Boys Being Graded Less for Behavioral Matters?

Do you have boys?  You may want to read this little story and start challenging the basis for their grades. According to an upcoming study highlight by Christina Hoff Sommers:

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys. 

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted. 

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys. 

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.

An interesting read to say the least.  If greade differentials begin at such an early age and in no relation to actual academic work, what does it mean.  Well for some nothing.  As Sommers writes further:

There are some who say, well, too bad for the boys. If they are inattentive, obstreperous and distracting to their teachers and peers, that’s their problem. After all, the ability to regulate one’s impulses, delay gratification, sit still and pay close attention are the cornerstones of success in school and in the work force. It’s long past time for women to claim their rightful share of the economic rewards that redound to those who do well in school. 

As one critic told me recently, the classroom is no more rigged against boys than workplaces are rigged against lazy and unfocused workers. But unproductive workers are adults — not 5-year-olds. If boys are restless and unfocused, why not look for ways to help them do better? As a nation, can we afford not to? 

A few decades ago, when we realized that girls languished behind boys in math and science, we mounted a concerted effort to give them more support, with significant success. Shouldn’t we do the same for boys? 

When I made this argument in my book “The War Against Boys,” almost no one was talking about boys’ academic, social and vocational problems. Now, 12 years later, the press, books and academic journals are teeming with such accounts. Witness the crop of books in recent years: Leonard Sax’s “Boys Adrift,” Liza Mundy’s “The Richer Sex,” Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men.”

In a world in which there are now far more women graduating from college than men (and women valuing that degree both for themselves and their future spouses) can we afford to tolerate an assessment scheme in kindergarten and elementary school that burdens young men because they have not developed the necessary self-control yet?  Or when that development of self-control has nothing to do with an individual boy as it is to simply being a boy?



There have been numerous studies and theories abound about what will happen to society in general if we keep demeaning boys and men, or denying their maleness.

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Check out my soccer blog at Nutmegs and Stepovers

The Very Real Costs of Free Public Education

Eduflack takes up the hidden "tax" on parents with kids entering public school. I talked about this issue about this time last year. Here is what I wrote,

My question is why do I and every other parent have to provide these supplies?

The answer, this school supply list is a scam, it is a "tax," a means of forcing parents to pay more for the public education system beyond the personal needs of their child and their already hefty tax payments. The school system gets the parents to buy "school supplies" so the system doesn't have to do the heavy lifting of determining what supplies are needed and how to pay for them. The school doesn't have to manage inventory, track useage rates, and all the other matters involved in supply provision and control. If schools need something or the teachers need something, they simply add it to the list of "school supplies" for each pupil and then "tax" each student to provide for the common "good." It doesn't matter to the schools, for there is a steady stream of new parents and new students each year to "tax."

The school supply tax is the perfect governmental scheme of passing responsibility onto the "tax payer" and shirking accountability for the use of the taxes.

I got one comment that called me an anti-tax whiner.

Well, I am an anti-tax whiner. I don't care about having to buy supplies for my child to use, after all they are needed by my child. I can enforce accountability on my child for the proper use and maintenance of those supplies. The fact that most parents walk into Target, Wal-Mart or other stores to buy supplies for "common useage" without thinking that they are paying a tax just makes it easier to get around the problem of the tax. If the parents had to write a check at the start of each year rather than buying the supplies themselves, then there would be greater impact.

The fact is, with the regular growth in school budgets, one should ask, "with so much more money from year to year, why do teachers and students have to buy common useage supplies?" That people don't is troubling and if by my asking, I am an anti-tax whiner, then I wear the label with pride.

What??!!! Principals at Failing Schools Eligible for Bonuses

According to the NY Times, the principals at four failing New York City schools are eligible for bonuses. How could that be you ask:

Education Department officials said the incongruity resulted from two different measuring systems.

The school report cards judge schools on factors that are not considered in allotting the bonuses. The report cards, for instance, judge high schools on how students perform on five Regents exams, while the bonuses look only at English and math Regents scores. The report cards also consider how many credits high school students accumulate each year, while the bonus system does not.

Alright, I see the discrepancy and differences in measurements, but is it not too hard to eliminate principals at schools that are failing from the list? I mean really.

This is just another episode of how one hand does not know what the other hand is doing in education.

Frederick County Teachers Want More Pay--But Are Well Paid Now

On Wednesday, the Frederick County School Board heard testimony about the FY 2009 budget. Among those testifying were Frederick County Teachers Association President Gary Brennan and Vice President Carol Dagan, both arguing for "competitive salaries" for county teachers.

