Seniority, in the modern reformy lexicon, is among the dirtiest words. Senior teachers are not only ineffective and greedy and never put interests of the children over their own, but they are in fact downright evil, a persistent drain on state and local economies and a threat to our national security! By contrast, “effectiveness” is good and since seniority and effectiveness are presumed entirely unassociated, the simple solution is to replace any reference to seniority in current education policies with measures of “effectiveness.”

If only it was so simple. This modern reformy mantra grossly misinterprets the relationship between seniority and effectiveness, presumes currently available measures of effectiveness to be more useful than they really are at sorting “good” from “bad” teachers, ignores that the proposed solutions have in many cases been found NOT to solve the supposed problem, and is oblivious to the broader literature on teacher labor markets, compensation and the quality of the teaching workforce.

Seniority and Effectiveness

Numerous studies over time have shown that as teachers reach somewhere around their 5^th year, student achievement gains under those teachers begin to grow more slowly and to an extent level off.[1]  These findings, to the extent we believe that these metrics of test score gain adequately represent teaching effectiveness, do not by any stretch of the imagination mean that more experienced teachers are less effective. Rather, their effectiveness increases from year to year level off. If they have indeed reached their optimal performance then it makes sense to continue to compensate senior teachers in order to retain them. A constant cycle of replacement costs money and costs in terms of lost effectiveness during the start-up years.[2]

Seniority and Fairness to Children

One argument is that seniority preferences in teaching assignments permit senior teachers to hold on to jobs in schools against their principals preferences and that these seniority privileges often lead to the neediest children having the least experienced teachers – as the more experienced teachers get the cushiest jobs in the district. On the one hand, this assertion acknowledges that new teachers, not senior ones, may in fact be the least effective. On the other hand, it’s simply not supported by research. Two separate studies, one on Seattle schools after implementing “mutual consent” hiring, and the other exploring Florida seniority contractual provisions have found that a) implementation of mutual consent initially exacerbated inequities across schools and ultimately led to no change[3] and b) that seniority provisions in contracts had no statistical relationship to inequitable distributions of teachers across schools and children.[4] Further, mutual consent hiring policies a) assume that central office decisions are necessarily bad and principals’ decisions necessarily good, b) they ignore that principal quality itself may be inequitably distributed and c) they ignore that central office is responsible for assigning principals.

Seniority and Layoffs

Another argument is that removing seniority preferences in cases of reduction in force (RIF) will necessarily lead to an improved teaching workforce as measured by student achievement outcomes. The argument is that seniority preferences must be replaced by “effectiveness” metrics that are predictably related to future effectiveness. First, such “effectiveness” measures are typically only available for core content classroom teachers between grades 3 and 8. In those relatively rare cases where Reduction in Force is actually implemented, the 20% of teachers for whom such metrics are available are least likely to be reduced and there typically exists significant latitude in deciding which programs and positions might be reduced first. Most reductions in force, which happen infrequently to begin with, chip away at other programs and services before ever approaching core subject area teachers.  Second, these effectiveness measures are wildly erratic and often substantially biased by who the teacher is teaching.[5]  In reality, these policies propose to replace seniority with a roll of the dice, or even a roll of rigged dice. Third, when implementing a 5% across the board cut, for example, effectively eliminating teachers at random by experience rather than eliminating only the newest teachers results only in nickels and dimes savings – certainly not enough to make even the smallest dent in the degree of persistent underfunding of Philadelphia schools, where debate on these policies is ongoing.[6]

While seniority is a seemingly arbitrary and imperfect measure for retaining teachers, replacing it with a roll of the dice is likely to have serious negative consequences for retaining high quality senior teachers and recruiting teachers into high need districts.

Bigger Picture Wage Issues

Most important to recruiting and retaining a quality teacher workforce in any given school district are a) the relative compensation and working conditions a teacher can expect throughout their career when compared with other career options in the same labor market and b) the relative compensation and working conditions a teacher can expect in one school or district versus another in the same labor market.[7]

Paying teachers competitively, offering good working conditions, including smaller class sizes and other resources, and providing job security are far more likely to produce the teaching workforce our children need.

In previous posts, I’ve conveyed my distaste for the oft obsessively narrow thinking of the traditional labor economist when engaged in education policy research. I’ve picked on the assumption that greed and personal interest are necessarily the sole driving force of all human rational decision making. And I’ve picked on the obsession with narrow and circular validity tests. Yet still, sometimes, I see quotes from researchers I otherwise generally respect, that completely blow my mind.

I gotta say, this quote from Tom Kane of Harvard regarding compensation for teachers holding masters degrees is right up there with the worst of them – most notably because it conveys such an obscenely narrow perspective of compensation policies (public or private sector) and broader complexities of labor market dynamics.

The quote comes to us from the Wall Street Journal the other day:

“Paying teachers on the basis of master’s degrees is equivalent to paying them based on hair color,” said Thomas J. Kane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director for the Center for Education Policy Research. Mr. Kane said decades of research has shown that teachers holding master’s degrees are no more effective at raising student achievement than those with only bachelor’s, except in math. Researchers have also shown that teachers with advanced degrees in science benefit students. (Wall St. Journal)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304795804579101723505111670.html

The broad implication of the quote by Kane is that immediate, measurable differentials  in teacher compensation should only ever be directly associated with characteristics, indicators, behaviors of teachers that can be directly associated with differences in measured student test score differences from time 1 to time 2. Here… and NOW! That’s it. Any and all pay differentials MUST be associated with estimated test score gains on reading and math! The extension of this logic is that if there exists no statistically estimated relationship between a teacher having a masters degree in X, Y or Z and their students test score gains in that or the next year (perhaps), then no compensation should exist for this characteristic. Apparently, the same would apply for the teacher with the additional year of experience if they could not show a marginal gain to their students test scores over what they had previously achieved with less experience.

There are two gaping holes in this logic (setting aside the huge questions of the validity of the test score outcome metric as most important in defining student success and attributing that success to the teacher).

