May
14

Edu-Philanthropists’ Dangerous Zero-Sum Game

Norman Eng Policy and reform, Politics 4 comments

I don’t think education philanthropies like the Gates Foundation are conspiring to “buy schools,” as some critics think. Nor am I against school choice. For that matter, I don’t care for bloated teachers unions, either. But, as an education researcher, I am wary of their increasing interest in K-12 education over the past ten years.

Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, defends assertive philanthropy on the grounds that it is, in fact, not new, and that critics who endorsed the Ford Foundation agenda in the 1970s and 1980s are simply hypocrites who dislike Gates’ motive. Yes, policy focus and funding strategies may be similar, but what Hess fails to understand is that, unlike traditional ones, these new, reform-minded foundations can leave lasting debilitating effects on schools.

Enrichment vs. Zero-Sum

Philanthropies of old focused on institution building (or as Hess called it, building programs and practices). It was low-risk and had little downside—if a donor and his program reached many students, they were considered effective. In the 1970s, the Ford Foundation funded women’s and African-American studies, which, if successful, promoted a greater understanding of marginalized groups. Failure merely meant a return to the status quo—one that never had gender and race studies to begin with. No harm, no foul.

American Honda Motor Company still follows this enrichment model. By creating the Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center in Estes Park, Colorado, Honda committed to changing the future for high school dropouts by providing a supplemental program to re-engage young people in becoming productive citizens. At-risk students would be no worse off if they hadn’t taken part in this program. Other traditional foundations bolstered local school reform efforts, redressed inequality, or supported community-based organizations’ work around educational issues, without much public outcry.

On the other hand, the lasting effects for newer, market-based philanthropies tend to have more dramatic effects. Edu-funders like The Broad Foundation, The Walton Foundation, and the Gates Foundation are not concerned with enrichment or institution building per se; they are accountability-driven and advocate for game-changing reforms such as charter school growth, standardized testing, and performance-based teacher evaluations. As a result of their influence, initiatives like Teach for America and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, originally supported with philanthropic funds, now receive significant funding with federal dollars. New York State has also recently adopted performance-based teacher evaluations for all 700 school districts, an initiative that the Gates foundation financed significantly. Its own annual report highlights its role in the development and promotion of the common core standards, which 45 states have adopted.

When the federal government starts to fund philanthropic-led initiatives, we are treading into dangerous territory. It no longer is about low-risk enrichment or building programs and practices; rather, it leads to a high-risk, zero-sum effect for beneficiaries. Consider what happens if:

  • Charter schools turns out to be no better than traditional public schools?
  • Value-added teacher evaluations turn out to be unreliable?
  • Students in voucher programs do no better in their new schools?
  • Merit pay doesn’t actually improve teaching?

With about 50 million public school children in America, the price of failure is much greater. Simply put, money that goes into charter schools, value-added evaluations, voucher programs, and merit pay is money taken away from the arts & humanities, physical education, teacher development, social services, gifted & talented programs, special education, technology, bilingual programs, and other school resources. Instead, we will have a generation of students who may be great test-takers, but don’t know how to collaborate, lead, innovate, or think. We don’t have to wait to see how it plays out, because it’s a scenario China is going through right now.

The warning signs

Despite its recent top ranking in the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), China is reaping the undesirable effects of a rote learning and standardized-testing culture; an effect they call gao-fen dineng: high scores with low ability. These are graduates whose academic skills are incompatible with the aforementioned real-world skills managers need for global competitiveness. While the Chinese government is racing to embrace the western ideals of diversity, creativity, and innovation, the American government (backed by conservative philanthropists) is scrambling towards the regimented, uniform, standards-based, and test-driven education model of China, according to University of Oregon Dean of Global Education Yong Zhao. Its educators are now struggling to “undo” thousands of years of regimented thinking that is preventing them from overtaking America outright. Is this what Hess wants to happen here?

There are more warning signs for America. Recent reports are beginning to document the impact of the philanthropic-led accountability movement:

What would happen if the current Gates-supported New York teacher evaluations, set to go into effect in 2013, were found to be invalid and unreliable? Money will have been wasted while teacher morale and retention plummet. Generations of students will suffer. Will Hess then urge foundations to pay for more teachers, more arts programs, and more public schools? Educated critics know its not about money or motives, as Hess claims. Its simply about not playing a high-risk, zero-sum game with our children’s future.

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Nov
30

Richard Rothstein: How To Fix Our Schools

Norman Eng Policy and reform, Politics, Research and Evaluation, Society and Culture Add you comment

Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), has written a lucid article on How to Fix Our Schools, which I have reprinted in its entirety below. Essentially, he asserts that education reform is more complicated than the accountability reformers would have you believe, and he happens to be right on point. Enjoy.

Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City public school system, and Michelle Rhee, who resigned October 13 as Washington, D.C. chancellor, published a “manifesto” in the Washington Post claiming that the difficulty of removing incompetent teachers “has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future.” The solution, they say, is to end the “glacial process for removing an incompetent teacher” and give superintendents like themselves the authority to pay higher salaries to teachers whose students do well academically. Otherwise, children will remain “stuck in failing schools” across the country.{i}

Klein, Rhee, and the 14 other school superintendents who co-signed their statement base this call on a claim that, “as President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income — it is the quality of their teacher.”

