TEP Charter: Teacher Pay, Student Scores

Wikipedia describes The Equity Project as

The Equity Project (TEP) is a New York charter school opened in September 2009. The school will instruct students in fifth through eighth grades and will pay its teachers a starting salary of $125,000 per year, more than double the national average. Teachers must also work double the hours a typical teacher works.

Now Vox reports that This school paid teachers $125,000 a year — and test scores went up

Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a study from Mathematica Policy Research released in October. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere: ...

... Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others' lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy.

The workload at TEP, where teachers also take on administrative duties and had an average of 31 students per class, is fairly heavy even with the extra pay. But the school also had more teacher turnover than usual. Nearly half of first-year teachers didn't return for their second year, either because they resigned or because they were not rehired.

Intriguing...and a hopeful sign generally. It should be noted, however, that I got to that report from the link at statistics-prof Andrew Gelman's blog on Time-release pedagogy?? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

...there’s something strange here or i’m missing something obvious. That jump from 3-year impact to 4-year seems excessive.

That does seem really odd. Still, it's a hopeful sign.

State Policy Impact on HCS Budget

(updated below 2015-03-31, and again 2015-04-03)
A link with clips to a document on the Hamilton Central website, at Factors Affecting the Hamilton Central School 2015-16 Budget (PDF)

New York Schools face an exceptionally difficult task when preparing budgets this year. The Governor has linked funding to an aggressive legislative agenda, and has pushed back the dates for sharing state budget runs with districts. This document provides a brief summary of how these proposals could impact HCS.

The Gap Elimination Adjustment(GEA) is an adjustment to state aid to schools first implemented in 2009-10 to help close large state budget deficits. ... The amount taken from this year’s budget was $474,572. We cannot predict the GEA amount for next year’s budget....With a 5 billion dollar state budget surplus there is no longer a budget gap, and there is no justification for continuing the GEA.

The final tax cap calculation for HCS that had to be submitted to the state by March 1 was -0.49%. In order to be tax cap compliant this year, we would have to reduce the 2014-15 levy amount by $32,232. Of course our expenses continue to rise, so even keeping the budget the same as the current school year would result in cuts to our current offerings....

The Governor and the Board of Regents advocate changing APPR so that 50% of a teacher’s performance score will come from student performance on standardized tests. [Part of the remaining score must be based on] observations... by an independent observer... This is an unfunded mandate, and would put more strain on our budget....

Contact Information:

• Governor Andrew M. Cuomo http://www.governor.ny.gov/contact
• Assemblyman Bill Magee contact via online form: ​ http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/William-Magee/contact
• Senator Dave Valesky​: valesky@nysenate.gov​
• Members of the Board of Regents: http://www.regents.nysed.gov/members/
• HCS Board of Education: boe@hamiltoncentral.org

Update:Deal Is Reached on New York State Budget; Ethics Measures Are Included - NYTimes.com

The governor had dangled a $1.1 billion increase in education aid in exchange for the Legislature agreeing to pass a series of reforms, including tying teacher evaluations more closely to students’ state test scores, making it more difficult for teachers to receive tenure and allowing the state to take over low-performing schools.

Teachers’ unions energetically opposed the governor’s proposals. ...

In the end, the budget will include an even larger increase in education aid – about $1.6 billion, according to Assembly Democrats. Cuomo administration officials said the budget would establish parameters for teacher evaluations that would result in a more rigorous evaluation system; the changes would be left to the State Education Department to work out.

The budget agreement would lengthen the time before teachers are eligible for tenure to four years, from the current three; Mr. Cuomo had proposed a five-year wait.

Update 2:Estimated State Aid for 2015-2016 is shown at 2014-15 AND 2015-16 AIDS PAYABLE ... HAMILTON which they summarize as

$ CHG 15-16 MINUS 14-15                                      140,890
% CHG TOTAL AID                                                 3.26
 
$ CHG W/O BLDG, REORG BLDG AID                               260,655
% CHG W/O BLDG, REORG BLDG AID                                  7.43

Most items are increased a bit, but the biggest single change is the $-291,889 reduction ("GAP RESTORATION") in the GEA. There's some discussion at Only 1 school district in Central New York will get state aid cut in NY state budget | syracuse.com

Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Training

On the topic of making teachers better...Arnold Kling, economist-who-is-skeptical-about-pretty-much-everything, notes in his "Null Hypothesis" series that Null Hypothesis Watch | askblog

On the bright side, TFA teachers appear to be at least as effective as regular teachers when it comes to teaching reading and math to elementary students. The fact that TFA requires only a five-week crash course in pedagogy — rather than traditional teacher certification — is another reason to question the value of an education degree.

I don't really doubt that "good teacher"/"bad teacher" is a very important distinction, at least in some situations, but it doesn't seem that education degrees have much to do with it. Not surprising, I suppose, since otherwise home-schoolers would perform substantially worse than those in public schools.

Ineffective Schools are Ineffective at Judging Effectiveness?

More precisely, failing schools rate their teachers higher than successful schools rate theirs. Well, at least in some cases. Grant Wiggins tries to compare NY schools that are doing badly with some that are doing well, as a way of evaluating Cuomo's much-criticized criticisms. This is not easy, and he ends up comparing just three against three. In Teacher Effectiveness Ratings – Part 1 he finds a

Tentative conclusion. From this (limited) data we can infer that in a successful school – whether clearly improving or doing well in absolute terms, on credible exams and client survey results – the local teacher effectiveness ratings are often lower, sometimes far lower, than those provided locally to teachers in failing schools. So, there would appear to be some merit to the core premise of the Cuomo report, regardless of how mean-spirited the approach feels to many NY educators.

This fits my biases. In an ideal world, we would just make the failing schools do teacher evaluations like the more successful ones, and then all schools would be successful. Somehow, my confidence in my biases is low: I doubt this will work. Still, it's possible that a culture of criticism would help a bit. It's also possible that a comparison of failing schools in general against successful schools in general would fail to confirm Wiggins' work here....and yet, and yet, it really does fit my biases. Perhaps I'm just ineffective at judging the effectiveness of effectiveness-judgement.