never specify what was included in the model. There is a reference to controlling for race/ethnicity and free-lunch status, but this was not clear. In fact, the authors never say how many of the students who participated in PreK were eligible for free or reduced price lunch (this is key as the program targets at-risk children). This is not just an arcane question of methodology, but can have real effects on the results. For example, consider two different hypotheses of the effects of pre-kindergarten on long-term achievement outcomes. One, preK gives a child a boost so that they learn more in kindergarten but then learn at similar rates as their non-PreK peers in subsequent grades. This is called an intercept model. The growth rate stays the same, but just the starting intercept gets pushed up.

The second hypothesis is called an intercept and slope model. This assumes that both the initial starting achievement in kindergarten and the growth rate in subsequent grades are increased due to preK. Note that under this hypothesis, the impact of preK increases over time. But this report found just the opposite. Looking at the graphs they provide, they actually found that PreK leads to a higher intercept, but smaller growth in subsequent grades. But why would we expect participating in PreK to lead to less learning in second and third grade? You can make an argument that it will lead to similar learning (same slope), but are hard-pressed to explain lower growth in later grades unless you consider what is going on schools attended by students who participated in PreK. Given that the program focused on at-risk children and the unequal resources and learning environments in schools with high concentrations of at-risk students, this explanation deserves some attention.

 

Let’s just focus on graduating in 4 years

Senator Lamar Alexander recently proposed for colleges and universities to move to a three year degree program in order to address the high cost and inefficiencies in our country’s higher education system. It’s true that the cost of a bachelor’s degree in money and time has increased dramatically. The average annual cost for tuition and room plus board at 4-year institutions has risen 31% in the last decade. In the 2006-7 school year, total annual cost averaged $18,471 ($12,797 in public 4 year institutions and $28,919 in private). In 1999-2000, the average bachelor’s degree recipient with continuous enrollment took 55 months to earn that degree. That average is roughly the same for those who start at a public 4 year institution (it’s longer for those who start at a 2 year college and shorter for those at private 4-years). We tend to think of the average college student as one who starts in August and graduates in May four years later, taking 45 months. So actually the average college student is taking a whole 10 months more than that.

While I applaud Senator Alexander for focusing on reforming our higher education system, I want to push back on his proposal in two ways. First, while reducing the length of time to a bachelor’s degree is a worthy goal, there is a much greater concern with getting students to graduate in just 4 years, rather than finding ways to help students graduate in 3 years. It takes a very motivated and well prepared student to graduate in 3 years. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from trying to do so. But as public policy, there is much more to be gained from focusing on the reasons students take longer than 4 years and helping them to graduate in just 4 years.  An increasing number of students enter college not prepared for college level work and must enroll in remedial coursework. In 2000, 20% of freshmen entered public 4 years colleges and took remedial courses. 38% of those students took more than a year’s worth of remedial coursework before starting on courses for college credit. This is an increase from 31% in 1995.

This means that one major policy solution to the problem of increasing time it takes to earn a college degree should focus on high schools and how well they prepare students for college. Of course, it’s not  like high school educators aren’t worried about this as well. The Tennessee Diploma Project and its higher standards is a step in this direction.

Second, looking closely at the colleges the senator highlights as examples of programs that reduce the time to degree and costs involve, we can see that either they don’t really save as much as the headline proclaims or that they are not solutions aimed at all students. Let’s look first at our own Lipscomb. Their three-year program requires students to take summer school. This would increase tuition costs for students, although students may still save some money over the cost of not attending summers. Although, I wonder if that would be true in many colleges. The cost savings of this approach (and the approach of Hartwick described below) depends on whether colleges charge tuition by the credit or by the semester. If the college charges by the semester, then squeezing as many credits into a semester is a good way to save money. But if the college charges by the credit, then it doesn’t matter whether you squeeze those credits into 3 or 4 years or spread it out over a longer period of time. The cost is the same. MTSU, for example, just recently changed their tuition policy so that any credit over 12 credit is charged separately.

Hartwick College, in upstate New York, has a three year program for a small number of students. But the details of this program show that it is not a radical rethinking (or even a significant reform) of how colleges are organized. They just give these small number of students priority to enrolling in the courses they need.  This is not a program that can be “scaled up” to drastically reduce the time to degree for every student at the college. It only works because it is available to a select group of students. Nearly anyone who has gone to college recently can attest to the difficulties of actually being able to enroll in the classes you need that semester. The courses most in demand are often overloaded and many students end up either enrolling in fewer courses that semester than they could afford or enrolling in classes they don’t need because they can’t get into the course they need. So Hartwick has a program to give some students priority for enrolling in necessary courses, but it doesn’t address the larger problem of why so many students find it difficult to enroll in the courses they need.

