From the editor
Once in a while you come across a piece of writing that leaves you shaking your head and wondering, ‘why didn’t I think of that?” David Greenberg’s article, included in this newsletter, is just such a piece.
This originally ran on the Schools for Tomorrow blog, and I included it in the “Blog Highlights” section of last week’s enewsletter. But then I worried that not enough people saw it; and it bears reading more than once.
When it comes to public education, we tend to get so caught up in theoretical questions or convoluted policy disputes that practical questions elude us. As David points out, school systems nationwide engage in ‘fuzzy math’ when it comes to measuring how much it costs to prepare any particular student to enter college or the workforce without remediation.
Since this is one of the primary goals of our education system (along with producing critical thinkers who can participate in our democratic institutions, at which we’ve failed dismally) one would think we would want to measure our effectiveness. Instead, David says, we measure all sorts of other things that skirt this central question.
Whether or not you agree with the Greenberg Standard and how to gauge its true costs, you have to admit that David exposes a gaping hole in our system (or lack thereof) of measuring results. Disagree? Email me your thoughts –
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I don’t expect to get many responses, since almost all of you are up in the mountains or elsewhere, escaping the heat and the ennui of late July.
On another matter: The Schools for Tomorrow blog needs some regular contributors. How would you like to be an official blogger for a few months, or a year? I’ve lost a few bloggers of late, because of career changes, or other life circumstances. Drop me a line if you’re interested. Send a writing sample along if you’re so inclined.
I’m especially looking for someone with some expertise in educational policy, and a good ear for national education issues. But if that’s not you, don’t be discouraged: I’ll take the three most intriguing applicants.
--Alan Gottlieb
The elephant in the room
By David Ethan Greenberg
Those of you who have been following this or other ed blogs, or whose lives are sufficiently empty that they read Ed Week, have probably noticed a certain pattern: the arguments about what to do to fix the system are frustratingly circular.
Take ProComp. The teachers union argues that the bulk of additional public money should go to more experienced teachers. DPS says the money should focus on attracting new blood to the system. Folks on the outside wonder whether more money for teachers, young or old, will lead to better results.
But here's something none of the advocates have said: "If you spend the money my way, I can prove that it will result in 24 more Hispanic kids graduating fully prepared for college. That's 15 more students than my opponent's strategy."
In fact, no one will say what the results of ProComp, or almost any other expenditure, will be in terms of a correlation between the investment and the result.
Let me illustrate the point a different way. What does it cost a school district to produce one low-income Hispanic student who graduates high school ready to attend a four-year college? What district in Colorado is most efficient in achieving that result? How large a dollar difference is there between the best district's performance in this category and the worst? What does it cost the best district in the nation? Is there anything the best performing district does differently that might account for the better performance, and save taxpayers money?
I can't answer that question, and neither can you. In fact, no one can.
Why? Because no one measures the cost of outcomes. No one measures what it costs to achieve a desired educational result.
Even more odd, few districts even bother to define what a desired educational result might be. Remember, it wasn't until this year that there was even a national standard for defining the drop-out rate.
Remember the Denver Plan? Here's its first objective:
All students will engage at every grade level in a rigorous course of study in the Denver Public Schools and, upon graduation, will exceed state performance standards in four core subject areas (literacy, math, science and social studies); be prepared to succeed in college/other post-secondary opportunities; and be critical thinkers.
The problem with this objective is that it is non-quantifiable. It says, for example, that upon graduation, all students will exceed the state performance standards. But it doesn't say: "All students will graduate". Nor does it say whether its a two or four year college, or whether they will "be prepared to succeed in college without remediation." No numbers, no where, no how.
Now, according to the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) "report cards," DPS spends upwards of $700 million annually, or roughly $10K per student per year. Is that money being well spent? The only way to answer that is to have some measurable outputs, and see how they are doing.
Let me digress by pointing out that this essay is not about DPS. I could use Aurora, or Cherry Creek, or for that matter San Diego or Scarsdale, and the point would be the same. DPS actually understands the nature of this problem better than almost any district in the nation. At least DPS has a plan. Most districts nationwide don't even have a mission statement saying that graduating students able to perform at a certain level is what the district is supposed to do. There are no agreed-upon output standards, and because they don't exist, it is impossible to measure performance against dollars invested. So instead we waste a lot of time arguing about dollar inputs.
