There's Good Money in the Ed Reform Racket

The University of Washington's very own Marguerite Roza, an assistant professor at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, made quite a splash recently with a study arguing that states should no longer pay additional money to teachers when they earn Masters degrees. This isn't a new line of thought, but getting a full page write-up in Education Week and a mention in the Education Gadfly in short order isn't a bad month for an education researcher.

I've written about her before as well, here.

Her research is pretty counterintuitive, particularly to a happy union hack such as myself. Recent topics have included the idea that teachers could take a pay-cut to stave off layoffs, that insurance benefits are rather wasted, and now this new bon mot about degrees. It makes one wonder, how comfortable is this professor who has made the thrust of her research an examination on how to take salary and benefits away from teachers?

Turns out, courtesy of the state salary database at the News Tribune, that Dr. Roza is doing quite well indeed--a $10,400 monthly base salary, which works out to a cool $124,800 per year. Not too shabby!

I've ragged on Dan Goldhaber of the UW before, too--he's written about education, and is a very convincing public speaker, but the ideas that he presented during the Basic Ed Finance hearings were waaaaaaaaay out there. According to the Tribune Dr. Goldhaber makes $13,530 a month, or $162,360 a year. Those numbers are provided by the state.

Want to know why teachers are often so cynical about change agents? Because it's usually not the change agent who will be most affected by whatever grand idea is being proposed--it's the teachers.

(For the record, I made $46,341 last year with a Masters degree plus 8 years)

Read more here, if any.

What’s Important from the May 2008 WERA Newsletter?

The Washington Educational Research Association (WERA) recently put out the newest edition of their quarterly newsletter. Some highlights:

• The front page article is by Robin Munson of OSPI on how the job of assessment director and testing coordinator has changed in the last decade. It’s an interesting read on how the system has evolved; those of you out there who are currently working with testing will appreciate it.
  
  
• New WERA president Nancy Arnold of Puyallup points out the white papers section of the WERA website in her column, which seems like an odd thing to highlight because it’s not the most well-developed resource they have.
  
  
• Later on, in the report from the annual meeting in March, there is discussion about strengthening the bond between WERA and higher education staff. This is a good thing, and it could go a long ways towards fixing the problem above. If a professor came up to me and said, “Ryan, good paper—make these revisions and it’ll get published on the WERA home page!”, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I suspect I’m not the only one.
  
  
• The Winter WERA Conference is December 3rd through 5th at the Airport Hilton in Sea-Tac. Start saving your money now.
  
  
• I have fallen in love with Google Scholar. Where was this during my undergraduate days?
  
  
• I also like ERIC’s new web interface. Getting research has never been easier.

It’s another great newsletter from WERA. I’m glad I’m a member.

Read more here, if any.

What Value Value Added?

There’s an interesting article in the May 7th Education Week on the “value added” model for judging teachers and schools. Under a value added (VA) system quality is judged by the change scores on a consistent scale; the MAP assessment from the NWEA is a good example of what a value-added test might look like. Some pieces from the article that struck me:

“My personal opinion is that this model is promising way more than it can deliver,” (Audrey Amrein-Beardsley) said in an interview with Education Week. “The problem is that when these things are being sold to superintendents, they don’t know any better.”

I’d be curious to understand what exactly it is that a data model like value added can really promise. The results of data analysis can be spun in a variety of ways, true, but the data itself is what it is. I’ve looked at VA as more a piece of the puzzle rather than as a whole puzzle in of itself, but maybe I need to look closer at the issue.

Later the article talks about the problems associated with using VA for programs like merit pay:

For example, results might be biased if it turns out that a school’s students are not randomly assigned to teachers—if, for instance, principals routinely give high-achieving students to the teachers who are considered the school’s best.

This is a legitimate concern. I’ve known several teachers in my short career who can do amazing things with gifted kids but can’t reach out to the low learners at all; by the same token, I want the low kids because the growth is the most spectacular in them. I think that this could be a strength of VA, because if you add 30 points to the scaled score of a low kid but only 5 to a high achiever, it’s clear where the most progress was made.

The most important piece of the article, and one that I’ve brushed on before:

But the more sophisticated the technique, the less understandable it could become for practitioners. The question is whether the added accuracy will make it harder for teachers and administrators to buy into value-added accountability systems, several experts say.

It’s critical that the teachers understand what the score on the test means, and that they know what factors could move that score up or down, especially if you intend to use this test to make a judgment about the teachers or their students. There’s nothing that breeds distrust faster than to be told, “You don’t need to know the details,” because that’s where the devil usually is.

It will be interesting to watch this conversation unfold.

Read more here, if any.

A Sad Statement on the Value We Place on Education

The March 5th issue of Education Week scratched my research itch with a front-page article on how the coming election could potentially change the emphasis that NCLB places on "scientifically based" research; they cite a recent forum (note: the link has video! and audio!) hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, and the quotes they pulled from it are very thoughtful.

The piece that really grabbed me came from a section on funding for educational research, with many saying it wasn't enough. The DoED spent $327,000,000 on research during FY2007, which sounds like a fantastic number until you compare it to other areas. Quoting the article:

The research and development budget of the US Department of Education falls far short of the total R&D budgets, shown below in millions of dollars and including facilities, of many other federal agencies.

