New Blog Alert

Another former NYC Teaching Fellow -- one who's actually remained in teaching -- has started an interesting new education policy blog. The blog is "Notes of a Former Teaching Fellow" and the address is http://formerfellow.blogspot.com/

Stephen sometimes sees the world a bit differently than I do, so I look forward to some good debates in the future -- after I finish this damn term paper. Until then I'll say only nice things about him.

Today's Random Thoughts

-No Sunday Commentary this week, I'm immersed in the final term paper of my grad school career.

-Maybe I was right when I speculated about the possibility of an Obama presidency reducing the achievement gap. A new poll out from the NY Times has the percentage of Blacks reporting that race relations in the country are generally good consistently around 30% the last couple decades (29% in July '08) and this month it's at 59%. A couple other interesting cross-tabs: 0% of Blacks disapprove of the way that Obama is handling his job, and from last July to now the percentage of Blacks who report thinking that the country is on the right track has risen from 3% to 70%. Full story on the poll here.

-This piece on how we should restructure universities is now the most e-mailed article on the NY Times website. I think he correctly diagnoses a lot of the problems, but am I the only who thought he went off the deep end when proposing some of his solutions?

-It continues to amaze me that people blindly quote from the Urban Institute's TFA study, apparently oblivious to its limitations. This is why it's really important for researchers to avoid making claims not backed up by their findings -- irresponsible research begets irresponsible journalism.

-I tend to be more caustic during finals time, so I'm going to stop there before I say something really mean.

TFA Alone Cannot Save Us

Dan Brown wrote yesterday that more than 99.8% of all teachers are not members of Teach For America. Chad Alderman writes a "yes, but . . ." piece today over at The Quick and the Ed. Yes, Alderman makes some good points, but . . .

First, the good:

While TFA currently represents only .16% of the teaching workforce, they're bigger than that because:

1.) They're mostly new teachers
2.) They partner with TNTP
3.) They're growing

All good points -- the .16% figure is a tad bit misleading. Alderman concludes by saying that "we should be careful not to underestimate its growing impact.

At the same time, Alderman's arguments are probably even more misleading:

1.) Sure, a greater percentage of new teachers are TFA members, but it's still only 2%. And, more importantly, they leave at rates much higher than other teachers. So if 2% of new teachers are recruited through TFA each year, 30 years from now we'd still see less a teaching force comprised of less than 1% TFAers

2.) Yes, TFA has sort of branched out into TNTP programs. But they're not one and the same -- they recruit somewhat different applicants (TNTP recruits a lot more mid-career people and has a stated goal of turning their recruits into career teachers, TFA recruits mostly fresh-out-of-college youngsters and encourages people to go make a difference in the world after their two years). Furthermore, most of the studies that people like to reference finding that TFA teachers are about as good as, or a little better than, other teachers do not inclue estimates of TNTP teachers.

3.) Yes, TFA has grown rapidly. But in its current form, it can never make up more than a tiny fraction of the teaching force. They already receive applicants from 5-15% of the graduating class of many of the top 100 colleges and universities in the country. Unless they morph into an organization that recruits people from less selective colleges, which might mean they recruit less effective teachers, their potential for growth is extremely limited.

4.) Alderman cites a recent study with a "large" sample size that finds TFA teachers are better than all others. I've already pointed out a number of limitations and shortcomings in that paper, so I'm not going to repeat myself. But I will say that the sample included only 98 TFA teachers from North Carolina -- which is certainly not a large sample when trying to generalize to all teachers in the United States.

5.) It's odd that Alderman mostly argues that TFA might make a bigger impact down the road, and then warns us not to underestimate its current impact. I don't think many people underestimate the current impact of TFA (probably more people overestimate it), but underestimating the future impact of TFA is easy to do.

I still think that the largest impact of TFA is going to be the what its alums do -- from research to leading schools to running government. In other words, I think TFA will have a big impact on education -- but through ripple effects, not through the few thousand teachers it hires it each year. So I think Alderman is mistaken when he tries to argue that TFA can hire enough teachers to make a difference in our education system. It its current form, TFA alone cannot save our classrooms -- but 20 years from now I think we'll have seen a huge impact in many other ways.

Is Teaching in the Bronx a Danger to your Mental Health?

