Sherman Dorn

This week, the expanding protest of teachers at Seattle's Garfield High School has become a topic of national debate. It is difficult to parse out the issues because the tactics of the teachers at Garfield are relatively narrow but resonate with all sorts of larger issues around assessment.

Continue reading "Seattle teachers and the administrative politics of formative assessment"

A quick note on today's decision of the Florida Supreme Court that the legislature has the authority to set tuition for the state's public universities. In 2002, voters approved a state constitutional amendment that created the Board of Governors as a constitutional body to manage the state's universities. Several key supporters of that amendment were among the plaintiffs arguing that the constitutional amendment gave the Board of Governors the implicit authority to set tuition.

In today's unanimous ruling, the state supreme court disagreed, arguing that the constitutional amendment gave the Board of Governors administrative and executive authority, not taxing authority. It's essentially a separation-of-powers decision based on broad language on legislative power over appropriations and what the court ruled was narrow language on the Board of Governors' authority.

But...

But in a short but significant passage, Justice Barbara Pariente said that the ruling was only about the general issue of tuition, not whether any language in the appropriations act could tie the hands of the Board of Governors as a contingency for receiving state funding. The language was in the main text of the court's opinion as well as a concurring opinion, and it clearly left open the possibility that in the future, the Court could rule that a specific contingency might be an encroachment on the Board of Governors' constitutional authority. Given our legislature's tendency to stuff all sorts of contingencies in the budget, that's a cautionary note for our friends in Tallahassee.

In other words, in the long-term tug-of-war between the legislature and the universities, the basic message is Stay Tuned.

If anybody had time yesterday to browse the In the Public Interest collection of emails from the Foundation for Excellence in Education, it wasn't me. I've read a few accounts, such as the one on Valerie Strauss's blog, so the following is a short, initial impression based on someone else's summary of a few items from the collection.

• I separate the allegations that the foundation is serving essentially as a trade association from the allegations of personal conflicts of interest. They are two very different issues, though they are being treated as identical. One is a question of organizational role and transparency: Foundation for Excellence in Education looks very different from the Foundation to Advance the Testing and Online Huckster Industries. The other is a question about whether a non-profit is being used to serve the financial interest of a key person (Jeb Bush).
• The question of foundation-as-trade-association is one I am not competent to judge. If the charter for the foundation is consistent with indirectly advancing the interests of one or more industries, and none of the specific activities violate federal law involving non-profits, then the worst one can say is that the foundation is operating on the marginal side of ethics (and possibly not that, depending on the range of non-profit activities). Journalists can do some good work here by consulting with tax attorneys with expertise in non-profits. But we need a little homework on the legal front before condemning FEE. 
• The question of a personal conflict of interest is both more serious and simpler to resolve. In the Public Interest is strongly suggesting that Jeb Bush personally benefitted by FEE's pushing the use of SendHub, a tech firm in which Bush became a visible investor in late 2012. One of SendHub's founders is a former Bush aide, but note that "late 2012" date (October, I think)? At least one of the emails from Patricia Levesque mentioning SendHub is from February 2012. I could not find the other emails mentioning SendHub on the website with the documents, but if the pushing of SendHub is from the first half of 2012 or earlier, it looks like casual back-scratching of people in the same circle. The only catch: Garrett Johnson (from SendHub) sits on the board of the Foundation for Florida's Future, which also employes Levesque. That relationship could present a conflict of interest, depending on when Johnson began on the board (again, journalists need to talk with an expert in non-profit management). But unless there is an email pushing SendHub after Bush became an investor, it's not an obvious conflict of interest for Bush personally.

I think most readers of this blog would correctly infer that I strongly disagree on a broad range of education policy with Governor Bush, Patricia Levesque, and other staff of both FEE and the Foundation for Florida's Future. It is very tempting to go after your policy opponents if something appears to present shady dealings that could be a political trump card. I don't see that here. Right now, all we have are records of some transactions and communications. Depending on non-profit law and FEE's charter, that could mean something illegal or squat. But no one has yet done the homework to justify the allegation of an improper conflict of interest. At most, all anyone has demonstrated is that Patricia Levesque is an effective trade association representative, no matter who's employing her.