First, the research on “masters” degrees in education has pretty much addressed questions related to whether holding something ambiguously classified as a masters degree is positively associated with test score gains. In fact, these studies have found that holding content area masters degrees in math is associated with gains in math achievement.[1]

BUT, that research has not to my knowledge asked the broader labor market question regarding whether school districts offering additional pay for holding or pursuing masters degrees achieve a recruitment advantage on the labor market for teachers, or any other benefits to their workforce and children they serve. That’s a totally different question and one that requires being able to think beyond the laughably narrow mindset that the ONLY benefit that can ever matter and should ever warrant additional public expenditure is that which contributes directly and immediately to test score gains (of the students with the specific teacher being compensated for their masters degree).

Quite honestly, it’s this same utterly ridiculous thinking that plagues Kane’s Measures of Effective Teaching studies for the Gates Foundation – the assumption pervasive at every step of the project that the one and only valid indicator of teacher quality is value-added itself and all other measures should be evaluated by their ability to predict value added. Because a teacher’s prior year value added is the best predictor of current year value added, and a better predictor than observations, student surveys, etc., therefore value-added is the best measure of teacher effectiveness!

Second, both from a practical perspective and with potential broader labor market implications, there are many, many reasons why a local public school district or private school… or other business entity for that matter might wish to provide additional compensation for their employees who chose to advance their education, either related specifically to their current job title and responsibilities, or not!

It may be entirely reasonable for local public school districts to provide additional compensation for teachers seeking graduate credentials that expand their possible involvement in district or school activities, such as achieving additional training to work with special needs populations, or additional content certifications, or for that matter additional training to engage in all of the new teacher observations Kane and others now seem to think are necessary for getting rid of bad teachers (even though his own work on MET did not support his own conclusion in this regard). That is, you might want to have the salary differential available for the utility player.

It may also be an entirely reasonable approach for school districts to view providing additional compensation for furthering one’s education as a useful tool for retaining teachers – especially those who themselves show interest in expanding their own knowledge/learning.

In both this, and the previous case, the additional degrees or credentials obtained may actually have no direct relationship to the current primary responsibilities of the teacher. Does that mean they are entirely useless? That they should not be in any way associated with differentiated compensation not only until they are used, but until they are used in such a way that we can estimate that the additional credential has led to test score gains?

That’s just freakin’ asinine.

And this reductionist thinking really needs to stop.

A few other points are in order here. As I’ve shown in previous posts, the pursuit of the education masters degree takes many forms and has drifted over years. See the following figures.

Indeed, more creative thinking about how and when we choose to compensate graduate degrees through salary differentials is important to consider. But it would be utterly foolish to consider only immediate contribution to student test score gain as the single valid metric for making this decision.

Also, there already exists some variation in the ways in which masters degrees tend to be compensated across local public school districts. On average, I have found in studying teacher wage data in large diverse metropolitan areas that it is in fact the more affluent suburban districts that a) tend to have larger shares of teachers holding masters degrees and b) tend to provide a bigger bump in salary associated with masters degrees. Here are the New Jersey figures from a few years back.

And in the Chicago metro area, based on prior work, a teacher in a majority minority (student population) district is only 69% as likely as a teacher in a non-majority minority district (in the same labor market and holding other teacher characteristics constant) to hold a master’s degree and a teacher in a district that is 100% minority is only 60% as likely to hold a master’s degree as a teacher in a district that is 0% minority.

This figure displays the salary differentials by degree level and experience:

Teachers in majority minority districts are much less likely to hold a master’s degree than teachers in other districts in the same labor market. On average, a teacher in a majority minority district – at the same degree level and experience as a teacher in a non-majority minority district – is making about $2,000 less in annual salary. Because a master’s degree “bump” in salary is worth an average of about $8,500 ($8,481) in annual salary, large shares of teachers in majority minority schools are earning over $10,000 less than teachers at comparable experience levels in non-majority minority districts in the same labor market.

So, in other words, if masters degrees are such an obscene inefficiency in our public education system, they are an inefficiency most among the affluent suburban districts and less so in major urban districts (it is actually common to find that financially less constrained districts spend less efficiently – at least in terms of direct relationship to measured outcomes).

Meanwhile, the policies endorsed by Kane (via the MET project) are at least implicitly far more focused on fixing the supposed inefficiencies of our major urban education systems.

Perhaps, just perhaps, if those suburban districts next door did not pay such large differentials for and recruit so aggressively the teachers with masters degrees, their urban neighbors might have a chance to recruit some of those same teachers. But in the current environment, pushing urban districts to remove any and all compensating differentials related to anything not tied directly and immediately to test score gains will undoubtedly do far more harm than good.

I just can’t drop the Philly issue, because of the complete absurdity of the reformy rhetoric about Philly schools and persistent willful ignorance regarding the role of equitable and adequate funding for Philly schools and the Commonwealth’s failure to provide any reasonable level of support.

For what it’s worth – and I’ve spent a great deal of time critiquing this and similar studies – the Commonwealth in the mid-2000s took on the task of determining the “costs” per pupil of what Pennsylvania school districts needed to get the job done. This cost analysis was then used to guide development of a new formula intended to drive appropriate levels of state aid to districts facing substantive gaps between current spending (2006-07) at the time, and cost estimates developed under state supervision, by independent consultants.

 [critique of these & related methods can be found here]

At the time, state officials found that districts including Philadelphia, Allentown and Reading faced funding (relative to cost) gaps between $4,000 and $6,000+ per pupil.  So, in rather bold style, they adopted a new school finance formula with the intent to phase districts toward their adequacy targets.  Then the economy tanked, and a new era of political attacks on state school finance formulas followed (as much a Cuomo/NY issue as a Corbett one!).

So, where are Pennsylvania school districts now, with 2013-14 (July estimates) funding (holding local effort constant), when compared to the 2006-07 funding gaps? That is, have Pennsylvania districts come any closer in the (7) following years to the targets that were estimated for them before it all came crumbling down?