P.S. You can go here, here, and here to find where I obtained data I cited.

P.P.S. When I first started thinking about what it would look like if colleges used their facilities during the summer, my more sarcastic side wondered where all the summer camp programs will go?

Education for democracy and Obama’s speech

I wrote an historical perspective of Obama’s upcoming speech to students on Friday. Today, I’ll give a philosophical perspective. In short, the furor over Obama’s speech (as evidenced by the 35 pages of comments in the Tennessean’s article) is due to an ongoing tension over control of public schools. This tension is not easily resolved but must be carefully balanced.

The argument I will describe stems from Amy Gutmann’s Democratic Education (1987). Drawing on John Stuart Mill, John Locke, and many other political philosophers, Gutmann’s argument begins with the purpose of public involvement in education in a liberal democracy. By liberal democracy, Gutmann does not mean liberal-progressive (as in the Democratic Party). Rather, a liberal democracy is defined by constitutional rights that protect individual freedoms while operating within a democratic form for government. The Federalist Papers spend a great deal of time thinking about how our constitution protects individuals from the tyranny of the majority. Practically speaking, a liberal democracy means that each of us are free to pursue our vision of a “good” life (within, of course, some basic limitations—your good life can’t involve stealing from me). The great diversity of our country demonstrates that we do indeed have multiple definitions of a “good” life.

What does this have to do with education? Well, Gutmann argues that the government should get involved in education to the extent that it needs to prepare students (read: future citizens) to participate in our liberal democratic form of government. We do, after all, have a government that is “of the people, by the people.” This would require some basic subject-specific skills (reading, adding, and other skills are useful for evaluating various proposals). But more important for democratic participation is the capacity to engage in rational deliberation:

[Children] also develop capacities for criticism, rational argument, and decisionmaking by being taught how to think logically, to argue coherently and fairly, and to consider the relevant alternatives before coming to conclusions. … [It] enables citizens to understand, to communicate, and in some cases to resolve their disagreements. Without this sort of mutual understanding, we could not expect to achieve widespread toleration of dissent and respect for differing ways of life. Nor could we expect minorities to convince majorities, or to be convinced by them, of their point of view. But quite apart from its political function, children will eventually need the capacity for rational deliberation to make hard choices in situations where habits and authorities do not supply clear or consistent guidance. … Children must learn not just to behave in accordance with authority, but to think critically about authority if they are to live up to the democratic ideal of sharing political sovereignty as citizens. … [People] who possess sturdy moral character without a developed capacity for reasoning are ruled only by habit and authority, and are incapable of constituting a society of sovereign citizens.” (pp. 50-51, emphasis in original).

A key principle of an educational system for a liberal democratic society is that the children must have the ability to rationally deliberate and choose their own vision of the “good” life. Children should be exposed to different visions of the good life (in a way that does not bias them towards or away from any particular vision) and given the skills to deliberate and choose their own good life. This is where the key tension comes in. Allowing children to have maximum ability to decide for themselves what their good life will be conflicts with allowing their parents to pursue their own good life because, while parents generally want their children to make their own decisions, their idea of a good life also entails instilling their values in their children. Yet if parents present their values to their children in a way that biases their particular vision of a good life, their children may not be given the ability to truly understand opposing visions, and thus their freedom is restricted. In short, as parents pursue their “good” life, they limit their children’s ability to choose from the whole range of possible “good” lives that could potentially make them happy.

And this is where we get to the uproar over Obama’s speech. Even the more moderate opposition to his speech emphasized parents’ rights to review (and thus to approve) what their children are exposed to during school. This debate is exemplified by the following exchange in the Tennesseean’s comment section:

First comment:

I would also like to know when my choice as a parent was stripped away and when it became okay for political agendas to be forced onto minors. My child will not be a political pawn for this administration.

Reply:

Apparently, your “choice as a parent” is to force your own political agenda on your child, and to make him or her a “political pawn” for you.

Parents do have a right to have a say in what happens to their children during school. But is this right absolute? Should there be any limits to parents’ ability to filter what their children experience in school? At what point is it appropriate for a representative of the government to say the need to expose students to a variety of visions of a “good” life (so they can understand other viewpoints and engage in rational deliberation) overrides the rights of parents? Is this point different for elementary students than for secondary students? Who gets to decide when we’ve hit this point?

There are no real answers to these questions. But as we close out a summer of tumultous town halls where there was a lot of shouting and talking past each other (on all sides), I do wonder if the balance is too far out of kilter. We need to return to a place where we can rationally deliberate and understand each other’s point of view, even if we don’t agree with it.

Obama’s speech

President Obama is giving a speech to schoolchildren on Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, which historically marks the beginning of the school year (although the first day of school has been creeping up every year). It has, to say the least, received a lot of criticism. The text of the speech is set to be released on Monday.

