When I started this blog two years ago, I set out to learn what performance means in education. I've focused on teacher and principal evaluation, on international comparisons, and on a host of other issues that have come up along the way. I've only scratched the surface of performance issues in education, but I've learned a great deal and hopefully shared a few insights of value.

I've greatly enjoyed engaging with readers through email and comments, and I hope to stay in touch one way or another. However, this post will be my last at On Performance.

My true passion in education is principal performance and productivity, which I write about at Eduleadership.org, the blog I've maintained since I started my journey as an educational leader in 2006. Since starting On Performance, my writing at Eduleadership has suffered, and I have realized that I need to focus more on Eduleadership. While I am interested in and concerned about teacher evaluation and the other issues I've written about here, my professional and scholarly work centers on principal performance and productivity, so that's where my writing must also focus.

For more on performance in K-12 education, check out Marc Tucker's great Top Performers blog or Tom Vander Ark On Innovation.

You can subscribe to my posts at Eduleadership via email here or via RSS here, and you can follow me on Twitter at @eduleadership. Stay in touch, and thanks for the great discussions these past two years.

Posted by Justin Baeder at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Pat Quinn, the "RTI Guy," (not the Pat Quinn who is the Governor of Illinois) recently sent this article to his mailing list, and graciously agreed to allow me to re-post it here. I wanted to share it for further discussion since it speaks very directly to issues of educational performance.

Simply the Best, by Pat Quinn
The United States system of education that has been created for students in Kindergarten through High School is the best educational system in the world. No exceptions. No disclaimers. No doubt. It is simply the best. While other countries may offer excellence in one area or offer an outstanding education to some students, the United States has created and maintained a system that serves everyone at an almost unbelievable level of quality. While no system is perfect, and the United States education system is certainly no exception to that rule, it is vastly superior to any other system in the world.

If this is the case, then why all the bad press? If this is actually true, then why the public onslaught toward our schools and their educators? The answer to these questions is multi-faceted but centers around a few key areas. There are people with agendas other than educational excellence who benefit from bad news about US education. Politics, popularity and ratings all cause people to fire the first shot and shout the loudest about how bad things have become. Yet time and again these very same critics choose our system of education over every other system in the world.

At this point you are probably thinking: "But I have seen the data! Many countries outscore the United States in Math and Science and Reading and..." The list goes on and on. Critics will often take one isolated statistic out of context to prove their point. If you look at one small piece of data, such as the results of a single test given around the world you could use that to paint any picture you wish. A broader look beyond that one small piece will paint a very different scenario. In this larger picture the United States stands at the top. The United States system of education teaches more, helps more, achieves more and in the end still gets criticized more than any system in any country in the world.

Free for All
One of the factors that make the United States educational system head and shoulders above other countries is the free access all children have to an education. This access is not limited to those who pay, as it is in some countries. This access is not limited to those with transportation, as it is in some countries. It is not limited to those who can afford uniforms, or lunch, or even a home. It is not even limited to those who legally reside in this country. Anyone can access this free education for 13 or more years of their life!

The next time someone shows you a country that has higher test scores in science than the United States ask them if free transportation is provided to school from the most remote regions of their country. Ask them if the students need money for uniforms, books, lunch or other costs before they can access the education. Do not even begin to compare our scores with the scores of a country that leaves hundreds of thousands of poor rural children without any education whatsoever. The comparison is false, unfair, and leaves you with an impression that is simply not true. No school system anywhere in the world exceeds the United States in providing free access to education for everyone.

Apples to Apples?
If you are still thinking "But their test scores are higher than ours!" there is one simple fact you need to understand. It is not pretty. It is not fun to think about. But it is true: The broader spectrum of children who take a test, the lower the average score will be. What does this mean? It means if only your top students take the test your average score will be very high. If only your top and middle students take the test your average score will still be quite high. If all of your students take the test your average score will be lower.

Add into this equation other factors such as poverty. Living in poverty reduces your access to health care, books, early childhood education and many other assets that increase learning throughout your life. If a school only tests the wealthiest students the average test score will probably be quite high. The average score will go down if you test all of your students. What do you think happens in countries where the poorest children do not have access to education? Their test scores may appear to be higher than the United States, but you are not comparing apples to apples. This is why free access to all students is such an important factor. Critics of US education who make their living shooting arrows at others will conveniently ignore this factor. Include free access to education for 13 years for all children into your calculations and there will be no doubt: The United States system of education is the premier system in the world.
 
A Premature Decision
Twenty years ago if a mother carried her unborn baby for 28* weeks and then gave birth, the baby would die. Today in the United States that baby has a very good chance of living. Five years later that child will enter kindergarten* and our school system will be responsible for helping that student read, write and learn math. In other countries in the world that child has a much lower chance of survival. It is not pleasant to think about, but five, ten and fifteen years later that lower live-birth rate will actually improve average test scores.

