A Rhode Island teacher’s resignation has become a YouTube sensation:

What I find interesting about this is that he’s articulating a bunch of the unintended consequences of standards obsession that I sketched out in Would you like fries with that?

The fact that he’s resigning makes him the embodiment of the teacher quality loops (top left).

A NY Times editorial wonders, Is Algebra Necessary?*

I think the short answer is, “yes.”

The basic point of having a brain is to predict the consequences of actions before taking them, particularly where those actions might be expensive or fatal. There are two ways to approach this:

• pattern matching or reinforcement learning – hopefully with storytelling as a conduit for cumulative experience with bad judgment on the part of some to inform the future good judgment of others.
• inference from operational specifications of the structure of systems, i.e. simulation, mental or formal, on the basis of theory.

If you lack a bit of algebra and calculus, you’re essentially limited to the first option. That’s bad, because a lot of situations require the second for decent performance.

The evidence the article amasses to support abandonment of algebra does not address the fundamental utility of algebra. It comes in two flavors:

• no one needs to solve certain arcane formulae
• setting the bar too high for algebra discourages large numbers of students

I think too much reliance on the second point risks creating an eroding goals trap. If you can’t raise the performance, lower the standard:

This is potentially dangerous, particularly when you also consider that math performance is coupled with a lot of reinforcing feedback.

As an alternative to formal algebra, the editorial suggests more practical math,

It could, for example, teach students how the Consumer Price Index is computed, what is included and how each item in the index is weighted — and include discussion about which items should be included and what weights they should be given.

I can’t really fathom how one could discuss weighting the CPI in a meaningful way without some elementary algebra, so it seems to me that this doesn’t really solve the problem.

However, I think there is a bit of wisdom here. What earthly purpose does solving the quadratic formula serve, until one is able to map that to some practical problem space? There is growing evidence that even high-performing college students can manipulate symbols without gaining the underlying intuition needed to solve real-world problems.

I think the obvious conclusion is not that we should give up on teaching algebra, but that we should teach it quite differently. It should emerge as a practical requirement, motivated by a student-driven search for the secrets of life and systems thinking in particular.

* Thanks to Richard Dudley for pointing this out.

Sit down and shut up while I tell you.

One interesting take on this compares countries cross-sectionally to get insight into performance drivers. A colleague dug up Educational Policy and Country Outcomes in International Cognitive Competence Studies. Two pictures from the path analysis are interesting:

Note the central role of discipline. Interestingly, the study also finds that self-report of pleasure reading is negatively correlated with performance. Perhaps that’s a consequence of getting performance through discipline rather than self-directed interest? (It works though.)

More interesting, though, is that practically everything is weak, except the educational level of society – a big positive feedback.

I find this sort of analysis quite interesting, but if I were a teacher, I think I’d be frustrated. In the aggregate international data, there’s precious little to go on when it comes to deciding, “what am I going to do in class today?”

 

 

I’m still attracted to the idea of objective measurements of teaching performance.* But I’m wary of what appear to be some pretty big limitations in current implementations.

It’s interesting reading the teacher comments on the LA Times’ teacher value added database, because many teachers appear to have a similar view – conceptually supportive, but wary of caveats and cognizant of many data problems. (Interestingly, the LAT ratings seem to have higher year-on-year and cross subject rating reliability, much more like I would expect a useful metric to behave. I can only browse incrementally though, so seeing the full dataset rather than individual samples might reveal otherwise.)

My takeaways on the value added measurements:

• Within reason, high measurement error by itself is not an obstacle to getting some performance benefit from value added rankings.
• From released data, I can’t satisfy myself that the NYC value added methods have measurement error “within reason.”
• High measurement error is rough on individual teachers.
  • This makes current use of VAM for tenure decisions suspect.
  • It makes it hard for teachers to learn from their better-performing peers, because identification of high performers becomes somewhat random.
• Feedback effects severely limit the potential for widespread use of VAM to improve education performance across the board.

