Do Teacher Quality Initiatives Impact the Wrong Teachers?

Let me illustrate my point by first telling three anecdotes.

1.) Believe it or not, back in elementary school I was just about the model student.  I was quiet and respectful in class, did all my homework on time, scored high on tests, wrote good reports, and won numerous awards.  When teachers fretted about the performance of their students, I don't think my name came up too often.

Which is why my first day of fourth grade sticks out.  I'd been assigned to a teacher new to our school, and I didn't know what to expect.  I hoped she'd be nice and was a little worried when she took the opportunity to sternly lay down the law and do her best to discourage any disobedience.  As my Mom tells it, I came home in tears that day, sobbing "She's sooo strict!"

2.) A couple weeks ago, I was the teacher fretting about my class.  As I prepared interim grade reports, it was even more evident to me that a number of students weren't putting forth the effort I was hoping they would (and had become accustomed to seeing from students in my class).  As I puzzled over this, part of me wanted to read my class the riot act.  I settled for hoping that the sub-par grade reports and a few words of motivation would kick them into gear.

A day later, I got a tentative knock on my office door.  A student was worried about the report.  I looked at the student's grades for the semester and quickly ascertained that there was no need for concern here.  We spoke for a while and I assured the student that earning the highest quiz grades in the class indicated a strong likelihood that the end-of-term grade would be pretty high if present efforts were maintained.

3.) A good friend of mine is a model teacher.  You know that teacher that arrives at school before dawn, gives up lunches, nights, weekends, and breaks to tutor students, chaperon dances, re-make that lesson plan for the 20th time, and do whatever else is necessary (and, usually, unnecessary)?  That's my friend.  Were I the principal, I'd promptly resign and insist my friend take the job.

A couple years back, the school district where my friend teaches implemented a new teacher evaluation program involving lots of new checklists and observations and other bells and whistles.  Ever since, my friend has been an absolute wreck.  Every conversation inevitably, and repeatedly, turns to the strong likelihood that my friend will no longer be employed in the near future.  I assure my friend that the new system is designed to ensure the district keeps the model teachers and that the worrying is unnecessary, but to no avail.  I don't know if the constant anxiety has negatively impacted my friend's teaching or not, but it's certainly impacting quality of life.


so, what do these three have in common?


In the first, the teacher (rightfully) wanted to scare the worst students straight and push the mediocre ones to do better.  But it was the best student (I'd like to think) who was mortified, not the worst ones.  Many years later, I found out my Mom had relayed my reaction to the teacher, who had sighed, shaken her head, and said something like "it's always the wrong ones who get scared."

In the second, I (rightfully, I sure hope) wanted to scare the worst students straight and push the mediocre ones to do better.  But the only reaction I got was from possibly the best student in the class -- the one who doesn't need to spend any time fretting about what the end of term report card will say.

In the third, the district (rightfully, I think) wanted to scare the worst teachers straight (and/or just fire them) and push the mediocre ones to do better.  I can't say how the other teachers responded, but the model teacher I know is the one who's been scared, despite being straight as an arrow to begin with.

what does this mean?

Is it possible that our attempts to scare teachers straight are only scaring the ones who were already doing things the right way?  After all, the ones who care the most about their performance are the ones who are most likely to take the new initiatives to heart.

Whether one threatens to fire teachers, rolls out a new evaluation system, publishes value-added scores, implements a new incentive pay system, or whatever else, I wonder who will be most responsive?  It seems likely that it's those who were already the most responsible.


so what?

If we can expect those who care the most to react the strongest to accountability and evaluation initiatives, then we need to change the way we frame and present these initiatives.  We can't just assume that a few threats will scare the stiffs straight when the stiffs aren't even paying attention.  And we don't certainly don't want to scare off the best and the brightest.

I'd argue, we need to take a more nuanced and targeted approach when pursuing these types of efforts.  Let's first make sure that those who are doing the right thing are recognized and thanked for their efforts.  Those who aren't recognized and thanked, and don't seem interested in being recognized and thanked, may be the ones we need to threaten, encourage, or hold accountable.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who manages organizational change in another field.  I relayed the story of my friend the model teacher and the subsequent anxiety.  My non-teacher friend quickly dismissed the anecdote, noting that all organizational change elicits fear and anxiety among employees.  It seems to me that teachers might be more anxious than others, but I'm inclined to agree with that point: all organizational change probably does elicit fear and anxiety among employees.  But is it the right employees who are scared and anxious?

