Profiting from Master’s Degrees, or Not

In Who Profits From the Master’s Degree Pay Bump For Teachers?, Matthew Chingos never actually answers the title question, except he’s pretty clear that most teachers don’t.

Chingos is shocked that teachers are actually losing money, taking on something like $50K in debt just to pay bump tat comes with an MA. Naturally, if the teachers stay in the profession a long time, they make back the money, but Chingos has lately been very worried about the teachers who leave the profession, and wants them to know that a master’s degree won’t pay off.

Okay, so this entire research line is nonsense. Half of all teachers are not taking on massive debt at their local universities to get a relatively small bump in salary with a master’s degree in education.

But I thought it’d be interesting to discuss, for two reasons. First, because if you know anything about this issue, it’s pretty instantly clear that the logic and assumptions are absurd, and not to be engaged with seriously. Chingos has no real desire to alert teachers to a risky debt. He’s in favor of merit pay and other strategies that would lead to most teachers taking a pay cut. This whole argument line is just a branch in the reformer effort to end the compressed, one-size-fits-all pay scale that teachers have in favor of differential (or merit) pay. Merit pay consistently fails to win takers, so presumably the new front involves finding short-term teachers who argue that they had to leave the profession because they couldn’t afford the cost of a master’s to get a salary increase. None of these sidebars are the real issue.

Besides, demonstrating the massive holes in Chingos’s thinking requires an explanation of teacher entry points that some might find useful, even though the information is not complete. In fact, I gave up on this piece several times until I decided it still had some value in its open-ended state.

I don’t really dispute Chingos’s underlying point—that additional education doesn’t improve teacher quality. Chingos only cares about test scores, I’d go farther: I doubt additional education improves teacher quality on any spectrum.

That said, the first of many things Chingos seems utterly unaware of is that some states require a master’s degree for a permanent credential. New York requires teachers to acquire a master’s in the first three years of their professional experience; I keep that Massachussetts has the same requirement, but don’t see it stated on the website. Ohio recently discontinued the requirement.

In fact, Chingos seems to ignore entry path to teaching entirely, as well as the state mandates, at every point. He must know that many teachers began their career with master’s degrees—or at least additional education beyond the bachelor’s—but he seems not to consider it relevant.

Typical entry points—there may be a few more, but the details would probably push them into one of these categories.

1. Education Majors: 4 year degree in education includes a teaching credential.
2. Teaching credential without masters: 4 year degree in something else, stayed a fifth year or later entered a credential program.
3. Teaching credential with masters: 4 year (and possibly graduate) degree in something else, entered a graduate program that provides a masters along with the credential. (I took this route).
4. Alternate I—the TFA kind, aka an internship program that allows them to take a job before they’ve finished the credential.
5. Alternate II—The Call Me Mister kind, focusing on low ability candidates who can’t easily pass the credential tests. (I wrote about the struggles of black and Hispanic candidates and the 1998 HEA.)

As I’ve been saying forever, not all teachers have education degrees, and not all education BAs become teachers. I am reasonably certain, even though I can’t confirm this, that most teachers who have BAs in education–that is, took option 1—are elementary school teachers.

But a substantial number of teachers get credentialed in a graduate program that does not result in a master’s.

How many? I couldn’t find out.

I couldn’t determine how many elementary teachers took the option 2 route after degreeing in some other subject. My best guess says that not all elementary teachers are ed majors, that some non-trivial percent, maybe hovering around a quarter, maybe less, majored in something else and then signed up for a fifth year of ed school.

A far larger number of secondary teachers take option 2, and get credentialed without the master’s, is my guess. How many? Not sure.

I wish I knew if this data existed somewhere. Title II reports only break down by traditional vs. alternate. Some numbers are a bit hard to believe, like this National Education Information Survey: In 2011, about two out of three (65 percent) teachers surveyed had entered the profession through a traditional college-campus-based undergraduate teacher education program and an additional 18 percent had prepared to teach through a traditional graduate teacher education program.

Sixty five percent of teachers have ed majors? Really? I’m wondering if the survey is conflating non-master’s graduate programs with undergraduate programs (options 1 and 2). I’m prepared to believe that only 18% of teachers start off with masters’ in education, but two thirds of all teachers have education degrees? Deeply skeptical. But I could be wrong.

Does this matter to Chingos’s point? Well, he’s aghast that half of teachers have invested in master’s degrees, so you’d think it’d be relevant that a number of them started with MAs, or substantial post-graduation credits.

