This post is an update to a series of earlier posts in which I summarized the production of education degrees over time. As policymakers continue their critiques of the supposed decline in the quality of teacher preparation, as if teacher and leader preparation has been static since the 1950s, it’s worth again looking at trends of the last 20+ years to see just what has changed.  The following graphs summarize undergraduate and graduate degree production classified by a) undergraduate institution selectivity as reported in Barron’s guides and b) institutional classifications from the 1994 Carnegie Classification system, which was more hierarchical (read: elitist) than later versions.

Related Research

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., Fuller, E. The Declining Academic Quality of School Principals and Why it May Matter. Baker.Fuller.PrincipalQuality.Mo.Wi_Jan7

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

1994 Carnegie Classifications

• Research Universities I: These institutions offer a full range of baccalaureate programs, are committed to graduate education through the doctorate, and give high priority to research. They award 50 or more doctoral degrees1 each year. In addition, they receive annually $40 million or more in federal support.
• Research Universities II: These institutions offer a full range of baccalaureate programs, are committed to graduate education through the doctorate, and give high priority to research. They award 50 or more doctoral degrees1 each year. In addition, they receive annually between $15.5 million and $40 million in federal support.
• Doctoral Universities I: These institutions offer a full range of baccalaureate programs and are committed to graduate education through the doctorate. They award at least 40 doctoral degrees1 annually in five or more disciplines.
• Doctoral Universities II: These institutions offer a full range of baccalaureate programs and are committed to graduate education through the doctorate. They award annually at least ten doctoral degrees—in three or more disciplines—or 20 or more doctoral degrees in one or more disciplines.
• Master’s (Comprehensive) Universities and Colleges I: These institutions offer a full range of baccalaureate programs and are committed to graduate education through the master’s degree. They award 40 or more master’s degrees annually in three or more disciplines. [Includes typical regional, within-state public normal schools/teachers colleges]
• Master’s (Comprehensive) Universities and Colleges II: These institutions offer a full range of baccalaureate programs and are committed to graduate education through the master’s degree. They award 20 or more master’s degrees annually in one or more disciplines.
• Baccalaureate (Liberal Arts) Colleges I: These institutions are primarily undergraduate colleges with major emphasis on baccalaureate degree programs. They award 40 percent or more of their baccalaureate degrees in liberal arts fields4 and are restrictive in admissions.
• Baccalaureate Colleges II: These institutions are primarily undergraduate colleges with major emphasis on baccalaureate degree programs. They award less than 40 percent of their baccalaureate degrees in liberal arts fields4 or are less restrictive in admissions. [Includes many cash-strapped, relatively non-selective, smaller private liberal arts colleges]

This post is a follow up on my previous post where I discussed which charter school operators are actually leading the nation in charter school enrollments. Here are a some slides breaking out the charter school enrollments by operator/manager for a handful of states.  These slides are made possible by my meticulous graduate student Mark Weber, who spent hours aligning operator classifications and school links first presented by Gary Miron and colleagues, and merging those classifications to the 2011-12 National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data and Civil Rights Data Collections.

The data are likely imperfect in many ways. For one, it’s not always easy to figure out exactly who’s managing what school. In addition, charter school enrollments have continued to expand rapidly since this time. But, we have little reason to believe, for example, that the distribution of operators within the charter sector has shifted dramatically. Bottom line – we should have better – “officially” (USDOE/NCES, SEAs) gathered data on such things.  For now, we don’t.

In later posts, I will, time permitting, spend a bit more time discussing some of the operators I’ve highlighted in red (w/yellow font) on these slides. My previous post includes some links and to some, these names will be familiar.

Bruce D. Baker & Mark Weber, Rutgers University, Graduate School of Education

November 16, 2015

Baker.Weber.NewarkBetterOff.NJEPF.11_15_15

In this research note, we estimate a series of models using publicly available school level data to address the following question:

Q: Did students in Newark (combined district and charter) make gains on statewide averages (non-Newark) on state assessments, controlling for demographics?

Specifically, we evaluate changes in mean scale scores on state assessments (NJASK) for language arts and math grades 6 to 8.

Newark Reforms Since 2009

Schools in the city of Newark have undergone a series of disruptive reforms since 2009, including substantial increases in the numbers of children served in charter schools, adoption of a unified enrollment system, ratification of a performance based teacher contract, and school closures, reconstitutions and reorganization.[i] Some of these reforms were instituted following the much publicized gift of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, chronicled in Dale Russakoff’s The Prize.[ii]

A commonly asked question in the aftermath of these disruptions is whether students in Newark on the whole are better off than they were before these reforms? That is, were the disruptions and resulting political turmoil worth it? Some have chosen to speculate, based largely on anecdotal evidence, that children in Newark must be better off today than before these disruptive reforms.

Chris Cerf, former NJ Commissioner of Education and current State Superintendent of Schools for the Newark Public Schools, asserts that the past few years have brought significant positive changes for Newark’s schools:

“Whether the measure is graduation rates, improved instructional quality, last year’s improvement in the lowest-performing schools targeted for special intervention, a nation-leading new collective-bargaining agreement, the addition of many new high-quality public schools, increased parental choice, or a material increase in the proportion of effective teachers, the arrow is pointed decidedly up in Newark.

“To be sure, as is always the case, the evidence of improvement is textured and in some respects uneven. The many positive indicators and trend lines, however, paint a picture of hope and progress that is completely at odds with the pessimism that has made its way into the standard storyline.”[iii]

Tom Moran, Editorial Page Editor of the Star-Ledger and a consistent supporter of the Newark reforms, writes: “The growth of charters has not damaged the kids in the traditional system. In fact, they’ve made modest improvements.”[iv] In a post on his Facebook page, Mark Zuckerberg, whose $100 million gift was the catalyst for the NPS reforms, writes: “No effort like this is ever going to be without challenges, mistakes and honest differences among people with good intentions. We welcome a full analysis and debate of lessons learned. But it is important that we not overlook the positive results.”[v]The chief-of-staff for Cory Booker, former mayor of Newark and current U.S. senator who was instrumental in secure Zuckerberg’s donation, states: “Newark students are quite simply better off now than they were five years ago.”[vi]

In these conversations, “better off” is often reduced to whether or not, on average, across district and charter schools, student test scores for children in Newark have improved. That is, are students achieving more than they otherwise would have, had there been no such disruptions? It remains far too soon to measure longer term outcomes, including graduation rates, college attendance or economic outcomes.

While we are unable to compare against what might have been in the absence of reforms, we can at least evaluate whether children in Newark have made progress when compared to statewide averages, controlling for student population characteristics.

Data

To make these comparisons we use a school level data set including measures from 2009 to 2014, most of which are publicly available – downloadable from the New Jersey Department of Education web site:

• Mean scale scores by subject and year[vii]
• Shares of low income (% free lunch) children and ELL[viii]
• City of school location[ix]

Web-based data do not include school level shares of children classified as having disabilities. We have obtained those data via request. Because of the volatility of year to year school level measures of disability populations, we have used three year averages in our analyses (for this measure only).

Among the most significant changes over time in the city of Newark has been the expansion of numbers of children served in the city’s charter schools, and adoption of a unified, citywide enrollment system for assigning children to charters.

Figure 1 shows the shares of valid scale scores for charter schools (as a percent of citywide valid scale scores) on state assessments. For grades 6 and 7, the share of valid test scores (for data included in our analyses) in Newark that are for children attending charter schools rise from around 18% to 25% or more from 2009 to 2014. The share of valid test scores for 8^th grade assessments also rises, but somewhat less.

Figure 1

Statewide, the share of valid test scores coming from children attending charter schools is much lower, rising to just over 2%.

Figure 2

Models

Assessing whether or not mean scores in Newark as a whole are rising faster or slower than mean scores for schools statewide other than Newark is relatively straightforward statistically (whether meaningful or not is another question entirely). To address this question, we estimate the following model:

Scale Score_st = b₀ + b₁Year + b₂Newark + b₃Year x Newark + b₄LowIncome_st + b₅ELL_st + b₆Disability_s+ e_st

Where scale scores for school “s” at time “t” are the dependent variable, and where we run separate models for each scale score. For each school statewide, we include measures of the share of children who qualify for free lunch, under the national school lunch program, shares of children who are limited in their English language proficiency and shares of children classified as having disabilities. As such, we am comparing changes in the relative position of Newark children to non-Newark children of similar demographics.

Scale scores for any subject and grade level tend to drift over time. As such, we include a set of “year” dummy variables which pick up that drift (more later). We also include a “Newark” dummy variable assigned to every district and charter school in Newark. The coefficient on this dummy variable will tell us whether the average score for children in schools in Newark is different from the average scale score for children not in Newark, controlling for demographics.

Of particular interest here is the interaction term of “Year x Newark.” The coefficients on this term will tell me whether, for each year, the scores of children in Newark have closed the gap (relative to the baseline year of 2009) when compared with children not in Newark, controlling for demographics.

Grade level differences are accounted for by modeling each subject by grade level assessment separately. We focus on grades 6 through 8 (rather than 3 through 5) to capture cumulative effects of schooling.

All models are weighted for school counts of valid test takers. Models are estimated with robust standard errors to account for the fact that repeated measures on schools over time are not independent.[x]

Findings

Table 1 shows the results of the regression models. Starting with demographic effects, the models show us that as we move from a school with 0% to 100% special education students, the average 6^th grade language arts scores drop by over 50 points. More realistically, as we move from about 10% to about 20% children with disabilities, average scale scores drop by about 5 points. Similarly, as we move from 0% low income to 100% low income, mean scale scores in 6^th grade language arts are about 42 points lower. Demographic disparities in math tend to be greater than in language arts on these assessments.

Table 1

Turning to the coefficients of interest: First we see that the “year” dummy variables have many significant coefficients. These represent average score differences from the baseline year of 2009. For example, for 6^th grade math, we see than in 2010, average scores were 1.42 points higher than in 2009. In 2011, they were 6.31 points higher than in 2009. The margins grow up through 2014. These coefficients represent a strong upward drift in Math 6 scores from 2009 to 2014. It is that drift against which changes in Newark scores must be measured. Math scores in general show stronger upward drift than language arts within the New Jersey data.

The “Newark” coefficients show that on average, after accounting for demographics, scale scores for Newark are a few points higher than statewide, but only statistically significant for Language Arts in 8^th grade.         Now for the interaction term: The interaction term tells us whether Newark schools on the whole (charters and district combined, where ¼ of scores are contributed by charters at the end of the period), are gaining on, losing ground or staying in the same relative position to other schools statewide. Since Newark schools on average are ahead of schools statewide (controlling for demographics), the question is whether they open up that lead, hold it, or lose it.

A quick summary of the coefficients in Table 1, focusing on the end of the period, tells us that in 2013 and 2014, Newark schools had gained no ground on schools statewide- period. Statistically, in terms of these measured outcomes, Newark children are not better off in their aggregate, compared to peers statewide than they were in 2009. They are also no worse off.

The figures that follow illustrate the changes in Newark scores compared to statewide scores for each assessment over time. To generate these figures we use the coefficients in Table 1 to calculate predicted values of the scale scores for Newark and non-Newark schools holding other measures constant. For example, we set all demographics to 0, such that the projected scale scores represent the scale scores of Newark and non-Newark schools at 0% low income, 0% ELL and 0% special education. This is why the average scale scores appear high. But all that’s relevant here are the relative position of Newark and non-Newark scores. We could have adjusted everything downward by setting all demographics to 100% (100% low income, 100% ELL and 100% disability). That would have simply lowered the level of the lines on all graphs but kept their trends and relative positions the same.

Each figure shows that scores of Newark children did jump in 2011 in some cases opening up a statistically significant gap with non-Newark children. In some cases the gap is increased as much if not more so by a drop in scores of non-Newark children. 8^th grade language arts is the only assessment addressed here which does not show that 2011 change.

But the apparent change in 2011 immediately disappears, such that by the end of the period – by 2014 – there are no differences in Newark students’ performance than students statewide and no gains made by Newark students compared to students statewide. On most assessments, from 2011 to 2014, Newark scores seem to flat-line or even drop.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

Conclusions

In a recent interview, Russakoff stated that she did not believe Newark’s students are better off today than they were five years ago: “…it feels like a wash.”[xi] The analysis herein, while admittedly narrow in scope and short in time frame perspective, finds that Russakoff is correct. Average state assessment scores in grades 6, 7 and 8 are pretty much right where they were – relative to non-Newark students – in 2009.

Follow-up analyses are certainly warranted, but limited by changes in state outcome measures.

NOTES

[i] Weber, M. (2015) Empirical Critique of One Newark: First year update. New Jersey Education Policy Forum. https://njedpolicy.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/empirical-critique-of-one-newark-first-year-update/

[ii] Russakoff, Dale (2015) The Prize: Who’s in charge of America’s schools? New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

[iii] http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/14/12/01/op-ed-dispelling-five-falsehoods-about-newark-s-school-system/

[iv]http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/09/newark_moran.html

[v] https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102461248065941?fref=nf

[vi] http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2015/11/newark_power_brokers_back_zuckerbergs_school_donat.html

[vii] http://www.nj.gov/education/schools/achievement/prior.htm

[viii] http://www.nj.gov/education/data/enr/

[ix] http://education.state.nj.us/directory/

[x] http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/webbooks/reg/chapter4/statareg4.htm

[xi] http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/09/author_dale_russakoff_discusses_new_book_on_newark.html

Today’s musing:

It is important to acknowledge that charter school market shares are not, in recent years, expanding exclusively or even primarily because of market demand and personal/family preferences for charter schools. Traditional district public schools are being closed, neighborhoods left without options other than charters, district schools are being reconstituted and handed over to charter operators (including entire districts), and district schools are increasingly deprived of resources, experience burgeoning class sizes, reductions in program offerings sending more families scrambling for their “least bad” nearest alternative. [i] These are conscious decisions of policymakers overseeing the system that includes district and charter schools. They are not market forces, and should never be confused as such. These systems are being centrally managed without regard for equity and adequacy goals or the protection of student, family, taxpayer and employee rights, but instead, on the false hope that liberty of choice is a substitute for all of the above (including, apparently, loss of individual liberties). [ii]

NOTES

[i] See, for example:

Mezzacappa, Dale (2015, Oct. 1) Hite Plan: More charter conversions, closings, turnarounds, and new schools. Philadelphia Public School Notebook. http://thenotebook.org/blog/159023/hite-plan-more-renaissance-charters-closings-turnarounds-new-schools

Weber, Mark (2015) Empirical Critique of “One Newark”: First Year Update. New Jersey Education Policy Forum. https://njedpolicy.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/weber-testimony.pdf

Weber, Mark (2015, Jun. 5) Camden’s “Transformation” Schools: Racial & Experience Disparity in Staff Consequences. https://njedpolicy.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/weber_camdentransformationsfinal.pdf

[ii]   Green, P.C.; & Baker, B.D.; & Oluwole, J. (2015, forthcoming). The Legal Status of Charter Schools in State Statutory Law- University of Massachusetts Law Review.

