Can Education Be ‘Moneyball’-ed?

Data analysis is so trendy these days that Brad Pitt is getting millions of people to sit through a movie about quantitative methodology. Moneyball, based on the 2003 bestseller by Michael Lewis, traces the rise of new methods that the Oakland A’s used to identify undervalued baseball players so the team could win more games with a smaller payroll. A lot of education reformers are calling for a similar approach to evaluate teachers and improve student performance. Given that I’m a longtime reformer and love baseball, you’d think I’d be all over this idea. But there are some significant strikes against a Moneyball approach to education.

Poor data quality. In baseball, you can rely on the accuracy of a statistic such as a batting average or percent of at-bats a player gets on base. In education, we’ve seen an explosion of data and statistics during the past decade — it’s one of the quiet successes of No Child Left Behind. Unfortunately, while states are trying to do better, all the data being produced are not yet high-quality. In some states, for instance, standards for accuracy are lax or the data isn’t audited to check for errors. And just 14 states have standards about what a district should do to try to locate or figure out what happened to a departing student, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national non-profit organization that has led the charge to improve state education data systems.

In addition, too many states have data systems that are inadequate or underutilized. According to the Data Quality Campaign, only 35 states are able to link student data to teacher data — and fewer states actually do this in practice, in no small part because it’s so politically contentious. And a lack of transparency plagues some states, where parents and other stakeholders cannot easily go online and find the data or use it to answer questions or learn about schools. What good is a lot of data if it’s difficult or impossible to use?

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Starving America’s Public Schools

Critics of America’s public schools always seem to start from the premise that the pre-kindergarten-through-12th-grade public education system in this country is failing or in crisis.

This crisis mentality is in stark contrast to years of survey research showing that Americans generally give high marks to their local schools. Phi Delta Kappa International and Gallup surveys have found that the populace holds their neighborhood schools in high regard; in fact, this year’s survey found that “Americans, and parents in particular, evaluate their community schools more positively than in any year since” the survey started.

How could there be such a disconnect between a national narrative about public education and opinions about local schools? The two contradictory narratives draw on completely different sources of evidence.

Read the report.

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School Cuts Hurt Kids. . . 

. . . By Increasing Class Size

. . . By Eliminating Critical Classes

. . . By Eliminating Great Teachers

Making (Up) The Grade In Ohio

Every year, most schools (and districts) in Ohio get one of six grades: Emergency, Watch, Continuous Improvement, Effective, Excellent, and Excellent with Distinction. Schools that receive poor grades over a period of years face a cascade of increasingly severe sanctions. This means that these report card grades are serious business.

The method for determining grades is a seemingly arbitrary step-by-step process outlined on page eight of this guidebook. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that a huge factor determining a school’s grade is whether it meets certain benchmarks on one of two measures: The aforementioned “performance index” and the percentage of state standards that it meets. Both of these are “absolute” performance measures – they focus on how well students score on state tests (specifically, how many meet proficiency and other benchmarks), not on whether or not their scores improve. And neither accounts for differences in student characteristics, such as learning disabilities and income.

As I have discussed before, there is a growing consensus in education policy that, to the degree that schools and teachers should be judged on the basis of test results, the focus should be on whether students are improving (i.e., growth), not how highly they score (i.e., absolute performance). The reasoning is simple: Upon entry into the schooling system, poor kids (and those with disabilities, non-native English speakers, etc.) tend to score lower by absolute standards, and since schools have no control over this, they should be judged by the effect that they have on students, not on which students they happen to receive. That’s why high-profile schools like KIPP are considered effective, even though their overall scores are much lower than those in affluent suburbs.

The strong relationship between district poverty and one of these absolute performance measures – the state’s performance index that Fordham’s Terry Ryan discussed – is clear in the graph below, which I presented in a previous post.

[...]

Perhaps the people who designed the Ohio system made a good-faith effort to achieve “balance” between the various components – a very difficult endeavor to be sure. But what they ended up with was a somewhat arbitrary formula that produces troubling, implausible results based on contradictory notions of how to measure performance. The grades are as much a function of income and other student characteristics as anything else, and they’re more likely to change than stay the same between years. So, while I can’t say what the perfect system would look like, I can say that Ohio’s report card grades, without substantial changes, should be taken with a shaker full of salt.

Unfortunately, that’s easy for me to say, but parents, teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders have no such luxury. These grades are used in the highest-stakes decisions.

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SB5 is very harmful to new teachers

When the supporters of SB5 talk about the teaching provisions, they use an ugly, divisive argument. The argument is mean to pit teacher against teacher, young vs old, like this example from "Better Ohio"

Or this from an extreme right wing blogger

It's an ugly argument, full of falsehoods on a number of levels, for a number of reasons. They not too subtly imply that because of seniority, young teacher get laid off - and that it's these young teachers that are "the best".