Simple answer? No!

That is, Philly remains more than $4,000 per pupil (by this quick&dirty analysis) below the funding target that was estimated for it nearly a decade ago. [BEF = Basic Education Funding]

BEF 2013-14: http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/education_budget/8699/SAEBG/539259

I had the displeasure of coming across this completely ridiculous and deceitful video the other day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aeEr2qk9s

Which was created to promote Eric Hanushek’s latest U.S. education crisis manifesto.  Around the 4:12 minute mark, the video jumps from crisis mode to policy solution mode,  telling us how among U.S. States, Florida is a model for the way forward, and states like Wyoming and New York provide proof positive that money really has nothing to do with helping schools. That money doesn’t matter is a critical underpinning of nearly every reformy rant.

Here’s the complete story to the contrary.

Now, most of what’s here has been summarized previously by Hanushek, and I have discussed this stuff previously on this blog.

This bizarre video got me thinking about a series of previous posts where I’ve looked across numerous indicators to try to tease out the relationships among them, across states.  I’ve selectively scoured scatterplots of relationships between various state level indicators and outcome measures, but have not for a while now, simply stepped back and evaluated the correlations across all of them, and then tried to tease out what states, if any really do stand out.

Let’s start with the indicators and their sources.

School Funding Fairness: First up in my state level data set are a series of indicators from http://schoolfundingfairness.org/

These indicators characterize the level of funding and effort in state school finance systems.

• Funding Level (predicted at 10% Poverty)
• Funding Effort (state and local revenue as a share of gross state product)
• Coverage (% of 6 to 16 year olds in public school system)
• Early Childhood Enrollment (% of 3 & 4yr olds enrolled in some form of school)

Union Strength: Second are the Thomas B. Fordham Institute rankings of state level union strength. Here, a rank of 1 means a state with strong unions, and a rank of 50 would be a state with a weak union role.  Thus, from a measurement standpoint, one might describe it as “union weakness” – that is, the higher the assigned value (thus lower ranking) the weaker the unions in that state. http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2012/20121029-How-Strong-Are-US-Teacher-Unions/20121029-Union-Strength-Full-Report.pdf

 Policy Context Reformyness:  Third, I have the grade point averages assigned to states by Students First in their state report cards. I use their overall GPA, their GPA for teacher policies and their GPA for parent power. http://reportcard.studentsfirst.org/ In brief, Students First supports removal of seniority privileges, test-based teacher evaluation, mutual consent teacher assignment policies, folding their preferences for these policies into their teacher GPA. Regarding parent power, they support such cockamamie schemes as parent trigger, and more common school choice alternatives such as charter school expansion and tuition tax credits.

Teacher Wage Competitiveness: Here, I rely on the Economic Policy Institute’s measure of the Teaching Penalty, which is the average weekly wage of teachers compared to non-teachers for each state. http://www.epi.org/publication/the_teaching_penalty_an_update_through_2010/

Harvard PEPG/Hanushek Catching Up Outcome Measures: Finally, along with mean scale scores of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, I also use some of Eric Hanushek’s own measures of student outcomes – and corrected versions of those measures – in order to track which of the above policies seem most correlated with various outcome measures – in the appropriate direction that is! http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG12-03_CatchingUp.pdf

Now, in the book of “reformy”, there are some well understood truths.

First, that school choice programs, no matter what, no matter how structured, necessarily lead to an improved system for all. Choice lifts all boats. It necessarily induces innovation, thus quality, and the pressures of innovative quality force the stagnant public system to step up or collapse (that is, unless political leaders have already crafted a scheme to forcibly close traditional public schools, creating a false demand for alternatives, and then publicize that false demand as real… and well… you know).

Second, teacher wages are completely unimportant, largely because teachers are already paid way to freakin much and as a result they are all just complacent, lazy and greedy, waiting on those fat pensions they stand to collect after they ride out their time. In fact, pure reformy ideology declares that the best way to improve teacher quality is to cut those wage for most teachers, and perhaps, based on the luck of the roll of the test score dice, grant a few bonuses here and there to the truly “great” teachers.

Spending more money on stuff like expanding early childhood education is just wasteful expansion of the existing bureaucracy, having no persistent positive gains for children down the line.

States that spend a lot on schools are really just wasting their money, and getting nothing for it (see the above video… which pretty much says this straight up! Re: Wyoming and New York).

Thus… we must look to the models… like Florida… or Louisiana… or perhaps even Arizona?

So I was wondering….

So, I was wondering, if I took all of the above indicators, and first evaluated the correlations among all of them, and then evaluated a few scatterplots of what appear to be among the more consistent correlations, what would I conclude? Clearly, by my snark above, along with a lot of the other content you’ve probably read on this blog, I already have an opinion in this regard… but let’s start with a look at the correlations.  Do they really tell us how totally freakin awesome reformyness is? And how totally freakin pointless it is to consider silly stuff…. Like money… and paying teachers well? And how completely freakin’ destructive unions are to quality education systems?

Here’s the correlation matrix… highlighted using a standard Excel conditional formatting feature.

Table 1. Correlations Across Indicators

And here’s a bullet point summary of the correlations.

• States with weaker unions (higher number in ranking, meaning lower union strength ranking), have systematically lower state and local revenue per pupil and less competitive teacher wages.
• States with weaker unions have systematically lower average NAEP scores.
• States with higher reformy grade point averages according to Students First, have lower shares of children in the public school system, and have lower average NAEP scores.
• Average NAEP scores are most positively associated with state and local revenue and teacher wage competitiveness.
• Standardized NAEP gains over time are most positively associated with shares of 3 and 4 year olds enrolled in school programs/pre-school.
• Standardized NAEP gains are also positively associated with Students First grade point averages.  But, standardized NAEP gains are pretty strongly related to starting point. That is, states showing greater gains are generally those who started lower.

Figure 1. Gains Depend on Starting Point

 

• Standardized NAEP gains, adjusted for starting point, are positively associated with enrollment of 3 and 4 year olds and with state and local revenue per pupil.
• Adjusted standardized NAEP gains are only very weakly associated with Students First grade point averages.

