Matt Yglesias

Is an Education Revolving Door Such a Bad Thing?

To have long-term prosperity, a country needs good schools. And it’s hard to have good schools without good teachers. And teaching effectively is, in turn, hard. Also hard is getting certification to teach. But, interestingly, the evidence suggests that there’s little correlation between the effectiveness of a teacher and whether he or she came through a standard certification program or one of the many “alternative certification” programs that exist around the country. Thus, there’s good reason to think that, as Robin Chait and Michele McLaughlin write, “These programs are among the most promising strategies for expanding the pipeline of talented teachers, particularly for subject shortage areas and high-needs schools.” But though alternative certification programs exist in all 50 states, in many states they’re not very robust and/or there’s no clear vision of how what’s already in place could be expanded and built upon. How to do that is the subject of their paper, but at the event CAP hosted based around the paper skepticism focused on the idea that alternatively certified teachers don’t stay in the profession long enough:

Richelle Patterson, senior policy analyst at the National Education Association, echoed concerns about the readiness of many alternatively certified teachers. She called traditional teacher training programs “career-starters,” and said that many alternative certification programs lead to a “revolving door.”

This just doesn’t seem like a huge problem to me. Evidence suggests that teachers improve their skills in their first couple of years in the classroom but that after that, additional experience doesn’t do a great deal to improve performance. So while there’s nothing wrong with veteran teachers, it’s not particularly crucial to get people to make a life-long commitment to teaching. And of course people who teach for a couple of years and find that they don’t have a taste for it should be encouraged to leave, not encouraged to stay.

More broadly, we’ve moved over the past 20-30 years to a much more flexible employment market. It’s less common than it once was for people to stay in the same job for long stretches of time, and more common for people to switch fields. In principle, this could be an opportunity for schools to pick up mid-career professionals who decide there’s something appealing about a teacher’s work schedule or who are suffering from structural shifts in the economy but still have the kind of basic subject-matter knowledge that could be the basis for effective teaching. Even if the economy recovers robustly, for example, there are going to be sectoral shifts involved and plenty of people with math and science skills who were working in finance or automotive engineering will need new jobs. Some sub-set of those people would probably make good math or science teachers. And conversely, there may be young people who are interested in teaching and potentially good at it but who just aren’t sure they want to commit to a lifetime in the field. This is a labor market that it would be good to tap. Unfortunately, the structure of current pension policies discourages that. And so does a mentality that says no pathway into the profession can be a good one unless it produces someone who’ll keep teaching for decades. But we should be moving in the opposite direction—more flexible pensions that let people change jobs, and more encouragement of “alternative” teachers.

Another thing I would note is that there’s “revolving” and then there’s revolving. A friend of mine in college did Teach for America for a couple of years, then revolved out the door to a position with a state Department of Education, then revolved to a teaching job in a different city, and now is an administrator at a charter school serving low-income kids in Boston. In this case, it’s true that her stay in the first school was likely too short-term for her students to benefit from peak-effectiveness teaching (but then again, it’s not as if highly skilled teachers had been clamoring for positions in high-poverty schools in the urban south and getting displaced by TFA kids), but it’s definitely wrong to portray her as a dilettante who just ducked in-and-out of education for two years. There’s an enduring benefit to bringing people into the general field of education and working in troubled districts that’s independent of the issue of how long someone stays in the exact position they were placed in.

Getting to Effectiveness

We have some very good evidence that teachers vary quite a bit in terms of their effectiveness in improving student achievement. We also have good evidence that the current certification process doesn’t do a good job of tracking effectiveness—certified teachers are no more effective than teachers who’ve come through “alternative certification” tracks. It’s also clear that our policies don’t reward more-effective teachers in a manner that’s consistent with the importance of retaining highly-effective teachers to building a highly effective school. Nor do our policies do anything to try to ensure that highly effective teachers can be found in the schools with the highest-need students. On the contrary, they tend to do the reverse. These basic points—and the idea that we ought to change things—have been penetrating mainstream consciousness of late. But it’s often not clear exactly what policy shifts will make it possible to obtain and use data on teacher effectiveness, especially because education policy gets made at a lot of different levels.

Yesterday, CAP released an excellent report from Robin Chait that recaps what we know and goes step-by-step through the issue of how federal policy could help support the idea of shifting from a system based on qualifications to a system based on effectiveness.

One interesting issue is whether Republicans will show any interest in these kind of things as we move toward re-authorization of NCLB/ESEA. The last version of the bill was really the only significant bipartisan initiative of the Bush years—a meeting of minds between George W. Bush on the one hand, and Ted Kennedy and George Miller on the other. And many conservative intellectuals are interested in this stuff, in no small part because teacher’s unions don’t much care for it. But in recent years, conservative politicians have more-or-more retreated to local control bromides and the current crop of GOP congressmen seems more Limbaughized than ever before.