Apparently this guy finally cracked. After at least a couple decades of teaching (I'm basing this assumption on his salary), he got sick of the administration, barricaded himself in a classroom, and said he'd planted a bomb. They evacuated the entire building and police rushed in to talk with him. Eventually he admitted there was no bomb and he surrendered.

When I started reading the article -- "A Bronx educational building that houses three public middle schools with about 1,200 students was evacuated by the authorities around 8:30 a.m. Friday after a disgruntled teacher claimed to have planted a bomb in the library" -- I thought it was going to be my former school.

The fact that the school building has been split into three schools means that the school was not doing well, got shut down, and the Region replaced it with three new ones. Which means it was probably not a pleasant place to work. He'd also recently been charged with corporal punishment -- not something one resorts to in an orderly setting.

Now, it's entirely possible that this guy had serious issues outside of teaching in a challenging school -- but trying to teach in a place like that for 20+ years can't have helped.

Shhhh! It's Testing Time

Check out this study I just found from 1981. Seems like P.S. 98 in NYC was right next to some elevated train tracks. When they tested the kids on the side of the building next to the tracks and compared them to the kids on the quiet side of the building, they found that the kids on the noisy side did considerably worse (about .3 - 1 SD, which they interpret as about 3 months to a year behind in reading). They then installed rubber railroad ties and soundproofing materials on the noisy side of the building and re-tested the decibel level (it was significantly decreased). Subsequent reading tests found no differences in achievement between the two sides of the building.

It's not clear that the kids on the two sides were comparable in 1978 (the author says he was assured by the assistant principal that they were, but no other tests were done to check this), but it doesn't seem plausible that they would be so different one year and not the next. It's also not clear whether the kids did better because the noise disrupted them during the testing, because it disrupted their learning during the year, or both.

Either way, it seems pretty incredible that such small changes can have such huge effects. And I'm sure that schools all over the country are trying to find such miracle cures during this testing season -- some schools ask parents to bring food, my school didn't allow kids to use the bathroom so that nobody would be in the hallway making noise, and I'm sure a million other ideas have been tried as well.

We're #1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The new ed school rankings are out, and Vanderbilt is #1.

Sure the rankings are pretty much meaningless, but I'm sure there will be a party to celebrate this momentous occasion. And, as a grad student, I've been trained to rejoice over free food.

I can't help but notice that our meteoric rise in the rankings has corresponded with my time here. And since I'm well trained in statistics and research methods, I'm absolutely sure that this correlation implies causation.

Listen to "The Culture of Poverty"

Alexander Russo linked to this the other day, an NPR segment featuring Sudhir Venkatesh and William Julius Wilson on the "culture of poverty." If you're at all interested in the topic, it's worth a listen. If not, here are a few tidbits from the discussion anyway:

-Venkatesh gives a good summary of the conflicting theories regarding why people are poor -- it boils down to some believing that it's due to the culture of the people themselves vs. some who think that it's due to discrimination, lack of resources, and other outside factors.

-The first caller, Bob, is a teacher at a Title I school. He is genuinely frustrated, particularly with two things: that very few students will do homework (indeed, many people tell them that he's setting them up for failure by even assigning it), and that there's "almost physical resistance" to doing work in class. Both of these were definitely true when I taught as well -- it never ceased to shock me the degree to which students resisted doing what they were asked to do.

-Zach, who manages a public housing complex in Chicago, says the two largest trends he notices in his complex are: 1.) that it's almost all single mothers with multiple kids from multiple fathers, and 2.) that children see their mothers living off of welfare and aim no higher and the cylce repeats itself. He says that we should help these mothers for a few years but then tell them to move on.

-William Julius Wilson points out that there is now a five year limit on welfare, but agrees that the norms around them certainly influence children and their attitudes toward teen pregnancy, living in the projects, etc.

-Anita, a hispanic woman grew up in poverty says that she was able to attend a school full of white kids from wealthy neighborhoods and saw many of the same problems (e.g. drug use, teen pregnancy) that are typically associated with high-poverty neighborhoods.

