This really resonated with me. I’m a high school English teacher in Missouri, and I think you captured something that feels very real on the ground. I also run PD and write curriculum aimed at helping teachers get excited about teaching again, so I spend a lot of time thinking about this from both sides.
I’ll be honest, I am pretty vehemently against policies like No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds. I’ve seen firsthand how they narrow learning and reduce so much of what we do to compliance and test performance. But I do find the idea of a student-growth-centered salary model interesting, even if it raises a lot of hard questions for me.
What happens with students who don’t give full effort, or who are inconsistent, or who are dealing with things outside of school that impact performance? How do you account for that fairly? And on a more structural level, how do you prevent dishonesty in reporting or avoid creating a system where teachers feel pitted against each other to protect their pay? I worry about what that would do to school culture, especially in places that already feel strained.
At the same time, I do think there is something to be said for pushing back against a culture of “good enough.” There are people in this profession who are coasting, and students feel that. Any model that forces more reflection, accountability, and effort is at least worth thinking about, even if the implementation is incredibly complex.
I’ve been writing about some of these same tensions from the classroom perspective, especially around expectations and the culture we’re building inside schools. If you ever have the time, I would genuinely value your thoughts on it.
This comment is late but I hope MY reads it. I live in Chicago and my three sons attended the local public school K-8 when Paul Vallas was the CEO of CPS. I was not a big fan of local school councils because of the way they could devolve into political cliques, but where they worked they made a big difference in the qualify of the school. There are no more school councils and you can count on two hands the number of local public schools you would send your kids to.
I have watched CPS enrollment drop by more than 100,000 students since 2010, yet the school budget and our property taxes keep going up and school performance keeps dropping.
When I saw how the Chicago Teachers Union defied every effort to keep the schools open at any time during the pandemic and afterward I was furious. CTU was and continues to be only about teacher pay and teacher benefits irrespective of the impact their demands have on student performance. They scream and shout when a school closes because there are only 50 students. They threaten strikes for any and every disagreement with the CPS board or mayor, and they are a BIG reason whey people have left the city and have left the public schools.
Education and crime are the reasons Lori Lightfoot lost the election. Brandon Johnson has a chance only because at least half the people in Chicago don't know or care about what is going on. Paul Vallas has legs of clay (not just feet), but at least he's learned something in his years running school systems and other administrations. Brandon Johnson is an empty chair.
"The funding is equalized citywide, so even though Jackson-Reed serves much richer neighborhoods, it doesn’t get better funding. "
This may be less true than Matt thinks.
The largest cost for running a school is teacher salaries. But schools don't typically get a budget and hire teachers like an ordinary business. Instead, they get teacher slots based on enrollment and the central district pays the costs of the teachers. In practice, this means that for any given school, expensive, experienced teachers cost the same as cheap new teachers. And expensive, experienced teachers typically prefer to work at easier schools with more academically capable and inclined students. The upshot is that if you actually looked at the spending, a lot more money is spent on schools with middle-class student bodies than those with lots of low-income kids.
I don't know enough about DC to say if this is true there but it is definitely true in Los Angeles and in other districts around the country.
What happened? The people who lived through that testing mania grew up and got involved in advocating for policy. Mandatory Standardized Testing for school funding just results in teaching to the test and a bad school experience. The monomaniacal focus on a single set of metrics was always going to lead to a dumb and bad result.
The basic reform notion is quite sensible, but there are a couple issues. 1) I've seen some of the measurement models and they're absolute garbage. 2) My sense is that integration (eg, forced bussing) really is a big deal, but it's an absolute nonstarter. 3) The idea that you can use higher pay to pull in a better class of teachers makes a lot of sense, but for it to work you'd need to pay not a little bit more, but multiples. That's just not going to happen. So in the end, both sides we're being a little disengenuous in their arguments
suggestion Matt that you reach out to Gary Rubinstein, a teacher, blogger, and former TFA member, as you look into how successful ed reform projects were, from school turnarounds to no-excuses charters. He's done deep dives into the test score data of many of these projects around the country. You may be more positively inclined to the reform movement than Gary is, but he does his homework and it's worth it to explore multiple perspectives
Matt-Have you read Diane Ravitch’s _Reign of Error_? I’m a high school teacher, and I can tell you it’s hard to overestimate the importance of the “quality inputs” (at least middle class wealth, educated, supportive parents) you mention. I try my best, but it’s very, very, VERY hard to get a high school Junior with a fourth grade level of literacy to engage in rigorous study of history at a high school level.
Nikole Hannah-Jones obviously went on to become much more well-known for other work, but I would love this series to include a straight-on assessment of the issues raised in her 2 part radio piece on This American Life called "The Problem We All Live With." Thanks in advance!
You mentioned on a Weeds podcast that educational outcomes had slightly improved after NCLB was passed and had declined after the law was gutted. I would love to hear you go over those numbers again, especially if you could add local data like with DC reforms.
Education as a material benefit for greater egalitarian ends (increased income over your life), something you don't hear about as much ig except around student loan debt?
I am a retired teacher and worked in a selective enrollment high school for almost 30 years. I have been out since 2019 now and want to share a few points. It is really hard to measure student achievement and progress. And the way tests were designed and administered and graded were not really standardized. The tests given were designed by committees and the grading was done by other teachers in the department and the grading was not standardized (like in grading AP exams). Of course all types of budget constraints meant you could not invest in a truly fair test and the district spent plenty trying to design these assessments which took a lot of teaching time to administer. They tried to do before (in September) and after (in May) assessments with the same test. Teachers encouraged students to not even try on the first assessment. Students were officially graded on "improvement." So if they tried on the first assessment, they did not get as much improvement for the year. At first, the school was graded, then they wanted to offer "bonuses" for teachers who got the most improvement. This meant teachers were competing against each other instead of cooperating. I could go on and on, but won't. I just want to say that measuring school performance or teacher effectiveness is not as straightforward as it sounds. Yes, the union was against this. I will be honest, I did not like a lot of what the union did, but I did agree with them on this issue.
I was around when Sputnik went up, which triggered a lot of angst over education, and some changes. So I've random thoughts:
Back in the day the best and smartest people were teachers, because that was the best job women could get. Women's liberation destroyed that competitive advantage for the education system.
Education suffers from NIH--someone comes up with an idea to improve education. Even if they're able to assemble the political support to implement, they move on to bigger and better things, and the next people in charge have their own idea. It's like planting trees, waiting for 5 years, then cutting them down and planting something else.
We can never agree on metrics, how to measure or what we want. Do we want good citizens, which was big in the 1950s, or for students to be their authentic selves, etc. etc.
We believe there's one magic bullet for everyone, forgetting "different strokes for different folks".
Inevitably we’re going to get to a future post about how all these ed reform experiments and expanded data collection brought us a conclusion that the grand experiments… did basically nothing. Only meaningful impact proven repeatedly is that charters can improve average performance by selecting out the worst or most disruptive students (and that doesn’t scale up). I have come around to the view that tying some teacher compensation to performance has a nonzero impact, but it’s very, very slight.
Education is important but liberals have to grow out of the 90s idea that american poverty can be ameliorated through educational performance. At the end of the day you need active labor market policies, a child benefit and unions. And at the level of like, very segregated and concentrated underclass poverty, you need a whole range of interventions, in which school is important but also a sort of intensified welfare state to try to break up concentrated unemployability.
What do you say to Cathy O'Neil's _Weapons of Math Destruction_ critique of the "fire teachers with bad value-add scores" idea, which is that the metrics we have for value-add _suck_.
If you look at teachers who teach the same subject, in consecutive grades, in the same year, you will find that there is almost no correlation in what the models say. It just is not plausible that we have a bunch of people who are good at teaching 6th grade math, but terrible at teaching 7th grade math.
A lot of people who got fed up with the reform movement didn't disagree, in principle, with "measure impact and use it to inform compensation / retention". They just disagreed that the tools available measured impact.
This really resonated with me. I’m a high school English teacher in Missouri, and I think you captured something that feels very real on the ground. I also run PD and write curriculum aimed at helping teachers get excited about teaching again, so I spend a lot of time thinking about this from both sides.
I’ll be honest, I am pretty vehemently against policies like No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds. I’ve seen firsthand how they narrow learning and reduce so much of what we do to compliance and test performance. But I do find the idea of a student-growth-centered salary model interesting, even if it raises a lot of hard questions for me.
What happens with students who don’t give full effort, or who are inconsistent, or who are dealing with things outside of school that impact performance? How do you account for that fairly? And on a more structural level, how do you prevent dishonesty in reporting or avoid creating a system where teachers feel pitted against each other to protect their pay? I worry about what that would do to school culture, especially in places that already feel strained.
At the same time, I do think there is something to be said for pushing back against a culture of “good enough.” There are people in this profession who are coasting, and students feel that. Any model that forces more reflection, accountability, and effort is at least worth thinking about, even if the implementation is incredibly complex.
I’ve been writing about some of these same tensions from the classroom perspective, especially around expectations and the culture we’re building inside schools. If you ever have the time, I would genuinely value your thoughts on it.
This comment is late but I hope MY reads it. I live in Chicago and my three sons attended the local public school K-8 when Paul Vallas was the CEO of CPS. I was not a big fan of local school councils because of the way they could devolve into political cliques, but where they worked they made a big difference in the qualify of the school. There are no more school councils and you can count on two hands the number of local public schools you would send your kids to.
I have watched CPS enrollment drop by more than 100,000 students since 2010, yet the school budget and our property taxes keep going up and school performance keeps dropping.
When I saw how the Chicago Teachers Union defied every effort to keep the schools open at any time during the pandemic and afterward I was furious. CTU was and continues to be only about teacher pay and teacher benefits irrespective of the impact their demands have on student performance. They scream and shout when a school closes because there are only 50 students. They threaten strikes for any and every disagreement with the CPS board or mayor, and they are a BIG reason whey people have left the city and have left the public schools.
Education and crime are the reasons Lori Lightfoot lost the election. Brandon Johnson has a chance only because at least half the people in Chicago don't know or care about what is going on. Paul Vallas has legs of clay (not just feet), but at least he's learned something in his years running school systems and other administrations. Brandon Johnson is an empty chair.
Really good observation about a "dog that isn't barking in the night" anymore. Look forward to more.
"The funding is equalized citywide, so even though Jackson-Reed serves much richer neighborhoods, it doesn’t get better funding. "
This may be less true than Matt thinks.
The largest cost for running a school is teacher salaries. But schools don't typically get a budget and hire teachers like an ordinary business. Instead, they get teacher slots based on enrollment and the central district pays the costs of the teachers. In practice, this means that for any given school, expensive, experienced teachers cost the same as cheap new teachers. And expensive, experienced teachers typically prefer to work at easier schools with more academically capable and inclined students. The upshot is that if you actually looked at the spending, a lot more money is spent on schools with middle-class student bodies than those with lots of low-income kids.
I don't know enough about DC to say if this is true there but it is definitely true in Los Angeles and in other districts around the country.
What happened? The people who lived through that testing mania grew up and got involved in advocating for policy. Mandatory Standardized Testing for school funding just results in teaching to the test and a bad school experience. The monomaniacal focus on a single set of metrics was always going to lead to a dumb and bad result.
The basic reform notion is quite sensible, but there are a couple issues. 1) I've seen some of the measurement models and they're absolute garbage. 2) My sense is that integration (eg, forced bussing) really is a big deal, but it's an absolute nonstarter. 3) The idea that you can use higher pay to pull in a better class of teachers makes a lot of sense, but for it to work you'd need to pay not a little bit more, but multiples. That's just not going to happen. So in the end, both sides we're being a little disengenuous in their arguments
suggestion Matt that you reach out to Gary Rubinstein, a teacher, blogger, and former TFA member, as you look into how successful ed reform projects were, from school turnarounds to no-excuses charters. He's done deep dives into the test score data of many of these projects around the country. You may be more positively inclined to the reform movement than Gary is, but he does his homework and it's worth it to explore multiple perspectives
Matt-Have you read Diane Ravitch’s _Reign of Error_? I’m a high school teacher, and I can tell you it’s hard to overestimate the importance of the “quality inputs” (at least middle class wealth, educated, supportive parents) you mention. I try my best, but it’s very, very, VERY hard to get a high school Junior with a fourth grade level of literacy to engage in rigorous study of history at a high school level.
Nikole Hannah-Jones obviously went on to become much more well-known for other work, but I would love this series to include a straight-on assessment of the issues raised in her 2 part radio piece on This American Life called "The Problem We All Live With." Thanks in advance!
You mentioned on a Weeds podcast that educational outcomes had slightly improved after NCLB was passed and had declined after the law was gutted. I would love to hear you go over those numbers again, especially if you could add local data like with DC reforms.
Education as a material benefit for greater egalitarian ends (increased income over your life), something you don't hear about as much ig except around student loan debt?
I am a retired teacher and worked in a selective enrollment high school for almost 30 years. I have been out since 2019 now and want to share a few points. It is really hard to measure student achievement and progress. And the way tests were designed and administered and graded were not really standardized. The tests given were designed by committees and the grading was done by other teachers in the department and the grading was not standardized (like in grading AP exams). Of course all types of budget constraints meant you could not invest in a truly fair test and the district spent plenty trying to design these assessments which took a lot of teaching time to administer. They tried to do before (in September) and after (in May) assessments with the same test. Teachers encouraged students to not even try on the first assessment. Students were officially graded on "improvement." So if they tried on the first assessment, they did not get as much improvement for the year. At first, the school was graded, then they wanted to offer "bonuses" for teachers who got the most improvement. This meant teachers were competing against each other instead of cooperating. I could go on and on, but won't. I just want to say that measuring school performance or teacher effectiveness is not as straightforward as it sounds. Yes, the union was against this. I will be honest, I did not like a lot of what the union did, but I did agree with them on this issue.
I was around when Sputnik went up, which triggered a lot of angst over education, and some changes. So I've random thoughts:
Back in the day the best and smartest people were teachers, because that was the best job women could get. Women's liberation destroyed that competitive advantage for the education system.
Education suffers from NIH--someone comes up with an idea to improve education. Even if they're able to assemble the political support to implement, they move on to bigger and better things, and the next people in charge have their own idea. It's like planting trees, waiting for 5 years, then cutting them down and planting something else.
We can never agree on metrics, how to measure or what we want. Do we want good citizens, which was big in the 1950s, or for students to be their authentic selves, etc. etc.
We believe there's one magic bullet for everyone, forgetting "different strokes for different folks".
Two great ideas: to cover this issue, and to not let the su stack format interfere with doing it right. Thank you!
Inevitably we’re going to get to a future post about how all these ed reform experiments and expanded data collection brought us a conclusion that the grand experiments… did basically nothing. Only meaningful impact proven repeatedly is that charters can improve average performance by selecting out the worst or most disruptive students (and that doesn’t scale up). I have come around to the view that tying some teacher compensation to performance has a nonzero impact, but it’s very, very slight.
Education is important but liberals have to grow out of the 90s idea that american poverty can be ameliorated through educational performance. At the end of the day you need active labor market policies, a child benefit and unions. And at the level of like, very segregated and concentrated underclass poverty, you need a whole range of interventions, in which school is important but also a sort of intensified welfare state to try to break up concentrated unemployability.
What do you say to Cathy O'Neil's _Weapons of Math Destruction_ critique of the "fire teachers with bad value-add scores" idea, which is that the metrics we have for value-add _suck_.
https://mathbabe.org/2012/03/06/the-value-added-teacher-model-sucks/
If you look at teachers who teach the same subject, in consecutive grades, in the same year, you will find that there is almost no correlation in what the models say. It just is not plausible that we have a bunch of people who are good at teaching 6th grade math, but terrible at teaching 7th grade math.
A lot of people who got fed up with the reform movement didn't disagree, in principle, with "measure impact and use it to inform compensation / retention". They just disagreed that the tools available measured impact.