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My month as Slate's resident Schoolhouse Rocker comes to an end today, and so with this post I hang up my blogger's keyboard. (Not entirely, actually; for the last few weeks I've been maintaining a bare-bones book blog for news about Whatever It Takes, and I'll keep that one going indefinitely.)
I'm grateful to my editors at Slate for giving me this opportunity, and I'm grateful to all the readers who wrote me with tips, suggestions, and stories about life in the classroom.
John McCain and Barack Obama aren't talking too much about education on the campaign trail these days—it probably has something to do with the whole two-wars-plus-collapse-of-capitalism thing. But nonetheless, the next president will take office at a moment of crisis and change in the public education system, and whichever candidate wins, he'll have a chance to push the conversation, and the system itself, in some new directions.
The local developments I've been writing about here—teacher-contract negotiations in Denver and D.C.; experimental schools in Los Angeles and San Francisco and the Bronx and New Haven—are crucial laboratories and test cases for national policy, and the next president will have the opportunity to expand, refine, and build on those experiments. There are some other useful steps he could take right away. He could make school financing more equitable (a Berkeley law professor named Goodwin Liu has some good ideas on how to do that). He could fund more education R&D. (You could fill volumes with what we don't know about which educational practices actually work.) And he could construct accountability models that are more precise and humane than those found in No Child Left Behind.
Both candidates have some good ideas in their education platforms and some smart advisers. And though neither candidate has moved too far away from his party's traditional approach to education, Obama seems more willing to look for new and innovative solutions, ideas that might stir up the stagnant politics of education.
To me, one of the most significant planks in Obama's education platform isn't in his education platform at all-it's in his poverty platform: his pledge to replicate Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the United States, as public/private partnerships, with the federal government's share of the bill coming to as much as a few billion dollars. Each city's version of the program would be unique, but presumably each would include a charter school as well as intensive preschool programs, after-school tutoring, and family counseling. And I would hope that each replication would include a program, like the Harlem Children's Zone's Baby College, that would encourage parents to adopt better child-rearing strategies. (I had a piece on This American Life this weekend about Baby College and the complicated process of trying to sway Harlem's parents toward different methods.)
There are a lot of potential obstacles to Obama's pledge becoming a reality (including the fact that he will have to be elected president before he can do much about it). As I wrote earlier this month in the New York Times Magazine,
A lot of conservatives would oppose a new multibillion-dollar federal program as a Great Society-style giveaway to the poor. And many liberals are wary of any program that tries to change the behavior of inner-city parents; to them, teaching poor parents to behave more like middle-class parents can feel paternalistic. Union leaders will find it hard to support an effort that has nonunion charter schools at its heart. Education reformers often support Canada's work, but his premise-that schools alone are not enough to make a difference in poor children's lives-makes many of them anxious.
There aren't yet airtight data to prove that Canada's model works—though as I wrote earlier this month, the numbers coming out of his elementary schools are very promising. And so rather than simply cloning the Zone and airdropping it into communities around the country, Obama's replication project will work best if each city is encouraged to adapt and innovate, to compete with every other city for the best results. (As Obama said in his speech announcing the plan, "every step these cities take will be evaluated, and if certain plans or programs aren't working, we will stop them and try something else.")
Obama's "Promise Neighborhoods" could challenge the traditional division between education policy and poverty policy—between improving schools and improving the lives of poor families. Geoffrey Canada's argument is that it no longer makes sense to think of each one separately. If we try to fix the schools in a low-income neighborhood without addressing the other needs of students there, it's not a real solution to the neighborhood's problems. And it isn't enough to provide social services to poor children if their neighborhood schools are still giving them a lousy education. A true solution to the problem of underachievement in inner-city public schools is going to require more nurturing families and safer neighborhoods as well as better teachers and more accountable schools. That's the real point of the Harlem Children's Zone, and, I think, it's going to be the next chapter in the debate over schools.
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After my post on cheating went up on Monday, a few readers wrote to remind me of a classic work of cheating economics, "Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating," by Harvard economist Brian A. Jacob and Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, which was prominently featured in Freakonomics, the best-selling book by Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. According to the original paper's abstract, the authors:
estimate that serious cases of teacher or administrator cheating on standardized tests occur in a minimum of 4-5 percent of elementary school classrooms annually. The observed frequency of cheating appears to respond strongly to relatively minor changes in incentives.
As Levitt and Dubner reported in Freakonomics, Arne Duncan, the CEO of the Chicago public schools, contacted Levitt and Jacob after their paper was published and asked for their help in catching the cheaters. Duncan and the economists chose 120 classrooms—some classrooms with suspicious results, some regular classrooms as a control—and retested them, but with officials from Duncan's office overseeing the test, rather than the teachers themselves. When the test results came back, the scores from the classrooms with suspicious results had dropped sharply. A dozen teachers were fired, and as Dubner and Levitt write in their book, "The final outcome of the Chicago study is further testament to the power of incentives: the following year, cheating by teachers fell more than 30 percent."
Another reader sent a link to this story, by the New York Sun's education reporter, Elizabeth Green, about an alleged rash of cheating at P.S. 48 in the Bronx. Green uncovered convincing evidence of a principal who pressured teachers to cheat:
Meanwhile, 11 of 12 P.S. 48 graduates interviewed last week said they were coached during the state tests. They said that teachers would look over their shoulders and instruct them to try again and again until they got answers right. ...
"When I was at 48, I never went to class, and I still passed the test," a seventh-grader said. "If you go to graduation, you pass."
If your paycheck depends on your classroom's test scores, there's always going to be a temptation to cheat. But stopping cheaters doesn't seem like rocket science. As another reader wrote: "One obvious solution is to stop allowing teachers to proctor their own student's tests. You don't let the students grade their own tests because of the temptation to cheat; you shouldn't allow the teachers that temptation either."
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I've long been impressed by the accomplishments of Achievement First, the charter-school network that grew out of Amistad Academy, a middle school founded in 1999 in New Haven, Conn., by Doug McCurry, an educator, and Dacia Toll, then a recent graduate of Yale Law School.
Amistad has always served a low-income, high-minority population—a demographic that tends to do poorly in school and on standardized tests. And yet Amistad's results are consistently excellent. In 2007, the eighth-grade students at Amistad were neck and neck with the students at Worthington Hooker School for the highest state-test results in New Haven. Hooker is a well-respected public school in the city's East Rock neighborhood; some of its students have parents who are Yale professors or who are otherwise connected to Yale. Very few of Hooker's students—just 16 percent—are from low-income families, while at Amistad, that figure hovers around 80 percent. And yet Amistad's eighth-grade students beat out Hooker's eighth grade for the highest math score in New Haven, and they earned the second-highest reading and writing score in the city, right behind Hooker—a fairly stunning result.*
What impresses me just as much as Amistad's sterling test scores is the commitment of the school's founders to the broader issue of equity in education. Achievement First's leaders see their mission as not just to serve the 3,700 students enrolled in their schools in Connecticut and Brooklyn, but to create a national model for school success in low-income communities.
Two years ago, Amistad middle school expanded upward to include a high school as well. And so I was interested, and a little concerned, to read in the New Haven Register last month that students at the high school have been struggling.
Last year, 19 of the 56 students in Amistad's ninth grade—the same cohort that scored so well on the eighth-grade tests in 2007—failed at least one course. And 11 students, 20 percent of the grade, failed two courses, meaning that they did not move on to the tenth grade.
