Posts filed under ‘Data’
Teacher Prep Needs to Lead – Not Follow
Higher education must attract talented students and prepare them for careers in their chosen fields. However, an equally important aspect of their core mission must be the genesis of new ideas and leadership in innovation. I am all for quality assurance among educators, but the current dialogue around regulation of teacher prep is the stuff of lowered expectations. How can we insist on incentives to look backward when incubation of solutions for the future is what will drive their real value-added?
Recently, I spent some time at the DesignEd Symposium learning about collaboration among Boston-area design schools. It was fascinating to explore issues of creativity, innovation, and excellence with a group of educators, students, and industry leaders. The usual issues of cost, attrition, and performance after graduation – universal themes – arose in the conversations. However, the one big takeaway for me was the need for universities to drive the process of innovation, not just deliver graduates who are career-ready. This is an important component of the mission of higher education that seems to be under-appreciated in discussions about teacher prep and quality assurance.
The Department of Education has been developing guidelines for teacher prep programs that promote quality through accountability for the performance of their graduates on the job. I remain among the skeptics when it comes to holding institutions accountable for people over whom they no longer have any direct line of authority. Beyond that, we are working with the presumption that left unregulated, the teacher prep programs will deliver substandard graduates…more lowered expectations. As if this were not enough, we add insult to injury with proposals that would leave them hamstrung by the process of constantly assessing past trainees rather than investing their resources in the future of teacher leadership.
Absent regulation, schools of education and their school district partners have long histories of collaborations. Pre-practicum experiences and student teaching allow candidates to develop relationships with future employers who will observe their performances first hand. New teacher portfolios, references, and classroom auditions offer insight for employers. There is ample opportunity for communication and feedback between teacher prep programs and school systems who hire their graduates. Neither party wants new teachers to fail. Further, creative tension between current performance and future innovations is a good thing. A visionary teacher prep program needs to be improving constantly, not waiting for instructions from their clients.
Budget limitations have created zero-sum games for most players in education. In the short-run, there will be a real loss in innovation in direct proportion to the size of the burden of teacher prep regulations. However, the long-term impact of failure to drive the industry forward will far outweigh any short-term reduction in uncertainty about the quality of new hires.
Why School Financial Statements Need an Overhaul
Wasting resources intended for our children or our retired public servants would seem to be reprehensible. Ironically, the government accounting systems that were created to protect these beneficiaries from fraudulent use of funds have become culprits. Regulatory accounting impedes analysis of the linkage between funding and mission. Further, its details are inadequate for building the robust models needed to evaluate the effectiveness of the delivery system.
Just a few of the problems with financial statements for public education…
- There is no direct link between the sources of funds and the students served.
- District accounting reflects compliance with regulations instead of education priorities. There is no standard for distribution of funds across content areas, cohorts of students, or programs (e.g., STEM).
- School-based accounting shows only a partial list of accounts. It does not capture full measure of resources invested in the educational effort or allow assessment of return on investment.
- School financial management guidelines are preoccupied with petty cash – vending machine and event cash receipts – not big picture funding of the school’s mission.
- Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) guidelines for pensions do not require accurate assessment of plan solvency.
- Lack of transparency renders fiscal oversight dependent upon translation by insiders.
Incumbents in school district finance or building leadership are specially trained in the esoteric demands of the existing regulatory model. Many have never worked outside of the industry. The echo chamber cannot be expected to identify the problems and agitate for change. Indeed, inexperience, lack of knowledge, or comfort with the status quo may conspire to obstruct progress toward a fiscal model that informs decisions without loss of integrity to regulatory intent. Nevertheless, we need change now.
More Musings on School Finance
School finance is definitely not mission driven and procedures reflect policy and compliance. Further, an emphasis on Federal compliance guarantees that the details do not reflect the state and local exigencies, despite the fact that most of the money and all of the children are local.
The big headings in school finance include…
- General instruction
- Student services (special ed, guidance, etc.)
- Food
- Transportation
- Facilities
These topics fit the federal funding concerns. To think and manage locally, wouldn’t it be better if the last four items were subheadings to the bigger heading of educating children at each school?
