Education
Measuring Teacher Performance
A recent report that the Los Angeles public schools will start publishing test scores by individual teachers has touched of a storm of protest. The so-called value-added gauges are intended to provide data on how well teachers improve the test scores of their students over the course of a school year.
An academic report by the Economic Policy Institute argues that “the nonrandom assignment of students to classrooms and schools—and the wide variation in students’ experiences at home and at school—mean that teachers cannot be accurately judged against one another by their students’ test scores, even when efforts are made to control for student characteristics in statistical models.”
Although that makes a lot of sense, I understand where the push for value-added gauges comes from. As a parent, I’ve never felt that the effectiveness of my children’s teachers has been evaluated in any meaningful way. Average and incompetent teachers return, year after year, to inflict their ineptness on their students. Lacking any reportable measures of competence, they are unaccountable for their performance except as part of an aggregate school’s overall performance. Teachers need to be accountable for the quality of their work, but measuring that quality has been elusive.
The EPI report offers alternatives that rely less on test scores such as “systematic observation protocols with well-developed, research-based criteria to examine teaching,” but, as the report observes, “American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers.” And this is only getting worse as shrinking budgets cut funds needed for…
1Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBest-Practice Teaching
Doug Lemov has written a book about a surefire way to improve education: Develop better teachers. Lemov is a former principal and teacher who is now a consultant to school districts. He looked at Stanford research that showed that in one year, the top 5% of teachers can raise students one-and-a-half grade levels, while the bottom 5% put their kids a half-grade behind. And then he asked: “What if we could make all teachers a little bit better?” (“Made to Stick: Watch the Game Film,” Dan Heath and Chip Heath, FastCompany, June 1, 2010)
You could start by firing the incompetent 5% across the U.S. but then you would need 185,000 new teachers to replace them. So Lemov asked another question: “What if we could make all teachers a little better?”
Sounds great, but what makes some teachers better? He decided he had better find out. He started with a great teacher in New Jersey, observing and videotaping him in action. He found another teacher and repeated the process, and then another, and another. Five years later he had recorded and analyzed hundreds of hours of videotape. He put his findings in a book: Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.
His techniques are concrete, specific, and actionable. Here’s an example:
8Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“When you want them to follow your directions, stand still. If you’re walking around passing out papers, it looks like the directions are no more important than all of the other things you’re doing. Show that your…
Higher Education at a Crossroads
Higher education appears to be poised at one of those crossroads—unless you believe it’s been walking down the wrong road for years. The cost of going to college has skyrocketed. The competition from online and research alternatives and from entrepreneurial and social ventures after high school are siphoning students away. More are questioning the value of a college education and deciding that it’s just not worth it.
On his blog, Seth Godin lists five reasons he thinks higher education is about to crash and burn:
1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students. We no longer live in an industrial economy that demands standardized students. In a networked, global economy, we need to teach students how to think critically, solve problems, work together, and be creative. Most colleges fail to do that for the majority of their students.
2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up. Godin includes a chart that shows the inflation of tuition and fees compared to medical costs and the cost of living. Since 1978, tuition and fees have risen by a factor of 9.5, medical costs by a factor of 6, and the cost of living by a factor of 3.2. We hear a lot of outrage over medical costs, which suggests that outrage over the cost of college is likely not far behind.
3. The definition of “best” is under siege. According to Godin, colleges send millions of pieces of junk mail to high school students to boost the…
29Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSchool Districts Saving Money
Public schools are desperate for money. Their funding has been frozen or cut for years, when adjusted for inflation, while the demands on their resources have grown. So what would they do to save this kind of money?
- $4 million saved through energy savings
- $300,000 saved by changing the utilization of preferred healthcare providers
- $366,000 saved my changing how it manages and controls its database
- $2 million saved annually by shifting how it purchased energy
- $4 million saved over a three-year period through a cooperative interagency bidding process for employees’ healthcare services
The three school districts that realized these savings are part of an education reform project, called North Star, developed by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC). You can read a white paper on the project here. What the districts did to save this kind of money was to implement a North Star plan with seven components:
- Learn from existing North Star schools to spread reform faster and more cost-efficiently
- Identify processes and outcomes, gaps, and best practices in a process and outcome measurement database available at APQC—if you contribute your district’s data
- Public training on process and performance management (PPM)
- Finding, learning, sharing, and comparing data and best practices in PPM
- Virtual networking through communities of practice
- A process maturity model for assessing your PPM system
- A PPM knowledge database
The focus of the North Star project is on two areas that are prominent in the Baldrige model: process and performance management. As Jack Grayson, founder, chairman and CEO of APQC and the author of the white paper, wrote, “the bulk…
31Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWho Are a High School’s Customers?