Now don't get me wrong, Brennan and Dagan have every right, even the duty, to plead their case for more money for teachers. But let's take a look at some facts. The Frederick News Post conveniently links to a table of Frederick County Public School Salaries. With the FCTA arguing that teacher salaries are not "competitive" you have to wonder, what is FCPS doing paying our teachers poverty wages? Well, lets take a look at the teacher' salaries at three county schools, Ballenger Creek Elementary, Urbana High School and West Frederick Middle School.

Ballenger Creek Elementary has 42 teachers, including music, art, special ed, intervention and PE Teachers. The average pay for these 42 teachers is $59,489.74. The median salary is $61,061.50, which means that 21 teachers make more than that amount and 21 less that $61,000. The top salary is $82,555, three teachers make that salary. The smallest salary is $31,925, two teachers earn that much. The total teacher payroll (salaries only) is $2.49 million out of a total school payroll of $3.17 million, or 78.5% of payroll on teachers. The average length of service for the teachers at this school is 11.3 years. The median is 9.5 years. There were four new hires in 2007 and 9 teachers (21%) with three or fewer years of experience.

West Frederick Middle School has 68 teachers. The average pay for these teachers is $60,989.23 and the median salary is $60,586.50. So there are not a lot of highly paid teachers or lesser paid teaches skewing the salary range, the salaries are pretty well distributed. The top salary is $90,971, with three teachers making that salary, and the lowest salary is $21,550 by a targeted intervention teacher who is apparently working part-time given a six year length of service with FCPS. The total teacher payroll for West Frederick (salaries only) is $4.14 million out of a total payroll budget of $5.42 million. The teachers at West Frederick have an average length of service of 11 years and a median service of 10 years. Only one teacher is a new hire in 2007 and 11 teachers (16%) have three or fewer years of experience.

Urbana High School has 96 teachers. The average pay for these teachers is $57,247 and the median pay is $53,886. The top salary is $90,971 and the lowest salary is $30,687. The average and median salaries are a bit lower at this high school compared to the elementary and middle school sampls because the average and median length of service in FCPS is significantly lower. The average length of service is 8.7 years and the median is 8 years. There are 20 teachers (20.8%) with three or fewer years of experience. The total teacher payroll is just shy of $5.5 million out of a total school payroll of $7.1 million.

Take note that these are cash compensation salaries and do not account for the substantial benefits package that teachers receive, including generous pension and health care benefits.

So, teachers at the three schools noted above had a average individual income of between $57,250 and $60,500. The median income, again for these individuals, was between $53,886 and $61,061. Economic data for Frederick County indicates that the median household income in November 2007 was is $60,507 and the median family income is $67,879. Using the lowest median teacher income for the three schools, teachers are making 89.2% of the median household income and 79.3% of the median family income--all by themselves with a generous benefit package. In Frederick County, males had a median income of $42,378 versus $30,564 for females. In our teacher pool for these three schools, female teachers (146) are making a median income of $55,558 on a median experience level of eight years. Male teachers (60) make a median salary of $59,023 on a median experience level of nine years. Thus female teachers in Frederick County are making a 81.7% larger income than the general female population in Frederick County. Male teachers are make 39.2% more money than the general population of males in Frederick County. In all of Frederick County there are 413 teachers employed by the FCPS making better than $80,000 a year.

This analysis is done on just three schools in Frederick County. A larger county wide assessment is worth a look to examine all the teachers, full or part time, in the county, but I suspect the numbers would not be all that different.

For all the bluster about teachers not being paid a competitive salary looks to be pure bunk, particularly when compared to the incomes of the rest of the county. So if teachers are being well compensatd with 413 invididually making some 30% more than the median household income, why then is the School Board even considering more than a cost of living increase in salaries?

The union can ask for more money, but it seems to me that teacher salaries in Frederick County are not only more than sufficient for our area, they are more than competitive with the every other industry in the county.

Teacher Evaluations Suck

If Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman could have gotten that line past the editors, it would have been just as accurate a title asRush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education. From the blurb:

Because teacher evaluation is at the heart of the educational enterprise —the quality of teaching in the nation’s classrooms—it has the potential to be a powerful lever of teacher and school improvement. But that potential is being squandered throughout public education today.

