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.

Charters, Incentives, Performance

A few days ago, USA Today editorialized Charter school experiment a success: Our view

Critics — whether district superintendents or teachers' unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters — snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they're siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.
But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There's little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.

And they talk quite a bit about the Knowledge Is Power Program

a KIPP school typically provides 60 percent more time in school than a regular public school.[12] By extending school days, requiring attendance on Saturdays, offering extra curricular activities, and adding three extra weeks of school in July, students have more educational opportunities. ...
Each middle school student receives a paycheck at the end of the week of KIPP dollars they have earned based on academic merit, conduct, and overall behavior.
At the end of the school year, KIPP students have the privilege of attending a week long field trip.
In June 2010, Mathematica Policy Research produced the first findings[16] from a multi-year evaluation of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)

Using a matched comparison group design, results show that for the vast majority of KIPP schools in the evaluation, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in math and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.

I believe what they say, and I can see a value to KIPP and similar high-intensity charters as providing a somewhat better factory school, one which will outdo our really bad urban schools; it also serves as a vehicle for self-selection, which is both good and bad. It is possible that similar schools could work in a suburban or rural context, matched against really-not-that-bad-at-all schools like HCS. I've become sceptical, however, about the incentives we're using -- grades, academic awards, KIPP dollars, disciplinary action. These certainly can and do lead to enhanced performance on some kinds of tests, but I'm afraid these are precisely the kinds of tests that ought to be becoming obsolete: tests for the ability to shut up and sit down and follow orders. Here's a discussion (with video) of the kind of research I mean: How Monetary Rewards Can Demotivate Creative Works | Techdirt

once people have a base level of money that makes them comfortable, using monetary incentives to get them to do creative work fails. Not just fails, but leads to worse performance.

When I think about this kind of research in the context of school reform, it seems to me that we as a nation have been heading in one of the wrong directions for a while now, and that the KIPP-style charter is a better dinosaur. The flexibility of charters may be necessary for finding better answers, but it also makes even worse answers available. I'll post soon about experiments in other directions.
Or then again, maybe not.

Education Election

A Time Magazine "ViewPoint" says that The Election Has Compromised Education Reform

The 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers’ unions had a good night, but so did charter schools....

We don't know the right answer... we muddle on.
Until we can't, of course.

Educational Cartoons...

Problems must be solved and dilemmas require compromise, according to Larry Cuban -- Cartoons on Problems and Dilemmas | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

I worked with K-12 teachers, principals, school board members and superintendents in distinguishing between problems and dilemmas when it came to figuring out school reforms and getting into complexities of classroom practice. Occasionally, I would use cartoons to make my points...

Interesting and fun, but the most thought-provoking item I found was not one of the cartoons, was not even one of the linked cartoons, but was a linked absence-of-cartoons in Cartoons/YouTube on Charter Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Of all the cartoons on charters that I found, every single one opposed them. I scoured the Internet and could not find a pro-charter cartoon. I do understand that the nature of cartoons is to satirize and caricature but those I found hammered again and again the theme that charters are, at best, harmful to, and, at worst, destroying public schools.

I have a feeling that controversy-cartoons generally do "anti" much better than "pro", and this is supported by the commenter who tells him to look for anti-union cartoons (as being implicitly or explicitly pro-charter, I guess). Very odd.
Or then again, maybe not.

Rocketship charters

This summer, the Washington Post asked Is a charter school chain called Rocketship ready to soar across America? - The Washington Post

After their first week at Rocketship, the children woke up early on Saturday morning to do their homework unprompted. The boys made progress. And Vivian had a math breakthrough. “She said, ‘Dad, I finally get it,’ ” Martinez said. “I asked how did your teacher show you?’ She said it wasn’t the teacher. It was the penguin.”
An animated penguin is featured in the math software used by Rocketship.
Computers cannot replace good teachers, Danner said. But rote tasks — math drills, for example — can be offloaded to computers, freeing teachers to focus on more creative work, he said.
Computers cut roughly $500,000 annually from Rocketship’s labor costs for each school, which has an average enrollment of about 500. The savings means Rocketship can finance its own new school buildings — a luxury in the charter world, where facilities pose the greatest obstacle.