Then Chingos goes through a bit of a bait and switch. His data source makes no distinction between type of master’s degrees, and at the start of the piece, Chingos doesn’t either: The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. No mention of degree type.

Then, about halfway through, he makes it clear he’s thinking of MA Ed (all emphasis mine):

I address this question by merging salary schedule information from the NCTQ database with data on the tuition cost of an education MA degree at colleges and universities located near each school district
….
For teachers who plan to spend “only” 10 years in the classroom, earning an MA in education is likely a waste of money and effort.

And then, in the comments Chingos says:

If subject-specific MA degrees have benefits in the high school grades, it would not show up in this research. This suggests that we need more systematic research on teaching in the high school grades, and that a more sensible policy regarding MA degrees might be to reward subject-specific degrees (for teachers working in the relevant subjects) but not general education ones.

Clearly, Chingos assumes that all teachers are just going back to school to get a master’s degree in education for the pay bump. But in fact, not only do many teachers have to go back to get that master’s, but also Chingos has no idea how many teachers are getting MA Eds. One huge overlooked area: many teachers go back to school to pursue an administrator’s credential, where the payoff is considerably larger and has nothing to do with the master’s bump.

These may all seem like just quibbles. So who cares whether Chingos has any understanding of teaching entry points, or how teachers get paid for education? He’s trying to warn teachers off of getting a master’s that isn’t cost justified based on the pay bump.

But Chingos doesn’t seem to completely understand the pay bump, either. For teachers who started an MA their first year in the profession, Chingos assumes it takes 4 years and that the payoff is “the MA salary bump, which begins in the teacher’s fifth year and continues as long as he stays in the district.”

However, in many districts, teachers move across columns by acquiring credits, no matter where they lead, and then get a separate stipend for a master’s degree, PhD, or board certification.

Some examples: LA Unified (which flips steps and columns) pays on both education acquired and then adds a bonus for master’s and doctorates. A South Carolina district gives a boost for 30 BA credits, then it looks like a master’s is needed to get more pay. Then, once master’s is acquired, the teacher can keep acquiring more credits. Montgomery County in Virginia is made of sterner stuff, granting pay bumps only if program leads to a master’s—but it doesn’t have to be a teaching or career related one, so MoCo teachers, go get that MBA. DC schools provide an either/or option.

Generally, teachers are going to see pay benefits from the additional coursework long before they get the master’s. In many districts, a teacher could never bother with any education classes and just take interesting technology seminars that never lead to an advanced degree and still see the same salary boosts as someone working directly towards a master’s.

So once we weed out the states that require the teachers to get a master’s degree in order to keep their credential, and eliminate some non-trivial amount of teachers start with a master’s, and remember still others aren’t going to have to invest in the full cost of a master’s because they only need a few credits, who exactly are we talking about that might jump in for a full-fledged master’s degree purely to get a big salary hike? Elementary school teachers, that’s who.

Even in assessing just those teachers getting a master’s for the boost—and I absolutely grant the behavior exists—Chingos appears to be overestimating the expense. Not that we can tell for sure, because he doesn’t provide his data or the average cost per master’s per region. But Chingos assumes they are all going to their local college, and he seems to be saying that the average debt is $35K.

Naturally, Chingos is terribly worried that elementary school teachers are sinking tens of thousands of dollars into a master’s degree, and while the obvious solution is to dump the bump, in the meantime the states “should instead encourage the creation of low-cost MA programs.”

Yeah. Because without Chingos to point this out, no businesses ever would have looked at the teacher market and figured out that a doling out low-impact master’s degrees to people looking for a pay bump was a good market.

The most popular teaching universities are almost all online and often for-profit; the University of Phoenix costs 10K/year. National University comes in at around $16K, assuming the teacher applies professional development time towards the credits.

Ironic, given Chingos does research in online education, that he’d completely ignore the online diploma generators lowering the cost of getting a salary bump.

I don’t know what number Chingos came up with, nor do I know how much teachers are actually paying for a master’s. But unlike Chingos, I don’t think teachers are morons, and I do know they make cost benefit analyses when deciding how much teaching education to pay for. I used to wonder why so many teachers who didn’t major in education would take option 2, above (credential only) rather than get the master’s, as I did (option 3). After asking around I realized that the year-long master’s program at a fixed cost is largely restricted to the elite ed school programs. Most universities offer both the credential and a master’s, and the latter takes longer and costs more. The credential-only route is the cheapest way for most non-education majors to become teachers.