Suicide rate has a similar effect on test scores. In some of the countries mentioned most often as being "superior" to the United States in education the suicide rate is much higher than it is in the US. A higher suicide rate will actually have the effect of raising average test scores.
The next time someone tells you that the United States ranks fifteenth, twenty-eighth or even tenth among other countries in math or reading or science education ask them what the live birth rate is in the other countries? Ask about the chances of survival for a baby born ten weeks premature. Ask about the youth suicide rate. Then ask yourself if you would trade any of these for higher test scores. Be careful what you measure and where you place your trust.

We are Special
A good measure of any society is how people treat those who are the most vulnerable and least protected. In the world of education these are students with special needs. The United States has developed a system of educating special education students that is vast and complex. It is also the benchmark by which every other system can be measured.

The response to students with exceptional education needs in other countries is wide and varied. In some countries these students are simply excluded. In other countries they are institutionalized. In some countries the parents must find and pay for special services. In the United States these students are not only included and offered full and free access, the schools go above and beyond in their offerings and do so well beyond the student's 12th year of schooling.

In every school in the United States these students are included in class. In math and reading and social studies they are there benefitting from the instruction the teacher is offering. In addition to this every student in the class is benefitting from the presence of these students. In many cases these students will also be included in our test scores. While other countries do not even see it fit for these students to be included in school, much less in the testing system by which they are evaluated, the United States offers an inclusive and free education to all. It is the gold standard by which other countries simply do not compare favorably.

More is Better
The list of reasons why the United States system of education is the best in the world is long and wide. Our curriculum has breadth that other countries simply would not even consider. As a nation we have placed a value on a wide and varied curriculum covering sciences, arts, language and literature. We have added societal issues to our curriculum like alcohol and drug abuse prevention, stress reduction and relaxation, and physical fitness. Many other countries would not consider adding these areas to their to-do list.

In addition to this we are committed as a nation to keep every option available to nearly every student through twelve years of education. This means that compared to many other nations we do not stratify our curriculum and pigeon-hole our students nearly as much. In the United States almost every 10th grader has course options available so they can attend a four-year college. This sort of access to higher education is simply not available in other countries where they determine at a much earlier age which track you will be pursuing.

The commitment to a wide and varied curriculum that includes societal issues as well as academic subjects is important in the United States. The commitment to make college available to nearly every student entering high school is another value the United States holds high. There is no doubt that doing education this way is more difficult than educating students with a stratified narrow curriculum. Yet despite this difficulty our schools continually step up to the plate and deliver on the promise we make. A promise that other nations cannot make nor fulfill.

Finally, size does matter. Most people who are comfortable cooking dinner for their family would struggle to cook dinner for a group of 200 people. Likewise, countries that educate thousands of students have no idea how their systems would stress if they needed to educate millions. Although critics are everywhere, it is easy to point out how small systems outshine big systems. The problem with this thinking is the belief that nothing would change if the small system would grow. The truth is that any other small system would collapse under the weight that the United States education system bears every single day.

Good but Not Perfect
There is no doubt that the United States education system needs to improve. Our graduation rates in certain areas are unacceptable and the achievement gap between our best schools and our worst is atrocious. But make no mistake: There is not another educational system in the world that could deliver the curriculum that the United States does to the same students at anywhere near the level of quality that this system achieves. It is simply the best.

Why this Matters
Why is this important? This is important not so that the United States can have one more area to claim to be the best. It is important because when the critics raise their voices, politicians and parents hearing only one side of the argument start to look for change. Not necessarily change for the better, but change to be different. Politicians start to look at other countries with inferior systems to ours for models to emulate. This very pattern has hurt US education more than it has helped, because the other system we are copying is not actually better. They are simply smaller, or educate only the top students or the rich students, or limit the opportunities of students early and often.

People who throw test scores around like they are the only measure of a school's success have done more to hurt education in the United States than nearly any other culprit. They point to other countries with higher scores and never point out limited access, low pre-term live-birth rates, high suicide rates, narrow curriculum, or excluded special needs students. They paint you a picture that is inaccurate and misleading.

When you look at the whole picture there is only one conclusion you can come to: The United States education system is not perfect, but it is the best education system in the world. Bar none. No exceptions. No exclusions. No disclaimers. Simply the best.
 
About the Author
Pat Quinn is an author, researcher, and speaker. He has been studying successful school systems for over 20 years and is the author of the book Changing Lives: How Parents and Teachers can Change the Lives of Children they Know and Love. His presentations across the country have transformed the lives of students, teachers and administrators. Learn more about Mr. Quinn at www.PatQuinn.com or by calling 309-662-5016. Contact Pat Quinn at pat[at]betterteachingonline.com.

*Note: The original version of this essay stated 20 weeks and first grade, which have been corrected to 28 weeks and kindergarten, respectively.

Posted by Justin Baeder at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I said recently that I don't think our 13,000-plus school districts and states can coherently form an education "system" the way smaller nations like South Korea and Finland can, and for that reason, we will never see the same level of performance from our schools.