A host of factors—a lack of accountability for school performance, staffing practices that strip school systems of incentives to take teacher evaluation seriously, union ambivalence, and public education’s practice of using teacher credentials as a proxy for teacher quality—have resulted in teacher evaluation systems throughout public education that are superficial, capricious, and often don’t even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students’ learning.

Still reading the actual report, but it doesn't take much of a genius to know that teacher evaluations are hard on the school's administration. In a typical elementary schools, and my daughter's school is pretty typical, there may be 22-25 classroom teachers, each of whom has to be evaluated. There is a principal, a vice principal and that is it for evaluators. There may be a "department head" but that is usually another classroom teacher.

Rothman and Toch make some recommendations--more on that to come.

Education Spending and Oil Prices

Carpe Diem has a graph that demonstrates that we are spending more on education than on oil, lots more.

Check out the graph.

Local Media and Education Statistics

Friends of Dave parses a story from a local paper in California. When major dailies make mistakes like these, they tend to get shredded by lots of people. When local media does it, there is very little accountability to the public. This is why so many people have a wrong impression of NCLB and education policy, because it is reported so poorly.

NCLB Reporting Problems

Nice to know that states follow the letter of the law.

SAT Achievement Gap

Both major Maryland dailies are reporting on a story that shows an achievement gap on the Standardized tests among blacks, even in the suburbs. The Washington Post notes:

SAT scores at the Washington region's top high schools show an achievement gap between blacks and the rest of the student population -- a gap that is often masked by the overall performance of the schools.

White students in the spring graduating class of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda -- the top performer in Montgomery County -- averaged 1893 out of a possible 2400 points on the SAT. The 13 black students tested averaged 1578, more than 300 points lower.

At Yorktown, Arlington County's leader, white students averaged 1804 on the SAT; black students averaged 1470. Black students at Severna Park High, the top performer in Anne Arundel County, averaged 1336, while white students' average was 1646.

School officials assert that part of the reason for the dispartity is that black students the level of preparation for the SAT.

"There are differences in preparation that will take years to erase," said Wayne Camara, the College Board's vice president for research.

In Montgomery, for instance, 65 percent of all white 2006 graduates took at least one Advanced Placement exam. The corresponding figure for blacks: 27 percent.

Recruiting black and Hispanic students into advanced math classes has been a top goal of Montgomery Superintendent Jerry D. Weast since he took the job in 1999. From 2001 to 2006, the share of the county's black students taking accelerated math in the sixth grade rose from 15 percent to 22 percent. Black student SAT scores should rise, Weast said, when those students reach high school.

"It's all about taking the right courses," Weast said. "And that's been particularly important for the Hispanics and the African Americans, because historically, they have not been in the right courses."

Assuming that the preparation and types of classes that are taken play a role, the school systems may be on the right track. Students with a solid grounding in math, specifically algebra and geometry (often tested on the SAT), English and writing skills will do well on the SAT, those without that background won't, it really is as simple as that. But the students discussed in the Washington Post article are enrolled in some of the area's best public schools, where there is an atmosphere geared toward college so that environment is not the problem.

However, some parents are learning the lesson that good education begins with the home environment.

Charisse Eubanks, mother of two black Churchill students, said it should be obvious to parents that sending their children to a top school is not enough. Parents must learn the system: enroll their children in advanced courses, see that they get good grades, take the right tests and earn the right scores, and "aggressively" encourage performance.

"Education starts at home," Eubanks said. "And I think that far too often, that's where the ball is being dropped -- at home."

Other black parents agree.

"Simply attending a high-performing school doesn't guarantee success," said Bertra McGann, mother of two students at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, where 444 points separate the average score of black students from that of white students.

McGann said the gap is about more than race: Even at affluent schools, it's about differences in family income, education and class.

Black students who score poorly on such measures as the SAT might have parents who "lack the capacity to guide and prepare the students for the college admissions process and also the college preparation process," she said. If those students "can be convinced of the link between a college education and the quality of life, then I think we could see the achievement gap narrow."

Meanwhile in the Baltimore suburbs, school officials and parents are coming to grips with the same facts in a different context, namely the Maryland high school assessments, a series of tests that the class of 2009 must pass in order to graduate.

An alarming pattern of failure is surfacing: Minority students, especially African-Americans, are struggling to pass the exams in the suburban classrooms their families had hoped would provide a better education.

"It is a wake-up call to African-Americans in Maryland," said Dunbar Brooks, president of the state school board and former president of the Baltimore County school board. "For many African-Americans, the mere fact that your child attends a suburban school district does not make academic achievement automatic."