It's not quite clear just what this means. Last year, the 10th-grade students at Amistad once again did very well on the state achievement tests. So by outside measures, achievement at the school remains high. And yet many students are struggling to meet Amistad High's own standards, even after four or five years of Amistad education.
Amistad, to its credit, has launched an internal review of the middle school's methods to see what steps it can take to better prepare its students for high school. As the Register reported:
Amistad is now examining both the academic and non-academic structure of its middle school, adding more non-fiction reading, for example, and evaluating whether the institutional attitude of "we will not let kids fail" has in turn failed to teach students how to learn independently. "Independence is something you teach and develop and cultivate. We need to be more thoughtful and more intentional about doing that," said [Dacia] Toll.
My guess is that whatever difficulties Amistad's high-school students are now facing can be traced back to their experiences before reaching Amistad. As at most high-performing low-income middle schools, students generally have been arriving in fifth grade at Amistad performing well below grade level. Amistad's intensive methods are usually able to propel those students to grade level and above in just a few years. But it may be that the early academic deficits those students experienced have some lingering aftereffects that will make high levels of achievement a continuing challenge for them at every stage.
Given Amistad's track record, and Toll's willingness to face her school's problems directly and publicly, I imagine that she and her staff will figure out how to get most of those students to graduate from high school well-educated and prepared for college, even if it takes an extra year or two.
I would also hazard a guess that in a few years, things will start to get a lot easier at Amistad High. Achievement First has been assembling its own version of Geoffrey Canada's "conveyor belt"; this year, for the first time, one of the group's charter elementary schools began feeding students into one of their middle schools with four years of Achievement First education under their belts—arriving ahead of grade level instead of well behind it. It seems a safe bet that the experience those students have in ninth grade, a few years from now, will be a lot smoother than the experience of the kids now enrolled at Amistad High.
To me, the struggles at Amistad High point to the same two conclusions as do the attrition issues at the Bay Area KIPP schools: First, that the KIPP/Achievement First middle-school model can achieve truly remarkable levels of success among the kind of students—low-income, behind grade-level, a less-than-ideal home life—who just a few years ago were routinely written off altogether. And second, that if and when these middle schools are linked together with equally well-run elementary schools and high schools (and then, I hope, with high-quality prekindergartens, parenting programs, and community and family supports), they will be able to achieve much more: better and more consistent results from a broader selection of students. If that happens—and at Amistad, it may begin as soon as this year—what now seems miraculous will, I hope, come to seem downright routine.
* I'd like to provide a link to the New Haven Register story reporting those figures, but it's not easily available on line. The reference, should anyone want to Nexis it, is: Maria Garriga, "Charter school group ups the ante on scores," New Haven Register, Aug. 7, 2007.
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The new union-friendly charter school in the Bronx I wrote about last week is not the only big project that Green Dot Public Schools has taken on this fall. The other is the attempted transformation of Locke High School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The school, which currently has about 2,500 students, has long been notorious as one of the worst in the city, with what the L.A. Times recently described as a "reputation for student fisticuffs and an appallingly high dropout rate."
Green Dot was founded by Steve Barr, a garrulous, outspoken Irish American in his late 40s who helped start Rock the Vote in 1990 and nine years later decided his role in life was to run high schools. His organization now manages 10 of them, mostly in L.A., and his new mission is to transform the way public education works in the city (and then in the rest of the country).
Barr is a bit of a bomb-thrower, and Locke is his most recent incendiary device. Two years ago, with the support of a few hundred dissatisfied parents of Locke students, he persuaded more than half of the Locke faculty to sign a petition calling for the L.A. Unified School District to turn the school over to Green Dot's control, and in September 2007, the school district reluctantly handed over the keys. Barr hopes to show the district that he can run a big urban high school better than it can. And he hopes to show the L.A. teachers union that the bare-bones 33-page contract that Green Dot's unionized teachers sign is a lot better than the 300-page contract that the regular union has with the L.A. school district. In the process, Barr hopes to change the way both institutions do business.
Last year was a transitional one for Locke, and it didn't go very well. Green Dot hadn't yet taken over, but the district had already more or less moved out. The result was a disastrous year for the students, culminating in a schoolwide brawl in May that involved as many as 600 students and brought dozens of police officers to the campus, some in riot gear.
Barr showed me around Locke yesterday morning. I never saw the pre-Green Dot Locke, so I didn't have anything to compare it with, but things looked calm and orderly, students wearing their new polo-shirt uniform tucked into their new regulation khakis. There were no fisticuffs.
The Locke project is in many ways a risky undertaking. It's hard to turn around miseducated ninth graders. And Locke is unlike other charters, in that families don't have to fill out a special application to attend. If they live in the neighborhood, Locke is their high school. As the L.A. Times pointed out recently,
it's one thing to make progress with students who voluntarily sign up for a rigorous academic environment and whose parents actively support the endeavor. Green Dot's experience with Locke's many doubt-filled teens will provide a more realistic measure of what charter schools can do for poor and minority students who typically have lower test scores and higher dropout rates. And if it succeeds, Green Dot will have created a blueprint for public schools.
Of course, what makes the project somewhat less risky is that after last year, the school has nowhere to go but up.
To all San Franciscans: I'll be reading and discussing Whatever It Takes tonight (Tuesday) at 7 p.m. at the Books Inc. in Opera Plaza, an event co-sponsored by 826 Valencia, the drop-in tutoring center for kids who want help with their writing. And tomorrow (Wednesday), I'll be giving a talk at lunch at the University of California-Berkeley journalism school, an event hosted by Berkeley professors Michael Pollan and David Kirp. If you're in the neighborhood, please drop by.
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One potential problem with basing teacher compensation in part on test scores is that it gives teachers an incentive not just to "teach to the test," but to game the test completely. Because of strict accountability measures imposed in Texas in the 1990s by then-Gov. George W. Bush and Rod Paige, the Houston school superintendent, test scores rose sharply. A few years later, after the governor had become the president and the superintendent had become the federal secretary of education, the Dallas Morning News, in a series of investigative articles, revealed that at least part of those test-score gains were due to widespread cheating by teachers and administrators.
I don't want to overstate the prevalence or the impact of cheating on standardized tests—I think accountability measures are crucial, and I believe a well-run school system can find ways to all but eliminate cheating. But still, I thought I should share this story, which a reader of this blog, a young teacher in the New York City public schools, e-mailed to me recently:
I'm writing in response to your column on paying teachers more money for raising their students' test scores from the year before. When I first heard this proposal, a couple of years ago, I was excited. That should be a decent measure of a teacher's efficacy, I thought.
Until I got my class last year. As sixth graders, they were all new to my school and came from different elementary schools. And when it came to the test, every single one of them, without fail, had the same story.
During our first standardized test of the year, many hands went in the air. I shook my head at them, because according to the rules, I'm not allowed to talk to them during a test. They were outraged. "Why can't you help us?" they asked.
We had a class discussion after the exam was over. Every single one of them had received help on state standardized tests in their old school. For some of them, the teacher would explain the questions when they didn't understand something. Several students had teachers give them the correct answer. One of my students saw a teacher sit down with another student's test, erase all of his answers, and write all new ones in.
If there are bonuses tied to test scores, even more cheating will take place. What can school districts do to ensure this doesn't happen?