And yet, I must stop short of actually advocating for full federal control of schools. Such a takeover would (massive complications aside) surely reduce inequities, but it would be profoundly un-American. The researcher in me doesn't find that a very compelling reason to stick with an inferior arrangement, but I don't see local communities giving up control of schools lightly. Since nationalizing education would probably require something on the order of an amendment to the Constitution, it's not going to happen, period.

But unlikely players are rapidly creating a "system" that has nothing to do with federal control. The Common Core State Standards Initiative is of course at the center of almost everything happening right now, and it was spearheaded by the National Governors' Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, venerable public professional organizations which virtually no one had heard of prior to Common Core. Common Core was of course accelerated by Race to the Top—a top-down federal program if ever there was one—but is a voluntary, state-led initiative.

And Common Core is now leading to all kinds of new possibilities. An interesting one that I've posted about before is LearnZillion, a social venture offering lesson planning resources to teachers, to increase lesson quality, reduce the planning burden, and save teachers the trouble of reinventing the wheel (see my interview with founder Eric Westendorf here). Imagine if the quality of your child's math lessons didn't depend solely on how interested his 4th grade teacher was in the subject, and if there was an easy way for teachers to collaborate and improve their lessons. Thanks to Common Core and LearnZillion (and probably many other similar resources), now there is.

Assessment is of course a major and still largely "TBD" element of Common Core's system-creating effect; the two assessment consortia (Smarter Balanced and PARCC) will have a powerful role not unlike that of a national education authority in creating de facto national standards for student performance.

Another major element of national education systems like Singapore's is an approach to recruiting, training, and retaining high-quality educators. WIthout a national "top third" policy, the US is unlikely to dramatically change the teaching population. But organizations like NBPTS and Knowles are making a difference despite having no formal authority over US policy.

Ronald Thorpe, CEO of NBPTS, writes on his World Teachers' Day EdWeek blog

The U.S. leads the world in every other profession, and we've done it through very conscious and strategic decisions, primarily coming from within those professions. There is no reason we shouldn't do the same in education.

...high performing countries typically come to the U.S. to learn best practice from us. Where we have difficulty taking these ideas to scale, however, they seem to figure out how to do that. Simply put, we are being bested by our own best ideas!

...it may be time to bring our best ideas to scale here at home, rather than wait to "discover" them as the reason for some other country's educational success story. link

As Thorpe suggests, other countries can take our best ideas to scale because they have a system, not 13,000 systems. I share his optimism that the profession can transform itself, with a little help from targeted legislation at the state and federal levels. I don't have great confidence that professionalization and stronger professional norms will reduce inequities between schools in different communities, but they can provide some of the same benefits a strong nationalized education system would provide, and few of the drawbacks.

Posted by Justin Baeder at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

How can educational leaders make the greatest difference for students? If you're not the one who actually does the teaching, what can you do to ensure that good things happen in your school or district?

I've been thinking about this since I came across Larry Cuban's incisive post "Can Superintendents Raise Test Scores?"

I think the answer to his question is yes—sometimes—but it depends on the particular set of challenges that the superintendent faces. In other words, it depends on what's wrong in the district and what needs to be done about it. And sometimes trying to raise test scores is the wrong goal.

Sometimes having a "laser-like focus on student achievement"—Google the phrase and you'll see tons of examples—is not the best approach.

If your district has been inflating scores for years by monkeying with enrollment and student classification like they were doing in El Paso, raising scores further is the wrong goal.

If your district has high scores already, but is facing a major budget crisis and a lack of public confidence, raising test scores is the wrong goal.

If your district is crippled by incompetence in key positions, focusing on student achievement isn't going to help.

Every school district in America faces a unique set of challenges, and the leader's job is to be responsible for everything while maintaining a focus on a manageably small set of problems. When the big problems are under control and the leader's competence is clear, the leader has a platform from which to share a compelling vision.

Being a superintendent is a huge job, but I think it starts with two basic responsibilities.

First, solve problems. No one cares where we're going if the car's on fire.

Second, set the vision and motivate your team. People only perform at high levels when the destination and the route are clear.

When people use the word "bureaucrats" to talk about education administrators, they are usually referring to people who do neither of these things, but instead focus on meta-work that is only marginally related to the core purpose of the organization, and is not particularly useful to anyone.

Why is solving problems and motivating staff toward a vision so important? What about strategic plans, five-year goals, data systems, departmental reorganizations, and all of the myriad other priorities superintendents are told to worry about?

The truth is, most of this doesn't matter to front-line educators or students, because it doesn't help them do their core work, and it doesn't inspire them to do better.

Two-factor theory, pioneered by psychologist Frederick Herzberg, identifies both motivational and de-motivational factors in the workplace, and suggests that these two sets of factors operate somewhat independently of each other.