Baltimore school officials and community activist note how far out of alignment the test scores are with the the community at large, which is fairly well educated.

Critics and activists in Baltimore County see the results in some schools, such as ultramodern New Town High in Owings Mills, as grossly out-of-step with area demographics not related to race.

More than 90.5 percent of area residents have earned a high school diploma and 42.8 percent have at least a bachelor's degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and median household income is $53,000.

"It's inexcusable," said Ella White Campbell, a retired city educator and executive director of the Liberty Road Community Council. "You can't say it's income that's the problem. And education levels are very high. ... The disconnect is in the fact that you have an educated community that has not realized kids are not getting the basics."

Of course, cultural perceptions come into play according to some:

Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard University who co-wrote a book about the achievement gap, notes other societal forces that can drag down black students at affluent schools. Black teens in well-heeled suburbs tend to socialize with children less affluent than themselves, to the detriment of their academic goals, he said. And black families might be less gripped by the "rat-race mentality" that sweeps up most parents in such suburbs as Potomac.

"Being behind is discouraging," he said. "And the easiest thing to do when you're behind is say, 'Oh well, who cares about this race anyway?' "

But there is a massive problem with this particular analysis posted by both the Post and the Sun, it is unfair to the black students. In the DC suburbs at least, the population of black students taking the SAT is pretty small, 19 in one school. It is very hard to draw comparisons between groups of students in that context, the sample size is just too small.

A better comparison would be to look not at black students versus white students on these tests only, but to look a little further. Where do the black students rank in terms of class ranking? Let us say that the majority of black students at that school are in the middle quintile (20 percent) of the school. Now compare their SAT of HSA scores against whites in the middle quintile. What is the achievement gap there? I will wager good money that the comparison of black students middle quintile is much closer to the middle quintile of white students, possibly even closing the gap altogether.

We need to compare apples to apples and we are not.

This is not to say that the phenonmenon is not cause for concern, because in theory at least, there should be black students in the top echelons of any high school, but there may not be (I don't know if there are or not). Any achievement gap is cause of concern, but let us make sure we have an achievement gap to begin with.

The Achievement Gap--A Familial Take

La Shawn Barber looks at the academic achievement gap and draws teh conclusion that the problem is not money or even the poverty status of poorly achieving black/latino students--it is home life. Looking at an LA Times story on the achievement gap and a report on relocating poor blacks to wealthier neighborhood schools, Barber notes:

You can move poor blacks into wealthier neighborhoods filled with white folks; you can poor billions more dollars into closing the achievement gap through the institutional approach; you can teach black kids myths about “black” Egyptians and how the Greeks stole their culture; you can teach in ebonics; you can come up with yet more idiotic educational theories; you can continue dumbing down the curriculum and decreasing the g-load on tests so it only appears minorities are improving; you can keep telling black kids they live in a racist world in which they’ll never catch a break; or…

…you can face reality. As long as blacks keep having babies without providing children stable, intact homes, as long as black parents keep turning a blind eye to the anti-intellectual strain that runs through the black subculture and in their own homes, and as long as they continue looking to the government to work miracles and fix problems, absolutely nothing will change.

Barber has long been advocating that blacks face up to the realization that their lifestyle and cultural choices are leading them along this path of substandard education despite efforts by government to help. I susptect that, to a certain extent, Barber is right. Poor people of other races, including dirt poor immigrants arriving on our shores unable to speak the language, routinely produce a next generation not only meeting academic requirements but succedding in the toughest of academic environments. The issue is not poverty or race,according to Barber, but parenting.

Education Next Survey on American Attitudes to Schools

The survey is here. I have not had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but one thing is apparent, like most controversial issues, there is a real split in America about education:

Americans both care about their schools and want them to improve. Though adults give the nation’s public schools only mediocre grades—a plurality confer a “C”—they are willing to invest more money in public education and they are reasonably confident that doing so will improve student learning. They are also open to a host of school reforms ranging from high-stakes student accountability to merit pay for teachers to school vouchers and tax credits that would give low-income families greater access to private schools. By sizable margins, they back reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal law that mandates school accountability.

The public, however, also appears selective in its desire for change. Americans balk at some market-based reforms, such as paying more for teachers who work in fields like math and science, where quality teachers are in scarce supply. And substantial percentages remain undecided about charter schools and other reform initiatives, suggesting that the current national debate over school policy has the potential to sway public opinion in one direction or another.

More to come as I get more of the results read.

Measuring Teacher Effectiveness

I haven't gotten much play on my Teacher Quality stats (see categories to the left), mostly because I have zero credibility in the area, but there are those who do who are pushing the same ideas that teacher effectiveness in the classroom is the most important measure.

Christopher Cerf, guestblogging at Eduwonk, talks about the issue thusly:

In combination, these two points explain why, quite appropriately, "value added analysis" has become the holy grail of the accountability systems urban school districts across the country are rushing to build. Opponents express the reasonable concern that isolating "teacher effect" as an independent variable is immensely complex given the many factors that contribute to achievement trends. But isn't that the point?

The debate is no longer over whether, but how evidence of student learning will increasingly inform the management of a school. In unsophisticated hands, achievement data can be used as far too blunt instrument to meet basic standards of fairness. Wouldn't opponents of "value added" serve their interests far better if, instead of opposing "value added" analysis altogether, they put their shoulder into the challenge of designing data systems that take into account the complexity of each individual classroom and working with districts to ensure that they are used responsibly?

Indeed, in my own work, I have yet to come up with ways to isolate some important inputs into the system, largely because there is both a plethora of data out there and not very much that is focused on the results of classroom functions.

Still I think Cerf is right, we are moving beyond the simple and into more complex measurements, but it is a worthwhile move.

Education Measurements

Kevin Carey talks about the NCLB reauthorization, and the proposal by Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education & Workforce Committee and principal guide for the bill, to include multiple measures as part of the accountability package.

As this gets discussed in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years, it's important to understand what's at stake. Nearly all the back-and-forth will be about what gets measured. But equally important--perhaps more important--is who does the measuring.

The multiple measures idea stems from one the most common--and correct--criticisms of NCLB: schools are rated almost exclusively based on state assessments in reading and math. This system can be inaccurate and reductive--not only are we limited to one way of measurement, via standardized tests, but we're also limited in what's measured. Subjects like art, music, social studies, etc. are left out, along with the non-academic skills and character traits that schools are charged with teaching students. By expanding school measures beyond once-a-year tests, the thinking goes, we can get a broader, more nuanced, more accurate sense of what schools are really doing for their students.

A worthy goal, to be sure. But here's the problem: in many multiple measure scenarios, it's the schools themselves that will be doing the measuring. And that undermines one of the great virtues of NCLB: the separation of those being held accountable from the process by which they're judged. That independence is based on a rock-solid understanding of human nature: people can't be wholly accountable to themselves.

Carey is completely right, you cannot allow the persons being held accountable to do the measuring. The measurements must be as "third" party as possible. But even now, we are not at a true independent assessment, no matter what model of assessment you choose.

I talked about multiple test format accoutability schemes and the benefits that can be garnered by relying on more than one test as a measurement of education success. But even in my scheme, the idea is that the testing must be done by an outside group. The fact is that even now we don't have a true third party evaluation. The states generally choose the test and administer the test while still having a pretty massive stake in the outcome (states with better schools attract more business and therefore more residents and consequently more tax dollars).

If the who of assessment is so important to objective testing, why are we still allowing the states, let alone the local school systems or even the schools themelves, to do the assessments? If as Carey points out, independent evaluators like outside auditors or tennis judges are important to maintain independence, then the states are not independent enough of an arbiter when it comes to education.

DC Reorganizing School Bureaucracy

Pursuant to the school takeover plan by DC Mayor Adrian Fenty (D), several administrative programs will be moved to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, a mouthful name for an office tasked with many of the jobs as other states, even though DC is a city with one school system.

The agency will mostly take responsibility for programs already established and funded and doesn't anticipate many new hires, said Deborah A. Gist, state superintendent of education. A financial officer calculated the estimate of 400 employees at the request of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), who set aside $26 million for the office in his 2008 budget, Gist said.

Officials don't have a complete list of the city agencies and departments from which the employees will come.

The uncertainty over the staff illustrates how difficult it can be to separate and merge bureaucracies, even within a single jurisdiction such as the District.

One large challenge comes in determining whether programs should be administered at the local or state level in a city with one public school system and 55 charter schools.

"Even though D.C. isn't a state, we have state responsibilities," Gist said.

Those responsibilities have historically included overseeing federal school nutrition programs, enrollment counts, residency requirements, postsecondary financial aid grants and educational research. Fenty renamed the former State Education Office in mid-June and expanded the responsibilities to include setting citywide policies, overseeing charter school funding and collecting statistics for reports. Public and charter schools will still have control of their curriculum, staff and day-to-day operations, Gist said.

