Keeping education public

By: centraljersey.com
It has been an eventful week for New Jersey schools.
First, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave Newark schools a $100 million grant with the implicit understanding the city would move forward on a reform agenda that includes charter schools, new ways to assess teacher performance and other changes.
Then on Tuesday, Gov. Chris Christie visited Old Bridge to unveil his plan for merit pay for teachers, an effort that dovetails with goals set by the Obama administration, which announced $442 million in grants to school districts around the country to create what it is calling teacher incentive programs.
All of this happened as a surprising political coalescence has formed. Liberals (President Barack Obama, Newark Mayor Corey Booker, Oprah Winfrey) and conservatives (Gov. Chris Christie, the school choice and voucher movements) have come together to push a common set of reforms that include charter schools, merit pay for teachers, the closing of failing schools and the like.
The subtext, of course, is America’s education system is in decline; our children are not getting the education they need, let alone deserve.
There is some cause for their concern though the twisted logic of the so-called reformers has left us with a set of proposals that will do little more than shift resources around, strip public education of its support and ultimately fail.
Let’s start with the basic premise: American schools are failing. The justification for making this claim is American students place in the middle of the pack on science and math tests and the dropout rates have been rising – arguments that have some basis in fact, but are misleading.
The causes of our failures, reformers say, are bad teachers and bad schools. Change the tenure and pay systems and force schools to compete, with bad ones having to shut their doors, and you change education for the better.
Let’s look at merit pay and tenure. There is no evidence to support the claims made by reformers – and, in fact, the few studies that have been done appear to contradict their arguments. As Maureen Downey, writing on the Get Schooled blog at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, wrote this week, a "much-anticipated study out of Nashville . . . shows no impact on student performance from teacher bonuses."
The study, issued by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, reviewed the test scores of students of 300 middle school math teachers who participated in the Project on Incentives in Teaching. The three-year study "tested the assumption," she wrote, "that teachers will work harder and produce greater student gains if they are rewarded for it."
Merit pay, according to researchers, failed the test.
"We tested the most basic and foundational question related to performance incentives – Does bonus pay alone improve student outcomes? – and we found that it does not," Matthew Springer, executive director of the National Center on Performance Incentives, told Ms. Downey. "These findings should raise the level of the debate to test more nuanced solutions, many of which are being implemented now across the country, to reform teacher compensation and improve student achievement."
Does that mean we should not make changes to compensation or tenure? No. What the study shows, however, is the simplistic approach being pushed by politicians and ideologues will do little to improving the quality of teaching – just as the huge compensation packages offered to corporate titans has done little to ensure they improve the performance of their companies.
School choice suffers from the same lack of statistical backing even as the narratives offered by supporters focus on the handful of successes (see "Waiting for Superman," the documentary that follows a small group of Bronx students seeking to get into charter schools). Charters have not been shown to be more effective, but even if we were to make the assumption that they are, the debate purposefully ignores the impact charters have on public school systems.
Money is shifted from the public schools to these autonomous entities, removing a level of democratic accountability and replacing it with a theoretical market-driven approach. That leaves less money available for the public schools – and the students – left behind.
Reformers have become fond of shouting – because shouting is the only way they can get their point across on this – that we can’t just throw more money at schools. But then they applaud Mr. Zuckerberg and Bill Gates for their willingness to throw money at schools. The contradiction underscores the dysfunction built into our educational funding system.
The fact is urban schools are in desperate need of money. The per pupil estimates the state provides are misleading because they gloss over the very real and costly challenges districts like Newark, Trenton and New Brunswick face such as the need for heavier security, the higher maintenance and utility costs associated with older facilities, the greater number of special education, basic skills and ESL students and the overarching hopelessness that paralyzes the world outside the classroom.
Real reform cannot be done on the cheap, and it cannot be accomplished by relying on private money or federal innovation grants like those offered by President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative. Real reform means spending money to hire teachers, fix buildings and buy new textbooks. It means untying the hands of teachers, who have seen their freedoms curtailed as the educational establishment has become more and more enamored of testing and measurable results.
And it means instituting a real urban policy in the United States, rebuilding our cities and returning places like Newark and Trenton to their former glory.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post. E-mail, [email protected]www.kaletblog.comfacebook.com/hank.kalet.