By the way, a great deal of these loans are forgiven. My master’s degree cost a bundle, but around $35K or so was wiped away, or will be (one more year for some of it).

One last thing Chingos ignores, although this is much more in the Paul Bruno bailiwick: having lots of education makes it harder to get jobs, particularly as a second career teacher. You’re old and expensive. Adding education also adds to the already considerable disincentive for teachers to leave districts: senior teachers always lose steps (most schools give 5 or 10 years at most) and unless schools are specifically looking for a veteran (usually because of outreach), they aren’t interested in paying an experienced teacher when they can get new ones for cheap. Every class a teacher takes increases district ties, making it less likely that the teacher will leave. As Paul Bruno is fond of pointing out, reformers and others who opine on education without understanding it are prone to confusing policy with job perks.

And so Chingos’s original research paper, the one he did with Peterson, is irrelevant, because districts aren’t under the illusion they are paying for quality. District officials almost certainly consider the education bump a means of keeping staff because, as I’ve written many times, keeping staff is a much bigger concern than firing staff.

Chingos’s ostensible concern is for the teachers going into debt to get more money that won’t pay off. He’s almost certainly wrong on that, as I’ve observed. His secondary concern is these silly districts that don’t understand they’re paying for quality they don’t get but that, too, is a misunderstanding of what districts are actually paying for.

In the main, I’m not bothered by the possibility–indeed, the likelihood—that the education bumps are nothing more than pay to play.

But only provided I don’t think about it for too long.

When I do think about it for too long, say the time it took me to write this, I am bothered by the possibility that many teachers go through the motions to get a master’s degree just to get a pay bump, for much the same reason that Jay Mathews Challenge Index offends me. States pay test fees to the College Board for tests that the kids will fail all so that the schools will have a higher ranking and, hopefully, improved property values. Teachers take out (small) loans to pay to a university for a no-brainer master’s so that the state will pay them more money. I’m all for free enterprise, but both the universities providing easy master’s degrees and the College Board are raking in dough that they really didn’t do much to earn through their business acumen or excellence. They’re just the purveyor of the credential that isn’t even a proxy.

So if there is, as I suspect, a good chunk of teachers forking out money to somewhat undeserving businesses to get largely meaningless credentials just for a raise, I think that’s a Bad Thing. I think it’s worth having a discussion about eliminating columns. However, like Chesterton’s Fence, eliminating an activity without knowing why it started often leads to difficulties. Paul Peterson says that rewarding teachers for education credits came about as a compromise to convince high school teachers to accept a compressed pay scale that put them on the same footing as elementary school teachers. If in fact most high school teachers start out two or three columns ahead of K-6 teachers, then eliminating columns leads to lower pay for high school teachers. Not a good plan.

Ah, say some, but that would lead us to another compromise. If we can’t have merit pay, surely we should at least pay teachers based on the relative demand of their skills. Pay high school teachers more than elementary teachers, and then within high school teachers, pay math and science teachers best because that way we can upgrade the profession, get more skilled people.

Okay, so focus hard: MATH AND SCIENCE TEACHERS ARE SMART ENOUGH. And the field pays well enough for people who want to be math and science teachers, particularly those who are happy to teach kids who will struggle to remember what a negative slope looks like.

Discussion at hand: what to do with the “column” money if the education columns are eliminated? In answering the question, accept that the outcome will only reallocate the money saved to a teaching population that looks just like the current one.

That’s an interesting question, but one that I suspect opens large cans of squiggly worms and when we all look inside, we’ll say hell, just let University of Phoenix et al get some undeserved profits.

Besides, that’s not a discussion that Chingos and other reformers want to have, because despite being the ones to raise the point, they aren’t interested in fixing the problem, but in forcing a solution.

Okay, I’ve been working on this long enough. Punting and posting.

On ending the year

Year 2 I did finals on the last day of class, because the school required it and my room was in the center of campus. I was returning—probably. (I looked for new jobs; an offer came in too late to accept). Better part of something not to flout administration, so I did the final on the intended day.

Every other year, I’ve a series of finals or one big one in the days before, and show a movie during the two hour final period. I’d misplaced my copy of Rear Window the year before, so on Friday it was the featured film in all three classes.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t really give a damn if my kids love math or just survive it, find “Hamlet” enthralling or torture, or are really interested in what the Founding Fathers thought of strict vs. loose Constitutional construction. But they will by god not turn up their noses at classic films.