It's a good question, without a simple answer. I do think school systems have the tools to stop cheating. But it's hard to do without first acknowledging that it's a problem. And superintendents (and mayors) have the same accountability pressures that principals and teachers and students do. Whatever level of the bureaucracy you inhabit, when your success depends on rising scores, it's hard to take steps that will serve only to lower those scores—whether that means blowing the whistle on a fellow teacher or launching an investigation of the whole system.
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Speaking of KIPP:
In Whatever It Takes, in one of the chapters on the Promise Academy middle school, I describe the impact of the KIPP schools in the Bronx and Harlem on the Promise Academy’s leaders and staff. This was during the first few years of the Harlem Children Zone’s middle school, which were a struggle, and those KIPP schools, which had very good test results, were for the Promise Academy administrators both a standard to be aspired to and a frustrating reminder that their own students weren’t performing at the same high level as KIPP’s students.
Terri Grey, the Promise Academy principal at the time, believed the attrition issue was part of what was holding her school back. As she put it to me in one conversation, “At most charter schools, if the school is not a good fit for their child, the school finds a way to counsel parents out”—to firmly suggest, in other words, that their child might be happier elsewhere. “Whereas Promise Academy is taking the most disengaged families and students and saying, ‘No, we want you, and we’re trying to keep you here, and we don’t want to counsel you out.” That policy made it impossible, she believed, for the Promise Academy to achieve KIPP-like results.
I’m not entirely convinced that that was the real problem at Promise Academy—or that the KIPP schools in New York were actually “counseling out” a significant number of students. But I do think it’s true that Geoffrey Canada’s guiding ethic has always been to go out of his way to attract and retain the most troubled parents and students. And that makes running a school, or any program, more difficult, even if it makes the mission purer and, in the end, more important.
To me, the solution to the attrition issue, whether it’s at a KIPP middle school or the Promise Academy middle school, is the Harlem Children’s Zone’s “conveyor belt” model, which provides continuous, high-quality early-childhood and elementary education to precisely those “disengaged families and students,” so that when those children arrive in middle school, they won’t have the kind of difficulty doing demanding work as did the kids who left the Bay Area KIPP schools or who underperformed at the Promise Academy middle school in its first few years.
As Geoffrey Canada put it in one conversation I quote in my book, “The question is, can you build a system where kids in middle school won’t need these kinds of interventions in order to be successful? And my bet—I could be wrong, but this is my bet—is if we start with kids very early, and we provide them with the kind of intense and continuous academic rigor and support that they need, then when they get to the middle school and high school level, we’re not going to need those superhuman strategies at all.”
The good news, from my point of view, is that a few KIPP schools are now beginning to follow a similar model. KIPP Houston, the flagship KIPP school, is creating its own version of a conveyor-belt system, one that starts with prekindergarten for 3-year-olds and goes right through high school. To me, that’s a very promising development. And if the model spreads to other KIPP schools, I think this whole attrition debate could before long be a thing of the past.
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In Wednesday's post, I mentioned a new study of the KIPP middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. I still haven't read the whole study (it's 140 pages), but I've read a good chunk, along with a report from the San Francisco Chronicle and one from the San Francisco Examiner. The study shows mixed results, and they're mixed in an intriguing way.
First, the five KIPP schools studied do, on the whole, a very good job of raising the achievement level of the students enrolled in them. Eighty percent of the students progressed faster than normal, and at the end of fifth grade, KIPP students outperformed their "matched counterparts"—demographically similar students at other schools who began fifth grade at the same academic level—by anywhere from five to 33 points on a percentile ranking.
Second, the KIPP schools didn't attract higher-scoring students than other schools in their districts. This is important, and it was somewhat surprising to me. In my 2006 article in the Times Magazine about the achievement gap, I wrote about the fact that at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, one of KIPP's two flagship schools, incoming students were above average for the neighborhood:
Even though almost every student at the KIPP Academy ... is from a low-income family, and all but a few are either black or Hispanic, and most enter below grade level, they are still a step above other kids in the neighborhood; on their math tests in the fourth grade (the year before they arrived at KIPP), KIPP students in the Bronx scored well above the average for the district, and on their fourth-grade reading tests they often scored above the average for the entire city.
The new study shows that even though that phenomenon may be a reality in the Bronx, it's not happening in the Bay Area. The report says that "students with lower prior achievement in [English] or mathematics were more likely to attend each of three KIPP schools, compared with other same-grade students in the same neighborhood." That makes KIPP's accomplishment in raising the scores of their students even more impressive.
But the third big piece of news in the report, on attrition, is less impressive. Sixty percent of the students who enrolled in fifth grade at the three KIPP schools studied had left their school by the end of eighth grade. Some of those students left simply because their family moved out of the district. (KIPP school leaders estimated that family moves accounted for 42 percent of the leavers.) But many of the rest of the students left, it seems, because KIPP was too demanding or difficult for them. One school leader is quoted as saying, "I think for a cohort of students and families, it was harder than they thought it was going to be. Our expectations were more than they had anticipated."
If that's true of KIPP schools across the country, it means that they're accomplishing an important but somewhat limited mission: providing an excellent education to that group of low-performing, low-income students who are able to keep up with the schools' intense demands.
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In my post last Friday on the Harlem Children's Zone (the subject of my new book), I referred briefly to the difficulties that the organization's charter middle school, the Promise Academy, faced while I was reporting in Harlem. On Sunday, I received an e-mail from a reader, a teacher named Derek, who had just finished the book and asked if he could "see more reporting if possible on the middle school at the HCZ; the book seemed to end with it hitting a real rocky road."
Then Diane Ravitch, a respected education historian who is a part of the Broader, Bolder Approach group I mentioned last week, wrote about Whatever It Takes on her blog for Education Week. She wrote that she found the book as a whole "very hopeful"—except for the middle-school chapters, which she found "depressing."
All of which made me think that there might be some gaps that I should fill in here regarding the Promise Academy middle school. To summarize those chapters briefly: The Promise Academy middle school opened in Harlem in the fall of 2004 with a class of 100 sixth-grade students. That first year was difficult, and the school's results on the citywide tests in the spring of 2005 were quite poor despite a lot of arduous preparation. Over the next two years, things improved gradually, but not quickly enough to prevent Geoffrey Canada from making some major changes to the school.
Each one of those first three years in the life of the school gets a chapter in my book. What I wasn't able to report there, because of my book deadline, was that in the fourth year (2007-2008) things improved significantly at the school. Test scores were up, and, from what I'm told, there were fewer behavioral problems and less antagonism between students and teachers. And after a year's hiatus in admissions—Canada decided that the middle school wouldn't bring in a new sixth-grade class in the fall of 2007—a new grade was admitted last month.
This week, the New York City Department of Education released their annual "report cards" for every elementary and middle school in the city, and the Promise Academy received an A, the highest grade, for the second year in a row. (Once you click on that link, you have to choose "Manhattan" and "District 84" to find the grades for charter schools.)
To me, though, the real point of those chapters wasn't to judge the success of Geoffrey Canada's middle school. It was to give readers a chance to ponder some of the most difficult questions in urban education today.
The first has to do with age. One of the main conclusions I reached in my book was that educational and social supports that start early in a child's life are much more effective than those that start in middle school. (Those are the "very hopeful" chapters Ravitch referred to.) Early interventions work better and faster, they involve less stress for both students and teachers, and they have the potential, I believe, to propel students to a higher level of success.
