Help desk - & another black mark on "technology"

If you are so inclined, could you and anyone else you know like these two Facebook posts?

"Bullies not bulldogs"

Della Lenz, Irvington, NY

Thanks -- I appreciate it.

These are the 3 posts I've written about this situation:

"Important message from superintendent"

Bullies, not bulldogs

Passwords on Post-its (superseded by next post...)

Students were given the teachers' password

More in a second post

Maybe the problem is presenters....

I've just come across a blog by Raymond Johnson, who writes:

I hold some grudges when it comes to the topic of research to practice in education. A few highlights: A principal who (probably rightly) thought I was struggling to engage my students told me to watch Barbara Streisand's performance as a college professor in The Mirror Has Two Faces and "do what she does, because her students love her." The question, "Which academic journal did she read that in?" sarcastically crossed my mind, and no, I never watched the movie. At a state conference presentation about RtI, a presenter told us to only use research-based intervention strategies. When a teacher at my table asked, "How do we know if a strategy is research-based?" the presenter responded, "I figure if it's something you find in writing, and didn't just make up by yourself, then it's research-based."
Schneider's From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse, Chapter 1: Bloom's Taxonomy

I guess Wikipedia counts.

GRE scores by intended field of study for college seniors

Source: Educating School Leaders, p 32

let's not and say we did, part 3

“Look, this is what you need to do. So like it or not, do it.”

A principal pushing teachers to raise expectations and adopt an inquiry model

quoted in Marshall Memo 307
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
October 26, 2009

Raising expectations AND adopting an inquiry model is going to be H-E-double hockey sticks for the kids.

Also...."pushing"?

"Like it or not, do it" is pushing?

Not shoving?

let's not and say we did
let's not and say we did, part 2
let's not and say we did, part 3

Erin Johnson on public school management

in a comment on Flypaper, Erin Johnson wrote:

Given the wave after wave of ill-conceived curricular reforms that have been imposed upon teachers (Whole language, Constructivist math, etc.) how would eliminating tenure affect teachers that are “being held accountable for student performance” and yet are being told by their administration that they must use poor curricula. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.

If we wanted principals to “stop acting like middle managers and start acting as true CEOs of their school” then we should be holding principals accountable for performance not the teachers. Or how about holding district superintendents or curricula specialists accountable for the misguided materials that they insist that teachers are to use in the classroom? In business, the leaders are always more responsible than their direct reports.

there is more

Meet the parents

from Magister Green:

My personal favorite moments come when our beloved administrators (who have advanced degrees in Education, natch) insist that the key to getting parents and families on board with new educational practices (read: Fad of the Moment) is "educating them." We need to "educate" the parents about what these new practices (fads) are all about and, should parents or even other teachers (!!) express reservations, well...they just need more "education"! The underlying principles and assumptions of these new fads are never questioned since, of course, they come from "experts" who have done "studies", so we all should just shutu....err, educate ourselves.

My district uses the expression "marketing to parents."

palisadesk on clueless consultants

How can they do that when they don't seem to be able to think themselves?

This contradiction has variously amused and enraged me, but it seems to be a systemic problem. As a "school in need of improvement" we have had cadres of experts come in purporting to teach us how to teach "higher order thinking skills." It is no exaggeration to say these gurus were so thick they would have been challenged to suggest a way to evacuate a phone booth.

I keep remembering the interesting data point from ETS that those who go on to get graduate degrees in Educational Administration have a mean GRE Verbal of 419 -- meaning a goodly number were well below that. A GRE score of 419 loosely correlates to an IQ of 90.

Not the sharpest knives in the drawer, folks.

anonymous on what administrators want

I just lost my position.... I wish I knew what they wanted. When students are silent in rows, they prescribe groups. When they are talking too much, they prescribe quietly sitting in rows.

the cost of bureaucracy

It is the purpose of this paper to test the following proposition: holding other important factors constant, does the size of the educational bureaucracy have any effect on the efficiency of school systems in producing educational achievement? The empirical results suggest that this is indeed the case. Using 1984 data from the states, we find that public school students in states having relatively large educational bureaucracies are less likely to graduate from high school, and those who do tend to perform more poorly on standardized achievement tests.

Educational achievement and the cost of bureaucracy Gary M. Anderson, William F. Shughart II, Robert D. Tollison
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 15 (1991) 2945. North-Holland

"Does School Quality Matter" Julian Betts

in a nutshell:

This paper has found that earnings of white male workers depend significantly on which high school they have attended. However, standard benchmarks of school quality explain very little of these differences between schools.

Does School Quality Matter? Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by Julian R. Betts
The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 231-250

Abstract

The paper searches for links between school quality and subsequent earnings of students. Using data for white males from the NLSY, the paper rejects the hypothesis that workers' earnings are independent of which high school they attended. However, traditional measures of school "quality" such as class size, teachers' salaries and teachers' level of education fail to capture these differences. This result is robust to changes in specification and subsample. The paper contrasts the results with those of Card and Krueger (1992a), and speculates that structural changes may have weakened the link between traditional measures of school quality and student outcomes.