And so three times, my film buff’s heart just went pitty-pat thump thump with satisfied joy as twenty to thirty kids shrieked in horror when Lars Thorwald came around the corner of the hall while Lisa was still in the apartment, or gasped and flinched when Burr realizes who’s been watching him.

One girl had seen it already, and she confided that the beginning was slow.

“That’s because you’re used to a different style of movies. But think of this as a novel you’re analyzing for lit class. Look for subtle changes in Stewart’s behavior, for the first time he openly reaches for Lisa instead of fending her off. Or look at the window stories and see how many of them are just reinforcing the different outcomes for women and relationships. And remember this: at the end of the first 30 minutes, Lisa asks if either of them can ever change. Consider that the rest of the movie as an answer to that question.”

She came up to me after it was over to say that she’d never before realized that movies were “just like books”.

“I could write an essay about Rear Window for the SAT!”

“You could indeed. Make a nice change from Martin Luther King.”

Anyway. A richly rewarding experience. Maybe even for my students.

On to the year-end check out.

While the last days of school are usually pretty easy, the very last day of duty is a hassle. Teachers have to get signed off on a bunch of things over the summer, turn in their keys, and leave. You can tell the teachers who count every second of the summer, who have been preparing their room for the end days for at least a week, who know the checkoff list by heart and have it all done before the last bell rings. They’re the ones waiting in line on Friday morning for an admin signoff so they can prove to the principal’s secretary that they’ve changed their voicemail password and turn in their keys.

Then there are teachers who make a day of it–eh, summer’s here, they won’t rush. These are teachers for whom the most significant task—room cleaning—is something they’d rather not think about. They come in late, sigh at the mess of their room, do some grading, get grades in, lackadaisically pack up a few boxes, go get coffee, come back and sigh at the mess of their room, shove a bunch of stuff into their car, go get lunch, toss a bunch of stuff they’d been saving in case they needed it, jam anything left over into their cars, and then look at the sign-off sheet to see what other tasks they need. By this time it’s usually late afternoon and everyone’s left, so they skate the things like turning in two copies of grades, turning in keys, changing voicemail and so on. They email the principal’s secretary and drop by a few weeks later to turn in their keys.

You’ll never guess which sort of teacher I am. Go ahead, guess.

Year 1 and Year 3, I was leaving the schools, so I’d taken all my belongings home earlier. The actual last day, I looked at the various things acquired at the school, remembered where I’d found them, realized no one would give a damn if they were gone, so shrugged and took them, too. Like the really cool geometry book I found stuffed into the corner of a box of books the previous teacher had left for the trash, or the white board found jammed into the back of a junk room that had “3/5/04” on the meeting agenda written (but still removable) on it. Or the massive trunk of fantastic manipulatives, taken from a room stuffed with such trunks that the book clerk told me had been there for five years because “no one used them”. Indeed, at my school, I was the only one who used them, along with the set of 30 student-sized white boards that I talked up to all my colleagues, who all looked at me perplexedly. “They’d just use them to draw on, or scribble obscenities.” “Sure. but sometimes they do math.” No takers. They’ve been put to good use. Those years I was usually the last one out, or close to it, but would usually turn in my keys early and then just prop my door open.

Years 2 and 4, I didn’t leave schools but changed rooms, which required me to pack my car much as if I was leaving because lord knows what gets lost in a move. Last one out both years, had to drive back to the schools to turn in my keys later.

Year 5: I am staying for a third year. No room change. My summer job doesn’t start until Tuesday, so I have an actual brief break to enjoy. Vowing to commemorate the occasion with a behavior change, I stay late both Wednesday and Thursday, finishing all but a bit of my grading, and get much of my room boxed up. On Friday, little to do but finish up grading and pack the boxes, computers, printer, lots of books, office supplies into my storage closet—nothing to come home! Then I bought a lock at the Dollar Store. Last thing in the closet, just before the lock, my class rules sign, made in Year 2, a big piece of thin yellow paper. I don’t like throwing things away.

What was left? Grades done. What was the stuff I usually skated because I was late? Oh, print out copies of grades. Check. Change voicemail. Well, I never set it up to start with, so that should be easy. But the preset password didn’t work. Oh, that’s right, our voicemail system had crashed. Use the system default. Didn’t work.

