More on Mumford

(Totally accidental pun, I promise. The man’s a disgusting sleaze, but he’s not stupid.)

So for some reason, the Clarence Mumford story broke this week. Odd, that.

A sample, just from my twitter feed:

Robert Pondiscio: “Cheating on teacher certification tests? Seriously?? Not exactly the highest bar to clear.”

Eduwonk: “The real scandal is the low-level of the Praxis test and why it continues to be used at all. The Praxis II is different, but the basic Praxis is much too low a bar given what we expect of teachers.”

Sarah Almy, Director of teacher quality at Education Trust: ““These are pretty basic tests….The fact that there were folks who felt like they needed to bring somebody else in in order to meet a very basic level of content knowledge is disturbing, in particular for the kids those teachers are going to wind up teaching.”

Walter Russell Mead: “Massive cheating scandal on teacher certification tests. Worse: tests are pathetically easy, only idiots could flunk.”

Here are the names of the people thus far indicted:

• Cedrick Wilson, ex-NFL player, paid someone to take his test. (Come on, aren’t you thinking it probably wasn’t the first time?)
• Shantell Larry Shaw: A biology teacher who took the biology certification test several times for other teachers, often just using their ids because “she looked like the teacher”.
• Carlo McClelland, of Meridian High School; reports suggest he paid someone to take the test.
• Jeryl Shaw Shantell Larry’s husband, paid for taking the test. I can’t find a picture, but Jeryl? Married to a black woman? Odds?
• Darcel Gardner paid someone to take the biology praxis test–during the same period Shantell Shaw was taking the biology tests.
• Then there’s ringmaster Clarence Mumford and his son.

Notice all these people are black. Which is what I predicted back in July, when this story first broke. Some of the other names are Jadice Moore, Felippia Kellogg (somehow, this Fox news story couldn’t find a picture of her), Dante Dowers, Jacklyn McKinnie. (A primary tester was John Bowen; I haven’t been able to find a picture of him, oddly, Fox News couldn’t find a picture of him, either.) If I do some bad ol’ stereotyping based solely on those names, I’d advise gamblers to bet on them being black, too.

I am pleased to be wrong about one thing—I thought it likely the testers who could easily pass the test would be white, but it appears that most of them are black, as well. Notice also that the Fox News story and many others make it clear that many of the people paying for the tests were already teachers, and that some of the tests were Praxis II. I’d written about that, too.

If you’re wondering why I am pretty sure that most, if not all, of the teachers paying for testers are black, here are some helpful graphics:

And yet, no one save little old me is even mentioning the race of the people involved, as if it’s this totally random factor, like you could find white teachers desperately paying thousands of dollars to pass these tests.

Robert Pondiscio, WRM, and Andy Rotherham and the many other people sneering about the people who need to pay someone else to pass the test, be very specific: Only 40% of African Americans can pass the Praxis I the first time. The other 60%? That’s who you are calling idiots.
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Let’s be clear what I am not saying. I am not excusing the fraud. I am not hinting that African Americans are incapable of passing the tests (this fraud ring shows clearly that they are not).

And since I’m prone to prolixity, I will bullet my points.

I am saying that reformers are:

• hammering constantly on the need for “higher standards”,
• sneering at the low standards on teacher credential tests,
• scoffing at grossly distorted stats suggesting that all teachers, regardless of content area, have low SAT scores,
• declaring that the only way to “restore credibility and professionalism to teaching” is to pull teachers from the top third of college graduates, ignoring the fact that high school content teachers are already drawn from the top half, as well as the fact that there’s no real need for elementary school teachers to be rocket scientists

And while they rant on endlessly on these talking points, they are ignoring the following unpleasantness:

• the low cut score on the basic content knowledge tests are put in place specifically to ensure that some small number of African American and Hispanic teachers will pass. The white averages are a full standard deviation higher; a huge boost to the cut scores in most credentialing tests wouldn’t bother the bulk of all teachers (white females, remember) in the slightest.
• research has turned up very close to empty in proving that teacher content knowledge has any relationship to student achievement. (Cite to research in my earlier article).
• research consistently shows that teacher race has a distressing relationship to student achievement–specifically, more than one study shows a positive outcome when black teachers teach black students. (again, cite in earlier article)
• Raising the cut scores will decimate the black and Hispanic teaching population.
• Many states dramatically increased the difficulty in elementary school credentialing tests after NCLB, yet research has not shown these new teachers to be far superior to the teachers who just passed the much easier (or non-existent) earlier tests. There hasn’t been research done specifically on this point. Hint. Oh, and by the way–those cut score boosts have already dramatically reduced the URM teaching population.