To put this speech in some perspective, it is useful to see if other presidents have made similar speeches to schoolchildren. All recent presidents have given speeches in various schools or brought students to the White House for various events. But some have also given speeches or held events meant to be broadcast to schools nationwide.

George H.W. Bush (who billed himself as the first education president) gave two speeches that were broadcast to students at the beginning of the school year. Once in 1989 on the importance of avoiding drugs. The second was a 1991 televised conference call with the Space Station that was televised on C- Span and broadcast to schools. This also happened right at the start of the school year and was intended to get students motivated about math and science. Thus it seems Bush 41’s speech to students was pretty similar to what Obama is planning. Democratic officials did object to Bush’s 1991 speech at the time as propaganda (although there is no evidence that the public was up in arms about it as well).

George W. Bush made pitches to schoolchildren, although I didn’t find speeches meant to be broadcast in schools. He did use a televised press conference to encourage children to donate one dollar to Afghan children about a month after 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan started.

President Reagan also had a speech and question and answer session with students. In addition to the students present (several local schools around DC), it was also broadcast on C-Span and broadcast in schools nationwide through an instructional television network. Reagan went a little further, though, and did not just press on students the importance of working hard and staying in school. He used this speech to sell his economic policies as well.

I couldn’t find any references to Bill Clinton (who also billed himself as the first education president) making a televised address to students, although like the others mentioned he made plenty of speeches to individual schools.

In short the planned speech itself is not new (despite the White House’s own press release calling it historic, it’s been done before). Although less publicized, the lesson plans attached to the speech are also drawing criticism. There are materials for both grades 7-12 and preK-6. These activities are pretty open-ended and given the text of the speech is about working hard in school, I don’t see how it is problematic for students to think about whether the president inspires them to work hard in school. Or the specific steps they should take to excel in school. I hope all of students who saw one of previous presidential speeches were also inspired by them. The Teaching Fellows that created these lesson plans are not new either; the Department of Education has had some form of a “teacher in residence” for many years.

The lawsuit

The NAACP sued the Metro Nashville school district this week over the rezoning plan. The suit centers around a student who was allegedly denied entry to Bellevue Middle due to the rezoning plan and attends John Early, where she had no textbooks and was bullied. There are a number of concerns over this lawsuit and Metro’s response to it. First, this lawsuit was clearly planned before the school year began (and even before the rezoning was officially passed by the school board) and it appears the NAACP was just looking for the right student and condition to use as the hook for the lawsuit.

Second, if the NAACP was preparing to sue Metro schools, why was Metro caught so flat-footed? The schools in North Nashville to which students were being rezoned to supposed to have extra resources. Even if Metro didn’t know that a lawsuit would be coming so quickly, they knew the rezoning was controversial and the schools subject to rezoning would be closely watched. So why did Metro not watch those schools closely to be sure the school year started off with everything they need? There is always some reconfiguring and adapting at the beginning of the school year, but these schools (and the fresh started schools) should have been at the top of list for getting the resources they need, if only because everyone else would be watching closely.

Third, and perhaps most important, was that Metro’s response to the lawsuit indicates that little has changed despite some positive rhetoric after achieving AYP. Just over a month ago, the school board and district leadership praised school staff and committed to supporting principals and teachers so they can do their jobs. It did not take long for the district to throw John Early’s principal under the bus for not getting enough textbooks in a timely manner. Sure, the principal should take some responsibility for not acting quickly enough to get all the textbooks the school needs. But school has been in session for three weeks. It should not have taken a judge’s order for the district to make textbooks a priority for schools that are supposed to be getting extra resources.

It’s not the lack of textbooks that is the main problem for Metro or even these particular schools in North Nashville (after all, they did have class sets for instruction during the school day, just not enough for students to use them for homework). It’s what the lack of textbooks says about the district’s ability to focus on schools in need and support those working in schools.

Highly Qualified Teachers

The first day of school.  Students usually approach this day with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety. The teachers that greet students on this day give them a glimpse of what the year will be like. Having a high quality teacher is the most important school factor for how much they will learn that year.

The Highly Qualified Teacher (HQT) component of No Child Left Behind tries to address the equitable access to high quality teachers. Schools are required to have 100% HQTs. They are also required to report their HQT data to the federal Department of Education and alert parents if their children are not taught by Highly Qualified Teachers.

A HQT is defined as a teacher who has both demonstrated subject matter competence and holds a state certification (alternative certification counts) in all subjects they teach. First, a word on what research tells us about these requirements. While research will confirm the importance of high quality teachers, the research base linking particular teacher qualifications to student outcomes is much weaker. Still, there are some areas with relatively consistent and reliable evidence. Taking the first part of the HQT requirement: subject matter competence. For secondary math, students learn more if their teachers have a math major or significant coursework in math. There is not a lot of evidence for other grade levels or subject areas, although given the lack of testing in science and social studies, there is little data to actually answer this question. Taking the second part of the HQT requirement: certification. Again, the only consistent evidence is in secondary math.

