Tucked inside this Chalkbeatstory on Hamilton County dropping its lawsuit over state funding of public schools is a note about just how inadequate the formula (the BEP) is.
In Tennessee, classroom size requirements have forced districts to hire more than 9,000 teachers beyond what the BEP provides to pay for their salaries, according to a statewide analysis presented by the Department of Education in December to the BEP Review Committee.
When looking at an average actual salary for Tennessee teachers of around $52,000, this means that local districts are responsible for $468 million in teacher salary expenses before benefits are included. That’s an unfunded mandate that easily exceeds half a billion dollars.
No one is suggesting we hire less teachers. In fact, many districts report needing additional teachers and other staff — such as nurses and counselors — to adequately serve their students.
However, this number does show that our state systematically underfunds public schools in a way not addressed by the current funding formula. It’s likely that when you combine the unfunded salary and benefits of teachers and the needs for programs like RTI2 with the proper staffing levels for nurses and counselors, you’d see a number exceeding $1 billion.
Let’s be clear: The state’s own Department of Education has provided information to the committee responsible for reviewing the state funding formula that indicates we’re at least $500 million behind where we should be in terms of current funding.
It’s also worth noting that these numbers don’t include any significant boost in pay for existing teachers.
In short: Tennessee is not properly funding schools.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
Nashville State Rep. John Ray Clemmons has filed legislation that would end the practice of “lunch shaming” in Tennessee public schools, WSMV reports.
A state lawmaker has introduced a bill to help students who cannot pay for their lunches. It’s called the ‘Anti-lunch Shaming’ bill. Representative John Ray Clemmons has presented the bill two times before.
Students would receive the same lunch as their peers. This bill would ban schools from taking actions against students who can’t pay for their lunches or those with lunch debt.
This is the third consecutive year Clemmons has introduced the legislation. The last two years saw the bill go down to defeat in legislative subcommittees.
Republicans voted 4-2 to defeat The Tennessee Hunger-Free Students Act—a bill with three measures to ensure students can eat school lunches and not be punished when parents fail to pay meal fees or a meal debt.
Last year, an education subcommittee also rejected a bill sponsored by Clemmons that would have prevented lunch shaming. Every legislator who has opposed this bill in the last two sessions has been a Republican.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
Here’s an interesting tweet from a Capitol Hill rumor monger:
A scout from the Department of Education reports the chief is fond of sending late night diatribes to top aides. Rumor has it that a review of emails sent to the recently departed would confirm the addled episodes.
As races for Knox County School Board come into focus, the ghost of former Director of Schools Jim McIntyre (Big Mac) looms large. Betty Bean has more in KnoxToday:
Four years ago this week, Knox County Schools Superintendent James McIntyre called a press conference and announced his resignation. The first reaction was shock: who walks away from a $227,256 a year job? Then he answered the question himself:
A superintendent who can count to five.
“The current political environment has become increasingly dysfunctional… The focus of the conversation has all too often become about me… There is a new school board essentially coming in on Sept. 1. There will be several new members,” McIntyre said. “The new school board deserves to choose the leader that they want to have in place.”
Bean details the impact of McIntyre’s tenure on the board and political climate and notes there are at least rumors of an attempted Big Mac Attack that would result in the former director returning to his old post.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
Chalkbeatreports that while Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD) may effectively be ending, another state-run charter-centric district may emerge to take its place.
Tennessee’s proposal to move all 30 schools out of its struggling turnaround district is already sparking debate about exactly who should run them if the plan gets legislative approval.
House Education Committee Chairman Mark White says any charter schools in the Achievement School District should be entrusted to the state’s new charter commission — not their local districts.
But Rep. Antonio Parkinson says White’s plan would just create an ASD under a different name:
“Moving these schools to the new charter commission would amount to a sleight of hand,” said Parkinson, a Memphis Democrat. “It would just essentially create another state-run district that’s called by another name.”
In fact, that’s exactly what happened in Nevada:
Nevada took a similar approach last year when closing its achievement district after struggling to attract charter operators and facing intense pushback from the communities it served. Four charters from that district now operate under a state-run charter school authority.
The State Charter Commission, Gov. Bill Lee’s vehicle for usurping local school board authority and privatizing public schools, is still in the startup phase. White’s proposal verifies the intent of the Commission — to undermine public education by continuing the proliferation of charter schools.
Also, it’s not clear why White believes this commission will be any better at managing the ASD charters than the ASD was. By contrast, Shelby County’s iZone schools have proven to be successful and returning the ASD charters to district operation there means sending those schools back to a district with a proven ability to get results.
White’s plan is simple: Change the name, keep playing the same “reform” game.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
Republicans in the Indiana House of Representatives are taking action to remove test scores from teacher evaluations, the Indianapolis Starreports.
