Review of "Education Myths"

More of my random thoughts as I read books on my vacation/sabbatical. The author of this book, Jay Greene, is the head of the Department of Education Reform at the UofA, an endowed research department set up with Walton money. Here's the departmental website if you're interested. http://www.uark.edu/ua/der/index.html

The book runs through 18 "myths" about education in America. Here's the list. I'll add a few comments to the points that particularly caught my attention.

1) Schools perform poorly because they need more money. The basic argument here is that even after adjusting for inflation, the cost per pupil to educate a student in the U.S. has roughly doubled in the last 30 years, but test scores, however defined, have roughly stayed flat. In absolute terms, you obviously can't educate someone at no cost, but the law of diminishing returns appears to have set in a long time ago, so the answer clearly isn't just about more money. Lots of Catholic schools, for instance, even after adjusting for various socioeconomic factors, achieve better test results at half of the per pupil cost or less.

2) Special Education programs are the cause of the increasing costs of public education. Lots of interesting information here, in particular that the number of handicapped children has not gone up. It's the percentage with learning disabilities that has seen the big spike (roughly quadrupling in recent decades). And a significant proportion of this spike is due to funding mechanisms that reward schools for designating larger and larger percentages of their kids as learning disabled, so the marginal kids are increasingly so labled.

3) Schools are helpless to overcome various social problems. The fact that some teachers and schools with similar problems do appear to overcome these hurdles would seem to indicate the fallacy of the argument.

4) Lowering class sizes makes a big difference in performance. We've had a similar discussion in OAA in which the various articles that have been passed around all seem to indicate that smaller class sizes have very little affect on student performance except in very particular circumstances (senior seminars, for instance).

5) Teacher Certification and teacher experience lead to substantially better instruction. This one surprised me in that we're in the business of telling people that teacher certification is important for effective preformance. Our pay scale is also predicated on the idea that years of experience make us better instructors. The book makes some powerful arguments, however, that our educational instruction should be focused much, much more on pedagogical practice instead of pedagogical theory, and that our pay scales should be much, much flatter (and focused on performance) than they are. I'll be interested to have the Education people read this chapter and give me their feedback.

6) Teachers are paid very poorly. The key point of disagreement is whether you count "hourly" or "annual" rates. Using Department of Labor statistics, hourly rates for teachers are better than for most engineers! And if you include benefit packages (which are typically better for teachers than in most industries), the results are skewed even more toward teachers. The "annual" rate, however, is the sticking point because most teachers only work 9 months. The way we used to calculate summer contracts and dean/division chair pay, for example, my supposed hourly rate actually went down when I was promoted to Associate Dean, but I got paid more because I was working the full year. By the way, using these Department of Labor charts and standards, the average teacher makes about $31/hour, the average engineer about $29.5/hour, and the average CCCU prof between $27 and $30/hour (I calculated the total two different ways, but the Dept. of Labor way would put us closer to $30).

7) Schools are getting worse over the decades. As Greene argued earlier, performance outcomes are roughly flat over the decades, not better or worse, despite the increasing resources.

8) Nearly all students graduate from high school. Basically, school systems self report and have every incentive to over report.

9) Non-academic barriers prevent many from attending college. Using some sophisticated models of college readiness, you end up with figures pretty close to the numbers who actually attend college. The real concern, therefore, is not affirmative action (pro or con) or some other political solution but finding ways to get more kids prepared for college. Not much we can do from our "university" end.

10) High stakes testing results are distorted by cheating and teaching to the test. He contends, with lots of number crunching, that it isn't happening in any significant way despite the occasional anecdotes.

11) Exit exams cause more students to drop out. Ditto.

12) Accountability systems impose large "unpaid mandates" on the schools. Ditto.

13) The evidence on vouchers is mixed. Using just the "verifiable" studies, the evidence is clearly favorable.

14) Private schools do better because they're much richer. Back to the Catholic school comparison that most private schools educate better with less money per student.

15) School choice undermines the public school system. Again, what solid evidence that exists appears to conclude that competition makes all of the players better.

16) Private schools push out disabled kids. Again, what solid evidence that exists appears to contradict this idea.

17) Private schools undermine democratic values. Ditto.

18) Private schools are more racially segregated. Ditto.

If you're still reading, the points I took away from this book are three.

1) If accountability is increasingly the wave of the future as this book suggests (along with lots of other things I've read), then we need to get in front of it with better systems of measuring that we're doing what we're saying (more pre/post tests, for example).

2) If "choice" is also a wave of the future, then we need to be clear and up front about what we're offering in this myriad of choices.

3) If smaller classes, higher pay across the board, and training in pedagogical theory haven't been shown to be particularly effective in affecting student performance (which is how I might summarize many of OAA's emphases over the 13 years that I've been at JBU), then we need to spend some time thinking and talking about what will help our students succeed.