Looking at the details, or lack thereof, in the federal requirements for school district reporting…
- Details are in the sideshows, not the main event. For example, there are as many mandatory line items for the Agriculture subcategory of Vocational Education as there are for Instruction in general.
- Mandated reporting is at the LEA (Local Education Authority) or district level.
What if we changed the details to recognize priorities within the mission of education and mandated that the reporting start at the school level and build up to the LEA aggregates?
Looking at how the business management functions within school districts are managed, there is a distinct shift toward, then away from, decentralization based on school district size.
- School districts seem most like to decentralize business functions when they hit the 10,000 to 19,999 student size
- Business functions are re-centralized for districts with 20,000 students or more.
Is there a creative shift that occurs in the moderate sized districts that could be exemplary for effectiveness within functions that is lost in larger districts? Or is it that a cumbersome collection of processes can be better underwritten centrally in the largest districts?
Anyway, just a few thoughts on a topic in development. Yeah, I can be boring…but I hate wasting the money dedicated to those who are least able to defend themselves.
Mortgaging the Future of Schools
What is a healthy debt load for a school district or other education authority to carry? Taking a first glance at the funds flow and balance sheets of a handful of school districts, there seems to be a wide variation in debt and debt servicing obligations. Investments in facilities and carrying unfunded pension benefits would account for most of these liabilities. So who is minding this store?
One of the key strategies for elementary and secondary education reform is decentralized funding of students. Directing dollars to mission just makes good financial sense. So does economic analysis of the production function that supports student learning. However, a less tangible benefit of this movement would be the improved transparency of financing decisions overall. In fact, to keep the primary mission of educating children intact, we need to get a handle on prior commitments of funds that will crowd out future investments in our children.
School districts across the nation have spent money on facilities or promised generous pensions to retirees in a manner that belies the shallow pockets of finance available to them. Cities and towns generally share control over their district school budgets and building funds with school committees, composed of elected or appointed local citizens. Often, a small number of committee members drive fiscal decisions, and they tend to be tightly aligned and like-minded incumbents. The depth of insight into the long-term financial impact of politically expedient decisions cannot be underestimated.
Decisions to mortgage the future of schools cannot go unchecked. Nor can they be swept into a blanket funding formula that rewards the highly leveraged at the expense of those who have been more prudent fiscally. We need to assess the solvency of all school systems and develop policies to serve the children equitably in the future. In the meantime, we need to go forward with attempts to develop weights for direct student funding that goes to current operating expenses, not to finance excess liabilities.
The Teacher Prep Debate – Of Double Standards and Managerial Dodge Ball
Teacher prep programs cannot be forced to maintain a longitudinal tracking system on the career progress of their alums. Such a system would violate the privacy of the individuals who were monitored, answer only genuinely academic questions – not timely solutions to problems, and crowd out more prudent investments in higher education for teachers. In the meantime, districts would be allowed to dodge accountability for talent management while sitting in the real locus of control. All the while, a revolving door of TFA darlings would bypass scrutiny as they churned through the schools with guaranteed turnover. In the end, the only real change in the picture would be a serious fracture in the long history of collaboration between teacher prep programs and school districts – one of the greatest assets we might have leveraged.
Teacher prep programs are being targeted for accountability in teacher quality. Under consideration is a Federal plan to have schools of education track their graduates for up to ten years after program completion. The goal is to sort the good from the bad and hold the prep programs accountable for any shortcomings in future teacher performance. The hair on the back of my neck is raised as I consider the Bill of Rights, school district responsibility for talent management, and the perennial boot camp teacher prep experiments. School districts and teacher prep programs have a long history of collaboration. Why kill this strength by pitting the two against one another?
Employers are responsible for hiring the best people for every job, supervising and motivating them effectively, and assessing their continuing value to the endeavor. Employees enter an organization honestly and with appropriate preparation. They share responsibility for keeping themselves whole on the job. Continuous growth and professional development must be valued on both sides of the contract. When these conditions are not met, employers and employees have a problem to solve. External parties may be asked to facilitate the process, but nowhere do labor standards call for privacy invasion or deflection of responsibility onto unrelated parties.
