In an op-ed for the New York Times, Diane Ravitch writes that turn-around schools are fairy tales. When you actually look at the numbers, those inner-city miracle schools with over worked teachers don't really do better than regular schools. Kids excel in schools, when they come from stable families with regular meals, bedtimes, and paychecks.
If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.
She and other education advocates have made this same argument several times over this past year. And I don't disagree with them. Statistically, no education reform is as important as the economic and emotional stability of a community.
But is it possible to argue both that A. Schools aren't as important as family life and B. Teachers are undervalued and need a raise and respect? If family life is the most important factor in predicting the educational success of a kid, shouldn't I be the one getting the raise? Isn't Ravitch undervaluing teachers in this article? Why should we pay teachers more, if their work doesn't seem to translate to more learning?
Apt. 11d 
I don’t think it’s contradictory to believe that while family factors are the greatest determinant of educational outcomes that having qualified teachers is also important. Ravitch seems to be saying that we should invest in reducing child poverty AND raising teacher salaries. That doing both will be the most effective way to close the achievement gap.
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When I was a childless educational assistant, many moons ago, this whole dialogue used to frustrate me to no end.
I taught in special ed and directly saw the impact of, for example, a child who was proud of himself for being able to open a can of spaghetti-os for dinner while his dad was passed out drunk…and who had not learned to read by grade 5, and who was becoming angry and frustrated and probably also had an undiagnosed learning disability that an engaged family would have pushed harder to get evaluated and addressed.
At the same time I did think that sometimes schools and teachers were not willing to take a hard look at the hours -in- school because they would give up at that point. Understandably so; how do you manage to get that child and the 5 others like him in class to read? And yet I would walk by this kid who was sent out in the hall on a daily basis for behavioural issues and think: He’s sitting in the hall. If only someone could be reading to him right now. Just reading -to- him.
And yes, he was getting pulled out for 45 minutes of instruction twice a week. Which was helping, but was not fixing the reading fast enough to save his self-image, which was quickly getting formed around being the kid who _isn’t_ going to read. It was such a tough age to watch – the little boy turning into an angry tween.
What more could we do? I don’t know. It’s tough. The good teachers were still in the fight. But a less good teacher, with whom he happened to land, was just sending him out in the hall a lot. (Or what seemed like a lot to me. Bear in mind I was in my early 20s and knew everything at the time.) And even that teacher wasn’t terrible…just overloaded.
So I agree: Even if the best predictor of success is the home environment, you can’t stop working the teaching-teacher-compensation-curriculum end of things.
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It seems to me that paying teachers might help attract great people, but it won’t help people do a better job. The real barrier to teaching effectively, particularly in urban areas, are the work conditions, particularly the lack of discipline in the classrooms. If a teacher has to spend most of his/her time making sure that students remain in their seats and keep the noise down to a dull roar, it will be difficult to teach them anything. Often, the major sources of disruption comes from a small percentage of students. I can understand a teacher with 20-30 kids sending the disruptive kid out into the hall in order to have a chance of reaching the other kids. In those cases, working more hours or being aware of the latest pedogoguies doesn’t help. It is a cruel calculus that has a teacher “give up” on a student, but unless you can get the the kid in a special ed situation where they will have slightly more resources, I don’t see how you avoid that happening most of the time.
Also, it would be nice if schools were air conditioned.
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Its not inconsistent to think that families/neighbourhoods are the main causes of disadvantage, and also that teachers should be paid more/better teachers should be secured. Here’s why.
Suppose that 80% of the valuable achievement gap is fixed by the family/neighbourhood. Then 20% is attributable to in-school factors. That 20% is the only part over which policymakers have any control. Now, I know that last sentence is not technically true for all policymakers, but since there is no political constituency for the kinds of measures that would transform disadvantaged neighbourhoods and families, it is as-if true. How do we affect that portion of the gap that we can affect? By improving schools. Now, this requires lots of things, not just paying teachers more — and just paying teachers more across the board wouldn’t achieve much even over the long term, and nothing in the short term, because it would not redistribute quality teachers, and would only marginally improve the quality of entrants to the profession (so there’s a huge time lag issue). But paying more to teachers in schools with high concentrations of disadvantage, and using other measures to improve those schools (including improving working conditions, which would affect the quality of instruction more quickly than raising pay) is nevertheless valuable.
You are only affecting 20% of the gap. But even that 20% may have huge implications for the quality of life course of the disadvantaged students.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with Ravitch that neighbourhoods, poverty, etc, are more important, and it is morally important to address that independently of its effects on education. And its not all about money, by any means, like educational interventions anti-disadvantage interventions require complex resources that are not reducible to dollar figures.