Demotivational factors—what Herzberg called "hygiene" factors—need to be dealt with swiftly and effectively. If buildings are falling into disrepair, if paychecks aren't arriving on time, if the hiring process gets bogged down in HR—these are killers of motivation and efficacy. Effective superintendents recognize these problems and task their direct reports with ensuring that they are quickly handled.

Motivational factors are not merely the opposite of the demotivational factors. People aren't fulfilled when they get a paycheck and work in a structurally sound building; such conditions are necessary but not sufficient. Motivational factors include achievement, recognition, intrinsically fulfilling work, and the opportunity to grow.

Two-factor theory leads me to the conclusion that having a "laser-like focus on student achievement" is not necessarily a good idea for superintendents. Why? Because superintendents do not actually teach students. Teachers should certainly have a laser-like focus on student achievement, and principals should take responsibility for such focus at the school level.

But when superintendents and other district administrators try to focus solely student learning, they inevitably start engaging in meta-work that prevents district staff from solving problems that need to be solved.

A classic scenario unfolds like this:
Superintendent: "We need to have a laser-like focus on student achievement."

Senior staff: "Yes, so we need to have a robust progress-monitoring system in place."

Slightly less senior staff: "We don't have the data systems to do that kind of progress monitoring."

Superintendent: "Then our top priority is getting a new data system online ASAP."

The entire central office then gets to work planning, procuring, and implementing a new data system. Principals are informed, and teachers barely know anything is happening, but the entire district office stays busy for months. No problems facing teachers are solved, and no one is motivated to grow and achieve. The hygiene factors don't change, and the motivational factors don't change.

Need another example? Ask me some time about the 60+ page booklet of "teaching and learning standards" that I received in 2004 after thousands of person-hours of work at my district's central office.

What's missing from this type of pointless activity? Solving problems for front-line educators, and helping them grow and achieve as professionals. Most meta-work that happens in district offices doesn't do this. The more "strategic" it is, the less likely it is to have any impact on teachers and students.

When a superintendent has a compelling vision for staff growth and achievement, and when distractions and problems have been bulldozed out of the way, teachers and administrators will rise to the challenge and have a laser-like focus on learning. And if focused, motivated professionals getting better at what they do won't raise student achievement, what will?

Posted by Justin Baeder at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There's quite a controversy brewing over Florida's different academic proficiency targets for different ethnic groups. While most educators will be familiar with NCLB-style disaggregated student achievement goals (which are based on improvement over past scores, not lowered expectations for some groups), apparently such racially disaggregated goals at the state level are something new, part of Florida's NCLB waiver. Many are crying foul, labeling the goals "the soft bigotry of low expectations," to borrow a phrase from former President Bush.

I'll go a step farther: setting goals at the state level is silly, period. States have a very, very indirect impact on the performance of students, which explains why states tend to monkey with the tests, not make educational changes, in order to raise scores.

Districts—especially large ones—also have very little direct impact on the academic achievement of students, so it's little surprise that huge improvements (absent some obvious logical cause) are often a sign of cheating, as they were in El Paso, or of demographic changes, as Diane Ravitch argues in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Under what conditions does goal-setting work? In other words, when can goals actually lead to improvement? I can think of several necessary factors.

First, goal-setting must be tied to a theory of action so that the impact of specific actions can be assessed. Yet there is virtually no effort to conduct this kind of analysis or distinguish true impact from coincidence.

While writing this post, I was thrilled to come across Larry Cuban's musings on the same topic. He inquires whether superintendents can raise test scores, and if so, how:

So superintendent contracts include clauses on raising test scores. But can they do so? The literature on the superintendency, with few exceptions, answers "yes" to the question. When writers, policy makers, and administrators mention successful school chiefs they point to increasing scores on standardized achievement tests, high percentages of graduates entering college, and National Merit Scholarship finalists.

Yet when superintendents are asked how they get scores or graduation rates to go up, the question is often answered with a wink or a shrug of the shoulders. Even among most researchers and administrators who write and grapple with this question of whether superintendents can improve test scores, there is no explicit model of effectiveness.

Perhaps rising test scores are nothing more than luck, Cuban continues:

Without some model by which a superintendent can be shown to have causal effects, test scores going up or down remain a mystery, a matter of luck that the results occurred during that school chief's tenure.

Second, for goal-setting to be effective, the area of improvement must be something that effort, practice, resource allocation, or other actions can actually impact.

I can set a goal to lose weight, but not to grow taller. Setting a goal to improve something you can't actually improve is called magical thinking.

Policy is a blunt instrument, and state-level policy is surely no exception. When state legislators or education officials make no substantive changes from year to year, why should they expect to see any change in scores for which they can take credit?

The classroom door is nearly impenetrable, as any experienced educational leader can tell you. If you can get teachers to open their doors, they can make change happen on an impressive scale, but most state actions have a vanishingly small impact on actual classroom practice, with the notable exception of high-stakes testing.