Green, P.C., Baker, B. D., & Oluwole, J.O. (2013). Having it both ways: How charter schools try to obtain funding of public schools and the autonomy of private schools. Emory Law Journal, 63, 303-337.

Mead, J.F. (2015). The Right to an Education or the Right to Shop for Schooling: Examining Voucher Programs in Relation to State Constitutional Guarantees, 42 Fordham Urban Law Journal 703.

Civil Rights Suspended: An Analysis of New York City Charter School Discipline Policies (2015). Advocates for Children of New York. http://www.advocatesforchildren.org/sites/default/files/library/civil_rights_suspended.pdf?pt=1

The blogging has been quiet for a while. This is partly because I feel like most issues that arise have already been dealt with somewhere on this blog. Also because I’ve been involved in several, simultaneous, long-term projects. These projects intersect with many topics I’ve addressed previously on this blog. At times, this blog serves as a palette for testing/sharing ideas. So… in this, and a rapid fire sequence of follow up posts, I will share some excerpts of forthcoming, and early stage in progress work. 

[from work in progress]

An Opportunity for Scalable Innovation

Since its origins in the early 1990s, the charter school sector has grown to over 6,500 schools serving over 2.25 million children in 2013.[i] In some states, the share of children now attending charter schools exceeds 10% (Arizona, Colorado), and in select major cities that share exceeds one-third (District of Columbia, Detroit, New Orleans).[ii] Modern day charter schools were conceived by union leader Albert Shanker in the 1980s as providing opportunities for creative, independent educators to collaborate and test new ideas with lessened policy constraints. [iii] To the extent these innovations were successful they might inform practices in traditional district schools. Over the next few decades, states adopted statutes providing opportunities for individuals and organizations, including traditional districts, to create these newly chartered schools. In some cases, statutes allowed for the creation of charters governed and financed by existing districts, and in other cases, for the creation of charters independent of district governance, while operating within the boundaries of and in competition with local public districts.

While charter schooling was conceived as a way to spur innovation – try new things – evaluate them – and inform the larger system, studies of the structure and practices of charter schooling find the sector as a whole not to be particularly “innovative.” [iv] Analyses by charter advocates at the American Enterprise Institute find that the dominant form of specialized charter school is the “no excuses” model – a model which combines traditional curriculum and direct instruction with strict disciplinary policies and school uniforms, in some cases providing extended school days and years.[v] Further, charter schools raising substantial additional revenue through private giving tend to use that funding to a) provide smaller classes, and b) pay teachers higher salaries for working longer days and years.[vi] For those spending less, total costs are held down, when necessary, through employing relatively inexperienced, low wage staff and maintaining high staff turnover rates.[vii] In other words, the most common innovations are not especially innovative or informative for systemic reform.

Emergence of Private Managers

The early charter movement coincided with the emergence of private management firms interested in public schooling. Two private for-profit companies tried their hand at providing school management services for public districts in the 1990s – Edison Schools, Inc. and Education Alternatives, Inc.[viii] Education Alternatives, Inc. a publicly traded for-profit company, failed financially while holding an operating contract for 9 (then 11) schools within Baltimore City Public Schools, soon after signing a contract with Hartford Connecticut Public Schools. The company failed prior to taking full responsibility for schools in Hartford. Edison Schools expanded cautiously in the wake of EAI’s failure, operating a school in Wichita, Kansas, in 1995 and 25 schools nationally by the end of 1996.[ix] Edison also faced financial troubles as a publicly traded stock, eventually buying back their company stock in 2003 and reverting to privately held status.[x]

As charter schools expanded, including online and hybrid schooling options, Edison Schools and other new, upstart for-profit companies shifted their growth strategy to the charter sector, where they could control employment contracts, increasing financial flexibility and profit potential. Coinciding with these developments, many now high-profile nonprofit charter management firms got their start as founders of single charter schools, including the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), with middle schools in Houston and New York City; Uncommon Schools, founded from North Star Academy in Newark, NJ; and Achievement First, founded from Amistad Academy in New Haven, CT. Presently the charter school landscape consists of a mix of schools operated by major nonprofit Charter Management Organizations, schools operated by for-profit managers, schools operated by other education management organizations described by Miron and colleagues as nonprofit in formal status but engaging in contractual arrangements more similar to for-profit organizations, and schools that remain independently operated (“mom-and-pop”).[xi]

From Portfolios to Parasites?

As early as the mid-1990s, authors including Paul Hill, James Guthrie and Lawrence Pierce (1997) advocated that entire school districts should be reorganized into collections of privately managed contract schools.[xii] This contract school proposal emerged despite the abject failure of Education Alternatives, Inc. in Baltimore and Hartford. This proposal provided a framework for renewed attempts at large scale private management including the contracting of management for several Philadelphia public schools in the early 2000s. Philadelphia’s experiment in private contracting yielded mixed results, at best.[xiii] Notably, Hill and colleagues’ contract school model depended on a centralized authority to manage the contracts and maintain accountability, a precursor to what is now commonly referred to as a “portfolio” model. In the portfolio model, a centralized authority oversees a system of publicly financed schools, both traditional district operated and independent, charter operated, wherein either type of school might be privately managed.[xiv] The goal as phrased by former New York City schools’ Chancellor Joel Klein is to replace school systems with systems of great schools.[xv]

A very different reality of charter school governance, however, has emerged under state charter school laws – one that presents at least equal likelihood that charters established within districts operate primarily in competition, not cooperation with their host, to serve a finite set of students and draw from a finite pool of resources. One might characterize this as a parasitic rather than portfolio model – one in which the condition of the host is of little concern to any single charter operator. Such a model emerges because under most state charter laws, locally elected officials – boards of education – have limited control over charter school expansion within their boundaries, or over the resources that must be dedicated to charter schools. Thus, there is no single, centralized authority managing the portfolio – the distributions of enrollments and/or resources – or protecting against irreparable damage to any one part of the system (be the parasites or the host).

Figure 1 displays a system in which a set of District Operated Schools (DOS), District Charter Schools (DCS) and Independent Charter Schools (ICS) serve a geographic space previously governed and operated entirely by local elected officials. In many states, independent charter schools may only be authorized by a government or government appointed entity – a single authorizer. Nonetheless, these schools are not required to be responsive to local elected governance (unless required under state charter law) and have little or no incentive to be concerned with the financial condition of their host. In other states, additional entities may authorize charter schools to compete for students and resources in the same geographic space. This approach further disperses authority for schools serving any geographic area. Among other issues, dispersed authorization provides the opportunity for potential charter operators, including those with previously failing track records to “shop” for authorizers who will more readily permit their expansion and more likely turn a blind eye to academic failure and/or financial mismanagement.[xvi]

Figure 1

Proponents of the dispersed governance model in Figure 1 assert that competition both for governance/accountability and for management/operations of schools provides greater opportunity for rapid expansion and innovation. However, some of the more dispersed multiple authorizer[xvii] governance models have been plagued by weak accountability, financial malfeasance and persistently low performing charter operators, coupled with rapid, unfettered, under-regulated growth.[xviii]

Nonetheless, charter advocacy organizations including Bellwether Education Partners (BEP) continue to argue for more rapid growth and increased market share for charter schooling. BEP provides a facile extrapolation (along unconstrained linear trajectories) to claim that at current rates, the charter sector will grow to serve 20 to 40% of all U.S. students by 2035. For charter expansion advocates like BEP, however, even this rate is too slow, constrained by having too few authorizers, caps on new charters in some states and unwillingness of districts as authorizers to approve new charter applications.[xix] For charter advocacy organizations, tight centralized regulation and slow or limited growth of charters is a non-sequitur, with the optimal balance somewhere between approximately 40% (Washington, DC) and 100% (New Orleans) of children served by independent charter schools.[xx]

Fiscal Stress, Inefficiency & Charter Expansion?

Increased attention is being been paid to the fiscal and enrollment effects of charter schooling on host districts. These concerns come at a time when municipal fiscal stress and the potential for large-scale municipal and school district bankruptcies are in the media spotlight.[xxi] Many high profile cases of municipal fiscal stress are in cities where the charter sector is thriving.[xxii] Some charter advocates have gone so far as to assert that school district bankruptcy presents “huge opportunity” to absolve the taxpaying public of existing debts and financial obligations and start fresh under new management, reallocating those funds to classrooms.[xxiii] Of course, this strategy ignores the complexities of municipal bankruptcy proceedings, and the contractual, social and moral obligations for the stewardship of publicly owned capital (and other) assets and responsibility to current and retired employees.

Advocates for charter expansion typically assert that charter expansion causes no financial harm to host districts. The logic goes – if charter schools a) serve typical students drawn from the host district’s population, and b) receive the same or less in public subsidy per pupil to educate those children, then the per pupil amount of resources left behind for children served in district schools either remains the same or increases. Thus, charter expansion causes no harm (and in fact yields benefits) to children remaining in district schools. The premise that charter schools are uniformly under-subsidized is grossly oversimplified and inaccurate in many charter operating contexts.[xxiv] In addition, numerous studies find that charter schools serve fewer students with costly special needs, leaving proportionately more of these children in district schools. Perhaps most importantly, the assumption that revenue reductions and enrollment shifts cause districts no measurable harm for host districts ignores the structure of operating costs and dynamics of cost and expenditure reduction.

Moody’s Investor Service recently opined that “charter schools pose greatest credit challenge to school districts in economically weak urban areas.” [xxv] Specifically, Moody’s identifies the following four areas posing potential concerns for host urban districts with growing independent charter sectors:

1. Weak demographics and district financial stress, which detract from the ability to deliver competitive services and can prompt students to move to charter schools
2. Weak capacity to adjust operations in response to charter growth, which reduces management’s ability to redirect spending and institute program changes to better compete with charter schools
3. State policy frameworks that support charter school growth through relatively liberal approval processes for new charters, generous funding of charters, and few limits on charter growth
4. Lack of integration with a healthier local government that can insulate a school system from credit stress

District officials in Nashville, TN recently contracted consultants to evaluate impact of charter expansion on their district. The consultants’ report noted specifically:

• They will continue to cause the transfer of state and local per student funds without reducing operational costs.
• They will continue to increase direct and indirect costs.
• They will continue to negatively impact deferred maintenance at leased buildings.
• They may have an offsetting impact on capital costs, if they open in areas of need for increased capacity. [xxvi]

Recently published academic analyses raise similar concerns. Robert Bifulco and Randall Reback (2014) evaluate the fiscal impact of charter expansion on two mid-size upstate New York cities – Albany and Buffalo.[xxvii] They find that charter schools have had negative fiscal impacts on these districts, and argue that there are two reasons for these impacts. First, districts are generally unable to adjust their expenditures on a student by student basis, because costs range from fixed costs (district wide and school overhead costs that are not reduced by the transfer of individual pupils), to step costs (including classroom level costs, also not reduced by the transfer of individual pupils) to variable costs, which are most easily reduced on a student by student basis, but constitute a relatively small share of school district budgets. These concerns echo those of consultants to Nashville Public Schools. Further, Arsen and Ni (2012) find that higher levels of charter school enrollments in Michigan school districts are strongly associated with declining fund balances, and that revenues declined more rapidly than costs in districts losing students to charter schools.[xxviii]

Second, Bifulco and Reback point out that “operating two systems of public schools under separate governance arrangements can create excess costs,” or inefficient expenditures.[xxix] Other authors have raised similar concerns about additional, often exorbitant overhead expenses created by introducing school systems within school systems (independent charter schools within districts).[xxx] That is, while inducing fiscal stress on host districts, charter expansion may also be increasing total overhead costs. Two studies of Michigan charter schools, which operate fiscally independently of local public districts, have found them to have particularly high administrative expenses and low direct instructional expenses. Arsen and Ni (2012) found that “Controlling for factors that could affect resource allocation patterns between school types, we find that charter schools on average spend $774 more per pupil per year on administration and $1141 less on instruction than traditional public schools.” (p. 1) Further, they found “charter schools managed by EMOs spend significantly more on administration than self-managed charters (about $312 per pupil). This higher spending occurs in administrative functions traditionally performed at both the district central office and school building levels.” (p. 13)[xxxi]

Izraeli and Murphy (2012) found that district schools in Michigan tended to spend more on instruction per student than did charter schools, and the gap grew by about 5 percent to nearly 35% percent over the period studied (1995-96 to 2005-06) (p. 265). Further they found the spending gap for instructional spending to be greater than that for general spending. The overall funding gap between district and charter schools was approximately $230. The spending gap for basic programs was $562 and for total instruction $910. The authors note “much like a profit-maximizing firm, charter schools generate a surplus of revenue over expenditure.” (Izraeli & Murphy, 2012, p. 265)[xxxii]

Baker and Miron (2015) show that in New Jersey, charter school administrative expenses are “nearly $1,000 per pupil higher than those of other regular school district types, and the share of budgets allocated to administration is nearly double.”[xxxiii] Further, that local public school districts maintain responsibility for providing some services to charter school students, and thus, the administrative overhead associated with those responsibilities. That is, on a per pupil basis, district administrative expenses are being over-stated and charter school administrative expenses understated. Additionally, these publicly reported administrative expenses do not include, for example, expenses (including executive salaries) from regional or national management organizations above and beyond management fees, further potentially understating total administrative expenses of the charter schools.