Teacher prep programs are supposed to get their students ready as teachers. School districts hire those people, and the locus of control over the situation is transferred. The education schools are essentially off duty with regard to specific students. In fact, just as the districts must have permission from prospective new teachers to seek information from their prep programs, the prep programs have no right to seek and track employment data about anyone except their own employees. They have no right to invade the privacy of their alums. Nor do they have any control over the conditions of employment that exist after students leave their programs.
Employment is always a “buyer beware” situation. If districts suspect they have hired teachers who are inadequately prepared for the job, they are protected by probationary employment contracts. Experienced leaders must assess the situation and, in consultation with the new hire, make a plan to remediate and reassess. A trend in bad hires from particular teacher prep programs is instructive much more rapidly than a gratuitous multi-year tracking system. In addition, prep programs may well have addressed constructive feedback from districts and improved their outcomes before the negative data stream has been aggregated, analyzed and reported.
And what about alternative pathways to credentialing of new teachers? I happen to believe many of these programs bring good teachers into the education field, but they benefit from a double standard in any regulation of quality. Teach for America (TFA) only asks for a two-year commitment, by which time novice teachers are considered barely adequate practitioners. Yet we only hear good news about their contributions and worry about losing them to what is prescribed turnover, not issues of quality.
Schools of education and school districts may continue to leverage their relationships to improve teacher prep as well as sustaining educator vitality on the job. However, their primary roles should not become blended, nor should their respective accountabilities be diffused.
Student Funding and the Healthcare Precedent
It is in our children’s best interest to match school finance to the mission of providing them the best education services. Weighted-average student funding could drive this focus on education’s mission, and lessons from other industries have shown how it can be accomplished. The question remains…Is the education leadership ready to take up this challenge?
In 1983, structural change began in the healthcare industry, driven by a new Medicare reimbursement program. In an attempt to control costs and create a path to case management, the Health Care Finance Administration organized hundreds of procedures that involved hospitalizations into Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) and set global payments for hospital care. Administrators were overwhelmed as they rushed to tweak accounting and data systems that had been rendered obsolete overnight. At the same time, they looked to quality assurance programs and utilization review with new urgency. Previously, hospitals had been compensated for their costs, without regard to efficiency or outcomes. Industry leaders were extremely concerned about financial failure and deterioration in quality of care. So what does this have to do with education?
School finance has been driven by costs, not outcomes for students, and financial accounting has been tailored to fit that model. DRGs in healthcare could be considered analogous to weighted-average student funding in education. Conversion to DRGs for healthcare reimbursement created a lever for change that cut across the entire industry. Hospitals were challenged to create data systems that informed them about individual episodes of care, both in terms of costs and outcomes. A new mindset was needed for case management and, while the transition was difficult, the emergence of patient-focused treatment, within hospitals and beyond, had to happen.
Lessons from the conversion to DRGs could be useful for educators as they begin the journey to student-centered finance and education services. Despite student centrism in the classroom, education’s mission and financial incentives have not been in synch. Like the hospital model, administrative overhead and bureaucratization have generated a burden for school districts that detracts from direct student services. Further, case management from a revenue, expense, and outcome perspective only occurs in isolated situations.
Charter schools have shown the benefits of direct student funding and outcomes management. Is it time for education finance to begin the transition to this model for all schools?
Tarnished Seals of Approval
There is gold in the teacher quality debate, just not for the children. Quality assurance programs are lining up for funding in exchange for promises to track teachers from their prep programs through the next several generations of their progeny. However, there seems to be a charlatan factor that has already gotten under the radar.
A year or so ago, I discovered that my principal certification was not transferable to a new state because the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University was not a quality leadership program for educators. Okay, so the echo chamber of education does not recognize the validity of general management training. Looking further, however, the School of Education at Northwestern did not make the list, nor did the Curry School of Education from my undergraduate school, the University of Virginia. In fact, I discovered that my best chance for adequate credentialing would be enrollment in one of a plethora of storefront correspondence schools scattered across Long Island and the Bronx. They had met the requirements for the national seal of approval.
