A Few Thoughts on Faculty Productivity

Richard Vedder isn't an easy guy to get along with, but he's good at one thing: pushing the agenda, sometimes in students' best interests.

I totally disagree with the guy when it comes to financial aid-- there's no way it's making students lazy on average, or causing them to party. On the other hand, he asks some good questions about our college-for-all movement that offers no alternatives for students who don't want to go to college right away, and he also raises good questions about institutional resistance to change.

In his latest piece, he takes on faculty. Boo-hiss, I know... The guy has the nerve to suggest that on average we don't teach enough. His analysis comes from Texas A&M (so popular these days, eh?) and finds a “sharp disparity in the teaching loads for individual faculty members” at UT. Strikingly, they find that the top 20 percent of “faculty with respect to teaching loads teaches 57% of all student credit hours” while the bottom 20 percent teach “only 2% of all student credit hours.”

His point, while overly aggressive (heck, I know something about that), is mainly that we established a way of putting students and teachers together a long, long time ago-- and since then colleges and universities have tried to save money on that approach by shifting to a part-time contingent workforce (reducing average teaching load), allowing more and more professors to buy out of teaching with grant money, and keeping class sizes about the same even while enrollments expanded dramatically and technology made other solutions possible.

When Richard says it, people freak out. A rebuttal from a Texas A&M political science professor tries to bat down the accusations. But he seems to miss the point of Vedder's approach, which is to say that every decision about staffing matters-- so we should lump together faculty in different categories given that theoretically the distributions could be changed. Case in point: "First, much of the skew in teaching duties observed by the CCAP report authors is simply a function of the fact that UT employs a large number of part-time faculty." Well, yes, but that's part of the point-- and a big problem. Universities do that NOT to serve students better but to save money on benefits. PT faculty are perfectly good at teaching but are overworked and underpaid so don't have time for out-of-classroom interaction. His second point, that there's a potential consequence for education quality is right, in theory, yet he cites not a single study showing that large class sizes are associated with diminish instructional quality in higher education. And that's because he can't-- such studies don't exist. Doug Harris and I covered this at length in our La Follette working paper released last year. I do agree that there should be adjustments by field, but this needs to be carefully done because decisions about offering fields with lower enrollments are also strategic decisions and institutions have to be accountable for them. I'm not saying don't offer them, but you can probably only do it if you high-demand fields are very productive. Finally, I see nothing about the use of our resistance to technology, especially blended learning, about faculty in the professor's rebuttal. Technology breaks the iron triangle between access, quality, and costs -- it makes it more possible to offer a high-quality lower cost accessible education. I'm on-board with that and it may be one thing that sets me apart from most other professors.

All that said, Vedder's analysis is far from perfect. It doesn't introduce the issue of impacts on students in any rigorous way. It doesn't take on strongly enough the political and economic reasons why part-time labor is being exploited across higher education. It doesn't question a business-style approach to measuring higher education "outputs." And it doesn't take seriously the need for faculty to LEAD this discussion so that reforms stand a chance of really being implemented.

I've long wondered why I teach today in approximately the same way my colleagues did a half-century ago. Why stand in front of classrooms of 30-50 undergraduates several times a week, rather than meeting with 300 of them twice a month and the rest of the time online? Some will inevitably say that will produce lower-quality instruction but they have nothing to point to-- studies of blended learning are strongly suggestive of positive impacts. Forget online-only, I'm not talking about online only and neither are most proponents of bringing technological advances into university teaching.

And let's get real: right now there are hundreds of professors who have to cancel classes in order to attend conferences, meetings, and such. They resent the requirement to be in-person all the time to teach, when nothing else in their lives requires that anymore. Some of them never reschedule, others hold makeup classes, and some use Skype to teach. The latter is a very low-tech approach and it's used because we're not given other options. What if we were? What if faculty could teach more students, more flexibly, and even with better pedagogy (for example by getting more regular feedback on student performance, rapidly, to use in our teaching) -- and this, together, helped preserve public investment in higher education because it demonstrated productivity gains? Why not?

I suspect part of the reason "why not" is because when you hear "online" you think "for-profit" or "business." When you hear "big classes" you think "community college." When you hear "improved pedagogy" you think "someone's going to tell me how to teach?" And when you hear "productivity" you think "neoliberalism, market-driven education." I know, I sometimes do too.

This is a problem-- professors are thoughtful, careful people and it's essential we not have knee-jerk reactions to ideas that aren't yet being shoved down our throats in propaganda-spun-out policy proposals. This is one we can help shape and get in front of, and make it our own. Or, we can wait until the Republicans bring it to us, and tell us what to do.


PS. One more thing. Richard's claims that faculty can do more because he's done more--juggling research and teaching--that's just plain silly. There's been a major change in the faculty workforce--it's feminized. Something I know for sure-- Richard never juggled teaching, research, breastfeeding, and taking care of small kids. We can and should do more, but there's no reason to base the model on Richard Vedder's style.