It is true that the president has sometimes said something like this. But in his more careful moments, he properly insists that teacher quality is not the most important factor determining student success; it is the most important in-school factor. Indeed, Mr. Obama has gone further, saying, “I always have to remind people that the biggest ingredient in school performance is the teacher. That’s the biggest ingredient within a school. But the single biggest ingredient is the parent.”{ii}

There is a world of difference between claiming, as the Klein-Rhee statement does, that the single biggest factor in student success is teacher quality and claiming, as Barack Obama does in his more careful moments, that the single biggest school factor is teacher quality. Decades of social science research have demonstrated that differences in the quality of schools can explain about one-third of the variation in student achievement. But the other two-thirds is attributable to non-school factors.{iii}

When the president says that the single most important factor is parents, he does not mean the parents’ zip code or income or skin color, as though zip codes or income or skin color themselves influence a child’s achievement. Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee’s caricature of the research in this way prevents a careful consideration of policies that could truly raise the achievement of America’s children. What President Obama means is that if a child’s parents are poorly educated themselves and don’t read frequently to their young children, or don’t use complex language in speaking to their children, or are under such great economic stress that they can’t provide a stable and secure home environment or proper preventive health care to their children, or are in poor health themselves and can’t properly nurture their children, or are unable to travel with their children or take them to museums and zoos and expose them to other cultural experiences that stimulate the motivation to learn, or indeed live in a zip code where there are no educated adult role models and where other adults can’t share in the supervision of neighborhood youth, then children of such parents will be impeded in their ability to take advantage of teaching, no matter how high quality that teaching may be.

President Obama put it this way: “It’s not just making sure your kids are doing their homework, it’s also instilling a thirst for knowledge and excellence….And the community can help the parents. Listen, I love basketball. But the smartest kid in the school…should be getting as much attention as the basketball star. That’s a change that we’ve got to initiate in our community.”

Of course, there are exceptions. Just as not all children flourish with high-quality teachers, not all children fail to flourish just because their parents can’t help with homework or because they live in communities where athletes are the most prominent role models. Under any set of circumstances, there will be a distribution of outcomes — that’s human nature. And on average, disadvantaged children who have high-quality teachers will do better than similar children whose teachers are less adequate. But good teachers alone, for most children, cannot fully compensate for the disadvantages many children bring to school. As we noted, differences in the quality of in-school experiences can explain about one-third of the differences in achievement.

Even the president’s more careful statement — that teacher quality is the most important in-school factor — is actually without solid foundation in research. It is true that some studies have found that variation in teacher quality has more of an influence on test scores than do the size of classes or average district-wide per pupil spending. In other words, you are better off having a good teacher in a larger class than a poor teacher in a smaller class. But that’s it. It is on this thin reed that Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee are mounting a campaign to make improving teacher quality, and removing teachers whose students’ test scores are lower, the centerpiece of national efforts to improve the life chances of disadvantaged students.

There are plausibly many other in-school factors, not quantified in research, that could have as much if not more of an influence on student test scores than teacher quality. Take the quality of school leadership. Would an inspired school principal get better student achievement from a corps of average-quality teachers than a mediocre principal could get from high-quality teachers? Studies of organizations would suggest the answer is yes, but there have been no such studies of school leadership. Take the quality of the curriculum. Would average teachers given a well-designed curriculum get better achievement from their students than would high-quality teachers with a poor curriculum? A very few research studies in this field suggest the answer might be yes as well.

Or take another in-school factor, teacher collaboration. Even when elementary school students sit in a single classroom for most of the day, several teachers influence their achievement. Teachers can meet to compare lesson plans that worked well and those that didn’t. Teachers in lower grades can successfully align their instruction with what will be most helpful for learning in the next grade. Teachers of the arts can reinforce the writing curriculum, and vice-versa. Will average-quality teachers who work well together as a team with the common purpose of raising student achievement get better results than higher-quality teachers working in isolation? Plausibly, the answer is yes. Will promising to pay individual teachers more if their students get higher test scores than the students of another teacher reduce the incentives for teachers to collaborate? Again, a plausible answer is yes.

Of course, schools should try to recruit better-quality teachers and should remove those who are ineffective. After all, the quality of teachers is an important part of the one-third share of the achievement gap that can be traced to the quality of schools. But before making teacher quality the focus of a national campaign, school systems will have to develop better ways of identifying good and bad teachers. Using students’ test scores as the chief marker of teacher quality is terribly dangerous, for a variety of reasons: it encourages a narrowing of the curriculum because only test scores in one or two subjects (math and reading) can be used for this purpose, and teachers who will be evaluated mainly by these test scores will have incentives to minimize attention to other subjects; it creates pressure to “teach to the test,” that is, emphasizing topics likely to appear on our existing low-quality standardized tests rather than other equally important but untested topics; and it is likely to misidentify teachers — labeling many good teachers as poor and many poor teachers as good — because test scores can be influenced by so many other factors besides good teaching.{iv}

The necessary task of identifying good teachers and removing those who are inadequate requires more than student test score data. It requires a holistic approach, in which qualified experts observe teachers’ lessons, evaluate the quality of their instruction, and examine a wide range of their students’ work and how teachers respond to it. This requires a bigger investment of qualified supervisory time than most schools are prepared to make. Using student test scores as a shortcut will do great harm to American education.

Making teacher quality the only centerpiece of a reform campaign distracts our attention from other equally and perhaps more important school areas needing improvement, areas such as leadership, curriculum, and practices of collaboration, mentioned above. Blaming teachers is easy. These other areas are more difficult to improve.

But most important, making teacher quality the focus distracts us from the biggest threat to student achievement in the current age: our unprecedented economic catastrophe and its effect on parents and their children’s ability to gain from higher-quality schools.