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When people discuss teacher salaries, they tend to compare the salaries to doctors’ & lawyers’ earnings, not social workers’ salaries. Why not? Why does a young college student decide to become a social worker, rather than a teacher?
Teachers’ salary structures are much more predictable than doctors’ and lawyers’ earnings. On the whole, teacher pay does not reach the heights, but it tends to be shielded from other threats. There are benefits, and a retirement fund. You don’t open your own teaching practice. Few teachers are sued for malpractice, and I’ve never heard of a successful teaching malpractice suit.
I don’t think paying teachers more would improve our schools. For one thing, look at the housing market. There isn’t a great pool of money to tap to increase teacher pay. Teachers aren’t volunteering to give up tenure in exchange for larger classes and higher pay, despite some reformers’ attempts to paint that as a great deal.
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But paying more to teachers in schools with high concentrations of disadvantage…
Right now, high pay and pick of school goes to people with seniority.
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JennG,
Ross Greene has a newish book entitled “Lost at School” about kids with behavior problems and the failure of the send-to-the-hall, send-to-the-principal model of discipline. Howard Glasser (“Transforming the Difficult Child” and “The Inner Wealth Initiative” talks about the same stuff from a slightly different (more behaviorist) angle. As they would point out, for the kind of kid you’re talking about, getting in trouble at school is the only way to get anybody to pay attention to them.
Greene and Glasser don’t talk about curriculum, academic content or instruction much, but that’s definitely an important issue. Imagine spending all day in an academic environment that is way, way above your head (like an intermediate Chinese class or advanced college physics). Isn’t the best case scenario that you’d tune out and play with your phone a lot?
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Diane Ravitch seems to me to be the best (inadvertent) advocate for what Matthew Yglesias calls “edu-nihilism:”
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/03/04/200106/edunihilism-and-early-childhood/
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It’s not contradictory because we will never be able to make all families healthy/functional/middle-class, but we will continue to insist that teachers try and fill the gaps for all students who don’t have such families.
Or, in short, what harry b said.
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MH — yes, exactly. Even within districts — even within schools for goodness sake — the resources are skewed to the more advantaged. It would take a radical change in the structure of the profession and of schools to change that.
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Amy P,
Thanks, I’ll look for those. I did see that in that kid. He was a bright kid, but couldn’t read, and by grade 4 most of the instruction starts with reading. So yeah, it really was like that for him.
And catfish I agree – it’s a fair decision, just kind of heartbreaking. What I saw is that most teachers would go for that. Some teachers would work harder on differentiated learning and that would help.
And, I agree it’s about better funding (or allocating funds to) the whole school environment, not just teachers. It depends where you are too. In Toronto teachers are pretty well-paid. My cousin who is a teacher in Florida, however, has to work summers at a restaurant to be able to pay rent on a modest home all year round.
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“The Inner Wealth Initiative” is a terrible title, but it’s the Glasser book dealing specifically with school.
Glasser and Greene deal with the same basic problem, but there’s a bit of a difference in approach. Glasser is more behaviorist and Greene leans more toward talky.
The short thread here has a discussion of Glasser and Greene (I’m Xantippe):
http://xantippesblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/alfie-kohn.html
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Yes, Harry, you’re totally right, but Ravitch didn’t make that argument. She’s actually doing a disservice to teachers and schools right now by going so far down the edu-nihilism track. Someone should tell her to shut up.
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I think that’s a little unfair to Ravitch. She’s talking about reforms that require testing for proficiency from populations that, in her view, probably won’t get there without dramatic social and economic changes to get rid of poverty. Maybe she’s wrong, but I don’t see anyone arguing with her that kids without food, sleep, and support aren’t going to learn effectively. I don’t see a lot of education advocates saying we should cut free lunch and breakfast programs to give teachers a raise (but maybe I’m missing those.)
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The Kitchen Table Math gang is weighing in on the Ravitch piece.
Catherine Johnson says, “I can tell you definitively that a child arriving at school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn from a family with a stable home and a steady income does not solve the educational problem of a high school junior needing to learn precalculus inside his actual school.”
Molly says, “[M]y children meet all those lovely criteria, but somehow our educational problems remain. My child’s good health and nutrition didn’t help her when her algebra class spent an entire week singing karaoke followed up by 12 minutes graphing the results. Her stable family with a steady income was of no use when her English class spent 4 weeks studying poetry but never read a single poem that wasn’t written by one of her 8th grade classmates. My child’s good fortune doesn’t do a damn thing to protect her from a crappy curriculum indifferently taught.”
