Tag Archives: education system

I don’t know a lot about India, except that a whole lot of people live there and my parents love the food (Me? I’ll stick with hot dogs and mac & cheese). But then yesterday I found this story about a study of India’s education system (PDF): We find that the teacher performance pay program was highly effective in improving student learning. At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations (SD) in math and language tests respectively….

It’s Friday. What better time to kick an institution that’s down, and deservedly so? If anyone is taking nominees for an American school district to tear down and start over the education system from scratch, I vote for the Detroit Public Schools. Anyone with me? The district’s well-documented failures and financial deficits are exacerbated by the latest findings of far-reaching corruption. The Detroit Free Press reports today about what was found in a pair of audits of Detroit Public Schools (H/T Intercepts): Among the findings: 160 outdated BlackBerrys, 11 motorcycles, 97 two-way phones and 50 handheld radios sat unused. One audit also showed that 411 people — including some who are dead — were receiving health insurance even though they weren’t eligible. Ending those benefits will save the district an immediate $2.1 million, [emergency financial manager Robert] Bobb said. Health insurance for dead people? To cover future embalming needs? Protection money from grave robbers? If we take away their benefits, will they be added to the rolls of Americans without health insurance? Unbelievable stuff. Do you see what I mean?

Our own appointed U.S. Senator and former Denver Public Schools superintendent Michael Bennet conducted a recent Q & A on federal education reform with Linda Kulman for Politics Daily. Here’s his answer to one question about incentives not matching objectives in the education system: We have not updated our theory of human capital, which is a fancy word for saying how do we attract and retain people to public education, since the labor market was one where women had two professional choices: being a nurse or being a teacher. We say to people, “We’d like you to come be a teacher, we imagine that you’re going to teach “Julius Caesar” every year for the next 30 years, we’re going to pay you a really terrible wage compared to what you could make doing almost anything else. … The way most school districts and states pay teachers in this country (is) if you leave any time in the first 20 years, you leave with what you’ve contributed to your retirement system … but if you stay for 30 years, you (get) a pension that’s worth three times what your Social Security is worth. No matter what else you want to do, […]

Update: It looks like I have been out-sillied by Jay Greene, who has posted the original unedited draft of “too cool” Kevin Carey’s comments. I’m not very serious. Of course, you probably already knew that. Golly, I’m a little kid who writes about the world of education policy and occasionally cites Kermit the Frog and Cap’n Crunch. But I don’t think you quite get how un-serious I am. At least according to Kevin Carey from The Quick and The Ed blog:

In today’s Washington Post, education columnist Jay Mathews raises the question: If you had $100 billion to fix our schools, what would you do? Faithful readers know I was skeptical of the federal government’s “magical money tree” a few months ago. My sentiment hasn’t changed. Some ideas for spending 100 billion (that’s a 1 followed by 11 zeroes) new smackeroos in the education bureaucracy inevitably will be better than others, and some may end up yielding some positive results. In his column, Mathews grades five proposals for spending the money, realistically noting of those who submitted the proposals: Their goal is to get the biggest change by January 2012. I think they are dreaming. The federal stimulus is designed to save jobs, not raise student achievement. But some (not all) of the ideas are so good some states might (repeat, might) be tempted to try them. To rate the five proposals yourself, as well as five others Mathews invented, check out his blog post.

In recent years we have seen reports from Colorado’s major newspapers – like this one from 2008 in the Rocky Mountain News – reacting to the release of Education Week‘s Quality Counts survey. The survey uses an assortment of measures in school finance, student achievement, accountability and more to come up with state-by-state scores and letter grades for comparison. Last year, Colorado overall ranked 38th with a low C. This year, Colorado overall ranks 37th with a low C. Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen any news stories yet. But trust me, I’m not complaining about this fact. Why do I say that? Check out legal scholar and philosopher Stuart Buck’s quick work of deconstructing Quality Counts. First, the humorous: In fact, the report reminds me of the old joke (I can’t remember who to credit for this) of a beggar sitting on the streets of New York, with a sign reading, “Wars, 2; Legs Lost, 1; Wives Who Left Me, 2; Children, 3; Lost Jobs, 2. TOTAL: 10.” Well, obviously, the number “10″ doesn’t represent ten of anything.

The argument only grows stronger that charter schools work. While some will dwell on the exceptions, the big picture becomes clearer and clearer. A new study by the Boston Foundation finds that in their city “charter school students consistently outperform their peers at pilot schools and at traditional schools.” As Core Knowledge blogger Robert Pondiscio notes, even factoring out the selection bias of more motivated parents shows charter schools doing more to improve student achievement. And the well-read Dr. Greg Forster puts the Boston study in context to note that “charters are an improvement over the status quo, even if only a modest one, as a large body of research has consistently shown.” He observes that “more freedom consistently produces better results, and more unionization consistently doesn’t.” Charter schools are one good way to bring more freedom to the education system so good ideas and practices can blossom while bad ones are rejected.

There’s a neat new site you ought to see if you care about public schools: Utah Education Facts. The highlight of the site is a video where they interview average Utahns and ask them questions about the financing and spending of their state’s education system: For those who aren’t from Utah, what if somebody asked you these same sort of questions about your state? How prepared would you be? Of course, the point isn’t to pick on individuals for their knowledge or lack thereof. Instead it highlights the misinformation on which poll-based demands for more education funding largely are based. Ultimately, such a project should aim to arm the populace with more knowledge and information. And isn’t that a major part of what education should be about? Does anyone doubt a similar “man-on-the-street” interview video project here in Colorado would be a good idea? I hope somebody out there is paying attention.

I just wanted to leave you with a quick reading assignment before the weekend comes. Writing over at National Review, Dan Lips from the Heritage Foundation says conservatives can’t give up on fighting for school choice but also need to focus their agenda broadly on a range of effective changes to the education system: First, principled support for aggressive reforms like vouchers has cleared a space for the types of reform policies that leaders like [Washington DC schools chancellor Michelle] Rhee are advocating. And, second, when it comes to systemic reform, conservatives have a broad agenda of policies that strengthen public education — and the results to prove it. Education reformers from across the political spectrum should give thanks to those who have spent decades promoting school choice. These efforts have yielded only modest (but increasing) enactment of voucher programs. But they have created political breathing room for less aggressive reforms — such as public school choice and teacher merit pay. Fordham’s Eric Osberg praises Dan’s article, adding: Of course we’ve said for years that choice and accountability go hand-in-hand, but also that such reforms to the structure of schooling have to be accompanied by changes in how schools and […]

Reforming how teachers are paid to better match the goals that benefit students in our education system is a tricky business. On one hand you have some people who oversimplify the issue of “merit pay” and think that it should be quite easy to implement a new system that has a positive impact on student achievement. (Of course, there is a significant grain of truth in what they advocate, as an analysis of a pilot program in Little Rock has shown.) On the other hand, you have entrenched opposition within elements of the education establishment who find it too hard to overcome the inertia that keeps the lockstep salary schedule in place. Paying teachers strictly for years of service and degrees is inefficient and ineffective, but a variety of obstacles are readily summoned to trip up any momentum toward compensation reform. That’s why it’s great news to read about a Colorado school district like Eagle County that at least has been working outside the box for the past six years to re-design teacher pay. Most noteworthy is that their system not only includes significant rewards for boosting student test scores, but also that it’s showing broader support among district teachers. […]