When Outsiders are Needed

I've written about the push to include more outsiders in education (here and here, for example), and often focused more on the negatives than the positives of doing so.  So, today, let me take a brief moment to highlight one of the negatives of not allowing outside perspectives into education.

As regular readers know, I used to teach at a middle school in the Bronx that was shut down a few years back.  While shuttering the school (and subsequently opening three new, smaller, schools inside the building) was certainly no panacea, it's hard for me to believe it could possibly have made the situation any worse.

Not everything at my school was a disaster (the most notable exception to me was that a good portion of the teachers were at least very devoted if not also very skilled), but the list of negatives far exceeds the list of positives.  "Dysfunctional" would be a fair (maybe even kind) assessment of the day-to-day operations of the school.

That's the background for this snippet of conversation between two veteran teachers from a few weeks ago:

Teacher 1: "The more i visit schools, the more I see we were doing this right. [Our school] should have never closed."
Teacher 2: "You are so right [Teacher 1]. I still get angry about it...like it was our fault!"

I'm not a psychologist, but it seems pretty clear to me that the two teachers are (still) unable to dispassionately evaluate our school.  This would align with the split in reactions to the announcement the school would close that I witnessed: the newer teachers in the building (myself included) mostly seemed to say things like "good riddance . . . I'll find a better position somewhere else," while the vets struggled with the decision and where to go next (and were suddenly filled with nostalgia for a school they'd ostensibly detested the week prior).  They obviously had a much deeper connection to the school than did us newbies, but they also seemed to interpret evaluations of the school as implicit evaluations of their own personal performance.

I'm sure there are a million good reasons for them to feel this way, but the policy-relevant point is that those feelings prevented them from seeing all sides of the situation.  If any attack on the school becomes a personal attack against them, it seems unlikely that they'd ever be able to embrace radical change in a school that clearly (to me, anyway) needed just that.

So, in this case, I'd argue that outsiders were needed to do that.  I left before the new schools were up and running, so I have no idea if the outsiders' solution really helped, but I think the recognition that the school wasn't working was a valuable contribution regardless.

In short: while outsiders frequently intrude where they're not needed, this was an instance where they were.

I'm back

Not that I ever officially left, but between dissertation, teaching, revising manuscripts, job hunting, etc. blogging kept falling to the bottom of my to-do list.  I don't expect that to-do list to grow much shorter in the next six months, but I've also noticed how much more engaged I am in ed. policy issues outside of my research-focus when I'm blogging regularly.  So I'm going to blog regularly.  Not every day.  And usually shorter pieces than I've written in the past.  But I'm back.

Why No Outrage over Principal Quality?

As teachers around the country start to head back to work, I'm starting to hear the same thing I hear every year from teachers I know: "my new principal is horrible".  But it seems like I never read anything in the news about principal quality: instead, everything seems to focus on teacher quality.  Bad teachers are absolutely a problem, but is it possible that bad principals are actually the larger problem?

Here in metro Nashville, a quarter of principals are new this year.  I'm not an expert on school leadership, but it's hard for me to imagine that most principals, like teachers, do more than tread water their first year.  While the new principals learn the ropes, the school climate hangs in the balance: too many moves in the wrong direction may result in teachers, staff, parents, and students becoming disillusioned by, or just flat out leaving, the school.

The research says that teacher quality explains a greater percentage of variance in student achievement on a yearly basis than does principal quality, which makes sense given the direct relationship one has with their teacher versus the mostly indirect relationship one has with their principal.  But in the longer-term, might a bad principal have a larger negative effect on a student than a bad teacher?  After all, a bad teacher can ruin a classroom, but a bad principal can ruin a school.