What might an output standard be? Well, the Greenberg Standard for being considered "college ready" is scoring proficient or higher on the 10th grade CSAPs, and achieving a 20 or higher on the ACT composite. Somewhat arbitrary, but it more or less aligns with the Colorado Commission on Higher Education college admission index, and the data is more or less accessible from the CDE homepage. It basically means a student could attend the University of Northern Colorado or Western State without the need for remediation.
So how much does it cost DPS to generate one low-income Hispanic student who graduates, by the Greenberg Standard, "college ready"?
The primitive calculus goes something like this: Take the cohort of all the free/reduced fund eligible Hispanic students who enrolled in DPS over the past 13 years as potential members of the Class of 2008. Multiply that by $8000, which roughly represents, in constant dollars, the amount of per pupil revenue and federal money that was allocated annually to educate these kids. Now, find the total number of kids in the cohort who actually graduated in 2008 having met the Greenberg Standard. Use that as the denominator…for those a bit slow in math, that means take all the money DPS spent on all the kids, and divide it by the number of kids who met the standard. Throw in a "fudge factor" to account for kids who left the DPS system but didn't drop out and met the standard.
What you will find, in general terms, is that for every 100 shiny happy Hispanic boys and girls who walked into kindergarten with their heads held high, perhaps 3 walked out in 2008 being college ready, at least by the Greenberg Standard. That's a 97 percent failure rate, although if you take into account the "fudge factor," maybe its only a 90 percent failure rate. Either way it means DPS invests somewhere north of $4 million to produce one "success"…and believe me, that's a low estimate.
By contrast, I can send a kid to Graland and Colorado Academy for roughly $250,000 (constant dollars) with a high level of confidence that the child, regardless of race or family income, will come out college ready. Unfortunately, that's not a "scalable" solution.
I've deliberately picked a hard case; you could argue that the Greenberg Standard is unreasonably high. If we asked how DPS performs with white, middle-class girls, my guess is that the output costs would be pretty reasonable, compared to other districts and private schools. But no one knows, because no one keeps the data or asks the question.
No doubt there are dozens of flaws in my methodology, but it is "directionally correct" and it does illustrate the problem. We don't know, and we don't talk about what the outcome costs are. And if we don't know, then what is the point of debating who gets the crumbs in ProComp, or whether charter schools are a good or bad investment for a district, and a million other questions?
Consider the question of "replicability." Many successful charters have to raise private money to supplement the PPR (per pupil revenue) they receive from the state or district. Charter opponents contend that this means the schools aren't replicable.
But urban districts fail to graduate 50 percent of their students, and the ones who do graduate often don't meet the most minimal education standards. So in what sense is a traditional urban district replicable or sustainable? If we researched the actual cost of student outcomes, the whole debate would be flipped on its head.
So next time you hear someone advocate a specific reform, ask them not just what it costs but how it will change the cost of a given outcome…that should save a lot of trees, and, in the case of blogs, make life easier on those poor, innocent electrons.
EdNews highlights
Study: teacher pensions pose challenges
Written by Alan Gottlieb
Colorado teacher pensions are among the most generous in the nation, and, like pension benefits across the country, are so skewed toward teachers who spend their careers in one state or district that they may contribute to teacher shortages, a new study says.
But because Colorado teachers do not participate in the Social Security system, they need more robust retirement benefits than many other workers, the document points out.
Written by Janet S. Hansen, vice president and director of education studies for the Committee for Education Development, the study, “Teacher Pensions: a Background Paper,” was commissioned by Denver’s Piton and Donnell-Kay Foundations. (Disclosure: both foundations are funders of Education News Colorado).
Summer reading helping kids catch up
Written by Rebecca Jones
More than a hundred middle school students in Brighton and Commerce City this week wrap up a costly six-week experiment in intensive reading instruction that educators there say signals a shift in how the school district views “summer school.”
But the Read 180 project in Adams School District 27J also goes well beyond summer school. Officials there hope that come fall, they’ll be able to offer age-appropriate reading assistance to students who in the past didn’t get much help.
“It’s not all that long ago that we simply didn’t have much good stuff for reading intervention at the secondary level,” said Isobel Stevenson, executive director for student achievement for the school district. “My history with trying to get reading intervention at the secondary level goes back at least 10 years. We used to give up on teaching kids reading decoding skills after the fifth grade. If they didn’t get it by then, they wouldn’t get it.”