So, if we want to improve outcomes for poor children and eliminate the achievement gap, should we devote more of our resources toward preschool and elementary school, where interventions are arguably more efficient? Or should we devote more of our resources toward middle schools, even if it takes more work and more money, because that might be our last chance to rescue failing students? (My preference is to spend more money earlier, though, of course, I think you need a balance.)
The second question is one that Ravitch raised in her blog post yesterday:
Do poor black and Hispanic kids really need to be in "no excuses" schools that insist on rote learning and rote behavior? That take control of their lives and change their culture? Should this be the model for education for children of color in big cities?
Ravitch is referring to middle schools run by charter organizations like KIPP and Achievement First, which emphasize not only an intensive academic curriculum, but also "character" education, often establishing an elaborate system of rules, rewards, slogans, and punishments intended to better prepare middle-school kids to learn. She's not a big fan of those schools, and I wouldn't necessarily agree with some of her language above—I wouldn't say those schools take "control" of students' lives, and I don't think they insist on "rote behavior." But I know what she means.
And I think it's a big question. I wrote about those schools in the Times Magazine back in 2006, and since that article came out, I've continued to visit KIPP schools and schools modeled after KIPP in cities across the country. Though I try to be skeptical, I'm always impressed by the atmosphere of the schools, by the engagement of their students, and by their results. (Coincidentally, a giant report just came out evaluating the KIPP schools in the Bay Area. I've only read a bit of it, but Eduwonk says it's "overall good news.")
In fact, I think one of the big reasons for the early problems at the Promise Academy middle school is that Geoff Canada and the school's administrators and teachers weren't able to do what every new KIPP school tries hard to do, which is to settle very early on a coherent school culture and then stick to it and reinforce it at every turn. That school culture doesn't need to include KIPP-type chants and slogans, and it definitely doesn't need to involve "rote behavior." But it does need to go beyond the classroom.
I think students from low-income families in blighted neighborhoods who enter middle school way behind grade level need something more than just extended hours and expert teaching (though they need that, too). They also need adults around them who believe in them and care about them and who can guide them toward the behaviors and the mental habits that will help them succeed in school and in life. I'm not sure if I'd call that "changing their culture." But I'd certainly call it changing their minds.
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The divide between the teachers unions and the charter-school crowd often seems unbridgeable. At an education-reform forum in Denver last month, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark and a member of the pro-charter Education Equality Project, spoke out against the unions, noting how "vicious" they can be:
Ten years ago, when I started talking about school choice, I was tarred and feathered. ... I literally was brought into a room by a [teachers] union [representative] ... and threatened that I would never win in office if I kept talking about school choice, if I kept talking about charter schools."
When collaborations—or even kind words—between the two sides do come along these days, they can seem all the more startling. Take the new Green Dot school in the Bronx.
Green Dot Public Schools is a charter-management organization that runs 12 charter high schools in Los Angeles. It's different from other successful charter groups, like KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, in three important (and challenging) ways: Green Dot runs high schools instead of middle schools. The group specializes in "transformations" of existing failing public schools instead of starting their own from scratch. And their schools work with unionized teachers, unlike most charter schools.
Two weeks ago, Green Dot opened its first school outside of L.A., a charter in the South Bronx. What's unusual about the school is that it is run in a partnership with the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union. The ceremony marking the school's debut was a lion-lying-down-with-the-lamb moment: Joel Klein, New York's school superintendent, stood next to his frequent adversary, Randi Weingarten, the president of the UFT, as they cut the ribbon.
It's hard to know if the new school will be the beginning of a trend toward unionized charters—for now, there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for this kind of arrangement on the part of any charter provider but Green Dot. But at the very least it's a model for a new type of relationship between old enemies. And if the reform folks really want to scale up their no-excuses model to a point where it's big enough to change things for a significant number of kids across the country, it couldn't hurt to have the unions on board.
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The reason I think the Harlem Children's Zone is so important—the reason I wrote a whole book about the program—is that I think it's the closest thing we have to a model for the kind of collaboration I was referring to yesterday.
What Geoffrey Canada has constructed in Harlem is a comprehensive set of integrated programs that currently serve 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood, starting at birth and going all the way through college. It is based on two innovative ideas. The first is what Canada calls the Conveyor Belt—a system that reaches kids early and then moves them through a seamless series of programs that try to re-create the invisible cocoon of support that surrounds middle-class and upper-middle-class kids throughout their childhoods. The Conveyor Belt starts with Baby College, a nine-week program that provides expecting parents and parents of young children with new information about effective parenting strategies. The next stop is an all-day language-focused pre-kindergarten for 200 4-year-olds, who then graduate into a K-12 charter school that has an extended day and an extended year and employs some of the intensive academic practices developed in the KIPP schools. Throughout their academic careers, students at the school have access to social supports: after-school tutoring, a teen arts center, family counseling, and a health clinic.
The second idea is a tipping-point notion—what Canada refers to as contamination. His theory is that in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood, if you offer social and educational supports to just a few of the kids who live there, their participation will always seem a bit oddball, and they won't have much of an effect on their peers. But if you get participation rates up to 40 percent or 50 percent or 60 percent, then taking part will come to seem normal, and some of the behaviors that used to seem commonplace in Harlem—teenage pregnancy, drug use, dropping out of school—will start to seem like the oddball path. The engaged kids will "contaminate" their friends with their behaviors and attitudes.
Canada's system isn't easy. It requires a lot of hard work just to keep it in motion. And in the years that I spent reporting in Harlem, Canada and his staff made lots of wrong turns and hit plenty of dead ends. In the book, I followed one class of parents through Baby College, and some of them, it seemed, faced such big deficits and such huge obstacles in life—they couldn't read, they had had other children taken away by Child Services, they had spent a couple of years in jail—that it seemed hard to believe they would ever be truly effective parents. In the middle school, the first couple of years were quite rocky, as Canada struggled to combine the ethos of a community organization with the accountability of a no-excuses charter school.
By the time I finished my reporting, though, the middle school was starting to find its footing, and the elementary schools, where some of the students had been with the Harlem Children's Zone since Baby College, were truly thriving. The third-grade test scores last spring were good—at one charter school, 97 percent of the third-grade class was on grade level in math, and in the other, 100 percent were. (The English scores were lower, but they were still quite good. At one school, they were 10 points above the state average, and at the other they were just a point or two below the state average.)
And perhaps more importantly, the elementary schools and the kids in them felt somehow ... normal. When I spent time in the classrooms, I got the strong feeling that when these kids got to middle school, they weren't going to need the kind of heroic interventions that Promise Academy and most charter middle schools need to employ today. They wouldn't need remediation and advanced character-building and constant test prep—they would just be competent, engaged students for the rest of their school careers. And these are kids who, for the most part, came from low-income, often difficult backgrounds, with a fair number of teenage parents and parents who didn't complete high school.
They were exactly the same kind of kids, in other words, who arrived in the sixth grade in the first year of Promise Academy middle school, the ones who showed up reading three and four years behind grade level, and whose subsequent middle school careers were a constant struggle. This new generation of kids had the good fortune to find a place on the Conveyor Belt, and that meant they faced a very different kind of future than most kids growing up in Harlem.
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The debate I wrote about yesterday, between the teachers-union wing of the Democratic Party and the pro-charter-school education-reform wing, is in some ways a symptom of a even deeper divide between two competing approaches to public education today.