The Middle Ground in the Discipline Debate

A new report being released today apparently finds that 60% of students in Texas were suspended or expelled at least once between 7th and 12th grades. As the NY Times reports, that's a huge number (though I don't quite understand why only 31% were suspended out of school -- apparently half of the kids received in-school suspensions instead (supposedly that's less severe, but does that seem like a worse punishment to anybody else?)).  Everyone interviewed in the article seems outraged at the number, and rightly so -- there's simply no way that 60% of students really cause serious problems in schools.

That said, simply reducing such punishments is no answer either. My school, for example, was under a good deal of pressure to reduce suspensions (word on the street was that our first principal resigned under pressure largely because the rate was deemed too high).  The result was that a few students got away with ludicrous behaviors, significantly reducing what the vast majority of students learned while simultaneously frustrating teachers in a building that already had a serious attrition problem.

So, I empathize with all those who are outraged by the sky-high numbers in this report.  We should certainly try to spend less time punishing, and more time teaching, our students.  But I also empathize with all those students and teachers whose learning and teaching are unnecessarily inhibited on a daily basis by a few students acting out.  I completely agree that we need to reduce the number of punishments meted out, but that can't be the only goal -- we simply cannot sacrifice student learning in the pursuit of less distressing numbers.

District Choice -- For Cities

Here's an interesting story to follow from the suburbs of Pittsburgh.  It seems that the majority of the residents of the tiny borough of Rosslyn Park have signed a petition asking that their community be part of the Chartiers Valley School District rather than the Carlynton School District.

Why?  A number of issues seem to be at play, but it seems that the main driver is that Chartiers Valley is, in many ways, a better district and has lower tax rates.  Given that 34 of 70 school-aged children residing in Rosslyn Park attend private or parochial schools, it's possible that the latter is actually more important than the former.

This isn't without precedent, but I can't say I've ever heard (or considered the possibility) of towns switching school districts.  Granted, this only applies to towns that are part of a multi-town school district -- which eliminates this as a possibility in an awful lot of places -- but it seems plausible that this could become a growing trend.  Based on the information in the article, I think if I lived in Rosslyn Park I'd want to switch districts too.  But I wonder if this were to catch on whether it would just be another way for parents to send their kids to more segregated schools.

Asking the Right Question About Charter School Skimming

This NYT article seems incomplete, but I like it for one simple reason: people talk all the time about charters cherry picking or cream skimming kids, but never seem to ask the right question . . . this article does. There's a ton of evidence that most charters do not take the highest scoring students (see, for example, this chapter from this new book) and those data are used as evidence that charters don't skim.

Case closed, right?  Do charters skim?  No, they don't.

But that's the wrong question. The issue shouldn't be whether charters take the highest scoring students, it should be whether they enroll the best-behaved and/or most motivated students (and then nudge out those who are unruly and/or unmotivated).

In other words, we should be asking if charters enroll kids who are better students instead of asking if they're enrolling students who previously earned higher scores.  Why?  Once you get a class or school full of motivated, attentive, and polite students it's a heck of a lot easier to teach them.  And a heck of a lot easier to see large gains in test scores.

I have yet to see any rigorous analysis of the extent to which charters do, in fact, enroll or retain better students.  Instead, I read a lot of anecdotes like the one from the NYT article I linked to above.  Were I to hazard a guess, it would be that there's at least one charter out there that enrolls/retains substantially better students than the surrounding schools.

Even if I'm right, whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing is a whole separate discussion.  But let's start that discussion by asking the right questions.

If Teachers are Impossible to Fire . . .

. . . then why are so many so petrified of losing their jobs? In conversation after conversation with teachers from a wide variety of schools around the country this continues to stand out to me. And I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

What are the contexts of these conversations? They mostly arise in the following two situations:

1.) A new administrative regime comes in (at either the school level or higher) or the current regime hands down a new directive. Teachers scramble to re-do their bulletin boards, do more test prep, fill out more paperwork, or whatever else they think they need to do to cover their behinds. This certainly doesn't apply in all situations, since I've also seen teachers ignore new directives, essentially refuse to implement new curricula, etc.

2.) More worryingly, I've seen it time and time again when teachers are aware of wrongdoing by other people in the building or district -- particularly when it involves a direct supervisor.  I often seemed to be the only one in my building willing to report the unethical behavior I witnessed -- possibly because I had the luxury of knowing I wasn't trying to teach in the same district again the next year. I was recently speaking with a colleague who has witnessed outrageously unethical behavior by the principal at his school. I encouraged him to report this, and the response I received was "I need my job too much . . . [my principal] is waaaaay too dangerous.  I'm scared to death of him".