The question is, how much of this is real reform and how much of it is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

The DC public schools have some 11,000 employees and most of them are bureaucrats supposedly serving and supporting the city's 4,200 or so teachers. In a school system with 55,000 students, do we really need to one adult employee for every five kids? Do we really need to have more bureuacrats and administrators than teachers? There is a teacher to bureaucrat ration of about 1:1.6 or three bureaucrats for every two teachers!!

A great deal of research had been done on the "optimum" student teacher ratio, but how much as been done on teacher bureaucrat ratio. T

he DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education will give a five fold increase in staff due to the transfers, but how many of those people truly need to transfer and how many simply need to be let go. As Chancellor Michelle Rhee settles into her job, one of her priorities should be on trimming the personnel fat of the DC schools. While the State Education office might be outside of Rhee's control, both she and Fenty would do well to really consider chopping the expected 400 staff by about 75 percent.

In many states, the superintendent's office is the highest office and oversees a number of districts. The Virginia superintendent's office employs about 300 people and oversees programs similar to those in the District. The Maryland office employees about 700 people who oversee 24 school districts. Unlike other states, the Maryland office also offers child-care certification, job training for impaired adults and prison education programs.

One wonders the what those 400 adults are going to do?

Measure True Graduation Rates

For many years, one measure of school's success was based on graduation rates. But the means by which graduation rates were calculated were based upon how many students were known to have dropped out. But a new formula that looks at the overall attrition rate has been endorsed by all 50 of the nation's governors.

All 50 governors have agreed to a new method for calculating the graduation rate. Their proposal, which will be adopted in Virginia by 2008, in the District by 2010 and in Maryland by 2011, is fairly simple: Divide the number of freshman in one year by the number of graduates four years later, adjusting for students who transfer in or out or repeat grades.

Applying the new math depends on an accurate count of transfers and students who repeat grades. State education officials say they are working on that and intend to go even further by applying a unique identifier to each student.

Of course, the impact of the new methodology is probably not going to be pretty. For example,

To illustrate the extent of student attrition at different county high schools, The Washington Post analyzed attrition data for the class of 2006 using a method similar to the formula embraced by the governors.

The analysis of head counts from 23 schools, provided by the state education department, found that the class shrank from 11,589 students to 9,743 between freshman year and graduation day. That suggests a graduation rate of about 84 percent, eight points lower than the 92 percent reported by the Maryland State Department of Education.

No one of the items noted was the use of a unique student identifier, which I am puzzled at this point as to why we don't have one. So much more information can be gleaned if schools, both private and public, were using a unique student ID.

But nevertheless, looking at attrition rates will present a much better picture of what is happening on a school by school basis.

Dyslexia--Middle Class Way to Hide Stupidity?

The reaction to this story is not going to be pretty:

Dyslexia is a social fig leaf used by middle-class parents who fear their children will be labelled as low achievers, a professor has claimed.

Julian Elliott, a leading educational psychologist at Durham University, says he has found no evidence to identify dyslexia as a medical condition after more than 30 years of research.

"There is a huge stigma attached to low intelligence," he said.

"After years of working with parents, I have seen how they don't want their child to be considered lazy, thick or stupid.

"If they get called this medically diagnosed term, dyslexic, then it is a signal to all that it's not to do with intelligence."

He added: "There are all sorts of reasons why people don't read well but we can't determine why that is. Dyslexia, as a term, is becoming meaningless."

One in ten people in the UK - including 375,000 schoolchildren - has been diagnosed with dyslexia.

The condition is said to impair short-term memory and the ability to read, write, spell and do maths.

Supporters of the condition argue that dyslexics are intelligent people who have difficulties processing information and need extra help and time than others who are poor readers.

But Professor Elliott has claimed that the symptoms of dyslexia - such as clumsiness and letter reversal - are similar to those seen in those who simply cannot read.

He argues that the condition should be rediagnosed as a reading difficulty.

His comments provoked fury among dyslexia campaigners.

You think.

Here is more likely the reality. Dyslexia exists and it does occur in some children. However, like most ADD or ADHD, it is often over-diagnosed because some parents spend too much time reading about it and then mis-interpreting actions by their kids as symptoms of the condition. Their kid is not doing well in school and rather than spending the time and effort to figure out why and determine a response, the easy thing to do is get a diagnosis of dyslexia to cover it.