On one side, you have people who think that the most important determiner of educational success is demographic. I've heard from a lot of teachers these past two weeks who have voiced this feeling: Low-income students come to them from broken homes and dangerous neighborhoods with poor reading skills and a slack work ethic, and it's just not fair to expect teachers to achieve high-quality results with those students.
On the other side, you have people who say that talk like that is nothing more than a convenient excuse for continued educational failure, a way to perpetuate an unaccountable school system. They say there's lots of evidence, especially coming out of some new and innovative charter schools, that we can make a huge dent in the problems of poor kids using extended class hours and intensive teaching methods.
There are two new advocacy groups that more or less represent the two sides of this debate. On one side you have a group of scholars and social scientists who call themselves the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. They call for increased spending on early-childhood education, health care, and other social supports instead of an emphasis on school reform alone.
On the other side, you have the Education Equality Project, led by Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. They call for legislative changes that would enable the people who are creating those successful experiments: more charter schools, the kind of teacher-pay reforms I wrote about last week, increased school choice.
These two groups announced their formation on consecutive days in June, and ever since, they've kind of been at one another's throats.
There are many people I admire on both sides of this divide. Geoffrey Canada, the subject of my new book, signed on to the Education Equality Project; James Heckman, the economist whose work I hold up in the book as the most persuasive evidence that the Harlem Children's Zone could have a transformative effect in the lives of poor children, signed on with the Broader, Bolder Approach. Wise scholars like Glenn Loury and Christopher Jencks and William Julius Wilson are on the Broader team; innovative superintendents like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee and Michael Bennet are on the Equality side.
There doesn't seem to be much common ground.
So, I'm going to suggest a compromise.
To those in the Broader camp: Let's admit that our public schools could be serving poor kids much, much better than they are today, and that in order to do that, they need a radical overhaul right away. Let's agree that the best charter schools, like KIPP and Achievement First and Green Dot, have found a whole new way of educating disadvantaged children, and that it works. So, why not embrace looser contracts like the one proposed in D.C. and the one adopted in Denver. Help persuade teachers to give up some job security in exchange for more pay. Help the school systems get rid of poor-performing teachers—not just a few of them, but a big swath, the whole bottom tier. And to replace them, let's create alternative certification programs and encourage unconventional career paths that will attract the kind of committed young overachievers who actually want to teach in the most challenging classrooms but can't stand the thought of slogging their way through a couple of years of education school.
To those in the Education Equality camp: Let's admit that alone, even the best charter schools can't fix the crisis in the nation's worst urban neighborhoods. Let's agree that if we truly want to be data-driven, we should accept the data that say that the most effective time to intervene in a poor child's life is in infancy, before that child ever gets into the school system. So, why not apply some of your intelligence, passion, organizational talent, and financial resources to building out-of-school supports like prekindergartens, parenting programs, and family counseling? Let's figure out how to take the accountability methods and organizational structures you've brought to middle schools and apply them to preschools. Let's figure out how best to provide poorly educated and overstressed parents with new strategies for preparing their kids for school. Let's build a new kind of no-excuses school, one that is integrated with an early-childhood program and a strategy to improve the surrounding community.
It may be wishful thinking, but that's where I believe Obama is trying to push his party. And I do think it's a path toward a real solution to some of the problems that seem most unsolvable—not only in our schools, but in our inner-city neighborhoods as well.
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Speaking of the country's education debate: In Dayton, Ohio, yesterday, Barack Obama delivered a major speech on education reform.
Last weekend, I wrote in the Times Magazine that Obama was facing a schism in the Democratic Party over education, with the teachers unions on one side and a new, accountability-focused group of education reformers on the other. Each camp, I wrote, was trying to claim Obama for their own, parsing his speeches and policy pronouncements, looking for clues that he favored their approach.
To me, yesterday's speech sounded more like the words of a pro-charter reformer than a union loyalist. Obama pledged to double federal funding on charter schools and to make teachers more accountable for the success of their students, saying, "Teachers who are doing a poor job will get extra support, but if they still don't improve, they'll be replaced."
But union folks, it seems, liked what they heard as well. Just after Obama's speech, I spoke with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and she told me she thought the speech was "very important." She pointed to Obama's support for a measure that would make it easier to close failing charter schools and said she admired his plan to increase the number of high-school students taking college-level or AP courses. The speech, she said, "had a balance of a great tone—even though there were things we disagreed with—along with some serious, concrete proposals."
For someone (like me) who finds the politics of education generally depressing and dysfunctional, what really stood out in the speech was its scope, the recognition that the system needs big, big change: not just charter schools or vouchers or better teacher pay but a complete overhaul. As Obama put it:
We need a new vision for a 21st century education—one where we aren't just supporting existing schools, but spurring innovation; where we're not just investing more money, but demanding more reform; where parents take responsibility for their children's success; where our schools and government are accountable for results; where we're recruiting, retaining, and rewarding an army of new teachers, and students are excited to learn because they're attending schools of the future; and where we expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate college and get a good paying job.
It's time to ask ourselves why other countries are outperforming us in education. Because it's not that their kids are smarter than ours—it's that they're being smarter about how to educate their kids. They're spending less time teaching things that don't matter and more time teaching things that do. Their students are spending more time in school, and they're setting higher expectations.
I think there are people on each side of the standoff within the Democratic Party who know that the eventual solution is going to require both sides to give something up. But neither wants to be the one to go first. And so for now, the debate feels stuck. It's exactly why I think a broad vision of reform like the one Obama laid out is potentially important—it might serve as something of a peace treaty, a chance for both sides to lay down their arms and figure out the real solutions to the country's education crisis.
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My interest in education and schools came about in sort of a roundabout way. In 2003, I started reporting on what was then a fairly modest social-service agency in upper Manhattan called the Harlem Children's Zone. That reporting turned into an article in the Times Magazine about the project and its founder, Geoffrey Canada, an ambitious and charismatic man in his early 50s who had come up with a unique approach to combating poverty. He had selected a 24-block neighborhood in central Harlem and was saturating the children who lived there with educational and social supports. His goal was to get them all to college and to transform the neighborhood in a single generation.
Usually when I get to the end of reporting a big magazine article, I'm pretty sick of the subject. But this time, the article felt like the beginning of a story rather than the end of one. I wanted to keep following the experiment that was unfolding in Harlem. And so I decided to write a book about it. The result, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest To Change Harlem and America, goes on sale today, a little more than five years from the first time I sat down in front of Canada and turned on my tape recorder.
There's some background on the Harlem Children's Zone in this review by Sara Mosle last week in Slate. And then, you know, there's always the book itself.
So, how did my Harlem reporting get me into writing about education? Two months after the Harlem article came out in the Times, Geoffrey Canada opened his first charter school, the Promise Academy. When the middle school opened, the administrators gave every sixth-grade student a diagnostic test. They expected that many of the children would be behind grade level; most kids in public schools in Harlem are. But when they got back the results, they were shocked by just how far behind grade level the kids were. Fifty-seven percent of the sixth-grade class was reading at a third-grade level or below.
And Geoff Canada had just promised to get them all to college.
I wanted to find out why those kids had fallen so far behind—and whether anyone had yet figured out a way to do what Canada wanted to do: take disaffected 10-year-olds who had till then received only the most threadbare education and accelerate them to a point where they were on par with their middle-class peers.