I sat there, perplexed. Wait. Is it possible that I did set it up after the crash? I vaguely remember the principal’s secretary telling us that the system would be upset if passwords were left in default. Could it be that I’d complied? I never do voicemail. Never. But if I had done voicemail, my password would be….

“You have three messages.”

Only three? Pretty good. Does this mean I’d set up a voice recording?

“Hi, this is Ed. I’m happy to get in touch with you, but to ensure a record of all my interactions, I prefer that parents contact me via email. If this is a problem, please send a note in with your student and I’ll be happy to contact you. ”

The only three messages were system-wides from other teachers. It worked!

I must have set this up in an extra five minutes I had between classes. Not a single memory of it, though.

I was done! Everything signed off, grades done. Turned in the keys. People were still cleaning their rooms. It was 3:30. I wasn’t last!!!!

Then I realized I’d left my laptop and the few take-home things in the classroom. To which I no longer had the keys.

Thank god a custodian was walking by right then. He didn’t even laugh at me.

And so summer begins.

Rick Hess Recycles

So Rick Hess, after delivering a bracing face slap to reformers on their complaints about pesky little implementation details, apparently decided to be evenhanded and talk tough to educators about their desires to run schools without the interference of those pesky politicians:

I had smart, talented leaders complain about ill-conceived accountability systems. About pols who weren’t willing to spend enough on schools. About why pols don’t listen to them or ask their advice. About how the pols ought to stick to their own business, and let educators run the schools.

And what does he tell them?

Mostly, I tell edu-leaders to get over themselves. Public schools spend public dollars and hire public employees to serve the public’s children. For better or worse, they’re going to be governed by public policies. Whether made by legislators or bureaucrats, and in Washington or locally, those policies sketch what educators can and can’t do, how money is to be spent, how performance will be judged, who can be hired, and much else.

And when educators respond by saying but wait, this is new behavior, what does he say?

Two answers: One, you’re wrong. Pols have always written regs about how money could be spent, how many kids could sit in a classroom, what subjects had to be taught, who could teach, and so on. Two, the reason today’s policy feels more invasive is because there’s substantial dissatisfaction with how schools are doing and with the effects of these older rules and regs. So, new policies focused on accountability, choice, teacher evaluation, and the rest, are an attempt to make sure that the public’s kids are well served and that public funds are spent effectively.

Besides, we have to sympathize with the life of a politician looking to improve schools:

Let me put it this way. If you were an elected official and were responsible for elementary schools where only half of kids are reading at grade level and high schools where only fifty percent of students are graduating, it’d be pretty understandable (and laudable, even) to think you can’t simply trust the educators to do the right thing.

But why do they get to make policy?

it’s simple: they’re elected to do that. You can argue that educators should have an untrammeled right to spend public dollars, educate the public’s kids, and run public schools as they see fit. But you can do so coherently if, and only if, you think military officials should have a free hand to make national security policy, police should get a free hand to write criminal law, doctors and pharmaceutical companies to make health policy, and bankers to regulate banking. Otherwise, if you want a say in things like health policy or whether police racially profile, then you need to recognize that folks expect educators to live by those same rules.

Well, he sure told off educators. But I have a few….……Wait. Wait. HOLD ON!

I’m so embarrassed. I am using the wrong Rick Hess tells off educators column! He wrote this one nearly two years ago. How could I screw up like that?

Here’s the one he wrote this week.

Talented educators regularly gripe to me about dumb accountability systems, teacher evaluation schemes, and such. They gripe about politicians who aren’t willing to spend enough on schools, to listen to them, or to ask their advice. They exclaim that policymakers ought to mind their own business and let educators run the schools.

And his response?

I get it. It’s an understandable premise, especially for a hard-working, talented teacher. But I tell these folks they need to step back and look at this with fresh eyes. See how it looks to the policymakers, say. After all, public schools spend public dollars and hire public employees to serve the public’s children. For better or worse, they’re going to be governed by public officials. Those officials are going to set the policies that shape what educators can and can’t do, how money is to be spent, how performance will be judged, who can be hired, and much else.

Hey. They don’t have to get over themselves any more! But apparently, these educators still think it’s new behavior, and:

There are two responses here. One, is that you’re wrong. Politicians and state bureaucrats have always written regulations about how money could be spent, how many kids could sit in a classroom, which textbooks would be used, what subjects had to be taught, who could teach, and so on. We’re used to all this, though, so it can be less noticeable. Two, the reason that today’s policy feels more invasive is because policymakers have been convinced that these older rules and regulations weren’t getting the job done. So, they’ve adopted new policies around accountability, school choice, teacher evaluation, school turnarounds, and the rest, in an attempt to make sure that the public’s kids are well-served and that public funds are well spent.