In addition, the uneven reshuffling of children and resources across schools within geographic boundaries can exacerbate inequities. Numerous studies have found charter schools to yield imbalance distributions of children by their income status, language proficiency and race. [xxxiv] Under some models, like the New Orleans all-charter system, stratification exists by design. [xxxv] Baker, Libby and Wiley (2014) find that through the sorting of children and resources, charter expansion induces inequities within districts – inequities among charter schools and between charter and district schools. [xxxvi] But, to the extent that charter share remains small, these inequities remain limited. [xxxvii] Profit-status of charter operators also may lead to very different available school level resources available to children, as for-profit schools seek to achieve profit margins, while non-profits seek to enhance revenues through tax exempt private giving.[xxxviii] Finally, the concentration of needy children in some schools can dramatically increase the costs of improving outcomes for those students. That is, uneven sorting of children by needs can create additional inefficiencies. [xxxix]

Finally, it is conceivable that the dissolution of large centralized school districts and introduction of multiple school operators into a single geographic space could compromise efficiency associated with economies of scale, which operate at both the school and district level. Numerous studies of education costs have found that the costs of providing comparable services rise as district enrollments drop below 2,000 students and rise sharply at enrollments below 300 students. Further, a comprehensive review of literature on economies of scale in education by Andrews, Duncombe and Yinger (2002) finds “there is some evidence that moderately sized elementary schools (300–500 students) and high schools (600–900 students) may optimally balance economies of size with the potential negative effects of large schools.”[xl] (p. 245) To the extent that charter expansion creates independent “districts” operating with fewer than 2,000 pupils and/or increases shares of children attending schools with smaller enrollments than those noted above, inefficiencies may be introduced.

Notes

[i] Tabulation by author using data from NCES Common Core of Data, Public School Universe Survey(s)

[ii]   Weber & Baker, (2015) Do For-Profit Managers Spend Less on Schools and Instruction? A national analysis of charter school staffing expenditures. Working Paper. Rutgers University

[iii] Shanker, A. (1988). Restructuring our schools. Peabody Journal of Education, 65(3), 88-100.

[iv] Preston, C., Goldring, E., Berends, M., & Cannata, M. (2012). School innovation in district context: Comparing traditional public schools and charter schools. Economics of Education Review, 31(2), 318-330.

[v] http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Measuring-Diversity-in-Charter-School-Offerings.pdf

[vi] Baker, B. D., Libby, K., & Wiley, K. (2012). Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations: Comparing Charter School and Local Public District Financial Resources in New York, Ohio, and Texas. National Education Policy Center.

[vii] Epple, D., Romano, R., & Zimmer, R. (2015). Charter schools: a survey of research on their characteristics and effectiveness (No. w21256). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Toma, E., & Zimmer, R. (2012). Two decades of charter schools: Expectations, reality, and the future. Economics of Education Review, 31(2), 209-212.

[viii] Richards, C. E. (1996). Risky Business: Private Management of Public Schools. Economic Policy Institute, 1660 L Street, NW, Suite 1200, Washington, DC 20036.

[ix] http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/17/us/edison-project-reports-measurable-progress-in-reading-and-math-at-its-schools.html

[x] http://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2003/jul/14/edison-founder-to-buy-back-stock/

[xi] Miron, G., & Gulosino, C. (2013). Profiles of for-profit and nonprofit education management organizations: Fourteenth Edition—2011-2012. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center.

[xii] Hill, P., Pierce, L. C., & Guthrie, J. W. (2009). Reinventing public education: How contracting can transform America’s schools. University of Chicago Press.

[xiii] Mac Iver, M. A., & Mac Iver, D. J. (2006). Which Bets Paid Off? Early Findings on the Impact of Private Management and K‐8 Conversion Reforms on the Achievement of Philadelphia Students. Review of Policy Research, 23(5), 1077-1093.

The authors found:

Non-Edison EMO schools actually performed worse than district-managed schools. With the exception of one older K-8 school in one cohort, Edison schools did not significantly outperform district-managed counterparts. Students in long-established K-8 schools generally outgained students in middle schools, but gains were not as large in newly-established K-8 schools. Across all types of schools, the second cohort of students obtained greater gains than did the first.

[xiv] Hill, P. T. (2006). Put Learning First: A Portfolio Approach to Public Schools. PPI Policy Report. Progressive Policy Institute.

More recently, the phrases “sector agnosticism” and “relinquishment” have been used to describe systems that turn a blind eye to whether public access schools are privately or publicly (elected officials/government) governed, or at the greater extreme, that public officials should “relinquish” any and all control of publicly accessible schooling to private providers/managers who will be far more responsive (than publicly governed/managed entities) to the needs and demands of children and their parents.

[xv] http://blogs.worldbank.org/education/system-great-schools-joel-klein-s-legacy-new-york-city

[xvi] http://www.journalgazette.net/news/local/indiana/Bill-seeks-to-stop–charter-shopping–by-failing-schools-5439091

[xvii] https://www.edreform.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/CERPrimerMultipleAuthorizersDec2011.pdf

[xviii] http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/10/21/charter-study.html and http://www.freep.com/article/20140622/NEWS06/140507009/State-of-charter-schools-How-Michigan-spends-1-billion-but-fails-to-hold-schools-accountable

[xix] http://bellwethereducation.org/publication/state-charter-school-movement

[xx] http://educationnext.org/how-many-charter-schools-just-right/

[xxi] http://www.governing.com/gov-data/municipal-cities-counties-bankruptcies-and-defaults.html

[xxii] Chester Upland, PA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-a-bankrupt-pa-school-district-teachers-plan-to-work-for-free/2015/08/28/0332898e-4dba-11e5-84df-923b3ef1a64b_story.html

Philadelphia: http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20151022_Near-broke_Philly_schools_must_borrow_to_make_payroll.html

Detroit: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/19/us-usa-detroit-education-idUSKCN0SD2KC20151019

[xxiii] http://www.prwatch.org/node/12932

[xxiv] Baker, B. D. (2014). Review of charter funding: Inequity expands. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved August, 7, 2014.

[xxv] https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-Charter-schools-pose-greatest-credit-challenge-to-school-districts–PR_284505

[xxvi] http://nashvillepublicmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/MNPS-Charter-Schools-Financial-Impact-Review.pdf

[xxvii] Bifulco, R., & Reback, R. (2014). Fiscal impacts of charter schools: lessons from New York. Education, 9(1), 86-107.

[xxviii] Arsen, D., & Ni, Y. (2012). The effects of charter school competition on school district resource allocation. Educational Administration Quarterly, 48(1), 3-38.

“Overall, the results do not support the hypothesis that competition from charter schools spurs regular public schools to shift resources to achievement-oriented activities. Charter competition has had remarkably little impact on standard measures of district resource use in Michigan schools. On the other hand, higher levels of charter competition clearly generate fiscal stress in districts. Moreover, changes in resource allocation cannot explain the differing trajectories of districts that do and do not turn back the competitive challenge. There are no significant differences in the resource allocation changes made by districts that stabilize enrollment loss to charters and those that continue to spiral down.”

[xxix] Bifulco, R., & Reback, R. (2014). Fiscal impacts of charter schools: lessons from New York. Education, 9(1), 86-107.

[xxx] Baker, B. D., Libby, K., & Wiley, K. (2012). Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations: Comparing Charter School and Local Public District Financial Resources in New York, Ohio, and Texas. National Education Policy Center.

[xxxi] Arsen, D. D., & Ni, Y. (2012). Is administration leaner in charter schools? Resource allocation in charter and traditional public schools. education policy analysis archives, 20, 31.

[xxxii] Izraeli, O., & Murphy, K. (2012). An Analysis of Michigan Charter Schools: Enrollment, Revenues, and Expenditures. Journal of Education Finance, 37(3), 234-266.

[xxxiii] These averages mask the highest administrative expenses, which occur in Camden Community Charter School (at $5,325 per pupil, higher than their instructional expense of $4,225)[xxxiii] and TEAM Academy (a KIPP school, at $4,851 per pupil,[xxxiii] but still much lower than their instructional expense at $8,639 per pupil).

[xxxiv] Stein, M. L. (2015). Public School Choice and Racial Sorting: An Examination of Charter Schools in Indianapolis. American Journal of Education, 121(4), 597-627.

Ladd, H. F., Clotfelter, C. T., & Holbein, J. B. (2015). The Growing Segmentation of the Charter School Sector in North Carolina (No. w21078). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kotok, S., Frankenberg, E., Schafft, K. A., Mann, B. A., & Fuller, E. J. (2015). School Choice, Racial Segregation, and Poverty Concentration Evidence From Pennsylvania Charter School Transfers. Educational Policy, 0895904815604112.

LOGAN, J. R., & BURDICK‐WILL, J. U. L. I. A. (2015). SCHOOL SEGREGATION, CHARTER SCHOOLS, AND ACCESS TO QUALITY EDUCATION. Journal of Urban Affairs.

See also: http://districtmeasured.com/2015/10/07/can-school-lotteries-make-schools-more-diverse/

[xxxv] Adamson, F., Cook-Harvey, C., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2015). Whose choice?: Student experiences and outcomes in the New Orleans school marketplace. Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.

[xxxvi] Baker, B. D., Libby, K., & Wiley, K. (2015). Charter School Expansion and Within-District Equity: Confluence or Conflict?. Education Finance and Policy.

[xxxvii] Baker, B. D., Libby, K., & Wiley, K. (2015). Charter School Expansion and Within-District Equity: Confluence or Conflict?. Education Finance and Policy.

[xxxviii] Weber, M., Baker, B.D. (2015)

[xxxix] Baker, B. D. (2011). Exploring the sensitivity of education costs to racial composition of schools and race-neutral alternative measures: A cost function application to Missouri. Peabody Journal of Education, 86(1), 58-83.

[xl] Andrews, M., Duncombe, W., & Yinger, J. (2002). Revisiting economies of size in American education: are we any closer to a consensus?. Economics of Education Review, 21(3), 245-262.

The blogging has been quiet for a while. This is partly because I feel like most issues that arise have already been dealt with somewhere on this blog. Also because I’ve been involved in several, simultaneous, long-term projects. These projects intersect with many topics I’ve addressed previously on this blog. At times, this blog serves as a palette for testing/sharing ideas. So… in this, and a rapid fire sequence of follow up posts, I will share some excerpts of forthcoming, and early stage in progress work. 

[excerpt from forthcoming work]

Increasingly complex governance structures for charter schools provide the financial and legal frameworks shaping charters’ financial management and disclosure. Charter frameworks vary substantively from frameworks governing traditional district schools, generating differences in the flow of money into and out of schools as well as differences in how the two sectors finance the acquisition of such capital assets as land and facilities.

Individual Rights in Traditional District Schools and Charter Schools

Distinctions between “public” and “private” entities raise important public policy concerns, and the charter sector’s evolution and expansion raise numerous questions regarding the rights of students, parents and taxpayers.[i] Three broad policy arguments typically underpin advocates’ promotion of unfettered, deregulated charter school expansion and charter school replacement of district schools—and even entire local public school districts:

1. Unlike “voucher-receiving” private schools, charter schools are considered “public” schools even if operated by private entities.[ii]
2. The public (or state) interest rests not in who operates or governs charter schools, but rather in positive changes in student outcomes that can be achieved regardless of governance and organization of the provider. This premise is referred to as “sector agnosticism.”[iii]
3. Accepting both premises above, government actors must be willing to “relinquish” government operated institutions to private providers and private parental choices in order to increase options available to parents/children and produce desired gains in student outcomes.[iv]

To a considerable extent, these policy arguments are divorced from the legal realities of mixed governance models for the provision of public services, including elementary and secondary education. Through legal challenges brought in both state and federal courts over the past few decades, we have learned that:

• Private entities and individuals may not be subject to the same financial or other document/records disclosure laws that apply to state operated entities and public officials.
• Employees of private entities are not guaranteed the same constitutional (and some statutory) protections they would be guaranteed under contractual arrangements with state operated institutions. Moreover, private entities operate under different labor laws than state operated ones.
• Students attending privately governed entities are not guaranteed the same constitutional (and some statutory) protections they would be guaranteed while attending state operated institutions. [v]

Transparency laws adopted by state legislatures requiring open meetings, public access to records and financial disclosure commonly apply to public officials and state operated institutions. However, courts across states have offered mixed opinions as to whether and to what extent those laws apply to charter schools, their authorizers, operators and governing boards. [vi]

In addition, the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government or its agents from violating individuals’ rights to free speech, due process, and freedom from unreasonable searches. Therefore, students and employees in public schools maintain these constitutional rights. In contrast, students in schools run by private entities, or employees engaging in contractual arrangements with private entities, may not enjoy the same protections.[vii] In many of these cases, employment contracts or school discipline policies provide employees or students (and their parents) only the rights guaranteed under private contract law.

Governance and Funding in Traditional District Schools and Charter Schools

Figure 1 compares several delivery structures for the provision of publicly subsidized elementary and secondary education in the U.S. The shapes in the figure with white backfill are public, or government operated institutions. Institutions in dark gray shading are decisively “private” entities, such as private religious schools. Those institutions with characteristics of both public and private organizations are shaded in light grey. For simplicity, Figure 3 excludes other permutations, including relatively new “education savings accounts,” a variation on voucher and tax credit policies.[viii]

As the left side of the diagram indicates, district operated schools are governed by boards of local elected public officials and financed primarily by taxpayers. District schools typically receive a mix of state aid and local (often publicly approved) property taxes, and/or sales and income taxes. The state aid typically comes from income and sales taxes, as determined by state policies. Tax monies collected by state and local government agencies are, of course, public funds.

As indicated on the right side of Figure 1, however, some structures—the Cleveland and Milwaukee voucher programs, for example—allow financial subsidies to be provided directly to private schools. Under these models the schools remain “private” entities, not branches of government itself. But whether they receive public subsidies directly or not, voucher-funded private schools are unlike government operated schools in that they may promote or endorse specific religious values, can restrict student or employee freedom of speech/expression, and need not provide due process in cases of dismissal, unless explicitly required in laws for voucher receiving institutions.