I have far too many anecdotes to fit into one blog post, but I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with panicked teachers anxious about their job status.  Given that almost all of these teachers were tenured at the time of the conversation, the anxiety in their voices doesn't jibe with the current rhetoric about teacher labor markets.  It seems to me that there are three possible explanations for this (not including the possibility that my perceptions are skewed):

1.) Teachers are, indeed, almost impossible to fire -- but they don't realize that.  I suppose it's possible that teachers perceptions are off, but it seems unlikely that their that off-base.

2.) Teaching as a profession tends to attract a lot of people-pleasers who are afraid to stand up for themselves.  This may not be entirely without merit -- I'd feel comfortable saying that most teachers I know or have met are more interested in helping others than causing trouble, but this seems like only part of the explanation at best.

3.) There's a dangerous lack of trust in too many schools and school systems.  I don't want to be alarmist or paint with too wide of a brush, but this strikes me as the most plausible explanation of the three.  If teachers don't trust their supervisors to be fair and ethical, it stands to reason that they'll constantly worry about their jobs regardless of whatever protections they have.

Is worrying about one's job always a bad thing?  Of course not; sometimes a little panic can boost productivity.  But when it results in the proliferation of unethical or downright abusive behavior, I start to worry about all the worriers.  And when policies aim to increase the worry-level of teachers, I worry about the potentially negative consequences for our schools and students.

To paraphrase the old milk commercials: Trust. It does a school good.

"For Me and Not for Thee"

Yesterday's Economic Scene Column by David Leonhardt captures my biggest objection to the "not everybody should go to college" argument.  He concludes the column by writing that:

I don’t doubt that the skeptics are well meaning. But, in the end, their case against college is an elitist one — for me and not for thee. And that’s rarely good advice.

First, some context.  Fewer than one-third of 25-29 year-olds have earned a four-year degree, and even fewer adults from older generations have done similarly.  And evidence abounds that students from high-SES families are far more likely to obtain a college diploma (to the extent that high-achieving high school students from poor families are less likely to earn a diploma than are lower-achieving students from wealthier families).  The last stat that I read was that 67% of students at the top 200 or so colleges come from families ranking in the top quartile economically while only 10% come from households ranking in the bottom half.  So if it's true that too many people are attending college, that probably means too many kids of high-SES parents are attending college.

But it seems that those who most forcefully demand that fewer people attend college and/or that more people should pursue other options possess college degrees themselves -- and plan on sending their own children to college.  Depending on how one looks at it, that makes many of these arguments either elitist or hypocritical.

What if a Principal Allows Teachers to be "Bad"?

The rhetoric about "bad teachers" may never go away -- in part some teachers will always perform poorly, act irresponsibly, and so on (just as there are poor performers and irresponsible people in all professions and fields).  That said, what bothers me most about the rhetoric is that it continually oversimplifies the problem.  Too many commentators seem to assume that bad people magically pop up in schools to torture principals and belittle children.  But reality is more complex.

One situation that has arisen in numerous anecdotes I've heard from teachers is that a Principal will allow selected teachers (often their friends) to behave irresponsibly or worse.  Examples include showing up late, parking illegally, dressing inappropriately, eating meals with the Principal instead of teaching, leaving other people in charge of their class while they run errands, and, in at least one instance, abusing children.

Are "bad teachers" a problem in these schools?  Absolutely -- and they should be dealt with -- but not following the script we normally read (teacher is bad, principal wants to fire him/her, union steps in).  In these cases, the story I hear is that a "bad" principal allows a few teachers to do as they please while the rest of the teachers stew in outrage and cower in fear.

Did the Principal in these situations make these teachers bad?  It's not quite that simple.  But these Principals have certainly negatively impacted the performance of a few teachers while subsequently damaging the climate and performance of the school as a whole.

Situations like these are why I worry more about the extent of the damage done by irresponsible Principals than I do about the damage done by irresponsible teachers.