Value Added Assessment and Weighted Student Funding in Ed Trust’s Fair Share.

Figuring out how to get experienced, certified teachers to work in hard to staff schools isn’t really rocket science. You just have to do the same thing you’d do to attract and retain people in any difficult job that requires talented people who have other options:

1. give them professional power, support their needs as human beings and as teachers; and

2. minimize the fears and problems associated with taking on an extra challenge.

You might also want to pay them a little extra if they’ll stay.

That makes sense. In fact, it’s what Ken Futernick concludes in A Possible Dream: Retaining California Teachers. Futernick says that teachers stay when they have adequate resources, adequate time for planning, effective support from the district office, strong collegial relationships, and (what mattered most says Futernick) the opportunity “to participate in decision-making at the school.”

And, it’s what Randi Weingarten pointed out in recent testimony. Weingarten and Futernick also listed some of the reasons teachers leave. Among Weingarten’s list: uneven implementation of school safety and disciplinary codes, crowded school hallways and cafeterias, and fear of retribution for reporting an abuse or problems at the school.

So then, schools need to support employees as professionals and minimize the problems and the risks. In any field, that’s the way to attract and retain employees to challenging positions when there are other options, and it certainly applies to teaching.

How very odd then, that a recent report by Ed Trust suggests nearly the opposite. Or, to put it another way, how many people think this is a good idea: solve the problem of hard-to-staff schools by telling teachers they’ll be evaluated by test scores if they come?

That’s pretty much what Ed Trust recommends in its latest report, Their Fair Share. To be fair myself, that isn’t all they recommend, and some of the report is really quite good. But coaxing a teacher to work in a hard-to-staff schools by threatening to evaluate him on scores is like coaxing a cat into a box by threatening him with a broom. Brooms have their uses, but using them on cats just doesn’t work. What’s worse, however, is that by tacking a call for value added assessment onto their report, Ed Trust has missed an opportunity to offer real solutions for real schools.

But let’s look at the report. It explores teacher retention in Texas, but could easily be about any other state. Its premise is two-fold:

1. students need teachers who are experienced and properly certified;

2. schools with a high proportion of low income students are less likely to have those kinds of teachers.

In other words, low income schools have a hard time attracting and retaining the experienced, certified teachers that they need.

That’s the clear focus of the report. The data compares low-income schools to other schools within various Texas districts and concludes that gaps exist in experience, certification and stability (funding too, but I’ll come back to that). I can’t comment on whether the actual data is accurate or significant; I simply do not know. But I do know that Ed Trust cites these gaps as destructive to the education of low-income children:

• On experience: Parents and teachers have long believed novice teachers are generally less effective than their more-experienced colleagues……Considerable research now supports those beliefs. (p 5)

• On inadequate certification: “The consequences for students are devastating and it shows in the data.” (p. 4)

• On staff stability: Students’ academic success is jeopardized by the lack of stability in their learning environment; remaining teachers must fill the voids; and administrators must spend more of their time and energy in recruitment, hiring and induction. (p. 7)

Since these gaps matter, it stands to reason that Ed Trust’s recommendations would focus on getting experienced and properly certified teachers into schools that lack them. Ed Trust’s recommendations, however, have little to do with that.

True, their first brief recommendation calls for making the schools more attractive to experienced certified teachers. But much more attention goes to evaluating (read terminating) teachers in these high needs schools according to their students’ scores! The enthusiasm of some economists and statisticians aside, ask a teacher what they think of the notion of evaluating teachers by their test scores, and they’ll tell you it’s about as reliable as holding your finger up in New York to find out what the weather will be tomorrow in L.A. Whether that sense of value added is a real one or perceived (and I’d say there’s more reality than perception there) teachers are not about to stick with tougher populations if you threaten to terminate them based on their results.

The oddest thing about Ed Trust’s value added recommendation is that it feels “tacked on” a little like the way Cato used to tack Delenda est Carthago (Carthage must be destroyed) onto all his speeches, regardless of the topic. And Ed Trust’s prominent but incongruous side bar on value-added measures deepens that suspicion. The sidebar says, essentially: never mind the research in this paper; value added formulas are the way to go.

Must all roads lead to value-added? At Ed Trust, at least in this paper, it seems the answer would be yes.

Another solution offered by the Fair Share article is a rehash of the weighted student funding schemes Klein tried in New York. The report looks at school budgets within districts, and claims that low-income schools do not get their fair share of the pie. As poof the authors point out that within school districts, schools with low-income students seem to have less money in their budgets. The implication is that with more money they could hire teachers away from other schools.

Sounds logical, right? Except it is built on the flawed premise that the obstacle for these schools is lack of funds. And that’s not true. If one school in a district has teachers with lower salaries than another, it’s not because that school couldn’t afford to hire the more expensive (better qualified, more experienced) teacher. Rather it’s because the teacher didn’t want to work there. Money in most districts will follow teachers from one school to the next. Low income schools with inexperienced teachers can appear to have less money in their budget, but that number only reflects the lower salaries of inexperienced teachers who work there. If you can convince your more experienced teachers to stay (or transfer in), then your budget will reflect their higher pay.

If there are inequities in school resources, of course they must be fixed. But for the vast majority of schools, using actual salaries to determine the resources a school has will distort tremendously the picture of resources at the school.

(If you would like a better explanation of the funding shell game, see my riveting – not to say seminal – article, here. It’s about New York, but the issue is the same.)

Let’s keep our eye on the ball. Teachers are educated professionals with other options. How can we encourage employees who are in demand to apply to tough assignments, and once we get them there, how can we encourage them to stay?

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