Let's face it, by definition half of the kids in the world are below average in intelligence. It doesn't make them bad kids or bad students, it must makes them a statistic. Despite what we want for our kids, not every child can be an Einstein or a Marie Curie or the next Nobel Prize winner in physics or literature.

What we as a society have to do is learn to come to grips with teh differences in children and stop trying to acribe slow progress in school to some sort of medical condition. Sometimes there is a condition or a learning disability, but sometimes the child is just not the brightest bulb in the box.

Teacher Shortage? Not Necessarily

Right Wing Prof takes on the Teacher Shortage Crisis in this post, looking at the number of degrees awarded in eduction, both bachelor's and Master's degrees.

One think RWP doesn't mention is that the teacher shortage "crisis" is largely manufactured by teachers' unions and politicians who have made some policy decisions that exacerbate the "problem." The major policy decision is the mandate for smaller class sizes. As I have noted before, smaller class sizes carry two built in problems. The first is that you have to lower the quality of teacher candidate in order to fill all those extra teacher slots. The second is that more teachers means less pay for those teachers, even with school budgets that seem to be expanding without limit.

But there is a third consequence that feeds this hysteria. The two effects noted above also means that it becomes more difficult to find quality teachers because people with quality skills can get paid more doing other things (which is not surprising the people want to do that).

The downward pressure on the teaching profession in terms of quality personnel is now being felt because more teachers are retiring in the next five to ten years than is predicted to be replaced. The top two reasons why teachers are leaving teaching, retirement (30%) and to take another education related, but non-teaching job (29.1%). There is your teaching shortage, right there. One part general demographics (baby boomer retirements) and desire to be involved in education, but play a different role. Maybe if teaching could retain more of that 29.1 % we wouldn't have as big a shortage.

The Problem of Truancy

The Indianspolis Star has a series of Editorials about the problem of truancy. (Check the right side column for the links)

A Star Editorial Board analysis found that about 13 percent of students in the county's public schools -- roughly 16,000 children -- recorded 10 or more days of unexcused absences in the 2005-06 school year.

That is only unexcused absences, what about the excused absences for those students?

Why Teachers Quit

Teacher Magazine has a story on the reasons why teachers leave the profession--stiffling administration.

It wasn’t her teenage students who drove Meghan Sharp out of teaching—it was the crippling inflexibility of her administrators.

All the innovative curriculum ideas and field trips she proposed to engage her 10th grade biology students were promptly shot down, and she left the profession after just two years.

“I still enjoyed teaching, but it was a constant battle with the administration,” says Sharp, who worked in an urban district in northern New Jersey. “I had to do things like submit weekly lesson plans. There was a lot of bureaucracy.” She now goes by her maiden name and asked Teacher Magazine not to identify her old school because she works as an education policy analyst.

According to a recent report on teacher attrition by the federal National Center for Education Statistics, her predicament—and her departure—are common in the profession. Among former teachers who took noneducation jobs, 64 percent said they have more professional autonomy now than when they taught. Only 11 percent said they’d had more influence over policies at school than in their current jobs.

The survey, based on interviews with more than 7,000 current and former teachers, also found widespread problems with workloads and general working conditions, and it notes that the percentage of teachers abandoning the classroom continues to grow. Among public school teachers, that proportion reached 8 percent in the 2004-05 school year—up from 6 percent in 1988-89.

Here is the study from the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the article, it would seem like teachers are leaving education in droves at least as compared to 15 years ago, right. Well, yes and no. According the NCES study the top two reasons why teachers leave the classroom are retirement (30 percent) and to take another education related but not teaching job (29.1 percent). The latter could be administrator, public policy, consultant or any number of other jobs. Another 12.5 percent leave to care for family members. Only twelve percent take a job outside the field of education.

Of those staying in the field of education, over half, 54 percent, are working for the local government, which leads me to conclude that those who stay in education are working for the school board in some capacity. Likewise, 28.5 percent are working for the state governemnt. So over 80 percent of public school teachers who leave teaching stay in teh education field working for the local or state government bureaucracies. (See table 7 of the NCES study).

Yes, teacher turnover is a problem, particularly when trying to find staffing for the regular turnover of younger workers, those most prone to change career tracks and at teh same time dealing with a large retiring workforce. But take care when reading these "the sky is falling stories."