I think the bigger issues have more to do with the content of the value added measurements rather than their precision. There’s nothing mysterious about what teacher value added measures. It’s very explicitly the teacher-level contribution to year-on-year improvement in student standardized test scores. Any particular measurement might contain noise and bias, but if you could get rid of those, there are still some drawbacks to the metric.

• Testing typically emphasizes only math and English, maybe science, and not art, music, and a long list of other things. This is broadly counterproductive for life, but also even narrowly for learning math and English, because you need some real-world subject matter in order to have interesting problems to solve and things to write about.
• Life is a team sport. Teaching is, or should be, too. (If you doubt this, watch a few episodes of a reality show like American Chopper and ponder whether performance would be more enhanced by better algebra skills, or better cooperation, communication and project management skills. Then ponder whether building choppers is much different from larger enterprises, like the Chunnel.) We should be thinking about performance accordingly.
  • A focus at the student and teacher level ignores the fact that school system-level dynamics are most likely the biggest opportunity for improvement.
  • A focus on single-subject year-on-year improvements means that teachers are driven to make decisions with a 100% time discount rate, and similar total disregard for the needs of other teachers’ classes.**
• Putting teachers in a measurement-obsessed command-and-control environment is surely not the best way to attract high-quality teachers.
• It’s hard to see how putting every student through the same material at the same pace can be optimal.
• It doesn’t make sense to put too much weight on standardized test scores, when the intersection between those and more general thinking/living skills is not well understood.

If no teachers are ever let go for poor performance, that probably signals a problem. In fact, it’s likely a bigger problem if teacher performance measurement (generally, not just VAM) is noisy, because bad teachers can get tenure by luck. If VAM helps with the winnowing process, that might be a useful function.

But it seems to me that the power of value added modeling is being wasted by this musical chairs*** mentality. The real challenge in teaching is not to decrease the stock of bad teachers. It’s to increase the stock of good ones, by attracting new ones, retaining the ones we have, and helping all of them learn to improve. Of course, that might require something more scarce than seats in musical chairs – money.

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* A friend and school board member in semi-rural California was an unexpected fan of No Child Left Behind testing requirements, because objective measurements were the only thing that finally forced her district to admit that, well, they kind of sucked.

** A friend’s son, a math teacher, proposed to take a few days out of the normal curriculum to wrap up some loose ends from prior years. He thought this would help students to cement the understanding of foundational topics that they’d imperfectly mastered. Management answered categorically that there could be no departures from the current year material, needed to cover standardized test requirements. He defied them and did it, but only because he knew that it would take the district a year to fire him, and he was quitting anyway.

*** Musical chairs has to be one of the worst games you could possibly teach to children. We played it fairly regularly in elementary school.

In my last post, I showed that culling low-performance teachers can work surprisingly well, even in the presence of noise that’s as large as the signal.

However, that involved two big assumptions: the labor pool of teachers is unlimited with respect to the district’s needs, and there’s no feedback from the evaluation process to teacher quality and retention. Consider the following revised system structure:

In this view, there are several limitations to the idea of firing bad teachers to improve performance:

• Fired teachers don’t just disappear into a cloud; they go back into the teacher labor pool. This means that, as use of VA evaluation increases, the mean quality of the labor pool goes down, making it harder to replace teachers with new and better ones. This is unambiguously a negative (balancing) feedback loop.
• The quality of the labor pool could go up through a similar culling process, but it’s not clear that teacher training institutions can deliver 50% more or better candidates, or that teachers rejected for low value added in one district will leave the pool altogether.
  

Several effects have ambiguous sign – they help (positive/reinforcing feedback) if the measurement system is seen as fair and attractive to good teachers, but they hurt performance otherwise:

• Increased use of VA changes the voluntary departure rate of teachers from the district, with different effects on good and bad teachers.
• Increased use of VA changes the ease of hiring good teachers.
• Increased use of VA attracts more/better teachers to the labor pool, and reduces attrition from the labor pool.