Catherine Johnson says, “I have to say….when you’re dealing with high school, observations about parents and nutrition and all the folderol just sound like noise from nowhere.
“WAYYYYYYY off-topic.
“The topic being:
“Help!
“Somebody!
“Trigonometric identities are going to be on the test!!!!!
“It’s too bad you can’t learn trigonometric identities by having a stable marriage and income.”
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2011/06/back-to-future-with-diane-ravitch.html?showComment=1307062603989
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Having just returned from volunteering in a class in which most of the kids do not get enough to eat on a regular basis, I find myself agreeing with Ravitch.
But I don’t interpret her words as saying that teachers aren’t important or shouldn’t be paid more.
I think she is reacting to the current political/educational climate in many of our states. They are simultaneously slashing public school budgets and services to the poor. The “earned income credit” is on its way out in Wisconsin, along with a whole slew of social services for the poor. That will only make closing the achievement gap harder, I think.
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You are only affecting 20% of the gap. But even that 20% may have huge implications for the quality of life course of the disadvantaged students.
In theory.
In practice, though, how do you maximize that 20% and quantify the results? My intent is not to “union-bash,” but the problem, as I see it, is that the teachers unions have fought every attempt to grade teachers, calling every method of evaluating teachers based on student performance “unfair” because the impact of the 20% is swamped by the 80%.
And maybe they are right. If the unions are right and you really can’t evaluate teachers, then there is no value in giving more money to them. If the unions are wrong and that 20% can be measured, then it should be and the teachers should be held to the results.
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You know, I grew up in one of those families. We didn’t eat every day, some days the only meal for the kids was free school lunch. I was ridiculed for being a “brain,” because beauty and compliance (my sister’s traits) were the only things that mattered.
But at school I was valued for my learning ability, and I could exercise mastery and be proud of my achievements. You’ll never make every school perfect any more than you can make every family middle-class, but really, you’ve got a much better chance with the schools, where you can get rid of drunks and abusers (eventually).
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“I see it, is that the teachers unions have fought every attempt to grade teachers, calling every method of evaluating teachers based on student performance “unfair” because the impact of the 20% is swamped by the 80%.”
It is unfair, because the 20% is swamped by the 80%. That doesn’t mean that the 20% doesn’t exist, merely that it cannot be measured with the n that is small enough to make teacher performance decisions. Potentially, the 20% could be measured over a teacher’s career, but not from class to class (and the numbers are pretty clear on this, from the folks who do the number crunching. Even the most optimistic predict very very small “performance” increases based on using performance metrics to make layoff, for example, decision).
The second, and big issue, is what performance means. Test scores? That clearly undervalues a lot of what a teacher might do.
So what to do? I do believe in measuring teacher quality, just not based on the performance of their students.
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PS: Note that in the case where we most strongly judge folks on someone else’s performance (i.e. coaches, though there might be other examples we can come up with, too), people get to pick their teams.
Are there management techniques where folks are judged largely on their team’s performance and don’t get any say in picking their team? I’m guessing there are. How do they work?
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Here’s a quote from a paper by Josh Angrist and some others with some happy news about KIPP:
“Our results show average reading score gains of about 0.12 standard deviations (hereafter, σ) for each year a student spends at KIPP, with significantly larger gains for special education and LEP students of about 0.3-0.4σ. Students attending KIPP gain an average of 0.35σ per year in math; these effects are slightly larger for LEP and special education students. We also produce separate estimates for students with different levels of baseline (4th grade) scores. The result suggests that effects are largest for those who start out behind their peers.”
Here are some quotes from Adam Ozimek, the blogger:
“The study also provides further evidence against the claim that KIPP’s model is based on kicking out the trouble students. The authors found that students who won the admissions lottery were no more likely to switch schools than those who lost, meaning that controlling for selection bias, KIPP students do not have a higher attrition rate.”
“I’m hoping that when Diane Ravitch releases the “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” in paperback the section that is skeptical of KIPP is updated to reflect this new evidence.”
http://modeledbehavior.com/2011/06/02/defending-kipp-again/
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There’s an article about teacher evaluation (without using test scores) in the NY Times, today: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/education/06oneducation.html
It profiles “PAR” (Peer Assistance and Review) at Montgomery public schools, in Montgomery county. I find the idea of the program, as profiled in the article interesting. It meets some of my criterion for teacher evaluation 1) evaluates teacher behavior — not student performance 2) it offers teachers an opportunity to correct issues. 3) it includes an array of peers to do evaluations. 4) it has the power to recommend removal of poorly performing teachers who do not address concerns.
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