A New Knowledge on Teachers

My last post on the subject of teaching involved references to Michael Lewis' Moneyball, that the same kinds of techniques that helped a much poorer baseball team compete in the Major Leagues, can probably be used in education to help schools, parents, policy makers and teachers better understand what makes a better teacher. If you have better teachers, you have better schools and you have a better educated child and ultimately happier parents and policy makers. So the goal is to find some statistics and data that will help us achive that goal.

Allow me to set the stage a little. The current regime of school data is almost entirely student centered, very little data beyond some very basic information is captured about teachers specifically. As a result, the data that is generated about school quality and teacher quality is at best derivative and doesn't tell a particularly detailed story of teacher quality and effectiveness. I don't mean this as a criticims of the student data currently gathered, but if we as a nation are to dramatically improve our schools, we need to look beyond the temporary, albeit, important denziens of the system and look to the most important factor in student success--the teacher.

The current school data, being student centered and currently gathered under NCLB and other federal programs is pretty easy to game. We have seen the results, where states announce X% of schools being quality schools, but NAEP scores telling a different story. Here is the best way to game a system.

Let us take a typical school in a working class/middle class neighborhood. A given percentage of students are going to be ranked proficient or otherwise pass the mandated exams (the quality of the exams is an altogether different post). Likewise, whether we like it or not, a smaller percentage of students will not pass. Thus, schools will focus efforts on that percentage of students who are borderline. While we may reel in shock about this "triage" it is natural given the stakes invovled.

This gaming relates to teachers in the manner in which a school deploys its teaching resources. Let us assume that 10 percent of teachers that our fictious school are truly outstanding, gifted teachers. It would behoove teh principal to assign our border line students to these teachers, the ones most likely to help their students make the greatest strides. The result is a much higher percentage of students passing the standardized tests, which in turn creates the public impression of a quality school, when in fact the schoold is just ordinary. In other, a small cadre of excellent teachers, if properly employed, raises a school's "quality" ranking, despite the fact that their teaching corps in general is nothing spectacular.

But my interest in this scenario is that cadre of excellent teachers. Assume that each teacher has between 100 and 150 students in their charge during a given year. We now have thousands of interactions and data points that can be measured. In Moneyball, Michael Lewis noted that everything that happens in baseball has happened thousands of times before. Similarly, everything that has happened in a clasroom has happened thousands, if not millions of times before. There is simply not enough variation in behavior for this observation to not be fact. So the challenge if figuring out not only what, but how to measure teacher performance and therefore make deductions about future performance.The question, of course, is how?

Heisenberg's principal states that the mere act of observing a thing changes that thing. Unlike baseball players or the stock market or other matters that can be quantitatively analyzed, teachers operate largely in private. Baseball games have hundreds of people watching for the only purpose of gathering data. Sabermetrics is an advanced statistical science that is remarkably good at analyzing past performance as a predictor (not a 100% accurate predictor, but a pretty good one) of future performance. But because teachers work largely on their own without a great deal of observation by anyone other than their students, we have a massive data collection problem. Students may not be perceptive enough to make the necessary observations. Self-reporting by teachers presents a conflict of interest matter that cannot be resolved in order to accumulate data.

Some information can be gleaned, by derivative, from student test scores, but that is only part of the equation, a results part of the equation. Another part is the day to day interactions with students, the pacing and completeness of curriculum, even the level and amount of homework given by a given teacher, i.e. the process part of the equation. So that the end result of the teacher's quality would be something like this:

Teacher Quality=Intrinsic qualities+Results data+process data+historical performance

Intrinsic qualities would be things like years of experience, years in current school, years in current job (like teaching English, etc.), personal educational degrees, certifications, continuing education credits, other experiences, etc. These would be matters apart from their interactions with students. This data would be easy to gather and while it counts toward teacher quality, it is not the most important. these are also data points we already collect

Results data would have to be derivative of and/or based upon student performance on tests. These data points would have to be weighted somewhat less because there is no or very little control as teacher has once the student begins a test. But this data would have some more bulk to it since each student will have multiple data points, data points that can be plotted and examined over time and should be tied to individual teachers.

Process Data is far and away, at least in my current hypothesis, to be the most important. Data collection would be largest for this cohort of data, but it is the most difficult to collect and right now has very little definition.

Historical performance is related to that teacher's personal perfomance from prior years. Solid professional teachers should experience a dramatic rise in year to year performance in their early careers followed by a gradual leveling as they gain more experience. These same professionals will also seek to keep the skill slope as steep as possible over time.

So right now we have a data definition problem and a data collection problem. Anyone have any suggestions?