SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Moneyball and CompStat: Implications for Education Policy

I have been reading a very important book entitled Teachers Matter: Rethinking how public schools identify, reward, and retain great educators, by Marcus Winter. I propose to do a series of posts that excerpt from this book, showing how Dr. Winter develops his argument. Today’s excerpt (pp. 1-2) examines the potential of data-driven teacher evaluation and compensation. As you read, bear in mind that most current administration systems hire and compensate teachers on the basis of factors (like experience and qualifications) that are unrelated to teacher effectiveness.

• In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis explained how in recent years the Oakland A’s managed to post one of the highest winning percentages of any team in Major League Baseball despite consistently having one of its smallest payrolls. The A’s trick, it turns out, was a data-driven assessment for identifying players who would contribute to a team’s success. Instead of relying on the traditional subjective analysis of baseball lifers and the usual array of official statistics, the team’s general manager, Billy Beane, hired a group of numbers geeks to develop statistical models that could better predict a player’s ability to produce runs in the future. Bean’s insight, which was already percolating among baseball outsiders, was that a team with better information about player quality has an advantage on the field. Data analysis didn’t ensure you’d win the World Series, but, all else being equal, it gave you a better opportunity to do so.
• In hindsight, it’s surprising that the smart people working in baseball before Beane came along thought that scouting reports correctly identified the best players. Scouts’ eveluations were often based on little more than viewing a few of a player’s at bats. Nonetheless, for little more reason than clinging to tradition, clubs simply did not bother to improve upon these clearly incomplete measures of a player’s worth for many decades. Failure to distinguish correctly beween the most and least effective players cost cost teams millions of dollars each year as they overpaid for mediocre talent.
• As in baseball, many features of the current system for employing public school teachers seem reasonable on the surface. For example, it seems self-evident that experienced teachers and teachers who have earned advanced degrees would be more effective than their junior colleagues.
• Sports franchises have recognized that they can use data to identify inefficiencies that will save them money and increase their performance. Policy makers have used advances in the development and use of data to save lives.
• In the early 1990s, New York City was a pretty difficult place to live. Crime was out of control, and it appeared that there was little that could be done about it.
• Then came CompStat. Adopted by Mayor Rudolph Giuliana under the guidance of his police chief, William Bratton, this revolutionary data system tracked crime precisely. The influx of data allowed the NYPD to focus its efforts on the most troubled neighborhoods, and to hold precinct captains accountable when things went wrong.
• Looking back, you have to wonder why it took so long for the police to adopt CompStat. Identifying the areas where crime is persistent would seem essential to anticipating it. Once technology was capable of maintaining and analyzing information about street crime, the obvious next step was to put such data to good use. Public schools are only now beginning to learn the fundamental lessons of Moneyball and CompStat.

Sunday at the Movies (Follow-Up to Teacher Bully Story)

You may recall a posting a week or two ago about how a parent bugged his son’s wheelchair and discovered the cruel treatment that his disabled son was receiving - along with the difficulty the father was experiencing in getting the school board to respond appropriately. The story went viral on YouTube, and here’s a follow-up video that speaks to school boards’ unwillingness or inability to fire bad educators. YouTube link. H/T MW

And now a word from our sponsor

It’s been a while since we’ve plugged our various services, and I thought that we might have some readers who are unaware of them or have forgotten that they exist….

Remedial program for students who are struggling with reading:  Stairway to Reading

Help for students who are struggling with math: Stairway to Math

Personalized help for parents with a question about how to help their children: Ask Aunt Malkin

Resources for parents of preschool and kindergarten children: Schoolproofing Your Child

Assorted resources for parents, including placement tests: Resources for Parents Whose Children Need Help

Free copy of How to Get the Right Education for Your Child

Newsletter archives containing informative articles sorted according to topic

Assorted resources for teachers: Resources for Better Teaching

Searchable database on student achievement and school board spending in Ontario: Sunshine on Schools

There’s lots more as well. To ask about something else, just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you asap.

Damned if they do and damned if they don’t

GUEST BLOG BY LOU D’AMORE, ONTARIO EDUCATOR

The longer I remain in the teaching profession the more I realize that a very small number of students use up the great majority of the available resources. These few students, who have an established history of negative behaviour which our system tolerates and never truly deals with, are the same students who take up most of our teachers’ time and energy. The cost of “educating” these individuals is very high and the added value is very small. Meanwhile, the chaos they cause in our schools is debilitating and it weakens teachers’ efforts to teach the majority.

