Analysis – ��

Betsy Devos, Trump’s EdSec Pick, Promoted Virtual Schools Despite Dismal Results

Matt Barnum — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Secretary of education nominee Betsy DeVos has a long history of backing virtual schools, including founding and funding groups that have supported the expansion of online education. Additionally, as of 2006, her husband, Dick DeVos, in K12, a large network of more than 70 online schools.

Although for virtual education say it is a lifeline for students who struggle in traditional settings, multiple research studies show that online charter schools and education models post dismal academic results, as measured by improvement on standardized tests.

DeVos, as chairman of the American Federation for Children — she last week — repeatedly called for expanding virtual schools. In a 2015 released through the group about a federal spending bill, DeVos said, “Families want and deserve access to all educational options, including charter schools, private schools and virtual schools. … [V]irtual schools are growing across the country. Greater innovation and choice will contribute to better K-12 educational outcomes for our children.” In 2012, DeVos a plan by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell that including an expansion of online schools.

The American Federation for Children has such schools as allowing for “more flexibility and options in education” and includes “virtual learning” as part of its .

Matt Frendewey, a spokesperson for the group, said that it primarily focuses on private-school-choice programs — such as vouchers or tax credits — but that it also advocates for the expansion of additional options, including online schools. “We’ve long supported all forms of choice,” he said. “We believe parents should be able to exercise the greatest number of choices, including public schools, public charter schools, virtual schools, online courses, blended learning, homeschooling and private schools.”

In 2013, the American Federation for Children put out a sharply critical after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.”

Another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools. (DeVos sat on the group’s board until last week.) In a 2015 to the the Michigan Board of Education, the group’s executive director, Gary Naeyaert, argued for “full school choice” including virtual schools.

In an interview, Naeyaert said that his group doesn’t privilege online schools over other options and supports accountability for any low-performing school. “Our position [on virtual schools] is the same with any [school]: Are the kids learning? Is the money being handled responsibly? We don’t make a big distinction with whether the environment is brick-and-mortar.” Naeyaert pointed out that many virtual education programs in Michigan are run by school districts rather than charter networks.

DeVos highlighted virtual schools as an important part of the “educational choice movement” in a 2013 with Philanthropy Roundtable. In a 2015 , DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.”

“We must open up the education industry — and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry,” she said in the speech. “We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators. … This is how a student who’s not learning in their current model can find an individualized learning environment that will meet their needs.”

In 2006, as by Politico, Betsy DeVos’s husband Dick noted in a financial disclosure while he was running for governor of Michigan that he held an investment interest in K12 Inc., a large, for-profit chain of online schools. It is unclear if the DeVoses are still investors. A spokesperson for K12 said, “As a public company we don’t disclose who our investors are, and frankly, depending on how specific investors hold shares, we may not be aware of every individual shareholder of K12.”

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Nate Davis, the executive chairman of K12, responded enthusiastically to DeVos’s appointment. “DeVos has been a longtime advocate for strengthening public education and empowering parents with the freedom to choose schools that best meet the needs of their children,” he wrote in a for The Hill. The group Public School Options, which backs online schools, also the appointment.

It is not clear to what extent DeVos, if confirmed as secretary of education, would or could promote online education. The Obama administration backed the expansion of charter schools through its Race to the Top grant program, but the subsequent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act has significantly reduced federal authority. Still, DeVos could leverage her office’s bully pulpit as well as federal charter school grant . Trump has promoted sending federal dollars to states to expand school choice — presumably including online schools — and his transition site to make “post-secondary options more affordable and accessible through technology enriched delivery models.”

Greg Richmond, head of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, said, “As the secretary of education, there are limited ways that Ms. DeVos can provide leadership on that front. One thing she can do is ensure that virtual schools, and for that matter any charter school run by a for-profit company, accounts for the federal dollars they receive.

“For example, any school that receives federal special education dollars must actually use those dollars for special education students and publicly account for those dollars,” he said.

Online charter schools have faced a wave of negative press, particularly after a large-scale 2015 study found that students who attended them lost a huge amount of academic ground. The study found that kids who returned to brick-and-mortar schools saw big jumps in test scores upon doing so. “Academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule,” the report’s authors wrote. Notably, Michigan was one of the few states where students at online charters performed comparably to other students, according to the research.

Several studies education is likely to produce significantly worse academic results than brick-and-mortar options. Online programs may have the potential to to more advanced courses or may be an option for students who can’t attend physical schools due to illness, for instance.

Online charter operators have proven in many state capitols. In an essay for ��, former Tennessee commissioner of education Kevin Huffman described his failed attempts to shut down a low-performing network of schools in the state — K12 Inc., the same company Dick DeVos was invested in as of 2006. (At the time, K12 responded that the schools they ran were not low-performing and were unfairly targeted for closure.)

DeVos’s support for online schools would seem to put her at odds with some charter school advocates, highlighting a tension between choice advocates who emphasize accountability and student achievement and those who argue that choice serves as its own form of accountability.

Earlier this year, three groups that support charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools. “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country,” according to the paper, released by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can.

