The Education Sector

Updates, Analysis, and Commentary on Today's Education Issues

Updates

Future Scientists of America

The buzz around Washington is that the upcoming State of the Union address will include initiatives to bolster America's international standing in science and math. This has become a hot issue of late, pushed by a range of top business leaders and several high-profile studies and commissions.  But there's a danger that this latest surge of concern about our global position in science and engineering will lead to misunderstood problems and over-simplified solutions.

To hear the conventional wisdom, one would think that vast hordes of highly-trained Chinese engineering students are poised to descend, Khan-like, upon the plains of the global labor market, with various south Asian counterparts close behind.  But as the Wall Street Journal showed last summer, many of the numbers commonly used by people (and publications who should know better) are of dubious or non-existent origin.  Similarly, a recent study from Duke University found that some new Chinese "engineers" are actually technicians, car mechanics, and HVAC repairmen.  This is not to say that America shouldn't pay attention to global competitiveness -- on the contrary, it's a significant issue.  However, at present, there is a lot more noise than signal about the nature of the problem.

There is good reason to be concerned that some of the solutions are similarly half-baked.  So far the familiar mix of new scholarships and student loan-forgiveness programs are being trotted out.  In other words, the same ideas for inducing college students to become scientists and engineers that have been around for a long time are being touted as the answer to this new challenge.

Yet scientists are disproportionately white, male, and from economically advantaged backgrounds.  Unless we believe that a substantial number of such students are failing to become scientists and instead choosing other careers for want of proper incentives and inducements, many of the scarce resources devoted to new scholarship programs may well be rewarding people of means for choices they would have made anyway. 

In fact, the richest untapped source of future talent will be found in our underserved cities and among left-behind poor and minority students who get inadequate preparation at the elementary and secondary level.  Getting a job in the sciences means first completing a rigorous secondary math and science curriculum, graduating from high school, getting accepted to a four-year college with a quality degree program, being able to pay for college, and finishing a four-year degree.  We lose huge numbers of minority and low-income students at each of these waypoints on the path to a science career.

So the best strategy for boosting America's global economic standing probably isn't giving more students a reason to choose careers in science.  It's giving more students the ability to choose careers in science.

To accomplish this, however, business leaders will have to pay attention to the tough policy questions about finance, human capital, and governance in our elementary and secondary schools.   Unfortunately, with a few noteworthy exceptions like  Ed Voice of California or the Broad and Gates Foundations*, business leaders have been better at showing up at photo-opportunities than undertaking the sort of sustained and politically contentious work that genuinely changing state policies requires.  In his recent book "Cheating Our Kids" Education Sector Non-Resident Senior Fellow Joe Williams discusses this issue and explains why, despite an abundance of conspiracy theories about the corporate role in education, business leaders are generally AWOL when it comes to the complicated day-to-day issues of school improvement.  To really address the issue of preparing more students for math-and science-oriented careers, that's going to have to change. 

*Disclosure:  The Gates Foundation is a funder of Education Sector's Work.  In addition, the Broad Foundation has funded several projects led by Education Sector co-director Andrew Rotherham during the past five years.

Further Reading:

Rising Above the Gathering Storm:  Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, before the U.S. House of Representatives, October 20, 2005

Outsourcing Fears Help Inflate Some Numbers, Carl Bialik, The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2005

Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate: Placing the United States on a Level Playing Field with India and China, Gary Gereffi and Vivek Wadhwa, Duke University, December 12, 2005

Merit Pay Milestone in Houston

Linking teacher pay to student performance--a longtime, elusive goal of many education reformers--appears to be steadily moving into the political mainstream.  A growing number of large school districts are making serious efforts to break away from the traditional, "single salary schedule" that ties pay raises exclusively to experience and educational credentials. Case in point:  On January 12th, the Houston, Texas school board unanimously approved a new plan for basing compensation on growth in student test scores.  Coming from the nation's seventh-largest school district, the Houston plan marks a milestone in legitimizing merit pay. But it also highlights the importance of translating the easily-understood, common-sense principle of paying better teachers more money into far more complicated practice.  