Recently, direct subsidy voucher models have been replaced by tuition tax credit models which insert an additional layer of private governance. Instead of the government providing taxpayer dollars to private institutions, individuals and corporations receive a tax credit for contributing money to a private scholarship granting entity, which in turn provides vouchers. Assuming a 100% tax credit for money donated, the result is mathematically the same as if the government provided the voucher directly. However, the involvement of another private, non-government actor in the flow of funds further limits taxpayer ability to challenge the distribution of tax-related funds.[ix] And, the schools receiving students funded by the scholarships remain clearly private.

Figure 1.   Alternative Governance Hierarchies

The middle of Figure 1 illustrates other governance options that occur under state charter school statutes. Charter schools are authorized to exist by an entity called an “authorizer”—either government itself or another entity with delegated authority. Charter schools are “authorized” to establish themselves as institutions eligible to receive taxpayer financed subsidies in order to provide elementary and secondary education to eligible children. The state may draw on its tax revenues to pay subsidies directly to “fiscally independent” charter schools. Or, the state may send its subsidies to local public school districts, which then pass on to charters a combination of state tax revenues and locally derived tax revenues. That is, under state charter school laws, districts that are geographic hosts to charter schools may be obligated to transfer to those schools both funds sent to the district by the state and funds raised from local property taxes. One permutation not depicted in Figure 3 allows local boards of education to authorize a charter school to operate independent of district governance (Wisconsin). Another permutation allows state approved authorizers to include such other public entities as universities, mayors, city councils, county boards and so on.

Other variations exist in state approaches to authorizing charter schools. In some states, the state agencies themselves exclusively determine who may operate a charter school, where that school may be located and who is eligible to attend. In other states, local public school districts may authorize establishment of charter schools within their jurisdiction. In both of these cases, the authorizing body remains “public,” and subject to the relevant legal obligations of public officials and government institutions.

Other states, like Ohio, permit private, non-government entities to serve as authorizers. That is, the state delegates responsibility for determining what entities should qualify for taxpayer subsidy. These authorizers are governed by boards of private citizens, not elected officials. As a result, their meetings, various activities, documents and so on may be shielded from public scrutiny, depending on case law and specific statutes in the state. Authorizers typically have the authority and responsibility to allow, renew and revoke charters. Public accountability of this system depends up authorizers and charter operators being independent entities.

Charter school operations and governing bodies also take many forms. In most states, charter school governing boards are appointed boards of private citizens, like those governing any private non-profit (and in some cases for-profit) institution. State laws vary in terms of how much private governing boards must disclose about their activities and documents as compared requirements for public entities. In theory, as would be the case with a non-profit private school, an individual or group of “founders” would seek and appoint a board of directors who would then collectively establish the mission and vision as well as bylaws of the institution. Just as a pending private school might seek accreditations and/or other endorsements (association membership, for example), the charter founders would apply to an authorizer for a charter to enroll students and receive the taxpayer subsidized funds that come with them.

Charter school governing boards may appoint school executives/leaders/managers, or alternatively they may contract with a private non-profit or for-profit management company, to handle some or all of the day-to-day operations of the school. For example, the charter school governing board may establish a contract with the private management company to both directly manage the school and to engage in all subsidiary contractual agreements; in this arrangement, the employer is the management company, not the school governing board. Any additional contracts, such as with food service providers or busing companies, are between the private management company and these subcontractors. That is, the governing board maintains only one contract, involving the transfer of the majority or all taxpayer subsidies to the management company, which then controls all other subcontracts. In such cases, only the single lump sum payment to the management company may be subject to public scrutiny, since all other contractual agreements are between private entities—if the charter governing board’s expenses are subject to public scrutiny at all. Further, agreements to abide by school discipline policies may be established between the private management company and parents, avoiding any role for public officials and government institutions and limiting students’/parents’ potential legal recourse.

 Maintenance of public accountability relies on the presumption that any charter school’s (or any business entity’s) board of directors is sufficiently independent of the contracted private management company that it may sever ties with that contractor and seek alternatives for school management, if necessary.[x]

Local public districts can also contract, and have contracted, private management firms to operate some or all schools within their jurisdictions.[xi] So too could private schools. But when public districts have contracted private management in the past, districts have maintained collective bargaining agreements for those teachers and other employees in schools operated by private contractors.[xii]

Traditional districts also contract with private for-profit busing companies, food service providers, providers of curricular materials, data management products and professional development programs. Employee contracts in these areas are unlikely to be subject to public scrutiny. Similarly, details of such expenditures may be shielded from public view.[xiii] Such is the nature of complex public-private business relationships.

It is not clear if a traditional district, governed by a board of elected or appointed public officials, could use private managers to shield themselves from disclosure requirements or violations of the constitutional rights of students, parents or employees. The multiple layers of private school operations and management, governing boards of private citizens, and in some cases, authorization by private entities, presents far greater opportunity to shield documents and avoid constitutional and statutory protections in the charter sector.

Table 1 summarizes key distinctions between traditional public school districts and privately managed, privately governed charter schools.

Table 1.   Key Differences in Traditional Districts & Charter Schools

Notes

[i]   Green, P.C.; & Baker, B.D.; & Oluwole, J. (2015, forthcoming). The Legal Status of Charter Schools in State Statutory Law- University of Massachusetts Law Review.

Green, P.C., Baker, B. D., & Oluwole, J.O. (2013). Having it both ways: How charter schools try to obtain funding of public schools and the autonomy of private schools. Emory Law Journal, 63, 303-337.

Mead, J.F. (2015). The Right to an Education or the Right to Shop for Schooling: Examining Voucher Programs in Relation to State Constitutional Guarantees, 42 Fordham Urban Law Journal 703.

[ii]     See, for example “Friendly Reminder: Charter Schools ARE Public Schools.” Education Post, January 8, 2015 http://educationpost.org/friendly-reminder-charter-schools-public-schools/#.VXGGB1LG_hU

[iii] McShane, M.Q. (2012) Moving from a School System to a System of Schools. Education Next http://educationnext.org/moving-from-a-school-system-to-a-system-of-schools/

[iv] See, for example the blog of Neerav Kingsland, formerly of New Schools for New Orleans, at: http://relinquishment.org/what-is-relinquishment/

[v]   Green, P.C.; & Baker, B.D.; & Oluwole, J. (2015, forthcoming). The Legal Status of Charter Schools in State Statutory Law- University of Massachusetts Law Review.

Green, P.C., Baker, B. D., & Oluwole, J.O. (2013). Having it both ways: How charter schools try to obtain funding of public schools and the autonomy of private schools. Emory Law Journal, 63, 303-337.

Mead, J.F. (2015). The Right to an Education or the Right to Shop for Schooling: Examining Voucher Programs in Relation to State Constitutional Guarantees, 42 Fordham Urban Law Journal 703.

[vi]   Green, P.C.; & Baker, B.D.; & Oluwole, J. (2015, forthcoming). The Legal Status of Charter Schools in State Statutory Law- University of Massachusetts Law Review.

Green, P.C., Baker, B. D., & Oluwole, J.O. (2013). Having it both ways: How charter schools try to obtain funding of public schools and the autonomy of private schools. Emory Law Journal, 63, 303-337.

Mead, J.F. (2015). The Right to an Education or the Right to Shop for Schooling: Examining Voucher Programs in Relation to State Constitutional Guarantees, 42 Fordham Urban Law Journal 703.

[vii] For a thorough discussion of related case law see:

Green, P.C.; & Baker, B.D.; & Oluwole, J. (2015, forthcoming). The Legal Status of Charter Schools in State Statutory Law- University of Massachusetts Law Review.

Green, P.C., Baker, B. D., & Oluwole, J.O. (2013). Having it both ways: How charter schools try to obtain funding of public schools and the autonomy of private schools. Emory Law Journal, 63, 303-337.

[viii] 5 states have this type (most notably Nevada) and it is different. For a discussion see,

Julie F. Mead, The Right to an Education or the Right to Shop for Schooling: Examining Voucher Programs in Relation to State Constitutional Guarantees, 42 Fordham Urban Law Journal 703 (2015).

Arianna Prothero, What’s the Difference between Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts? EDUC. WK.’S BLOGS (June 9, 2015, 5:17 PM), http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/charterschoice/2015/06/school_vouchers_ education_savings_accounts_difference_between.html

Arianna Prothero, Some States Put Parents In Charge of Student Spending, EDUC. WK. (Feb. 24, 2015), http:// http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/02/25/some-states-put-parents-in-charge-of.html.

[ix] ARIZONA CHRISTIAN SCHOOL TUITION ORGANIZATION v. WINN . The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. 25 August 2015. <http://www.oyez.org/cases/2010-2019/2010/2010_09_987&gt;. see also McGee v. Boyd, http://law.justia.com/cases/alabama/supreme-court/2015/1130987.html

[x]   Richards, C.E.; Shore, R.; & Sawicky, M.B. (1996). Risky Business: Private Management of Public Schools. Economic Policy Institute

See also: Richards, C.E.; Baker, B.D.; & Cilo, M. (1996) Is Privatization more Efficient: The Case of Education Alternatives, Inc. in Baltimore. Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, New York. Available at: https://schoolfinance101.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/eai.pdf

Ascher, C.; Fruchter, N.; & Berne, R. (1996). Hard lessons: Public schools and privatization . New York: Twentieth Century Fund Report.

[xi]   Marsh, J., Hamilton, L., & Gill, B. (2008). Assistance and Accountability in Externally Managed Schools: The Case of Edison Schools, Inc. Peabody Journal of Education, 83(3), 423-458.

Miron, G., & Gulosino, C. (2013). Profiles of for-profit and nonprofit education management organizations: Fourteenth Edition—2011-2012. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved July 10, 2015 from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/EMO-profiles-11-12

[xii] Richards, C.E. Shore, R., Sawicky, M.B. (1996). Risky Business: Private Management of Public Schools. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute.

[xiii] Llopis-Jepsen, C. (2015) USD 501 says private buses don’t pose concern for public information access. Topeka Capital Journal. http://cjonline.com/news/2015-05-10/usd-501-says-private-buses-dont-pose-concern-public-information-access

The blogging has been quiet for a while. This is partly because I feel like most issues that arise have already been dealt with somewhere on this blog. Also because I’ve been involved in several, simultaneous, long-term projects. These projects intersect with many topics I’ve addressed previously on this blog. At times, this blog serves as a palette for testing/sharing ideas. So… in this, and a rapid fire sequence of follow up posts, I will share some excerpts of forthcoming, and early stage in progress work. 

[from work in progress]

Some point to expansion of successful charter schools as a validation that money doesn’t matter for improving school quality.[i] That is, charter schools achieve more, for less or the same funding, while serving the same students. The core assumption is that charter schooling improves efficiency because the flexibility afforded through chartering permits charter schools to engage in more creative teacher compensation strategies and technological substitution, such as trading small class sizes for efficient use of technology through blended and online learning. Further, efficiency improvement yielded by charter innovations creates competitive pressure on traditional public schools to improve.[ii] Regarding productivity improvements from technological substitution, a recent review of charter school literature by Epple, Romano and Zimmer (2015) characterized online and cyber charter schools in particular as a “failed innovation, delivering markedly poorer achievement outcomes than traditional public schools.” (p.55) [iii] That said, we do not know if these markedly poor achievement outcomes were achieved with markedly fewer resources, and thus, a break-even on efficiency.

The assertion of large efficiency gains through chartering is often built on poor and/or mis-estimation of the resources received and used by charter schools. Specifically, it is asserted that charter schools generally receive less funding than do traditional public schools and achieve the same or better outcomes, thus are more efficient.[iv] The first assertion, that charter schools receive less funding and spend less is certainly not uniformly true.[v] Baker, Libby and Wiley (2015) explain that charter school spending varies substantially by context and by operator within context. Some charter operators, in some contexts, spend substantially more than both other charter schools and traditional public schools in the same context, while others spend much less.

For example, a handful of studies identify significant positive achievement effects of middle schools from the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) network, but this same research pays little attention and provides only weak, imprecise measures of resources available in these schools. [vi] Baker, Libby and Wiley (2012, 2015) indicate that in New York and Texas, where KIPP schools operate, they tend to spend substantially more than traditional district schools serving similar populations.[vii] Similarly, Dobbie and Fryer declare high standards and “no excuses” strategies of select charter school operators to be more important than spending differences in producing improved student outcomes.[viii] But spending measures in the study are poorly documented and incomplete. Baker, Libby and Wiley’s (2012, 2015) review of financial documents and public data applying model based comparisons of school site expenditures to schools serving similar student populations reveals that many of the school operators involved in Dobbie and Fryer’s study spent far in excess of surrounding, most similar district schools. [ix] Baker, Libby and Wiley (2012) also explain that much of the additional spending among high spending charter operators is allocated to maintaining smaller class sizes, providing longer school years and school days, and paying more to teachers, holding experience and education levels constant, for working those additional hours. That is, the investments by charter operators follow traditional wisdom, and are not especially innovative.

Perhaps the strongest empirical evidence of charter school efficiency advantages comes from the work of Gronberg, Taylor and Jansen (2012) on Texas charter schools.[x] The authors find that, generally, Texas “charter schools are able to produce educational outcomes at lower cost than traditional public schools—probably because they face fewer regulations—but are not systematically more efficient relative to their frontier than are traditional public schools.” [xi] (p. 302) In other words, while the overall cost of charter schools is lower for comparable output, the variations in relative efficiency among Texas charter schools are substantial. Efficiency is neither uniformly nor consistently achieved.

