Sensible Education Reform

It is a pleasant surprise whenever I find a liberal public institution making a sensible policy proposal. Thus the report of the Hamilton Project, associated with the liberal Brookings Institution, caught my eye. (It was even written up today by Nicolas Kristof in the New York Times -- another surprise.)

“Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job,” written by Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger, makes several specific recommendations for K-12 education reform:

Recommendation 1: Reduce the barriers to entry into teaching for those without traditional teacher certification. There is no reason to limit initial entrance into teaching to those who have completed traditional certification programs or who must take such courses in their first years on the job (like my friend Bob G.).

Recommendation 2: Make it harder to promote the least effective teachers to tenured positions. School districts have very good information about a teacher’s effectiveness after two or three years on the job and should base retention decisions on that trial period.

Recommendation 3: Provide bonuses to highly effective teachers willing to teach in schools with a high proportion of low income students. Today, the lowest achieving teachers are clustered in the poorest schools where students are most in need of effective teaching.

While there is a severe shortage of science and math teachers, the potential supply of technical workers (engineers, lab technicians, etc) who might enter teaching is thwarted by the credentialing requirements. Recent evidence demonstrates that teacher certification is a poor predictor of teacher effectiveness. Data from 150,000 students in 9,400 classrooms in the Los Angeles Unified School District (yearly from 2000 through 2003) show that there is no statistical difference in achievement for students assigned to certified and uncertified teachers.

If one examines the course curriculum of teacher’s colleges, this result is not surprising. Heather MacDonald in The Burden of Bad Ideas explains why Johnny’s teacher can’t teach. It’s because Teacher Ed schools worry more about stamping out racism in aspiring teachers than about test results. In fact they worry about “Anything But Knowledge”: self-actualization, social adjustment, following one’s joy, multicultural sensitivity,… “ABK” was born in the anti-intellectual fervor following WWI when progressive educators such as John Dewey decided that schools needed to prepare students for life by providing life knowledge as opposed to traditional knowledge.

They decided that kids needed to learn “critical thinking skills” rather than spelling, the multiplication tables or any facts at all. When teachers dismiss actual knowledge, you have to replace it with something, and the Ed schools favored “constructed knowledge.” I have mine, you have yours, Johnny has his, and it’s all just fine.

They promoted “child-centered schools” where the kid became the decision maker relegating the teacher to the role of advisor (a much easier gig). Teachers were taught disdain for report cards and objective tests in favor of “meta-cognitive thinking.” At all costs teachers must avoid “teaching to the test.” It sounds like discredited folderol, but professors of education, “like aging vestal virgins, still guard the progressive flame.”

Returning to the Hamilton Project report, effectiveness varies substantially among certified teachers and also among uncertified teachers. And those large differences are evident even after adjusting for the obvious socioeconomic and educational factors such as baseline test performance, race/ ethnicity, family income, gender and so on.

While certification status was not helpful in predicting teacher impacts on student performance, teacher ranking during their first two years of teaching does provide a lot of information about their likely impact during their third year and beyond. The average student assigned to a teacher who was in the bottom quartile during his or her first two years lost on average 5 percentile points relative to students with similar baseline scores and demographics. In contrast, the average student assigned to a top-quartile teacher gained 5 percentile points relative to students with similar baseline scores and demographics. Therefore, the average difference between being assigned a top-quartile or a bottom-quartile teacher is 10 percentile points. Furthermore this 10 point delta is cumulative growing to 20 points in two years, etc.

Many measures might be used to assess teacher performance including principal evaluations, parent evaluations, classroom observations, and the number of times a teacher is absent. However, measures of outputs and performance rather than credentials would need to be used.

We hear a lot about the critical need to reduce class sizes. An experiment in Tennessee of classroom size reduction found that schools could improve achievement by half as much—5 percentile points—by shrinking class size in early grades. But class size reduction of the magnitude considered in that experiment is expensive: shrinking average class size from twenty-two to sixteen students per class would require a 38 percent increase in the number of teachers and the amount of classroom space in those early grades.

Progressive doctrine has severely damaged our educational system. It is time to bring teaching into the twenty-first century where competition drives improvement and over-regulation is the enemy of progress.