This should offend any veteran educator, in no other profession is experience denigrated or misrepresented in this manner.

The very best teachers in Ohio have some of the deepest and longest experience. Consider Ohio's teachers of the year

Tim Dove, 2011 Ohio Teacher of the Year - 29 years experience
Natalie Wester, 2010 Ohio Teacher of the Year - 7 years experience
Jennifer Walker, 2009 Ohio Teacher of the Year - over 14 years experience
Deborah Wickerham, 2008 Ohio Teacher of the Year - over 33 years experience
George Edge, 2007 Ohio Teacher of the Year - over 28 years experience
Eric Combs, 2006 Ohio Teacher of the Year - over 20 years experience
Deepa Ganschinietz, 2005 Ohio Teacher of the Year - over 20 years experience
Kathy Rank, 2004 Ohio Teacher of the Year - over 20 years experience
Doreen Uhas-Sauer, 2003 Ohio Teacher of the Year - over 35 years experience

The argument is particularly ugly because no one wants to argue that there are some fine young teachers, but all the evidence in the world indicates that if SB5 passes it is young teachers, not more experienced teachers, who would suffer to the greatest extent.

First, teaching is an incredibly hard, complex job, requiring lots of skill, practice and experience. This is one of the primary reasons why it is estimated that almost a third of America’s teachers leave the field sometime during their first three years of teaching, and almost half leave after five years (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education). If we were to rely predominantly on young teachers our schools would experience significant shortages and very distruptive turnover.

Moreover, study after study shows that teachers become more skilled with experience (see Rice, 2003; Murnane, 1975; Murnane & Phillips, 1981; Ferguson, 1991; Ferguson & Ladd, 1996; Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 1998; Grissmer, Flanagan, Kawata, & Williamson, 2000; Rivers & Sanders, 2002; Rowan et al., 2002; Wayne & Youngs, 2003; Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2004; Hanushek, Kain, O’Brien, & Rivkin, 2005; Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger, 2006; Gordon, Kane, & Staiger, 2006; Harris & Sass, 2007; Aos, Miller, & Pennucci, 2007; Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2006, 2007a).

If teachers are to be evlauated, paid, hired and fired based on their performance, it is unlikely that most new, inexperienced teachers are going to benefit from this rubric when compared to their more experienced colleagues. Indeed, in the absence of preferential treatment or compensation level based decisions that seniority protects against, younger teachers should expect to be let go more often, not less. See their pay grow slower and not faster

How many people would want to enter such a profession?

To be explicit. If SB5 were to become law, young teachers entering the classroom would be harmed significantly by it.

Supporters of SB5 are not interested in rewarding the best teacher, or any teachers. If they were they would have included money in the bill, or the budget, to provide that reward. Instead they made unprecedented cuts to public education.

Cashing In on Education

StateImpactOhio has a great piece today, Charters Schools Part III: Cashing In on Education. It discusses at length to for-profit nature of Ohio's "non profit charters". It starts with the tale of one charter teacher experiencing her own kind of "Corporate innovation" - not getting paid.

Nagorsky says the it took her by surprise, but in hindsight, she says there were definitely some tell-tale signs: “I remember obviously the pay checks bouncing, which was huge. I remember the phone call telling me I was $900 in the hole in my account because everything I had sent out had bounced.”

Of course an article on profiteering charters would be incomplete without mention of White Hat Management and David Brennan

White Hat has been sued by some of its own schools, and critics keep pointing to the poor grades most of the schools get on annual report cards.
[...]
Minson says that would not have bothered him, if he felt like students in his schools were getting a good education.

He did not.

“We saw a lot of strategies put in play that tried to lessen the cost of educational delivery on a couple of different points, and that really gave us the vision that the number one priority of prosit was in direct competition at times with educational delivery.”

That's from the board chair of two of White Hat's own schools!

But lawyer April Hart says White Hat’s problem isn’t tough students. She argues it’s a teaching method that relies on computer instruction – a model she says is good for profits but not students.

“If you don’t care at the end of the day what’s going on in the school as long as your enrollment numbers are up, you’re going to have a problem in a for-profit situation,” says Hart.

So charters prefer not to hire too many teachers, and when they do, some even prefer not to pay them. Left holding the bag are thousands of students getting low quality, high profit educations from Ohio's accountability free charter school system.

UPDATE: Gahanna city council in the hot seat

Last night Gahanna city council met to discuss a resolution to support Issue 2. It drew a lot of attention as over 50 citizens of Gahanna flocked to the meeting to display their opposition to this resolution.

We are informed by sources that council members were inundated with emails opposing any reoslution in support of issue 2. The level of opposition clearly had an impact. 4 of the 6 council members (1 was absent) indicated that they oppose the resolution. No one offered any amendments. The vote on the resolution is scheduled to take place next Monday, October 17th.