On balance, I’d guess that these are currently inhibiting performance. Value added measurement is widely perceived as noisy and arbitrary, and biased toward standardized learning goals that aren’t all that valuable or fun to teach to.

• Increasing the rate of departure requires a corresponding increase in the hiring rate, but this is not free, and there’s no guarantee that the labor pool supports it.

There are some additional limiting loops implicit in Out with the bad, in with the good.

Together, I think these effects most likely limit the potential for Value Added hiring/firing decisions to improve performance rather severely, especially given the current resistance to and possible problems with the measurements.

Suppose for the sake of argument that (a) maximizing standardized test scores is what we want teachers to do and (b) Value Added Modeling (VAM) does in fact measure teacher contributions to scores, perhaps with jaw-dropping noise, but at least no systematic bias.

Jaw-dropping noise isn’t as bad as it sounds. Other evaluation methods, like principal evaluations, aren’t necessarily less random, and if anything are more subject to various unknown biases. (Of course, one of those biases might be a desirable preference for learning not captured by standardized tests, but I won’t go there.) Also, other parts of society, like startup businesses, are subjected to jaw-dropping noise via markets, yet the economy still functions.

Further, imagine that we run a district with 1000 teachers, 10% of whom quit in a given year. We can fire teachers at will on the basis of low value added scores. We might not literally fire them; we might just deny them promotions or other benefits, thus encouraging them to leave. We replace teachers by hiring, and get performance given by a standard normal distribution (i.e. performance is an abstract index, ~ N(0,1)). We measure performance each year, with measurement error that’s as large as the variance in performance (i.e., measured VA = true VA + N(0,1)).

Structure of the system described. Note that this is essentially a discrete event simulation. Rather than a stock of teachers, we have an array of 1000 teacher positions, with each teacher represented by a performance score (“True VA”).

With such high noise, does VAM still work? The short answer is yes, if you don’t mind the side effects, and live in an open system.

If teachers depart at random, average performance across the district will be distributed N(0,.03); the large population of teachers smooths the noise inherited from the hiring process. Suppose, on top of that, that we begin to cull the bottom-scoring 5% of teachers each year. 5% doesn’t sound like a lot, but it probably is. For example, you’d have to hold a tenure review (or whatever) every 4 years and cut one in 5 teachers. Natural turnover probably isn’t really as high as 10%, but even so, this policy would imply a 50% increase in hiring to replace the greater outflow. Then suppose we can increase the accuracy of measurement from N(0,1) to N(0,0.5).

What happens to performance? It goes up quite a bit:

In our scenario (red), the true VA of teachers in the district goes up by about .35 standard deviations eventually. Note the eventually: quality is a stock, and it takes time to fill it up to a new equilibrium level. Initially, it’s easy to improve performance, because there’s low-hanging fruit – the bottom 5% of teachers is solidly poor in performance. But as performance improves, there are fewer poor performers, and it’s tougher to replace them with better new hires.

Surprisingly, doubling the accuracy of measurements (green) or making them perfect (gray) doesn’t increase performance much further. On the other hand, if noise exceeds the signal, ~N(0,5), performance is no longer increased much (black):

Extreme noise defeats the selection process, because firing becomes essentially random. There’s no expectation that a randomly-fired teacher can be replaced with a better randomly-hired teacher.

While aggregate performance goes up in spite of a noisy measurement process, the cost is a high chance of erroneously firing teachers, because their measured performance is in the bottom 5%, but their true performance is not. This is akin to the fundamental tradeoff between Type I and Type II errors in statistics. In our scenario (red), the error rate is about 70%, i.e. 70% of teachers fired aren’t truly in the bottom 5%:

This means that, while evaluation errors come out in the wash at the district system level, they fall rather heavily on individuals. It’s not quite as bad as it seems, though. While a high fraction of teachers fired aren’t really in the bottom 5%, they’re still solidly below average. However, as aggregate performance rises, the false-positive firings get worse, and firings increasingly involve teachers near the middle of the population in performance terms:

Next post: why all of this this is limited by feedback.