Consider the implications of this catastrophe for our aspirations to close the black–white achievement gap. The national unemployment rate remains close to an unacceptably high 10%. But 15% of all black children now have an unemployed parent compared to 8.5% of white children. If we also include children whose parents have become so discouraged that they have given up looking for work, and children whose parents are working part-time because they can’t find full-time work, we find that 37% of black children have an unemployed or underemployed parent compared to 23% of white children. Over half of all black children have a parent who has either been unemployed or underemployed during the past year.{v} Thirty-six percent of black children now live in poverty.{vi}

The consequences of this social disaster for schools are apparent, and include:

  • Greater geographic disruption: Families become more mobile because they can no longer afford to keep up with rent or mortgage payments. They are in overcrowded housing; they often have to double up with relatives in apartments that were already too small. Children have no quiet place to study or do homework. They switch schools more often, fall behind in the curriculum, and lose the connection with teachers who know them well enough to adapt instruction to their individual strengths and weaknesses. Inner-city schools themselves are thrown into turmoil because classes must frequently be reconstituted as enrollment rises and falls with family mobility. Even the highest-quality teachers cannot fully insulate their students from the effects of this disruption.{vii}
  • Greater hunger and malnutrition: When more parents lose employment, their income plummets and food insecurity grows. More children come to school hungry and/or inadequately nourished and are less able to focus on schoolwork. Attentive teachers realize that one of the best predictors of how their students will perform is what they had for breakfast, if anything at all.{viii}
  • Greater stress: Families where parents are unemployed are under greater psychological stress. Such parents, no matter how well-intentioned, often become more arbitrary in their discipline and less supportive of their children. Children from families in such stress are more likely to act out in school and are less able to progress academically. The ability to comfort and support such students may be a more important indicator of a teacher’s quality than her students’ test scores, which may still be lower than the scores of students coming from stable and secure homes.
  • Poorer health: Families where parents lose employment are also more likely to lose health insurance.{ix} Their children are less likely to get routine and preventive health care and more likely to miss school days because of illness. They are less likely to get symptomatic treatment for illnesses like asthma, the most common cause of chronic school absenteeism. Children with asthma, even when they attend school, are more likely to come to school irritable, having been up at night with breathing difficulty.{x}

All these consequences of unacceptably high unemployment rates for disadvantaged parents contribute to depressing student achievement for their children. It is obtuse to expect to narrow the achievement gap in such circumstances. It is fanciful for national policy makers to pick this moment to raise their expectations for academic achievement from children of families in such stress and to single out teacher quality as the culprit most deserving of their public attention.

It would inappropriately undermine the credibility of public education if, in such an economic climate, educators were blamed for their failure to raise student achievement of disadvantaged children. Indeed, educators should get great credit if they prevent the achievement of disadvantaged children from falling further during this economic crisis.

Meanwhile, our political system is paralyzed, unable to take meaningful steps to reduce unemployment. Corporate profits are healthy, but an unjustified fear of short-term deficits prevents public spending from putting low-income parents back to work. Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and the other superintendents who signed their manifesto are influential in states whose national and state leaders contribute to this paralysis. These school leaders should raise their voices in protest against economic policies that doom children to failure.

Of course, the superintendents should continue attempts to improve teacher quality. They should work on developing ways to identify better and worse teachers without relying heavily on the corrupting influence of high-stakes test scores.{xi} In addition to teacher quality, they should pay attention to school leadership, curriculum improvement, and school organization. They should consider what initiatives they can take, either themselves or in partnership with other community organizations, to improve children’s opportunities to come to school in good health and with enriched experiences in early childhood and out-of-school time.{xii}

But they will have to embed all of this work in an insistence on broader efforts of economic and social reform if they hope their school improvements to make any difference.

Otherwise, their manifesto might appear to be more an example of scapegoating teachers than a reflection of serious commitment to the futures of our children.

Endnotes

{i} “How to Fix Our Schools: A Manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and Other Education Leaders,” Washington Post, October 10, B01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100705078.html

{ii} Barack Obama, Remarks by the President in Arnold, Missouri, Town Hall. April 29, 2009. Emphasis added. Pauses and word repetitions omitted. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-arnold-missouri-town-hall.

{iii} The 2/3 — 1/3 breakdown between family background and school influences was the core finding of the 1966 federal study, the “Coleman Report.” But this interpretation of the report overstates its finding about the influence of schools, because Coleman and his colleagues considered the influence of a child’s schoolmates (“peer effects”) to be a school factor, not an out-of-school factor. (Coleman, James S., and Ernest Q. Campbell, Carol J. Hobson, James McPartland, Alexander M. Mood, Frederic D. Weinfeld, and Rober L. York, Equality of Educational Opportunity, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Government Printing Office, 1966.) Yet the only way to affect the composition of peers in the neighborhood schools he studied would be to change the composition of neighborhoods, with housing integration policies, for example. Of the in-school influences, the Coleman Report identified teacher quality (defined by teacher characteristics such as their educational attainment and experience) to be most important.

In a more recent study, Meredith Phillips and colleagues analyzed data from a federal longitudinal study, “Children of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth.” They controlled for factors such as whether anyone in the family subscribed to magazines or newspapers or had a library card, grandparents’ educational attainment, a mother’s own cognitive ability (test score) and educational attainment, how often a mother reads to her child, the size of a family and its income, single parenthood, parenting practices, child birthweight, and others. They concluded that “{e}ven though traditional measures of socioeconomic status account for no more than a third of the {black–white} test score gap, our results show that a broader index of family environment may explain up to two-thirds of it.” There are other differences, for example health and housing, not considered by these analysts that might explain even more of the gap. (Meredith Phillips, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Greg J. Duncan, Pamela Klebanov, and Jonathan Crane, “Family Background, Parenting Practices, and the Black–White Test Score Gap,” in Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998.)

{iv} Eva L. Baker, Paul E. Barton, Linda Darling-Hammond, Edward Haertel, Helen F. Ladd, Robert L. Linn, Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, Richard J. Shavelson, and Lorrie A. Shepard, Problems With the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers, Economic Policy Institute, 2010. http://www.epi.org/publications/bp278

{v} These data are for 2009, and have been calculated by analysts at the Economic Policy Institute from the Current Population Survey. Current overall unemployment is slightly higher than it was in 2009 (9.7% vs. 9.3%), so it is unlikely that the differences in family unemployment for black and white children are now appreciably different from a year ago. Tables from which these data were drawn are available from the author upon request.

{vi} Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz, A Lost Decade: Poverty and Income Trends Paint a Bleak Picture for Working Families, Economic Policy Institute, September 16, 2010. http://www.epi.org/publications/a_lost_decade_poverty_and_income_trends

{vii} In 2009, 18% of African American children lived in households that had moved at least once in the previous year, compared to 11% of white children (U.S. Census, Current Population Survey, calculated from http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/migration/cps2009/tab01-02.xls and http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/migration/cps2009/tab01-03.xls). A national survey of nearly 2,000 school districts finds substantially growing numbers of homeless students, largely due to parental unemployment and home foreclosure (Barbara Duffield and PhillipLovell, The Economic Crisis Hits Home: The Unfolding Increase in Child & Youth Homelessness, National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) and First Focus, December 2008,  http://www.naehcy.org/dl/TheEconomicCrisisHitsHome.pdf). A controlled study of homeless and stable children in New York City found that “homeless children perform at a lower academic level and have a higher rate of grade repetition…compared with housed children {otherwise similar demographically} in New York City, despite our finding no difference in cognitive functioning” (Donald H. Rubin, Candace J. Erickson, Mutya San Agustin, Sean D. Cleary, Janet K. Allen, and Patricia Cohen, “Cognitive and Academic Functioning of Homeless Children Compared With Housed Children,” Pediatrics 97(3):289-294, 1996).

{viii} From 2007 to 2008, the percentage of black children who lived in households without adequate food (“food insecure households”) jumped from 26% to 34%, while the percentage of white children in such households jumped from 12% to 16%. From 2008 to 2009, the percentage of black children who at least some time were hungry, skipped a meal, or did not eat for a whole day because the household could not afford enough food nearly doubled, rising from 1.8% to 3.2%, while the percentage of white children in this category grew from 0.5% to 0.6% (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics (ChildStats.gov) http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/eco3.asp). By age 15, 85% of all black children have lived in a household that used food stamps at some time during their childhood, compared to 33% of white children (Mark R. Rank and Thomas A. Hirschl, “Estimating the Risk of Food Stamp Use and Impoverishment During Childhood,” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 163(9):994-999, November 2009). The U.S. Conference of Mayors surveyed 27 cities and reported an overall increase of 26% from 2008 to 2009 in the number of requests for emergency food assistance, with unemployment by far the most significant causal factor (U.S. Conference of Mayors, Homelessness and Hunger Survey: A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America’s Cities: A 27-City Survey, December 2009 http://usmayors.org/pressreleases/uploads/USCMHungercompleteWEB2009.pdf).

{ix} In 2009, 11.5% of black children had no public or private health insurance, up from 10.7% the previous year. For white children, the percentage grew from 6.7% to 7.0% (Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supplement, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032009/health/h08_000.htm and http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032010/health/h08_000.htm).

{x} Another Conference of Mayors report summarized the situation as follows: “When a child is unable to concentrate because they haven’t eaten in days and misses a week of school because they could not fight off a simple cold, they cannot succeed in school. Lacking a solid education, they cannot find high-paying jobs. Ultimately, they are forced to remain in poverty, eventually placing their own children in the same situation” (U.S. Conference of Mayors and Sodexo, Childhood Anti-Hunger Programs in 24 Cities, 2009, http://www.usmayors.org/pressreleases/uploads/20091116-report-childhoodantihunger.pdf).

{xi} The accountability statement of the “Broader Bolder Approach to Education” campaign (www.boldapproach.org) describes the outlines of appropriate school accountability.

{xii} The initial call for a “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” (www.boldapproach.org) elaborates on these points.

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Nov
22

Thomas Friedman: How About Better Parents?

Norman Eng Policy and reform, Politics, Society and Culture Add you comment

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has finally asked the question that I, along with other critics of the current teacher accountability reform movement, have been covering in this blog since its inception: How about better parents? His column, printed below in its entirety, will hopefully be the tipping point in shaping a more holistic education reform.

In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

How do we know? Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., conducts exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in the world’s leading industrialized nations on their reading comprehension and ability to use what they’ve learned in math and science to solve real problems — the most important skills for succeeding in college and life. America’s 15-year-olds have not been distinguishing themselves in the PISA exams compared with students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.

To better understand why some students thrive taking the PISA tests and others do not, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the exams for the O.E.C.D., was encouraged by the O.E.C.D. countries to look beyond the classrooms. So starting with four countries in 2006, and then adding 14 more in 2009, the PISA team went to the parents of 5,000 students and interviewed them “about how they raised their kids and then compared that with the test results” for each of those years, Schleicher explained to me. Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the three main findings of its study:

“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”

Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”

For instance, the PISA study revealed that “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”

Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”

The kind of parental involvement matters, as well. “For example,” the PISA study noted, “on average, the score point difference in reading that is associated with parental involvement is largest when parents read a book with their child, when they talk about things they have done during the day, and when they tell stories to their children.” The score point difference is smallest when parental involvement takes the form of simply playing with their children.

These PISA findings were echoed in a recent study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, and written up by the center’s director, Patte Barth, in the latest issue of The American School Board Journal.

