Sara Mead's Policy Notebook

Kevin Carey has a smart post up about the NYT's release of value-added data for NYC teachers. Obviously, the "margin of error" question is an important one, but the bigger issue, to me, is the free-standing release of one piece of data that's intended to be part of a larger evaluation. No one can prevent newspapers from publishing this sort of data, but all the effort that's going into developing complex, multi-faceted teacher evaluations seems to be undermined if newspapers persist in publishing a single component. Will NYT and LAT continue to publish value-added data alone when new evaluation systems become available? Getting back to margins of error--Kevin makes solid points about how we think about the trade-offs here and our tendency to fear Type I errors more than Type II errors. I have to wonder if some of that tendency springs from the fact that the market for public school teacher talent has been something of a monopsony. Education policy debates tend to focus a lot on how the monopoly local school districts have historically held on provision of public education limits choices for students. But it's also true that the public school monopoly on provision, combined with traditional human capital practices in many districts, limits employment options for teachers in many locations--so a teacher who loses a position or just isn't a fit may have few alternative local employment options in their chosen profession (and probably don't want to move to Anaheim--never mind that certification might make it hard to do so). That makes the consequences more significant than in a more competitive labor market. One little-discussed effect of increasing diversity in public education provision is that it also increases teachers' choice of employers. In theory, this should have benefits, by improving teacher-school fit and creating competition among schools for high-quality teachers. In practice, it can also have downsides, particularly if weaker teachers wind up bouncing from school to school (as is the case among low-performing charters in some jurisdictions, particularly those where inequitable charter funding leads to lower wages).

Awesome chart from the Children's Defense Fund sums up the state of state-level policies on full-day kindergarten. Ten states and D.C. mandate* full-day K--all of them except for New Mexico located in the South. Accompanying state-specific fact sheets provide greater detail, including birthday cut-off for kindergarten entry, age of compulsory school attendance, state funding for kindergarten, kindergarten standards, and kindergarten entry assessment. Great resource for anyone interested in early childhood, PreK-3rd, or kindergarten policy.

Charter authorizing is not, sad to say, on the glamour side of the education reform movement, so I was psyched to see this New York Times editorial highlighting the importance of authorizing and calling out D.C.'s own Public Charter School Board (on which I serve) as an example of strong authorizing policies.

Homeschooling is hot these days, at least if you judge by the media coverage:

By now the recent MET study findings have been widely discussed, but my fellow Ed Week blogger--and must-read reporter on all things teacher--Steven Sawchuck makes a sharp observation, drawing from both MET and a recent study from Chicago: The growing body of information we have from rigorous observational measures of teacher practice suggests that teachers are pretty good at what Sawchuck calls "procedural" tasks, such as behavior and classroom management and creating a supportive or respectful learning environment. But very few teachers are demonstrating strong performance on domains more associated with pushing students to think critically and analytically, such as "analysis and problem solving," "using questioning and instructional techniques," "quality of feedback," "student participation in meaning making and reasoning," "explicitness of importance," or "investigation/problem-based approach."

I was traveling last week, so I haven't been able to think or say much about last week's announcement of federal ESEA waivers for 10 states. One thing I do think is interesting, though, is the relatively limited overlap between the states that applied for and won Round 1 Waivers, and those that received growth model pilot waivers from the previous administration. One might think, given the importance of growth measures for both the new school identification and teacher evaluation systems the waivers require states to describe, that schools that had been approved for the growth model pilot might have a leg up here, but of the 10 states that received ESEA Waivers last week--New Jersey, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Indiana, Colorado, Minnesota, and Oklahoma--only 4--Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, and Tennessee, were approved for the earlier growth model pilot. The move toward teacher evaluations that take into account student growth data seems to be driving some states to move forward with value-added and growth models that haven't been previously put in place and refined for school-level accountability. This seems a little backwards because using growth or value-added data for teacher evaluation is even more complicated (and higher-stakes) than using it for school level accountability.

Will there be a second round of federal Early Learning Challenge Grants to help states build their early learning and development systems? It's a big open question. In December 2011 the Department of Education awarded grants to 9 states, using $500 out of just under $700 million in funding appropriated for Race to the Top in the FY2011 budget.

Marguerite Roza and Paul Hill put the smack down on critics of their work on educational productivity in this post on the CRPE website. In December, a Colorado-based think tank issued a report challenging Secretary Arne Duncan's calls for schools to focus on doing more with less in response to "the new normal," as well as a set of resources--including work by Roza and Hill--that the Department of Education highlighted on its website to help schools do this. Hill's and Roza's response reiterates why it's important to focus on productivity (hint, lots of school districts are facing budget shortfalls today, and if they don't focus on productivity, we'll end up seeing draconian cuts, like more 4-day school weeks). They also argue that, given these pressing needs and the current state of the evidence, it's better to help districts to think smart about productivity using reason and what we currently know, rather than waiting for perfect "cost-effectiveness" and cost-benefit studies before offering counsel to districts.

Dads are playing a more prominent role in caring for their children while moms work, according to recently released Census Bureau data (h/t Eye on Early Education). In families with working moms and preschoolers, one-fifth of children have their father as their primary caregiver while mom works. And across all families of children under 15 with working moms, one-third of dads regularly care for kids while mom is at work--up from just a quarter eight years ago. Experts point towards the current economic climate as one potential cause for the shift. To my mind, it's positive to see dads playing a more prominent role in caring for their children, but to the extent that this reflects families under economic pressure, that's troubling.

Economist Christina Romer, writing in the New York Times, says that improving access to education to prepare workers for high-skilled jobs in many industries is a better strategy for addressing income inequality than trying to return to the days when factories provided family-supporting jobs for low-skilled workers.

The Washington Post's Steven Perlstein (via Matt Yglesias) takes a look at how economic, technological and business evolutions in recent decades have negatively impacted civic leadership at the regional level, as regionally focused companies that previously viewed their fortunes as tied to particular regions or communities have disappeared, and the larger multinational corporations no longer have a particular stake in specific regions or communities. Though Perlstein doesn't mention it, this is an issue that is particularly relevant for education: Historically, business leaders have had both an interest in a well-educated workforce and the authority and political clout to lead on education issues at the state or local level. Business leaders played a major role in supporting standards-based reform in the 1990s, and business groups still play a key role on education issues at the state or local level in some places. But the same factors that Perlstein mentions can also impact business engagement on education issues. I spoke recently with an education reform advocate in one "rust belt" city who mentioned that business leaders had played a prominent role in supporting quality education in the city in the 1980s and 1990s, but that this was no longer the case, as the corporations that had once been head-quartered in the city either no longer existed or had moved elsewhere, and the previous generation of leaders with strong commitments to the city were aging and passing away.

In a recent Ed Week interview, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan signals that he'd like to use the bulk of $550 million in new federal RTT funds to fund an RTT competition for school districts--something the Congressional appropriation language gives him the authority to do.

Last year, when the administration announced that it was going to devote $500 million in Race to the Top funds to the Early Learning Challenge Grant competition, a bunch of K-12 reform folks asked me about the "pre-k Race to the Top." And I always had to start out by explaining that, "actually, Early Learning Challenge is not a pre-k program, but is more about building statewide systems and improving child care quality across the range of programs serving 0-5 year olds"--which was about when my K-12 focused friends' eyes started to glaze over.....

One interesting result of the the seemingly ever-increasing vogue for evoking Finland in education reform conversations is that it's become a sort of conventional wisdom that "In Finland, teaching is a high-status profession, comparable to doctors," a statement I most recently saw evoked by omnipresent Finnish educator and Finnish-style reform (whatever that means) evangelist Pasi Sahlberg in this Ed Week forum. Then someone controlling edweek's twitter feed asked if teachers should be on the same pay scale as doctors.