Jacques of all Trades

An interesting article that problematizes the idea of firing teachers as the cornerstone to improving teacher quality:

How many teachers would school reformers have to fire in order to get American schools performing at their best? That’s the question researchers Doug Staigerand Jonah Rockoff set out to answer in a study they presented at the Columbia conference.

The researchers went through a simulation exercise, building on prior findings about the impact that great teachers have on their students, the fraction of incoming teachers who turn out to be strong performers in the classroom, and the “signal-to-noise” ratio in a teacher’s performance during her first couple of years (i.e., how hard it is to tell whether a teacher is bad or just unlucky).

When they ran the numbers, the answer their computer spat out had them reviewing their work looking for programming errors. The optimal rate of firing produced by the simulation simply seemed too high: Maximizing teacher performance required that 80 percent of new teachers be fired after two years’ probation.

This is a fascinating piece from the New York Times, using one of the most extensively researched education policy studies (Tennessee STAR), but using real life outcomes—rather than test scores—to show a lasting impact of great kindergarten teachers.  

The policy implications are not necessarily clear-cut, but how this changes researchers’ thoughts about the fade-out effect could have major effects on future interventions: 

How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?

Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not — which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.

There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child’s health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: “We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.”

Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives. On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They’re fairly explosive.

Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.

For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education). Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average. (via azspot)

This finding has actually been promoted in a number of studies of child development and educational attainment in the last decade or so.  A major question that is always attached is to what extent the number of books in the home is a proxy for other household characteristics that reflect the amount of time or energy that parents put into helping the child navigate through early development.  (Similarly, number of museum visits at a young age is occasionally cited as another input correlated with higher educational attainment).  

Some studies that I have read say that the correlation between books-in-home and educational attainment holds even when controlling for other factors—such as parents educational status, and household income levels—which this study does as well.  Where this one seems to go beyond is by positing that the effect is actually stronger in lower-income households, which would be a particularly persuasive finding.   

It doesn’t make sense that something as passive as having books in the house would make such a difference, but the strong effect shown by this study suggests that we should look more closely at what else the number of books represents.

Go to the link for the full transcript from the State Department. Here’s an excerpt:

The United States is making major investments to combat preventable diseases and improve child survival through our Global Health Initiative. Increasing access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene will help save lives that are now being lost to preventable diseases.

Seventy percent of the world’s water use is devoted to agriculture, and the outcome of our work to promote global food security depends in part on having a successful water policy and sound water management. Floods and droughts can wipe out crops, and decimate economies that depend on agriculture.

We are also working to empower women around the world, because depending upon which continent we’re talking about, the average is 60 percent of the farmers are women. In addition to that, women who gain access to sanitation, who are freed from the burden of walking for hours each day just to locate and carry water, will find it easier to invest time and energy in their families and communities.

The stability of young governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations depends in part on their ability to provide their people with access to water and sanitation. A lack of water, sanitation, and irrigation we know leads to economic decline, and even can lead to unrest and instability.

Part of being serious about dealing with and adapting to climate change is about being serious about water. As the earth warms, rainfall patterns can shift, bringing new patterns of drought and flooding. And we need to get out in front of that problem.

Successful engagement on water can also affect how our country is perceived in the world. We spend a lot of time working on issues such as terrorism and arms control and nuclear proliferation. These are obviously important topics that deserve our attention. But the reality is that they are not problems most people deal with on a day-to-day basis. Water is different. When we demonstrate our concern for the issue, it speaks to individuals on a whole different level. Everyone knows sensation of thirst firsthand. We all have daily personal experience that we can think about and relate to, even if the nature and magnitude of that experience varies widely. Our ability to satisfy our need for water depends on our location and our circumstances. But as a matter of biological necessity, access to safe, sustainable supplies of water is a priority for everyone on the planet.

In the United States, water represents one of the great diplomatic and development opportunities of our time. It’s not every day you find an issue where effective diplomacy and development will allow you to save millions of lives, feed the hungry, empower women, advance our national security interests, protect the environment, and demonstrate to billions of people that the United States cares, cares about you and your welfare. Water is that issue. )(

(via caraobrien)

To the surprise of many educators who campaigned last year for change in the White House, the Obama administration’s first recipe for school reform relies heavily on Bush-era ingredients and adds others that make unions gag.

The emerging plan (currently in its most visible form with the proposed rules for “Race to the Top” funding) indicates a few key componenets:

• To create systems to track individual student achievement over time and link growth in scores to individual teachers and principals;
• To use those data in part to evaluate and compensate teachers and principals;
• To lift limits on independently operated but publicly funded charter schools, which usually are not unionized; and
• To shake up perennially struggling schools identified through No Child Left Behind.

I’m not too sure how surprising this is, since Obama talked a lot about charters, merit pay and “data-driven” accountability on the campaign trail.  In fact, his emerging program seems to look a lot like what Democrats for Education Reform have been pushing over the last couple of years, making this less surprising:

In a joint statement, the Center for American Progress, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Equality Project and the Education Trust called the proposal “a strong and good-faith effort” to fix education problems.

There is a lot still to be hashed out, but it appears the “ed reform left” is among the early frontrunners in the Obama education policy influence race.