Related work by these authors reveals that the lower overall expenses are largely a function of lower salaries and inexperienced staff (Taylor et al., 2011). [xii] That is, the difference in total staffing cost, and resulting total instructional expense per pupil, was largely in the reduced experience levels of teachers, resulting in part from the fact that many of the schools existed for fewer than 10 years (many fewer than 5), in addition to high turnover among teachers in their first few years. That is, compensation was held lower not because of creative technological substitution, or alternative compensation, but relative inexperience and high turnover. Epple, Romano and Zimmer (2015) suggest that these patterns are similar across studies of charter school teachers. [xiii] Thus, estimated efficiency gains, where they do exist may rely on maintenance of high turnover and relatively inexperienced staff, a questionably scalable and sustainable option.

Put simply, research on the charter school sector in the aggregate tells us little about whether and to what extent money matters, or money can be made to matter more or less than it currently does -leveraged through traditional investments in public schooling. Some charter schools spend much more than both other charter schools and districts schools and appear to yield benefits to students from that spending. Others spend less and do poorly, and still others spend less but do less poorly than expected (and are thus, more efficient). But, the variations in the charter school sector, and variations across traditional public schools may provide insights down the line in how to more effectively and efficiently leverage resources. By and large, charter schools that spend more appear to spend more providing competitive compensation for their teachers, offering longer school days and school years, and maintaining smaller classes, while those that spend less do so by maintaining inexperienced staff and high turnover.

NOTES

[i] Wolf, P.J., Cheng, A., Batdorff, M., Maloney, L., May, J.F. & Speakman, S.T. (2014). The productivity of public

charter schools. Fayetteville, AR: Department of Education Reform University of Arkansas. Retrieved August

5, 2014, from

http://www.uaedreform.org/downloads/2014/07/the-productivity-of-public-charter-schools.pdf.

[ii]Some, however, find that charter school expansion may exert negative effects through student/peer sorting:

“Results show that charters induce modest but statistically significant drops in math and language test scores, particularly for elementary students. However, results for middle and high school students show improvements in discipline.”

Imberman, S. A. (2011). The effect of charter schools on achievement and behavior of public school students. Journal of Public Economics, 95(7), 850-863.

Epple, Romano and Zimmer (2015) discuss the much larger literature on this topic.

Epple, D., Romano, R., & Zimmer, R. (2015). Charter Schools: A Survey of Research on Their Characteristics and Effectiveness (No. w21256). National Bureau of Economic Research

[iii] Epple, D., Romano, R., & Zimmer, R. (2015). Charter Schools: A Survey of Research on Their Characteristics and Effectiveness (No. w21256). National Bureau of Economic Research

[iv] Wolf, P.J., Cheng, A., Batdorff, M., Maloney, L., May, J.F. & Speakman, S.T. (2014). The productivity of public

charter schools. Fayetteville, AR: Department of Education Reform University of Arkansas. Retrieved August

5, 2014, from

http://www.uaedreform.org/downloads/2014/07/the-productivity-of-public-charter-schools.pdf.

Glass, G. V (2014). Review of “The Productivity of Public Charter Schools.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-productivity-public-charter.

[v] Baker, B.D. (2014). Review of “Charter Funding: Inequity Expands.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charter-funding-inequity.

[vi] Tuttle, C. C., Gill, B., Gleason, P., Knechtel, V., Nichols-Barrer, I., & Resch, A. (2013). KIPP Middle Schools: Impacts on Achievement and Other Outcomes. Final Report. Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

[vii] Baker, B. D., Libby, K., & Wiley, K. (2012). Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations: Comparing Charter School and Local Public District Financial Resources in New York, Ohio, and Texas. National Education Policy Center.

Baker, B. D., Libby, K., & Wiley, K. (2015). Charter School Expansion and Within-District Equity: Confluence or Conflict?. Education Finance and Policy.

Others report similar resource differentials (and more) for KIPP schools:

Gronberg, T. J., Jansen, D. W., & Taylor, L. L. (2012). The relative efficiency of charter schools: A cost frontier approach. Economics of Education Review, 31(2), 302-317.

[viii] Dobbie, W., & Fryer Jr, R. G. (2011). Getting beneath the veil of effective schools: Evidence from New York City (No. w17632). National Bureau of Economic Research.

The authors note: “We find that traditionally collected input measures — class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree — are not correlated with school effectiveness.”

[ix] Baker, B. D., Libby, K., & Wiley, K. (2012). Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations: Comparing Charter School and Local Public District Financial Resources in New York, Ohio, and Texas. National Education Policy Center.

Baker, B. D., Libby, K., & Wiley, K. (2015). Charter School Expansion and Within-District Equity: Confluence or Conflict?. Education Finance and Policy.

Others report similar resource differentials (and more) for KIPP schools:

Gronberg, T. J., Jansen, D. W., & Taylor, L. L. (2012). The relative efficiency of charter schools: A cost frontier approach. Economics of Education Review, 31(2), 302-317.

[x] Gronberg, T. J., Jansen, D. W., & Taylor, L. L. (2012). The relative efficiency of charter schools: A cost frontier approach. Economics of Education Review, 31(2), 302-317.

[xi] Gronberg, T. J., Jansen, D. W., & Taylor, L. L. (2012). The relative efficiency of charter schools: A cost frontier approach. Economics of Education Review, 31(2), 302-317.

[xii] Taylor, L.L. Alford, B.L., Rollins, K.G., Brown, D.B., Stillisano. J.R., Waxman, H.C. (2011) Evaluation of Texas Charter Schools 2009-2010 (Revised Draft). Texas Education Research Center. Texas A&M University, College Station.

[xiii] Epple, D., Romano, R., & Zimmer, R. (2015). Charter Schools: A Survey of Research on Their Characteristics and Effectiveness (No. w21256). National Bureau of Economic Research

The blogging has been quiet for a while. This is partly because I feel like most issues that arise have already been dealt with somewhere on this blog. Also because I’ve been involved in several, simultaneous, long-term projects. These projects intersect with many topics I’ve addressed previously on this blog. At times, this blog serves as a palette for testing/sharing ideas. So… in this, and a rapid fire sequence of follow up posts, I will share some excerpts of forthcoming, and early stage in progress work. 

[from work in progress… some re-used stuff here, from http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/does-money-matter]

The Coleman report looked at a variety of specific schooling resource measures, most notably teacher characteristics, finding positive relationships between these traits and student outcomes. A multitude of studies on the relationship between teacher characteristics and student outcomes have followed, producing mixed messages as to which matter most and by how much.[i] Inconsistent findings on the relationship between teacher “effectiveness” and how teachers get paid – by experience and education – added fuel to “money doesn’t matter” fire. Since a large proportion of school spending necessarily goes to teacher compensation, and (according to this argument) since we’re not paying teachers in a manner that reflects or incentivizes their productivity, then spending more money won’t help.[ii] In other words, the assertion is that money spent on the current system doesn’t matter, but it could if the system was to change.

Of course, in a sense, this is an argument that money does matter. But it also misses the important point about the role of experience and education in determining teachers’ salaries, and what that means for student outcomes.

While teacher salary schedules may determine pay differentials across teachers within districts, the simple fact is that where one teaches is also very important in determining how much he or she makes.[iii] Arguing over attributes that drive the raises in salary schedules also ignores the bigger question of whether paying teachers more in general might improve the quality of the workforce and, ultimately, student outcomes. Teacher pay is increasingly uncompetitive with that offered by other professions, and the “penalty” teachers pay increases the longer they stay on the job.[iv]

A substantial body of literature has accumulated to validate the conclusion that both teachers’ overall wages and relative wages affect the quality of those who choose to enter the teaching profession, and whether they stay once they get in. For example, Murnane and Olson (1989) found that salaries affect the decision to enter teaching and the duration of the teaching career,[v] while Figlio (1997, 2002) and Ferguson (1991) concluded that higher salaries are associated with more qualified teachers.[vi] In addition, more recent studies have tackled the specific issues of relative pay noted above. Loeb and Page showed that:

“Once we adjust for labor market factors, we estimate that raising teacher wages by 10 percent reduces high school dropout rates by 3 percent to 4 percent. Our findings suggest that previous studies have failed to produce robust estimates because they lack adequate controls for non-wage aspects of teaching and market differences in alternative occupational opportunities.”[vii]

In short, while salaries are not the only factor involved, they do affect the quality of the teaching workforce, which in turn affects student outcomes.

Research on the flip side of this issue – evaluating spending constraints or reductions – reveals the potential harm to teaching quality that flows from leveling down or reducing spending. For example, David Figlio and Kim Rueben (2001) note that, “Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics we find that tax limits systematically reduce the average quality of education majors, as well as new public school teachers in states that have passed these limits.”[viii]

Salaries also play a potentially important role in improving the equity of student outcomes. While several studies show that higher salaries relative to labor market norms can draw higher quality candidates into teaching, the evidence also indicates that relative teacher salaries across schools and districts may influence the distribution of teaching quality. For example, Ondrich, Pas and Yinger (2008) “find that teachers in districts with higher salaries relative to non-teaching salaries in the same county are less likely to leave teaching and that a teacher is less likely to change districts when he or she teaches in a district near the top of the teacher salary distribution in that county.”[ix]

With regard to teacher quality and school racial composition, Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin (2004) note: “A school with 10 percent more black students would require about 10 percent higher salaries in order to neutralize the increased probability of leaving.”[x] Others, however, point to the limited capacity of salary differentials to counteract attrition by compensating for working conditions.[xi]

In a perfect world, we could tie teacher pay directly to productivity, but contemporary efforts to do so, including performance bonuses based on student test results, have generally failed to produce concrete results in the U.S.[xii] Recently published studies of individual and group financial incentives continue to find mixed to null effects. [xiii] Alternative compensation models in some settings have yielded positive results. Dee and Wyckoff (2014) find some evidence that comprehensive strategy combining teacher evaluation and financial incentives can yield marginal improvements to the average rate of student achievement growth among retained teachers.[xiv] Similarly, in a study of Austin, TX pay for performance (P4P) program, Balch and Springer (2015) found that ““The AISD REACH program is associated with positive student test score gains in both math and reading during the initial year of implementation. Student test score gains are maintained in the second year, but we do not find any additional growth.” [xv] Sojourner and colleagues (2014) found “Exploiting district variation in participation status and timing, we find evidence that P4P-centered HRM reform raises students’ achievement by 0.03 standard deviations.” [xvi] In a more extreme application of financial incentives, characterized as “loss aversion,” Fryer and Levitt study the effect of providing teachers’ bonuses in advance and taking the money back if students do not improve sufficiently. They find that this approach “yields math test score increases between 0.2 and 0.4 standard deviations. This effect is on par with the impact of increasing teacher quality by more than one standard deviation.” [xvii]

Still missing in this literature are cost effectiveness comparisons of the alternatives. That is, if we take the same total payroll dollars and allocate those dollars traditionally across teachers with incremental differences in salaries by experience and credentials held, as opposed to implementing those salaries and bonuses by the above alternatives, along with the associated costs of the evaluation metrics used for allocating salaries, do we see differences in production of student outcomes? That is, can comparable or better outcomes be achieved where the summed costs of alternative compensation and costs of producing metrics for allocating that compensation are equal to or less than current costs?

Assertions that performance-based pay is necessarily more cost-effective than traditional salary structures also falsely assume traditional step and lane salary schedules to be monolithic. In practice, salary differentials associated with experience and credentials vary widely. Some are compressed from top to bottom, and some not. They may favor experience over credentials or vice versa. Hendricks (2015a, 2015b) explores these issues. Hedricks finds that

“Increasing salaries for teachers with 3 or more years of experience differentially retains high-ability teachers, while higher salaries for teachers with 0-2 years of experience differentially retain low-ability teachers. This likely occurs because higher early-career salaries disrupt a positive sorting process that exits among novice teachers.”[xviii]

That is, one might restructure traditional salary schedules to achieve gains comparable or greater than deeper structural changes to compensation. Hendricks also finds that changing salary structures may alter recruitment potential, and the recruiting pool:

“Overall, a 1% increase in base salary for teachers of a particular experience level increases the proportion of the targeted teachers hired by 0.04-0.08 percentage points. Pay increases have the largest effect on hire rates among teachers with 2-3 years of experience and the effect diminishes with experience. I show that higher teacher salaries provide a dual benefit of retaining and attracting a more effective distribution of teachers. Districts may also improve student achievement growth at no cost by reshaping their salary schedules so that they are increasing and concave in teacher experience.”[xix]

In the wake of growing literature and policy rhetoric asserting the inefficiency of paying teachers according to experience and credentials, a handful of new studies have surfaced revealing that the gains in student outcomes resulting from increased teacher experience may extend well beyond the first few years of experience.[xx] Thus, it would not be entirely inefficient for salaries to continue scaling upward with increased experience, especially given additional costs of implementing alternative measures on which to base salaries. Wiswall (2013) finds that:

“using an unrestricted experience model I find that for mathematics achievement there are high returns to later career teaching experience, about twice as much dispersion in initial teacher quality as previously estimated, and a pattern of negative selection where high quality teachers are more likely to exit.”[xxi]

Papay and Kraft (2015) find:

“Consistent with past research, we find that teachers experience rapid productivity improvement early in their careers. However, we also find evidence of returns to experience later in the career, indicating that teachers continue to build human capital beyond these first years.”[xxii]

Ladd and Sorensen (2014) find:

“Once we control statistically for the quality of individual teachers by the use of teacher fixed effects, we find large returns to experience for middle school teachers in the form both of higher test scores and improvements in student behavior, with the clearest behavioral effects emerging for reductions in student absenteeism. Moreover these returns extend well beyond the first few years of teaching.” [xxiii]

Perhaps most importantly, the overall efficiency and effectiveness of teacher compensation does not depend exclusively on the extent to which each dollar allocated to any and every teacher’s salary can be associated precisely with a measurable, marginal gain to the test scores of children linked with that teacher. First, benefits of schooling extend beyond short run measured achievement gains. Second, teacher compensation exists, and exerts whatever influence it may, within a complex social and economic system. Thoughtful expositions considering these complex dynamics are few and far between. Two recent examples, however, include a largely theoretical piece, supported by longitudinal descriptive data by Gilpin and Kaganovich (2011) and a recent NBER paper by Jesse Rothstein (2012).