-WJW says that this is a good point, but that the difference is that the wealthier kids have parents with the resources to pull them out of this and helm them overcome these behaviors. And he again plugs the Harlem Chidren's Zone as an excellent example of how to help kids overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

Which brings us back to what I wrote on Sunday -- it sure makes sense that social policy and educational performance would be linked, but it would be nice if we could figure out exactly how.

Charter School Teacher Retention

Debra Viadero reported last week on a paper by Dave Stuit and Tom Smith finding that charter school teachers are 230% more likely to leave the field (an updated version actually pegs it at 237%) at the end of the year than are teachers in traditional public schools, based on data from 2003-04.

Given that both writers are from Vanderbilt and that I find the topic interesting, I thought I'd look into it further. It's a conference paper -- not a finished paper that's been peer-reviewed and published in a journal -- so I'm not going to get into significant detail. While I'm sure it's not perfect and that it will undergo further revisions, I will say that the methodology seems pretty straightforward and that I trust both of the writers to investigate things rigorously and interpret them correctly, so my guess is that when the final version is released most of these figures will remain about the same. That said, let's get to it.

The most striking finding was that charter school teachers were more than twice as likely to leave the field as are teachers in traditional public schools -- the raw numbers are 14.1% and 7.0% (please note that the 230% estimate is based on log-odds ratios calculated using Hierachical General Linear Models controlling for clustering in schools*). They also calculated that charter school teachers were 113% as likely to transfer to another school.

They also found turnover nearly twice as high in schools that were new start-ups versus schools that had been converted to charter schools -- which makes sense because a new start-up would have more growing pains and instability than would a converted school.

But the most important question is why charter school teachers were more likely to leave the profession. Based on survey responses from those who left, charter school teachers were about twice as likely to report leaving for better salary and benefits (46%/22%), dissatisfaction iwth school (51%/24%), or due to school staffing action (40%/20%), and more than three times as likely to report leaving to pursue additional coursework outside education (27%/8%). They were also about one-third as likely to report leaving due to retirement (14%/38%).

In short, it seems that more teachers are leaving to move on to bigger and better things. This makes sense if we consider how many charter schools pluck people to serve as almost missionaries for a few years (think KIPP and their use of TFA fellows). I would expect that charter schools employ more people who are teaching as a way to give back to the community for a few years and fewer people that want to make a career out of teaching than are traditional public schools. Indeed, if we look at the demographics, charter schools employ more people under the age of 30 (34%/20%) and fewer over the age of 50 (18%/29%) than do traditional public schools. Teachers are also much less likely to be certified (67%/90%), and one would imagine that investing the time and effort into getting certified means that a teacher both intends to stay longer and will now be more likely to stay longer.

I've only just scratched the surface of all the paper examines and discusses, but I think the difference in attrition between sectors is worth thinking through. I could see the interpretation that this means charter schools need to work harder to retain teachers. I could also see an argument that attrition will hold back charters from achieving the success they could. But my main interpretation would be that charters tend to employ different types of teachers than do traditional public schools -- and these teachers, put simply, are less likely to stay in the profession for a long time (which could be exacerbated by the amount of time and effort required to teach in some of these charter schools). And I think the largest question it raises is about the replicability and scalability of charter schools.

If we continue to expand the number of charter schools and replicate those that have been more successful, will they continue to operate by employing teachers that don't make a career out of teaching? If so, how many people are out there that are both capable of being good teachers and want to teach for a few years?


*there was some confusion over how the 230% figure (now 237%) was derived on the Inside School Research site. After consultation with the author it's been explained that it was done thusly: a log-odds ratio of 3.368 was calculated. An odds ratio of 1 would mean that teachers were equally likely to leave the profession from both sectors. A ratio of 3.368 means that those in charter schools were 3.368-1 (=2.37, move the decimal point so that it turns into 237) percent more likely to leave.

Sunday Commentary: Can Social Policy Close the Achievement Gap?

We all know that large gaps exist in achievement and attainment between blacks and whites, poor and rich, upper-class and lower-class, etc. On Tuesday, I wrote that we have tried four main strategies to address this:

1.) Equalize School Resources
2.) Integrate Schools
3.) Enhance Impoverished Schools
4.) "No Excuses"

On Thursday, I commented on Nicholas Kristof's latest op-ed. Kristof essentially argues that non-school factors create an IQ gap in this country and that we should close this gap by improving schools.