So reformers, when you call for higher content standards, when you say that teachers who can’t pass the test are idiots who should never be allowed in a classroom, you are talking about black and Hispanic teachers. When you demand that we need far more rigorous demonstrated content knowledge for teachers, you are merely making calls for changes that will decimate the already reduced URM teacher population.

And you are doing this with next to no evidence that your demanded changes will impact student achievement, merely on your own prejudice that smarter teachers would make better teachers.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s a perfect research paper out there waiting to be written that will winkle out the lurking variables to prove that yes, we need smarter teachers and yes, it’s okay to annihilate the black and Hispanic teaching population in a good cause. Fine. Go find it.

Or maybe you just want to be snobby elites who don’t personally know anyone who scored below 600 on any section of the SAT, and think your own personal prejudices should substitute for education policy.

Whatever. Just learn and accept what you’re doing. You are calling for changes that will further homogenize an already white career category, closing off a major career option to over half of all blacks and Hispanics, for what is thus far no better reason than you think teachers should be smarter.

Got it? Own it. Or shut the hell up about it.

Algebra and the Pointlessness of The Whole Damn Thing

The whole algebra debate kicked off by Hacker’s algebra essay has…..well, if not depressed me, then at least enervated me.

A recap:

Hacker:

We shouldn’t make everyone take algebra. No one needs algebra anyway; we never really use it. Statistics would be much more useful. Algebra is the primary obstacle to high school success; millions of kids are failing because they can’t manage this course. If we just allowed students to have an easier time in high school, more of them would graduate successfully and go on to college.

Outraged Opposition:

Algebra is essential to college success and “real life” and one of many obstacles to high school success. No one is happy with the current state of affairs, but it’s clear that kids aren’t learning algebra because their teachers suck, particularly in elementary school. We need to teach math better in the lower grades, rather than lower our standards. Besides, the corollary to “not everyone should take algebra” is “some people should take algebra” and just how are you planning to divide up those teams? (Examples: Dan Willingham, Dropout Nation)

Judicious Analysis:

Sigh. Guys, this is really a debate about tracking, you know? And no one wants to go there. While it’s true that algebra really isn’t necessary for college, colleges use success in advanced math as a convenient sorting mechanism. Besides, once we say algebra isn’t necessary, where do we stop? Literature? Biology? Chemistry? But without doubt, Hacker is right in part. Did I say that no one wants to go there? Or just hint it really, really loudly?
Examples: Dana Goldstein, Justin Baeder Iand II.

Voldemort Support:

Well, of course not everyone should take algebra, trig, or calculus. Or advanced literature. Or science. Not everyone has the cognitive ability or the interest. We should have a richer and more flexible curriculum, allowing anyone with the interest to take whatever classes they like with the understanding that not all choices lead to college and that outcomes probably won’t have the racial distributions we’d all prefer to see. Oh, and while we’re at it, we should be reviewing our immigration policies because it’s pretty clear that our country doesn’t need cheap labor right now.

Hacker, Outraged Opposition and Judicious Analysis to Voldemort Support:

SHUT UP, RACIST!

So really, what else is left to say? The Judicious Analysis essays I linked above were the strongest by far, particularly Justin Baeder II.

Instead, I’m going to revisit a chart I updated from the last time I posted it:

These are California’s math scores by grade and subject, the percentage scoring basic/proficient or higher on the CST. Algebra entry points differ, so the two higher (and slightly longer) of the four short lines are the percentages of “advanced” students with those scores—those who took algebra in 7th or 8th grade. The lower, shortest lines represent the scores of students who began algebra in 9th grade.

Notice that advanced students don’t match the performance of the entire elementary school population through 5th grade. Notice, too, that the percentage of advanced students scoring proficient or higher is just around half of the population. When I just considered algebra students who began in 8th grade (see link above), the percentage never tops 50. Notice that around 40% of the kids who started algebra in 9th grade achieved basic or higher.

NAEP scores show the same thing—4th grade math scores have risen, while 12th grade scores stay flat. In fact, Daniel Willingham, who declares above that we’re doing a bad job at teaching elementary math, was considerably more sanguine about teacher quality back in December, citing the improved elementary school math performance shown in the NAEP. So the strong elementary school performance, coupled with a huge dropoff in advanced math, is not unique to California.

These numbers, on the surface, don’t support the conventional wisdom about math performance: namely, that elementary school teachers need improvement and that the seeds of our students’ failure in higher math starts in the lower grades. Elementary students are doing quite well. It’s only in advanced math, when the teachers are much more knowledgeable, with higher SAT scores and tougher credentialling tests, that student performance starts to decline dramatically.

What these numbers do suggest is that as math gets harder, fewer and fewer students achieve mastery, or anything near it. . What they suggest, really, is that math knowledge doesn’t advance in a linear fashion. Shocking news, I know. We have all forgotten the Great Wisdom of Barbie.

Break it down by race and the percentages vary, but not the pattern. I skipped Asians, because California tracks Asians by subcategory, and life’s too short. I’m going to go right out on a limb and predict that Asians did a bit better than whites.

(Note: I know it’s weird that in all cases, 9th graders in general math have nearly the same percentages as 9th graders in algebra, but it’s easily confirmed: whites, blacks, Hispanics).

Whites in the standard math track perform as well as advanced math blacks and just a bit worse than advanced track Hispanics. Sixty to seventy percent of blacks and Hispanics on the standard track fail to achieve a “basic” score.

Some people are wondering how poverty affects these results, I’m sure. Let’s check.

Hey! Look at that! The achievement gap disappears!

Just kidding. This chart shows the results of blacks and Hispanics who are NOT economically disadvantaged and whites who ARE economically disadvantaged. You can see it on the legend.

So that’s how to make the achievement gap disappear: compare low income whites to middle class or higher blacks and Hispanics and hey, presto.

And that’s all the charts for today. I’m not detail-oriented, and massaged this all in Excel. You can do your own noodling here. Let me know if I made any major errors. The 2012 results should be out in a couple weeks.

Anyway. With numbers like these, it’s hard not to just see this entire debate as insanely pointless. In California, at least, tens of thousands of high school kids are sitting in math classes that they don’t understand, feeling useless, understanding deep in their bones that education has nothing to offer them. Meanwhile, well-meaning people who have never spent an hour of their lives trying to explain advanced math concepts to the lower to middle section of the cognitive scale pontificate about teacher ability, statistics vs. algebra, college for everyone, and other useless fantasies that they are allowed to engage in because until our low performers represent the wide diversity of our country to perfection, no one’s going to ruin a career by pointing out that this a pipe dream. And of course, while they’re engaging in these fantasies, they’ll blame teachers, or poverty, or curriculum, or parents, or the kids, for the fact that their dreams aren’t reality.

If we could just get whites and Asians to do a lot worse, no one would argue about the absurdity of sending everyone to college.

Until then, everyone will divert themselves by engaging in this debate—which, like many kids stuck in the hell of unfair expectations, will go nowhere.

Black teachers, teacher quality, and education reform, revisited

In the interest of focus, I left a few things off my original post.

First, and most importantly: teaching is insanely complicated and non-linear. For me, it’s a free-form high-wire act on a daily basis, interspersed with bouts of intense mental activity outside of class as I try to figure out the best way to explain complicated subjects to kids who don’t want to be there and often don’t have the requisite skills to master the material. But for others, it’s a highly structured daily routine in which each lesson is planned out months in advance. I know many math teachers who have each problem worked out before they teach it (in many cases problems they’d done for years); I often make up my problems as I write them on the board, so I can carefully calibrate the difficulty level based on the students in that class. I know history teachers who have tremendous difficulty lecturing without index cards and can’t casually lecture on any topic in their curriculum without preparation; I can go from complete unfamiliarity to ready to talk in 2 hours.

Many non-teachers visualize their ideal teacher as someone more like me, except a lot younger–smart, fluid, an expert on anything a student might want to inquire about, and particularly an expert in the subject taught. Highly educated elites, in particular, have romantic notions of their little snowflakes being taught by a bright Harvard graduate who went to a top 50 school and wants to help the next generation be as enamored by learning as she is.

Given the tough times I have finding jobs, I encourage all those who hold these romantic notions to find the evidence that teacher IQ and general intelligence is dispositive in successful teaching. (It must be said, however, that principals don’t like teachers that are too smart. Or too old.)

Much as I’d like a world that makes it easier for me to find a job, though, I think the reality is much less comforting to those who want “smarter” teachers. Certainly, research has provided little comfort. When the best news available tells us that teachers in the 95% percentile get very small improvements over the very worst bottom-dwellers, and any improvement at all is considered great news because it’s so hard to find any teacher quality criteria that show any increase at all….well, it’s just possible that being smart ain’t all that.

I really understand the intuitive belief that smarter teachers are better teachers, because I used to hold the same notion, when I was a suburban parent. But that belief was shaken even before I became a teacher and realized that teachers weren’t complete morons and, furthermore, that the demonstrated knowledge requirements for teachers took a sharp increase after NCLB, particularly for elementary school teachers. Huge. So big that, if teacher competency were a factor, we should have seen some improvement in teacher outcomes. Instead, recent research shows, again, that experience boosts performance a bit and new teachers are still weakest of all. I’m open to having my mind changed on that one because no research has specifically tested on this point. But again, the boosts in demonstrated ability were huge in many states, and shouldn’t we have seen some improvement in performance?

But what we got for sure were far fewer black and Hispanic teachers.

Notice that the fraud ring involved existing teachers, teachers who were probably caught in the NCLB net and forced to re-qualify for existing positions. As always, ETS explains this with a helpful graphic (I’ve combined text and image from page 16. ETS has excellent data. That’s why everyone trying to push an educational policy ignores it.)

In 2001, NCLB required teachers to be fully credentialed, forcing many existing teachers with emergency credentials to pass a Praxis test. Many black teachers couldn’t. Hence, the fraud. This wasn’t simply a case of wannabe teachers, but actual teachers, teachers with jobs. What if they were considered competent teachers?

There’s a really interesting study idea: test the outcomes of the teachers who committed fraud, compare them to white and black teachers who passed the test legally. What if they do well?

I’m not fuming at the double standard revealed by the reformers who scream about “unqualified teachers” but duck and cover when black teachers are found to have committed fraud. I am, however, annoyed that reformers are constantly promoting a lie, or at least a fantasy unsupported by research, and they don’t even have the balls to hold consistently to that position. Instead, they wilt and run away from the Clarence Mumford case. They never seem to commit, exactly, to the qualifications teachers should have, and how the current tests fall short.

Why? Because failure to commit to a line in the sand allows them to skate on two points. First, the minute they draw that line, they will be ferociously questioned about the impact their standards will have on black and Hispanic teachers. Race is an area that reformers are absolutely determined to avoid, unless it’s an opportunity to call teachers racist for the uneven performance results, of course.

Furthermore, the minute they draw that competency line, they will be forced to confront the fact that, as I’ve said with some frequency, research doesn’t support their claims. It’s hard to argue for changes that will further obliterate the population of black and Hispanic teachers when you can’t prove being smart makes that much difference—and that the teacher’s race seems to matter.

So instead, reformers prate endlessly about incompetent, mediocre teachers who aren’t anything but white, of course, talking cheap about improving standards while fleeing in terror from the tiniest suggestion that raising teacher test scores will disparately impact black and Hispanic teachers.

It’s too bad, because if they stood up for their beliefs, we could have a meaningful discussion about where, exactly, the line is for teacher competency. One reasonable interpretation of the research thus far is that we are well above the line needed. Bad news for reformers, if so.

I keep wondering about one other possibility, which might explain why a low or failing score on a basic skills tests could nonetheless belong to an effective elementary school teacher.

Maybe they’re underperforming.

My years in test prep have shown me a number of oddities, including more than a few African American kids (by far, the smallest percentage of my demographic), who have a terrible time reading and thinking “on their feet” (that is, a general skills test), and can’t think abstractly at all, yet have very strong demonstrated abilities that they’ve internalized.

Two different African American girls have had exceptional writing skills with a strong demonstrated vocabulary (both got perfect scores on their essay), but struggled to break 500 on the SAT verbal. One of them got a 4 on the AP US History test. More than one boy (including some Hispanics) can do relatively complex math word problems beautifully but, given a simple equation, can’t isolate x. I had one kid who could not solve 4x -3 = 21, but if you asked him what number you could multiply by 4 and subtract 3, and get 21, he’d say “6″ before I’d worked it out myself.

I’ve had more than a couple kids ask me why they were being tested on history when they’d never studied it in school. It took me a while to realize they thought the questions on the reading passage were questions they were supposed to know offhand. Their reading scores shot up (from say, the 3rd percentile to the 35th or 40th) when I explained that the big chunk of text on the right had the answers to the questions. They had no idea. And although they did better, they still complained that they wanted to be tested on “what they know” rather than “learn new stuff on the test”. Yes, that sort of thinking is completely alien to me and yes, it’s still pretty common.

In other words, I wonder if maybe crystallized vs. fluid intelligence impacts test scores on the bottom half of the bell curve. This might explain why relatively low skilled people have difficulty showing that knowledge on the test, but can be effective classroom teachers to young kids.