Building A Better Teacher

If you haven't been reading the excellent "Building A Better Teacher" news series in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, you should be. It really doesn't matter whether you're from Wisconsin or not, or particularly interested in this state's policy context. The series is taking an expansive look at the various issues related to human capital development, teacher effectiveness and teaching quality. And it's not quoting the same overused Beltway prognosticators to drive its points home.

The fourth installment in the eight-part series, funded by Hechinger, ran this past Sunday and was entitled "Trying to steer strong teachers to weak schools."

My main quibble with this particular article was that it gave short shrift to one of the most effective answers to the question posed: How do we steer strong teachers to weak schools? The answer: Improve the teaching conditions at those schools.

Here's the extent of what the article offered on this issue:

So what else might be done, in hopes of having more impact? A few ideas in nutshells:

• Make schools better places to work: This is both the simplest and most complex solution. The New Teacher Project report in 2007 said, "The best way to staff high need schools is to make them attractive to great teachers." But how do you achieve that?

Mike Langyel, president of the Milwaukee teachers union, listed things that would attract teachers: "A competent and fair principal is key not only in getting teachers there but in keeping them.... We're also looking at schools that are safe."

My suggestion would have been a much more robust treatment and discussion of the issue of teaching conditions. I have extrapolated on its importance in a series of blog posts, and the New Teacher Center (my employer) has unique national expertise in administering statewide Teaching and Learning Conditions surveys. The NTC has a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to administer a Teaching & Learning Conditions Survey as part of the foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project. The Survey is being administered in select schools and districts participating in the MET project across the country.

Perhaps Wisconsin and Milwaukee, in particular, should consider administering such an anonymous full population survey to its educators -- teachers, administrators and support staff -- and see what they have to say. Why do they stay or leave a given school or district? What's working and what isn't? States and districts that have administered such surveys have used the data to improve principal preparation, rewrite professional standards for teachers and principals, and strengthen teacher mentoring and professional development. This is not data to be afraid of but data that can empower policymakers, school leaders and teachers alike.

Teaching and learning conditions are highly correlated with issues such as teacher retention and the presence of such conditions explain as much as 15 percent of the variance in student achievement between schools (Helen 'Sunny' Ladd, 2009). This stuff matters greatly in the current policy debates about teaching and student outcomes and it gets far too little attention as compared with value added, teacher evaluation and teacher pay.

The Manifesto, Income Inequality & Credibility

On Friday, I wrote a blog item ('Misleading Manifesto') chiding a group of urban superintendents for misstating educational research in a 'manifesto' published in Sunday's Washington Post. Teacher quality *is* important -- but it does not matter MORE THAN family income and concentrated poverty.

I am convinced that too many educational reformers are happy to 'spin' the truth for rhetorical purposes. I think this is exactly what we saw in this manifesto. While this may help to simplify messaging, target solutions at a more narrowly construed problem, and focus in on what education leaders have direct control over, it carries an inherent policy danger along with it. That danger is two-fold: (1) teacher policy reforms may be set up for failure by overstating their potential impact; and (2) more comprehensive strategies desperately needed to combat rising income inequality and growing poverty in our nation may be discounted and ignored.

For me, this isn't an issue of setting low expectations for children from poverty. We must train and support our teachers to have high expectations and develop the potential in all children. But, from a policy perspective, which is the world in which I work, to not even discuss poverty and inequality -- even though the research evidence points to its preeminence -- is akin to taking it off the table as a policy priority.

Nor it is a lack of belief in the ameliorative benefits that sensible teacher reforms can have on student outcomes by expanding the recruitment pool of teacher candidates, improving initial training and on-going support of classroom teachers, improving teaching and learning conditions within schools, providing differential compensation to teachers for leadership roles, difficult assignments, shortage fields, and demonstrated effectiveness, and more....

For teacher quality specifically, as I argued in my previous post, playing fast and loose with the facts isn't necessary. There is a powerful argument to be made based on the fact that teachers are the most important school-based influence on student learning. That's exactly what my colleagues at the New Teacher Center have done. We've made careful and honest declarations about teacher quality being the most critical within-school variable, but haven't framed the issue in a way that would make us education-industry Pinocchios.

And this leads us directly to the question of credibility. While I am personally inclined to support elements of what the superintendents' manifesto calls for -- and inclined to support elements of broader education and teacher reform agendas -- I am disinclined to associate myself with a clarion call that is dishonest on its face and misserves the national need for a critical conversation and accompanying set of public policies to address issues of economic inequality. That need extends well beyond the education system and requires responses much broader than merely strengthening the teaching profession and overhauling human capital systems.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently has been banging the drums challenging policymakers -- and Democrats, in particular -- to address our nation's historic levels of income inequality and rising levels of poverty. As reported by the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein, since 1976 "virtually all of the benefits of economic growth have gone to households that, in today's terms, earn more than $110,000 a year." Further, UNICEF reports that the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty among 24 OECD nations -- over 20% -- and the second-worst rate (barely ahead of bottom-dwelling Great Britain) of childhood well-being in the industralized world. Further, as Walt Gardner recently noted, a September 2010 U.S. Census Bureau report showed that the percentage of Americans below the poverty line in 2009 was the highest in 15 years. And the rise was steepest for children, with one in five affected. Think this has any bearing on U.S. students' relatively poor performance on international student assessments? Uh-huh.