In fact what Rocketship brings to the table that's new may be mainly financial. Back in February, Larry Cuban had asked and answered: Are Rocketship Schools the Future? Part 3 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The answer is maybe. But not for all schools.
Like KIPP, Aspire, YES Prep Schools, Uncommon Schools and other charters including regular schools that have aimed at enrolling low-income minority children and youth...–hybrids like Rocketship are the latest generation of the “effective schools” movement that began in the late 1970s. Aimed at urban failing schools, Ron Edmonds’ work on whole-school reform energized districts across the country as they replicated his five features (strong principal leadership, climate of high expectations for students, focus on basic academic skills, etc.) that seemingly accounted for high-achieving slum schools. ....
What the standards,testing, and accountability movement has done for the past two decades is create different models of “effective schools” to rescue students from toxic urban schools. Rocketship schools founded just before the recent economic recession offers a less expensive hybrid model...

It's certainly plausible that parts of that may carry over to schools that really aren't failing and are very far from urban...but there's no special reason to think that the solutions of "toxic urban schools" will work for us. Maybe we're already doing what they do, just not as cheaply. On the other hand, I'm not knocking cheap. Cheap is good, cheap frees up resources for other things, cheap is a quantity having a quality all its own. (Yes, quantity having a quality all its own is supposedly Stalin.) I find it very plausible that each of us, whether six or sixty, of whatever income and linguistic background, can have a collection of things to be learned by computer games, and that's where Rocketship comes in; and a collection of things to be learned in self-assembling study groups (mostly of people in your own time zone, but video between Greece and the US does work), and a collection of things to be learned with the individual assistance of actual teachers, with teachers preferably being certified by students rather than by officials... It might work.
Or then again, maybe not.

Chicago teachers vs. teaching?

The Economist notes on The teachers' strike in Chicago: Fighting irrelevance with fire that

The boffins at the Urban Education Institute (UEI) in Chicago have written an exemplary book on school improvement. They looked at 100 elementary schools that showed progress in attendance and test scores over a seven-year period, and 100 others that did not. They argue—with quantitative data—that five essential pillars are needed to build a great school. These are:

• effective school leadership,
• collaborative teachers (with committed staff and professional development),
• parent-community ties,
• a student-centered (and safe) learning climate with high expectations,
• and ambitious and demanding instruction.

(Reformatted.) I'm always suspicious of lists like that, but it's plausible. In any case, like most of what I've read in the past few days, the point of the article is far from favorable towards the striking teachers; the author here believes that they not just demanding more money, but trying to prevent improvements in a failing school system. And this seems to be bipartisan, to a considerable extent: they're battling Rahm Emanuel, extremely prominent Democrat, while from the other side we hear Paul Ryan on Chicago Teachers’ Strike: ‘We Stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’ - ABC News

“I’ve known Rahm Emanuel for years. He’s a former colleague of mine. Rahm and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher’s union strike is unnecessary and wrong. We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.”

Emanuel and Ryan both like charters, too. So do I. And they both like external evaluation. I have mixed feelings about that. Should Teachers Be Graded On Standardized Tests?

if you think that teachers do make a difference, and that some of the teachers aren’t very good, it seems to me that you have two choices. Hold out for a decentralized, discretionary, local-knowledge based system which has no change of materializing for various legal and structural reasons. Or develop admittedly imperfect evaluations, and use them as a replacement metric for seniority and ed credentials. Naturally, the teachers will hate this, in part because some of the resulting decisions will in fact be unfair. But it might be the best we can do.

Well, in Chicago it might be the best they can do; I suspect that local small schools can eventually do better. Or then again, maybe not.

There was also a roundup of opposing views at Chicago Teacher Strike: A News and Opinion Roundup | Via Meadia.

Gallup on Schools

Gallup says public schools have a credibility problem. Americans look down on public schools:

Only 32 percent of Americans believe public schools deliver a good education, and just five percent of people surveyed believe students at public schools will receive an excellent education. Sixty-one percent of Americans think public schools will give only a fair education at best, including 18 percent who rate the education as poor.
The public school system’s disapproval rating is higher than the approval rating of charter school systems. Sixty percent of Americans think charter schools will provide at least a good (43 percent) or excellent (17 percent)....