When it comes to disaggregated goals, why on earth would the State of Florida expect to see specific growth among specific groups absent any targeted action to address their needs? Are they putting serious money behind detailed plans to achieve these goals? Taking no action and expecting big change is called delusion when individuals do it, but apparently it's called goal-setting when states do it.

Third, if we're not on track to achieve our goals, we need to be able to make adjustments along the way. To the extent that the goals depend on the performance of other people, there must be latitude to make more dramatic adjustments to other factors to compensate for this limited degree of control. If a CEO has a division that is unprofitable, he can increase its R&D and marketing budget, fire the VP in charge, or make other similarly bold changes. If the quarterback keeps throwing the ball away, the coach can call a time-out and develop a new plan.

Usually there is no such latitude in education at the state level, which partially explains why we're seeing increasingly desperate moves such as the present efforts to tie educator pay to student performance. If state policymakers want to actually set and achieve goals, they need resources that they can flexibly deploy to address emerging needs. In a two-year budget cycle, this tends to be impossible.

Let's put this in perspective: as a principal, I can't make a kid do his homework or master a concept, despite the wide range of motivators and conditions I can influence. Do we really believe that Florida education officials can have a specific impact on how many Latino students graduate from high school?

Given these limitations on goal-setting at the state level, I'm not getting too worked up about the targets any particular state sets for its students. Goal-setting is mostly a waste of time.

Instead, states should decide what they want to happen, figure out the most efficient ways to make it happen, and relentlessly execute specific, focused plans to achieve viable targets. Let's say you want to increase the graduate rate among Latino students. Great. How about investing in 8th graders in the areas with the highest dropout rates, and seeing if you can move the needle for them over a 5-year period? You can then figure out what works and how much it will cost, and do more of it.

This is what great teachers do. They figure out how their students are currently doing, and design appropriate plans of adequate intensity to get them to where they need to be.

This is what states should be doing, not setting silly goals. If states want to make wild predictions about things outside of their control, it would be easier to stick with fantasy football.

Posted by Justin Baeder at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm all for better teacher evaluations, as well as devoting substantial time to informal instructional leadership activities. Time spent in classrooms is time well spent.

But LA principals seem to be crushed with a burden of paperwork, "plans," and other administrivia that makes what I faced as a principal look like a day at the beach.

The Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the principals' association in the nation's 2nd-largest school district, recently published a newsletter that serves as something of an open letter to Supt John Deasy and the rest of the sprawling district's senior leadership. They note the extraordinary demands that are being placed on them:

The cuts to clerical, custodial and supervision staff have directly increased the administrative workload at school sites.
...
AALA members, both certificated and classified, are reeling from the stress of taking on too many extra responsibilities. As we have said before, with power, politics and personalities constantly changing, AALA members continue to hold this District together. Their reward? More initiatives, more plans, more responsibility, more accountability, more intimidation--and less support, less compensation, less autonomy and less professional growth and development. Add to this the District's trifurcated reorganization that separates instruction, operations and parent services--necessitating principals to report to three supervisors. Superintendent Deasy, we heard you when you said that you were dividing the responsibilities that the directors had under the previous structure because they were overwhelming for one person to handle. Yet, the schools have lost clerical, custodial, supervision, cafeteria and administrative support, and principals are being asked to do more with less. Don't you find that overwhelming for school administrators, or do only directors get overwhelmed?

I don't think the newly required two formal observations per teacher per year are unreasonable; I've done it for a staff of 30. But adding this as a new requirement on top of an already outrageous workload is about to break the principals of LA Unified, who lead schools that are among the largest in the nation. The district's 730 schools serve some 694,000 students; I'll let you do the math—these are enormous schools.

I don't expect districts to pony up for new support staff to free up principals to spend more time on teacher observations. But principal time is a finite and precious resource, and when you add something to the plate, something else has to come off. The AALA letter lists just a few pressures on principals' time:

Plans, plans and more plans—Attendance, Safety, Single School, Accreditation, Common Core, Master, Discipline, Parent Involvement and Autonomy—all plans! Dr. Deasy, are you even aware of the number of plans that principals are supposed to develop, submit AND implement? Couple that with targets for the Performance Meter in your multilevel Strategic Action Plan, the numerous "certifications" that they must sign, the difficulty accessing information from the District's MyData system and the lack of user-friendly software, is it any wonder that principals are feeling like they're drowning and it's just the second month of school?

I was fortunate to work in Seattle at a time when purposeful moves were being made to streamline requirements such as these, to reduce the burden on principals. There are a number of ways district leaders can avoid distracting principals from the substantive work in their schools.

First, recognize that educating students is the purpose of a school system, and that districts do not educate students; schools do. For this reason, school districts should serve the needs of schools, not vice-versa. Here's some great research to start with.

Principals should not report to three different bosses each. That's crazy. If you're a principal's boss, your job is to a) make sure the principal is competent, then b) serve as a bulldozer to clear out all of the obstructions in the way of your principals, toward the goal of supporting great teaching and learning.