So, who are the real standouts?

Okay… okay… but those correlations just suggest that states with higher spending and more kids in early childhood education seem to be doing better and gaining more over time.  The correlations also, in the most generous case, suggest that the most reformy policies have been adopted in states that do and have historically done very poorly on outcome measures and that states with reformier policies aren’t necessarily outpacing those without (when the performance measures are adjusted for starting point).

Now… one might say… we must give these policies time… we’ve only just begun. To which I say many of the underlying policy conditions in these states, but for more recent changes to teacher evaluation policies under Race to the Top, have actually been in place now for a decade or so. Reforminess IS THE STATUS QUO in many of these low performing and gain-lagging states!

Figure 2. State & Local Revenue and NAEP Mean Scale Score

State and local revenues remain positively associated with NAEP mean scale scores, but this is indeed a case, in part, of those who have versus those who don’t. Here, Massachusetts is lookin’ pretty good, with New Jersey squashed below it, just above New Hampshire.  Minnesota’s not lookin’ too bad. Florida is squashed in the middle of the pack among the low spenders.

Figure 3. State and Local Revenue and Adjusted Gains

Interestingly state and local revenues are also loosely (r=.228) associated with adjusted (by starting point) standardized gains on NAEP from 1990 to present (whereas reformier policy preferences were less correlated or not at all with adjusted standardized gains).

Now, a point not to be overlooked here is that New Jersey is actually further above the “expected” value, given its starting point, than Florida. But reformy types HATE New Jersey because it doesn’t conform to their preferences, just like they hate Maryland and tolerate, at best, Massachusetts.  New Jersey spends a lot, has very low percent of kids in charter schools and has relatively strong unions.

Thus, the emphasis on Florida as the obvious (really?) standout – the model for all! Some pretty massive freakin deceptive, cherry picking there if you ask me. Missing from this graph is Massachusetts.  Amazingly, no mention of New Jersey or Massachusetts in the goofy video above.

What I found most intriguing in this whole exercise was the relative strength of early childhood enrollments both with respect to NAEP mean scale score levels and with respect to the change in the percent of children scoring below basic.

Indeed, the first graph below also reflects some of the have/have not relationship. States like New Jersey and Massachusetts have higher income, more educated families that even without publicly financed pre-k programs would likely enroll their youngsters at a higher rate than parents in much lower income states.  These are the strongest relationships in the matrix above… and early childhood enrollments are also most positively correlated with changes in shares of children scoring low on NAEP and most positively correlated with corrected standardized gains on NAEP.

Figure 4. 3 & 4 Year Old Enrollment and NAEP Mean Scale Score

Figure 5. 3 & 4 Year Old Enrollment and Reduction in % Below Basic

So, maybe it’s just me, but if anything, the correlation matrix above suggests that states that are spending on schools seem to both be doing okay, and to be improving over time.  Standouts on gains include Maryland and New Jersey (and Delaware). Florida doesn’t strike me as the big standout here, though they do have high NAEP change over time. But, others including New Jersey have higher adjusted NAEP gain and have much higher reduction in the percent below proficient.  And while New York and Wyoming raise some questions… some of these are easily disposed, with Wyoming being among the most sparsely populated states in the nation, for example, and New York being home to the largest city in the nation, embedded in the highest cost labor market in the nation.

As I’ve explained on previous posts… there’s a whole lot going on behind any simple scatterplot like these. They don’t tell of complex underlying causal relationships. They don’t really point us to those perfect models to follow.  But they sure can be illustrative, and raise some important questions about the BS constantly hurled at us, increasingly in cleverly produced youtube format.

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Addendum: This paper was recently tweeted as providing proof that the presence of strong teachers unions in states creates a substantial drag on student performance gains.  I’m actually quite shocked that such a methodologically goofy paper was actually published in this journal, which tends to be quite reasonable. First and foremost, the outcome measure – achievement growth over time – is created using states’ own assessments and looking at the difference in proficiency rates between 8th and 4th graders [with an unsatisfying “correction” for differences in test difficulty], in the same year [not even real cohort change]. This is problematic on two levels – first that differencing proficiency rates is a junk analysis to begin with, given policy shifts and other changes in state assessments and cut-scores over time, not to mention the massive information loss that occurs when we look only at numbers of kids shifting over  a particular bar (yes… one of my graphs above suffers this same problem – # 5).  No, these differences cannot be corrected by the simple regression used in the study.  Second, state assessments, rigor of items and cut scores differ so vastly that the idea of comparing proficiency rate changes across states is utterly ridiculous.  No, these differences cannot be corrected by the simple regression used in the study.  Finally, explanatory variables/covariates in the models are a relatively simple collection of measures for which entirely unsatisfying justification is provided. But that doesn’t matter so much when the dependent measure is complete crap.

This is an issue I’ve written much about over time – the persistent failure of New York State to fund its highest need public schools, and more recently, the audacity of state officials to place blame for their own egregious failures on the teachers and administrators in the state’s least well-funded school districts. Here’s a recap of previous posts:

1. On how New York State crafted a low-ball estimate of what districts needed to achieve adequate outcomes and then still completely failed to fund it.
2. On how New York State maintains one of the least equitable state school finance systems in the nation.
3. On how New York State’s systemic, persistent underfunding of high need districts has led to significant increases of numbers of children attending school with excessively large class sizes.
4. On how New York State officials crafted a completely bogus, racially and economically disparate school classification scheme in order to justify intervening in the very schools they have most deprived over time.

Much like my recent posts regarding the completely misinformed bluster of pundits like Andy Smarick regarding Philadelphia, when I read stuff like this from Joe Williams of Dems of Ed Reform – I get a little irked!