Frendewey, of the American Federation for Children, said he did not think his group had been approached about joining the report because AFC focuses primarily on expanding access to private schools, as opposed to charters. “It’s highly unlikely we would [have joined the report] not because of the content, but because of our mission, which is private choice,” he said.

Frendewey noted that his group has supported quality-control measures for private-school voucher programs: “Our often includes commonsense accountability.”

Richmond, whose group co-issued the the paper, said he is not worried about DeVos’s position on the issue: “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too — we just want them to be a lot better.”

The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation provides funding to ��, and the site’s Editor-in-Chief, Campbell Brown, sits on the American Federation for Children’s board of directors, which was formerly chaired by Betsy DeVos. Brown played no part in the reporting or editing of this article. The American Federation for Children also sponsored ��’s 2015 New Hampshire education summit.

The Merit Pay Myth: Why the Conventional Wisdom About Paying Teachers Is Wrong

Matt Barnum — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

“Merit pay,” to education historian Diane Ravitch, “is the idea that never works and never dies.” New York City teachers union president Michael Mulgrew has , “In study after study, experiments with merit pay have failed to improve student performance.”

Journalists have echoed these claims. NY1 political anchor Errol Louis that there’s “a mountain of evidence suggesting that [merit pay], which sounds fine in theory, simply doesn’t work.”

Statements like these have become received wisdom, often repeated without citation in news coverage.

In fact, the research on merit pay (also called performance pay, usually by supporters) is mixed, with some studies finding no effect but many others finding positive impacts. The emergence of the conventional narrative — that it has been proven not to work — shows how an education myth is quickly built, repeated, and self perpetuated: even when it’s wrong or missing important nuance.

A handful of high-profile studies make the case against merit pay — and a myth is made

In 2010, just before the release of a major study on performance pay, American Enterprise Institute scholar Rick Hess worried that the study wasn’t designed for “understanding what we care about when it comes to performance pay.”

He that “the study will confuse the issue, obscure the actual question of interest, and (depending on the results) lend either simple-minded advocates or performance-pay skeptics a cudgel that they will henceforth freely misuse in the name of ‘evidence.’”

The next day, researchers at Vanderbilt University announced that , in which teachers were awarded $15,000 if they produced gains in student test scores, found that students with teachers eligible for bonuses did not perform better than those whose teachers were not eligible. “Teacher bonuses don’t raise student test scores,” USA Today.

Soon to follow was a 2011 New York City examining schools that received the opportunity for building-wide bonuses — distributed equally to each teacher — for strong performance. Again there was no evidence of a positive effect for merit pay.

Yet another , which produced a number of headlines, found that performance pay only worked when it was given to teachers at the beginning of the year, but taken away if the teacher didn’t hit performance goals. Traditional incentive pay, though, didn’t produce results — yet another nail in the merit pay coffin, it seemed.

The limits of these studies — usually pointed out by the researchers but often overlooked in news accounts — is that they examined just one of multiple ways performance pay might have a beneficial effect. As Hess put it, “Whether the merit pay experiment shows big test jumps or none at all, it won't tell us a damn thing about the ability of performance pay to attract new talent to teaching, undergird efforts to promote professionalism, retain talent, or boost regard for the profession.”

Recent studies find more promising results

Matthew Springer, a professor at Vanderbilt who was coauthor of both the Tennessee and New York City reports, explained that such studies only measure one part of the potential benefits of merit pay. He calls this the “motivational effect”: whether teachers perform better or work harder due to the opportunity of extra pay.

(Or, as this idea is often , here by journalist Linda Perlstein: “Presuming that merit pay alone would elevate student achievement makes sense if you assume teachers have a hidden trove of skills and effort they are not unloosing on their students only because they lack the proper incentives to do so.”) This seems to be the most common theory of action for merit pay, at least as conceived by skeptics.

What these studies don’t look at though, according to Springer, is a “compositional effect,” meaning the possibility that performance pay would help attract and retain effective teachers. Springer says there is good evidence that merit pay can have a positive impact in this area.

For instance, Springer recently coauthored a finding that a different performance pay system in Tennessee helped retain teachers in tested grades and subjects. Another of Denver’s system showed that pay incentives improved retention in high-poverty schools.

And recent studies — in D.C., , , and — have suggested that performance pay can in fact directly improve student achievement, though it’s not always clear if the gains resulted from compositional, motivational effects, or some combination of the two.

Springer says these favorable recent studies have attracted less publicity than some of his earlier papers showing no impact. A quick search of news clips shows that Springer’s 2010 research was cited in coverage of recent performance-pay debates in , , and . His newer findings, by contrast, have been largely ignored outside of local outlets in Tennessee, where Vanderbilt is located .

Springer remains optimistic that performance-based compensation can be an improvement over traditional salary schedules: “In large part the way in which we currently compensate teachers — using experience and degrees held — is highly inefficient. What the better practice may be we’re still trying to figure out. With careful design and implementation, we could be moving to a much better way.”

Towards a nuanced understanding of the research

Most summations of research findings do not fit on a bumper sticker, and the performance-pay literature is no exception.