Second, recognize that plans do not accomplish anything. Plans are reactionary efforts to appease various stakeholders and maintain the appearance of addressing everything that needs to be addressed, even if actually addressing so many priorities is completely unrealistic. Most "plans" are merely compliance documents that should be eliminated completely.

If certain plans are required by law, they should be created at the district level, adapted as needed for each school, and given to principals for signature. If this won't lead to enough visible action, then this action needs to be budgeted (money, time, and personnel) and managed at the district level. Pretending that schools can implement seventeen different plans while also attending to the small task of actually educating students is absurd.

Third, recognize that as the AALA newsletter claims, principals are the backbone of any school district, holding it together across endless changes in senior leadership, organizational structure, and operational procedure. What principals need, principals should get. If they say the software for submitting teacher evaluations is terrible, listen, and do something about it.

If LA Unified has 730 principals, we know they're spending upwards of $75 million annually on principal salaries and benefits. These are people with Master's degrees, and in many cases, doctorates. When they say their time is being wasted, we should take note. When they propose solutions, we should listen. When they define their job as supporting the work of teaching and learning, we should line up behind them to support this work.

The plans, the administrivia, and the Tribble-like paperwork requirements have to go. I hope someone is listening.

Posted by Justin Baeder at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

What is the relationship between educational excellence and local control? In my last post, I concluded that we will never have the kind of world-class education system that Finland or Singapore have as long as our "system" is made up of some 13,000 local school districts. Our approach, which Ken Mortland recently called "an extremely loose confederation," is never going to keep pace with a tightly coordinated, centralized system.

Perhaps this is OK; after all, independence and autonomy are the American way. We're wary about top-down approaches that impose Washington's priorities on local affairs, and we don't seem to have much confidence in the federal government to competently and efficiently operate vast enterprises like public education. Besides, Singapore and Finland are tiny in comparison to the US; no one knows if a nationalized approach would even work in such a large, populous country as the US.

But to what extent is it wise for education to be a truly local affair? From a performance perspective, it's hard to say, since the US is so dissimilar to the other nations to which it's usually compared. But from an equity perspective, reducing local control may be a good thing.

Local school districts may be responsible for educating the children in their community, but how well they do is a matter of national importance. Even if our community does a great job of educating its kids, we all suffer if opportunity is lacking anywhere in our country, or as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." And educational quality is surely an issue of justice.

Local control may be a good thing to the extent that it capitalizes on local communities' interest in ensuring bright futures for their children. On the other hand, local control opens the door to wide variation in the opportunities that are available. Some local control will be exercised poorly, to the point that it has to be taken away; for example, New Mexico's Education Secretary recently suspended an entire school board for incompetence, and an Iowa judge ordered that school board members be jailed for failing to comply with an earlier ruling.

Of course, we'll always have scandals and incompetence, so it's perhaps a tradeoff between having more, smaller scandals in local affairs versus having fewer, larger scandals at the state or federal level. At least everyone is affected equally when we have a major national scandal.

As interesting as it might be to speculate on what a nationalized US education system might look like, I'll instead make a prediction about what will actually happen.

I think we'll see the federal government continue to exercise its power through softer policies and funding; we'll see states take much more active roles in education; and we'll see local control wane as state control (guided by federal mandates) waxes.

We've seen the most action lately at the state level. State legislatures are ending decades-old local battles over matters such as teacher tenure and evaluation, effectively removing local control over substantive issues in public schooling. For the next few years, I think this will continue—states will take more control over education, reducing the autonomy of local school districts and reducing inequities. The NY Times reports that some 20 states have passed legislation on teacher tenure in the past year.

The battles will also get larger and more fierce, as we're currently seeing in Idaho, and as we saw in Wisconsin last year.

But the power of the federal government will grow too, because as we saw with Race to the Top, states are perfectly willing to cede control to the federal government if it will bring in much-needed funding.

I can only conclude that the impact of this shift will be to improve performance and reduce inequity across our 13,000 school systems. We saw this with Brown v. Board of Education. We saw the same with IDEA. We've seen the same with Head Start and other well-administered federal programs, and with state-administered School Improvement Grant programs.

It's easy to ignore inequity at the local level because you can blame particular people and circumstances. It's much harder to look across a state or nation and accept the status quo when kids and communities aren't getting what they need.

On the other hand, I think we'll also see increasing desperation for federal funding, and more poorly conceived legislation based on unproven reform approaches, just as we saw with Race to the Top. What do you think?

Posted by Justin Baeder at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I spent most of this morning reading Marc Tucker's last few posts on his excellent Top Performers blog here at EdWeek. In this post, he compares the US education and healthcare systems to those in the rest of the developed world, and explores the reasons our systems are so inefficient:

In the health industry, just as in education, other countries are providing much better results overall at significantly lower cost than is the case in the United States. link

I can't read Tucker's writing without concluding that we will never catch up to other developed nations as long as we have more than 13,000 local school districts. We don't have an education system; we have a vast number of different systems that bear some similarity to each other, but are nothing like the national systems of Finland or South Korea. Local control is a very American idea, one that may never go away, but one that is tightly linked to the inequities that Tucker identifies. (For more, see his recent book Surpassing Shanghai).