Houston policymakers deserve credit for focusing its teacher rewards on improvement--teachers can earn up to $1,000 extra for each of three separate measures of school- and classroom-level growth in student scores on standardized tests in reading and math, compared to similar classrooms and schools.  A bonus for attendance is also smart--teacher absenteeism is an under-recognized problem in many districts.  In addition to support from local business leaders, a parents group, and the district's current elementary school teacher of the year, the Council of Great City Schools strongly endorsed the plan. 

But no one should think that implementing merit pay here or elsewhere will be simple.  Balancing individual and group incentives is tricky--teachers should be rewarded for personal excellence without undermining their incentive to help their peers and contribute to the school community.  All measures of learning growth have statistical margins of error, which should be accounted for.   And while any merit pay system should be based primarily on objective evidence of student learning, there should also be room for managerial judgment, particularly for teachers of subjects without standardized tests.  

The incentives also have to be big enough to matter--$3,000 is a seven percent increase over the average teacher salary in Houston, not much when you consider studies that say student growth in classrooms taught by the most effective teachers exceeds the least effective by 100 percent or more.  Houston leaders plan to raise the maximum bonus to $10,000 over time--better, but probably still short of what's needed in the long term.

News coverage included various disapproving comments from local and national union leaders.  Said one Houston teacher, "Any time you divide one set of teachers from another, you are sending the wrong message." This is the standard anti-merit pay talking point--you'll hear the words "divide" and "division" again and again as more districts decide to give higher-performing teachers more money.  It's also the key to understanding the underlying dynamics of this debate. 

Division, after all, is the polar opposite of union--divide, and be conquered.  Thus, teachers unions have long promoted cohesion through the illusion of sameness--unity through uniformity.  But it has come at a steep price: inflation-adjusted teacher salaries were largely stagnant during the boom years of the 1990s, even as national wealth soared.  The public was willing to pay for more teachers through class-size reduction programs, but not pay existing teachers more money.    

Yet instead of attacking stagnant teacher pay by giving the public new reasons to raise the pay ceiling for the best teachers, unions have instead tried to raise the pay floor--see the National Education Association's unrealistic and absurdly expensive plan to raise the minimum teacher salary to $40,000 nationwide.  This proposal, along with other pipe dream ideas to vault teacher pay across the board, will never, ever be implemented. 

Merit pay, by contrast, enjoys growing acceptance and should benefit from a new $99 million federal appropriation to support differentiated compensation based on test score growth in high-needs schools.  In the long run, good teachers will only get the pay raises they clearly deserve if more districts like Houston decide to make obvious performance differences among teachers transparent and meaningful to their compensation.  They, and their students, will be better for it.

Further reading:

Bold Teacher-Performance-Pay Plan Draws Widespread Support: HISD Holds News Conference to Announce Important Endorsements, Houston Independent School District, January 11, 2006

Houston to Link Teachers' Pay, Test Scores, Juan Lozano, The Houston Chronicle, January 11, 2006

Houston Ties Teachers' Pay to Test Scores, Ralph Blumenthal, The New York Times, January 13, 2006

Houston to Tie Teachers' Pay to Test Scores, Associated Press, January 13, 2006

If Only You Could Use Acronyms in Scrabble...

What's a four-letter word that would score major points in Scrabble and allows schools and school districts to borrow money at zero interest? It's QZAB--or Qualified Zone Academy Bonds, a promising federal school-construction program that is currently on shaky footing.

QZAB allows schools and school districts to finance school renovation by issuing bonds that are, for them, interest-free.  Rather than interest payments from borrowers, the bond holders receive a federal tax credit, so schools need only repay the principal, saving roughly half the cost of financing needed repairs or renovations.  There are a few catches, however. For starters, only schools located in an Empowerment Zone or Enterprise Community, or those with more than 35 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, can participate.  Second, schools using QZABs must finance at least 10 percent of the project's cost through a private match. Finally, QZABs can be used only for specified purposes--renovation or repairs to a school building, purchasing equipment for use in it, or course development and teacher training--and NOT for new construction.

Congress created QZABs in 1997, but due to poor outreach and state-level implementation, the financial community's reluctance to work with the new mechanism, and a few early technical glitches, they were not widely used in the first few years.  After the feds ironed out the glitches, however, a small community of lenders and brokers began to develop expertise in QZABs as a valuable niche market, and word about the interest-free financing began to spread.  A 2002 study from the Progressive Policy Institute found that 82 percent of then-available QZABs had been put to use, with demand for QZABs in some states exceeding the amount schools are allowed to issue. 

But the QZAB program's fate depends on tax legislation currently before Congress, commonly referred to as an "extenders package," because it extends a variety of expiring tax provisions for another year.  Versions of the package passed by both the House and Senate would extend QZABs for 2006 and 2007, so there's a good chance the program will continue.  But the high costs of some proposals in both bills means a conference committee, the group tasked with reconciling differences between House- and Senate-passed bills, must find ways to jettison provisions in order to bring down the costs of the final legislation.  So QZABs aren't in the clear yet.  The conference committee is expected to begin work on this in February, so stay tuned for more on the best federal school construction program you never heard of. 

Further Reading:

Early Returns: Tax Credit Bonds and School Construction?, Sara Mead, Progressive Policy Institute (September 2002)

Qualified Zone Academy Bonds, U.S. Department of Education

Quick Clicks

You're Invited!

Please come to the formal launch of Education Sector on January 31, which includes the release of "Margins of Error: The Education Testing Industry in the No Child Left Behind Era," a ground-breaking report by Education Sector Co-director Thomas Toch. Register and find out more details about the event.

New From Education Sector:

Education Sector's Kevin Carey looks at trends in college aid for low income students in a new "Chart You Can Trust" and Education Sector's Sara Mead reviews Frank McCourt's Teacher Man in an Education Sector "What We're Reading."

Ringing Hollow

Education Sector's Andrew J. Rotherham writes in the St. Petersburg Times that despite the serious shortcomings of the Florida voucher program, the Florida Supreme Court decision overturning it is hardly a cause for celebration. 

Re-writing the Charter?

Education Sector's Sara Mead writes in the Washington Post about ways to improve public charter schooling in the District of Columbia.

65 Percent Solution 100 Percent Substance Free

In an op-ed in the Akron Beacon-Journal Education Sector's Kevin Carey describes the lack of substance in the "65-percent solution" and why it's not the way to improve public school funding.

On a State-By-State Basis

A new RAND study of charter school demographics finds that black students in California and Texas are more likely to move to charter schools than their white counterparts. Data also shows students choosing charter schools tend to be lower performing than students at the public schools they are leaving. The students are more likely to move to public charter schools that are more racially homogenous than the public schools they left.

In Good Company?

With Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) campaigning to be the next U.S. House Majority Leader, the media and some lawmakers are taking a closer look at his ties to Sallie Mae and other student-loan providers that contributed a net $295,000 to his campaign last election cycle. Still reeling from the fallout of ongoing ethics scandals, it appears some Republican lawmakers could be wary of supporting a candidate whose actions as chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce may have benefited the companies in the industry that lobby and support him. 

A Doubletake on a Double-Standard

Slate's William Saletan takes aim at the media uproar surrounding the "new double-standard" in teacher/student sexploitation cases. With a host of recent media reports implying that female teachers who abuse male student get lighter sentences than male teachers who abuse female students, Saletan does a critical analysis of the actual data.

Where The Boys Aren't

Richard Whitmire examines the often-overlooked issue of lagging achievement by boys in latest The New Republic. Whitmire walks through the data that exists and points out the important questions that researchers and policymakers need to start asking about this understudied but critical topic.  Hopefully, this subject will receive more national attention, especially now that Newsweek and NBC's Today show have given it coverage.

Edu-what?

Check out the latest education news and analysis on Eduwonk.com. Take a look at the response to John Stossel's documentary, whether No Child Left Behind makes Milton Friedman smile, and more from New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who's a man with a new plan.

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