Blog highlights
The New York Times discovers economic integration
Monday, July 21, 2008
Written by: Alan Gottlieb
It only took 13 months after the U.S. Supreme Court destroyed the last vestiges of race-based school integration, but the New York Times Magazine finally figured out that socio-economic integration might be a nifty idea.
School integration based on socio-economics is an issue a handful of us have been shouting about for years. But our appeals have fallen on deaf ears. Perhaps the spread in the Times will help. Or perhaps the court’s abysmal decision will force school districts to get creative.
In any case, the Times seems finally to get it:
And the effects of those high concentrations of poverty were striking: poor students in Louisville [Kentucky] black and white, fared worse when they attended schools filled with other poor kids.
For a somewhat outdated but thorough examination of the issue, read this publication. Disclaimer: I wrote it.
Getting to the bottom of Westminster’s spat
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Written by: Uncle Charley
We all know politics can get ugly. Education politics can get even uglier. Six weeks ago I wrote about the “hornets nest” stirred up in Westminster over the use of school bond money. Today, the Denver Post’s Monte Whaley brings us up-to-date, as two conflicting efforts to recall a total of three school board members—Kevin Massey, Vicky Marshall, and Marilyn Flachman—appear to have blown the lid off the debate:
“It’s appalling what they are doing to this district,” said Dino Valente, who is pushing for the recall of Massey and Marshall.
He said there is an organized campaign to defame Flachman and her supporters through drawings and hate mail.
Massey claims Flachman’s backers also are slinging disinformation around the community to tarnish his and Marshall’s reputation. “A ton of what they are saying is simply untrue,” Massey said.
My goal is not to wade into the acrimonious he-said, she-said, though undoubtedly it would be helpful to get to the bottom of the story. Instead, allow me to take a birds’ eye approach with some thoughts for both sides, in case they have yet to be considered. What do I mean?
To the citizens angry about the decision to spend all the money on Westminster High School and who launched the initial recall: Be careful of getting fixated on the characters rather than the structure. Even if you’re right, the “throw out the bums” approach yields only a temporary salve. Let’s also look constructively at ways to change the governance of our school system, maybe devolving power away from school boards to an even more local form of control—maybe Weighted Student Funding, with greater school-level autonomy and parental choice.
To the board majority’s defenders launching the counterattack: If you are in the right, it would be best to look beyond the current heated dispute as much as possible. Think about the vital interests and the potentially loud voice of taxpayers now on display, and how such anger might have been averted with greater transparency. From more detail on budget line items to more open access to the decision-making process, ponder how the high ground attained from this sort of policy could strengthen your defense and your case for leadership.
Just a few stray thoughts as I read the story this morning. I may be a bit of a rosy-eyed optimist, but it would be very satisfying to see some sort of productive systemic reform move forward as a result of the ongoing dispute in Westminster.
You may say I’m a dreamer…
ProComp losing national lustre?
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Written by: Captain Haddock
Saturday’s Rocky has an interesting perspective on the latest ProComp negotiations: how they affect Denver’s place on the national education scene. Originally viewed as a point of pride for Denver’s education community, ProComp is now being swept under the PR rug, according to the Rocky:
Denver’s pick as host of the Democratic National Convention was seen by city education leaders as a chance to show off an urban school district in the midst of groundbreaking reform.
Now it may bring more embarrassment than acclaim.
The unique collaboration between Denver Public Schools and its teachers union that produced the nation’s first wide-scale pay-for-performance plan is in tatters as the two sides squabble over how to spend the $25 million approved by voters to make the plan work.
ProComp, officially the Professional Compensation Plan for teachers, has been hailed from New York to Beijing for thoughtfully leading the nation’s foray into merit pay for teachers.
And why, need we remind ourselves, is ProComp now an “embarrassment”? What has mired this innovative program in so much controversy? Well, much like the “controversy” over teaching evolution in schools, this one has primarily been fabricated by ill-informed opponents, most significantly the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. They’re the folks who, absurdly, opposed Michael Benet’s plan to boost pay for teachers in the early years of their careers and to pay teachers more for working in high-poverty schools and for teaching hard- to-fill subjects, such as math and special education.
Denver’s education community is losing its space on the national stage because of such missteps. For example, Barack Obama is no longer mentioning ProComp in his stump speeches, according to the Rocky article.
Perhaps the DCTA will turn its attention back to supporting teachers and kids, rather than generating “controversy” where none need exist. Then Denver can find its way back to the national map, where it belongs.
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