While we may never end up with the same type of system that top-performing nations have (especially since the US is such a large nation in comparison), I do think there are vast opportunities for improvement, and most of these opportunities fall under the heading of efficiency.

Efficiency is something of a bad word in education, because it's often falsely contrasted with effectiveness. Given the choice, I'll take good over cheap, thank you very much. But that's not what efficiency means. From Merriam-Webster:

EFFICIENT
1: being or involving the immediate agent in producing an effect
2: productive of desired effects; especially : productive without waste

Efficient does not mean cheap; it means effective without waste, so any attempt to pit efficiency against effectiveness is simply wrong.

Perhaps we're wary of efficiency in US public education because of our experience with the factory model of schooling. In a factory, efficiency requires stamping out variation in order to produce a product of uniform quality. We spent decades trying to do this with kids, and it doesn't just not work; it's wrongheaded. In a factory, variation in the raw materials is a problem to be solved; in education, variation among students isn't something to be stamped out, but something to be built upon to help each student set goals and learn.

When I talk about efficiency, I'm not talking about standardized testing and pushing all students through a factory-model school system. I'm thinking about high-quality schools that we would want our own children to experience, performing at a high level, without waste. Let's set aside our baggage about the word, and consider the ways a focus on efficiency could improve our systems.

First, efficiency is an opportunity everywhere, not just when new funding is available; on the other hand, if we refuse to focus on efficiency, we can't improve without more resources. We've come to hate the phrase "do more with less," because we know it just means our budget is being cut, but doing more with less is actually something we should always be striving for. I believe efficiency is the single greatest resource available in our schools today—greater than Race to the Top funding, greater than a new computers, greater than virtually any of the resources we're perpetually waiting for.

Second, efficiency is a focused way to turn around a failing system. We know intuitively that just throwing more money at a mediocre system isn't going to be a great investment, but we usually fail to identify this specifically as an efficiency issue. When textbooks sit unused in warehouses, we know the solution is to get them into classrooms (along with training on the new curriculum). When the buses are late, we know the solution is to find out why and get them running on time. But there are so many more ways focusing on efficiency can impact schools.

I believe efficiency is an incredibly powerful but underutilized lens for improvement. Consider several types of efficiencies schools can exhibit:

• Customer service—efficient schools respond to inquiries and concerns without giving people the runaround, preventing complaints from escalating and becoming a distraction
• Instruction—efficient schools use more of the more effective teaching strategies and approaches, and less of the less effective approaches
• Human resources—efficient schools allocate staff to the areas where they will have the greatest impact, and weed out ineffective staff
• Prudence—effective schools use the data they collect, and don't waste time compiling information they won't use
• Iteration—efficient schools learn from their experience, built on it each year, and avoid re-inventing the wheel

Those are just a few examples; you can no doubt think of dozens more (photocopier use, anyone?).

Perhaps efficiency is a boring topic for everyone except me and Marc Tucker, but I think it's one of the most important opportunities schools face today.

Posted by Justin Baeder at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Chicago teachers voted overwhelmingly today to ratify their new contract, sealing the deal that ended September's 7-day strike. The Chicago Teachers Union prevailed in obtaining a 2-3% annual raise for the next three to four years (totaling as much as 17.6% cumulatively), and in keeping the teacher workday short despite a lengthening of the school day for elementary students.

These two provisions will cost the city some $300 million and $150 million, respectively, over the next three years. While the Chicago school system has even bigger budget woes due to capital and debt issues, these new contractual obligations promise to accelerate the coming fiscal crisis, which will almost certainly lead to massive layoffs.

Paradoxically, this could do more to improve the performance of Chicago's teachers than the merit pay and student performance rules that Emanuel wanted to build into the new contract. Allow me to explain.

Chicago schools have a layoff and recall policy that is based heavily on performance, and only partially on seniority, thanks to a state supreme court ruling earlier this year. The new contract specifies the layoff order as follows:

1. Unit
2. Certification
3. Unsats
4. PAT's (Probationary Assigned Teachers) by rating tier
5. Tenured Needs Improvement (<250, then >250)
6. then all other tenured teachers by seniority

This gets a bit technical, but it essentially means that among people who do the same job, those with the lowest performance will be laid off first. Seniority only comes into play if it's necessary to lay off all the teachers who are below proficient as well as some who are proficient or better.

CTU president Karen Lewis predicted during negotiations that up to 6,000 teachers could be fired if the city prevailed in its effort to weigh student test scores more heavily in teacher evaluations. However, it appears that the sheer expense of the new contract may have the same result: If the city is forced to lay off teachers, its performance-based layoff and recall policy will result in the dismissal of the lowest performers.