By Request: Personnel Quality

I liked NS’s other question too:

Why is “finding better teachers” such a preoccupation among self-described education reformers? Of course, we’d have a better education system if our teachers were better. We’d also have a better military if our soldiers were better and a better health care system if our doctors and nurses were better. Why is education the only policy area where “find better people” is treated as a workable solution?

With regard to soldiers, I would reject the premise. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War there was a very low level of interest in joining the United States military and consequently in order to maintain the required overall force size it was necessary to make recruiting standards quite low and to be pretty lax about who you would keep on. The rebuilding of the quality of the personnel employed by the military over the course of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the great prides of the officers who were involved. And when the Iraq War was leading to a personnel crunch and moves toward diluting recruiting standards there was, rightly, a great deal of hand-wringing over it. Concern about personnel quality is also one of, if not the, main reason why the military brass is generally very hostile to the idea of conscription and this is also why we’ve encouraged our NATO allies to abolish conscript and build smaller, higher-quality, more professionalized forces.

Quality of personnel should always be a concern across public services. Some cities, for example, have trouble offering police officers salaries that are as high as what’s offered in neighboring suburbs. This tends to lead to problems with the quality of the staff available to urban police departments which, in turn, makes it more difficult to keep crime under control.

With regard to teachers, though, it’s worth trying to be more specific since the debate has focused on a couple of particular points. In the United States, we tend to require teachers to do a lot of preemptive qualifying in terms of getting themselves certified. And then after a few years of teaching, they become eligible for tenure status. But we do have some fairly extensive experience with teachers going into the classroom without traditional certification. And the evidence suggests that such teachers are basically just as effective as the teachers who do have the traditional certification. The evidence also suggests that while teachers tend to get a lot more effective after their first couple of years of experience, they don’t get more and more and more effective as further time passes. Thus, the general shape of the teacher quality reform proposals is to (a) relax the preemptive screening so as to make it easier for anyone with a college degree to get into the classroom, (b) make the tenure decision more strictly tied to student achievement, and then (c) take advantage whatever increase in your potential labor force step (a) has given you to make it possible to in step (b) dump the bottom X% of the worst-performing teachers. To all of this I would be strongly inclined to add (d) start paying people more to further increase the size of the labor pool and make step (c) all the more effective.

But the need to have good people doing important public services is by no means unique to teaching and it certainly applies to the military.

Ex Post Teacher Quality

I really highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s article on quarterbacks and teacher quality in the current New Yorker. Unfortunately, I think that when talking about this important paper from Thomas J. Kane, Douglas O. Staiger, and CAP’s own Robert Gordon he gets a bit too entranced by the slightly mysterian notion that it’s impossible to identify effective teachers in advance. That may be true, but what the paper actually says is that our current certification methods don’t in fact do a good job of predicting teacher effectiveness.

One response to this could be to try harder to dream up a better method. But while it would probably be good to do some research into this issue, the Kane/Staiger/Gordon research also indicates that we could do a lot to improve the quality of instruction in our schools without identifying such a method. That’s because ex post evaluations of teacher effectiveness are pretty reliable predictors of future performance. In other words, if we look at the first few years of a teacher’s performance we can get a pretty good sense of how well she or he will fare over the course of her career.

The main policy implication of this is that we should be less strict about who we let into the classroom in the first place (since our current ex ante screening mechanism doesn’t work) and more strict and evidence-based about who we give tenure to (since we have good ex post screening mechanisms that we just don’t make much use of). A secondary implication is that it makes sense, at the margin, to commit resources to things that are more likely to draw applicants into the teaching profession through, e.g., higher salaries than on things like smaller class sizes. Basically, we should increase starting salaries and relax (or scrap) credentialing requirements, then make tenure decisions after a few years based on value-added test measures along with financial incentives to try to get the best performing teachers into the high-poverty schools and classrooms where they’re most needed.

Teacher quality is the internal-to-the-school variable that has the biggest apparent impact on students’ learning, and we actually have decent ways of measuring teacher performance. But we don’t actually do very much to put that information to good use. It’s a tremendous waste.

Class Size

I don’t disagree with Hendrick Hertzberg very often, but I think this is wrong:

Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.

For one thing, we need to start out with the fact that decreasing class size isn’t an alternative to addressing school finance issues and the lack of equity involved. Obviously, to have smaller classes you need more teachers and that would cost more money. And more money should be spent, especially on schools with lots of poor students (see this from Robert Gordon for some proposals to improve funding issues). But even once we’re assuming that struggling underfunded schools are going to be getting more money, I don’t think it’s totally clear that reducing class size is the best use of the marginal dollar.

There are already a lot of difficulties involved in getting the best staff available into the schools that need them the most. If you simply expand the number of people you’re trying to hire for what are currently the least-desirable positions, you’re going to wind up decreasing the average quality of your staff when we really need to increase it. Clearly, there are a lot of schools in the United States and perhaps some of them have class sizes so large that reducing them is really the most pressing need. But in most cases, I would say that creating financial incentives to better fill hard-to-staff positions is going to be a better use of money than creating new positions.