One of my resolutions this year is to engage in a long-term effort to upgrade my quantitative skills, as I'm a mid-career historian with some quantitative skills, of the type that inherently grow stale (along with my patience with SAS). I thought I'd share my thoughts about a few books, two of which I'm in the middle of reading. Each is geared towards a different approach to quantitative methods that might best fall under the "heterodox" label because each is different from the most common training in statistics.

Bayesian methods: John Kruschke's Doing Bayesian Data Analysis (2010). Kruschke's text is the friendliest I've found for explaining modern Bayesian methods, at least for someone with my background (comfortable with reading stats material at a practical level, not primarily focused on proofs). Chapters 7 and 8 are almost worth the price of the book in themselves for justifying/explaining Markov-chain Monte Carlo methods--this is the engine of analysis for Bayesian statistics today. And as a text, it's remarkably reasonable in price (though it is sad that an $80 stats text is considered low-budget).¹ One caveat: Chapter 11 is much too aggressive in arguing against a frequentist approach (the standard that most students learn in stats classes, with hypothesis testing and p values), with two exceptions.² But except for chapter 11 and a few practical glitches (fewer than in most texts), I am finding this text very useful as an introduction to Bayesian analysis.

Econometrics: Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics. (2008). This book focuses on some of the more common causally-oriented methods of empirical microeconomists, including instrumental-variable analysis, propensity-score matching, and regression-discontinuity designs. It does not include discussions of panel data, time series, and several other pieces of the econometrician's toolbox,³ but it is an extraordinarily useful (if occasionally dense) peek into the minds of econometric cowboys, the sort of people who think of birth month, vending machine locations, and nursing home densities as instrumental variables for something.⁴ Angrist and Pischke are unabashed advocates of simple regression and if you can wade through the expected-value semi-proofs sprinkled in each chapter, you will understand clearly why they take the positions they do. See Andrew Gelman for a statistician's review of the book.

Demography: Sam Preston, Patrick Heuveline, and Michel Gillot's Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes (2000). Demography is an applied slice of social sciences whose fundamental analytical tool is the transition event: birth, death, etc. Each event happens in a population exposed to the event, a concept that is at the root of a demographer's perspective. As a result, demography's focus on exposure as a fundamental unit makes its analysis much closer to epidemiology and engineering's time-to-failure analysis than to the rest of social sciences. If you've ever seen statistical survival analysis, that's the type of thinking involved in demographic analysis. The Preston, Heuveline, and Gillot text is a general introduction to the concepts used in demography, including life tables, indirect methods of estimation, and some more abstract models that demographers use to think about population change. Disclosure: I had Sam for several courses in grad school, and he roped me into the program at Penn for a masters; I saw a few draft chapters of this text in his courses many years before the publication of the text.

There many other practical quantitative methods that are not included here, and I suppose that's what makes life interesting. Nominations for other stuff to read in quantitative methods?

Notes

1. Since I've wanted to learn R to wean myself off SAS, the text's use of R fit one of my other goals, but that's just a bonus from my perspective. [↩]
2. One exception in Chapter 11 is multiple comparisons. A common error of graduate students is to use their "I'm trained in frequentist approaches" background, make multiple comparisons, and forget to use a Bonferroni or similar adjustment to account for the fact that random error would generate statistically-significant results if you have enough comparisons. With a Bayesian approach, that is not a conceptual error. Similarly, a Bayesian approach allows post-facto investigation without guilt. [↩]
3. I was wrong on the omission of panel data; it's not a chapter in itself but does appear in a few sections. [↩]
4. Disclosure: at no point in the book did Angrist and Pischke use vending machines or nursing homes as instrumental variables, but I'm sure they could do something with them. [↩]

I've been having some troubles finishing a blog entry on remedial education--there are multiple moving pieces in my head, and explaining how they fit together is partly a matter of taking them apart and rearranging them. I had intended to finish it Friday, and then Saturday, and now sometime this year apparently. But since there's another "report card" on education policy, this time on teacher education, I can address that. Whenever there are two news items that make me want to put my head through a wall for various reasons, I probably can explain the problems.