The Daily Beast's James Warren explains the budgetary situation and laments the city's failure to keep the costs of the new contract down, predicting a heavy round of layoffs in the cash-strapped windy city:

Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a tax and government research group, said late Tuesday that it was too early to fully analyze the contract's details but it seemed very difficult for the city to accommodate the pay hikes. Significant reductions in schools and teachers will be necessary.

The current budget, he noted, provided for only a 2 percent raise, with no hikes for years of service and advanced degrees. That meant draining all the reserves in the school system's general fund and some added restricted reserves totaling $431.8 million to close a deficit of $665 million. In doing that, the system failed to heed its own fund-balance policy.

The system has already projected a $1 billion deficit for the 2014 fiscal year due to its structural deficit and the end of a three-year partial suspension of contributions to the teachers' pension fund. Those required contributions will grow by at least $338 million, Msall said, to $534 million in fiscal 2014, from $196 million in fiscal 2013.

The system's long-term debt has risen by 28.3 percent, or $1.1 billion, in the last five years, largely due to its capital construction program.

"In summary," he said, "the wage increases and other enhancements will likely require very dramatic cuts in personnel."

It's something that Emanuel, even as he turned emotional Tuesday, knows is unavoidable: to save itself, the system must shrink dramatically.

Oddly, Warren characterizes the new contract as predatory on the part of teachers:

The teachers, who now average about $74,000 a year and cost the system in the vicinity of $100,000 with benefits, will continue to ravenously suck up most of the system's cash.

Chicago is one of the toughest school systems in the country, and anyone who begrudges its teachers their pay should go earn a teaching certificate and try substitute teaching in Chicago schools—which average 90% free/reduced lunch— for even one day. If the city is getting great teachers for $100K, that's a bargain.

You can call it self-serving, but I think Chicago's teachers did the right thing here: They insisted on being paid well, and they knew that the lowest performers would pay the price. That's how it should be. Rewards flow to the competent—no merit pay necessary.

When the high tide of a budget crisis rolls in, it's supposed to wash out those who are dragging down the system, not hit everyone equally.

Posted by Justin Baeder at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Valerie Strauss has a great guest post on her Answer Sheet blog from NY principal Carol Burris, who argues that new teacher evaluations incorporating student test scores are in fact harming students. She explains that principals are now reassigning students to prevent great teachers from repeatedly receiving low scores:

Some principals stated that they would change their teacher's assignment next year and assign them less needy students so that they could protect these excellent teachers from the ineffective rating. The unintended consequences to students are beginning.

New York principals appear to have numerous concerns about the new evaluation rules, which of course were implemented as part of New York's Race to the Top application. These concerns are outlined in a position paper, which was recently updated now that the first round of scores and ratings are available. More than 1/3 of the principals in New York State have signed the position paper, a fact of which policymakers should take note.

One factoid that's being tossed around is that teachers only contribute to 10-15% of the variance in student test scores. Diane Ravitch has been repeating this figure frequently, and lots of people cite Diane Ravitch, but I did find it in a this 2005 paper (which cites a paper in a 2002 volume that Ravitch edited). I'm not sure how much research is behind this figure, or how disputed it remains, but no amount of statistical athleticism can turn "teachers make a difference" into "teachers control outcomes" when we're only talking about a 15% contribution.

Burris wonders:

How can an evaluation system in which the evaluators themselves have little faith possibly be productive? The question is, what will we collectively, and individually as school leaders do?

I'm not sure I fully agree with her rhetorical point—that systemic change in a profession can't succeed without the full cooperation of the professionals involved—because I've seen so many examples to the contrary in other professions (check out Atul Gawande's books on improvement in medicine and you'll see what I mean). We often have to be dragged kicking and screaming into best practice.

But I do think Burris is on to something here, and it's that front-line professionals—teachers and principals—have extraordinary power to sabotage ill-conceived reforms. As she notes, this is now happening. It's a completely rational response, even though it's not very good for kids.

If I have a superstar 3rd grade teacher who is getting dinged because of low test scores, I can swap that teacher to 2nd grade for a year so there are no standardized test scores for her class. If that's not an option, I can monkey with the class configuration so that she shares responsibility for students with several other teachers, so the formulas are impossible to apply to individual teachers. Or I can have her teach something else altogether. I can do all of this and more, to ensure that none of my teachers end up with a score that is going to harm them professionally.

Of course, all of this monkeying is disruptive, and that means it's probably bad for kids. But it's also bad for kids to fire great teachers for stupid reasons that are linked to their performance only according to arcane and untested statistical formulas.

So we educators get to say "This isn't working—see how many problems it's causing?" and this is ultimately easier than convincing legislators and the public that the math is bad. It's a brilliant move, and one that policymakers should have anticipated.

It may be possible to implement reforms in spite of rather than with educators, but you can't expect great results when money and political will, rather than evidence, are the drivers of those reforms. Professionals need to hear evidence from the field, not just political rhetoric.

Via Larry Ferlazzo

Posted by Justin Baeder at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend