Fear-Based Instruction

As I drove to work yesterday morning, NPR graced my ears with a story about improving education through - what else? - improving teacher quality.  This time it was a "fascinating" study by Chicago economists who found that something called "loss aversion" was highly effective in improving student test scores.  Basically, the idea was to offer teachers $4000 in cash up front, if they promised to return the money if their student's scores didn't improve significantly.  Compared to the control group, the author of the study said scores improved dramatically.

"What we found is strong evidence in favor of loss aversion," he said. "Teachers who were paid in advance and [were] asked to give the money back if their students did not perform — their [students'] test scores were actually out of the roof: two to three times higher than the gains of the teachers in the traditional bonus group."

Yowza.  According to this fascinating piece by Cass Sunstein, my bias against teacher reform has me pulling only the things I want to hear, or the fact that fit with my pre-conceptions out of the story. Thus, I do indeed find the story appalling, and am thus frantically searching my brain for how this story might turn out to be false.  Because, after all, it seems to show that teachers are actually dramatically underperforming, and apparently simply out of lack of motivation.

OK, so wait a minute.  Teaching is one of the hardest jobs out there.  You have to be incredibly motivated to put up with it to begin with.  I have 120 students, half of whom are so-called "reluctant learners", which means if I don't literally walk around and constantly remind them to take their notes, they won't, and thereby failing my class.

And the study apparently found that promises of performance rewards had little effect on test scores, i.e. teaching.  But gains two to three times higher?  Without seeing the actual study (I have to get to work!), I'll allow myself to remain agnostic.

But regardless, what really got me in the piece was the concept of "loss aversion", which is a fancy way of describing something all teachers have come to understand about what teacher reform is all about: fear.  This study is essentially saying that when teachers fear losing compensation, they teach better, leading to better scores for their kids.  More fear = better results. 

Really?  Given the insanity of modern day teaching, how incredibly inequitable it is as a profession, in terms of the job at "good" schools being exponentially easier than that at "poor" schools, and the amount of pressure teachers are under at any given second of the day, a study points to the efficacy of more fear?

And let's be clear about what the mechanism of fear really means.  A teacher consciously, or unconsciously, when teaching, hears a little voice in her head that says, you're going to lose money if you don't get this right.  It's not an externally transmitted physical pain, like an electric shock, but it is pain nonetheless.  And it is a pain that lingers, a kind of emotional anguish.  "Am I doing a good enough job?  Was that lesson good enough?  Oh, I hope they pay attention."  And considering the myriad factors in a child's education that are completely beyond a teacher's control - did the child get yelled at this morning and is now in a foul mood, is the child nervous about neighborhood bullies, does he or she have a mental block or emotional issues? - the fear ends up bleeding into a generalized anxiety that keeps many a teacher up at night.

Wait a second.  That kind of fear is already there, with or without the reward.  Teachers fear that their students aren't going to be successful on a daily basis.  At least I do.  In fact, for my mental sanity, the less I worry about my students, the better I am able to be objective and focus on what really matters - planning good lessons, being prepared and organized, getting good sleep. 

So, I'm supposed to buy the notion that aside from all my sacrifices I make on a daily basis to meet the needs as best as I can with my 120 students, each of them with different specific needs, that the introduction of even more fear is supposedly going to make me a better teacher.

Hmmm.

More Excuses...

This weekend on Up with Chris Hayes, guest host Sam Seder made some brilliant points, along with his panel, addressing some of the "reform" points being made by the neo-liberal on the panel.  ("Neo-liberal" is a term I sometimes use on this blog, and what I basically mean by it is that it pretends that through specific, technocratic adjustments, we can transcend larger structural problems with capitalism that conspire to create fundamental problems of poverty and inequality in the first place.  For example, not every child is going to go to college because our economy relies upon a vast underclass making poverty wages).

This morning the NY Times (ever the neo-liberal paper of record)  this morning argues that reform of teacher evaluations is fundamental to helping poor kids, and assumes unions as the culprit in ultimately perpetuating failing schools.

That teachers’ unions in much of the country now agree that student achievement should count in evaluations at all reflects a major change from the past, when it was often argued that teaching was an “art” that could not be rigorously evaluated or, even more outrageously, that teachers should not be held accountable for student progress.

The problem is actually getting good data on student achievement. State tests give you terrible data for a variety of reasons, ultimately telling you very mixed stories about the actual effect of the teaching in the class. A quality administrator, given a proper amount of time, could look at what students are actually doing in the classroom and tell rather quickly how effective a teacher is. That so many teachers are given high rating by administrators says more about administration policy than teaching (except that so many teachers out there are doing a brilliant job in the face of terrible odds).

In the end, the push for data is driven by the notion that poor kids are being taught well enough by teachers. Yet this is often like squeezing blood from stone: parent background, etc. account overwhelmingly for student achievement, with good teaching making up a small portion of the margin.

Dealing with issues outside the classroom, by rearranging the classroom model itself - smaller classes, more aids, more counselors, etc. - are completely missing from the "reform" agenda, which primarily emphasizes accountability, testing, charters, union-busting and ending tenure.

But again, we aren't even begining to have that conversation.  When it is brought up, teachers are accused of making excuses.  Yet if teachers - the ones on the front lines every single day - feel this is the real need, what students need to be successful, who is really making excuses?

The Reality of "Choice"

Gail Collins writes about the growth of online K-12 charter schools, the most successful being for-profit K-12, Inc.

"...a big private online education business. It was founded by a former Goldman Sachs banker and by William Bennett, the Republican writer and talk-show host, with an infusion of cash from the former disgraced junk-bond king Mike Milken. Its teachers generally work from their homes, communicating with their students by e-mail or phone. (At one point in Arizona, essays of students attending an online academy run by K12 were outsourced to India for correction. K12 says the program was a pilot and was discontinued.)"

Having taught at a charter school with a major emphasis on homeschooling, and that was increasingly moving towards an online model, I can speak to some of the concerns people have about these schools.  There was little transparency in terms of how the school was run, and financed its activities.  This is a critique of charter schools in general, removed as they are from conventional public school accountability.  This was especially concerning to me, as I worked at one of the satellite campuses, which was located in a poor neighborhood and drew from a largely disadvantaged population.  I worried that the students' needs were not being met and being given short-shrift by the charter's more middle-class, home-schooled demographic priorities.

Another concern people have with online programs is that they'll further inhibit poor brick and mortar schools' ability to serve the special needs of their populations.  As with brick and mortar charters, they will further siphon off the families with means, leaving behind the families with the fewest resources.  The poor are often thought of as a homogeneous demographic, defined only by financial capital.  But in reality there exists a great diversity of means, in terms of human and social capital, the efficacy of individual parenting, family education levels, issues with substance abuse or criminality, etc.  Statistically, only a very small percentage of poor parents have been actively trying to get their children into charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools.  These are the parents who would be raising higher performing students, and realize that their students are being subjected to the many negative social pressures and forces at work in ghettos.  This is simply a function of geography and property values.

The effect of this movement of high-capital families out of poor schools is to further segregate communities by means.  While certainly a great benefit to those who know how to take advantage of the process, those left behind are further isolated and concentrated in their disadvantage.  For instance, an average poor classroom might have 20% of its students suffering from emotional, behavioral, and academic deficits owing to severe neglect and strife at home, and another 20% enjoying the benefits of a cognitively stimulating and loving environment at home, able to complete work and be actively engaged in positive learning.  In a class of 30-35 students, this presents an enormous challenge for a teacher in differentiating his instruction to adequately meet the needs of every child.  In removing the top 20% of students, you are essentially (if my math is correct) removing 100% of the highest performers, in return for a 5% increase in the lowest and 15% increase in middle performers.

Now, in a perfect world, this may not be the worst thing.  There are many advantages to less differentiation, or more homogeneity in a classroom.  With a smaller range of needs, the teacher is better able to manage his instructional specificity.  At the site level, resources can be more focused and delivered more efficiently.  Unfortunately, this doesn't really happen.  The poor have a tendency to get neglected.  In the classroom, more low-performing students means more interruptions, more truancy, more remediation, lower standards, and greater teacher burnout.  Class sizes remain the same, only increasing the teacher's burden.  At the site level, while more services are often offered, the decline in parent means translates into less local community resources, and more demand for interventions, requiring ever more services and attention.  Socially, the negative pressures are reinforced, while the positive pressures are reduced.  Net negativity is thus increased.

It doesn't have to be this way.  If class sizes were reduced, more services were offered, and resources were made available for teachers and staff to leverage, you would have a system in which high concentrations of disadvantage and dysfunction were ripe for efficient, targeted intervention.  Yet the system would have to be designed to support this extra burden.  From the ground floor up, it would take into account the population's special needs, and not expect teachers to primarily bear the burden.  Currently, "teacher accountability" is frequently mentioned, but more rarely is "systemic accountability".  Where is the accountability when systems are in place that shovel highly needy, at-risk populations into traditional classroom environments.  It is as if schools, teachers and students are set-up to fail.

I would not be as skeptical of educational innovations such as charter schools or online programs, if they were understood in the context of larger socioeconomic issues in education.  For many poor parents, online schooling might make the most sense, and be a good fit for their child's needs.  For many others, their children's needs may be better served by an environment that can set the bar higher, knowing that students will be able to competently meet it, as opposed to simply being set-up for failure.

I've long thought a rigorous socio-economic assessment regime could be designed that measures and then places families into school settings designed to appropriately meet their specific needs.  To me, this is truly what "choice" looks like.  It isn't bottom-up, in terms of parents being "allowed" to send their children wherever they like.  But that concept assumes that poor families are homogeneous in their ability to best see to their children's development.  The reality is that many poor families need top-down help, and giving them "choice" is a false notion, implying that poor performing families are "choosing" not to be successful.  Everyone wants to be successful, even the families struggling with poor parenting skills, single-parenthood, substance abuse, etc.  But they don't know how.  The sad reality is that we only have two choices when it comes to many poor families - the nanny state, or the neglectful parent state.  Contrary to the fantasies we would like to believe about human behavior, reality is that, due to the many disadvantages and behavioral constraints besetting poor communities, owing to numerous historical and systemic factors, we are in a position of "parenthood", in that if left to fend for themselves, too many families - and their children - will not be successful.  That is the reality.  That is the reality of "choice".

You Can't "Reform" a Broken Pillar

Mark Kleiman has some comments on the concept of reform among a few some high-profile industries, namely oil, finance, public schools, and universities.  The structure of his post is interesting and it's worth a look, but his point is essentially: these institutions are very important, as such they all need to be under scrutiny, and yet their size and complexity demands an equal care and deft flexibility in holding them accountable.  I was reminded of how tricky the word "reform" is, and how, in terms of education, we're still so far from understanding what it should really mean.  With the financial crisis still hanging over us and oil from a damaged well rushing into the gulf, there is no argument that those are two industries in which the word regulation should never be out of earshot.  But with some minor reform they might indeed be set back on a proper course.  Education however needs a complete rethinking.

I had a long talk with my father (career high school teacher, retiring in 2 years, bless his soul) this morning. He’s off tomorrow on a flight to a week-long training seminar in project-based learning. We talked about the various reform proposals floated over the years, and how in the end it never fails to come down to a sort of synchronicity at the local level: administrators, teachers, parents, etc. all clicking in just the right way. But switch out some of the pieces and the entire structure falls apart. He recalled talking to a friend of his who’s been teaching for 3 decades and who agreed that, as far as what goes on in the classroom, nothing’s really changed. In his area of Seattle, the kids are still all black. Still an incredible achievement gap.

I understand the point on complexity and bureaucracy.  Schools will never be simple to adjust.

But what occurred to me is that there’s one really big difference between education, at least at the earlier levels, and the rest. Well any other field, really. And we’ve kind of understood this as a society. We’re beginning to use language that hints at it. It was the driving acknowledgment behind NCLB.


Education has the power to end social stratification. The end of class. The end of poverty. The end of criminal justice. The end of a lot. In fact, so much we’re afraid to even really try and imagine it. It seems too big. It seems, well, unimaginable. But all the social research tells us it is absolutely possible. There are examples of it happening in schools around the country. The problem is scale, among plenty others. But if they can do it, there’s no reason to think it can’t be done for all children.

The constitution points us in the right direction. Many major court cases have been fought over this very issue. Proposition 13 in California was built on it. The question was never if it was right to do it, but whether we could. Well, we can.

But we need a paradigm shift in thinking. This is where education needs to be thought of apart from any other sector, business or public. Education needs to be thought of less like a resource, or a public good, and more like a pillar of civilization; as an essential for life akin to air, food or water. As such, we need to take a serious look at how we deliver it unto each soul that enters our nation. 

This is not how we currently view it. Not by a long shot. And it isn't too much of a surprise.  The audacity of this notion, that you can take any child from any circumstance and through education put him on equal footing with his citizen peers.  The social research behind this idea, beginning with the thought that it might even be a worthwhile endeavor to begin with, has only been around for less than a century - much of it half that.  In a way, it's a sort of marvelous thing to be alive at a point in history when we not only have the philosophical and economic means to offer a plan for socioeconomic equality through education, but the scientific theory and data to back it up.

Take any two kids in America, from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and look at what services get provided them by a public school. There is very little difference. Aside from some federal Title I money to pay for crappy lunches and a reading specialist, you get very little. Considering the vast differences in human and social capital that the two children have access to, the attempt at equity is almost absurd. You rectify this imbalance, you have social dividends that we can’t even begin to dream about.

I've been thinking a lot about what a policy prescription might look like.  At this point it revolves around the notion of Student Capital (human + social / age), and means-tested allocation of funds - likely eventually federal, as drawing from constitutional rights and recognition of natural law.  I'm not naive enough to think that it is anything that might be accomplished in even a decade; I think it might require a good 30 or 40 years to germinate and unfold as part of a larger awakening of social consciousness.  We are just beginning to grasp the significance of new understandings in human development and behavior.  As these begin to draw thin the old egocentric attitudes about human agency, hopefully more avenues for not just understanding but implementation of a theory of Student Capital may open up.

Real Education Reform

There's a lot of talk about education reform these days. Many on the left are accused of making excuses for teachers, opposing reform and doing nothing but complain about poor teacher salaries.

I'm on the left and I think teachers are underpaid, but would like to see reform. Just not in the form of union busting and straw charter schools. The bottom line is what we're all talking about are crappy student populations where the state is trying to make up for every conceivable social ill that comes to bear on each individual student.

There will be crap administrators. There will be crap teachers. But there will be great ones. No one complains about the high-scoring suburban schools, even though their structure is mostly no different than ghetto schools. In fact, I'll bet if you took the entire staff of a suburban school and swapped it with a ghetto school, your results wouldn't be that different.

We need to get out of the blame-the-schools model and focus on instituting neighborhood intervention, starting with pregnancy and continuing with early childhood home-visits, highly qualified pre-school, health services, parent support classes and incentives. Kids are entering the system 2-3 years behind, and then getting cobbled-together classroom interventions - basically requiring the teacher to single-handedly make up for a tidal wave of social capital-destruction happening outside school.

We set teachers up to fail. The amazing ones manage to achieve great things, and we then base our expectations off of them. We stick to our expensive, bloated and ineffective model - but when the vast number of teachers - as in any profession - are simply not in the 95%, we blame all teachers. Especially the ones who happen to teach in the most difficult environments, and getting the worst test scores. This is insane.

What we need will be expensive. But it will be effective. It won't require extraordinary sacrifice by teachers (whose sacrifice now is only "ordinary"). It will be scaleable nationally. It will be targeted and take into account demographic need. Suburbs won't be compared with ghettos. Parents will get the support they need. Difficult classrooms will be smaller. Poor schools will be smaller. Teachers and administrators in such schools will receive extra support. Social services personal will be on hand to intervene early and quickly.

While this may be expensive in the short term, it will pay out many times over in long-term dividends - not only in decreased late-childhood intervention, but also in social costs such as criminal justice and health services which end up costing much more. Not to mention the lack of a productive member of the workforce. Of course, those are only the practical benefits. The moral imperative is even stronger.

Which is what the real burden in all of this is: moral clarity. We need to acknowledge that poverty is being perpetuated by our current system. We need to take responsibility for those least among us and come to their aid in a real and urgent way. When a teen mother gives birth and brings her child in to school 5 years later, we cannot expect the teacher to be the only capable person in that child's life, one of 30 others, for a handful of hours a day. We can't wait that long. We can't do that little.

Before we expect more from the situation, we need to begin to expect more from ourselves.