Here’s what we can say: exclusively test-based bonuses are unlikely to change teachers’ behavior in a way that improves student achievement. However, performance pay linked to a comprehensive evaluation and support system is more on that front. Moreover, there’s encouraging — if still far from conclusive — evidence that merit pay can help and keep effective teachers.

Yet implementing performance pay systems, particularly determining how to measure performance, can be . More research is needed to determine the long-term impact, potential unintended consequences, , and best designs of merit-based pay.

These are questions worth discussing carefully and without overly broad declarations that performance pay “doesn’t work.” In education research, it’s usually a lot more complicated than that.

Research Shows That … Education Journalists Don’t Always Use Research All That Well

Matt Barnum — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The two scariest words in all of education journalism are “research shows.”

Although sometimes writers ignore research altogether, many education journalists quite rightly want to bring empirical evidence to an education debate that is frequently based on intuition and anecdote. But often “research shows” means no such thing, and is actually more like “one high-profile study that I can easily recall shows.”

Here’s a case study: We are now solemnly told that “research shows” incentive pay for teachers “doesn’t work.”

A beginning-of-the-school-year from Chalkbeat – Colorado claims, “Research has shown that paying teachers more money to stay at schools with difficult working conditions largely hasn’t worked.” No citation is offered.

Writing on the same topic in the Los Angeles Times, journalist Kristin Rizga , “Politicians have tried to solve the country's teacher attrition problem by giving bonuses to teachers working in high-poverty schools or tying pay to standardized test scores. But shows that such approaches have been mostly unsuccessful.”¹

The tone in both cases is matter-of-fact. It’s what research shows! What — do you not believe in science?

But there’s a big problem with these specific statements: research on the topic is so much more complicated. There are many rigorous studies finding positive benefits of performance pay for teachers or bonuses for those working in hard-to-staff areas:

A in Tennessee found that teacher retention improved among those who received a performance bonus; so did a in Denver.
A in Washington, D.C. showed that teachers raised their performance in response to performance incentives.
A of Austin’s performance pay system found gains to student achievement; so did a of Minnesota's performance-based pay and professional development system.
Two studies in Israel found and gains to students of teachers who were received performance bonuses.
A of several unnamed school districts found gains to student achievement due to a program that paid high-performing teachers bonuses for transferring to high-poverty schools.
A of a North Carolina program that gave small bonuses to teachers in math, science, and special education found that it increased teacher retention.
A randomized of schools utilizing performance pay across the country found small, statistically significant gains in reading achievement.
A of districts across the country found that those using a performance pay system attracted more academically able teachers — as measured by SAT scores — than districts not using performance pay.

Now, we can and should have an extended debate about what these different studies mean. Were their research designs appropriate? Did they miss any unintended consequences of incentive pay? Would money spent on such programs be better used elsewhere? What about some of pay?

These are discussions well worth having, but clearly the simple-minded view that incentive pay doesn’t work is misguided and one-sentence dismissals of its effectiveness lacking citation are misleading.

Even when journalists delve more deeply, they often fall back too easily on the safe and ambiguous standby “the research is mixed.” For example, a in EdSource concluded that the impact of high school exit exams on students was “uncertain.” But in fact, that such exams on student achievement, and lead to a host of negative consequences for vulnerable students, including rates of incarceration. But one wouldn’t know this from EdSource’s article.

Journalists understandably can’t go into a nuanced review of research on every topic in the middle of a news story. But there are some best practices that all of us writers ought to follow:

Whenever saying research shows, always cite, ya know, research (or at least a summary of specific research). Sometimes we are told what research shows with no citation, or with a link to another article that doesn’t clearly state what research is being referred to.
Be wary of basing a summation of research on just one or two studies. Instead, consider multiple studies from different sources or look for meta-analyses, which analyze a topic based on many pieces of research. At the very least, when focusing on one study, emphasize its limitations.
Try to find time to write a standalone article on the research regarding important topics. It will always be difficult to summarize complex research on complex topics in a couple paragraphs or a sentence. Instead, it’s crucial that empirical evidence on important topics — think charter schools, teacher evaluation, differential compensation, class size — is thoroughly discussed. (At The Seventy Four we’ve tried to do just that with our growing set of flashcards.) A bonus is that all future stories on the topic can link back to a careful research review.

It’s terrific that more and more journalists want to use evidence to inform their writing. But a little bit of research poorly used can actually be worse for the reader than no research at all.

So let’s use research, but use it well.

Footnotes:

1. The “recent research” Rizga cites is actually an in The Atlantic claiming, “Little research supports combat pay as an effective tool,” citing a 2011 research from the Center For American Progress. This brief points to yet another research finding that some incentive pay programs have been cancelled or had attracted little interest, but does acknowledge that “studies show that teachers respond to wages in their decisions to enter and remain teaching.” Not one item in this research bridge to nowhere is a rigorous study of the effects of incentive pay on teacher retention or student achievement. (Return to story)

Analysis – ��������

Betsy Devos, Trump’s EdSec Pick, Promoted Virtual Schools Despite Dismal Results

The Merit Pay Myth: Why the Conventional Wisdom About Paying Teachers Is Wrong

Research Shows That … Education Journalists Don’t Always Use Research All That Well

Analysis – ��