Something is missing. As I have said before, if there is anything upon which education researchers agree it is that student achievement is influenced more by non-school factors than in-school factors -- and the evidence is overwhelming.

That is to say, non-school factors do more to create the achievement gap but we seem to spend most of our time trying to address the in-school factors.

I will be the last to argue that these in-school factors should not be addressed. Never in a million years would I want my child, or any child for that matter, to attend the school where I formerly taught. And we should not rest until this is no longer true.

But I wonder if we are barking up the wrong tree. A myriad of problems in schools (inexperienced teachers, lack of discipline, negative climates, etc.) cause enormous problems and, therefore, merit our attention. But the root of most of these problems starts in the homes and neighborhoods of the children in these schools. Disorder reigns in many of their homes and neighborhoods as well as in their schools.

And I wonder if spending the bulk of our time and energy trying to alleviate these problems through social policy (e.g. housing, health care, etc.) might work better. And, yes, I am wondering -- not advocating. While we know that most of these problems start at home, I think it safe to say that many are easier to address at school. Helping a student who is a year or two behind in reading seems a lot more manageable than curtailing teenage pregnancy, ending gang violence, or solving any one of a thousand seemingly intractable family and neighborhood problems.

We know that changes in non-academic areas can make a difference in school performance. Improving nutrition, distributing eyeglasses, and providing vision therapy, among other things, have led to positive changes in achievement. And we know that various factors in homes and in neighborhoods negatively impact achievement. But we have little evidence that changes in social policy can positively impact academic performance. Studies on three different housing policy changes indicate that students probably do a bit better when they move to better housing in better neighborhoods, but we hardly have a smoking gun.

That we are unsure about the exact relationship between social policy and educational success means that we should not put all of our eggs in that basket just yet. But it also means that we need to spend more time examining the relationship. Which means thinking through how social policies might affect schools before implementing them -- though there must be at least one out there, I am unaware of a single social policy that was implemented with the explicit goal of improving school performance.

While we cannot be sure that changing social policy is a better way to change schools, it is something we should investigate further.

Does TFA Raise the Status of Teaching?

During a class discussion today, a student made an interesting claim -- that Teach for America raises the status of the teaching profession. The rationale was that TFA attracts students from Ivy League and other prestigious colleges and universities to the field -- graduates that, by and large, would not otherwise enter teaching.

To some extent, I buy the rationale -- TFA certainly raises the prestige level of the current teaching force in districts where they're present. But, after some thought, I have to disagree with the claim. TFA attracts academic stars into teaching, but I don't think they raise the prestige of the teaching profession as a whole; if anything, TFA lowers it.

When I applied to TFA my plan was to teach in an urban school for a couple years or so, help some kids, gain some experience, and then move on to bigger and better things. And TFA very much sells itself that way to prospective applicants; promotional materials discuss how many TFA alums enroll in law school or business school, for example. And current TFA corps members have access to an online jobs portal where they are recruited by some of the top firms in the country.

I don't know the precise figures, but the vast majority of TFA members do not make a career out of teaching. I believe somewhere around half stick around for a third year, and the numbers decline for every year after that.

I have a hard time believing that convincing people to teach for a few years and then move on to bigger and better things raises the status of the teaching profession. If anything, it lowers it. Teaching with TFA is akin to joining the peace corps -- it looks great on your resume and you have the opportunity to make a difference in the world, but for most people it's not a permanent career. In other words, teaching is a stepping stone. And making a profession a stepping stone doesn't exactly encourage the best and the brightest to pursue it as their lifetime occupation.

So, upon further reflection, I'd have to say I'm pretty sure that TFA reduces the status of the teaching profession in America. Now, this is not to say that TFA is evil or that, on net, they do more harm than good. Indeed, many TFA alums go on to bigger and better things within the field of education. In the long run, I think the biggest impact of the program will be the alums who ascend to positions of power in government, business, and school management. It's a pretty safe bet that TFA provides some of the poorest students in the country with better teachers than they would've otherwise had and also exposes some of the best and brightest young college graduates to the realities of high-poverty schools -- two very valuable things. But, at the same time, it lowers the level of prestige associated with a career in teaching -- and I'm not sure which one is more important.