No change there. He still wants sympathy for the politicians, and he “puts it the same way”:

Let me put it this way. If you were an elected official and responsible for elementary schools where only half of kids are reading at grade level or high schools where only fifty percent of students are graduating, it’d be pretty understandable to think you need to do something about it. Now, it’s totally cool to disagree with what policymakers are doing: to think it’s misguided or wrong-headed. But you’re in an infinitely better place to cage-bust if you start with an appreciation for where they’re coming from.

And why do these politicians get to make policy?

If you’re wondering why people who aren’t experts on schooling get to make policy, it’s simple: they’re elected to do that. You can wish that educators should be free to spend public funds and run public schools as they see fit. But that’s not the way it works. In any event, you can only make that argument in good conscience if you think military officials should have a free hand to craft national security policy, police to write criminal law, doctors and pharmaceutical reps to make health policy, and bankers to regulate banking. Otherwise, if you want a say in things like whether we invade other nations, what health care should look like, or what our laws say, then educators need to be prepared to live by those same rules.

You’re wondering how I recognized this. I’d love to say I commit Rick Hess’s work to memory, but in fact I responded to the earlier piece, in one of my favorite posts: The Fallacy at the Heart of All Reform. You should read it. Rick Hess did, because I emailed the post to him and we had a nice conversation about it. My conclusion:

Rick Hess is wrong in saying that education leaders are “allergic” to policy. They are “allergic” to mandates with no relationship to reality. And his sympathy for political leaders who are dragged in reluctantly, poor folks, to spare the kids from uncaring, dysfunctional schools is also misplaced. The problem isn’t the schools. The problem is the mandates—both progressive and reform. The problem is the imposition of political and ideological objectives into the educational world, screaming and howling and suing for five impossible things before breakfast.

I was tempted to just repost this whole essay and see if anyone noticed, but I’m not as famous as Rick and I doubt anyone would. Notice.

Note to Rick: I know you’re busy with the books and all, but I have to tell you this didn’t end well for Jonah Lehrer.

Keeping Teachers New

So John Merrow of Taking Note discusses “teacher churn” . Merrow, who I don’t really object to much, is a bit like another veteran education reporter Jay Mathews in that he’s superb at hard reporting but should avoid analysis. (At least Merrow hasn’t been responsible for massive grade fraud and wasted taxpayer dollars. Thanks, John!)

… somewhere between 30% and 50% of all new teachers leave the profession within their first five years…The churn, which seems to be increasing, has had a profound impact on our teaching force. As recently as 1987, schools were hiring only about 65,000 new teachers a year. By 2008, the last year I found data for, schools were hiring 200,000 new teachers. As a consequence of the churn, one-quarter of our teachers have less than five years of experience, and that’s a huge change: In 1987 the modal ‘years of experience’ was 15—we had more teachers with 15 years of teaching experience than any other. Today the modal teacher is a rookie in her first year on the job.

And in fairness, his flawed reasoning here isn’t any worse than the crap that most policy advocates, particularly on the reform side, go through.

But flawed it is. One, we are hiring more teachers. Two, more teachers are leaving the profession after a few years….but wait. No, we don’t know that more teachers are leaving the profession, as a percentage of the population, since 1988. It’s a bit like an SAT inference question, isn’t it?

Teacher turnover has been an area of study since at least the late 70s. Murnane is a name that pops up often. An early paper by Linda Darling Hammond calls for more data collection, challenging the then received wisdom that teacher turnover and teacher quality were problems that would inevitably lead to shortages—heavens, that sounds familiar. I don’t in fact know that teacher turnover is worse (and trying to hunt that data down is the kind of research that leads to increased lag time between my posts), but certainly it’s been an area of study for close to forty years.

So while Merrow doesn’t actually state that turnover is increasing, he does imply that turnover, or “churn”, is why we’re hiring more teachers. But that’s obviously not the only possibility. The late 70s to early 80s were a tough time for teachers, as the boom generation finally left K-12 education and the “baby bust”, coupled with fiscal issues, led to layoffs. The following echo boom would have required more teachers.