A bill to remove student test scores from performance evaluations that can impact teachers’ pay and promotion prospects unanimously passed a key committee Tuesday. Statehouse leadership is championing House Bill 1002, which could end up being one of the most consequential bills of the 2020 legislative session.
Current state law requires that test scores makeup a significant portion of a teacher’s evaluation, which rates them as highly effective, effective, improvement necessary or ineffective. A teacher’s rating can determine their salary, whether or not they’re eligible for raises or bonuses and impact their movement through the profession.
If this legislation is successful, Indiana will join states like Hawaii, Oklahoma, and New York in moving away from using testing — and, especially, value-added modeling — to evaluate teachers.
A study I reported on last year noted that using value-added modeling (as Tennessee does by way of TVAAS) is highly problematic. In fact, this particular study noted that value-added models suggest that your child’s teacher could impact their future height:
We find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement, raising obvious questions about validity. Subsequent analysis finds these “effects” are largely spurious variation (noise), rather than bias resulting from sorting on unobserved factors related to achievement. Given the difficulty of differentiating signal from noise in real-world teacher effect estimates, this paper serves as a cautionary tale for their use in practice.
In short, value-added data doesn’t tell us much about teacher performance. Additional data indicates further problems with value-added modeling for teacher evaluation — especially as it relates to middle school teachers:
Well, it could mean that Tennessee’s 6th and 7th grade ELA teachers are the worst in the state. Or, it could mean that math teachers in Tennessee are better teachers than ELA teachers. Or, it could mean that 8th grade ELA teachers are rock stars.
Alternatively, one might suspect that the results of Holloway-Libell’s analysis suggest both grade level and subject matter bias in TVAAS.
In short, TVAAS is an unreliable predictor of teacher performance. Or, teaching 6th and 7th grade students reading is really hard.
The study cited above showed that 6th and 7th grade ELA teachers consistently received lower TVAAS scores and that this was true across various districts. Or, as I noted: The study suggests both grade level and subject matter bias in TVAAS results.
Or, maybe, if your kid gets the “right” teacher, s/he WILL end up taller?!
The bottom line: Using value-added modeling to evaluate teachers is total crap.
Indiana’s lawmakers are finally catching on. It’s time for Tennessee to catch up.
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
While Tennessee has a clear need for school infrastructure upgrades, especially as it relates to lead in water, it’s also worth noting that improving air quality in schools could have tremendous benefits for students — both in terms of health and academics. A new study highlighted in Vox notes that student achievement improves when schools install air filters.
The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we’re talking about. The school district didn’t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it’s consistent with a growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution, which finds that everyone from chess players to baseball umpires to workers in a pear-packing factory suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted.
A study following the installation of the air filters noted a significant impact on student performance:
He finds that math scores went up by 0.20 standard deviations and English scores by 0.18 standard deviations, and the results hold up even when you control for “detailed student demographics, including residential ZIP Code fixed effects that help control for a student’s exposure to pollution at home.”
These findings are consistent with other data on the subject:
But Sefi Roth of the London School of Economics studied university students’ test performance relative to air pollution levels on the day of the test alone. He found that taking a test in a filtered rather than unfiltered room would raise test scores by 0.09 standard deviations. That’s about half the impact Gilraine found, just based on day-of-test air quality. In Gilraine’s natural experiment, students benefited from cleaner air for about four months. Given that context, it’s not incredibly surprising that you could see an impact that’s about twice as large.
So, a relatively inexpensive change in schools could have a big, positive impact on every student in the state. By contrast, school vouchers represent a very expensive intervention that negatively impacts participating students:
Recent data from the non-partisan Brookings Institute, for example, shows that four rigorous studies done in Louisiana, Washington, D.C., Indiana and Ohio found that struggling students who use vouchers to attend private schools perform worse on achievement tests than struggling students in public schools.
So, will the Tennessee General Assembly repeal the voucher legislation and move forward with a plan to add air filters to classrooms?
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
Jeff Bryant writes about the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates and the shift in the national Democratic party on issues like charter schools:
Education has been mostly ignored in previous presidential elections, and the topic had not come up for serious discussion among the candidates in televised debates prior to the Public Education Forum 2020, held in Pittsburgh on December 14. But at an event in which candidates knew they would have to field some tough questions about education issues and be held closely accountable for their answers, most of the leading candidates—including the front-runners—showed up and welcomed the dialogue. Furthermore, the tables were turned on who controlled the dialogue. “How many times have we been dictated to, have we been told to do?” asked American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. Teachers, students, and community organizers who’ve wanted more of a dialogue with political candidates and elected officials have often been “silenced,” Weingarten stated. But what unfolded in Pittsburgh was “a paradigm shift,” she said, because the candidates had to “actually listen” to the folks who inhabit the world that is “the farthest place in the universe,” to use Bennet’s words, from education policymakers in Washington, D.C. The candidates heard that “the priorities of the federal law should be to level the playing field to make sure that kids… actually have the things they need,” she said. “These candidates are listening to us.” The change in heart of Democratic candidates has been a long time in coming.
