It is indeed sad to see the state of public schooling in Hawaii. Teachers are furloughed and students are losing valuable classroom time. The state has chosen to use ARRA stimulus funds to fill budget gaps – which has been done by many states – but Hawaii has chosen to cut more than fill.

Arguably, Hawaii’s current education funding problems can be traced back to 2003 and a hard-nosed attempt at revenue-neutral education reforms – Fad-based reforms! Not fact-based ones. Off-the-Shelf School Finance solutions, as Doug Elmer and I describe in a recent article. (http://epx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/1/66)

Some historical context is provided here:

http://archives.starbulletin.com/2003/11/25/news/story2.html

Among other things, Hawaii’s leaders were misled in 2003 to believe that Hawaii already spent far more than necessary on its schools and that decentralized governance alone would solve their problems, driving more money to classrooms without ever having to add a dollar of new revenue.

The report by Bruce Cooper and William Ouchi concluded:

If Hawai’i were to reach classroom spending of 65 cents out of each education dollar, it would mean an additional $46,250 to spend on each classroom per year. This diversion of money to non-core uses is typical only of very large school districts.[1]

The results of our study bear on the consideration by the state of moving to a new system of management, Weighted Student Formula (WSF).

But this was an argument based on shoddy analysis and poorly documented summaries of state spending (actually, state and local total revenue) – comparisons which the authors of the original report even failed to understand. Yet, their message stuck with Hawaii policymakers.  No more money for schools. Just structural (read superficial) reform.

Oddly enough the original Cooper/Ouchi report which chastised Hawaii’s Board of Education for spending way to much to begin with and driving less than 65% to the classroom, never actually provided legitimate analyses supporting the secondary conclusions of that report – promote decentralized governance and implement a weighted student formula with the money you already have! Doug Elmer and I discuss these issues in this article: http://epx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/1/66

This whole series of events provided the governor and legislature in Hawaii the platform to continue starving the state’s education system while placing blame on the State Board of Education for not acting on their reforms, which in their view, would have solved everything. http://www.kpua.net/news.php?id=9232

Hawaii’s education system problems run much deeper than any superficial, off-the-shelf management guru strategy can solve.

Hawaii is among the few states where fewer than 80% of 6 to 16 year old children attend the public school system (78.8% according to American Community Survey 2005 to 2007). Yes, less than 80% of children in the age groups where most kids attend public schools are in Hawaii’s public schools. And yes, they are the lower income kids compared to their peers in Hawaii private schools.

That said, Hawaii’s educational effort (share of Gross state product spent on public schools) is relatively average to above average among states. Further, cross state comparisons of Hawaii’s educational spending provide mixed messages:  Hawaii’s current spending  – depending on how it’s measured and/or how it’s adjusted for regional cost variation is relatively average to above average (looking at total state and local revenue) or below average (looking at current expenditures per pupil) , adjusted for regional costs.

During the recent economic downturn, Hawaii’s total state revenue decline has been near the middle (upper middle) of the pack nationally – total state revenue losses from peak to June 2009 (p. 20 and 21), according to this Rockefeller Institute Report (best site for this stuff):

http://www.rockinst.org/pdf/government_finance/state_revenue_report/2009-10-15-SRR_77.pdf

This very recent WSJ article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125635093976805443.html) shows how Hawaii’s education funding cuts compare to those in states like California, Florida, Georgia and New Mexico – all of which have experienced much greater declines in total state revenue than Hawaii as of earlier this year – according to the Rockefeller Institute analyses linked above.

Even though Hawaii’s total state revenue is not declining as fast as these other states, Hawaii’s cuts to public schools have been comparable or even greater.

A few years back, Scott Thomas (now at Claremont Graduate School) and I were asked to provide analyses for and guidance to the Hawaii Department of Education regarding implementation of the decentralized weighted student funding plan which had been adopted as part of the comprehensive reforms of 2004.  To a large extent, our attempts at modeling financial redistribution options across Hawaii’s schools under revenue neutral assumptions proved to be an exercise in re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic.  Our two reports can be found here:

Part I – includes executive summary and conceptual framing of analyses, along with comparisons to other state formulas

http://sites.google.com/site/schoolfinancepolicy/consulting-reports/Hawaii.Part1%262.2006.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1

Part II & III – includes specific analyses of teacher labor markets, distribution of teachers by qualifications across richer and poorer neighborhoods, locations & islands, and concludes with simulations of redistribution options

http://sites.google.com/site/schoolfinancepolicy/consulting-reports/Hawaii.Part3.2006.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1

On page 34 of the second report, Scott Thomas and I explain:

=======  Begin Excerpt

A recent New York Daily News (7/2/06) editorial opined:

“Rather than simply pumping more gas into this broken down car, it’s time to design a much smarter and more effective way to get from Point A to Point B. A reform idea called ‘weighted student funding’ does just that, making intelligent use of the resources we already devote to education. How? Unlike the current system—which funds school districts through an incredibly complicated calculus—weighted student funding ties the money to the student.” (Cooper)

Increasingly, pundits supporting this view of WSF use the analogy of students carrying with them a need-based backpack of funding. Hawai‘i’s BOE and Committee on Weights now recognizes that in a system already constrained by limited resources, targeting sufficient need-based weighting simply costs more, not less or the same amount of money. As noted in our original report, we do not envy the members of committee charged with redistributing limited resources. If, as our estimates suggest, some schools need 40% more than others on the basis of poverty alone (we believe this to be a low estimate), and if this is to be done with no new money added to the system, then others must necessarily give up 40% of their funding.

In other words, assume Johnny and Malaya both need backpacks and currently they both have $10, sufficient to buy an ordinary backpack at Target or Wal-Mart. But, Malaya, by virtue of combined economic disadvantage and limited English proficiency, needs a $20 backpack. Johnny may need only an $8 backpack—the cheapest available (but with less padded shoulder straps than Johnny is used to). Unfortunately, if we redistribute the necessary resources to Malaya, then Johnny is out of luck altogether. If we leave Johnny with enough for the $8 backpack, then Malaya is out of luck. It’s a lose/lose proposition. For both Johnny and Malaya to get the backpack (read education) they need through a WSF, we will likely have to find more money. We ourselves might view this issue differently if it was plainly obvious that Hawai‘i’s schools are flush with funds and simply squandering those funds on unnecessary, frivolous endeavors. We lack any evidence to support this conclusion.

======= End Excerpt

While I’ve not followed Hawaii closely for the past few years, it would appear that this ship has now begun to sink – widening the gap between the fewer than 80% of children left in public schools (on the ship) in Hawaii and the 20% from first class who had access to life rafts.

I find it most disturbing that much of this mess may have been avoidable had it not been for purely political interests and self-absorbed snake-oil salesmen ready and willing to serve those interests with the simple message that money can’t fix schools.  Off-the-shelf reforms like WSF can!

The reality is that substantive education reform often costs money – sometimes a lot of money and sometimes a lot more than the amount already being spent. Automatically assuming that there’s enough money in a system just because it looks like a big number is not enough. More detailed analysis is required. You can’t starve a system into reform, especially if the reforms cost money. Unfounded assumptions and arguments that there’s plenty of money and that money doesn’t matter and may never matter are not only absurd but are potentially very harmful. It would appear that Hawaii is now becoming a stark example of that harm.

You can rebuild the engine and transmission as many times and in as many ways as you want, but if you don’t eventually put gas in the car, it won’t run!

(my apologies for combining sinking ship metaphors, backpacks and cars that don’t run in a single blog post)

Call me crazy, but I’d have to say that one of my favorite publications of all time is a National Center for Education Statistics report mapping state standards onto NAEP, allowing comparison of where state proficiency benchmarks align with NAEP scores. I’ve likely provided links to that report more than a few times in my blog. Well, they’ve done it again. The new MAPPING STATE PROFICIENCY STANDARDS report is out, and you can find it here:

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2010456.asp

A frequent, but much debated conclusion from teacher quality research is that teachers’ own academic ability, measured by test scores or even more bluntly the “competitiveness” of the colleges teachers attended as undergraduates, is associated with student outcomes. This occurs even when we use such crude classifications as the Barrons Guide rating system. In recent, exceptionally methodologically strong piece, Boyd, Lankford, Loeb and Wyckoff found:

“Furthermore, almost half of the teachers in the most effective quintile (based on student outcomes) graduated from a college ranked competitive or higher by Barron’s, compared to only ten percent of the teachers in the least effective quintile.”(p. 23)

http://www.teacherpolicyresearch.org/portals/1/pdfs/Matching_of_Public_School_Teachers_to_Jobs.pdf

Okay, for some this may hurt, and smacks of elitism. But nonetheless, it is a strong and relatively consistent finding which we should likely give some attention.

This finding is highly relevant to Arne Duncan’s talk yesterday at Teachers College, Columbia University where he took aim at the role of university based preparation programs in Education. Notably, Duncan referred to related work by these very authors, but did not mention this finding. In an effort to be egalitarian, Duncan promoted the virtues of institutions like Teachers College but also those like Emporia State in Kansas.