Department	FY 2007 Actual
Defense	$78,936
Health and Human Services	$29,566
NASA	$9,952
Energy	$8,522
National Science Foundation	$4,440
Agriculture	$2,275
Commerce	$1,080
Homeland Security	$1,003
Veteran's Affairs	$819
Transportation	$768
Interior	$607
EPA	$606
Education	$327

Put another way, the budget for education research is 4/10 of 1 percent of the budget for military research.

We teachers need better lobbyists.

Read more here, if any.

Bridging the Academe/K-12 Divide

I think that anyone in education who has worked towards a master’s degree has met the sort. They’re nice enough, in their tweed jackets and sensible shoes, many of the things they say make sense on a visceral level, and their doctorates lend a sense of credibility to what they do. Then, one day, the realization comes to you. It might be as sudden as the flap of a hummingbird’s wings, or it might suddenly make itself obvious like an expected landmark on the horizon, but it’s an undeniable truth, and it’s earth shattering.

I speak, of course, of professors who don’t know what they’re talking about.

I’ve been blessed in my Leadership program to have had quality instructors, but I had some real lulus during my masters program. One had an academics understanding of teaching, but hadn’t actually taught in the classroom in better than 20 years; another crowed about how she went and read at her grandson’s elementary school for an hour a week. These were your strict Vigotzkians who believed that all knowledge could be discovered eventually through play, that all classes would follow the rules if only they wrote them for themselves, and that phonics was a plot by the same people who hate Head Start to take all of the joie de vivre out of education. These were the same folks who are telling my student teachers that an acceptable lesson plan is about 5 pages long when I’m telling them you should be able to write it on a note card.

These people are idiots.

I bring it up because of an excellent commentary in the February 28th Chronicle of Higher Education (Creating a Third Culture), penned by Robert Weisbuch of Drew University, where he talks about the “gorge” that divides the theory of the academe from the practice of the schools. I think that it’s an important topic, because if we were able to harness the brainpower of the colleges to give all of us in K-12 those things we actually need (Kindergarten readiness tests! Quick and easy phonics screens! A DIBELS for math!) the whole system would benefit.

It’s a thoughtful article that would benefit anyone interested in education policy. I've also written some other posts about the research-to-practice gap that you can find here.

Read more here, if any.

A New Model for Education Research

That’s the title of a paid commentary from the Education Deans Alliance that appears in the December 12th Education Week. The research-to-practice theme is one that I’ve thought about quite a bit, so I found it pretty interesting. You can read it here.

Read more here, if any.

Education Research Could Improve Schools, But Probably Won’t

That’s the title of a brilliant commentary by Ronald Wolk in the new issue of Education Week. It’s one of the best articles they’ve run in the last couple of years and should certainly be required reading for anyone working with education research. Some excerpts, with commentary:

In my idealistic days 25 years ago, I believed that education research would lead us to the promised land of successful schools and high student achievement……As much as I hate to say it—and I truly hope I am wrong—I no longer believe it, and here’s why:

Research is not readily accessible—either physically or intellectually—to the potential users. Summaries of major studies appear in periodicals like Education Week, by the detailed results (usually written for other researchers in academic-speak) are usually available only in separate reports or in relatively low-circulation journals that don’t reach those who most need to know.

The research that you see utilized in the schools is usually action research, usually carried out by the teacher as an individual or part of their team, and usually fairly meaningless to anyone but that one teacher. This is where “That’s always worked for me!” and “Oh man, this program was great!” come from, which is also the birthing ground of some of the worst habits in our schools.

And the heavy use of intelligentsia vernacular (like that, see!) is a major obstacle that cuts two ways; unapproachable language turns off teachers, and if you refine the reports too much (for example, turning the 500+ pages of A Nation at Risk into “Kids Is Dumb”), you risk losing the meaning in the condensing.

Even if research findings were widely available and written in clear prose that even a dimwit like me could understand, the reports would not be widely read. Most teachers are not consumers of research, nor are most principals or superintendents.

And even if educators and policymakers did read all the studies in a timely fashion, schools and education practice would not change very much, mainly because making significant changes means altering value structures, disrupting routines, and teaching old dogs new tricks.

My belief is that most teachers don’t care about research because there’s such a disconnect between the theory and reality. I’ll single out The Reading Teacher from the International Reading Association for a mild chiding here. They run research in every issue, but often times it’s impossible to see how you can translate what looks good on paper into a practical, useable classroom strategy. Schools are curriculum-driven; we trust that the curriculum is research-based, and during the adoption process some wag will often pipe up with a “What does the research say?” If there was research out there that said that an element of the curriculum wasn’t a best practice, most teachers would ignore the research and keep on with what’s in the teacher’s guide. It’s just what they do.

Moreover, researchers seem to delight in neutralizing each other. That’s easier to do in social sciences than the physical sciences because there are so many uncontrollable variables. And the bigger the question addressed, the more vulnerable the findings.

When one study claims small classes boost student achievement, another insists they do not. One study finds social promotion harmful; another says retentions hurts children more. Money matters; no it does not. Vouchers work; no they do not. And on and on.

This, too, is why teachers trust their own practices and their own numbers far more than they do anything that is passed down from the Ivory Tower. I can be a consumer and judge what’s working within my four walls, and I can mostly trust what I’m seeing with my own two eyes, but expanding beyond that invites a chorus of often discordant voices that may or may not help, and if I can’t trust that they’ll make my practice better, why bother?

It’s a good article, very thoughtful, and well worth tracking down. Highest recommendations!

Read more here, if any.