2008 October 06 Archive at The Core Knowledge Blog

Archive for October 6th, 2008

Teacher Quality, Unintended Consequences, and the Baseball Achievement Gap

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 6, 2008 in Education News and Educational Policy. 2 Comments

New York’s Department of Education is beginning to measure the performance of thousands of elementary and middle school teachers based on how much their students improve on annual state math and reading tests, the New York Times reported last week. A joint letter to NYC teachers from Chancellor Joel Klein and UFT President Randi Weingarten explained the data is intended to “empower teachers with information useful in our teaching. In this same vein, the letter expressly prohibits the use of that information for evaluating teachers, in both annual ratings and tenure decisions.”

When the plan first came up in February, Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the New York Daily News, comparing value-added data to the pioneering work done by maverick baseball general manager Billy Beane. The subject of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, Moneyball, Beane has often managed to keep his small-market Oakland A’s competitive with deeper-pocketed teams by rejecting conventional baseball wisdom in favor of data-driven decision-making. “By crunching numbers without prejudice, Beane discovered that certain statistics that really mattered on the field, like on-base percentage, were being hugely undervalued in the player job market,” Carey wrote. “While scouts and other executives made decisions based on personal bias and flawed perceptions, Beane kept to the statistical bottom line.” Seen through this lens, the hope and promise is that we can find equivalents to on-base percentage in teacher performance that drive student achievement.

The Moneyball comparison, however, strikes me as a potentially dangerous analogy. Here’s why: Players are to baseball teams as students — not teachers — are to schools. Teachers succeed by getting the best performances from their students. Their closest counterparts in baseball are managers and coaches. Baseball executives like Billy Beane do not use data to help ordinary players over-perform. They use data to replace underperformers with overachievers. To run a school like Billy Beane runs the Oakland A’s would mean regularly replacing low-scoring students with high-scoring students.

That would be one way to close the achievement gap. Continue reading ‘Teacher Quality, Unintended Consequences, and the Baseball Achievement Gap’

Using Video Games as Bait

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 6, 2008 in Education News. 0 Comments

Book publishers are increasingly using video games to “extend the fictional world” of novels for young readers. By doing so, the New York Times reports, authors and publishers are hoping to lure gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book. And that’s just a start.

Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom. In New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is supporting efforts to create a proposed public school that will use principles of game design like instant feedback and graphic imagery to promote learning.

“But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word,” the Times notes.

Mark Bauerlein, the Emory University professor and author of the recent best-seller The Dumbest Generation is not among those quoted by the Times. But it’s a safe bet he would cast a skeptical eye on the piece. In a recent essay he wondered whether digital literacy is reading at all. ”Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,”he cautioned, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention.”

For publishers, the lure of appealing to gamers is obvious: enhanced sales and — as they say in marketing-speak — multiplatform merchandising. For educators? Proceed with caution.

The Strength of the Wolf is the Pack

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 6, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Influential Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews is no fan of merit pay, warning that Michelle Rhee’s plan to pay Washington, DC high-fliers up to $20,000 extra a year has the potential divide teachers, instead of getting them to work together for struggling kids

The idea troubles me, because it is at odds with what I have learned from charter leaders who have made great achievement gains in their independent public schools. Their staffs thrive on teamwork. Everyone shares lesson plans, swaps ideas and reinforces discipline to help each child. Won’t big checks to just a few members of the team ruin that?

“Teams with all players pulling hard are also more likely to attract more committed people,” Mathews correctly observes, “happy to escape schools where co-workers make fun of strivers.” He quotes several leaders of successful, high profile urban charter schools, each of whom takes issue with the idea off rewarding individual teachers for gains made by their students

Dave Levin, co-founder of the KIPP school network, said, “Given the interconnectivity of teaching kids, the best incentives are school incentives which the school itself can then decide how to allocate.” His fellow KIPP co-founder, Mike Feinberg, quoted Rudyard Kipling: “The strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”