Advance and hindsight with CSAPs

Posted on September 16, 2010 by axooms

Back in March, as students were filling in the last of their CSAP ovals, I wrote a post encouraging a discussion of what to look for with 2010 CSAP scores — which were then still 6 months away.  And while I agree with Mark that CSAPs are an autopsy and do next to nothing to help teachers gauge student progress and deficiency during the school year, like an autopsy they do provide valuable insight into overall trends at a broad level.

While not so useful to teachers, CSAPs and the comparisons in the Colorado Growth Model, can help both a district and individual schools see where they are making progress, and where they are not.  In Denver, we also now also have the 2010 School Performance Framework, for which CSAPs are the primary engine, which adds a little more color and multiple measures of assessment.

Usually CSAP scores are used in hindsight to justify existing positions (um, like the end of this post). So last March, I identified four areas where I thought CSAP results would be particularly illuminating — well before anyone knew what those scores would be.  Now we do.

Here are those same areas revisited, and what we might discern from the results:

1.  DPS Academic Growth

March: So when the 2010 CSAPs come out, start here: how much real academic growth has the district achieved?

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State beats Ivy

Posted on September 15, 2010 by axooms

As a continuation of the discussion of the value of a college education comes the revelation that many companies are more actively recruiting and hiring students from state schools than from the Ivies. And, as the article notes, the underlying economics are thus:

College tuition has outpaced Americans’ ability to pay it, The Economist reported earlier this month. Median household incomes are 6.5 times what they were 40 years ago, but the cost of attending a state school is 15 times higher for in-state students and 24 times for out-of-state students. The cost for private colleges rose by roughly the same rate or less, but that tuition remains out of reach for many families. One year at a private four-year university averaged $35,636 in 2009-10, according to the College Board. In-state tuition and fees at public four-year institutions averaged far less, at $7,020, while out-of state averaged $18,548.

Equally as interesting is the results of a study that shows school selectivity has little impact on a student’s future earnings. Now that is not to say that there are no other differences, but it does beg the question: if one school costs a lot more than the other, and does not make any difference in one’s ability to pay back the cost of attending, well maybe — in the immortal words of Joel Goodson after his interview at Princeton – “Looks Like State U.”

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Small schools math mistake

Posted on September 8, 2010 by axooms

While it’s true that in education, the topic of math and probability is often viewed as an annoying impediment to passionate opinion, for anyone interested in using data to draw conclusions — and perhaps informing opinion — I highly recommend this post. An excerpt:

Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean?  Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools and a lot of the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best performing schools.

Personally, I think the education debate has fundamentally shifted from the question of SHOULD we use data (to measure student growth, school quality, educator effectiveness, and other topics) to HOW do we use data. If you are of the former opinion, this is certainly not for you.  But anyone interested in the latter should take a look, as this is an instructive example of a well-intentioned mistake.

And human fallibility being what it is, the ability and willingness to learn from our mistakes — math and all — is a pretty good shorthand for what most folks consider progress.

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Loco control

Posted on August 29, 2010 by axooms

Defeat often begets a scapegoat.  In the wake of the twice-short Colorado application to R2T, this has now solidified: the judges were “perplexed by local control” which led to a lack of objectivity. This is a familiar refrain — them pointy-headed Eastern elites jest don’t git the way things work out West, what wid our frontier sensibilities ‘n all.  So local control is the Western value we refuse to sacrifice to appease these high-fallutin fiscal brutes.

Except I think it would be prudent to entertain, at least briefly, one small possibility:

Um… What if they are right?

Colorado has 178 independent school districts, and the differences in size are staggering.  Using CDE data (Fall 2008), let’s look closer at these 178 districts that contain over 800,000 students:

  • The average district has 4,560 students.  But because there are a few large districts and a lot of small ones, a better metric is median district size, which is just 603 students.
  • The largest district has over 85,885 students, the smallest has just 54.
  • 106 (60 percent) of districts have fewer than 1,000 students. 79 districts (44 percent) have fewer than 500 students.
  • The largest 10 districts combined house 56 percent of total students.  The smallest 100 districts combined house 4 percent.

Now, say what you want about Eastern elitism and impenetrable Western values, but these numbers show a control system that is loco, not local. When the median school district contains just 600 students — the same size as many urban schools, it’s not local — it’s microscopic. We are, after all, the United States, not Cities, nor Towns.  But for school districts, we somehow ended up with micro control — the Districts of Individual Buildings (and not very large ones at that). Is it really so wrong to dock points in a competitive competition for this system?

