Reasons NOT to tie teacher pay to student test scores

Gordon MacInnes of The Century Foundation has published this brief on the topic of using student test scores to measure teacher effectiveness, a proposition that has been advanced by a number of school reformers. This very controversial topic recently returned to news headlines after the New Haven (CT) teachers’ union signed a contract that includes student performance in the evaluation process tied to teacher salary.*

Among the reasons MacInnes gives for NOT using student test scores to ‘grade’ teacher performance:

• Students are not randomly assigned to teachers (nor to schools) – some teachers might only be assigned students perceived to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’
• Standardized tests are evaluated for reliability and validity based on their intended purpose,  such as assessing 4th Grade math proficiency, not for evaluating teachers
• Compensating teachers according to individual performance might lessen the impetus for teachers to collaborate and share best practices

 

*See this New Haven Register (CT) article for more information on the contract signed by New Haven teachers.

The debate over 3-year bachelor’s degrees

Recently, NEWSWEEK published this cover story by former US Secretary of Education (and current Republican senator) Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Sen. Alexander argues that four-year bachelor’s degrees are outmoded and too expensive to maintain in the current economic climate. He concludes:

Expanding the three-year option or year-round schedules may be difficult, but it may be more palatable than asking Congress for additional bailout money, asking legislators for more state support, or asking students for even higher tuition payments. Campuses willing to adopt convenient schedules along with more-focused, less-expensive degrees may find that they have a competitive advantage in attracting bright, motivated students.

 

In the same issue, NEWSWEEK published this very interesting debate between five researchers and policy makers from around higher education. Both these articles are well worth reading.

U. S. Dept. of Ed report shows American students lag behind other nations in science and math

CNN reports:

…A special analysis put out last week by the National Center for Education Statistics [compares] 15-year-old U.S. students with students from other countries in the Organization for Economic Development.It found the U.S. students placed below average in math and science. In math, U.S. high schoolers were in the bottom quarter of the countries that participated, trailing countries including Finland, China and Estonia.

According to the report, the U.S. math scores were not measurably different in 2006 from the previous scores in 2003. But while other countries have improved, the United States has remained stagnant.

In science, the United States falls behind countries such as Canada, Japan and the Czech Republic.

The report is available here.

The troubled economy leads to teacher layoffs

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Widespread layoffs caused by tight school budgets are forcing thousands of teachers out of the classroom, in some cases, permanently. Many are taking other jobs or considering changing careers, even as they anxiously hope to be recalled.

When school begins this month, as many as 100,000 of last year’s teachers won’t have jobs, resulting in an overall drop in education jobs in the U.S., estimates Carmen Quesada, director of field operations for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

Some students paying for unpaid internships

The NY Times reports:

With paying jobs so hard to get in this weak market, a lot of college graduates would gladly settle for a nonpaying internship. But even then, they are competing with laid-off employees with far more experience.

So growing numbers of new graduates — or, more often, their parents — are paying thousands of dollars to services that help them land internships.

Call these unpaid internships that you pay for.

Does the U.S. face a shortage of scientists and engineers?

USA Today reports:

As the push to train more young people in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — careers gains steam, a few prominent skeptics are warning that it may be misguided — and that rhetoric about the USA losing its world pre-eminence in science, math and technology may be a stretch.

One example: Numbers from the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics issued Tuesday showed the unemployment rate for electrical engineers hit a record high, 8.6%, in the second quarter, more than doubling from 4.1% in the first quarter.

The rate for all engineers climbed to 5.5%, up from 3.9% in the first quarter. Those are still better than the nation’s overall unemployment rate of 9.7%, but the world is also still minting thousands of new graduates.

U.S. colleges graduated about 460,000 scientists and engineers combined in 2005 (many in social and behavioral sciences), according to the National Science Foundation.

Meanwhile, emerging nations such as India and China produced nearly 700,000 engineers alone. But the slow growth of U.S.-born STEM workers, analysts say, may have less to do with funding commitments than with cloudy career paths and low wages relative to other specialized careers such as medicine, law and finance.

Among the most vocal critics: Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which funds basic scientific, economic and civic research. He says there are “substantially more scientists and engineers” graduating from the USA’s universities than can find attractive jobs.

“Indeed, science and engineering careers in the U.S. appear to be relatively unattractive” compared with other career paths, he told Congress in 2007.

New report argues that K-12 teacher evaluations are flawed

The Denver Post reports:

Excellent teaching goes unrecognized and poor teaching is ignored across the country and in Denver, according to a national study that says failed policies make teachers as interchangeable as widgets.

The two-year study called “The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness” examined four states and 12 school districts, including those in Denver and Pueblo. It found common patterns: that teacher effectiveness rarely factors into decisions, such as how teachers are hired, fired or promoted.

“If you ask a superintendent and head of a union to name the top teachers and the bottom teachers, they couldn’t tell you,” said Dan Weisberg, vice president of policy for the New Teacher Project — the national nonprofit that conducted the study. “It goes back to the widget effect, which is the flawed assumption that each teacher is as good as the next.”

The study released Monday recommends districts adopt fair evaluation systems; train administrators to conduct the evaluations; tie evaluations to compensation and dismissal; and give poorly performing teachers a dignified way out.

The full Widget Effect report is available here.

More on 3-year bachelor’s degrees…

I previously posted here on the phenomenon of 3-year bachelor’s degrees, which some institutions see as a way to meet the needs of students who had difficulty affording expensive tuition without sacrificing college access.

The Washington Post has its own story on this phenomenon:

The four-year bachelor’s degree has been the model in the United States since the first universities began operating before the American Revolution. Four-year degrees were designed in large part to provide a broad-based education that teaches young people to analyze and think critically, considered vital preparation to participate in the civic life of American democracy.

The three-year degree is the common model at the University of Cambridge and Oxford University in England, and some U.S. schools have begun experimenting with the idea. To cram four years of study into three, some will require summer work, others will shave course lengths and some might cut the number of credit hours required.

In a struggling economy, finance professionals look to teaching

The NY Times reports:

In March, the [New Jersey] State Legislature approved a pilot program… Called Traders to Teachers… designed to turn unemployed finance professionals into math teachers in three months. Successful candidates, who are not required to have been math majors, will attend classes free at Montclair State University…

Since December 2007, New Jersey’s financial services sector has shed 16,000 jobs, said David J. Socolow, state commissioner of labor and workforce development. Thousands of other residents lost similar jobs in New York.

Traders to Teachers, financed by a federal grant, will do more than retrain dislocated workers, Mr. Socolow said, it will also ease the state’s shortage of math teachers.

Weak economy prompting some students to stay in – or return to – school

MSNBC reports:

…Across the country, education leaders say they’re seeing what may be one bright spot in the dismal downturn: more students opting to stay in — or return to — school.

…Long waiting lists for adult education and GED — General Education Development — classes, spiking enrollments at community colleges and, perhaps, a surge in returns by high-school dropouts and a decline in those who leave in the first place, may all point to a renewed focus on education, experts say.

“If there’s anything good to come out of this recession, it’s to make educational lemonade out of these lemons,” said Bob Wise, the former West Virginia governor who now heads the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy group.