As I noted in my previous post, one thing we know is that the majority of teachers come through relatively non-competitive undergraduate colleges (on a 6 point rating system, from non-competitive, less competitive, competitive, very competitive, highly competitive, most competitive). On average, public school teachers come from the less competitive and competitive categories (about 2/3 of all teachers in these two categories alone) far more so than the highly and most competitive (about 6.5%). So too do most college students generally. That’s just the way the higher education system is distributed.

Teachers also come in large numbers – 42% – from 1994 carnegie classification – Comprehensive I – colleges and increasingly from less selective liberal arts colleges (carnegie 1994 Liberal Arts II colleges). And these Carnegie classifications from 1994 are somewhat associated with Barrons ratings. In short, the system of teacher education, nationwide, is not set up to produce large numbers of teachers who have the attributes that authors above find to be associated with higher student outcomes. A teacher preparation or administrator preparation program is only as good as its students.

Other authors have argued that the dominance of non-selective colleges in preparing teachers and higher costs of pursing teaching through more selective colleges creates a disincentive for academically strong high school students to pursue teaching. Add this to relatively low salaries, and the problem is exacerbated. Perhaps its the PIPELINE and system as a whole and not so much the individual institutions and prep programs that need reforming. Perhaps we need some incentives to encourage academically talented students to pursue teaching and some incentives to encourage the “highly and most competitive colleges” to get in the game of teacher preparation. At the same time, we may need to make some tough policy decisions about academically weak undergraduate and graduate institutions which have increased their role over time.

An interesting twist related to teacher academic preparation is that principals with stronger academic backgrounds seem more likely to recruit and retain teachers with stronger academic backgrounds (http://eaq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/3/449) So, we’ve got to find some way to get stronger principals into schools where they are needed most, and make sure there is a supply of stronger teachers produced through a better pipeline, from which those principals can build strong teams.

One problem here is that rather than becoming more concentrated in strong academic institutions over time, educational administration programs have become more distributed across more diverse… and quite honestly academically weaker institutions. For example, between 1993 and 2003, comprehensive colleges went from producing about 3% of education leadership doctorates to about 25% (http://eaq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/43/3/279).

So why does that matter? How does this finding relate in any way to the fact that principals with stronger academic backgrounds (measured crudely by Barrons ratings of undergrad colleges) are more likely to hire teachers with stronger backgrounds, and those teachers are shown to make a difference? Isn’t it likely that there exists no relationship between graduate preparation and undergraduate preparation, and that we should be unconcerned that comprehensive colleges are the ones producing the doctorates? Well, again the dots connect logically. As it turns out, we show in the same article above that about 22 to 25% of doctoral recipients from Top 20 ranked (US News, of all things) education schools and 13% to 15% of doctoral recipients at all Research Universities attended highly or most selective undergraduate colleges, compared to only 5% to 10% of doctoral recipients in comprehensive colleges.

Yes, these are relatively harsh and elitist realities. And yes, I am implying that having a strong academic background is likely an important attribute for someone who wishes to lead an educational institution. That seems to make sense.

In his speech yesterday, Arne Duncan invoked the usual comparison to medical training:

http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/2009/10/10222009.html

The point, of course, was to emphasize the importance of clinical training. But, let us not forget that the medical model relies on two critical prerequisites to clinical training – 1) highly selective entrance criteria and 2) successful completion of rigorous undergraduate + 2 years of rigorous content upload of basic sciences and other relevant curriculum. Without academically strong candidates to begin with, the model fails. Without rigorous up-front information uploading, and students who can handle it, the model fails. The medical model is equally reliant on all of its parts, not just the clinical training.

Just connecting some dots here. Cheers.

Secretary Duncan is again on the stump today, at Teachers College (where I attended) where he is expected to make the case that education schools are “cash cows” of the university, generating large sums of tuition revenue which are then diverted to other parts of the university.

http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/2009/10/10222009.html

This proposition is hardly new, and appears to come from the pages of past TC president Arthur Levine in his report on ed schools a few years back.

http://elan.wallacefoundation.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/WF/ELAN/2007%20Second%20Half/EducatingSchoolLeaders.pdf

(this is the one on preparing school leaders. there was also one on teacher education)

At the time, my colleagues and I were intrigued by a number of the assertions being made and engaged in a series of research projects trying to untangle the “realities”, but actually did not explore specifically the cash cow notion. But, our research from that time does have a few facts to offer with respect to the cash cow argument, as well as important general context issues.