The Department of Education has released state-level data on HQT from the 2007-8 school year. Tennessee is ranked 20 for the overall percentage of HQTs in classrooms (15 in elementary, 22 in secondary). We do slightly worse when considering the gap in access to HQT between high poverty and low poverty schools. Tennessee is ranked 28 for elementary and 23 for secondary. Most of Tennessee’s non-HQ teachers are due to special education teachers lacking proof of subject matter competence. Note that Tennessee is somewhat unique among states for having most of their non-HQTs in special education. Only 4 other states at the elementary level and 6 other states at the secondary level indicated that subject matter competence was the biggest reason their teachers were not Highly Qualified.

One thing that’s missing from this report (and the definition of a Highly Qualified Teacher) is teacher experience. The most consistent teacher qualification linked to student outcomes is whether the teacher is in her first few years teaching. While years of experience after 3-5 years is not linked to teacher effectiveness, there is evidence of a learning curve in those first couple years.

Self Governed Schools

Minnesota made history in 1991 by passing the first charter school law. It appears the state is set to make history again with Minneapolis creating yet another new type of school – Self Governed Schools. These schools are intended increase teacher autonomy, school flexibility, and innovation:

The Star-Tribune reports:

Under a new state law, teachers can spearhead the creation of charter-like schools, but under the school district’s umbrella. …Once approved by a school board, the schools would be free to govern themselves, run their own curriculum and tend to specific niches — a language-immersion program, for example.

If that sounds familiar to anyone following education policy debates for a while, that’s because it’s pretty similar to the original idea behind charter schools, as first described by Al Shanker in 1988:

Districts could create joint school board- union panels that would review preliminary proposals and help find seed money for the teachers to develop final proposals. The panels would then issue charters to these groups and commit themselves to trying to waive for the charter schools certain regulations that legitimately stand in the way of implementing their proposal, if the faculty so argue… [It] should encourage thinking and innovation.

Here we have another proposal for a new type of school that encourages innovation and flexibility and are developed and organized by teachers themselves. How did the charter school movement get so far from its original purpose? There is no real answer to this question, but a couple of observations are important. First, while initial charter schools were intended to be teacher-initiated schools, the charter movement was seized by proponents of school choice more generally. As vouchers encountered more and more resistance, school choice advocates moved to charter schools, a much more palatable alternative. And so the purpose of charter schools slowly evolved from teacher professionalism, autonomy, and innovation to choice and competition.

Second, the growth of charter schools was accelerated with the realization that while individual schools need flexibility, they also do need some support, especially with recruiting principals and teachers and managing their finances and physical facilities. At the same time, educational entrepreneurs took on a new and more prominent role (there have always been entrepreneurs in education, see textbook publishers and test developers). This gave rise to management organizations like KIPP, National Heritage Academies, GreenDot, Aspire, etc. While these organizations may provide valuable services to schools, they also helped move the discussion about charter schooling from unique, innovative schools to growing the number of schools under a given model.

Third, despite the head of the AFT (Al Shanker) leading the call for charter schools in 1988, teacher unions opposed charter school laws after he stepped down. This was partly due to the intermingling of advocates for autonomy and innovation with anti-union rhetoric blaming union rules for the existing system’s inflexibility. Whether this was deserved or not, it shaped the charter school debate. Unions are now trying to get back into the charter school discussion by opening unionized charter schools. It will be interesting to see how the discussion of Self Governed Schools evolves and whether they in turn provide competition to charter schools.

What’s the Score?

This past week, former Senator Bill Frist’s Tennessee SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education) issues their interim report on the state of education in Tennessee. This report has a good overview of the state’s educational system, including important policies in our past, current reform efforts in the state and locally, and profiles of every district. What it doesn’t have is much evidence behind it. It does use evidence on educational outcomes to highlight how poor Tennessee fares both nationally and in the Southeast. But what’s missing is a clear link between how to improve those outcomes and the issues and promising practices highlighted in the report.

The practices highlighted are good ideas. And they may in fact be leading to positive outcomes for the communities that are pursuing them. But it’s not clear these are the most evidence-based practices. For example, the report is particular concerned with teacher quality, as it should be. There’s a lot of research to back up the importance of the teacher (even though we know little about what makes a high quality teacher). But the report focuses almost exclusively on teacher recruitment as an important policy problem and the goal of most of the promising practices. Yet most research on the teacher labor market indicates it is teacher retention, not recruitment, that drives teacher shortages and lowers quality. How is the state addressing teacher retention?