This column from Joe Williams of DFER goes on the attack against those who would criticize NY Governor Cuomo’s call to impose the “death penalty” on failing schools. Williams asserts that any opposition to Cuomo’s statements can be rooted in nothing other than union/teacher self-interests. That there clearly is no possible case, on behalf of parents and/or children, for opposing Cuomo’s death penalty option. It’s just the right thing and only thing to do on behalf of suffering parents and children.

In New York, to cite yet another example, the state teachers union wasn’t happy that Gov. Andrew Cuomo had the audacity to suggest that the public – including the state Government – shouldn’t tolerate schools which persistently fail to educate children. The union’s flacks quickly seized on Cuomo’s descriptive use of the term “Death Penalty” for failing schools. We can only assume they we’re pretending to be outraged on behalf of homicidal maniacs on Death Row or something clever like that.

Thankfully, Cuomo wasn’t distracted by the manufactured outrage at NYSUT headquarters. Yesterday, he stuck to his guns, telling the Buffalo News that he was going to stand with parents, students, teachers, and taxpayers in fighting often-decades-long failure. Amen.

http://www.dfer.org/blog/2013/09/grabbing_the_bu.php

So, let’s take a look at some actual data on how well Governor Cuomo has been looking out for the interests of those disadvantaged children and families trapped in low performing schools and districts around New York State.

To review my previous posts, New York State has a funding formula that bases the amount of funding each district theoretically needs in order to achieve desired outcomes on the average spending of districts that do achieve those outcomes… and then attaches weights to account for additional student needs and regional costs.  After setting this target funding figure, the state determines the amount that should be paid for with local tax revenue sources and the amount that should be paid with state aid.

The state sets a state aid target for each district to aid in reaching their adequate spending target.

I’ll set aside entirely the really big and important question of whether these targets set by the state are actually adequate.

So, we’ve got two targets here and as I’ve shown previously, the state under the leadership of Governor Cuomo has missed both targets by long shot – and has especially missed those targets for districts serving the children with the greatest needs. Since I’ve beaten this issue to death in several previous posts, I’ll provide only a short review here.

This first figure shows the size of the average STATE AID TARGET GAPS – or amount per pupil that the good Gov’ Cuomo has deprived these children of – for the 2013-14 school year. Notably, the state aid shortfalls- the amount the state underfunds its own formula – grow bigger and bigger as the state’s own pupil need index goes higher and higher. The huge bowling ball here is New York City. I’ve have noted a few standouts from past posts, including Utica and Poughkeepsie, and I’ve include Buffalo here because it seemed to have been the target of the death penalty comments.

Figure 1.

This second figure shows the average gaps of both types described above, by the average shares of children qualified for free or reduced priced lunch in school districts facing those gaps.  This graph shows the average gaps of both types. Notably, the lowest poverty districts do spend, on average, more than they need to achieve adequate outcomes, even though they are not receiving their full state aid allotment. They simply have the local capacity to offset these losses – a capacity that higher poverty districts don’t have – and under the Governor’s tax limit policies – couldn’t even use if they did!

Figure 2.

Yeah… that’s right, the good Gov’ who is clearly the only one trying to do right by kids and parents here (according to the bloviating Williams) a) has deprived districts in some cases of over $6,000 per pupil in state aid they are supposed to get, and b) has imposed local tax limits that prohibit those districts from even partially closing the gap the state – the Governor – has created for them.

But hey… it’s all for the kids, right? At least he’s not a union lacky just lookin’ out for himself.

Let’s hit a few more figures here, linking the Governor’s death penalty claims with the funding shortfalls he persistently endorses. This graph shows the average spending gaps of districts of schools falling in the state’s accountability classifications – where presumably, those Priority Schools are the ones on death row.

Figure 3.

Like other states with approved NCLB waivers, New York has adopted a modified performance classification scheme to identify those schools and districts subject to the most immediate interventions.

Using 2010-11 school year results, NYSED will identify as Priority Schools the lowest achieving district and public charter schools in the state based on combined ELA and math assessment results or graduation rate for the “all students” group, if these schools are not demonstrating progress in improving student results. The Department will identify any district with at least one Priority School as a Focus District. If a district is among those with the lowest achieving subgroups in ELA and mathematics combined or for graduation rate and is not showing improvement, the district will also be identified as a Focus District. These districts in turn will be required to identify, at a minimum, a specified number of schools as Focus Schools.[1]

Under this model, the state assumes no blame for a district’s or school’s “failure” to achieve measured outcome goals, but grants itself additional authority to impose significant structural, programmatic and staffing changes. By design of this system, the fault lies with district and school management and operations and the quality of teachers delivering the curriculum. Schools identified as priority schools and districts identified as focus districts are unlikely to receive substantive additional financial resources from the state but will face additional accountability and potential restructuring requirements.

Though unlikely to be a successful strategy with the state as arbiter, districts so severely underfunded by the state and serving high need student populations should push back against the state on the following basis:

Districts with schools that have been preliminarily identified as Priority Schools, as well as preliminarily identified charter schools, that believe that there are extenuating or extraordinary circumstances that should cause the school to not be so identified may petition the Commissioner to have a school removed from Priority status. These petitions will be due two weeks from the date of notification that a school has been preliminarily identified as a Priority School. (p. 6) [2]

That is, it might be a logical strategy to use the state’s own dramatic underfunding of the state’s own estimate of adequate funding as basis for arguing extenuating circumstances.  Until the state at the very least meets its own minimum funding obligation, the state should have little authority to force additional requirements or structural changes on these districts. The state must accept at least partial blame for current conditions, if not the lion’s share.

Okay… just a few more to reinforce my point here. These next few graphs compare school level 2013 8^th grade outcomes with district level spending gaps – leaving out New York City. Priority schools are indicated in Orange. Indeed, Priority schools are very low performing especially on the new state assessments. But notably, all of the priority schools in these figures are also in districts that spend $2,000 to $6,000 less per pupil – as a direct function of state aid deprivation – than the state itself estimates that they need in order to achieve desired outcomes.

For the stat geeks, the r-squared for each of these is around .50 – that is, spending gaps alone explain 50% of the variance in the outcomes. Below, I provide the multiple regression output.