The study, called “Back to School: How parent involvement affects student achievement,” found something “somewhat surprising,” wrote Barth: “Parent involvement can take many forms, but only a few of them relate to higher student performance. Of those that work, parental actions that support children’s learning at home are most likely to have an impact on academic achievement at school.

“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”

To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.

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Nov
21

Applying the Right Business Mentality to Education

Norman Eng Philosophy, Policy and reform, Politics 1 comment

Why is it that the business people who are increasingly influencing education policy do not follow the doctrines that have made them successful in their industry? Chief among them is how executives and managers allocate limited time and resources on the things that generate the biggest returns, not on the least profitable ones.

This metaphor is particularly relevant now, given the pervasive influence of business practices in schools. Powerful forces within this industry, whether they be individuals (e.g., Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg) or private foundations (e.g. the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation, and of course the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) have shaped education reform in unprecedented and sometimes misguided ways. The relentless focus on teacher accountability is one such reform lifted straight out of the business world. In theory, it was a godsend concept whose time had come, given the bureaucratic failings of both the public school system and the teachers’ union over the past three decades.

So if teacher accountability is the reform du jour of business-minded politicians and reformers, one would think that teachers, more than any other possible factor, have the greatest influence on student outcome.

This is simply not true.

Most empirical studies consistently reveal that teacher quality, though the biggest in-school variable, accounts for no more than 20 percent of student outcomes (in some cases as low as 10 percent, according to education economist Eric Hanushek). In fact, non-school factors, such as the home environment and the family, along with culture and SES, play larger roles. Famed sociologist James Coleman confirmed the importance of a balanced perspective in one of the largest education study in the 20th century, the Equality of Educational Opportunity, which found that academic achievement was due more to the mixed factors of the school composition, student perception of his environment and future, verbal skills of the teacher, and particularly student background. These four major factors clearly included both in-school and non-school factors.

Simply put, children from birth to age 18 also spend less than 20 percent of their time in school. Based on calculating 7 hours per school day over 180 days per school year for 13 years (starting from age 5 to age 18 when most children start pre-K and graduate, respectively) the figure comes out even lower: 10 percent. With NAEP (considered the nation’s report card and the gold standard of assessments) scores showing little significant improvement compared with 2009 (particularly in reading), the decision to focus on teacher evaluations and performance pay over other non-school factors constitutes an inefficient use of capital at best, and gross mismanagement at worst.

Figuratively speaking, if student outcome is the deliverable, and the Department of Education the publicly traded company, then surely the board of directors, who represent the interests of the company’s shareholders, would hold upper management accountable. The parents, as both the board and the stakeholders, are already gaining political power to demand leadership changes in failing schools, particularly in California and Texas. Their accountability is just as crucial as those of teachers. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), in fact, called the family “America’s smallest school.”

Merely investing in teacher effectiveness to the exclusion of non-school factors is not a profitable executive decision, particularly if teachers account for a fraction of student performance. Part of the misallocated funds would be better spent on the front end recruiting top talent and comprehensively training and supporting teachers as the Finns have done with astonishing success — than counterproductively on the back end; only then will teachers be truly professionals, as I have argued previously.

Smart businesses invest first in research and development to create the best products. In education, parents are the R&D equivalent who nurture and develop habits of mind to create a school-ready child. Here is where investing in eradicating poverty and building community and family partnerships can have the most substantial, efficient, and long term impact. To maximize return, this is where business insight would best serve education.

Apr
20

The Privatization of Public Education

Norman Eng Policy and reform, Politics, Research and Evaluation Add you comment

The New York Times‘ article recently listed the educational background of the major players in the current ed reform movement. David Guggenheim, producer and director of the widely acclaimed and pro-charter school documentary Waiting for Superman went to Sidwell Friends School, the same one that President Obama’s daughters are attending, for example. Accountability advocate and financial backer Bill Gates went to private Lakeside School in Seattle. Former DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee went to Maumee Valley Country Day School in Toledo, Ohio. Accountability hawk Jeb Bush went to highly acclaimed independent school Phillips Andover in Massachusetts. Apparently, they all had private school education and have alternately advocated for stricter teacher accountability, charter schools, vouchers, or tying teacher pay/tenure to performance; in essence, the privatization of public schooling.

This observation is interesting on two fronts.

First, the privatizing of public education (traditionally a conservative and Republican doctrine), has been equally adopted by democrats as a way to address the educational slide raised by the report A Nation at Risk and current international performance comparisons of PISA. Such alliance was largely responsible for the relatively easy passing of No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and its expected reauthorization this year by the Obama administration. Though bi-partisanship is generally welcomed, it signals a potential danger to teachers’ rights, particularly since the profession has been steadily weakened.

Second, conspiracy theorists might suggest that this privatization movement was designed to dismantle public education all along. NCLB originally mandated that all students will be proficient by 2014; however, with Secretary Duncan’s announcement that 82% of schools will be labelled “failing” this year (unless amendments are made to the existing Elementary and Secondary Education Act), it is tempting to believe in a hidden agenda when NCLB was first authorized. Conservative scholar Chester Finn further inflamed advocates of public education by recommending, “Blow it up and start over.”

With the increasing presence of venture philanthropists like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Sam Walton, who contribute vast amounts of money to research and education, public education policy is being influenced in ways not seen before. Joanne Barkan’s essay, Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools brilliantly uncovers their intricate connections.

As such, the privatizing of public goods has always been the divisive issue between the haves and the have nots; simply put, those in power will always seek to curtail or dissolve social services since they have other means and resources, while those without it seek to keep and expand them. So what is the answer?

Balance.

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Mar
27

Conservatives: What Happened to Personal Responsibility?

Norman Eng Philosophy, Policy and reform, Politics Add you comment

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times highlighted the woeful state of children’s health and fitness: about 1 in 3 California students passed the physical fitness test in 2010.

Children's fitnessSpecifically, 28.7% of students in grade five, 34.6% in grade seven, and 38.5% in grade nine were rated as “fit,” or to use accountability parlance, “proficient.” Given the fact that obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years and that only 25% of boys and 15% of girls were found to have adequate exercise, according to Reuters, this is certainly no surprise. The American Heart Association recommends children get at least 60 minutes of moderate physical activity every day.

So where are the accountability hawks on this issue? If children are not deemed fit, should the physical education teachers be blamed, just as teachers are now liable for students’ academic progress? How about the school?

Let’s take this parallel further. If all schools had standardized physical fitness tests every year starting in 3rd grade, how much is the PE teacher responsible? If children consistently failed, would paying teachers more based on physical fitness performances be any more effective? If the school neglected to reach adequate yearly progress, would we send children to other private schools and shut down failing schools?

Sounds like a bit much, considering children spend considerably more time outside of school eating and doing physical activities. I imagine most conservatives would revert back to their mantra of exercising personality responsibility — we should be able to eat what we want and use restraint (and keep the government out!). If you get fat, it is your problem, and no one else’s. That’s certainly how some New Yorkers felt when Mayor Bloomberg made unilateral decisions to cut down salt and trans fat from the city’s restaurants and markets (not to mention indoor smoking).

So why is this same theme of personal responsibility not applied to academic learning? All of the sudden, it is not the child and the parents’ responsibility to do well in school, but the teachers’? This is the thinking behind merit pay, value-added data, and other performance-based evaluative measures for teachers.

You can’t have it both ways.

I leave you with the inspiration for this post, The Conservative Hypocrisy.

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Mar
06

America’s Outlook: Looking Ahead or Looking Back?

Norman Eng Economy, Politics, Society and Culture Add you comment

 

The debate on America’s global position between geopolitical analyst Fareed Zakaria and journalist David von Drehle in this week’s Time characterizes the typical dichotomous perspective in current political polemics: One is forward-thinking, while the other looks back.

For quite some time Zakaria has questioned America’s commitment to maintain economic dominance, as written in the recent Time article:

…we have a political system that has become allergic to compromise and practical solutions…We have an electoral college that no one understands and a Senate that doesn’t work, with rules and traditions that allow a single Senator to obstruct democracy without even explaining why. We have a crazy-quilt patchwork of towns, municipalities and states with overlapping authority, bureaucracies and resulting waste. We have a political system that geared toward ceaseless fundraising and pandering to the interests of the present with no ability to plan, invest or build for the future. And if one mentiones any of this, why, one is being unpatriotic…

He argues that countries as China, Germany, India, and those in Northern Europe have (or are investing in) systems and structures that will provide a global edge, such as flexible governments, dedicated research and development, and even social and cultural capital (e.g., work ethic, positive dispositions about standard of living). He believes that America’s success has made it arrogant and insular to the world at large, and that it needs to adapt and meet that challenge. I have made similar argument in my post, More Evidence of American Decline?

On the other hand, Drehle maintains that these same pundits have perennially bemoaned a national decline, and that this message is overstated:

…how come we’re so much stronger than we were 50 years ago? Somehow, in the 235 years since we got started, Americans have weathered…Soviet science prodigies, violent lyrics and sex out of wedlock. We’ve survived a Civil War, two world wars and a Great Depression, not to mention immigrant hordes, alcohol, Freemasons and the “vast wasteland” of network television. (See Drehle’s full article)

This at a time when emerging powerhouse China is averaging an astounding 10% annual economic growth by investing in education and infrastructure (compared to about 3% U.S. growth) and just recently revealed an ambitious five-year economic plan “to raise ordinary people’s income, rein in pollution and energy use, and build advanced-science industries in fields like biotechnology and environmental protection” (See article on China’s five-year plan).

I am not necessarily questioning Drehle’s data; some of which are probably true. It is more the reactionary mindset that troubles me, because he represents a sizable bloc that glorifies what had worked for America in the past. There is an inherent satisfaction about America’s current position, as opposed to a hunger to improve: It’s worked so far, so why change?

In business, such resistance to change and adapt usually results in failure. Steve Jobs, Apple’s irrepressible CEO, revolutionized the music industry ten years ago with Apple’s iPod player (and iTunes digital music store), yet the company has not relied on its success to maintain its industry lead. In the fast paced technology world, Apple has remained at the top by consistently and aggressively seeking opportunities that no other organization has successfully capitalized on. It soon added the game-changing iPhone in 2007 and the iPad tablet last year. The competition have barely kept up, let alone out-innovate. Microsoft, much like the U.S., has taken the more complacent attitude, and its tenuous grip on market dominance has been exposed. No doubt its employees have worked hard and sacrificed too, but I don’t detect that same sense of urgency. And it shows. In the world of geo-politics, Zakaria has sounded the alarm while Drehle has been content to say “…the U.S. will do just fine in the world it has shaped.”

Look at history. FDR, Eisenhower and Kennedy quickly reacted and adapted American priorities after WW2 to stimulate economic growth and to counteract perceived foreign threats with the New Deal, the interstate highway system, renewed investment in science, technology, and public education. Since enacting these changes, America has gained political, economic, and military hegemony.

Zakaria summed up America’s current state with the word sclerotic. It means becoming rigid and unresponsive — losing the ability to adapt.

Want to see scleroticism at work? Let’s look at the issue of high-speed internet development: While South Korea leads the world in broadband access for all families, and while China has plans to expand its technology to smaller cities and rural areas, America continues to lag behind with 40% of its citizens without any access at home, and even higher in rural households. Part of the problem stems from the sluggish response of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to make regulatory changes that would allow telecommunication companies to share the cost of laying down fiber into the ground. Another part involves the monolithic stronghold of big companies like Verizon to allow fertile competition that would drive down the price and help breed innovative solutions.

Not that FCC is dragging its feet; they are actually making policy recommendations towards universal broadband for 100 million U.S. households with speeds of 100 megabits per second (mbps) by 2020. That is several times faster than current speeds in most households — anywhere from 3 to 20 Mbps. Unfortunately, those projections won’t come even approach what Hong Kong has done recently.

1,000 megabits per second (1 gigabit). All for only $26 per month.

To compare, Verizon’s fastest service for residential customers can download 50 mbps (20 for uploading) for about $150 per month (it does offer 150 mbps for small businesses for $195/month). See full article comparing HK and U.S.

What’s the big deal? Well, nothing if all you do is check email and surf the internet, but a lot if you’re consuming entertainment, developing new applications, or using telemedicine, for example. In other words, universal broadband is the key to driving economic development by creating job and luring business opportunities. How long have we talked about doing this? But it won’t happen without decisive changes by politicians and the FCC.

Scleroticism.

One last thought. For thousands of years, China was notably insulated while Western Europe was the opposite; it aggressively sought new opportunities through expansion and innovation. China has changed much since then, due in part to Deng Xiaoping’s open door policy on international trade; more recently, it created substantial economic growth through international partnerships with Africa, Germany, New Zealand, and South America. On the other hand, American exports account for only 10% of its economy — not the picture of globalization. With its aggressive modernization, China is the one looking forward, ironically, while America is looking back.

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Dec
22

China’s Entrance Exam System: Time for a Change?

Norman Eng Economy, International, Policy and reform, Politics, Society and Culture Add you comment

In addressing the need for more American economic competitiveness, President Obama called on the nation to set the goal that “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” It is an ambitious plan to make the U.S. competitive in the 21st century, considering that the Center on Education and the Workforce predicted that at current graduation rates, America would fall short of the needed 22 million graduates in 2018 by 3 million. Adding to the problem, ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer reported that this year China will graduate four times the number of college graduates than the U.S.

Clearly, Americans need to worry about themselves, as suggested in one of my previous posts. However, as progressive as China is made to sound, its dominance is not inevitable.

For one, China’s education system, though widely lauded for its rigorous culture, is also struggling to meet the demands of the 21st century economy.

The deeply ingrained Asian Confucian ideal of hard work, dedication, and “following the master’s way” has created a culture of education that has consistently placed China, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong among other Asian nations to the top of international lists in math, science, and even reading achievement (according to the latest international PISA results). The U.S. can learn from such dedication and high standards. But China’s emphasis on the all-important gaokao (college entrance exams) unintentionally creates three roadblocks toward premier status:  1) it sustains an anachronistic culture of rote learning in a modern era; and 2) it creates a social and economic divide; and 3) it sustains a thriving industry of fraud that jeopardizes China’s legitimate power.

The rigid culture of lecture and rote memorization has produced a thriving manufacturing economy, but for China to compete, it must be able to innovate and create new products and services. These fiercely competitive gaokao exams, where 9.5 million high school students compete for 6.5 million university positions, is also not conducive to producing revolutionary innovators on the level of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, according to the ABC World News report. China has, however, recognized this problem and is working towards a more open curriculum that fosters creativity.

Secondly, this meritocratic exam, though it theoretically allows even the poor to equitably advance to a better life, has also inadvertently created a social divide. The students who pass then go on to college in economically developed urban areas as Shanghai and Beijing, but the ones who cannot pass essentially go back to their rural areas. Most likely the unfortunate ones end up as itinerant manufacturing laborers migrating from rural hometowns to urban areas; the result: a classic economic gap. As the well-educated prosper, education itself has become more expensive as these parents pay for enrichment materials, supplemental classes, nursery schools in early preparation for the all-consuming gaokao exams.

Perhaps the most deleterious effect of this exam is corruption and fraud. Not that exams create this problem per se, but its long-standing, all-important tradition nourishes an environment ripe for fraud that begins early on. There has been rising media exposure (both inside and outside China) documenting rampant academic and government fraud in China and calling for Chinese action. With an emphasis on quotas and quantity over quality, academicians are more susceptible to plagiarizing papers, fudging data, or simply fabricating qualifications. The Economist recently wrote about this phenomenon, citing one case in particular:

The most notable recent case centres on Tang Jun, a celebrity executive, a self-made man and author of a popular book, ‘My Success Can Be Replicated.’ He was recently accused of falsely claiming that he had a doctorate from the prestigious California Institute of Technology. He responded that his publisher had erred and in fact his degree is from another, much less swanky, California school.

With senior academicians and scientists rarely punished, a dangerous precedent is set for generations to come (the aforementioned “following the master’s way”). How the Chinese government reacts to this trend will speak volumes about being seen as a collaborative world partner. To compete as a credible power in the global economy, they will need to create legitimate peer-review structures and consistently enforce them. However, as recent as this week, The New York Times reported that six men in Xinjiang, China were detained by police for an attack that left a journalist brain dead. The crusader, Song Hongjie, a correspondent for the Northern Xinjiang Morning Post, had a reputation for exposing corruption and wrongdoing. Other recent beatings included two Chinese science reporters who were known to expose academic fraud.