So here are the two news items:

• The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has decided that the nation has a D+ on average in teacher education policy. Florida's at the top of the class with a B-. Let's go celebrate!¹
• A set of inside-the-Beltway wonks regularly surveyed by Whiteboard Advisors is skeptical that anything will happen at the federal level with improving teacher education.

Cue up Jurgen Herbst's solid history of teacher ed, And Sadly Teach, rewind, and watch again. The Holmes Group, NCTQ, and many others keep wanting the same things without tackling the sticking points.

• Many people argue for more selectivity at some level, in some shape, at some point along the process of becoming a teacher. At various times people frame this as needing a teacher competency exam, higher admissions criteria to teacher education programs, and so forth. Some of the sticking points: colleges and universities often desperately need the students in teacher education and other lower-cost undergraduate programs to cross-subsidize other programs; the various selection options often would have a disproportionate effect on potential teachers from racial and ethnic minorities; parents expect someone in front of their children no matter where they live in the country and no matter what age their child is; the same policymakers asked to make teacher education more selective are also asked to open the path for people to become teachers in multiple ways.
• Many people would like new teachers to have great mastery of content knowledge, solid pedagogical skills, and have loads of clinical experience, all within an undergraduate degree with no extra time required. Sticking points: the calendar; undergraduate student debt; and don't forget the cross-subsidizing-other-programs bit mentioned above.  One more thing: elementary education and special education teachers have the broadest content coverage in terms of their classes, which should theoretically mean they spend the most time learning content and also the most time learning pedagogy and the most time in clinical settings. Guess which programs typically have the greatest enrollment in colleges of education (i.e., used to cross-subsidize programs)?²
  
• Many people, such as the leadership of NCTQ, would say that colleges of education or someone independent of school districts should have the right to filter potential supervising teachers, to make sure that those in teacher preparation programs are only in model classes. Sticking points: colleges need the cooperation of districts for clinical experiences in schools, supervising teachers are volunteers, and remember that numbers/cross-subsidizing dynamic mentioned above? The more people in a program, the more classes you need for placement purposes.
• Many people argue that teacher education should be held accountable for the outcomes of students in the classes of their graduates, and NCTQ gave Florida a B- (a good grade, in their view) in part because we do something sorta kinda like maybe a quarter of the way towards George Noell's more careful reports in Louisiana. Sticking points: most operating value-added models are not ready for prime time, the outcome-oriented approach conflicts violently with the input-oriented oversight and regulation of many state departments of education, many teacher education programs (not colleges and schools but individual programs) do not have graduates who teach in tested subjects (or subjects that give you data that can be used in a value-added approach), many graduates do not work in schools under the data-collecting guise of a state, smaller programs are vulnerable to being on the extreme ends of ratings if the system is not designed well (let's assume a state would not design this well), and the feedback loop of any reasonable length (a few years after graduates leave) is giving data on the structure of a program that was operating five years ago or more.

These are not insuperable barriers to improving the preparation of teachers and other educators at multiple levels. But they cannot be wished away by calls for the reforms. Do I have ideas for improving teacher education that are I think are somewhat more shrewd than the usual suspects? Yes! Do I have time to explain them tonight? No! But I have a teaser: less micromanagement, more programs as protocols.

Notes

1. Disclosure: I am the chair of a department with two educator preparation programs (school counseling and school psychology) and where our courses are taken by many students in teacher education. This blog is about my personal views, not those of my department, but you should know where I sit to understand where I stand. [↩]
2. More than two decades ago, the Holmes Group of colleges of education proposed that teacher education should move towards graduate programs or combined undergraduate/graduate programs. Frank Murray was the head of the Holmes Group for a time while he was dean of the (then-)College of Education at the University of Delaware. When I was a visiting faculty member there 20 years ago, I taught a full slate of undergraduate classes, and Murray never got rid of the undergraduate-only programs. [↩]

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