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R2T: 2, Colo: 0

Posted on August 24, 2010 by axooms

I confess my interest and knowledge on Race to the Top is at some small distance: I did not follow the nuances closely, believing (correctly) that the Colorado bid was in good hands, and (incorrectly) that the hard work of many skilled people would prevail.  And in the wake of disappointment, while I understand the temptation to either complain about the judging, or — far worse — celebrate the defeat as some sort of divine personal vindication, neither make much sense.  For I think the R2T decision is a harsh but helpful reminder of two very important, and often overlooked, truths:

1. Outcomes matter most. For all the rhetoric over the ample list of reforms both instituted (ProComp, the Colorado Growth Model) and pending (CAP4K, SB 191), the hard truth is that overall outcomes in Colorado have not improved. To paraphrase Auden, reform – in and of itself – makes nothing happen.  Waiting for a single reform panacea (or cocktail) remains the dream of a weary Godot.  Reforms — by themselves — mean little. Outcomes, and the changes in the trajectory of individual lives, are everything.  In the wake of this disappointment we should redouble our efforts to examine the places where outcomes are changing, and give these our continued attention and support.

2. Money matters less. Always eclipsed by the lure of a big payday, the hard truth is that since 1970, per-pupil spending in the US has doubled while there has been no improvement in academic results. Money may help a success already in place, but it is never the catalyst for substantive change. Colorado is simply not dependent on largesse of any kind to improve.  There is a lot of money already in the public education system, and in many ways adding additional funds postpones some of the difficult conversations and choices that are necessary. Scarcity usually reveals more than abundance, and tends to sharpen one’s focus: we need to choose between strategies, not continue to add layers of them on top of each other.

So what now?  I suggest: Think local, act local.  Education reform was here before R2T, and it will be here long after the winners have exhausted their checks.  Examples of state-wide successful reform are few and far between, and when the last dime of R2T rolls down the register, there will likely be one or two more — but far less than the number of grantees (12).  And I am pretty confident that there will be an equivalent success somewhere among the nine finalist states that were disappointed, so it might as well be here.  There are instances of real, meaningful, and inchoate reform happening across Colorado (and even scored high on some rewardless lists).  Look locally, focus on outcomes, and remember that in education (as in most things) expense rarely correlates to quality.

After all, as anyone bearing the scars of education reform in Colorado can tell you, it is not now — and never was — a race.

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Public schools aren’t all that

Posted on August 15, 2010 by axooms

This month in Denver, six new public schools open their doors. Both innovation and charter schools operating autonomously from certain district and union regulations, these programs offer novel approaches ranging from environmental sustainability to language immersion in Mandarin Chinese. Their founding educators, and the Denver Public Schools’ administration and Board of Education (who vetted and approved each proposal), deserve praise for their willingness to try new models in the face of a troubled system.

However, both in the education community and among many public officials there remains a pervasive belief in the inherent superiority of the traditional public school model. Under this bias, traditional public schools are the de facto correct choice, with new schools either harmful distractions that divert resources (at worst), or permissible side projects limited to research and development activities (at best).

This mistaken belief increasingly prevents meritocracy in public education. It results in a dogmatic approach that elevates school type to paramount importance, dwarfing more relevant criteria: academic growth, demographic achievement, and enrollment policy. Parents instinctively care less about school type and more about school quality. Our education policy needs to follow suit.

For on close inspection, the presumed superiority of the traditional public school model is largely a myth. And, like many myths, these narratives were created to explain what otherwise resists comprehension: how our noble educational values somehow resulted in an appalling public school system. Also like many myths, these beliefs reflect what we want to believe, rather than what is true.

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What’s missing from the DPS pension dispute?

Posted on August 10, 2010 by axooms

What’s missing? Teachers.

And that’s a little odd, isn’t it, since it is their pensions primarily at issue, and individually they have the most to gain or to lose.  Now mix in that the same people crying foul over the pension deal are usually leading the charge for this constituency: on blocking direct placement reform and the evaluation provisions of SB 191, and even on individual teacher dismissals. So why not call in the teacher brigade on the pension refinancing?

Well, because one can’t. No matter how one tortures the financing numbers, or claims willful ignorance on the 30-year-old, four-syllable practice which comprises an “interest rate swap” (which, just to clarify, is when two parties, um, swap interest rates), it’s pretty much impossible to argue that DPS teachers are anything but significantly better off as a result of the pension refinancing.

Before the refinancing, DPS’s pension faced isolation, a $400 million shortfall and demographic quicksand of just 1.2 active employees per retiree (more on this later). After the refinance and merger, DPS teachers now have their pensions funded at a higher rate than any other part of PERA; enjoy portability (so taking a job in a different Colorado district no longer means losing benefits); and are supported by a more diversified and stable funding base, as PERA at the time of the refinance had 2.5 active employees for every retiree (and I suspect that ratio has increased).

What is completely absent from this dispute is anyone clamoring for DPS teachers to return to the previous pension system — because even in the dark-clouds-and-lightning claims about the refinancing, absolutely no one can make an argument with a straight face that teachers should go back to what they had before (and if someone asks, I’d like to see their request honored). So where are Denver’s teachers, and particularly their union, the DCTA?

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Posted in Fiscal & Economic, Politics, Teacher Unions | Tagged , | Leave a comment