A Research-Based perspective on Educational Reform in Illinois

Jean W. Pierce, PhD.

2333 Danbury Court

Geneva, IL 60134

630-232-1891

As a professor emeritus in educational psychology from Northern Illinois University, I am a former teacher, teacher educator, and researcher. Recently, I have been surveying research literature relating to social justice and education.

I am familiar with research which contends that teacher quality has a major effect on the education of children. Therefore, the state of Illinois should be doing all that it can to attract quality teachers to its public schools. I will base my comments on research which supports five issues regarding funding and assessment of teacher quality.

Funding for high quality teachers in Illinois

High quality teachers, like other professionals, can be attracted through good salaries and good working conditions.  However, while meeting with school superintendents in the Kane County region, I have become acutely aware of the fact that Illinois is not currently meeting its obligation to public education. School districts are owed millions of dollars by the state, which does not seem to be upholding its end of the bargain to provide funding for an adequate education for the children.   In fact, according to Ralph Martire, of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, Illinois ranks 49th out of the 50 states in the portion of education funding coming from the state — just 28 percent of the cost.

The Education Funding Advisory Board  has told the state that an adequate education for students costs $7,388. This figure is conservative compared to the research-based recommendation of more than $13,000 from the Illinois School Finance Adequacy Initiative.   And yet, the adopted budget foundation is well below both of those figures — just over $6,000.

A major reason why Illinois appears to have some poorly-qualified teachers can be traced back to the low level of state funding for education and the fact that this has shifted the burden to local property tax revenues.  Martire has calculated that low and middle income wage-earners in the state took home less money in 2009 than in 1979 when their salaries were adjusted for inflation. And yet, they are paying a percentage of their local taxes which is actually higher than high income earners in Illinois. (To see how this works, 1 percent of  6-figure incomes yields far more money for education in property-rich districts than does 1 percent of 5-figure incomes in property-rich districts).  This has created a large discrepancy in per-student funding between property-poor districts and property-rich districts — ranging from $6000 to over $25,000.  As mentioned above, $6000 does not finance an adequate education in this state.

Darling-Hammond (2010) has observed that poor districts tend to have many teachers who receive low teacher evaluations. A number of reasons for this will be explored later in this paper. It will be shown that teacher evaluations fluctuate from year to year and are based in large part on variables which are not under the teacher’s direct control. Districts which cannot afford adequate resources, support staff, and low class sizes are placing huge roadblocks in the paths of teachers. Dismissing teachers who are having trouble performing in under-funded districts does not seem to be nearly as important as providing adequate funding for those districts. As a tax-payer, I believe that the most effective way for Illinois to reform education would be to meet the state’s funding responsibility to its schools.

Why it would be problematic to dismiss teachers who are labeled unsatisfactory twice in a 5-year period

    As noted above, teacher evaluations can fluctuate wildly from year to year. Ravitch (2010) has cited studies of this effect. In San Diego, Koedel and Betts (2007) observed that 20 percent of teachers who initially ranked in the top 20 percent fell to the bottom 20 or 40 percent in the following year. Similarly, when Lockwood, McCaffrey, and Sass (2008) looked at middle school math teachers in Florida, they found that between only one fifth to two fifths of the teachers in a county remained in the top 20 percent from one year to the next.  In fact, a report published this year by a number of highly-regarded educational researchers (Baker, Barton, Darling-Hammond, Haertel, Ladd, Linn, Ravitch, Rothstein, Shavelson, and Shepard, 2010) observed that teacher effectiveness ratings one year were poor predictors (identifying only 4 to 16 percent of the variation) of  the same teachers’ ratings the following year.

    In addition to the lack of reliability of teacher ratings, there is another reason why the focus on dismissing teachers is misplaced. Darling-Hammond (2010) noted that when just one teacher leaves the profession early, the costs of separation, recruitment and hiring and training can approach $15,000 or even $20,000. She cited the case of Texas, which has hired a number of alternative-route teachers and has experienced high annual attrition rates for those educators. (“Alternative routes” typically refer to teachers who lack training in education and attempt to teach at the same time that they are acquiring basic pedagogical knowledge.) It is estimated that teacher losses have cost Texas between $329 million and $2.1 billion each year.

Another issue which needs to be considered is who would be hired to replace the teachers who are dismissed. Based on the experience in Texas, it appears that this would result in hiring inadequately-trained teachers who are working on alternative certification and people who cannot obtain jobs in property-rich districts which have adequate resources.

Why it would be problematic to rely heavily on student performance for evaluating teachers

    Baker et al. (2010) wrote,

    “There is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed.”

    One piece of evidence which they cite to support that contention comes from test scores of students before and after implementation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies, which relied on test-based accountability.  Although NCLB was intended to close achievement gaps, particularly for minority students, scores of African Americans increased at a much higher rate prior to NCLB in fourth grade math and eighth grade reading than after NCLB. This was also true for white students in fourth and eighth grade math and reading.