So I’m not as ready as I was five years ago to say that people who can’t pass a basic skills test don’t, in fact, have sufficient mastery of basic skills.

I’m not excusing the fraud. But it infuriates me that everyone’s ignoring it, because the conversations it would kick up are conversations we need to have—and, of course, they’re conversations we’re afraid to have.

Radio silence on Clarence Mumford

The Clarence Mumford case has gotten little traction outside its area. Save for the excellent Joanne Jacobs, probably the best pure education blogger around, none of the usual suspects have tweeted or blogged about it in the week since it happened.

Mumford, a former assistant principal, has been facilitating fraud in the Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi teaching pool for 15 years or more. Teachers and prospective teachers who couldn’t pass the PRAXIS on their own sent him a few thousand dollars each. For that fee, he scheduled a test and created phony driver’s licenses for people who took the test instead.

I understand why the media is reluctant to touch this story, but the eduformer silence is deafening. Here’s devastating, damning evidence of an organized crime ring passing tests in the name of teachers aren’t actually qualified, proving a demand for teachers too weak to pass the credentialing tests, and…..nothing.

Me, I’m thinking race.

None of the articles I’ve seen mention that Mumford is black, although most articles provide the picture. The U.S attorney (also black) who brought charges against Mumford doesn’t provide the names or races of the teachers who gained or kept credentials. I will be extremely surprised if it does not turn out that most if not all of the teachers who bought themselves a test grade are black. (I am also betting that the actual testers are white, but am not as certain. It just seems that if black people were taking the test and guaranteeing passage, the fees would be higher.)

I suspect that everyone not talking about the Clarence Mumford is doing so because they, too, are pretty sure that the teachers paying for test passage are black, even though they’d hasten to holler “racist!” if anyone said this aloud. If I’m wrong, and it turns out that Clarence Mumford has been helping white teachers fake their credential scores, then when that news comes out I anticipate an avalanche of coverage. Everyone will be relieved.

Eduformers pushing for “more competent teachers” (read teachers with higher test scores) are doing their best to pretend away the enormously bad news about the end result if this push were successful. They push the bogus factoid about ed majors’ SAT scores, demand that our teachers be drawn from the top 30% of our college graduates, and do everything they can to promote the notion that teachers are as dumb as stumps.

If their audience were to visualize, without getting needlessly specific, that these low achievement scores were due to the overpopulation of some hapless bong-hitting Millennials who wandered through a state school reading nothing more than the Cheese Doodles packaging when they had the munchies and beer wasn’t sufficiently nutritious, why, that’s purely coincidental. If their audience were then to contrast this know-nothing pile of lazy do-nothings with the freshly-pressed penny bright Ivy League grads and conclude that, by golly, only the Best of the Best should be teachers, who should blame them? Certainly not the eduformers.

And so if this Mumford story were about white teachers, they’d be all over it. Look! Those damn teachers are morons! Burn them! See! Teachers are stupid!

But black teachers? Thud. Silence.

I’ve written on the lurker in the teacher quality debate, but here’s some ETS data. (Cite, and I pulled out images of the relevant points in the gallery below)

The bullets, dressed up with details to drive the point home:

• The white Millennial bonghitter with a 1.2 GPA who teaches sixth grade science after his parents booted him out of the basement ties the freshly-pressed hardworking black track star with a 3.8 GPA teaching special ed.* ( Cite)

• The goofball wannabe manicurist who loafed through Podunk U and went into teaching kindergarten after the tenth of her problematic boyfriends dumped her outscores the idealistic black welfare daughter success story on a full scholarship to Harvard who went into teaching sixth grade English to “give back” to her community.* ( Cite)

(*on average, of course)

In so many words: “Improving teacher quality” by increasing test score mandates will result in a dramatic drop in black (and Hispanic) teachers.

Bumping the basement won’t even make a dent in the white teacher population, which is almost certainly meeting or exceeding any realistic score requirement.

And then, the irony: the research base offers little in the way of proof that “improving the teaching pool” (raising required test scores) will improve results.

Best news, from the most optimistic research:

• “Quite striking” results show that teachers who score 2 or more standard deviations above average in math improved student gains by .068 of a standard deviation relative to average. (2sd is 95%ile).
• Teachers who scored 2sd below average in math reduced achievement by .062 of a standard deviation.
• Thus, the teachers from the 95% percentile or higher had a “whopping” improvement of .13 standard deviations over the teachers literally scraping the bottom.
• No significant difference in reading scores.