Reduced class size initiatives, the huge increase in special education mandates, charter growth—all of these would lead to increased teacher hiring without entailing turnover. Charters rarely take away enough students from a single school for a one-to-one teacher exchange, and of course charters are allowed to cap growth (nice work if you can get it).

No reason to think the increase in teacher hiring has been caused by increased churn, then.

Given that Merrow hasn’t even really built the case for increased teacher churn, it makes sense that his culprit is totally off.

But I nominate schools and colleges of education as the primary beneficiaries of churn. After all, someone has to train the replacements. Consider one state, Illinois: In 2012, its institutions of higher education graduated over 43,000 education majors, presumably the majority of them trained to be teachers.[3] Illinois K-12 schools employ about 145,000 teachers. If 20% leave in a given year, that creates 29,000 vacancies–I.E., jobs for 29,000 replacements.

Right, it’s ed schools! They aren’t turning out bad teachers because of their own incompetence, but because it feeds the need for their service!

Except, um, ed schools already overproduce elementary school teachers. (I don’t think they do so deliberately—my sense is a lot of unmotivated women who just want a degree go this route without ever really intending to be teachers. No evidence, but there’d be a lot more complaining if that many teachers each year couldn’t find employment.)

Besides, ed schools benefit from the “step and column” pay structure, in which teachers are paid both by time and acquired education. Most pay scales dramatically slow the “step” increases after year eight to ten, deliberately pushing teachers towards professional development. Teaching is apay to play occupation—the state makes us pay to jump through a bunch of hoops. Ed school benefits from the whole process, not just the entry point. No increased steps, no column. No incentive for massive churn.

As I’ve observed before, teachers and cops have a lot in common and wow, check out the research on cop turnover. Like teachers, policing is a state government job that requires intelligence, doesn’t have a huge amount of upwards growth, but offers qualified people an interesting challenge or a safe job, depending on their inclinations and abilities. And both occupations turn out to be harder than they appear to the outsider, thus leading to what I assume is a higher than average degree of turnover for a professional occupation. Thus I don’t see any sinister cause for teacher churn.

Please God, spare us all from the Linda Darling Hammond solution of more, longer training.

All that said—and in this next part, consider my tone descriptive, not prescriptive—I pointed out in the Chris Christie piece above that teachers are clearly targeted in a way that cops aren’t, despite the fact that they’re more expensive, work fewer years and take longer pensions (or disability) and just as hard to fire.

A growing conventional wisdom is forming among the elites—the opinion makers, business leaders, political leaders—that teaching should be a short term job, that they aren’t worth the government expense. While they probably feel this way about cops, too, current memes dictate respect to the men (and they are, usually, men) who fight—crime, terrorists, fires, and the like. Teachers, on the other hand, are mostly like elites except not as smart—because otherwise, they wouldn’t go into teaching—and far more female. Hence the emphasis on their supposedly weak qualifications and determined ignorance of all evidence showing the qualifications aren’t weak. To put it in political terms: the center-left is supportive of cops and critical of teachers in a way that’s relatively new. The bulk of the people defending teachers and criticizing cops (these days on stop and frisk) are way, way to the left.

Acceptable targets change over time. Teachers moved up the chain, cops moved down. Makes sense, really—the crime rate was an issue in 80s and early 90s, then crime rates improved. Meanwhile, we’d spent twenty years thinking that affirmative action and equal opportunity would end the achievement gap and that didn’t pan out—time to blame teachers.

So teachers should hunker down, I guess—attentions and fashions will change again.

Certainly, reformers are trying to discourage long-term teaching careers. I see no evidence that cops, judges, firefighters, professors, or lawyers, to pick a random sample, are studied for “effectiveness”, much less found to be more “effective” with years in service. Nor do I see any mention of police use of sick leave, judges’ work load, or state university academics use of sabbaticals. Somehow, the fact that teachers don’t “improve” with time on the job is put forward again and again as evidence that they should be paid differently than any other government worker. And it’s hard to see Andrew Rotherham’s otherwise ludicrous obsession with teaching pensions as anything but an attempt to increase the sweetener for short-termers at the expense of lifers, to encourage teachers to find another line of work after a few years.

But hey, that’s how reformers make their bones.

The problem with teaching is that all “sides” of the debate accept as a given that we are failing to educate our kids, that we could do a much better job. In fact, we aren’t failing, and there’s no evidence we could be doing much better. But so long as everyone agrees that “schools are failing”, teachers will be on the firing line, and “churn” will be seen as either desirable or not based on absurd expectations and beliefs.