Such is the case with the ever-increasing number of false accusations being made against teachers these days. I teach in a high-needs school, and this year, a boy in grade 3 accused TWO male teachers of physically assaulting him. They were off school for more than two weeks before proven innocent. The boy ? Well, he was “unconsequenced” (yes this is an education buzzword).

Three years ago, a boy in grade 5 accused me of slapping him across the face while he sang in my choir at an Ash Wednesday service held in our church. It didn’t matter that the church was filled with 400 people who saw nothing; it didn’t matter that I had a 32-year unblemished history of positive teaching experience; it didn’t even matter that the boy (on medication for his behaviour) was being questioned by his psychologist when he reported the “attack” (the psychologist had been called in because the boy was lighting fires in our school) – none of this mattered because the Children’s Aid was still called and I was kept out of my teaching position for eight weeks! It was personally devastating.

The lawyers were called in, the Children’s Aid investigators were called in, my union reps became involved, substitute teachers were called in to replace me, and pretty soon a minor economic stimulus had been unleashed.

Armed with a Children’s Aid report stating that my accuser’s story was “inconsistent and not credible”, I finally returned to work.  I was encouraged by my union to ask that my accuser be “consequenced”. We met with my superintendent and we argued that as teachers we are responsible for teaching basic morality and, because this boy had lied, it was our responsibility to make him understand the damage he had caused. The superintendent threatened to end the meeting right there – he wasn’t going to stand by while we accused a poor innocent child of lying. He forbade  any kind of meeting with the boy or any kind of reprimand. Apparently, what happened between the boy, Children’s Aid, and me, was irrelevant to my school board.

The details of my ordeal are very disturbing, and more so because I’m convinced that this same nightmare is happening to many other teachers. Union officials, Children’s Aid and the lawyers I talked to all admit they are seeing more of these cases. They can even see patterns – apparently, music, French and substitute teachers are the most common victims.  The great majority of accused teachers are found to be innocent.

We need to ask our politicians to mandate our school boards to keep track of these false accusations and require a report on the costs incurred to resolve these cases. Tax dollars earmarked for the classroom are being wasted carrying out these teacher witch-hunts and we should all know the extent of the problem so it can be fixed.

I can tell you that the school boards are very secretive about investigations on their teachers – best to pay the hush money and protect the corporate image. No one in the system wants to draw attention to the problem. Accused teachers are isolated and discouraged from telling their story.

I am somewhat encouraged by a teacher who recently came forward to tell how she became the subject of a false accusation. The CBC ran at least two articles about her on consecutive days. Three years ago, when this happened to me, I spoke to the CBC and they weren’t interested in doing any sort of story. Perhaps the CBC is realizing that these accusations on teachers are not isolated events but rather, a growing problem that is beginning to cripple the education process.

Musick has charms to sooth a savage breast

As you may have noticed, the human brain is not a straightforward logic machine. One of its strangest (to me, anyway) quirks is how the brain interacts with music. For example, anyone who has participated in a dance exercise class or jogged to music knows that that music makes it easer to exercise. Here’s an interesting interview about how music helps athletes - including its potential to promote feelings of patriotism and unity.

Now comes a Cambridge study that suggests music promotes empathy as well. Clearly, a better understanding of music’s potential could be very helpful when it comes to education.

Lessons on the Game of Life

I’m not sure what you’re going to make of the following excerpt (I’m not sure what I make of it myself), but it’s taken from a book called Coach by best-selling author Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis basically attributes his sucess in life to his baseball coach, as described in the following passage. Before you read it, I’ll just mention that this coach is now being undermined by many of his athletes’ parents for being too hard on the kids. Here’s what Coach Fitz has to say about this trend: “All this is about a false sense of self-esteem. It’s now bestowed on kids at birth. It’s not earned. If I were to jump all over you today, you would be highly insulted and deeply offended. You would not get that I cared about you.”

The summer of 1976 had been especially uncomfortable. Fitz had entered us in a better league, with bigger schools. Defeat followed listless defeat, until the night of this final Fitz story. We had just lost by some truly spectacular score. Twice at the end of the game he had shouted at our base runners to slide, and, perhaps not seeing the point, when down 15-2, in getting scraped, or even dirty, they’d gone in standing up. Afterward, at eleven o’clock or so, we piled off the bus and into the gym. Before we could undress, Fitz said, ‘We’re going out back.’ Out back of the gym was a sorry excuse for a playing field. The dirt was packed as hard as asphalt and speckled with shell shards, glass, bottle caps, and god knows what else. Fitz lined us up behind first base and explained we were going to practice running to third. When we got there, we were to slide headfirst into the base. This, he said, would teach us to get down when he said to get down. Then he vanished into the darkness. A few moments later we heard his voice, from the general vicinity of third base. One by one, our players took off. In the beginning there was some grumbling, but before long the only sound was of Fitz, spotting a boy coming at him out of the darkness, shouting ‘Hit it!’.