So, let's talk about how to strengthen teaching and its central importance to student outcomes. But let's not fence ourselves in with self-serving rhetoric. Let's be honest in our communications and expansive in our thinking about policies needed to improve the lives of American children.

It's about education -- and a whole lot more.

LA Times Value Added Editorial

The Los Angeles Times editorial page gets it mostly right today on the value-added issue ("Good teachers, good students," September 3, 2010). It says a number of smart things that I agree with, such as:

• "Test scores are indeed just one indicator of a teacher's performance."
• "But it's revealing, and disturbing, to read the comments of some teachers who don't seem to care whether their students' scores slide. They argue that they're focused on more important things than the tests measure. That's unpersuasive."
• "This page has never believed that test scores should count for all of a teacher's evaluation — or even be the most important factor. But they should be a part of it."
• "Right now, the "value-added" scores The Times has been reporting are more useful for evaluating schools than teachers. Many factors can throw off the data at the classroom level."
• "That's why we think the Obama administration has been too hasty to push states into linking test scores to teacher evaluations and to reward states that overemphasize the scores, making them count for half or more of a teacher's worth. The administration's first priorities should have been developing better tests, which it's working on now — if we're going to judge teachers in part by these scores, it's unacceptable to say that top-notch tests are too expensive — and statistical models that minimize random factors and make the scores a better evaluation tool."
• "Current teacher evaluation practices are ripe for overhaul. Performance reviews should include, at minimum, classroom observations, portfolios of student work over the academic year and, yes, objective test data."

I just wish its news division had taken some of these points to heart, namely having patience until the methodology was ready to be joined by other measures of teacher effectiveness, such as classroom observations, and not publishing the value-added scores of individual teachers and definitively labeling some as most effective and least effective.

Heather Horn of The Atlantic magazine offers a nice summary of some of the related issues and links to relevant sources in this September 1, 2010 blog post.

And Dana Goldstein offers a smart retort (and a preview of her upcoming The Nation feature on value added?) to a vacuous and vitriolic Slate post by Jack Shafer on this topic.

Related Posts:

• Education Optimists: "Adding Value to the Value-Added Debate" (August 31, 2010)

• Education Optimists: "More Grist for the Value-Added Mill" (September 1, 2010)

• Education Optimists: All "value added" related posts

More Grist for the Value-Added Mill

Here is additional smart and pithy commentary on the current value-added conversation that I wasn't able to incorporate into yesterday's post or have only discovered since.

• Dr. Douglas Harris - "Not By Value Added Alone" (The Blog of Harvard Education Publishing)
• Dr. Aaron Pallas - "Value-added measures: The cardinal rule and the cardinal sin" (A Sociological Eye on Education)
  
• Stephen Sawchuk - "Some Scholars Slam Value-Added for Teacher Accountability" (Teacher Beat/Education Week)
• Jay Mathews - "America's Best Teacher and the L.A. Times" (Class Struggle/Washington Post)
• Dr. Daniel Willingham - "3 Key Factors in Teacher Evaluation" (The Answer Sheet/Washington Post)
• Sherman Dorn - "Please leave your magic numbers on the magic carpet with your magic wand" (Sherman Dorn)
• Bill Tucker - "My Value-Added Number" (Quick and the Ed)
• John Thompson - "High-Ranking Teachers Ignore Pacing Standards" (This Week In Education)
• Walt Gardner - "Why Not Name and Shame Teachers?" (Walt Gardner's Reality Check/Education Week)
• Claus von Zastrow - "The LA Times Goes Astray" (Public School Insights/Learning First Alliance)
• Alan Borsuk - "Where newspaper goes in rating teachers, others soon will follow" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
• Andy Rotherham - "LA Story" (Eduwonk)

Teachers' Voice

An important survey was released this week that captures teachers' perceptions of their professional working environment. The national study of 900 teachers by Public Agenda describes educators as falling into one of three groups: "Disheartened," "Contented," and "Idealists." It also raises some serious policy implications for the placement, retention and longevity of teachers based on teachers' perceptions about working conditions, why they entered the profession, and their opinions about proposed policy reforms.

But as useful as this survey may be in defining these issues at a 30,000-foot level, it does not approach the power and utility of teacher surveys that offer entire populations of educators in individual states and districts the opportunity to share their voice about working conditions, leadership support, resources, opportunities for professional learning, etc. In turn, these anonymous surveys also provide contextualized, customized summary data at the state-, district- and school-level based on the perceptions and opinions of local educators.

Teaching and Learning Conditions surveys have been led by the New Teacher Center in states such as Alabama, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina and West Virginia, and in school districts such as Fairfax County, Virginia. They provide state and district policymakers and educational leaders with powerful data to define issues that need to be addressed in school and districts that have major implications for the quality and effectiveness of teachers and principals.

Read the Public Agenda report, but also think about conducting a Teaching and Learning Conditions survey in your state or school district. What do the teachers where you live and work think?