Cops were rescued from public condemnation by a dramatic reduction in crime—which they may or may not have contributed to. Teachers won’t be rescued by a decreased achievement gap. We’ll just have to wait for a new scapegoat to another big policy problem. Alternately, for society to accept that we’ll never end the achievement gap.

Which means we better wait for another policy problem. Hey, folks, did you know that firefighters don’t actually fight fires?

200 Posts

I did 100 posts in 10 months, but I had a number of ideas backlogged. 200 posts took me 19 months. At the rate I’ve been going, 300 posts will take me 25 months.

I want to change that, but I’m not sure how. I like each essay to be stand alone, and the best way to increase my output is to chunk thoughts. So I did that with Finding the Bad Old Days and Just a Job, which I’d originally planned as one piece. I likewise have chunked Memory Palace for Thee, but Not for Me and the Advanced Placement analysis. But I haven’t gotten back to Memory Palace, and am not sure when I’ll get back to the AP work. On the other hand, if I hadn’t posted that much, when would you all have seen it? I’m still pushing to get to 5 essays a month, but thus far I’ve been hardpressed to keep to four. However, as Mark Zuckerberg said to Cory Booker, “DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT”. Billionaires are all Js, in Myers Briggs terms, so I’m going to try and up the J of this blog and downplay the P-ness. (haha! MB joke, that.)

Anyway. I have just hit 385,000 views, have 560 or so Twitter followers, and have long since given up tracking posts that made over 1000 views. I have nine posts that have exceeded 5,000 page views, four of which I’ve written since October of 2012—in fact, all of four have been written since April of last year.

Leaving popularity aside, here are some favorites from the last 100 posts, in rough order of my preference:

• Philip Dick, Preschool, and Schrodinger’s Cat—This is one of the best things I’ve ever written. Third most popular essay on the site.
• College Admissions, Race, and Unintended Consequences—I like this slightly better than the most heavily visited essay on the site (see below).
• Dan Meyer and the Gatekeepers—Dan is still mad about this, I suspect, but like the one above it, I think it does a great job of building a very logical, well-founded case.
• Core Meltdown Coming: also written in October, as was the Asian immigrant piece. I was on roll.
• Not Why This. Just Why Not That
• NAEP TUDA Scores: Detroit Isn’t Boston and NAEP TUDA Scores: Does Black Poverty Matter?—I wish more people would read these, and not just because they were a lot of work. Big takeaways: yes. Poverty matters after sorting for race. and “free and reduced lunch” is not poverty.
• Asian Immigrants and what No One Mentions Aloud—I like this one a lot, but its popularity kind of shocked me. Blasted past all the other candidates and sits comfortably at the top of the most read queue by a couple thousand page margin.
• SAT’s Competitive Advantage—I like this one because NO ONE is talking about the issues I raised. Some day soon, I will look prescient.
  It’s the Tests, Zitbrains!—entry #7 in my railing about the impact of credential tests on URM teacher population.

• The Negative 16 Problems, and Educational Romanticism—probably my favorite combination of teaching and policy talk I’ve managed.
• What Can We Blame Teacher Unions For
• Content Knowledge and Reading Comprehension: Bold Talk and Backpedaling—I like this one mostly because I got it done. I’ve been mulling this one for ever.
• American Indian Public Charters: What Word Are You Forgetting, People?—AIPC isn’t American Indian, isn’t black, isn’t Hispanic. It is (or was) Chinese.
• The Release, and Dumbing it Down
• In Teaching, Even Caitlin Flanagan Has Her Uses
• Jason Richwine and Goring the Media’s Ox—I was quite angry that the media allowed him to write about cognitive ability until they could use it against him. Tsk, tsk.
  On John Quincy Adams and His Photograph
  Modeling Probability

And if you’re interested, here’s my most recent take on why I blog.

Newcomers, you can check out the Encyclopedias, which I’ve updated:
Encyclopedia of Ed:
Things Voldemortean
The Players
Teaching
Movies, Miscellany, and Me

Repeating myself: this blog has a readership and influence that has wildly exceeded anything I envisioned, not only when I started two years ago, but to this day. Thanks again for following me on twitter, on the blog, for your comments (even when I’m cranky), and for taking the time to stop by.

PS: Go ahead, Pershan, mock me.

Anyway.