Over and over again we circled the bases, finishing with a headfirst slide onto, in effect, concrete. We ran and slid on that evil field, until we bled and gasped for breath. The boy in front of me, a sophomore new to Fitz, began to cry. I remember thinking, absurdly, ‘you’re too young for this’. Finally, Fitz decided we’d had enough, and ordered us back inside. Back in the light we marveled at the evening’s most visible consequence: ripped, muddy, and bloody uniforms. We undressed and began to throw them into the laundy baskets - untill Fitz stopped us. ‘We’re not washing them’ he said. ‘Not until we win’.

And they didn’t. I’m skipping quite a bit here about the continuing torture of these boys, and here’s the conclusion of this episode.

He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure. To make the lesson stick, he made sure we encountered enough of both. What he knew - and I’m not sure he’d ever consciously thought it, but he knew it all the same - was that we’d never conquer the weaknesses within ourselves. We’d never drive the worst of ourselves away for good. We’d never win. The only glory to be had would be in the quality of the struggle.

I never could have explained at the time what he had done for me, but I felt it in my bones all the same. When I came home one day my senior year, and found the letter saying that, somewhat improbably, I had been admitted to Princeton University, I ran right back to school to tell Coach Fitz.

What is the real issue here?

In Mississauga, several teachers in a publicly-funded Catholic school gave their students the option of signing a petition that might lead to the criminalization of abortion in Canada. More here. The president of the Canadian Secular Alliance, a group that supports the abolition of public funding for Ontario Catholic schools, is using the teachers’ actions as more support for his organization’s mission. 

While I agree that these Catholic teachers should not have used their position of power to influence their vulnerable students, I do not agree that this is evidence that public money should be withdrawn from Catholic schools.

After all, many - if not most - teachers are constantly using their positions of power to influence their vulnerable students. Sometimes, the influence is wielded in obviously inappropriate areas, for example during political campaigns or when it comes to religious questions. Not so obviously inappropriately, however, there are campaigns and brain-washing going on in schools all the time - against, for example, global warming, smoking, and bullying, and in favour of, for example, homosexuality, good nutrition, and recycling. 

Some of these campaigns I agree with, some I don’t. And therein lies the rub. Because most likely, your set of approved campaigns is going to be different from mine. And who is to say which of us is right?

The only fair solution I can see is to mandate schools to teach, as far as humanly possible, only the academic skills and knowledge commonly agreed to be essential for success in our 21st-century world. Simply removing funding from publicly-funded Catholic schools is unlikely to make much of a difference one way or another.

Lower-Order Thinking Skills?

Yesterday’s blog elicited a comment from one of our faithful readers along the lines of he rejected the argument because it came from a right-wing organization. Another of our readers kindly warned that citing that organization would forever brand SQE as crazy right-wing and give our enemies all the evidence they need. Both of these readers are or were educators.

Hello?

Intellectual honesty and openness require that every argument be considered on its merits. If the argument is correct, what difference does it make who advanced it?

Are/were these educators teaching our children this sort of closed-minded, prejudicial thinking? I certainly hope not.

Sunday at the Movies (School Choice)

The Heritage Foundation has created a series of videos: Education Unions, Education Spending, Washington’s Role in Education, and School Choice. There is no attempt at nuance (the videos are all stamped “made simple” after all), but nevertheless the videos may make it possible for viewers to look at each issue through a different prism. I have chosen to embed the school choice video, and I encourage you to send it on to non-choir-members. H/T RC

Testing for dummies

Today’s posting is for people who take test results at face value. I have three sites for you to visit.

The first link is just for fluff - it’s a true story about a silly test item on the New York state English exam for grade 8 students. Its contribution is to call into question the merit of testing in general. I mean really. Why did the animals eat the pineapple? You’ve got to be kidding!

The second link provides sample questions for the PISA test. A brief look at these questions will disabuse anyone of the idea that success on the PISA indicates high scholastic achievement. Rather, PISA is looking at parental support systems as much as anything.

The last link provides sample questions for the TIMSS test. Finally, here’s a test of the value added by schools. And, by the way, the latest round of TIMSS results is due out this fall. 

Test results must be interpreted carefully. Otherwise, it’s like believing that 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.