Gilpin and Kaganovich (2011) propose a general equilibrium model of teacher quantity and quality adopting the premise that teachers’ relative wages (to other sectors) are critical to maintaining quality of teaching workforce. Additionally, compression of salaries (at the high end) may reduce retention and recruitment of talented teachers. Illustrated in their data, the long run increase in teacher quantity has led to lagging wage competitiveness, thus potentially compromising labor quality. But so too has growth in wages of competing sectors. They explain that a rise in premium for high ability will outpace that for the average even besides the effect of technological change, hence an additional downward pressure on the “real” quality of education inputs. Because of the rise in premium for high ability, Gilpin and Kaganovich assert that “Countering this trend would therefore require an increase in the share of GDP spent on basic education, assuming that the institutional setup of the school system remains unchanged.” (428) In other words, because talent is becoming more expensive more rapidly in other sectors, more investment, as of share of GDP, may be required merely to maintain education quality. That said, this theoretical exposition, while built on much the same research base as I review herein and previously, is not fully vetted in the present article.

Rothstein (2012) critiques the presumption that tying teacher pay directly to measures of performance outcomes would necessarily improve efficiency of money allocated to compensation. He explains:

Simulations indicate that labor market interactions are important to the evaluation of alternative teacher contracts. Typical bonus policies have very small effects on selection. Firing policies can have larger effects, if accompanied by substantial salary increases. However, misalignment between productivity and measured performance nearly eliminates the benefits while preserving most of the costs.[xxiv]

And so it goes – while we have some new evidence that alternative compensation methods and evaluation metrics may yield some positive results, we do not as of yet have deeper understanding of the relative cost effectiveness of alternatives. Further, we have some evidence that restructuring compensation while still based on traditional metrics (experience and credentials) may have positive effects on teacher recruitment and retention. What we do know in each case is that the overall level of teacher compensation continues to matter for recruitment of talent into the teaching profession, relative to other labor market opportunities. Further, the relative compensation of teachers across settings within labor markets continues to matter.

To summarize, despite all the uproar about paying teachers based on experience and education, and its misinterpretations in the context of the “Does money matter?” debate, this line of argument misses the point. To whatever degree teacher pay matters in attracting good people into the profession and keeping them around, it’s less about how they are paid than how much. Furthermore, the average salaries of the teaching profession, with respect to other labor market opportunities, can substantively affect the quality of entrants to the teaching profession, applicants to preparation programs, and student outcomes. Diminishing resources for schools can constrain salaries and reduce the quality of the labor supply. Further, salary differentials between schools and districts might help to recruit or retain teachers in high need settings. In other words, resources used for teacher quality matter.

NOTES

[i] Hanushek, E.A. (1971) Teacher Characteristics and Gains in Student Achievement: Estimation Using MicroData. Econometrica 61 (2) 280-288

Clotfelter, C.T., Ladd, H.F., Vigdor, J.L. (2007) Teacher credentials and student achievement: Longitudinal analysis with student fixed effects. Economics of Education Review 26 (2007) 673–682

Goldhaber, D., Brewer, D. (1997) Why Don’t Schools and Teachers Seem to Matter? Assessing the Impact of Unobservables on Educational Productivity. The Journal of Human Resources, 332 (3) 505-523

Ehrenberg, R. G., & Brewer, D. J. (1994). Do school and teacher characteristics matter? Evidence from High School and Beyond. Economics of Education Review, 13(1), 1-17.

Ehrenberg, R. G., & Brewer, D. J. (1995). Did teachers’ verbal ability and race matter in the 1960s? Economics of Education Review, 14(1), 1-21.

Jepsen, C. (2005). Teacher characteristics and student achievement: Evidence from teacher surveys. Journal of Urban Economics, 57(2), 302-319.

Jacob, B. A., & Lefgren, L. (2004). The impact of teacher training on student achievement: Quasi-experimental evidence from school reform. Journal of Human Resources, 39(1),50-79.

Rivkin, S. G., Hanushek, E. A., & Kain, J. F. (2005). Teachers, schools, and academic achievement. Econometrica, 73(2), 471.

Wayne, A. J., & Youngs, P. (2003). Teacher characteristics and student achievement gains. Review of Educational Research, 73(1), 89-122.

For a recent review of studies on the returns to teacher experience, see:

Rice, J.K. (2010) The Impact of Teacher Experience: Examining the Evidence and Policy Implications. National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research.

[ii] Some go so far as to argue that half or more of teacher pay is allocated to “non-productive” teacher attributes, and so it follows that that entire amount of funding could be reallocated toward making schools more productive.

See, for example, a recent presentation to the NY State Board of Regents from September 13, 2011 (page 32), slides by Stephen Frank of Education Resource Strategies: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/mgtserv/docs/SchoolFinanceForHighAchievement.pdf

[iii] Lankford, H., Loeb., S., Wyckoff, J. (2002) Teacher Sorting and the Plight of Urban Schools. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 24 (1) 37-62

[iv] Allegretto, S.A., Corcoran, S.P., Mishel, L.R. (2008) The teaching penalty : teacher pay losing ground. Washington, D.C. : Economic Policy Institute, ©2008.

[v] Richard J. Murnane and Randall Olsen (1989) The effects of salaries and opportunity costs on length of state in teaching. Evidence from Michigan. Review of Economics and Statistics 71 (2) 347-352

[vi] David N. Figlio (2002) Can Public Schools Buy Better-Qualified Teachers?” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 55, 686-699. David N. Figlio (1997) Teacher Salaries and Teacher Quality. Economics Letters 55 267-271. Ronald Ferguson (1991) Paying for Public Education: New Evidence on How and Why Money Matters. Harvard Journal on Legislation. 28 (2) 465-498.

[vii] Loeb, S., Page, M. (2000) Examining the Link Between Teacher Wages and Student Outcomes: The Importance of Alternative Labor Market Opportunities and Non-Pecuniary Variation. Review of Economics and Statistics 82 (3) 393-408

[viii] Figlio, D.N., Rueben, K. (2001) Tax Limits and the Qualifications of New Teachers. Journal of Public Economics. April, 49-71

See also:

Downes, T. A. Figlio, D. N. (1999) Do Tax and Expenditure Limits Provide a Free Lunch? Evidence on the Link Between Limits and Public Sector Service Quality52 (1) 113-128

[ix] Ondrich, J., Pas, E., Yinger, J. (2008) The Determinants of Teacher Attrition in Upstate New York. Public Finance Review 36 (1) 112-144

[x] Hanushek, Kain, Rivkin, “Why Public Schools Lose Teachers,” Journal of Human Resources 39 (2) p. 350

[xi] Clotfelter, C., Ladd, H.F., Vigdor, J. (2011) Teacher Mobility, School Segregation and Pay Based Policies to Level the Playing Field. Education Finance and Policy , Vol.6, No.3, Pages 399–438

Clotfelter, Charles T., Elizabeth Glennie, Helen F. Ladd, and Jacob L. Vigdor. 2008. Would higher salaries keep teachers in high-poverty schools? Evidence from a policy intervention in North Carolina. Journal of Public Economics 92: 1352–70.

[xii] For major studies specifically on the topic of “merit pay,” each of which generally finds no positive effects of merit pay on student outcomes, see:

Glazerman, S., Seifullah, A. (2010) An Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program in Chicago: Year Two Impact Report. Mathematica Policy Research Institute. 6319-520

Springer, M.G., Ballou, D., Hamilton, L., Le, V., Lockwood, J.R., McCaffrey, D., Pepper, M., and Stecher, B. (2010). Teacher Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence from the Project on Incentives in Teaching. Nashville, TN: National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University.

Marsh, J. A., Springer, M. G., McCaffrey, D. F., Yuan, K., Epstein, S., Koppich, J., Kalra, N., DiMartino, C., & Peng, A. (2011). A Big Apple for Educators: New York City’s Experiment with Schoolwide Performance Bonuses. Final Evaluation Report. RAND Corporation & Vanderbilt University.

[xiii] Yuan, K., Le, V. N., McCaffrey, D. F., Marsh, J. A., Hamilton, L. S., Stecher, B. M., & Springer, M. G. (2012). Incentive Pay Programs Do Not Affect Teacher Motivation or Reported Practices Results From Three Randomized Studies. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 0162373712462625.

Springer, M. G., Ballou, D., Hamilton, L., Le, V. N., Lockwood, J. R., McCaffrey, D. F., … & Stecher, B. M. (2011). Teacher Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence from the Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT). Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.

Springer, M. G., Pane, J. F., Le, V. N., McCaffrey, D. F., Burns, S. F., Hamilton, L. S., & Stecher, B. (2012). Team Pay for Performance Experimental Evidence From the Round Rock Pilot Project on Team Incentives. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 34(4), 367-390.

[xiv] Dee, T. S., & Wyckoff, J. (2015). Incentives, selection, and teacher performance: Evidence from IMPACT. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 34(2), 267-297.

[xv] Balch, R., & Springer, M. G. (2015). Performance pay, test scores, and student learning objectives. Economics of Education Review, 44, 114-125.

[xvi] Sojourner, A. J., Mykerezi, E., & West, K. L. (2014). Teacher Pay Reform and Productivity Panel Data Evidence from Adoptions of Q-Comp in Minnesota. Journal of Human Resources, 49(4), 945-981.

[xvii] Fryer Jr, R. G., Levitt, S. D., List, J., & Sadoff, S. (2012). Enhancing the efficacy of teacher incentives through loss aversion: A field experiment (No. w18237). National Bureau of Economic Research.

[xviii] Hendricks, M. D. (2015). Public Schools Are Hemorrhaging Talented Teachers: Can Higher Salaries Function as a Tourniquet?. Available at SSRN 2564703.

[xix] Matthew D. Hendricks, Towards an optimal teacher salary schedule: Designing base salary to attract and retain effective teachers, Economics of Education Review (2015), doi: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2015.05.008

[xx] For a review of much the same literature, see: http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/recent-evidence-teacher-experience-and-productivity

[xxi] Wiswall, M. (2013). The dynamics of teacher quality. Journal of Public Economics, 100, 61-78.

[xxii] Papay, J. P., & Kraft, M. A. (2015). Productivity returns to experience in the teacher labor market: Methodological challenges and new evidence on long-term career improvement. Journal of Public Economics.

[xxiii] Ladd, H. F., & Sorensen, L. C. (2014). Returns to teacher experience: Student achievement and motivation in middle school. Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research Working Paper, 112.

[xxiv] Rothstein, J. (2012). Teacher quality policy when supply matter. Documents de treball IEB, (35), 1-65.

Rothstein, J. (2012). Teacher quality policy when supply matters (No. w18419). National Bureau of Economic Research.

A Reply from Matt Barnum:

Nice post. I certainly agree with a lot of your points here – particularly on the importance of a strong base salary and some of the issues around cost effectivness- but I’m more optimistic about alternative, partially performance-based compensation than you. Here’s why:

Retention/recruitment: You don’t get into it but there is evidence that (not too surprisingly) performance pay will improve the retention of teachers deemed effective. This to me is the primary goal and benefit of performance pay. See: http://www.tnconsortium.org/data/files/gallery/ContentGallery/Effective_Teacher_Retention_Bonuses_Evidence_from_TN.pdf and http://epa.sagepub.com/content/36/1/67.

This one’s trickier to prove causality, but there’s also research suggesting performance pay helps recruit more qualified applicants to teaching (albeit by the pretty crude measure of SAT scores): https://aefpweb.org/sites/default/files/webform/Teacher%20Selection%2011-17-11.pdf

TN/NY studies: I generally don’t put too much stock in these studies, well designed as they were. They measure a very narrow aspect – effort – of how performance pay can improve outcomes. I strongly suspect that if we ran the same experiment but with base pay increases being the treatment, we would find similar null results. And yet as you document base pay matters a great deal.

Cost effectiveness: This is a big question mark as you say. Sojourner et al found the MN program was highly cost effective based on its social benefits but didn’t compare it to alternative interventions. The Talent Transfer Initiative study (http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/our-publications-and-findings/publications/evaluation-of-the-teacher-incentive-fund-implementation-and-impacts-of-payforperformance-after-two) which paid effective teachers to transfer schools, found the program cost effective relative to class size reductions at the elementary school level, but not in middle schools. Rothstein’s paper that you cite found that performance pay would be cost effective relative to CSR, though as you point out his interpretation was one of skepticism regarding whether the performance metrics could be appropriately utilized.

I actually think the best evidence may be the recent study on TIF (http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/our-publications-and-findings/publications/evaluation-of-the-teacher-incentive-fund-implementation-and-impacts-of-payforperformance-after-two) which found (very) small gains in achievement for schools that used performance pay relative to schools that raised pay across the board. This suggests that performance pay may be preferable to broad based raises (at least in the short term).

Master’s degrees: You don’t get into this issue but another study recently came out in the long drip-drop of research that has pretty consistently found master’s degrees have virtually no measurable effect on teacher performance: http://www.caldercenter.org/publications/do-master’s-degrees-matter-advanced-degrees-career-paths-and-effectiveness-teachers

Experience: I think the recent studies on experience have been really interesting and important, though I’m not quite convinced they’re enough to change conventional wisdom on most gains coming in the first couple years. McGee+Winters also have a good point on this issue:

“Such papers demonstrate that the gains to experience from later years are disguised by selection bias, whereby more effective experienced teachers are more likely to exit the classroom than less effective teachers. While such papers offer evidence of quality returns to late- career experience for teachers who remain in the classroom, the papers do not dispute the assertion that quality differences, between more and less experienced teachers in the same school district, essentially plateau after five to seven years”.

(http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/cr_104.pdf)

The Winters/McGee paper also finds that including pensions into salary significantly raises the extent to which experience is rewarded through salaries. Fitzpatrick shows that teachers value pension compensation at 20 cents on the dollar: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257%2Fpol.20140087

I agree with your point that tests aren’t the only thing that matters here, though it’s not clear which way that cuts. Jackson found zero benefits of experience in his estimates of teacher impacts on non-cognitive outcomes: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18624. On the other hand, the Ladd/Sorensen study you cite finds large gains to experience when it comes to teachers’ impact on student attendance; Gershenshon also finds positive returns to experience though they’re smaller than Ladd/Sorensen (http://nebula.wsimg.com/d7c78771b96568a0cf214566fbab09e6?AccessKeyId=33C759F2990E6F78DB85&disposition=0&alloworigin=1). We would definitely benefit from more research on this point.