And that’s the good news. RAND found “no evidence that [experience, education, scores on licensure examinations] have a substantial effect on student achievement.” (This report also has an excellent overview of the research (including the relatively cheery Clotfelter study above), starting on page 6.)

Meanwhile, there’s this rather unsettling, and recent, finding from Goldhaber’s Race, Gender, and Teacher Licensing:

Same-race matching effects dwarf most any information conveyed through the licensure test signal. We wish to point out that when teaching Black students, Black teachers in the lower end of the teacher test distribution are estimated to have impacts that are approximately the same as White teachers at the upper end of the distribution.

In summary, we find that evidence suggesting the uniform application of licensure standards for all teachers is likely to have differential impacts on the achievement of White and minority students. Specifically, we see that Black and other minority students appear to benefit from being matched with a Black teacher regardless of how well or poorly that teacher performed on the Praxis tests, and these positive effects due to matching with Black teachers are comparable in magnitude to having the highest-performing White teachers in the classroom. Removing the lowest of performers on the exam would necessarily remove some of the teachers that appear to be most effective for this segment of the student population.

…..

Third, when isolating specific teacher-student interactions, we find evidence that Black teachers have more consistent success than White teachers in teaching minority students, and this matching effect is greatest in magnitude for Black teachers at the lower end of the licensure performance distribution.

Despite a decade or more of trying, the link between teacher cognitive ability and student outcome remains tentative at best, and appears to have a floor. Meanwhile, Goldhaber isn’t the first researcher to find that black students seem to do better with black teachers.

And so radio silence on the Mumford story, even though on the surface, it would seem to play right into their case for improving teacher quality. They can’t afford to be seen screaming for the removal of the thousands of African American teachers who would otherwise meet their criteria of “mediocre or worse”, and the mostly white population of eduformers certainly can’t afford to openly acknowledge that their demands for an improved teaching pool means a near decimation of the African American and Hispanic teaching pool–even without the unsettling lack of research to support their teacher quality fantasies. Because the optics, to put it mildly, suck.

Which is why they’re probably all secretly, desperately hoping the teachers are white so they can scream and point fingers. Because it’s fine to call white teachers stupid.

Note: I followed up on this post here:

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Update: Hey, after 4 months, the Mumford case gets a bit more attention. I have periodically been checking for updates, and I don’t recall seeing Cedrick Wilson’s name mentioned before. So maybe an ex-NFL lineman makes it a bit more newsworthy.

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Following a factoid

Last week, Diane Ravitch called for a cite on a frequently used factoid from the Big Book of Eduformers: research shows that students with effective teachers make three times the progress of students with ineffective teachers.

More than a few commenters found the cite: Eric Hanushek, “The Trade-off between Child Quantity and Quality,” Journal of Political Economy 100 no. 1 (1992): 84-117 (at p. 107).
The research conclusions are based on the data from the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment, which took place between 1971 and 1975, and which involved 1920 exclusively low-income black children.

Just to show how rarely anyone has read the original article, check out these quotes: “There is… no evidence that changing the immediate circumstances of the family will have any effect on student performance. The work behavior of the mother has no influence on the educational performance of the children. Neither does the absence of a father.” (page 113) and “Of the determinants of teacher expenditures per pupil (ie, teacher experience and degree level and class size), only years of experience are significantly related to student performance. (page 109) (emphasis mine, in both cases).

I suspect the emergence of the actual article will result in Ravitch and others calling bullshit on this cite in the weeks and months to come, and the eduformers will be backing off, for reasons that eduformer Stuart Buck make clear:

“So it’s not the most recent or externally valid finding one could wish for, that’s certainly true.”

Then comes the amusing part of Buck’s post, and the reason for mine:

“But is it so implausible that some teachers could produce 1.5 years of learning while others produce half a year? The real questions would be how many teachers are in each category and how we can identify them accurately, without crediting or blaming them for outside-school factors.”

Hahahaha.

Melinda Gates: Well, we know from good research that the fundamental thing that makes a difference in the classroom is an effective teacher. An effective teacher in front of a student, that student will make three times the gains in a school year that another student will make.

Suppose Gates had said “Well, I believe that effective teachers are fundamental. Is it so implausible that some teachers can produce three times the gains”? Doesn’t have nearly the ring of authority, does it?

So we’ve seen the research. It’s old, it’s demographically limited and the support is pretty weak to boot.

But hey, it’s pretty plausible, right?

Factoids are so much fun. Until, you know, someone actually thinks about them and the romance goes poof.