A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor described the value of analyzing data for high school educators. (“Numbers Game Grows in Education, Healthcare,” March 4, 2010–no link available). The article uses the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (CalPASS) as an example of how “data-driven discoveries are helping to revitalize educators’ efforts.”
CalPASS has a database of more than 355 million student records from kindergarten through college. It uses business intelligence software to analyze the data and provides reports on its findings.
One study found that students who stopped taking English courses after 10th grade required the same level of remediation in community college as students who continued to take advanced English courses through 12th grade. Teachers naturally wondered how this could be true, which caused them to examine the differences between what they were teaching and the expectations of community colleges. According to Brad Phillips, executive director of CalPASS, “educators learned that high-school courses emphasized literature, while community-college courses covered writing and grammar, and four-year colleges emphasized analysis and argumentation. As a result, officials changed high-school teaching to create better alignment.”
From a Baldrige perspective, this means that high school teachers identified community colleges and four-year colleges as their customers, identified their customers’ requirements, and changed their curricula to better meet those requirements.
That’s an excellent start but I’m not sure it will solve the bigger problem, which is preparing high school students to succeed in life. The changes high school officials made should help their students be better prepared for college, but are…
15Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat’s the Real Value of a College Education?
The Baldrige Criteria are all about asking the right questions to help you understand and improve how your organization operates. If your organization is a college or university, here are four fundamental questions recently posed by Fast Company:
- What do you really learn in college?
- Is what you learned in college really what’s producing the value?
- Or is it simply the mere fact of having a college degree?
- Or maybe there’s something more subtle going on—that is, people who go to college tend to be more motivated or hard-working and would have ended up succeeding whatever they did?
“Infographic of the Day: Is College Really Worth It?” by Cliff Kuang suggests answers to the these questions in an intriguing graphic. The key points are:
- Two million high school graduates enroll in college each year. One in three drops out after the first year, which wastes $9 billion.
- One out of five students can’t balance a checkbook.
- One out of two students can’t correctly analyze prose like news editorials. (How can a democracy function if our supposedly smartest young people cannot think critically?)
- The average college freshman spends over ten hours a week partying and eight hours a week studying—and more than 63 hours engaged with media and technology (games, cell phones, TV, social networks)
- 57% of students need six years or more to get their degree
Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business (MCB) received the Baldrige Award in 2004. In the Results section of its application summary, available here, it responds directly to the first two questions above:
- What do you really learn…
Lessons from High-Performing K-12 Schools
If you’ve been looking for K-12 education processes and results to benchmark, check out The Education Trust. Each year it honors high-performing schools with its Dispelling the Myth Awards, about which it writes, “These schools don’t offer simple answers or easy solutions, but several common strategies emerge from their practices. They provide a rich curriculum coupled with strong, focused instruction. They have high expectations for all students. They use data to track student progress and individual student needs. And they employ purposeful professional development to improve teachers’ skills.”
The Education Trust’s Web site offers a number of reports and presentations that use success stories to address everything from value-added data to state accountability systems to the achievement gap between white, minority, and low-income students.
For example, you can download the following PowerPoint presentation: “Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps Between Groups: Lessons from Schools and Districts on the Performance Frontier.” The report begins with positive news about progress in reading and math in elementary and middle schools. The good news doesn’t extend to high school, however, where achievement in both reading and math has been flat since 1984.
And then the news gets worse. Of 29 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the U.S. ranks 24th in math and in math problem-solving. We rank 21st in science out of 30 OECD countries. You can’t argue that the low achievers are holding us down because our high socio-economic students rank 23rd out of 29 OECD countries in math. You can’t even argue that immigrants are hurting our…
15Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