It seems to be the case that only a handful of major university education programs have applied for accreditation in the new teacher quality programs. And the reason may be that they don’t have to…their work stands on its own merit. Why would they undergo yet another tedious review procedure to prove to the narrow field of education that their world-class standing is, indeed, deserved?
School districts know the sources for strong teacher preparation. They are more likely to have trouble hiring and retaining new teachers from high quality programs because of LIFO and seniority issues, the limitations of career advancement, or the pension trap. Further, teachers who offer promise but deliver less success over time may reflect their employment environments more so than their original training.
I believe in continuous quality assurance. I cannot endorse expending serious resources to raise the barriers to entry in a field that lacks commitment thus far to annual goal setting and performance reviews once access to the field has been achieved.
PS, What are the chances that you are getting some of your best insights from alums of one of the perennial boot camp teacher prep programs that bypassed most tradition quality hurdles?
Show Me the Reports
Step 1 in any merit-based compensation program is training around the definition of merit. A template for performance measures and evaluation thereof is shown to the people who will be subject to them. Then the forms are filled out and discussion ensues. At some later date, these criteria are used for actual merit pay. Trust comes from knowing the people and the tool. It is not the basis for signoff on a system to be designed later.
With all the talk about teacher effectiveness and compensation, there must be hundreds of teacher effectiveness reports out there, right? Of course, they are based on well-developed records of student outcomes…which don’t really exist yet either, do they? Please tell me I’m wrong. Show me the reports.
Children learn with outward results; however, they also internalize many things that will manifest themselves later. We will never know all that we have taught them, the good, the bad, or the rest. That is why we look at teacher effectiveness with an eye to process and outcomes. Accordingly, multiple measures have been tossed around with regard to teacher performance. Now it is time for the report designers to just put the templates out there and validate them.
Similarly, children take tests to show what they have learned, their ability to analyze and solve problems. Children also demonstrate their habits of learning, their creativity and industriousness, and their civic mindedness. All will contribute to a foundation for lifelong learning. Additional measures that document intellectual and psychosocial development track their successful growth toward adulthood as well as highlighting need for intervention. Schools have built databases that cover some of these elements, but the models are not robust enough to be fully instructive or actionable. Still, it is time to print them and share them.
Absent good data, the debate over student outcomes and teacher effectiveness is being held in moot court. It is time for demonstration projects to reveal themselves and share what they have got, warts and all. Be prepared for flak, but don’t be surprised if you get more than a bit of praise from real reformers. We all need something tangible to turn this discussion into a problem with a solution.
Prior posts…on teacher effectiveness…on basic student data…on psychosocial development
Updating Decision Architecture for Student Success
The decision architecture for education was designed to support macro level management of Federal exigencies. Micro level decision support has been cobbled out haphazardly across the nation by educators without the strategic vision of economists, production planners, or profiteers. These are dirty words in education, but there are lessons from microeconomics that could guide the way we create decision architecture for local management of student outcomes. In the meantime, there is no need to give up accountabilities.
The debate over the role of Federal and State governments led me to an analysis that, for the first time, gave me insight into why we keep our books the way we do in education. It also explained why we don’t seem to fund student learning. Now, there will always be questions about how firm a hand government should have in local operations. However, the real solution lies in teaching the States how to micromanage the learning process, and I mean that in a good way. Perhaps, we can reframe our argument at the Federal level to address setting guidelines for interstate transferability of our systems and targeted outcomes during the transition period as we await the impact good microeconomic conditions.