Those are some of the questions I explored in my book and which I've been blogging about, in one way or another, here on Slate for the past two weeks. Over the next few days, I'm going to write more about what I found during my time in Harlem—and why I feel it has the potential to change the terms of the country's education debate.
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Sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider to put a thorny issue like school funding into perspective.
Michael Barber was Tony Blair's chief education adviser, and he helped push through a major overhaul of Britain's public-education system. Now he's an educational consultant with an increasingly high profile in the United States. When I was reporting in New Orleans earlier this year, Paul Pastorek, the Louisiana superintendent of education, told me Barber's ideas had had a big influence on him. And as Sam Dillon reported in the Times last year, Joel Klein, New York City's school superintendent, is also a fan of Barber's; he "asked Sir Michael to address hundreds of New York principals at Lincoln Center about school improvement strategies."
In an interview with Education Sector, a Washington think tank, Barber listed some of the problems he saw in the American education system, including this rather jumbo-sized one:
The other fundamental flaw that I think is absolutely devastating in the U.S. is that because so much of the school system depends on very local taxation, the distribution of funding is inequitable. You can see how it originates in 19th century American history, but it is a big problem. Even the best education laws are only leveling up to the same funding per pupil so that high-poverty areas have funding on par with other communities. Whereas, in any sensible system you'd spend more money per pupil in a high-poverty area than another area. The Conservatives [in Britain] were in power from 1979 to 1997, and they never questioned that. They always thought it was absolutely right to spend more on areas of high poverty than other areas.
It seems so clear and straightforward (you can almost hear the British accent): Poor kids need more help in school than rich kids, so the government should devote more resources to their education. Let's do it! But a plan like Barber's would require a complete rethinking and reorganization of our approach to funding public education. And that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.
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An unusual act of civil disobedience last week in Chicago: To protest inequities in Illinois' system of school financing, James Meeks, a Baptist minister and state senator, organized a boycott of the first day of school by 1,400 Chicago public-school students, almost all of whom were black. The twist: That morning, he bused them all to Northfield, a wealthy, mostly white Chicago suburb, to the lavish campus of New Trier Township High School, a public school with four orchestras, a rowing club, a course in "kinetic wellness," and AP classes in French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Latin, and Chinese. You know, your basic American public school. The Chicago kids lined up and tried to enroll for classes—symbolically, at least.
To their credit, the administrators at New Trier, as well as a few parents and students, welcomed the visitors with signs, snacks, and cool drinks. Every Chicago student who took part in the protest was invited to register at the school, but none of them will in fact be able to enroll because of New Trier's residency requirements. No house in the suburbs, no spot in the school.
Mayor Daley fulminated, calling Meeks's protest "very selfish." But it was a peaceful demonstration and by all accounts a successful one ("This is civil disobedience at its finest," one New Trier parent said).
As the Chicago Tribune reported: "At issue is how much money schools spend per student. In a funding system fueled largely by local property taxes, New Trier Township spent nearly $17,000 per student in 2005-06 ... while Chicago Public Schools spent an estimated $10,400 per pupil."
It's one of those basic facts of American educational life that seem inevitable and yet impossible at the same time. On the one hand, of course the wealthy burghers of Northfield are going to spend more on their public schools than the poor residents of inner-city Chicago. On the other hand: We're really going to send rich white kids to excellent, well-funded public schools and send poor black kids to substandard, poorly funded public schools? That's our plan for fixing public education in America?
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Today's paper brings the news that Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of the D.C. public schools, has come up with a Plan B to use if the D.C. teachers union refuses to accept her proposed new contract.
Plan A, as I wrote last week, was a contract under which teachers could give up tenure in return for large pay increases. Plan B, essentially, is a system in which teachers lose tenure and don't get large pay increases. Rhee says she and the state superintendent could also change the licensing requirements for the district's teachers so as to require them to demonstrate classroom performance—the kind that would have earned them big bonuses under the contract—merely to keep their jobs.
The story in the Washington Post suggests that Rhee is not only aware of the city's generation gap among teachers, she also plans to take advantage of it.
Rhee's ultimate goal is clear: to weed the District's instructional corps of underperformers and remake it, at least in part, with younger, highly energized graduates of such alternative training programs as Teach for America, where she began her career. Unlike many tenured Washington teachers, those emerging from such programs are unlikely to invest their entire working lives in education. But they will, in Rhee's estimation, be more inclined to embrace her core message: that children can learn no matter what economic and social conditions they face beyond the classroom and that teachers should be held directly accountable for their progress through test scores and other measurements.
What we're hearing from Rhee and other superintendents is that urban school systems as they are currently constructed simply can't be made to work for the disadvantaged children who need their help the most. They need a complete overhaul.
In New Orleans, they had Hurricane Katrina to wash the old system away. In D.C., Michelle Rhee is trying to do it herself.
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Last week's posts on teachers, compensation, and unions provoked a lot of mail from readers, and I thought I'd kick off this second week with two suggestions.
One reader, K.B., wrote in with a few more examples of what she thinks are promising experiments in teacher pay:
In your discussion of teacher quality and merit-pay programs, I was disappointed that you talked about the failed Florida bonus program but didn't talk more about some of the innovative "second generation" merit-pay (or performance-pay, as they're more often called) programs that are being tested in school districts all over the country. These programs, which include Minnesota's QComp, the TAP program, Oregon's CLASS Project, and many of the individual TIF sites, as well as the Denver ProComp program you cited, are attempting to learn from the mistakes of programs like Florida's. Instead of basing compensation on test scores alone, they are working to develop more nuanced measures of teacher quality, often in collaboration with both individual teachers and teachers' unions.
Another reader, R.C., suggested an intriguing inverted approach to a teacher's traditional career path:
Here's the situation now: a new graduate comes out of ed school and is looking for a job. It is very hard to get into the good suburban districts without experience, so she ends up in an urban or urban-ring district with high-needs kids. Let's say this teacher is a reasonably decent teacher. In three years (about the time when studies say teachers really start to know their stuff), the odds are she is going to either quit teaching altogether or hop to a suburban district that now values her experience - because the high-needs school has burned her to a frazzle between the demands of the kids and the incompetence of the system.
Here's what SHOULD happen: a new graduate comes out of ed school and finds a job in a good suburban district. In three years, this teacher is good and is hitting her stride. Wouldn't it be nice to have her in an urban school? Why not come up with a program that allows her to go to an urban school, with merit pay, for a few years with a guarantee that she will have a job in her old district? There are VERY few good, dedicated teachers who can put in an entire career under the conditions found in most urban districts right now.
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For the debut week of this blog, I concentrated on teachers,
in part because that's where much of the political debate seems to be focused
right now. (Last night, John McCain told
his fellow Republicans, a little menacingly, that he wanted to "help bad
teachers find another line of work," to raucous cheers.)
But as Slate readers have commented in the Fray (here, for
example) and in the email
messages they've sent me, there are some issues that are difficult if not
impossible for teachers to deal with alone. Funding inequities often
shortchange the school districts where low-income students live, and after the
last bell rings, those students often return to chaotic communities and
troubled home lives, both of which make it harder to succeed in school.
That's the other big political debate in education right now
- what can and should schools do differently in order to improve the lives of
disadvantaged students - and that's what I'm hoping to get into next week. For
now, thanks for reading, and to all the teachers, students and parents out
there, congratulations on surviving the first week of school.