First of all, who is producing the teachers, and administrators? One implication of the current rhetoric is that major universities like state flagship universities and major private universities which offer a diverse array of programs, undergraduate and graduate majors are also producing large shares of all teachers. As it turns out, the major research universities actually produced about 13% to 15% of teachers who were working in public schools in 2003-04 and 2007-08. 42% of public school teachers received their undergraduate training at regional comprehensive colleges, many of which were the former “normal schools” or “teachers colleges.” In many of these schools, education majors are the dominant major, perhaps helping to sustain the institutions, but with a minority of other program areas to draw on education tuition dollars – except by the role that liberal arts and science departments play in providing undergraduate credit hours to teachers in their content areas. But, this is revenue received for credits delivered – not a redistribution of profit margin, per se.

The role of education schools in major research universities is potentially more interesting, but again, ed schools in research universities produce a relatively small share of all teachers and that share appears to be declining. The same is true of graduate degrees in educational administration. In the early 1990s, regional comprehensive colleges produced about 3% of doctorates in educational administration, and now produce about 25% or more (as of 2003). That is, graduate degrees in educational administration are being increasingly produced by institutions whose primary goal is to produce educators and education related professionals. So, from these perspectives, it’s getting harder to see how ed schools or programs are substantially subsidizing other schools or programs within universities, when increasingly, the production of educators and educational leaders is being concentrated in schools focused on education.

I’m unsure whether there’s other evidence to contradict this pattern. I’ve not studied it for a few years. There is some evidence that small cash strapped formerly undergrad only liberal arts colleges have expanded delivery of online certificate programs including administrative masters degrees, but they are hardly a major producer yet. In fact, they’ve expanded production in areas such as MBAs even more so than teacher and administrator education.

Now, on to the basic premise laid out by Levine and echoed now by Duncan, that ed school tuition dollars subsidize the rest of the university. This could be the case if tuition was constant for a credit hour across all students in all units in the university and if the average cost of providing a credit hour to undergrads was lower for education students than for other students in the university. One might imagine this to be the case, if we assume that education faculty are simply less well paid, for example, than engineering, business or economics faculty and that ed school classes are large. Actually, the bigger driver of cost per credit hour produced is the class size piece.

A few years back Chris Morphew and I did an analysis of data from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty, estimating wage models and models of “cost per credit hour” by field in which those credit hours were delivered. We accounted for relative salary of similar rank faculty, share of salary to teaching and class sizes of average undergrad load of teaching faculty. We actually found that ed school credit hour costs were about average, comparable to business for that matter. While b-school salaries were higher, ed school class sizes were smaller, on average across the full range of undergrad courses. Next, we linked our credit hour cost estimates to course taking data on students in different majors to come up with estimates of the relative cost of producing and ed major versus an econ major, etc. based on the full mix of courses students take across units in a university and the relative price of those units. Again, cost of producing an ed major was relatively average – not low.

Now, there are factors we could not and did not consider with our limited data – including shares of undergrad credits delivered by teaching assistants  and whether this rate is significantly higher, or lower for ed schools. We also were unable to generate estimates of other “overhead” costs such as equipment that might be necessary in engineering or sciences, but this would hardly seem to compromise comparisons between ed schools and other areas such as social sciences that would seemingly have comparable non-faculty expenses.

That said, I’d be curious as to what other evidence is now out there to support, or refute this assertion that Duncan is now making. Here’s my preliminary reading list for anyone interested:
Morphew, C., Baker, B.D. (2007) On the Utility of National Data for Estimating Generalizable Price and Cost Indices in Higher Education. Journal of Education Finance 33 (1) 20-49

Baker, B.D, Orr, M.T., Young, M.D. (2007) Academic Drift, Institutional Production and Professional Distribution of Graduate Degrees in Educational Administration. Educational Administration Quarterly 43 (3)  279-318

Baker, B.D., Wolf-Wendel, L.E., Twombly, S.B. (2007) Exploring the Faculty Pipeline in Educational Administration: Evidence from the Survey of Earned Doctorates 1990 to 2000. Educational Administration Quarterly 43 (2) 189-220

Wolf-Wendel, L, Baker, B.D., Twombly, S., Tollefson, N., & Mahlios, M.  (2006) Who’s Teaching the Teachers? Evidence from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty and Survey of Earned Doctorates.  American Journal of Education 112 (2) 273-300

Here’s a link to a new report on the effect of the economic downturn on state tax revenues. Particularly interesting is the table ranking overall budget impact across states on Page 20 (Table 12).

http://www.rockinst.org/pdf/government_finance/state_revenue_report/2009-10-15-SRR_77.pdf