    The same authors note that using student test scores is an invalid approach to evaluating teachers, and it unfairly penalizes educators working with  low-income, minority, and special needs students. Baker et al. note different types of factors which influence student performance that are outside of the control of individual teachers: 1) the practices of other educational professionals working with the students, 2) school conditions, 3) school attendance, and 4) a variety of out-of-school learning experiences. Other educational professionals include teachers from previous years, team teachers, current teachers of other subjects, and tutors or instructional specialists. School conditions include the quality of curriculum materials, supports provided by specialists or tutors, class size, etc. School attendance can be influenced by parents who need their children to care for younger siblings or to work. Out-of-school learning experiences come from the home, peers, museums, libraries, summer programs, park districts, on-line education, etc. Baker et al (2010) conclude,

“For these and other reasons, even when methods are used to adjust statistically for student demographic factors and School differences, teachers have been found to receive lower “effectiveness” scores when they teach new English learners, special education students, and low-income students than when they teach more affluent and educationally advantaged students. The nonrandom assignment of students to classrooms and schools—and the wide variation in students’ experiences at home and at school—mean that teachers cannot be accurately judged against one another by their students’ test scores, even when efforts are made to control for student characteristics in statistical models.”

   

Why Illinois needs to consider remediation instead of focusing on using students’ test scores to dismiss teachers or on merit pay.

For many teachers, remediation would be preferable to dismissal. Neither threats of dismissal nor incentives have been shown to be effective in improving teaching quality. As a researcher who has studied motivation, I am familiar with a variety of studies which have concluded that threats and punishment of teachers do not result in students who are effective problem-solvers.  Researchers with different theoretical orientations have reached the same conclusion: if the goal is to create motivated students who are problem-solvers, their teachers must also be motivated problem-solvers. In a large-scale study in 1989, Midgley, Feldlaufer, and Eccles found that student efficacy mirrored their current teachers’ efficacy. Bandura and others have illustrated the effect that efficacy can have on learning. Teachers who are punished for low student performance cannot have high confidence that they will succeed, and this reflects in their students’ lack of confidence that they will succeed.  More recently, Reeve (2009) agreed that teachers who are self-determined are more likely to support autonomy in their students.

Incentives do not improve teaching, either. In the first major study of performance pay in the United States, the National Center on Performance Incentives and the Rand corporation studied effects over a three-year-period (Springer, Ballou, Hamilton, Le, Lockwood, McCaffrey, Pepper, and Stecher, 2010.) They concluded that teachers who were randomly assigned to receive bonuses based on their students’ performance did not have higher-performing students than teachers not offered the same incentive. In other words, merit pay does not seem to have a solid foundation in educational research.

Why it would be problematic to assume that privatization of education offers a quick fix

    Although the issue of privatization of schools does not appear in the draft of issues to be considered by the House Special Committee on Educational Reform, the topic has frequently been suggested by proponents of charter schools. If this becomes part of the focus of the current committee, I strongly urge you to read the findings of Lubienski and Weitzel (2008). These researchers present a thorough review of research in the area and conclude that, based on independent research which has been published and not funded by corporate sponsors, there is an uneven quality of private schools, and accounting for demographics makes advantages disappear and even reverse.   

    Indeed, there seem to be some powerful voices in favor of privatization, such as Benno Schmidt, the former President of Yale, who observed that despite roughly doubling per-pupil spending after inflation in public schools since 1965, students are posting lower SAT scores than a generation ago. In contrast, superintendents in Kane County clearly agree with Miles and Rothstein (1995), who cite the number of unfunded mandates which have raised costs for public schools significantly without providing the money necessary to address the needs of basic instruction.

Conclusion

I strongly encourage the committee to recognize that there can be no miraculous “quick-fix” to the issue of how to reform education in Illinois. Attempts which cite any one solution — including the dismissal of teachers based in large part on student test scores — are doomed to failure.  In the popular media these days, “Waiting for Superman” has received a lot of publicity. But I recommend that you watch another recently-released film, “Race to Nowhere” which bases its conclusions on educational research and illustrates the complexity of problems affecting education today.

Major References:

Baker, E.L., Barton, P.E., Darling-Hammond, L., Haertel, E., Ladd, H.F., Linn, R.         Ravitch, D.,     Rothstein, R., Shavelson, R.J., and Shepard, L.A. (2010) Problems     with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. The Economic Policy     Institute. http://epi.3cdn.net/b9667271ee6c154195_t9m6iij8k.pdf

Darling-Hammond, Linda (2010). The Flat World and Education: How America’s     Commitment to Equity will Determine Our Future. New York: Teacher’s College     Press.

Ladd, . H.F. (2008). Teacher effects: What do we know?. Paper presented at the     Teacher Quality Conference at Northwestern University, May 1, 2008.

Lubienski, C. & Weitzel, P. (2008). The Effects of Vouchers and Private Schools in Improving             Academic Achievement: A     Critique of Advocacy Research.  Brigham Young             University Law Review, Issue 2,  447-485.

Martire, R. (2008).  Money Matters: How the Illinois School Funding System Creates     Significant     Educational Inequities that Impact Most Students in the State     http://www.ctbaonline.org/

Ravitch, Diane (2010). The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How     Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. 

Springer, M.G., Ballou, D., Hamilton, L., Le, Vi-Nhuan, Lockwood, J.R., McCaffrey, D.F.,     Pepper, M., Stecher, B.M.  (2010). Teacher Pay for Performance Experimental      Evidence from the     Project on Incentives in Teaching. National Center on     Performance Incentives.    http://www.performanceincentives.org/data/files/gallery/ContentGallery/POINT_REPORT_9.