In sum, I think there is good reason to be cautiously optimistic about alternative compensation systems in comparison to the traditional models. The cost effectiveness/alternatives issue is still very much an open empirical question as you say, but I think there are good theoretical reasons to expect performance pay to win out. Again, your summary was very thoughtful, and I agree with parts of it, but I thought it might be useful to share the perspective of someone who looks at the same evidence but coming to different conclusions.

Quick response, from me:

I have actually addressed the Master’s issue a few times on the blog:

https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/bump/

https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/paying-economists-by-hair-color-thoughts-on-masters-degrees-teacher-compensation/

I also realistically view teacher compensation structures as the ugly/imperfect output of a necessary negotiation process, somewhat like school finance formulas. They will always be imperfect, and some players/groups in the system will get “more than they should” (an inefficient, or seemingly inefficient allocation) as political tradeoff, but that the system still requires a process of deliberation/negotiation among parties. In the best case, reasonable technical/research evidence is introduced into those negotiations and helps to shape the output. One of my arguments is that traditional step and lane salary schedules are not entirely inefficient, as Hanushek argues (at the extreme), because a) the steps are tied primarily to experience which does matter, even beyond the first few years, and b) implementing these salary schedules at scale is cheap… because it depends on easy to measure/obtain proxies like experience and education (where the master’s degrees may be as much about how many positions you can play as they are about whether you play your one position well). Is it the tightest link? No. BUT, a) establishing a really tight link between each additional dollar allocated to salary and “outcomes” requires knowing what the hell those outcomes really ought to be, b) figuring out how to measure them and c) efficiently integrating them into a compensation model. At some point, the imperfect proxies start looking good again. That said, as my post points out, I’m open to thoughtfully negotiated alternative compensation schemes, including those that incentivize teaching in high need schools and differentiation by area of expertise (based on external labor market pressures).

Imposing some supposed technocratic ideal won’t work, because the technocrats are responsive to political forces (and political money) as well, and often are as imbalanced ideologically (though perhaps along different ideological spectrum) or even more imbalanced than the negotiation process.

Back in 2012, I opined: “It is hard to imagine a time in the history of American public education when there has been such a widespread political effort to argue that improving the quality of schools has little or nothing to do with the amount of money spent on public education. That is, that money simply doesn’t matter.”[1] It seemed as though at some point, discourse might begin to turn the corner on this question. That it might become more publicly acceptable and even acceptable in some political circles to acknowledge the relevance of money for improving the quality of schooling, and creating more equitable and adequate schools for achieving modern outcome goals.

But that rhetoric persists as strong as ever both in political circles and in the pseudo-academic policy research which informs that rhetoric. Further, even as the economy has begun to rebound state school finance systems have continued to lag, perhaps in part due to the persistent rhetoric regarding the irrelevance of school funding, and preferences for not merely revenue neutral, but revenue negative reforms.

In reference to a legal challenge brought against New York State, by small city school districts, New York’s Governor Cuomo opined:

“We spend more than any other state in the country,”

“It ain’t about the money. It’s about how you spend it – and the results.” [2]

In conversations regarding Federal education spending priorities, Virginia Congressman Dave Brat proclaimed:

“Socrates trained Plato in on a rock and then Plato trained in Aristotle roughly speaking on a rock. So, huge funding is not necessary to achieve the greatest minds and the greatest intellects in history.” [sic][3]

And so it is: we need only provide sufficient collection of rocks to ensure educational adequacy. That is, setting aside the modern-day competitive wage required to recruit and retain philosophy instructors of the quality of Socrates and provide them 1:1 student/teacher ratios.

In recently published analysis, I found that during the recession, state school finance systems took a substantial hit, both in terms of total state and local revenue and in terms of equity between districts serving lower and higher poverty student populations:

The recent recession yielded an unprecedented decline in public school funding fairness. Thirty-six states had a three year average reduction in current spending fairness between 2008-09 and 2010-11 and 32 states had a three year average reduction in state and local revenue fairness over that same time period. Over the entire 19-year period, only 15 states saw an overall decline in spending fairness. In years prior to 2008 (starting in 1993) only 11 states saw an overall decline in spending fairness. [4]

A more recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that through 2014-15, most state school finance systems had not yet begun to substantively rebound:

At least 30 states are providing less funding per student for the 2014-15 school year than they did before the recession hit. Fourteen of these states have cut per-student funding by more than 10 percent. (These figures, like all the comparisons in this paper, are in inflation-adjusted dollars and focus on the primary form of state aid to local schools.)

Most states are providing more funding per student in the new school year than they did a year ago, but funding has generally not increased enough to make up for cuts in past years. For example, Alabama is increasing school funding by $16 per pupil this year. But that is far less than is needed to offset the state’s $1,144 per-pupil cut over the previous six years. [5]

In short, the decline of state school finance systems continues and the rhetoric opposing substantive school finance reform shows little sign of easing. Districts serving the neediest student populations continue to take the hardest hit. Yet, concurrently, many states are substantively raising outcome standards for students[6] and increasing the consequences on schools and teachers for not achieving those outcome standards. Some positive signs include recent structural reforms, possibly involving new revenue in California and Pennsylvania, in each case focusing on districts serving high poverty student populations. But other states which cut substantially during the economic downturn, even under the pressure of prior and ongoing judicial review and oversight, have continued to cut (Kansas) or largely freeze state aid (New York).

From the cloud of doubt to a rock of certainty

In my 2012 report Does Money Matter in Education? I explained how one man’s mission to create a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the relationship between school quality and available funding has distorted public policy discourse over school finance reform.

One might characterize Eric Hanushek as education’s own “merchant of doubt.”

I explained the evolution of Eric Hanushek’s frequently reiterated assertions of “no systematic relationship between school expenditures and student performance,” [7] originating in the 1980s, to more recent, bolder claims that substantial funding cuts cause no harm.

While compelling evidence has continued to accumulate regarding the importance of funding for improving school quality, Hanushek in various outlets and public testimony has continued to drift from the cloud of doubt to a rock of certainty. That is, certainty that money has little or no role in improving school quality and that school finance reforms which infuse additional funds only lead to greater inefficiency, having little or no effect on either equity or adequacy of schooling.[8]

To summarize, the current Hanushekian dogma includes the following core principles:

1. Because schools already spend so much and do so with such great inefficiency, additional funding is unlikely (read “will not and cannot”) to lead to improved student outcomes;
2. How money is used matters much more than how much money is spent;
3. Therefore, some schools and districts having more or less than others is inconsequential, since those with less may simply make smarter spending decisions.

According to the recent rhetoric of Hanushek, these principles are ironclad, in in his own words they are “conventional wisdom,” on which “virtually all analysts” agree. They are “commonly believed,” “overall truth,” and backed by an “enormous amount of scientific analysis” and “substantial econometric evidence,” and “considerable prior research.”

For example, in the winter of 2015, in the context of school funding litigation in New York State, Hanushek opined:

“An enormous amount of scientific analysis has focused on how spending and resources of schools relates to student outcomes. It is now commonly believed that spending on schools is not systematically related to student outcomes.”[9]

Yet, the enormous amount of scientific analysis to which Hanushek referred in his expert testimony was primarily cited to a 2003 summary of much of his prior work from the 1980s, work which has been discredited on numerous occasions, [10] not to mention, research that has occurred in the last 12 years.[11] Similarly, in the same context (Maisto v. State) Hanushek proclaims:

“There has been substantial econometric evidence that supports this lack of relationship.”

Backed again (in footnote 6 of his report) by the same short list of dated self-citation.[12] In an even more recent attempt to rebut a new, major study finding positive effects of school finance reforms,[13] Hanushek (2015) makes the following version of the same claim:

“Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom.”[14]

This time, anchoring that claim only to his 2003 piece (by hyperlink to the “prior research” phrase) on the Failure of input based schooling policies,[15] choosing to ignore entirely the considerably larger body of more rigorous work I summarize in my 2012 review on the topic.

The extension of these claims that nearly everyone agrees, and all (or, a veritable shit-ton of) research says that there’s no clear relationship between spending and student performance is the assertion that there is broad agreement that how money is spent matters far more than how much there is. As phrased by Hanushek in the context of New York State school finance litigation:

“Virtually all analysts now realize that how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent. This finding is particularly true at the upper levels of current U.S. spending.[16]

As with the prior declarations, this one is made with the exceedingly bold assertion that virtually all analysts agree on this point – without reference to any empirical evidence to that point (a seemingly gaping omission for a decidedly empirical claim about a supposedly empirical truth). Put bluntly, if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it. Thus, the two issues – how much you have and how you spend it – are inextricably linked.

Perhaps most disconcerting is that Hanushek has recently extended this argument to declare that equity gaps in funding, or measures of them, aren’t an important policy concern either. They are, by his proclamation “vacuous” and “lacking any scientific basis.”[17]

Put differently, what Hanushek is opining by declaring calculations of equity gaps to be vacuous and lacking scientific basis is that it matters not whether one school or district has more resources than another. Regardless of any spending differences, schools and districts can provide equitable education – toward equitable outcome goals. Those with substantively fewer resources simply need to be more efficient. Since all public schools and districts are presently so inefficient, achieving these efficiency gains through more creative personnel policies, such as performance based pay, and dismissal of “bad teachers”, are easily attainable.

Of course, even if we assume creative personnel policies to yield marginal improvements to efficiency, if schools with varied levels of resources pursued these strategies with comparable efficiency gains, inequities would remain constant. Requiring those with less to simply be more efficient with what they have is an inequitable requirement. This argument is often linked in popular media and the blogosphere with the popular book and film Moneyball, which asserts that clever statistical analysis for selecting high productivity, undervalued players was the basis for the (short lived) success of the low payroll in 2002 and 2003 Oakland A’s baseball team. The flaws of this analogy are too many to explore thoroughly herein, but the biggest flaw is illustrated by the oft-ignored subtitle of the book – The art of winning an unfair game. That is, gaining a leg up through clever player selection is necessary in baseball because vast wealth and payroll differences across teams make baseball an unfair game. Put bluntly, public schooling should not be an unfair game.

The Eroding Soil under the Rock

From judges to scholars, critics of evidence (other than myself) used by Hanushek to support the above claims have characterized that evidence as “facile,” based on “fuzzy logic”[18] and “weak and factually tenuous.”[19]

Two recurring examples used by Hanushek to illustrate the unimportance of funding increases for improving outcomes, are the “long term trend” or “time trend” argument, and anecdotal claims of the failures of input-based reforms in New Jersey. Baker and Welner (2011) tackle in depth, the fallacies of Hanushek’s New Jersey claims.[20] Here, I point to Hanushek’s own, albeit facile, unacknowledged self-debunking of his New Jersey claims. But first, I address the “long term trend” claim.

Again from recent testimony in New York State, Hanushek provides the following exposition of the “long term trend” assertion:

The overall truth of this disconnect of spending and outcomes is easiest to see by looking at the aggregate data for the United States over the past half century. Since 1960, pupil‐teacher ratios fell by one‐third, teachers with master’s degrees over doubled, and median teacher experience grew significantly (Chart 1).4 Since these three factors are the most important determinants of spending per pupil, it leads to the quadrupling of spending between 1960 and 2009 (after adjusting for inflation). At the same time, plotting scores for math and reading performance of 17‐year‐olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows virtually no change since 1970 (Charts 2 and 3).5[21]

This claim like many others is made with language of astounding certainty – the “overall truth” as it exists in the mind of Hanushek. This claim is commonly accompanied by graphs showing per pupil spending going up over time, pupil to teacher ratios going down, and national assessment scores appearing relatively flat, much of which is achieved via the smoke and mirrors of representing spending and outcome data on completely different scales, and failures to adjust appropriately for changing costs and related obligations of the public education system, and changing demography of the tested population.[22] Oversimplified visuals are used to make the proclamation that student achievement shows “virtually no change,” a statement discredited on closer inspection.[23] Jackson and colleagues provide additional examples of how such facile analyses lead to fallacious conclusions (ironically using cigarette smoking data).[24]

Hanushek extends his use of the long term trend argument in his recent critique of findings from Jackson and colleagues that court ordered infusions of funding to select schools and districts led to long term gains in educational attainment, income and poverty reduction for those subjected to increased funding. Hanushek asserts:

If a ten percent increase yields the results calculated by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico, shouldn’t we have found all gaps gone (and even reversed) by now due to the actual funding increases?

Thus, if the massive average spending increases reported by Hanushek as the actual long term trend did not lead to elimination or reversal of gaps, Jackson, Johnson and Persico’s findings must be wrong? Right?

Of course, this assertion is complete and utter nonsense, because Jackson and colleagues don’t assert, and Hanushek’s own national average long term trend data do not show that all low income children, lower performing subgroups and/or those in low wealth communities were subjected to dramatic funding increases. In fact, if Hanushek’s average spending increases were driven as much by increases in wealthy (low poverty/minority) districts as they were by increases in poorer districts, then gaps would likely remain constant, all else equal.  That is, the average level of funding, and changes in average level say nothing of gaps or distributions in funding or changes in gaps or distributions. Put bluntly, the average level of funding, and the distribution of funding are two different things. Conflating the two is intentionally deceitful.

As explained by Baker and Welner (2011)[25] Hanushek for years has cited the failures of New Jersey’s school finance reforms as the basis for why other states should not increase funding to high poverty schools. In litigation in Kansas in 2011, Hanushek proclaimed:

“The dramatic spending increases called for by the courts (exhibit 34) have had little to no impacts on achievement. Compared to the rest of the nation, performance in New Jersey has not increased across most grades and racial groups (exhibits 35-40). These results suggest caution in considering the ability of courts to improve educational outcomes.”[26]

Hanushek reiterated these claims in the context of the even more recent New York school funding challenge. [27] This is a surprising claim to preserve when one’s own recent (2012) marginally more rigorous analyses of state achievement growth rates on national assessments (from 1992 to 2011)[28] find the following:

“The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.”[29]

The same report by Hanushek shows impressive reductions in the share of students scoring “below basic” in New Jersey, especially for 8th grade math (Figure 4).