Figure 4.

Figure 5.

So, before making calls to impose the death penalty on failing New York State schools, I would argue that the Governor should take a hard look at his own policies of recent years, before placing blame – vilifying teachers and other school officials – and assuming easily attainable revenue-neutral solutions.

Put simply, what the New York public should NOT tolerate, is a Governor and Legislature who refuse to provide sufficient resources to high need schools and then turn around and blame the schools and communities for their own failures. (all the while, protecting billions of dollars in separate aid programs that drive funds to wealthy districts).

Appendix

Table 1 provides a multiple regression analysis which asks the question – to what extent are spending gaps associated with outcomes, among schools with similar percentages of low income or non-English speaking children, in the same year.  In other words, are the spending gap to outcome relationships displayed in previous figures merely a function of the relationships between outcome gaps and student population characteristics, and spending gaps and student characteristics?  Table 18 shows that in each case, for each outcome measure, outcome gaps are associated with spending gaps, even among districts with similar student needs. A$1,000 reduction in spending gap is associated with a 3.3% increase in 4yr college attendance, 1.1% increase in postsecondary attendance, 1.2% increase in 8^th grade math scores and 1.4% increase in 8^th grade ELA scores.

Table 1.

My last post was about the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s role in starving the Philadelphia school district into submission. The failure by deprivation of the city district has now been used as a basis for blaming the district and its employees – primarily teachers, for that failure.

Of course, once the district has been quietly squeezed into submission over time, the obvious reformy answer for fixing Philly schools (along with expanding the policies that have not worked so well for the past 10 years, including charter expansion and private management), is to subvert existing employee contracts and district/city policies to break the union stronghold that protects the interests of teachers over those of children. Two steps toward this end game include eliminating “last in, first out” layoff preferences and adopting “mutual consent” teacher placement (save discussion of slashing contractually obligated pensions for those who put in years of service at modest wages for another day).

These are classic smokescreen reforms which a) have little to do with the district’s current mess and b) do little to improve conditions. First of all, a simple back of the napkin cost-benefit analysis shows that the supposed gains from replacing seniority based layoffs are very small [nickles & dimes won’t close this gap]. Second, yet another study has (first study summary, second study) shown that seniority provisions in district contracts aren’t associated with or a drive within-district, between-school disparities. Besides, it’s not like “within district” disparities across schools were/are the primary problem facing Philly!?!

The bottom line is that none of this stuff has anything to do with actually improving the conditions of public schooling in Philadelphia. If proponents of these resource-free (yeah… $50 million in the Philly context is still relatively resource-free) policy changes really think it does, then they are even more clueless than I thought.

But this post isn’t about Philly… well… okay… the first part is. This post is about an entire state that has taken a similar approach – Good ol’ Tennessee. Yeah… that’s right… racin’ to the top Tennessee.

And this post is about yet another, emerging reformy smokescreen! Teacher licensure reform!

There’s a whole lot goin’ on in Tennessee these past few years, and weeks. Most notably, in recent weeks Tennessee was praised by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan for its changes to teacher licensure.

“I want to praise Tennessee’s continuing effort to improve support and evaluation for teachers. For too long, in too many places, schools systems have hurt students by treating every teacher the same – failing to identify those who need support and those whose work deserves particular recognition. Tennessee has been a leader in developing systems that do better—and that have earned the support of a growing number of teachers. Tennessee’s new teacher licensure rules continue that effort, by ensuring that decisions on licensure are informed by multiple measures of their effectiveness in the classroom, including measures of student learning. The new system also adds reasonable safeguards to make sure any judgment about teacher performance is fair.”

http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/statement-us-secretary-education-arne-duncan-tennessee-making-changes-teacher-li

Under these new policies, teachers in Tennessee will have to produce student test score gains to obtain, or keep their teaching license and to keep their jobs/careers.  After all, it is well understood that overpaid lazy unionized teachers with fat pensions are the undeniable cause of Tennessee’s persistently low NAEP scores.  Oh wait… Tennessee already had very weak union protections… coupled with their low NAEP scores… silly me (complete post).

Yep, that’s right. Teacher tenure and license renewal in Tennessee will now be subjected to a roll of the dice!

Tennessee will strive through aggressive deselection, via licensure requirements, (of the 1/3 for whom scores can be generated), to achieve a statewide system of Irreplaceables!

The true reformy brilliance here is that these changes, with little doubt, will cause the best teachers from around the region and even from Finland, Shanghai and Singapore to flock to Tennessee to teach…at least for as long as they don’t roll a 1 and lose their license (pack your dice!).  In fact, it is a well understood reformy truth that the “best teachers” would be willing to take a much lower salary if they only knew they would be evaluated based on a highly unstable metric that is significantly beyond their direct control. That’s just the reformy truth! [a reformy truth commonly validated via survey questions of new teachers worded as “don’t you think great teachers should be rewarded?” and “Wouldn’t you rather be a teacher in a system that rewards great teachers?”]

No money needed here. Salaries… not a problem.  Resource-Free Reformyness solves all!

All that aside, what do we know about the great state of Tennessee?

• Tennessee is persistently among the lowest spending states in the country on its public education system.
• Tennessee is not only one of the lowest spenders, but Tennessee spends less as a share of gross state product than most other states.
• Tennessee has one of the largest income gaps between public school enrolled and private school enrolled children, and has among the higher shares of private school enrolled children.
• Tennessee has relatively non-competitive teacher wages with respect to non-teacher wages.

Let’s take a visual/graphic stroll through some of these issues.

First, here’s the relationship between funding effort (state and local spending as a share of gross state product) and funding levels. Specifically, this graph looks at the predicted state and local revenues (based on the model used in our funding fairness studies, updated with 2009-2011 data) for districts with high poverty concentrations.

Figure 1.

Hmmm… Tennessee is certainly no standout there – well – actually it kind of is – and not in a good way – better than Arizona I guess…slightly. Really low spending… and really low effort to get them there. But heck, schools don’t need money… they need reformyness! Just like Philly!

Besides, with some solid teacher compensation reforms – dumping the lazy overpaid deadwood – a little pension slashing – tenure based on test scores… license renewal based on test scores – we can have the greatest teachers in the world (or at least close to Finland) and maybe even spend less than Arizona!

Here is the current relationship between the average “competitive wage” for teachers and funding effort. Here, competitive wage is based on a regression model of U.S. Census data in which I compare the average teacher wage, on an hourly basis (controlling for hours per week and weeks per year) with the wages of non-teachers at the same age and education level (among only those with a BA or MA). 100%, or 1.0 means teacher wages are roughly at parity with non-teacher wages on an hourly basis (other models, such as the one here, typically produce lower relative wage estimates for teachers).

Figure 2.

So, it would seem, that teacher wages in Tennessee overall aren’t that competitive.  And relative wages matter! But hey… what’s it matter if we throw in a little more career uncertainty!

Here is Tennessee’s public school funding effort with respect to the income gap between public and private school enrolled children – public school household income to private school household income ratio. Hmmmm… it doesn’t look like Tennessee’s higher income households are particularly invested in the public system.

Figure 3.

But heck… we know that those higher income families will flock back to the public schools as soon as they can rest easy knowing their child’s teachers will only keep their license if their child cranks out sufficient test score gains!?!

Now, it’s one thing for Tennessee politicians to move forward with these teacher licensing policies with their own political goals in mind, ignoring the real issues – their persistent underfunding of the entire state system for decades (or more).  And it’s one thing for someone like Andy Smarick to be so belligerently uniformed about Philadelphia.

It is yet another, however, for the U.S. Secretary of Education to continue patting state and local school officials on the back for completely ignoring the real issues severely undermining their public education system.

My point here is that we all need to start looking at the BIG PICTURE regarding these state systems of schooling – the context into which new policies, new strategies, “reforms” if you will, are to be introduced. As I’ve noted previously, even if some of these reform strategies might be reasonable ideas warranting experimentation, whether charter expansion or teacher compensation and licensure reform, none can succeed in a system so substantially lacking in resources, and none can improve the equity of children’s outcomes unless there exists greater equity in availability of resources.

Yeah… I know it’s tough for the punditocracy, the ignorati as some have called them, to actually try to contextualize reform proposals to better understand the complexities of actually makin’ stuff work.  In fact, I’ve grown to understand that some of them, on either side of the aisle, really don’t care.

But there’s no excuse for the U.S. Secretary of Education to do the same…

Over…

Over…

and Over again!

Please stop the madness!

Let’s take another trip back to Philadelphia for the day, because the reformy conversation around Philadelphia is just so darn illustrative of how reformy thinking works. Here’s a synopsis of the reformy approach to pushing pre-established, fact free, ideological reforms:

• Step 1: Create a story line
• Step 2: Find a poster child (school district, city, etc.)
• Step 3: Conjure some reformy buzz phrases (“failed urban district” & “sector agnosticism”)
• Step 4: Repeat, over and over and over again… with complete disregard for facts or evidence to the contrary

Nowhere is this thinking more evident than in recent Twitter activity of Andy Smarick. Let’s take a look at a few recent tweets. First, the broad crisis oriented storyline- the monolithic “urban school district” is a massive freakin’ failure. They all stink. It’s their own fault (let’s ignore urban planning and development, white flight, state school finance systems & tax policy, and the like). Crappy management – high paid bureaucrats in charge, overpaid, lazy teachers waiting out their time to collect huge pensions and bankrupt the city… that’s how it all works.

@stopthefreezeNJ The failed urban district has done wrong by millions of kids. Those boys and girls desperately need something better.

— Andy Smarick (@smarick) August 11, 2013

And of course, don’t forget that year, after year after year… all we’ve ever done is throw more and more money at these bureaucrats and teachers… and all they’ve done is pocket it and waste it… and really not give a crap about the kids. Enter Smarick’s seemingly favorite poster child district – Philadelphia.

@kombiz Philly’s district = terrible for decades, families left, as a result it’s bankrupt. Gotten huge state funding for yrs to prop it up.

— Andy Smarick (@smarick) August 11, 2013

@kombiz No entity can fix Philly district or any urban district for that matter. Urban district is broken, can’t be fixed, must be replaced.

— Andy Smarick (@smarick) August 11, 2013

Add to that some great certainty of knowledge about the city:

@kombiz I know Philly gets among (if not THE) highest levels of funding from the state. I also know it’s been losing thousands of students.

— Andy Smarick (@smarick) August 11, 2013

@kombiz And I know the state just bailed it out again. And now the district is asking for more money. Again.

— Andy Smarick (@smarick) August 11, 2013

Certainty is really important in reformyland… especially if you have all of your facts completely wrong! Especially if nothing in your story line actually matches up with reality. If that’s the case, be wrong loudly and repeatedly. Don’t back down.  Rule #1 in the reformy story line.

[Now, one might accept Smarick’s claim that Philly’s total state aid likely does exceed all other districts in the state. But that comparison reveals a whole new level of ignorance. Philly is actually larger than most PA districts? Yep… & Philly’s local revenue raising capacity (while better than some) is pretty weak. Overall, per pupil state and local resources in Philly (the right comparison) are pretty darn low as discussed below.]

So, let’s recap here. The story line is that urban school districts are an evil monolithic blob that eats up poor, disadvantaged kids.  They all suck.

That is the status quo! No doubt about it.

They must be dismantled. The must be closed and charterized.  They can’t be fixed. It’s that simple.  It all just requires a rethinking… a relinquishing (read “submission) of control to those necessarily better charter operators. Mind you, we only want charter operators who are among the “above average” group.  ‘Cuz we all know that while charter schools, on average, are average, the really good ones are above average!

Arguably, the most important step in the reformy story line development above is selection of the poster child, and then perhaps validating that the poster child is somehow representative of others – you know… so that the whole idea is scalable.

So, what would be required here, to validate that we have the right poster child?

Well, you’d probably want to find a district that has actually seen some infusions of funding over time, for naught.

You’d probably want to find a district that hasn’t already been adopting the strategies you propose as the solution (for over 10 years).

That is, you ought to vet your poster child… at least at some level.

But alas, this would require the very slightest effort to look at some numbers… gosh no… not math… not data… and read some real research… rather than think tank goo from the reformy echo-chamber.

So, what is the status quo in Philly?

For the past 10+ years, Philly has seen rapid expansion of charter schooling, and Philadelphia charter schools have generally not topped the list of stellar performers.

For the past 10+ years, Philly has tried outsourcing management of large numbers of schools to private management companies, including Edison, where the research conducted on these reforms seemed to suggest that resources, not management type, mattered more.

Oh yeah… and they’ve even tried “weighted student funding,” an oft-relied on reformy distraction from real equity concerns. (and one that doesn’t work so well if you simply don’t have the money to redistribute).

For the past few decades, Philly public schools have been systematically financial deprived as a function of one the nation’s most inequitable state school finance systems. To review:

1. Pennsylvania has among the least equitable state school finance systems in the country, and Philly bears the brunt of that system.
2. Pennsylvania’s school finance system is actually designed in ways that divert needed funding away from higher need districts like Philadelphia.
3. And Pennsylvania’s school finance system has created numerous perverse incentives regarding charter school funding, also to Philly’s disadvantage. (see here also)

The Philly area remains among the most racially and economically segregated areas in the nation.

So wait a second… the actual status quo in Philly is reformyness itself?… not throwing money at the problem. For more than 10 years, Philly has been an experiment in resourceless (but for some funding applied through the privatization venture in the early 2000s) reformyness.  So, if Philly is the poster child here, then perhaps the story line has some pretty significant flaws.

But don’t let the facts get in the way!

What do the Numbers Look Like for Philly?

First, here is the state and local revenue per pupil for Pennsylvania school districts in the Philly metro area with respect to poverty.

Figure 1

Second, here’s the current operating expenditure per pupil for Pennsylvania school districts in the Philly metro area with respect to poverty.

Figure 2

As I’ve noted, over and over and over again… no-one’s been throwin’ money at Philly… not now, not two years ago… not five years ago… not further back than that!

Figure 3

And you know what, it’s not because Philly is just throwing all of their money into their own low poverty schools. The disparity that exists at the district level passes right along to the school level.

So forcing Philly to adopt a decentralized weighted student funding formula in order to fix their own equity problems really isn’t a major solution either! Wait… already done that!

Figure 4

Actually, the only one doin’ money throwin’ here is arguably Lower Merion School District.  But hey, Lower Merion must be pretty far away geographically. Perhaps they are in a remote, rural area, where they need to spend more due to population sparsity or economies of scale.  Or perhaps not.  Here’s a map showing the locations of schools (by % Free Lunch) and districts by % Black in the Philly area.

Figure 5

So wait, Lower Merion is just a wealthy white suburb… right next door? And by the way… to clarify as I have on many previous posts… the big disparities here are between, not within districts. Kids are segregated largely between, not within districts. We have rich districts, white districts, poor districts, black districts. We have poor, minority schools in poor minority districts and richer whiter schools in richer whiter districts. It is actually that simple… almost. And in Pennsylvania, poorer minority schools are sadly lacking in state support.

Now, let’s take a quick look at the patterns of “chartering” that have occurred by 2011. Charters have a little star on them. Sorry, no gold star. I’m not in the business of handing those out. First of all, we see that charters only exist in districts with more black students and more low income schools. Charters aren’t flourishing in the Philly ‘burbs, like Lower Merion! (that’s because they must have “great” schools!?).

As I’ve noted on previous posts, this means that larger shares of low income and minority students (and their teachers) are potentially subjected to greater deprivation of constitutional and statutory protections – unless states step in to clean up their charter laws.

Now let’s look a little closer. As if the Philly area wasn’t already sufficiently segregated, what we see here is that within Philly, several charter schools seem to be serving relatively low shares of low income kids (qualifying for free lunch) when compared with surrounding district schools. Most district schools are bright red here… while several charters… well… are not.

So, what’s happening with charter expansion in Philly is an increase to socioeconomic segregation in some areas… but little or no attempts to correct resource disparities.

Figure 6

Wow… seems like that reformy story line has a few cracks in it, eh?

But hey, don’t let the facts get in the way.

Why “chartering” & “sector agnosticism” isn’t the solution for Philly

Let’s start by reiterating the point that too much funding, classic bureaucratic waste, not enough choice/charters and not enough privatization ARE NOT the problem in Philly.

So, here’s a quick summary of why chartering and “sector agnosticism” aren’t the simple, logical solution for Philadelphia as the post child for the failed urban school district.

1. Chartering seems to simply be leading to greater segregation of the already segregated, leaving behind even higher concentrations of more disadvantaged kids in district schools
2. Pennsylvania charter schools don’t seem to have a particularly strong record of academic performance, despite their propensity to sort.
3. Chartering, as has been practiced thus far, leads to substantive deprivation of student and employee constitutional and statutory protections. Worse, when chartering is adopted as the solution solely for poor, minority contexts, then it is poor and minority students who disproportionately forgo these rights, most of the time unknowingly.
4. Chartering, as has been practiced thus far, has reduced fiscal and governance transparency, as charter managers/operators increasingly shield their records under private governance (contract information, financial dealings, real estate holdings/dealings, etc.).
5. Even if we accept a “sector agnostic” perspective – acknowledging  the transparency and rights concerns – success requires resources.  Equitable and adequate funding is a prerequisite condition for improving conditions in Philadelphia.

Like I said in a previous post. The ridiculous must stop. The buzz phrase reformyism, shallow logic, and lack of disciplined inquiry must be replaced with more thoughtful and measured analysis, thinking and ultimately policy development.

As far as Philadelphia is concerned, real reform must begin with resources!