The Federal role in public education could be suggested to include…
- Funding and financial standards
- Core curriculum standards for interstate portability
- National data standards
- Management of “market” imperfections
- Food and transportation for the poor
- Disability benefits
- Incubation of innovation
If data and reporting is any indicator, we already have much of the accounting and decision architecture in place for these functions at the macro level. A continuing dialogue is needed, of course, especially in the following areas…
- An extension of macro and micro financial standards to include those that are student-centered
- Core curriculum standards across States
- Refinement of data needs for student outcomes
In addition, today’s emerging global economy demands that the US take a stronger role in the education of its people to remain competitive. This policy shift seems like Federalism, but it may just be a temporary course of good medicine in a nation whose invisible hands are severely injured. Now for the micro level…
At a local level, States and their school districts address the following exigencies…
- Student populations and their learning needs and distributions
- Matching of resources to students
- Creating the milieu/incentives, for effective learning
- Managing the quality assurance process
Trouble is…we have been try to do this while accounting for budgets for
- general education,
- special education,
- food,
- transportation, and
- capital spending.
In a world where our mission should be maximizing student outcomes while minimizing costs, we have been managing the costs alone. And we have been linking the money to the Federal concerns, not the local students. Financial accounting standards made business performance transparent nearly a century ago. Absence of a profit motive does not eliminate the need for mission-driven budget development and measurement of performance. Further, any system that places undue control over resources in the hands of specialists who operate in a relative vacuum and, without whom, leaders cannot read or present results of operations is flawed. Inefficiencies, myopic vision, and episodes of corruption are guaranteed.
The Obama administration gets the fact that we need to ramp up our microeconomics for education. The Bush administration understood that the schools needed help recognizing their mission of educating every child.
Now can we save the best of both worlds by keeping accountability targets AND fixing the local decision architecture?
Promote Teacher Quality with Career Mobility – Not More Regulation
Professionals often get their first jobs because of their educational backgrounds; they keep getting jobs because of where they have worked and what they have done. They enter each job well-prepared and committed to keeping themselves current, energized, and growing. Obstacles are hurdles to be overcome; problems are opportunities for leadership and accountability. These are NOT the values of regulation; they are the values of entrepreneurship.
Historical patterns of regulation in K-12 education tended to erect barriers to entry in lieu of professional quality assurance. Teachers and administrators have had to complete required coursework and apprenticeships as well as passing exams or other assessments to achieve licensure. They then entered the profession, often remaining in the same school district for the duration of their careers. Periodic recertification required professional development and, in some cases, additional formal education. However, by that time, most had achieved tenure. They were IN the system, and every financial incentive from paycheck to pension created barriers to exit.
The US Department of Education has determined that this regulated approach to teacher quality has failed. What we need is…drum roll, please…regulation to make the barriers to entry higher. Huh? Yes, let’s make it harder for those closest to the energized newbie end of the spectrum, new teachers-in-training, to get the job. Not sure how this addresses the problems of hiring and retention in urban education, but it clearly does something that even the toughest blame-game champions have never been able to accomplish: assign accountability for failures within the public education system to people who have not yet participated. Way to keep the peace guys!
I am truly disappointed. This is not Change I Can Believe In. This is further abdication of leadership. We have an opportunity to inject entrepreneurship into the system, challenge bureaucratic procedures, and reset the way we motivate leaders in the classroom and in the front office. Let’s rethink this thing. And not with the institutional myopia of a group of insiders whose vision comes from the wrong end of the telescope. It’s time to let people in education come and go as they please, and to bring a more cosmopolitan approach to problem-solving. I’m talking removal of the barriers to exit.
Suppose teachers and administrators had freedom to move about the education system, seeking new experiences, sharing expertise, and disseminating best practices…without severe financial penalties. Suppose a great teacher wanted to go for an MBA instead of an MA in school leadership…to bring new management tools back to the system. Suppose an empathetic school leader wanted a burned-out educator to get to a better place…without losing the ranch.
Educator quality arises from openness to change, which, when managed correctly, translates into professional growth. It is predicated on trust, fair evaluation of performance, and safe harbor while taking calculated risks and exploring creativity. It is stifled by rigid regulations, inflexible pay and benefits, and scapegoating behavior. We will not build a better education system with a slow trickle of teachers from more tightly regulated teacher prep programs. We have a lot of great teachers. We need to set them free.