This is not a post affirming or condemning Chinese politics; rather, it is about understanding how the millenia-old culture and its emphasis on the practical and traditional must go through a constant meta-analytical process to maintain Confucius’ original vision (aptly captured in his maxim: Study without reflection is a waste. Reflection without study is a danger). Otherwise, bastardized by-products such as piracy, corruption, and fraud become the unintended norm and prevent China from moving forward. They can start by rethinking how to better evaluate student knowledge and skills.

Addendum: Nick Kristof wrote a spot-on article (China’s Winning Schools) about their education system soon after this post, asserting that their Confucian reverence for education is the best thing we can learn. However, many Chinese teachers are highly critical of its own system, pointing to the lack of self-reliance and creative development in students, as I alluded to above.

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Nov
08

Confronting the Blame Mentality

Norman Eng Economy, International, Policy and reform, Politics, Society and Culture Add you comment

In a previous post, I had echoed the sentiments of certain analysts who believed that politicians (and many Americans) erroneously blamed China for American economic woes. Since then, pundits as Fareed Zakaria have asserted that the U.S. had to focus less on consuming and more on investing in itself, and that China was merely reaping the rewards of long term investments in its infrastructure and education. During a recent forum on climate change in Hong Kong, New York City mayor and business magnate Michael Bloomberg similarly questioned critics who blamed China’s “policy” of subsidizing clean energy exports to the U.S. while restricting imports. He contended that Americans need to examine itself and more importantly, bring back the work ethic that it once had and that characterizes many first generation immigrants to turn around the current decline:

“It is very dangerous for us as a society — I’m speaking of America — to focus on blaming others, because what you do then is you don’t focus on your own practices…The hard work [in Asian cultures, presumably] should be envied…Americans on average I’m not so sure they’re working as hard as they used to…We are becoming more dependent on entitlements and feel that society owes us.”

China, of course, has long held a Confucian work ethic that permeates its society, as detailed in Part 3 of the “Creating a Culture of Education” series. Bloomberg openly criticized the federal government’s decision to investigate China’s perceived violations of World Trade Organization rules, which many believe has led to a trade imbalance. He also excoriated newly elected senators and congressmen (many of whom also blamed China) for basically being uneducated:

“If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate—they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.” (See Wall Street Journal blog article and video below).

The current scapegoating of China only magnifies the ignorance of a popular segment of American society. Bloomberg, both a moderate political figure and a private sector corporate mogul, is wise enough to know that a Keynesian perspective (i.e. that government and private sector are important balances for macroeconomic growth and stabilization) needs to be maintained. It is no coincidence that his administration includes some fairly aggressive and polarizing ideas for the “business side” (such as increasing city revenue by charging more for tolls, and suggesting a soda and cigarette tax) and for the government side (e.g., mandating lower salt content in foods and prohibiting smoking in public spaces). In maintaining that balanced perspective, Bloomberg also suggested that Hong Kong can learn from U.S. by opening itself more to immigrants, who would presumably bring diverse and innovative ideas.

It is worth repeating that a society will become educated and will make wise decisions about its future through lifelong learning and maintaining a broad perspective. Such investment is essential to ridding Americans of the blame mentality that is seen so much today.

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Nov
04

More Evidence of American Decline?

Norman Eng Economy, International, Policy and reform, Politics, Research and Evaluation 8 comments

News item #1: The Chinese Tianhe-1A has just been proclaimed the fastest supercomputer in the world, a category perennially dominated by the United States since 2004. The underlying networking technology was built by the National University of Defense Technology, a Chinese scientific research center. According a New York Times article, such supercomputers are “valued for their ability to solve problems critical to national interests in areas like defense, energy, finance and science.”

News item #2: In India, Abhishek Sinha and his brother Abhinav noticed that large numbers of migrant workers coming to Delhi from poorer rural areas had no real means to store their hard earned money or to send money home. As a result, the brothers created a software program that leveraged the ubiquitous local mom-and-pop kiosks as virtual banks that would record, store, and send money through these workers cell phones (read article). The Sinha brothers’ team, EKO India Financial Services, comprises of graduates from India’s top prestigious technology institutes, some of whom worked in the U.S. but came back home.

News item #3: A Nepali telecommunications firm just installed a 3G network service at the top of Mount Everest, so that thousands of climbers and tourists can access the internet through their mobile phones.

All three news stories broke within the past week. In itself, such developments do not seem like a big deal, but it expresses a symbolic shift occurring on a global stage: that countries in Asia are (and have been) poised to take on America for technology and economic superpower status. As discussed in one of my previous posts, the Chinese economy has been growing 10% annually for the past ten years, with substantial investments in education and its infrastructure. It comes as no surprise that this new supercomputer was developed under the dual-supervision of the Chinese Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education. Meanwhile, the information technology (IT) industry in India continues to account for a major share in its exports, asserting its global technological status and creating national pride. In both cases, the government showed a sense of urgency towards investing in their respective countries’ future.

While China and India are moving assertively towards global superpower status, the U.S., with its feckless partisan bickering, seems to be mired in political and economic stagnation. The long-drawn battle over health care, the economic stimulus package, and education reform demonstrated the increasing polarization of the government and in the American public, and shows no sign of abating with the Republicans now winning the House majority and in prime position to roll back the Obama initiatives. Can the public expect two more years of filibustering? Or will the House and Senate come together and find a collective vision of health care for all citizens and a rigorous education that will produce America’s future leaders? For now, the U.S. has not taken the bold steps necessary to counteract the momentum of the emerging powers of China or India. National pride cannot happen without a united country; as Abraham Lincoln once said, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

 

Related Articles:

America’s Outlook: Looking Ahead or Looking Back?

Why Blame China for Our Economic Woes?

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