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One striking phenomenon revealed by the Denver negotiations was a generational split among teachers. Younger teachers were generally in favor the deal being offered, and older teachers tended to oppose it. (Some veteran teachers told the Denver Post that they felt "dissed.")
A similar generational divide has appeared in D.C., where, as the Washington Post reported last month,
many of the District's 4,000 public school teachers are locked in a heated debate over Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's proposal to offer salaries exceeding $100,000 for those willing to give up job security and tie their fates to student achievement. ... The split in the teaching corps largely, but not exclusively, is occurring along generational lines, with younger teachers more willing to accept the risks and older ones often questioning the proposal.
The Post story mentioned an anonymous young teacher-blogger, "D.C. Teacher Chic," who is a fan of Chancellor Rhee and is decidedly in favor of her new deal (under which teachers could choose a "green plan" that would trade tenure for a higher salary or a more traditional "red plan"). Her blog—often funny, usually outraged—offers a great insight into the mind of a teacher on the young side of this growing generational divide.
At the beginning of August, when it seemed that George Parker, the president of the D.C. teachers union local, was going to turn down Rhee's offer, D.C. Teacher Chic blew a gasket:
I am going to cry. Seriously. And then I am going to start looking for another school system.
I cannot believe George Parker is supporting scraping this entire contract and going for a more "traditional agreement." Clearly, not only does he not represent me, but he is also taking money right out of my pocket!
I understand that shitty teachers who have been working in the system since 1952 don't want to give up tenure. Fine. I get it. So choose the red plan! I don't understand opposing the entire proposal, unless you just haven't read it.
On a school-by-school level, a generational war can't be very productive. (Why are all the young teachers sitting together in the cafeteria?) But the split is important in the big picture. According to a recent study, incoming teachers now are better educated than incoming teachers were 10 years ago. (In the mid-'90s, only 27 percent of prospective teachers taking a national licensing test had a GPA of 3.5 or higher; by the mid-'00s, the figure had jumped to 40 percent.)
So: a new generation of better-educated teachers interested in reform? That's a powerful force, one that in the coming months and years might push both management and labor toward a new kind of arrangement, one in which teachers really are treated like professionals.
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There’s another city that spent the summer locked in high-stakes negotiations over teacher compensation: Denver.
Three years ago, voters there passed a levy to fund something called the Professional Compensation System for Teachers, or ProComp, designed to increase teacher pay and to reward the best teachers doing the hardest jobs. So far, ProComp has pumped $50 million into the city’s education system.
In May, Denver’s ambitious and reform-minded young school superintendent, Michael Bennet (the subject of an excellent piece by Katherine Boo in The New Yorker in 2007), proposed changes to ProComp that, he said, would make it more attractive to teachers, especially to the young teachers whom he wanted to bring into the system.
The leaders of the local teachers union didn’t like the changes. The basic dispute boiled down to this: The union wanted to take the extra ProComp money and distribute it more or less evenly throughout the system, so that every teacher would get a generous raise. Bennet wanted to use it to increase bonuses for teachers who taught in a high-poverty school, took a hard-to-fill job teaching math or science, or boosted their students’ test scores significantly. Under the old contract, teachers could receive $1,000 bonuses for each of those categories; Bennet wanted to increase each bonus to $3,000.
So if you were a successful math teacher at a high-poverty school, under Bennet’s proposal you could make an extra $9,000 a year. The problem, as the union saw it, was one of fairness: If you were, say, an English teacher at an affluent school, you would have no shot at two of the bonuses.
Which, Bennet replied, was the whole idea: to convince those teachers that they should come teach where they are really needed.
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A reader who spent the last five years teaching in Los Angeles and Chicago writes,
You’re right that the next fight in education is all about the teachers. We need to pay them better. But there are so many ineffectual teachers out there that it is difficult if not impossible to weed them out.
What you have yet to mention is the difficulty in weeding out those teachers. You have talked about rewarding teachers who are “successful,” but on what grounds will that success be measured? Testing can only measure so much, and some subjects (the phys ed teacher for one) aren’t tested in any meaningful way anyway. If testing cannot or does not measure the success of a teacher, then that puts power into the hands of the principals, which can be incredibly dangerous.
I agree, it’s a difficult question. But some useful answers are emerging. The best research I’ve read about teacher quality is a paper from 2006 by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger.
They make five points:
1) We don’t know yet exactly how best to measure teachers, and the federal government should give R&D money to the states to test out some different methods.
2) That said, it seems that some measure that combines growth in test scores—how much a teacher raises his students’ scores over their scores the previous year—with more subjective measures like principal evaluations will actually give us a pretty accurate picture.
3) How can we tell it’s accurate? Because teachers who do well in one year by these measures tend to do well the next year, too. In other words, in any given school, there are teachers who consistently do well and teachers who consistently do poorly, and it’s not all that hard to figure out who’s who. (Though it is hard to predict ahead of time, at hiring.)
4) We should offer bonuses to teachers who perform well by those measures—in the top quartile, say—though only if they’re willing to teach in schools with a lot of low-income students, where they’re needed most.
5) Even though bonuses are nice, the more effective way to use the evaluations is to fire the bottom quarter of teachers. This is less politically palatable. But these teachers are the ones, Gordon and his co-authors say, who do real damage to the students they teach, and they tend to do that consistently.
The authors have a neat firing idea—they make it the default. So a principal simply couldn’t continue to employ a second-year teacher who performs in the bottom quartile without sending a note home to parents explaining why this low-performing teacher deserves to keep his job.
It’s not a solution we’re likely to hear on the campaign trail any time soon. Pro-layoff politicians don’t last long. But, politics aside, what these authors are proposing is a valuable and natural flipside to a bonus system. What good is paying the high performers more if the low performers are still hanging around, mishandling another classroom of kids every year?
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It’s one thing to talk hypothetically about merit pay for teachers. It’s another to actually put a merit-pay system into practice.
Under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida became one of the first states to experiment with merit pay. In 2006, after years of negotiation, the state created a new compensation system to reward successful teachers. Each district was offered additional state funding if they opted into the plan. Districts were given some flexibility in how to measure student success, but standardized-test scores had to make up at least 60 percent of the formula. In February, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times found that in one urban district that had opted to take the deal—Hillsborough, which includes Tampa and its suburbs—“merit” checks were going in overwhelming numbers to teachers at affluent schools.
[O]nly three percent of the educators deemed worthy of the $2,100 bonuses worked in the low-income schools that struggle most, where at least nine in 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. And almost two-thirds taught in A-rated schools, where they arguably were least needed.
That wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
Indeed.
But just because merit pay didn’t work in Florida doesn’t mean it can’t work, period. A more effective merit-pay program wouldn’t reward every successful teacher, it would reward teachers who succeed with those students that are hardest to teach. And it also might define “success” in a more creative way than Florida does. One thing most teachers seem to agree on: they hate being judged on their students’ test scores alone. If you ask current teachers about a deal like the one in Hillsborough, most of them say no thanks. In the teacher-compensation study I mentioned yesterday, researchers surveyed teachers in Washington state and found that 83 percent of them opposed merit pay, including almost 60 percent who “strongly” opposed the idea. But the survey defined merit pay very narrowly, as a system that gave bonuses only for standardized-test gains. If we could come up with a more flexible system, the number of teachers opposing change might start to fall.