To be sure, there are others in academe and policy research that raise questions about the most effective ways to leverage school funding to achieve desired outcomes, and do so via more rigorous, thoughtful analyses.

There are others who opine in the public square[30] and courtroom[31] that school finance reform – specifically infusing additional funding to districts serving high need student populations – is neither the most effective nor most efficient path toward improving schooling equity or adequacy. But empirical evidence to support claims of more efficient alternatives remains elusive.

Nonetheless, the “facile” and “factually tenuous” illustrations above must be put to rest, and the divisive, manipulative (intellectually insulting) and damaging rhetoric of education’s merchant of doubt cast aside once and for all.

NOTES

[1] Baker, B. D. (2012). Revisiting the Age-Old Question: Does Money Matter in Education?. Albert Shanker Institute.

[2] http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2014/02/11/cuomo-on-education-funding-lawsuit-it-aint-about-the-money/

[3] http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/02/13/3623158/brat-education-plato/

[4] Baker, B. D. (2014). Evaluating the recession’s impact on state school finance systems.

Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22(91). http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n91.2014

[5] Leachman, M., & Mai, C. (2014). Most States Still Funding Schools Less Than Before the Recession. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 16, 2014, http://www. cbpp. org/cms/index. cfm? fa= view&id, 4213.

[6]

Bandeira de Mello, V., Bohrnstedt, G., Blankenship, C., and Sherman, D. (2015). Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Results From the 2013 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments (NCES 2015-046). U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved [date] from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch.

[7] Hanushek, E.A. (1986) Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools. Journal of Economic Literature 24 (3) 1141-1177. A few years later, Hanushek paraphrased this conclusion in another widely cited article as “Variations in school expenditures are not systematically related to variations in student performance”

Hanushek, E.A. (1989) The impact of differential expenditures on school performance. Educational Researcher. 18 (4) 45-62

Hanushek describes the collection of studies relating spending and outcomes as follows:

“The studies are almost evenly divided between studies of individual student performance and aggregate performance in schools or districts. Ninety-six of the 147 studies measure output by score on some standardized test. Approximately 40 percent are based upon variations in performance within single districts while the remainder look across districts. Three-fifths look at secondary performance (grades 7-12) with the rest concentrating on elementary student performance.” (fn #25)

[8] Notably, Hanushek then and now asserts that it’s not that money doesn’t matter at all, but rather that additional money doesn’t matter on top of the already high (apparently indisputably and invariably) levels of spending that currently exist across all U.S. schools.

[9] http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/maisto/masito%20trial%20documents/State%27s%20Expert%20Report%20-%20Dr.%20Eric%20Hanushek.pdf

[10] Baker, B. D. (2012). Revisiting the Age-Old Question: Does Money Matter in Education?. Albert Shanker Institute.

[11] Including but not limited to:

Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R., & Persico, C. (2015). The Effects of School Spending on Educational and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from School Finance Reforms (No. w 20847) National Bureau of Economic Research.

Papke, L. (2005). The effects of spending on test pass rates: evidence from Michigan. Journal of Public Economics, 89(5-6). 821-839.

Hyman, J. (2013). Does Money Matter in the Long Run? Effects of School Spending on Educational Attainment. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jmhyman/Hyman_JMP.pdf.

Deke, J. (2003). A study of the impact of public school spending on postsecondary educational attainment using statewide school district refinancing in Kansas, Economics of Education Review, 22(3), 275-284. (p. 275)

Nguyen-Hoang, P., & Yinger, J. (2014). Education Finance Reform, Local Behavior, and Student Performance in Massachusetts. Journal of Education Finance, 39(4), 297-322.

Downes, T. A. (2004). School Finance Reform and School Quality: Lessons from Vermont. In Yinger, J. (Ed.), Helping Children Left Behind: State Aid and the Pursuit of Educational Equity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

[12] Specifically, Hanshek includes the following footnote:

Hanushek (2003). See also Hanushek (1981, (1986, (1989). The statistical analyses focus on the independent impact of resources on performance after allowing for differences among families, peers, and neighborhoods. A variety of sophisticated approaches have been applied to schooling situations across the countries, and the reviews summarize these studies. The aggregate results of the most sophisticated of these studies are shown below.

[13] Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R. C., & Persico, C. (2015). The effects of school spending on educational and economic outcomes: Evidence from school finance reforms (No. w20847). National Bureau of Economic Research.

[14] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/opinions/does-money-matter-after-all

[15] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%202003%20EJ%20113%28485%29.pdf

[16] http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/maisto/masito%20trial%20documents/State%27s%20Expert%20Report%20-%20Dr.%20Eric%20Hanushek.pdf

[17] Specifically, Hanushek proclaims:

It also underscores how calculations of equity gaps in spending, of costs needed to achieve equity, or of costs needed to obtain some level of student performance are vacuous, lacking any scientific basis.” (Maisto, p4)

http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/maisto/masito%20trial%20documents/State%27s%20Expert%20Report%20-%20Dr.%20Eric%20Hanushek.pdf

[18] http://educationnext.org/money-matter/

[19] http://www.shawneecourt.org/DocumentCenter/View/457

[20] Baker, B., & Welner, K. (2011). School finance and courts: Does reform matter, and how can we tell. Teachers College Record, 113(11), 2374-2414.

[21] http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/maisto/masito%20trial%20documents/State’s%20Expert%20Report%20-%20Dr.%20Eric%20Hanushek.pdf

[22] http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2011/04/bill-gates-should-hire-a-statistical-advisor.html

[23] See, for example:

http://www.epi.org/publication/fact-challenged_policy/

[24] The authors explain:

To see the problems of Hanushek’s logic, consider the following true statistics: between 1960 and 2000 the rate of cigarette smoking for females decreased by more than 30 percent while the rate of deaths by lung cancer increased by more than 50 percent over the same time period.[1] An analysis of these time trends might lead one to infer that smoking reduces lung cancer. However, most informed readers can point out numerous flaws in looking at this time trend evidence and concluding that “if smoking causes lung cancer, then there should have been a large corresponding reduction in cancer rates so that there can be no link between smoking and lung cancer.” However, this is exactly the facile logic invoked by Hanushek regarding the effect of school spending on student achievement.

http://educationnext.org/money-matter/

[25] Baker, B., & Welner, K. (2011). School finance and courts: Does reform matter, and how can we tell. Teachers College Record, 113(11), 2374-2414.

[26] http://www.robblaw.com/PDFs/1169.pdf

[27] http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/maisto/masito%20trial%20documents/State’s%20Expert%20Report%20-%20Dr.%20Eric%20Hanushek.pdf

[28] As explained by the authors:

We also examine changes in student performance in 41 states within the United States between 1992 and 2011, allowing us to compare these states with each other.

Our findings come from assessments of performance in math, science, and reading of representative samples in particular political jurisdictions of students who at the time of testing were in 4th or 8th grade or were roughly ages 9–10 or 14–15.

[29] Hanushek, E. A., Peterson, P. E., & Woessmann, L. (2012). Is the US catching up: international and state trends in student achievement. Education Next, 12(4), 24.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG12-03_CatchingUp.pdf

[30] http://jaypgreene.com/2015/05/29/does-school-spending-matter-after-all/

[31]Including renowned segregationist David Armor who continues to testify alongside Hanushek, http://www.edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/maisto/masito%20trial%20documents/State’s%20Expert%20Report%20-%20Dr.%20David%20Armor.pdf

Education policy research and the rhetoric emergent from that research typically fails to represent the realities – the real distribution – of schooling across our nation. We focus extensively on urban schooling most often ignoring what might or might not work in the suburbs or rural areas. We focus on development of reading and math/STEM skills but far less on other content, knowledge or skills. We focus on measuring teacher/teaching quality through estimates of student gains in reading and math, but often ignore the contextual factors that may influence teacher effectiveness, or other less commonly measured outcomes.

These foci aren’t necessarily problematic. After all, there’s only so much we can research at any given time. The problem lies in our desire – specifically in translation to policy recommendations – to broadly extrapolate the meaning of these findings.  Sometimes, it’s a mere extrapolation problem, where researchers and well-meaning policymakers simply wish to project one finding onto an entirely different situation.

Other times, it’s a straight up bait-and-switch, where self-interested actors or advocates point to one great success, and then swap it for a cheap imitation in their own policy recommendations/proposal. It’s like holding up Exeter or Andover as examples of great private schooling to advance a voucher argument, and then providing a voucher sufficient for children to attend their local evangelical school housed in a double-wide on a vacant lot. [private school cost/spending data here]

Charter school research is, in my view, one of the most problematic areas of education policy research, especially in its translation to policy recommendations. The most extreme version of the pro-charter unregulated expansion argument goes something like this:

Look at the research on those massive gains created by KIPP schools, especially those studies done by Mathematica researchers, as well as the work of Dynarski and colleagues in Boston. And hey, look at Fryer’s stuff on NYC’s ‘no excuses’ charters! This is incredible. We must move forward with all deliberate speed to replicate this!

And how must we do that – well, we really need to take the lid off this movement – no caps. Increase subsidies. Have more authorizers available to fast-track the flood of new applications from these great providers! That’s it. Move… and move now! From Arizona, to Ohio, Michigan, Florida and beyond – authorizers will ensure accountability. The few… and let me emphasize that… few… bad actors will be shut down, and these amazing providers will flourish across our great nation!

Okay… so maybe I’m overdoing it a bit. Certainly some, even those at TB Fordham institute have now admitted problems in the Ohio charter accountability process. And the folks at Brookings have raised questions about the quality of Arizona charter schools.

At least a handful of studies on high profile charter operators have yielded substantive, positive results, at least with respect to growth on narrowly measured student achievement outcomes, and in some cases on college acceptance/matriculation. Of course, even these studies, like the Mathematica/KIPP studies, or Fryer studies tend to totally ignore key features of the models that may be contributing to those outcomes – like money, smaller classes, more time and teacher pay to support that time.

But here’s the bigger picture – In all of this time that we’ve been allowing and inducing charter school growth, while studying KIPPs and others to validate positive effects – we’ve paid far too little attention to the actual distribution of providers out there. Most charter schools aren’t KIPP (whether we like KIPP or their educational model/practices). And most charter schools across the country aren’t like NYC’s (or Boston’s) other major charter operators.

First, here’s a national map of charter school distribution based on the 2013 NCES Common Core, public school universe survey, with indicators from 2011-12 of the management type fort those schools (data set for Wisconsin incomplete). Yeah… there are charter schools in major Northeastern/Mid-Atlantic cities from Boston to DC, but there are also one heck of a lot of charter schools in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and other states where charters have a far less stellar track record. There are also, as shown in Figure 1, a large number of charter schools presently operated by for-profit management companies (much more on the implications of this in a future post).

Figure 1. National Distribution of Charter Schools by Management Type

And even in the Northeast, most of them are NOT those heavily privately subsidized KIPP schools (though there are a few more “Uncommon” schools than elsewhere). Yeah, there are a few scattered around, and by 2015, KIPP’s own website indicates that they serve about 70k kids, but that would still put them only close to the top 5 providers nationally, against our 2011-12 figures (assuming no other operator grew since then, as KIPP did).

Who is out there? Well, Edison Schools are still there. White Hat, K12, and others with more questionable track records. And this (region) is as good as it gets!

In these maps, I’ve only labeled the management company for companies that managed at least 20 schools in our 2011-12 data. Management company data linked from prior work by Gary Miron and colleagues (diligently matched/vetted by my doc student Mark Weber. Mapped version here from prelim data set).  Note that a common issue with mapping this type of data is that the school address may show up at the corporate address rather than the actual school location.

Figure 2. Atlantic Coast Schools

Figure 3. Southeast

But for a few KIPP schools, more southeastern charters are either managed by smaller firms, are independent, or are managed by White Hat. Florida is even more fun. Florida has a plethora of providers we don’t often hear about in academic research, but more often hear about in scandalous news headlines (Academica, Mavericks, Imagine[more later])

Figure 4. Florida

Great lakes states are dominated by providers like White Hat Management, Summit Academy, Concept Schools and also Imagine Schools!  No, these are not the Exeters and Andovers (or KIPPs) of charter schooling. What they are is the actual population of providers as they exist across states. Again, there are a few KIPPs in there but they are clearly overshadowed by other providers for whom we have far less rigorous academic analysis of their program/service quality.

Figure 5. Great Lakes

The KIPP presence in Texas and New Orleans is somewhat stronger, but again, they exist amidst a multitude of other providers including National Heritage Academies, Cosmos schools, among others.

Figure 6. Gulf Coast

And moving west….

Figure 7. Southwest

Figure 8. California

I’m certainly not saying these are all bad schools. That any non-KIPP charter can’t be as good as a KIPP charter. That’s just silly.  I’m also not saying that all KIPP schools are great and that they are the only great charter schools. Yes, my own research has found KIPP schools, along with Uncommon Schools and other NYC charter chains to be particularly well endowed financially.

What I am saying is that it is very problematic to adopt the logic –

KIPP = Charter School

KIPP = Awesome (by virtue of KIPP-iness alone)

therefore

Charter = Awesome (by association with KIPP-iness)

therefore unfettered expansion of charters is super totally awesome!

For most of America, this argument leads to a massive bait and switch.

Further, as I’ve explained in recent posts, it would be worth our time to step out of the charter vs. district school box and ask more broadly, what’s working? Where is it working? Why is it working?  Can it work similarly elsewhere? And most importantly, what the heck to we mean by “working?”

We must evaluate collectively charter, district, and for that matter private schools across rural, urban and suburban settings, with consideration for the uniqueness of regional, state and local policy contexts. This is all doable.  But periodically, we need to step back and assess what’s really going on.

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Market share by manager (for those enrolling over 10k students in 2011-12. all others aggregated to single category. excludes Wisconsin data)

Hmmm… seemed relevant (a bit over the top, but relevant):