Opinion

Toss the bums out

Improving K-12 education begins with better teacher selection

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from half a century of studying the American educational system, it is this: throwing more money at the problem will not solve anything. According to the Department of Education, between 1960 and 2000, the pupil-teacher ratio fell from 25.8 to 16.0, the percent of teachers with masters degrees or higher went from 23.5 to 56.2, and the real amount spent per pupil went from $2,235 to $7,591 in 2000 dollars. What did we get for all that money? Reading and math achievement stayed the same, while science results actually fell. In 2003, our spending per pupil was five times that of Poland, but we actually achieved worse results on the international PISA tests.

All of the ways we have thought of to spend more on education show little promise. Longer school days, longer school years, smaller class sizes, more intensive pre-kindergarten programs, higher teacher salaries, and more teacher training have shown few positive results when studied by economists.

Neoliberals such as myself are convinced (partly out of empirical evidence, partly out of faith in competition) that school vouchers and other privatization efforts are the ultimate answer. But the question is moot — for reasons of political economy, a nation-wide school voucher program is simply not in the cards, and even if it were, the public school system would likely remain the educator of the majority of our children for the foreseeable future.

And so, if appreciable gains are to be made in education, the answer is going to have to come in the form of improvements to our public school system. If more resources don’t help, then what can be done with our inefficient schools?

The answer is actually pretty simple: fire bad teachers.

Improving teacher quality by a standard deviation results in a tenth to a fifth of a standard deviation improvement in student performance (see Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain’s 2005 paper on the Texas school system; Rockoff’s 2004 paper on the Los Angeles school system; or Aaronson, Barrow, and Sander’s 2007 paper on the Chicago school system). This is not a small effect; U.S. students are roughly half a standard deviation from the lead in international competitions.

Let’s put it another way: at a given pay level, there is a pool of people in this country willing to work as K-12 teachers. Currently, our school system selects which of these people teach in a near-random manner, hiring them on the basis of qualifications that offer hardly any predictive power for teacher performance. If hiring practices were improved such that only the top third of the labor pool was hired, our student test scores would go up by roughly 1.1 standard deviations. In the latest PISA tests, the U.S. came in 13th, 15th, and 22nd out of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in reading, sciences, and math respectively. If we were using the top third of our teachers, those rankings would have been sixth, ninth, and 12th. Teacher hiring and firing practices are the silver bullet that could end our nation’s below-average academic performance, at minimal cost to the taxpayer.

There are two important questions in developing a policy of improving teacher quality.

The first question is whether or not high-quality teachers can be easily identified — knowing that teacher quality matters doesn’t do much good if it takes 20 years of data before the wheat can be separated from the chaff. Fortunately, the answer is yes, bad teachers can be quickly identified (see Goldhaber and Hansen, 2010). Just two years of student test results offer a powerful data set for distinguishing good from bad teachers, making it possible for school districts to remove bad teachers before they’re given tenure and its associated union protections.

The second question is how aggressively teacher quality can be pushed upward. If our children were taught by only the top 2 percent of our teacher pool, we’d find our educational system sharing the podium with the very best countries in the world. But we are unlikely to find 49 people willing to work as teachers for every teacher we currently have, even in a down economy such as this.

However, even if the dream of an ultra-elite teacher corps is out of reach, the more modest goal of ending American sub-performance is eminently achievable. Not only do we have a large pool of teachers to select from, but even small changes in policy could greatly increase the number of available teachers. The first step is to throw away our teacher certification programs and insistence on graduate-level training: certified teachers perform no better than their uncertified peers (Goldhaber and Brewer, 2000), and teachers with masters degrees — despite their significant salary premium — offer only vanishingly small improvements (Rice 2003 is a good metastudy). By removing the artificial barriers to entry that exist in the teaching profession, we would find ourselves with a much, much larger pool of people to choose from without any degradation of the pool’s quality. It is not unreasonable to think that we could pass over two-thirds of the teaching labor pool and still fill all of the positions that need filling.

After taking these free gains, we could go even further. Increases in teacher pay or an increase in class sizes could yield significant benefits when paired with proper teacher selection. Appropriately targeted merit pay could expand the labor pool while improving its quality, allowing school districts to be more choosy. And while increases in class sizes are not without cost (a doubling of today’s class sizes would result in roughly a tenth of a standard deviation decrease in test scores), having fewer teaching spots to fill would allow principals to be even more selective. Good teacher selection can form the foundation on which other education policies can be built, leading to complementary effects.

Seemingly all politicians promise the best of the best for our educational system. Few are willing to admit that getting the best starts with removing the worst. Today is the time to begin that process, by firing our absolute worst and refusing tenure to those who don’t make the cut.



5 Comments
1
Anonymous almost 13 years ago

I have an even better predictor of student performance - poverty. Consider the following stats from PISA 2009 reported by Washington Post:

American students in schools with less than 10 of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country.

Those in schools with 10 to 25 of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

American students in schools with 75 or more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

In other words, if the US addresses the inegalitarianism in American school system, its PISA ranking will be first among nations. This certainly sounds a lot better than the "silver bullet" proposed by Mr. Yost, which merely improves our standing to 6th, 9th, and 12th.

2
Anonymous almost 13 years ago

1: Unfortunately, Mr. Yost doesn't believe in inequality.

3
Jonathan almost 13 years ago

In the large, loud, and increasingly vicious debate over American education reform it baffles me that pundits, politicians, and experts seem to neglect what were the most important factors in my own successful turn through public eduction: parental engagement and at-home reinforcement. Comment #1 indirectly addresses this if one assumes (rightly, I think) a correlation between affluence and opportunities for parental engagement.

It was for me a given that when I came home from school every day my learning did not end. My parents did not simply hand me over to my teachers for eight hours a day of child care, but were my partners in education. They asked about my reading, checked my math homework, and were invested in my academic success. They did not rely on policymakers to track my performance but developed courteous if not personal relationships with my teachers and treated them with the respect they deserved. If they disagreed or disapproved of anything in the classroom they could leverage this relationship to find constructive solutions--a far cry from the nasty indictments of teacher performance by clearly out-of-touch parents reported in the media. By no means were most of my teachers great, although they were all competent, and I do support efforts to remove truly damaging teachers. But when parents reclaim their responsibilities for education in the home, child discipline, moral and social instruction, etc.--responsibilities that they have abdicated to overworked, underpaid teachers--I think we will find that teachers who are now just scraping by will be much more successful in shaping minds in the classroom.

There is a perverted virtue of willful ignorance and academic mediocrity pervading this country--the "elites" so derided by the right-wing pundits have much in common with parents in the academically successful countries in that they are wholeheartedly, and sometimes violently, invested in their children's academic successes. I think that if the quantitative management metrics championed by school reformers nationwide put a higher premium on cultivating at-home reinforcement we will start to see not only test scores start to improve but also a reinvigorated public education system overall.

4
Paul almost 13 years ago

The OP is correct that vouchers are the better way for so many reasons I cannot count the ways but here are three top reasons.

The cost of public education is grossly under estimated as the estimates do not include the cost of capitalization, loss of tax revenues from choice real estate, etc.

Public schools are also our number one form of child abuse ! 100,00 0 children stay home every day because of bullying !

Further, a gay child, for example, cannot only not practicably sue the government for the forced abuse but cannot even get their parents' own tax monies back to stop the abuse via alternative education.

The melting pot theory of education takes away our freedom! This freedom will do to education what it has done to computers and will create educational concepts so advance you would not recognize it as being such. Public schools keep us in the dark ages of education.

Yost's belief that "school vouchers and other privatization efforts are the ultimate answer. But the question is moot for reasons of political economy " is correct as self interest groups fight to retain their turf.

The solution is as always when power groups take over. Civil disobediences. It is the way of the world.

Parents, students and teachers unite as you have nothing to lose but your chains !

5
Paul almost 13 years ago

I am curious as to how many MIT students went to regular public schools, private schools, home schooling, Montessori, etc

Does anyone know ?

As for Jonathan's comment (3) I disagree that parents should have to spend so much time educating their children. That is the school's job. If the school cannot do it then the school needs to be changed, not the parents.