Where am I?

I am sorry about all the blog-jumping around. My latest blogging can be found on the SSI K12 web site.

Edustat Blog

My education blogging will now mostly take place on the EduStat blog. I made a few posts and comments today. I invite you to check it out.

Milton Friedman on Home Schooling

Fora.tv

QUESTION: Dr. Friedman, my question has to do with home schooling. Is that large enough yet to qualify as competition for the public school system and do we learn anything from that?
ANSWER: We do learn from that. We learn from home schooling that there is a serious problem with our public schools. Do you know any other major advanced product that people make at home? ...

Innovative paths to solutions

Barack Ben-Gal, the budget director of Oakland Unified School District, offers a fresh approach to leadership within a school district. Ben-Gal first worked in Oakland as a Broad Fellow under Dr. Randolph Ward. Ward took control of the bankrupt Oakland school district in 2004. Ben-Gal has worked diligently for the last three years on the policy of Results-based Budgeting and revamping the finance system of the entire district. While the policy went into effect for the first time in the 2005-06 school year and the logistics of the system are still being worked out, I commend Ben-Gal for his innovative way of approaching challenges within the district.

Recently, business school students from across the United States competed in a Case Study Competition at Berkley looking at the Results-based budgeting policy in Oakland. The competition challenged each group of students to address the problems of implementation and sustainability for the program, especially taking into consideration the movement from state-led control of the district to local control in the next few years. By encouraging young minds throughout the nation to address the challenge, Ben-Gal not only created an opportunity to delve into the intricacies of the issues and possible next-steps for the policy, but he was also able to create awareness for business students about how their skills can be used in numerous contexts outside of the corporate world, especially within education.

With more leaders such as Ben-Gal in district positions, we could see phenomenal new approaches to education in the United States.

Universal Voucher Program in Utah

This new voucher program strikes me as a very big deal. Coulson points out the obvious shortcoming though.

the maximum value of Utah’s school vouchers would be $3,000, only about half of what Utah spends per pupil in its public schools. So Bill 148 would still leave private schools at a considerable financial disadvantage compared to their state-run counterparts, and that would inhibit competition between the public and private sectors and retard innovation.

Balanced Scorecard - The Business Solution

Sinead does a wonderful job of highlighting some of the problems with the way that people frame the merit pay debate. I want to second her concern.

The problem is perfectionism. Policymakers want to design the perfect policy. They want to create the perfect merit pay system. If the system being proposed is not perfect, then policymakers revert to doing nothing.

Two major criticisms of merit pay are that schools don't want to create an internally competitive environment and there is no way to measure everything about being a good teacher. Businesses deal with these issues all the time.

If a business does not want to create an internally competitive culture, then they design the compensation and incentive systems around this strategy. Businesses also have a very difficult time finding the correct way to measure somebody's effectiveness. The best employee is one who

Improves the productivity of their colleagues

Makes the customers happy

Works well with their boss AND their subordinates

Delivers results

Develops good relationships with suppliers

Among many more measures...

But this does not mean that businesses should abandon the idea altogether.

The idea of merit pay is very simple. In theory, if someone performs their job well, then they should be rewarded more. Once the ed policy world buys into that theory, then the entire debate should revolve around the design of the merit and incentive system.

The human resources literature has many different ways of approaching this issue. For starters, 360-degree feedback is gaining popularity in many businesses. In education, the teachers could be rated by their principals, fellow teachers, students, support staff, parents, etc. Then, committees including selected teachers, principals, support staff, etc. can spend a day and assign bonuses.

But measuring someone's success should not be a once a year occurrence. The best businesses are always giving their employees constant constructive feedback, and positive reinforcement. Schools or businesses can never be perfect, but they should always be working towards improving themselves. In operations, this is known as Kaizen (continuous improvement).

One of the solutions that a group in my Education Consulting class made to improve a principal's management was to introduce a balanced scorecard. In the presentation to 10 principals on the topic, everyone was excited and wanted a copy of the report.

UPDATE: Bobby sent me this link about Balanced Scorecards.

Merit Pay Debate

The University of Florida just released a new study on the benefits of merit pay. It concluded that merit pay is associated with higher performance on standardized tests.

While I find some flaws in the design of the research, my concern in this post is on the overall debate of merit pay. The article demonstrates nicely how people are constantly responding to the idea of merit pay by highlighting its short comings-

"We have to be wary of simplistic approaches to evaluating teacher effectiveness. Merely comparing test scores does not capture the whole picture"

or "There is more to educating a child than can be seen on a score from a standardized test."

Or personal stories of accomplishment within teaching that teacher merit pay could never capture-

"When I was a teacher, I worked closely with a couple of high school students who wanted to drop out of school. I put in long hours and gave them individual attention. They stayed in school and graduated," Tuttle said. "This was the major achievement of my teaching career, but you won't see this on any test score or learning gain."

I think this argument is flawed. While I agree strongly with every statement above, I do not believe it needs to be part of the merit pay debate. Teachers in Florida will continue to get paid their base salary. Incentive pay is a means of rewarding teachers who show significant gains in test scores with their students. Whether one believes in the importance of test scores or not, it is the assessment tool that we currently use to evaluate students. Merit pay does not assess the teacher as a whole, it does not reward them for success as a role model, it does not capture every aspect of their job. However, it does allow the state to create an incentive model for one aspect of every teacher's job- increasing test scores. This is what the state wants to measure, and it has a tool for rewarding teachers who acheive the desired outcome.

In education, we often fall into the trap of seeing every issue from every angle and highlighting every problem. This often results in never moving past the debate and onto possible solutions. Merit pay does have some drawbacks and some real concerns in terms of long term sustainability of growth, but I do not believe that its inability to measure the effect of the "whole teacher" is a reasonable argument against its implementation.