I got an e-mail yesterday from a reader, a former New York City teacher, making the case against judging teachers by standardized tests alone. (She asked to remain anonymous, “in case my old principal actually learned how to use the Internet.”)
In the school where I used to work, I would be alternately canonized and demonized each year, as we compared not how each student had progressed each year, but how one eighth grade compared to the grade in front of or behind it. The year our eighth grade went from 400 motivated kids to over 500 “challenging” students, test scores fell, and I was told not to be creative in my classroom, “at least until after the test.”
The next year, the eighth grade shrank to 250 students, and a good group of them, at that. When test scores for that class were higher than the previous eighth grade, I was praised to the heavens as if I had actually had anything to do with the increase. If my performance review and job security were tied to that kind of a measure, I’d be terrified, and would demand a salary equal to two or three years what I actually deserved just to build in security for my inevitable firing.
Accountability nuts get nervous when teachers say they want to be judged by more flexible standards than test scores alone. And for good reason—without some kind of objective measure, it would be way too easy to design an accountability system that could be gamed, where teachers were rewarded based on “parental satisfaction” or some equally vague measure, or where sub-par teachers received bonuses along with high-quality teachers, out of a sense of “fairness.”
Still, the Florida system—bonuses based only on test scores, and no extra compensation for working in high-needs schools—clearly isn’t working.
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The fight over the compensation of teachers is in many ways a fight over the nature of teaching itself. Is it a skilled profession, like law or medicine or finance, in which those who succeed in a competitive marketplace receive high compensation? Or is it a public-service job, like being a police officer or a firefighter or a civil servant, in which the exchange is job security and ample benefits for a commitment to serve the public? Right now, most teacher contracts are like civil-service contracts: You get gradual and steady raises based primarily on how long you’ve been in the job. Most of the benefits come on the back end, in retirement and in the years leading up to it.
But the “army of new teachers” that Obama has pledged to bring into the system may not be so crazy about a civil-service job.
Earlier this summer, a research group in Seattle called the Center on Reinventing Public Education came out with a new study on teacher compensation. The graph below, taken from the study, shows the results of a simulation for “what a single white woman with a technical degree from a selective college would earn inside and outside of teaching at three points in her early career.” When this imaginary woman graduated in 1994, she would have earned $3,561 more as a teacher than outside of teaching, because of a starting salary guaranteed by a union contract. By the time she was nine years into her working life, though, she would have fallen behind her peers, making $10,203 less as a teacher than if she had followed another career path.
So, how do you restructure compensation to make teaching more attractive to that archetypal selective-college graduate? Do you pay all teachers more? Provide other benefits to compensate for a smaller salary? Or do you restructure teacher pay so that high performers earn more than their colleagues?
In Washington, D.C., right now, the fight over teacher quality is being debated at the negotiating table. Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor, has been in office only a little more than a year, but already she has become one of the most important education officials in the country. Not “important” in the sense of “powerful”—D.C. is a pretty small school system—but important because of the sweeping reforms she is trying to put in place.
Back in July, Rhee proposed a new contract for the city’s teachers. As the Washington Post reported at the time,
Under the proposal, the school system would establish two pay tiers, red and green. … Teachers in the red tier would receive traditional raises and would maintain tenure. Those who voluntarily go into the green tier would receive thousands of dollars in bonuses and raises, funded with foundation grants, for relinquishing tenure.
In other words, red for traditionalist civil servants, green for merit-pay rebels.
The bonuses and raises Rhee proposed were unusually large. Even teachers who chose the safer option would do pretty well. But not as well as the greens. As the Post noted, in the red tier, “a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 10 years of service who makes $56,000 could receive $73,800 by 2012.” If that same teacher chose the green tier, she could be making as much as $122,500 in that year. (Currently, the average teacher salary in the country is $47,600.)
The downside of choosing the green tier: You give up tenure and spend a year on probation. If at the end of that year the principal decides that you haven’t proved yourself, you’re fired, no matter how long you’ve worked for the system.
It’s a revolutionary idea—last week, a columnist for the Post wrote that the proposed contract, if accepted, “would be a watershed event in U.S. labor history.” D.C.’s teachers are divided on whether it’s a good deal. The leader of the local teachers union seems to be leaning toward taking it, but other union officials are firmly opposed. The union local’s vice president, Nathan Saunders, told the Post in July that the deal would be “a tremendous step backwards for teachers as dignified professionals. … It is the purchase of valuable rights for cash.”
Of course, that’s kind of what being a professional entails: giving up the kind of job security and stability that you get if you’re a wage laborer in exchange for a whole lot of money.
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The new school year begins today in New York City, where I live, and in many other cities around the country. (Though no school this week in New Orleans, where I was reporting during the spring and summer, because of Hurricane Gustav.)
For many returning teachers, this is an uncertain moment, and not only because they’re facing a brand-new crop of students. There is a growing sense out there—in labor negotiations, at conferences, and on the campaign trail—that the next big debate in the politics of education is going to be about teachers: how to attract them, how to compensate them, how to evaluate them, how to fire them, and, perhaps most importantly, how to get good ones in front of the students who need their help the most.
Barack Obama, in his speech at Invesco Field in Denver last week, sketched out the broad outlines of a possible new deal for teachers. He said that, as president, “I’ll recruit an army of new teachers and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability.”
Beyond this basic tradeoff—money for accountability—Obama has been vague about exactly how a deal might work in practice. But others have plunged in. Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek in July, told Obama that he should
offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance—or face extinction.
Matthew Miller, writing in the Wall Street Journal in the same week, had similar advice for the candidate. Obama, he said, should
go beyond vague talk of modest pay reform and offer a bold new “grand bargain” to reshape the profession. He should make a $30 billion pot of federal money available to states and districts to boost salaries in poor schools, provided the teachers unions make two key concessions. First, they have to scrap their traditional “lockstep” pay scale. In this scheme, a physics grad has to be paid the same as a phys-ed major if both have the same tenure in the classroom, and a teacher whose students make remarkable gains each year gets rewarded no differently than one whose students languish. Second, it has to be easy to fire the awful teachers that are blighting the lives of a million poor children.
Miller’s language is perhaps over the top—teachers in low-income schools aren’t all “awful,” and even many of the substandard ones might well turn into above-average teachers with a little more mentoring and training and support.
But somewhere in there, the outlines of a new deal for teachers seem to be forming: more money for less job security. Will this deal appeal to teachers themselves? That’s a separate question—more thoughts on it soon.
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For the month of September, Slate has invited me to blog about schools, education reform, parenting, and poverty. I’m an editor at the New York Times Magazine, where I’ve written cover stories, in recent years, on school reform in New Orleans, on the achievement gap and charter schools, and on the Harlem Children’s Zone. I’m also the author of a new book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America, that will be published next week.
I fell into these subjects more or less by accident—I started reporting on Geoff and his project simply because I found his ideas on poverty so intriguing. But as I worked on this book over the last five years, I came to appreciate that I had stumbled into a particularly fertile moment in education, with heated political debates, surprising scholarship, and promising initiatives underway around the country.
I’m hoping to use this blog over the month as a place to explore some of those ideas and developments, as well as news from the presidential campaign and elsewhere. If you’ve got comments or suggestions for me along the way, please send them to me at slateschoolhouserock@gmail.com. Thanks for reading.