Education writer Peter Greene takes a look at the history of the Achievement School District and the factors that led to its downfall in a recent piece in Forbes. Here’s more:
The ASD grew too quickly. It tried to scale up to the point of being ineffective for some schools. It did a lousy job of listening to the community, and depended too much on folks from outside, instead of growing a local, sustainable support culture. Also, turning around a school takes time.
School takeover models remain one of the great policy artifacts of ed reform hubris, the notion that if we just let the right people grab the wheel, they can fix things right up (because, honestly, the education professionals and experts either don’t know or aren’t trying). But one of the repeated lessons of the last decade is that school turnaround via takeover is really hard to pull off.
Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD), a state-run, charter-centric school turnaround model, may soon effectively end operations while remaining an intervention option in a vastly restructured format. This according to a recent story in Chalkbeat. The story notes:
Tennessee wants to return 30 state-run schools to local districts in Memphis and Nashville no later than the fall of 2022, but also wants to retain its state-run district to possibly take over other chronically low-performing schools, says a proposal being unveiled this week.
According to a copy of the proposal obtained by Chalkbeat, the transition is part of a massive reset for the embattled turnaround model known as the Achievement School District – made up mostly of charter organizations – which has fallen woefully short of its goal to improve student performance since launching in 2012.
Warning
If only there had been some sort of warning early on, perhaps all of this could have been avoided. You know, like someone objectively observing the results of the ASD and the behavior of the district’s leaders and reporting on likely outcomes. Someone who in 2015 wrote something like this:
Instead, the ASD has followed a rather bumpy path, growing while struggling to meet performance goals. The ASD needs growth of 8-10 points a year in the schools it operates in order to hit its targets — and it is well below that number now. That may be in part due to the rapid growth beyond original expectations.
Here’s something that should give policymakers pause: According to the most recent State Report Card, the ASD spends more than $1000 per student MORE than district schools and yet gets performance that is no better than (and sometimes worse) the district schools it replaced.
Immediately after my ASD Mission Creep story was published, a high-level ASD staffer asked me to coffee so he could extol the virtues of the ASD leadership team and let me know I had it wrong. If the ASD stayed the course, I was assured, lots of positive things would happen for kids. Just a few months later, the ASD’s first Superintendent, Chris Barbic, would leave his position and Tennessee. Not long after, the staffer who chastised me for having the gall to point out the facts had also left the Tennessee kids he was so allegedly passionate about helping.
Chaos
While it is nice to be right about a prediction, I am not excited about this news. Yes, I’m hopeful that the transition described will ultimately be positive. But, I’m also concerned about what happens to the kids currently in ASD schools. Additionally, I’m sad for the kids who were part of a failed, 10-year experiment. Here’s a note from the Chalkbeat piece on what’s next for these kids:
Shuffling schools and students among districts also creates a level of chaos that can be harmful to kids and teachers, said Regenia Dowell, president of a parent-teacher-student organization in Frayser, a Memphis community with eight achievement schools.
Would this type of repeated disruption be allowed in a district of wealthy white children? Chaos. You have chaos when a school gets moved into the ASD and converts to a charter. You have chaos when a charter operator decides to opt-out of the ASD just before an academic year starts — or, worse, in the middle of a school year. You have chaos when there’s no clear plan to return schools to district operators. You have chaos when you spend ten years on an experiment that fails to move the needle for kids. It’s not like we don’t know what the challenges are OR how to address them:
Addressing poverty would mean providing access to jobs that pay a living wage as well as ensuring every Tennessean had access to health care. Our state leads the nation in number of people working at the minimum wage. We lead the nation in medical debt. We continue to refuse Medicaid expansion and most of our elected leaders at the federal level are resisting the push for Medicare for All.
Meet the New Plan, Same as the Old Plan
The state’s own presentation on the challenges in the ASD notes:
“Despite good intentions, the ASD was implemented (or grew) too quickly,” the state’s presentation says in recapping some of the lessons learned in Tennessee. “Demand outpaced supply and capacity.”
In 2015, I wrote:
The original plan seems sensible: Work with the 13 most persistently low-performing schools, get them on track, and then use strategies learned in the process to help other schools. Meanwhile, Renewal Schools would be operated by districts and implement other turnaround models (think the iZone in Memphis and Nashville).
In other words, sticking with what was written into the Race to the Top legislation regarding the Achievement School District would mean less chaos and more consistent, focused assistance to the schools most in need of help.
It only took 5 more years for the state to actually admit this. And, it will take another two years for schools to transition back to district control.
The one remaining question is: Will this transition be accompanied with the resources and support districts need to actually help kids and their families?
For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport
