A Critical Response to the East Baton Rouge Parish

"Committee for Excellence in Education Report"

Once we acquired a copy of the this report we were disappointed to find that the work of the committees does not appear to be informed by research, but instead appears to have been driven, in large part, by ideology. This lack of research to support the recommendations of the committee was exhibited starkly in numerous areas of the report. We have taken two examples from the document to exemplify these limitations.

In the first example, we point out an obvious disconnect between reality and the recommendation of the committee. In the second example, there is no evidence that any of the research on the topic was examined at all, and certainly the advice of the leading groups of experts in this country was totally ignored, if the committee members were even aware of it. The depth of these obvious errors certainly calls into question the process itself, and invites a very critical response from the community when the limitations of this report are brought into the limelight of public discourse.

In the Section of the document titled "Culture and Safety/School Climate and Human Capital we find the two examples we use to illustrate the problems we found in the report. Strategy No. 5, Tactic No. 1 states:

Use the Instructional Culture Index (ICI) to measure school climate and culture and drive school-based decisions on culture. Create and publish a semi-annual school climate score card (sic) and prioritize physical plant improvements based on score card results.

The problems with this tactic become clear with just a bit of research. First, the Instructional Culture Index is not something that many in the education community would recognize, for a very good reason. The ICI was "developed" (and we use this term loosely) by The New Teacher Project (TNTP) between June and November of 2010. According to a presentation by TNTP the "study" consisted of partnering with 37 charter school campuses in Washington, D. C. with a goal of creating "an index of Instructional Culture that would help us uncover what sets top performing charter schools apart."

In a number of other areas of the presentation t of the presentation he full title of this index is given as the "Charter School Instructional Culture Index" (CSICI). TNTP asked teachers and administrators to fill out forms concerning their perceptions and attitudes about instruction and expectations concerning instruction at their respective schools. Some were also interviewed for the study, and "performance data" was collected on each teacher through "individual interviews with school leaders." It is not clear what this latter "data" consisted of.

TNTP, in a period of less than 5 months, studied, interviewed, analyzed and "created" this Instructional Culture Index. This is not the protocol that is normally followed when formulating the basis for a pilot study of any new proposed tool. What we see here is an instance where the exploratory work necessary to devise a tool has been misused as the initial pilot. This is usually considered bad practice simply because it encourages the researchers to build a tool that "explains" the data that they already possess rather than devising a more rigorous tool that would have explanatory power in situations where the outcome is not yet known.. According to TNTP the ICI is "a statistical composite of teacher agreement with three leading indicators of strong talent management." The three indicators are 1) Teachers at my school share a common vision of what effective teaching looks like; 2) At my school, the expectations for effective teaching are clearly defined; and 3) My school is committed to improving my instructional practice.

The ICI is a measure of the strength of these three indicators, and it was derived from a "study" taking less than 5 months, and involving 37 schools, but only 26 schools had data from the D.C. Comprehensive Accountability System (CAS). In a chart showing the correlation between the ICI and student achievement as measured using the CAS there are two years of data reported, yet obviously there was no ICI computed for the 2009 data set, for it was not yet in existence that year. In 2010 there were only 23 schools shown on the chart. It was not at all clear why you would show correlations between achievement and ICI for a year in which no ICI was available. It was also not clear why three of the 26 schools with data actually did not appear on the chart in 2010.

The methodological problems with this "ICI" are many, though some might have been cleared up if this "index" was properly piloted, peer-reviewed and replicated in a broader setting. Alas, we have seen no detailed data to suggest that it is valid at all. We also have no data to suggest that the schools used in the study were comparable, or whether the student achievement in any schools was in any way outside of norms for their respective student bodies. Any attempt to claim causality would likely have to include more schools, more time, and significantly more data and data analysis. And there is, in the literature of TNTP a clear indication that they believe that it is because schools have higher scores on the index that they are indeed scoring higher. Unfortunately this is the classic case where the limited methodology used to generate the findings invalidated such a conclusion. It is almost always possible to construct a tool that finds a correspondence between a policy initiative and data that has already been gathered. This is why the type of research associated with this study is best understood as exploratory and is best used to construct a tool whose value is demonstrated in a different context against data that played no part in the devising of the tool.

For the sake of our response to the entry of the ICI into the report we are currently examining, however, we can ignore all of these methodological and theoretical challenges to the ICI. Instead, we can simply ask one question. Is anyone looking at the language of this tactic not now aware that the authors clearly have no idea what the ICI is? How in the world could the ICI, even if it were valid, tested, and reliable, be used to "prioritize physical plant improvements" in our school system? The ICI has nothing at all to do with the physical plant of a school. At least one researcher has suggested the misapplication of this "index" is due to a reference within the presentation that included the ICI to "culture and climate." Perhaps one or more members of the committee though this meant the physical "climate" of the classroom. We also note that this is not the only time acronyms and terminology from The New Teacher Project are highlighted in the report.

The second of our examples suggesting a total lack of research orientation from those writing and developing the recommendations in this report come from the same section of the report. Strategy No. 4 states:

Reward teachers who rank in the top 25% statewide of performance in terms of improving student achievement (i.e., using the statewide value-added assessment model) and remove those teachers who rank in the bottom 25% statewide of performance.

Putting aside the tortured language of this "tactic," we examined the research on the validity of using current "value-added" assessment of student achievement to determine teacher effectiveness. Value-added assessment are used because researchers have long ago determined that measuring the actual scores of students on a test give no reliable data about the effectiveness of the teacher. This is due to a number of limitations. For example, long-accepted and validated research has clearly pointed out that teachers are responsible for only a small portion of student achievement. For example, Charles Lussier recently highlighted research published in 1998 by "economists Eric Hanushek, John Kain and Steven Rivkinin " who "estimated that at least 7.5 percent of the variation in student achievement resulted directly from teacher quality and added that the actual number could be as high as 20 percent. Out-of-school factors such as poverty, however, remain much better predictors of student achievement." For this reason, the scores of students in a particular teacher's classroom would be more affected by factors outside of school than by the teacher's instruction.

Therefore, researchers and "reformers" who wish to access the quality of teachers have resorted to "value-added" measures. In its simplest forms "value-added" is the process of statistically predicting where a student should be achieving academically at a certain point in time based on a variety of factors, including the student's prior scores and the average growth of similar students, and then comparing the actual score with the predicted score. If the student achieves a higher than predicted score, that is, in the scenario, extra value "added" by the teacher. In practice, the gains of a class of students are compared to the gains predicted and achieved by the "average" teacher for those students. It is complex in theory, and in practice. According to the National Research Council's letter to the U.S. Department of Education's Race To the Top guidelines, their concerns about the validity of value-added were many. It is worth quoting extensively from the letter:

Prominent testing expert Robert Linn concluded in his workshop paper: “As with any effort to isolate causal effects from observational data when random assignment is not feasible, there are reasons to question the ability of value-added methods [VAM] to achieve the goal of determining the value added by a particular teacher, school, or educational program” (Linn, 2008, p. 3). Teachers are not assigned randomly to schools, and students are not assigned randomly to teachers. Without a way to account for important unobservable differences across students, VAM techniques fail to control fully for those differences and are therefore unable to provide objective comparisons between teachers who work with different populations. As a result, value-added scores that are attributed to a teacher or principal may be affected by other factors, such as student motivation and parental support.

VAM also raises important technical issues about test scores that are not raised by other uses of those scores. In particular, the statistical procedures assume that a one-unit difference in a test score means the same amount of learning—and the same amount of teaching—for low- \performing, average, and high-performing students. If this is not the case, then the value-added scores for teachers who work with different types of students will not be comparable. One common version of this problem occurs for students whose achievement levels are too high or too low to be measured by the available tests. For such students, the tests show “ceiling” or “floor” effects and cannot be used to provide a valid measure of growth. It is not possible to calculate valid value-added measures for teachers with students who have achievement levels that are too high or too low to be measured by the available tests.

In addition to these unresolved issues, there are a number of important practical difficulties in using value-added measures in an operational, high-stakes program to evaluate teachers and principals in a way that is fair, reliable, and valid. Those difficulties include the following:

1. Estimates of value added by a teacher can vary greatly from year to year, with many teachers moving between high and low performance categories in successive years (McCaffrey, Sass, and Lockwood, 2008).

2. Estimates of value added by a teacher may vary depending on the method used to calculate the value added, which may make it difficult to defend the choice of a particular method (e.g., Briggs, Weeks, and Wiley, 2008).

3. VAM cannot be used to evaluate educators for untested grades and subjects.

4. Most databases used to support value-added analyses still face fundamental challenges related to their ability to correctly link students with teachers by subject.

5. Students often receive instruction from multiple teachers, making it difficult to attribute learning gains to a specific teacher, even if the databases were to correctly record the contributions of all teachers.

6. There are considerable limitations to the transparency of VAM approaches for educators, parents and policy makers, among others, given the sophisticated statistical methods they employ.

In addition, there are prominent statisticians and mathematicians as well as other researchers who have clearly cautioned against using "value-added" for more than a small portion of teacher or administrator evaluations. The confidence level of those who have examined value-added in practice is not high. We note here that we are puzzled by a system of evaluation being promoted for teachers using "value-added" methodology while the State of Louisiana is still using student scores as the largest component of School Performance Scores (SPS) while in no way accounting for the very differences in students that led them to adopt "value-added" in evaluating individual teachers. To just point out one obvious problem with using student scores for SPS purposes, just note that the top twenty schools in the state use selective enrollment, giving those schools an obvious advantage. Also note that the top district in the state has the lowest percentage of students qualifying for free meals, while the lowest performing district in the state has the highest level of low-income students? A value-added system would not evaluate schools this way.

A second layer of complexity and problematic decisions appears not to have been anticipated by the authors of the report. This layer concerns the practical limitations and questions concerning the details of this tactic. Is the intent to use only student achievement? The language of the tactic suggests this. The instability of year-to-year measurements highlighted by the American Research Council suggests that using a two to three year measure might be useful to avoid single-year errors, yet many new teachers, including Teach For America teachers, are not there long enough to receive scores. In addition, EBR could not likely replace 25% of the teachers and administrators in any given year, especially in hard to fill areas.

The authors of this tactic apparently have not read any of the recent research outlined by Dan Pink that is shaking up historical understandings of motivation. Using "carrots and sticks," as this tactic does flies in the face of more contemporary understandings of the serious problems in using contingent rewards. There is, at best, limited success at using bonuses in teaching. For example, one of the most often cited programs using "pay-for-performance," an incentive program for teachers in New York City, was dropped in the summer of 2011 after research on the program made clear that it was not working! Here it how it was reported:

Weighing surveys, interviews and statistics, the study found that the bonus program had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.

“We did not find improvements in student achievement at any of the grade levels,” said Julie A. Marsh, the report’s lead researcher and a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. “A lot of the principals and teachers saw the bonuses as a recognition and reward, as icing on the cake. But it’s not necessarily something that motivated them to change.”

The results add to a growing body of evidence nationally that so-called pay-for-performance bonuses for teachers that consist only of financial incentives have no effect on student achievement, the researchers wrote. Even so, federal education policy champions the concept, and spending on performance-based pay for teachers grew to $439 million nationally last year from $99 million in 2006, the study said.

According to a research report from the London School of Economics highlighted in Dan Pink's TED Talk on the subject, "financial incentives…can result in a negative impact on overall performance." The title of a research paper by David Marsden that the London School of Economics has published says it all: "The paradox of performance related pay systems: ‘why do we keep adopting them in the face of evidence that they fail to motivate?'"

Finally, the financial implications of the combination of monetary rewards for the top performing teachers (as measured by a questionable value-added system) and the costs of recruiting and training for a stream of new teachers replacing teachers determined by the same value-added system to be low performing could easily overwhelm the budget of the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, which is already operating with a rapidly declining budget balance.

While we recognize that there are some strategies and tactics which, if implemented with fidelity will likely improve our schools and the experiences of those attending them, we, the undersigned, are very concerned about the lack of quality apparent in far too many of these tactics, and believe that there needs to be more transparency in the conversations about these recommended actions before the Board takes any action to set them into policy. We are more than willing to assist, and offer as a starting point that all recommendations include references to the origins of, and research behind, each of them.

The undersigned urge the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board to carefully examine the recommendations of this report, and to examine and have provided to the public the research base supporting or calling into question each of them.

(Note: There are others involved in this response, but only the three of us have approved this version so far.

Noel Hammatt, Independent Education Researcher, Baton Rouge

John St. Julien, Ph.D., Retired Professor of Education, Lafayette

Donald Whittinghill, Education Consultant, Baton Rouge

STP! Stop, think, and praise.

As I look back on my decision to run for another four-year term as your school board member I remember how difficult that decision was. Serving as a school board member, many will say, is a thankless job. I don't find that to be true however, and I freely admit that I enjoy the stops in the grocery store, or in other venues, when folks thank me for my service, and talk about how pleased they are with one aspect or another of the changes we have made! I smile as they say to me that they are sure it is "a thankless job" even as they thank me.

The truth is that working together, we have achieved so much in this community. As the only candidate still running who was endorsed by Community Action for Public Education (CAPE), I remember all too well the conditions we found in a school system that had been neglected by far too many in this community. Schools were crumbling all around us, and there had been no new schools built for thirty years or so. Buildings at Lee High and Woodlawn and other sites had been condemned, but not removed. All roofs leaked every time it rained. Working together with the community we identified well over a billion dollars worth of immediate needs in the physical condition of the schools. The job is not done…. But so much HAS been done!

More importantly, the community had, in fact, nearly given up on their schools. No new taxes had been passed in many, many years, and teachers were being paid significantly less than those in many other districts, and in fact they had been furloughed for three days when a previous board ran out of money! Today, our teachers are paid competitive salaries, and we don't worry about covering up equipment in all the schools when it rains. The citizens in our community have passed tax renewals and new taxes with large margins, and new schools and buildings are going up around the district, on time and under budget. The long running desegregation lawsuit, which began before I was born, is over, and there is no forced bussing at all in Baton Rouge. None. Although I am still amazed to see uninformed people saying that we should end bussing in Baton Rouge! Should all students be forced to walk to school?

During my 16 years on the school board time I have remained true to the principles that CAPE espoused. In spite of the constant bashing of our schools, we have come so very far in the last 16 years. As a community, we sometimes have short memories, especially in the midst of an election when it seems every new candidate wants to show just how bad things are. Some of the things you will never hear from challengers include those items just mentioned, such as new schools, an end to forced bussing, and other things I have referred to in some of my other posts on here. Things such as the cooperation of the School System with the EBR Fire Department, the EBR Library, BREC (all of whom share facilities and land with us all over the parish, something that did not happen before) are forgotten in the unceasing desire, it seems to heap more abuse on our schools.

In spite of pullouts, including two areas that included some of our highest performing schools before they left the system, we have continuously improved on the scores for every subgroup in the parish. By subgroup, I mean different groups of students whether by race or ethnicity, or by other characteristics such as whether or not the student qualifies (based on family income) for free of reduced meal prices. For example, our EBR school system was just recognized as having the ninth highest on-time graduation rates for Black males large districts across the country. I am still amazed that some will take that fact, and turn it on its head and complain that the rate is far too low! (By the way, I agree that the rate is too low… but with an important caveat! Can't we at least take a moment to recognize that every district in the country is having problems increasing the graduation rate for this group of students, and your neighbors and friends, the teachers in our schools, are doing better than almost every other district in the country!) For students who are white, EBR ranks 5th out of all the districts in the state for their achievement, and for students who do not qualify for free or reduced price meals, our students rank 6th out of all districts in the state.

In another study, the researchers at Education Week, the premier weekly that focuses on pre-K through high school issues, calculated the "predicted" graduation rates for districts across the country, based in part on risk factors outside of school control, so called "out of school factors," and then compared the predictions with the actual graduation rates. Again, East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools were ranked 31st in the entire country out of all the large school systems! No one that I know of us is saying that we have reached the mountaintop…that we can now rest, for the job is done! However, can we not take a moment to thank teachers for the progress they have made? Against incredible odds, and in spite of all the bashing they take?

Intellectual honesty is something I often talk and write about. I ask each of us to set aside our prejudices, our preconceived notions about ideology and what "we believe," and actually look at some of the data and research out there. It might just cause us to pause the next time we have a knee-jerk reaction about "our failing school system." I admitted that I enjoy receiving a "thank you" every now and then… but I would be happier still if this community thanked our teachers for their efforts, each and every day, to educate ALL students who walk (or roll) through the doors of OUR schools. To the teachers and staff of OUR schools, THANK YOU!

The Elusive Graduation Rates….

When I was in school "back in the day" as my son would say, a dropout was someone who "dropped out" of school and went to work or joined the military. For us, a "dropout" was someone who never finished high school.

Alas, today's use of the words "dropout" has an entirely different meaning. When you hear the startling statistics about the number of "dropouts" you might be hearing incredibly high numbers, and wondering just how horrible our schools have gotten! Before you lose all hope, you might want to explore a little about what, exactly, all these numbers mean! When you hear the term "dropout" it might be used in quite a number of different ways. For example, it could be that I was a dropout in high school. I "dropped out" of high school, since I did not graduate with my class. In fact, I remember going by Lee High School and saying "hi" to everyone as they were preparing to go to Panama City during their break to celebrate their upcoming graduation. I was heading to Panama City as well, only in my case the Panama City was in the Republic of Panama. I graduated at the end of the Fall Semester of my Senior Year, and enlisted in the army. It is very likely that a "cohort graduation rate" would have missed the distinction that I graduated early. The easiest (but not particularly accurate) way of determining a "cohort graduation rate" for a school district is to take the number of graduating seniors at the end of a given year, and divide by the number of ninth graders four years earlier. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it.

A "cohort dropout rate" on the other hand, would be the "cohort graduation rate" subtracted from 100%. OK, that sounds fairly straightforward. A district with a cohort graduation rate of 58% would be one where 42% of the students do not graduate. For the record, I just intentionally made the same mistake made in article in The Advocate this morning; and by so many politicians who are trying to show us just how bad our education is! What was the mistake? To put it simply, whenever talking about the "cohort" rates, we need to distinguish that we are talking about students graduating on time! It seems simple to include those two important words, but the number of Presidents, Governors, and so called "education reformers" who forget to mention the two words is phenomenal. In today's parlance, a dropout is anyone who does not graduate on time, that is to say with her or his classmates who started together.

So, does the cohort graduation rate above mean that 42% of seniors did not graduate? No. Does it mean that 42% of students in the school did not ever graduate? Again, the answer is no. It indicates that 42% of those in the freshman class did not graduate exactly four years later. Some of them might have taken an extra semester to graduate based on illness, or failing a particular course. Some of them might have moved, and lost credit for a course they didn't finish at one school that was not offered at the new school. Some might simply have left the school system, and so they did not graduate with their peers. The most important point to make, I believe, is that many, if not most of these students, actually do graduate or pass their GED tests, signifying that they have in fact mastered high school level material.

For perspective, and something that is almost never mentioned by the politicians and "reformers" doing everything they can to tell the public how important it is that we all sup at the table of their particular educational changes currently being promoted, remember that when many of us were young, life was simpler. We didn't need to do that much math. If you dropped out of school, and did not graduate, at all, then you were considered a "dropout." Today, it is necessary to do a chronological study and determine when you should have graduated! For another perspective, colleges evaluate their progress by determining their graduation rates in a different way. They use a standard "six-year graduation rate" for their undergraduates, even though most, if not all of their undergraduates are in four-year degree programs. Their numbers, in most cases, are "worse" than the average high school "four-year graduation rate."

Now… let's look at some other complications when calculating our "graduation rates" for school districts. As The Advocate newspaper reported today, East Baton Rouge Parish public schools were highlighted in the national Schott Report as having the ninth highest "cohort graduation rate" for African-American males among all large school systems in the country with at least 10,000 African American males. This report, as do others from the Louisiana State Department of Education, likely contains some common errors. For example, how do the rates calculated account for the fact that EBR schools four years ago included Central High School, one of our larger high schools. For the last few years, those students continued to graduate, but they were no longer in the EBR system, since the citizens of Central formed their own school system. So dividing the EBR graduating class by the number of EBR students four years earlier gives you an error! Do the math! It is interesting to note that the effect of the error is much greater for white students than for African-American students, since the vast majority of African-American students in Central High School returned to EBR schools, since they were in a variety of choice programs, whereas most other students did not. So the Schott report likely underestimates the graduation rates for all EBR students.

What other ways can you imagine that graduation rates can be misleading? Or asking the question in another way, why should we always ask how such rates are being determined? Take a look at www.noelhammatt.org to see some of the things EBR has been doing to increase the real graduation rates

An important note: I cannot criticize the author of the article in our newspaper this morning, for he is relying, in a quotation in the story, on one of the following two statements from the same Schott Report! See if you can spot the subtle, but important, differences in meaning!

Yes We Can, The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, starkly illustrates that only 47% of Black males graduate from high school—far short of the trajectory and post-secondary credentials needed for our nation to be globally competitive by 2020. (Page 1)

Yet, unfortunately, the graduation rate for Black male students for the nation as a whole in 2007/8 was only 47%, that is, most Black male students did not graduate with their cohort." (Page 6)

Breaking Out of the "Reformers" Box!

Over the last few years I have pointed out to state education officials that there is a clear pattern that should be obvious to anyone looking at so-called "failing" schools in Louisiana. I shared with leaders the average demographics of the schools threatened with takeover by the state: approximately 95%+ of the students qualify for free or reduced price meals, and approximately 95%+ of the students are African-American. For the record, I am neither making any kind of "predictions" as to the academic achievement of the students in these schools based on "low expectations" nor am I saying that African-American students from low income families cannot learn or achieve high academic standards. On the other hand, I am stating that we should be carefully examining why it is that these are the shared demographics of these schools.

Researchers have found, by and large, that neither race/ethnicity nor the income of families has much to do, directly, with student achievement. What researchers have found, however, is that many of the underlying conditions that are found to impact student achievement are disproportionately distributed by race and income. These underlying conditions, which include such things as number of parents in the home, the number of books in the home, the number of hours of televisions watched, and the number of times a week children are read to, are all powerful predictors of student achievement, and are not under the control of our schools. I asked Paul Pastorek, the State Superintendent, to join with a number of groups looking at developing initiatives to impact some of these out-of-school factors. Instead, he started highlighting what he calls high poverty/high performing schools. None of these schools come close to overcoming the kinds of challenges faced by those schools taken over by the state.

I decided to look for "75/75/75 schools" in Louisiana. These would be schools where 75% or more of the student body was African-American, and at least 75% of the students came from families qualifying for free-or reduced meal prices, and 75% or more of the students in the school met state proficiency standards in both reading and math. I did a search using data from a nationally recognized school data engine, School Data Direct, and discovered the following. In the latest data set, Louisiana had 359 public schools in the state where over 75% of the students were African American, and over 75% of the students were receiving free or reduced meal prices. Out of these 359 schools only one school met the 75/75/75 criteria. I won’t even mention the school’s name, because it is not likely that the school actually created the success, since it is elementary, in New Orleans, and is a school of choice. Due to these factors it would require a bit more analysis to determine if it is the school that is achieving these results, or whether the results are the product of some selective admissions practices, and score-scrubbing which appears to currently be a problem in New Orleans. At any rate, ignoring the patterns of the 358 out of 359 schools does a disservice to the students in those schools, and a policy based on the one school that appears to be an outlier would likely not be fruitful. A policy based on exceptions is not likely to be an exceptionally good policy! Instead, let's work together to develop interventions that impact the underlying conditions!

We must break out of the box that limits education reforms to the limited time that students spend at school!

Want to meet your child's first teacher? Look in a Mirror!

The first and most solidly based finding is that the largest source of variation in student learning is attributable to differences in what students bring to school – their abilities and attitudes, and family and community background. (OECD, 2005, page 2)

For some examples of the incredibly powerful nature of out-of-school factors, you might explore the Educational Testing Service report, “The Family: America's Smallest School (ETS, 2007). In this Policy Information Report, the authors point to research looking at state level data for four out-of-school factors in order to predict eight grade reading scores for each state. The four factors were ratio of students to parents (number of single parent families), attendance rate data, television watching data, and the percentage of children whose parents were reading to them every day. (Note that schools do not generally have any direct influence on three of these variables.) Using the data, researchers predicted the scores for each state, and in 45 states, the predicted scores were within six points of the actual scale score for that state. (Really close, in other words.) The authors from ETS are careful to point out the complex nature of student achievement factors, and caution the readers of their report about coming to premature conclusions about the relative importance of any factors.

When the OECD (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group which includes the United States, talked about the greater importance of outside (of school) factors in student learning, they followed the statement which opened this post with this statement.

Such factors are difficult for policy makers to influence, at least in the short-run.

Is it really beyond the realm of possibility to develop a comprehensive public relations campaign based on impacting at least three of the above factors? How controversial would it be to invite parents to understand the relationships between television access, reading to their children, getting them to school, and the academic achievement of their children? Is this really any harder than a similar campaign aimed at stopping parents and caregivers from “shaking babies”? Why do policy makers seldom consider these possibilities? In part, because we accept myth-information and are looking for “quick results.” Haven’t we learned anything from the business models so loved by those seeking to foster these “competitive practices” in our nation’s schools? A focus on the next quarterly earnings report, driving out a focus on long-tern viability or the public good, sounds an awful lot like focusing on the next round of student testing results.

It is my hope that those who read this blog will carefully evaluate the claims (and myth-information) presented by so-called education "reformers" and ensure that presentations and reports which might be used to guide their policies are screened and fact-checked prior to their incorporation into policies which impact our state’s school children. In addition, it is my fervent hope that the ideology of those who would hold our schools totally accountable for the academic achievement of all students will be questioned by leaders with an understanding of the research on educational achievement that clearly does not support such ideology or mythology.

Myth-Takes in Reform Efforts

Dr. Tabitha Grossman recently made a presentation to Louisiana’s Blue Ribbon Commission for Educational Excellence. In her remarks she made reference to the importance of teacher quality, as she does in documents referenced herein, saying that teacher quality is the largest single factor impacting student achievement. I would like to point out a major mistake in her reporting of research, and one that rises to such a level as to raise questions of whether such a mistake is possible given her credentials, or whether this was simply another, in a long line of “myth-takes” by prominent researchers based on ideology.

Dr. Grossman is listed as the author of “Building a High Quality Workforce: a governor’s guide to human capital development” (hereinafter referred to as The Guide) which was produced by the National Governor’s Association Center for Best Practices, Education Division, where Dr. Grossman holds a position as Senior Policy Analyst.

On page 1 of The Guide, the following quote appears:

Teacher effectiveness is the primary influence on student achievement, followed by principal effectiveness.1 Given this reality, state efforts to improve student achievement should focus on workforce policies and practices, and on workforce funding decisions that improve the quality of the education workforce. To do this, governors should consider a comprehensive human capital approach that strategically invests in teachers and principals and that, in turn, can improve student outcomes.

The reference given in the above quote is: 1. The Wallace Foundation, Becoming a Leader: Preparing School Principals for Today’s Schools (New York: Wallace Foundation, 2008). The quote below is the only location in that entire document on the relative importance of teacher and principal influences on student achievement. See if you can note the not-so-subtle differences between Dr. Grossman’s passage and the passage from the Wallace Foundation document.

The importance of effective school leadership and the accompanying need to provide principals with more appropriate training to meet today’s needs are getting long-overdue attention. Teachers have the most immediate in-school effect on student success. But there is growing agreement that with the national imperative for having every child succeed, it is the principal who is best positioned to ensure that teaching and learning are as good as they can be throughout entire schools, especially those with the highest needs. (page 1)

Any researcher specifically referencing another publication has a responsibility to accurately capture the essential elements of the publication being referenced, even if the researcher wishes to disagree with the findings outlined in the document. In this case, Dr. Grossman somehow confuses “…the most immediate in-school effect on student success” with her statement that “Teacher effectiveness is the primary influence on student achievement.” The two statements are not at all synonymous. If Dr. Grossman had merely made such statements in her spoken presentation to the BESE, one could argue that she simply made a mistake. Having included the statement, and the reference, in a written document does compound the error. But she doesn’t stop with the one reference.

On page 3 of The Guide, in a section titled “Why is a Human Capital Strategy Necessary?” Dr. Grossman again emphasizes the point she made earlier, by making a very clear statement. “Research shows that teacher quality is the primary influence on student achievement.5” Putting aside the question of whether such a statement should actually provide some reference to actual research, this statement might again have referenced the Wallace Foundation study cited above, but Dr. Grossman this time provides the following reference: “5. Organisation (sic) for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers—Final Report: Teachers Matter (Paris: OECD, 2004).” In its overview of this report, the OECD authors include the following on page 2:

Three broad conclusions emerge from research on student learning. The first and most solidly based finding is that the largest source of variation in student learning is attributable to differences in what students bring to school – their abilities and attitudes, and family and community background. Such factors are difficult for policy makers to influence, at least in the short-run.

The second broad conclusion is that of those variables which are potentially open to policy influence, factors to do with teachers and teaching are the most important influences on student learning. In particular, the broad consensus is that “teacher quality” is the single most important school variable influencing student achievement.

The first paragraph above makes it difficult to accept Dr. Grossman’s use of this document as a reference… since it makes clear that “the largest source of variation in student learning is attributable to differences in what students bring to school….” While it goes on to state “such factors are difficult for policy makers to influence, at least in the short run” we should be careful not to make the incredible ‘leap of faith’ that Dr. Grossman appears to have made. Just because taking policy actions directed at what students bring to school may be difficult, it does not then follow that “research shows that teacher quality is the primary influence on student achievement.” (I will be shortly providing a post on what we CAN do about some of the out-of-sachool factors!)

What is troubling about Dr. Grossman’s compounding of what I call “myth-information” is that it becomes part and parcel of public and political efforts to develop policies holding schools accountable for circumstances beyond their control, while carefully hiding from the public the actual research results which clearly point to the greater impact of out-of-school factors. These factors, pointed out in the OECD report cited earlier, are best summed up in the words of the group, “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.”

Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can substantially, consistently, and sustainably close these gaps. A Broader, Bolder Approach

Through the creation (or repetition) of a myth about teacher quality being the most important factor in student achievement, Dr. Grossman, et al. develop the groundwork for such policies as “pay for performance” and the “competitive compensation” proposals so enamored by those who see as socialist evils, unions, teacher pay scales, and civil service policies.

Such “myth-informed” policies cannot have the impact suggested by Dr. Grossman and others, since the impact of teachers on student achievement is much smaller than her statements suggest. In fact, policy makers would do well to heed the suggestions of the signatories to “A Broader, Bolder Approach” by focusing on issues related to out of school factors as well as in school factors. In future posts I will outline some of my proposals in these areas.

Reflections on a neighborhood walk through North Baton Rouge

Today I was privileged to join with member of the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, the District Attorney's Office, the Sheriff's Office and a number of other groups to walk the neighborhoods of one of our North Baton Rouge Schools. The purpose of our walk was to remind parents of the fact that school starts this coming Wednesday, to ensure that their children were registered, and to provide information to help them get to school on time and prepared.

Jennie Ponder from the Truancy Office and I teamed up to walk one side of the street, and we met some of the nicest, most sincere and caring parents one can find anywhere. We also saw living conditions that were absolutely appalling. We saw well-kept lawns and small, cute houses, and we saw totally overgrown lawns and boarded up houses covered with graffiti. We saw adults drinking beer and smoking cigarettes (this was at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning) surrounded by young kids. At one home we suddenly realized as we were talking to a mother that her young child, perhaps 18 months old, had a pack of cigarettes in one hand and was chewing on one. While the situation was quickly dealt with by the mother, when she noticed us looking at her child, it was a scary reminder of what children live with. In a number of homes kids were home alone, and we spoke through the doors to children who knew not to open the door to strangers.

I am always reminded anew, when I walk through neighborhoods and see the conditions in which some of our students live, that those who argue that teachers alone are responsible for the education of our youth somehow just don't get it. We are educated from the moment we enter this world, and the conditions of our young lives impact us every day of our lives. While we all know of children who have overcome tremendous odds to succeed, we can also recognize the incredibly strong correlations between early childhood resources and conditions and academic success. In all the homes we visited, we saw not a single book. Televisions were on, and children were present, but no books did we see. The words of Peter, Paul, and Mary come back to me…. "Oh, when will we ever learn? Oh, when will we… ever learn?" I often end a speech in the community with these words… "We will have the schools, and the community we want, when each of us wants, for other people's children, what we want and demand for our own children." It is going to take so much work, and so much caring, to short-circuit the cycles of poverty, economic and spiritual. There is no better time to start than today!