Battelle Blasts Papers decision

From our mailbag, Battelle for Kids condemns the Plain Dealer and NPR's decision to publish teacher's value-added scores, calling it "the poster child for name, blame, and shame and the antithesis of our approach to using value-added data"

To: All SOAR districts
From: Jim Mahoney and Bobby Moore
Date: June 17, 2013

Yesterday, a three-part series on value-added was launched by The Cleveland Plain Dealer and State Impact Ohio. It includes both articles and radio segments specific to value-added analysis as a measure of teacher effectiveness. Highlighted in the articles is a link to a database of teacher ratings, hosted by The Plain Dealer and the State Impact Ohio partnership.

Currently, Ohio laws governing the release of teacher records would apply to teacher value-added results. Thus, teacher level value-added information is subject to public records requests through ODE. Through The Plain Dealer and State Impact Ohio database, the general public can now access a teacher's overall composite rating derived from two years of his/her results in grades 4-8 math and reading. These data reflect information for less than 1/3 of the math and reading, grades 4-8 teachers in Ohio.

Battelle for Kids was not aware these ratings would be published in this way, at this time.

While Battelle for Kids does support the use of value-added information for school improvement and as one of several components of a multi-measures evaluation system, value-added should NOT be used in isolation to draw conclusions about a teacher's effectiveness.

Multiple data points over time from multiple perspectives are crucial because teaching and learning and the evaluation of teaching and learning are complex.

Therefore, we are NOT supportive of these ratings being publically available and discourage promoting the use of this public database.

Talking points and articles, to support your local conversations, are available on the Ohio Student Progress Portal.

http://cts.vresp.com/c/?BattelleForKids/f43a0e1b46/fb8aa9ca4e/313346eb88/sflang=en

Obviously, this is the poster child for name, blame, and shame and the antithesis of our approach to using value-added data.

Please call if you have any questions.

Thank you for all you do for Ohio's students!

-Jim and Bobby

Charter School Authorization And Growth

If you ask a charter school supporter why charter schools tend to exhibit inconsistency in their measured test-based impact, there’s a good chance they’ll talk about authorizing. That is, they will tell you that the quality of authorization laws and practices — the guidelines by which charters are granted, renewed and revoked — drives much and perhaps even most of the variation in the performance of charters relative to comparable district schools, and that strengthening these laws is the key to improving performance.

Accordingly, a recently-announced campaign by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers aims to step up the rate at which charter authorizers close “low-performing schools” and are more selective in allowing new schools to open. In addition, a recent CREDO study found (among other things) that charter middle and high schools’ performance during their first few years is more predictive of future performance than many people may have thought, thus lending support to the idea of opening and closing schools as an improvement strategy.

Below are a few quick points about the authorization issue, which lead up to a question about the relationship between selectivity and charter sector growth.

The reasonable expectation is that authorization matters, but its impact is moderate. Although there has been some research on authorizer type and related factors, there is, as yet, scant evidence as to the influence of authorization laws/practices on charter performance. In part, this is because such effects are difficult to examine empirically. However, without some kind of evidence, the “authorization theory” may seem a bit tautological: There are bad charters because authorizers allow bad charters to open, and fail to close them.

That said, the criteria and processes by which charters are granted/renewed almost certainly have a meaningful effect on performance, and this is an important area for policy research. On the other hand, it’s a big stretch to believe that these policies can explain a large share of the variation in charter effects. There’s a reasonable middle ground for speculation here: Authorization has an important but moderate impact, and, thus, improving these laws and practices is definitely worthwhile, but seems unlikely to alter radically the comparative performance landscape in the short- and medium-term (more on this below).

Strong authorization policies are a good idea regardless of the evidence. Just to be clear, even if future studies find no connection between improved authorization practices and outcomes, test-based or otherwise, it’s impossible to think of any credible argument against them. If you’re looking to open a new school (or you’re deciding whether or not to renew an existing one), there should be strong, well-defined criteria for being allowed to do so. Anything less serves nobody, regardless of their views on charter schools.

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Impact of Eroding Teacher Salaries

Not the kind of pattern one would want to see if the goal is to increasr the quality of the workforce, and make the profession more attractive to potential future educators.

Individuals who choose to teach over other professions may be doing so at a consider financial cost as teacher salaries have been in decline during the past three years. It is important to note that between 1978-1979, public elemenatary and secondary school teacher salaries fell over 3%, followed by a 6% drop the following year before picking up again in 1982. The question at large is how bad will the next leg down in teacher salaries be in 2013? So far there’s been nearly a 2.5% drop between 2011-2012. Below is a chart illustrating estimated wage erosion over the past three years for elementary and secondary public school teachers

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Teacher Turnover Affects All Students' Achievement

In light of the Kasich education cuts, and the looming sequestration that will lead ot large education cuts, this article appearing in Education Week should be bourne in mind by law makers.

When teachers leave schools, overall morale appears to suffer enough that student achievement declines—both for those taught by the departed teachers and by students whose teachers stayed put, concludes a study recently presented at a conference held by the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

The impact of teacher turnover is one of the teacher-quality topics that's been hard for researchers to get their arms around. The phenomenon of high rates of teacher turnover has certainly been proven to occur in high-poverty schools more than low-poverty ones. The eminently logical assumption has been that such turnover harms student achievement.

But a couple years back, two researchers did an analysis that showed, counter-intuitively, it's actually the less- effective teachers, rather than the more- effective ones, who tend to leave schools with a high concentration of low-achieving, minority students. It raised the question of whether a degree of turnover might be beneficial, since it seemed to purge schools of underperforming teachers.

When reporting on that study, I played devil's advocate by pointing out that it didn't address the cultural impact of having a staff that's always in flux. The recently released CALDER paper suggests I may have been right in probing this question.

Written by the University of Michigan's Matthew Ronfeldt, Stanford University's Susanna Loeb, and the University of Virginia's Jim Wyckoff, the new paper basically picks up on the same question. Even if overall teacher effectiveness stays the same in a school with turnover, it's well documented that turnover hurts staff cohesion and the shared sense of community in schools, the scholars reasoned. Could that have an impact on student achievement, too?

To find out, they looked at a set of New York City test-score data from 4th and 5th graders over the course of eight years. The data were linked to teacher characteristics.
(All the usual caveats about limitations of test scores apply, of course.)

Among their findings:

• For each analysis, students taught by teachers in the same grade-level team in the same school did worse in years where turnover rates were higher, compared with years in which there was less teacher turnover.
• An increase in teacher turnover by 1 standard deviation corresponded with a decrease in math achievement of 2 percent of a standard deviation; students in grade levels with 100 percent turnover were especially affected, with lower test scores by anywhere from 6 percent to 10 percent of a standard deviation based on the content area.
• The effects were seen in both large and small schools, new and old ones.
• The negative effect of turnover on student achievement was larger in schools with more low-achieving and black students.

Read the whole piece here.

The Long-Run Impact of the Reduction in Classroom teachers

A recent study, by The Hamilton Project, looked at the impacts of cuts to government employment rolls, including educators. Their findings should open a lot of eyes.

One area where there is a sound body of literature to draw upon is the returns to education – specifically, the impact of class-size on student achievement and lifetime earnings. Drawing on this evidence, we quantify the impact of reductions in the number of public school teachers on our country’s future.

In 2011 there were over 220,000 fewer teachers in America’s classrooms than in 2009, a reduction accounting for nearly forty percent of the decrease in public-sector jobs during this period. This decline in the number of teachers increased the student-teacher ratio by 5.9 percent.

To determine the consequences of these reductions, we assumed that class-size increases were applied equally across all grades in K-12 schools. We then drew from recent research that links future earnings with class size to assess the wage impacts for today’s children, when they become working-age adults.1 All of this is explained in more detail here, but the bottom line is that this research suggests that the Great Recession will live on for decades through the lower future wages for our children.

Of course, an important test for the efficiency of government spending is whether the benefits exceed the costs. The savings from these cuts, in terms of teacher salaries and benefits, are $11.8 billion per year nationwide. While a significant figure, it is substantially smaller than the estimated present value in foregone earnings of $49.3 billion dollars for the children, whose education is affected by larger class sizes. To put a fine point on these findings, this translates into a per-student, per-year loss of nearly $1,000 in future earnings. In summary, the foregone benefits are more than four times larger than the current budget savings!

Investing in classroom teachers then, not only improves the economy today, but vastly improves the economy of the future. There's hardly a better return on investment that can be made. Someone ought to tell columbus lawmakers.

Opportunity Knocks

Here's a new one for the ol' Reformy Thesaurus: the "Opportunity Culture" in education.

Sure sounds good, doesn't it? Who doesn't want our American kids to have more opportunities in life? Except--oops--this campaign, rolled out by Public Impact, is actually about opportunities for "teacherpreneurs" to make more money by teaching oversized classes--and of course, for school districts to seize that same opportunity to save money through "innovative" staffing models.

How did this exciting window of opportunity emerge? Public Impact explains:

Only 25 percent of classes are taught by excellent teachers. With an excellent teacher versus an average teacher, students make about an extra half-year of progress every year--closing achievement gaps fast, leaping ahead to become honors students, and surging forward like top international peers.

That's a whole lot of leaping and surging. Unfortunately, it's based on a faux statistic, sitting triumphantly on a pyramid of dubious research, prettied up with some post-modern infographics. Like other overhyped blah-blah of "reform"--the "three great teachers in a row" myth, for example, or nearly every "fact" in Waiting for Superman--it's a triumph of slick media slogans over substance. A quick look at the Opportunity Culture Advisory Team tells you what the real purpose of the OC is: cutting teachers, privatizing services, plugging charters and cultivating a little astroturf to cover the scars.

The Opportunity Culture's bold plan begins with a policy recommendation: Schools should be required by law to identify the top 25% of their teachers. Then, once that simple task is completed, OC suggests ten exciting new models for staffing schools, beginning with giving these excellent teachers a lot more students (plus a merit pay carrot) and ending with enlisting "accountable remote teachers down the street or across the nation" who would "provide live, but not in-person instruction while on-site teammates manage administrative duties and develop the whole child."

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