I. Introduction

A lengthy literature has attempted to de- termine which "inputs" to the schooling process affect student outcomes. In detailed surveys, Hanushek (1986, 1989) concludes that there is little evidence that standard measures of school quality have any effect on student performance.

The vast majority of work in this area, dating back to the widely read Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966), has used test scores to gauge students' achievements. However, the validity of test scores as a performance measure is questionable, given the low correlation typically found between test results and subsequent labor- market outcomes.

[snip]

Indeed, if earnings are the metric by which economists measure success in the labor market, it makes more sense to use wages or earnings to gauge the effectiveness of schooling.

[snip]

A second trait, shared by two-thirds of this literature, is the use of spending per pupil as the single measure of school quality. Murnane et al. (1991, p. 7) criticize this approach as "sterile," since it gives no indication of which of the many components of education spending should be increased to improve student performance

In summary, no published paper in this literature on school quality and earnings has yet measured school quality at the level of the school actually attended. In addition, most studies have measured "quality" in terms of spending.

[snip]

My findings indicate that while there are significant differences between the labor-market performance of students who attended different schools, these differences are not significantly related to standard measures of school quality. These results accord with the literature on school quality and test scores, as surveyed by Hanushek.


III. Results

It would be premature to search for the characteristics of schools which influence earnings without first determining whether earnings differ between workers who attended different high schools, ceteris paribus.

[snip]

[A]ll four regressions were repeated with the addition of father's and mother's years of education, a dummy variable indicating whether any family member possessed a library card when the person was 14 years old (as a measure of the intellectual environment of the family) and the imputed hourly wage of the father.'0 But in each of these regressions, even when these personal and family characteristics were added, the null hypothesis that schools have no effect on earnings was rejected...

[snip]

In summary, despite repeating the regression under many different specifications, and using various subsamples designed to eliminate poten- tial data problems, the same conclusion holds throughout: three commonly used measures of school quality--the teacher-pupil ratio, the relative salary of starting teachers and the percentage of teachers with Master's degrees or higher--in general bear no significant positive relation to the subsequent earnings of students.

[snip]

Overall, these results do not lend much strength to the notion that better high schools contribute to earnings by leading workers to acquire more education and/or training than they otherwise would have.

[snip]

However, as shown in table 5, subsequent earnings of students do appear to be positively and significantly related to the number of students enrolled at the school, although the elasticity at the means is only 0.044. This suggests that mildly increasing returns to scale may be at work. Table 5 also presents evidence that a school with a higher percentage of disadvantaged students is likely to produce graduates with lower earnings, at least for those students who achieve less than 12 years of education. (The interaction term between this variable and education is actually positive, so that students with more than 11.98 years of education are predicted to have higher wages as the percentage of disadvantaged students rises.) Similarly, the percentage of grade 10 students who drop out without completing grade 12 has a negative and significant effect on earnings, at least for those workers who obtain less than 13.4 years of education.2

[snip]

[T]he size of the school, as measured by enrollment, is related to earnings, and is a variable which policymakers can control. This is the sole measure of school "quality" which this study has found to be significantly related to students' subsequent earnings. [ed.: don't know how this relates to the "small school" movement...]


bureaucratization of the schools & school quality:

[I]ncreasing bureaucratization of public schools might have weakened the link between standard measures of school quality and educational outcomes. In a cross-sectional study using state-level data from 1984, Anderson, Shugart and Tollison (1991) find that states with larger educational bureaucracies tend to produce stu- dents with lower standardized test scores. In a 1987 survey of secondary school principals, fully 69% complained of administrative roadblocks caused by new State guidelines and requirements (National Center for Education Statistics, 1991, p. 92). The idea that increasing bureaucratization of the public schools reduces their effectiveness is gaining widespread acceptance.

[snip]

An implication of these hypotheses of "structural change" in the public school system is that standard school quality measures should still be significantly and positively related to wages of those who attended private and parochial schools. When the basic regression from table 1 was run on the subsample of white males who had attended such schools, the teacher-pupil ratio and the percentage of teachers with post- graduate degrees were indeed significantly and positively related to earnings. However, this intriguing result should be regarded with caution as it is based on 507 wage observations involving only 58 individuals.


growing the administration

Coming across this study today is a case of serendipity.

In the past five years, my tiny little school district (1848 student enrollment in K-12 projected for 2009-2010) has been massively bureaucratized. I've always been told that when you grow the administration school quality declines, but I'd never seen a study saying so.

Now I've got two.



Anderson, Gary M., William F. Shugart III and Robert D. Tollison, "Educational Achievement and the Cost of Bureaucracy," (pdf file) Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 15 (1) (1991), 29-45.

Weintraub, Daniel M., "Wilson Calls for Schools to Set Own Rules," Los Angeles Times (Jan. 29 1993), Al and A26.