Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Common Core's remarkably weak evidence base

Must this happen so often? The backers of a broad-based political movement tell you their cause is an evidentiary slam dunk, but then you look at the research yourself and find basically nothing there. The Common Core education standards (de facto national standards) are a great example. As I wrote for National Review earlier this week:
...[T]he Center for Education Policy at George Washington University has put together a compendium summarizing over 60 research papers related to Common Core design and implementation. If there is empirical evidence on the importance of strong standards, this is probably the place to find it. Unfortunately, only two papers in the entire compendium are devoted to measuring the impact of Common Core on test scores. Both papers employ the dubious correlation-across-states methodology, and both give mixed results at best.
Read the whole thing there.

Here's a radio interview I did to promote the piece:



And the Washington Free Beacon did a nice summary as well.

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

"Why we shouldn't raise teacher pay" published in The Federalist

I'd been meaning to write a piece on public school hiring practices, so when the editors of The Federalist offered me a chance to do something for them on education policy, I figured this was the time. Here's the thesis of the article:
Even without the tenure obstacle, putting the best teachers in the classroom is a more challenging problem than many reformers will admit. One of the most common reformist prescriptions is raising teacher pay to attract stronger applicants. The logic seems simple, even obvious. But raising teacher pay will not work. In fact, it could be counter-productive. The reason lies not just with the well-known difficulty in predicting who will be a good teacher, but also with the entrenched hiring system of public schools.
The article focuses on the latter obstacle--the teacher hiring system that often disfavors the brightest applicants--but an entire piece could be written on the difficulty in predicting who will become a good teacher. Yes, smarter teachers tend to be more effective, ceteris paribus, but the correlation is not strong. Even if public schools were eager to take in the best and brightest, doing so would be no panacea.


Here's the conclusion of the piece:
Public school systems need fundamental changes in how they operate to improve teacher quality, and abolishing tenure just scratches the surface. The creeping emphasis on credentials must be reversed. School administrators must be willing to hire promising applicants who never received the standard education-school training. Objective evaluation systems must be adopted and refined. All parties must become comfortable with a process that will increase teacher turnover. And, finally, the public must maintain sober expectations about the value of high-quality teachers, understanding that their effectiveness is naturally limited by the abilities and family situations of the students themselves. To effect all these changes, pundits and policymakers must move beyond their “pay teachers more” mantra. The idea is attractive for its simplicity, but in reality it is no solution at all.
 Read the whole thing here.