Nonsense=makes no sense.
Last year, when the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study of teacher effects was published on the front page of the Néw York Times, it created a sensation. It seemed to say that the “quality” of a single teacher would raise lifetime earnings, reduce teen pregnancy, and have other dramatic effects.
The story said: “Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms.”
One of the authors of the study said that the lesson was “fire bad teachers sooner rather than later.” This was used to support the test-based evaluation systems pushed by Race to the Top that otherwise had no evidence behind them (and still don’t). It also supported economist Eric Hanushek’s view that the “bottom” 5-10% of teachers, judged by their students’ scores, should be fired every year.
Just a few weeks later, President Obama cited the CFR study in his State of the Union address. He said: ” We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.”
But it is all a great exaggeration.
Bruce Baker of Rutgers demolished the study here. He pointed out many flaws, including the fact that most teachers are not rated.
But what about the claim of earning an extra $266,000 or $250,000 per year per class over a lifetime?
Baker writes:
“One of the big quotes in the New York Times article is that “Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate.” This comes straight from the research paper. BUT… let’s break that down. It’s a whole classroom of kids. Let’s say… for rounding purposes, 26.6 kids if this is a large urban district like NYC. Let’s say we’re talking about earnings careers from age 25 to 65 or about 40 years. So, 266,000/26.6 = 10,000 lifetime additional earnings per individual. Hmmm… no longer catchy headline stuff. Now, per year? 10,000/40 = 250. Yep, about $250 per year (In constant, 2010 [I believe] dollars which does mean it’s a higher total over time, as the value of the dollar declines when adjusted for inflation). And that is about what the NYT Graph shows: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/06/us/benefits-of-good-teachers.html?ref=education”
What this boils down to is that a student can get a lifetime boost of $5 a week if we now spend billions of dollars on value-added rating systems. Maybe. Or maybe not. ”
One of the authors wrote Baker to say that their calculations show that the actual gain per student would be about $1,000 a year or $20 a week.
There have been other criticisms of the study, some noting that the study was based on teaching before NCLB, before high stakes testing. Others questioned whether a large scale study of this kind could connect specific teachers to specific children. And one reviewer insisted that the study contradicted itself and said nothing.
Diane, you sure skewered this “study.” Nice.
Even if you grant everything in CFR, the lesson is not “fire sooner than later,” as that makes a number of additional assumptions:
1) Infinite precision in the estimate of a teacher’s effects on their students’ later earnings;
2) Infinite precision in the judgment of who is a good teacher.
Apart from everything else that limits what you can say from the study, it is wrong to take any econometric study and play the “let’s see what happens with a decision-rule” game without also simulating the errors. If you simulate errors at both levels above, my guess is that both the Hanushek and the CFR claim would fall apart even granting EVERYTHING else.
Why are we still listening to economists anyway? Didn’t the crash of 2008 prove that it’s all one big cult of error?
Perhaps they should be fired sooner rather than later. There is no time to waste!
Amen. Let’s start compiling their value added scores.
Dienne, you’re seriously suggesting we don’t listen to economists because the 2008 economic crash happened?
Economists as a class have proven over and over again that they are woefully out in left field when it comes to predicting, or even analyzing after the fact, anything that involves human behavior. They’re still stuck in a Skinnerian mindset that humans respond only to external stimulation – rewards and punishments – and that internal motivation is meaningless. Nevermind that generations of research (not to mention simple common sense) shown how wrong that model is.
Dienne, I don’t have much experience with economists or their predictions related to education. I’d be interested in historical examples of what you’ve referred to in your response, but it’s probably beyond the scope of this post :).
Actually economists think that people make the best choices, given there own preferences an information, amoung the available choices. We leave it to the psychologists to explain people’s preferences.
Dienne, I’m continuously baffled that economists are deemed experts in education despite their lack of credentials and knowledge base in the field. I recently came across an education journal at my national SPED conference published by Taylor & Francis. The editor of the ‘Journal of School Choice’ is an economist and the editorial board includes several well funded, right wing think tanks. Steven Brill, who has been granted expertise in education by the choice fairies, has an article published in it. There are several academics on the board, as well, but how does this journal avoid publishing agenda driven research given the powerful think tanks on the editorial board? Check it out here: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/aboutThisJournal?show=editorialBoard&journalCode=wjsc20
So the main purpose of education is to earn money. Got it.
Let’s see. One of my female students got pregnant over Christmas break one year when the boy’s mother left her and her boyfriend in their apartment alone while she went out of town. She was 15 and he was 17. He was already coming to school high on marijuana and not of sound judgment in the first place having had a serious brain injury at 5 years old and was trying to be a drug dealer. She had cerebral palsy and the family was living off her SSI. Mama was a drunk and when she ran out of liquor money she beat the daughter. She also had twins when the daugter was 13 and expected her to take care of them. Now tell me all about how it was MY fault as her teacher (first year with the class) that she was pregnant. Oh, I also had one in my homeroom who was pregnant and 5 more who were mothers (one an honor roll student with 2 kids) and a boy whose picture went into the yearbook as “Mr. Southside” his senior year—him and his son. So I guess they were all my fault. Could not have possibly had anything to do with their home environment.
Ken also has a problem with his recent argument for debt and austerity. Seems there is a slight math problem. Take your pick of articles:
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=rhinehart_roghoff+debt+study&oq=rhinehart_roghoff+debt+study&gs_l=hp.3…1494.10264.0.10626.28.28.0.0.0.0.195.2647.20j8.28.0…0.0…1c.1.9.psy-ab.0ZQNhDcA3vA&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45368065,d.dmg&fp=29ad01ce4128767b&biw=1280&bih=574
What this tells me is that our President, who I voted for, is probably part of this corporate vulture take-over of public schools.
And where President Bush failed in his hyping of the privatization of social security, President Obama seems to be making progress in his hyping of the privatization of public education.
Now I’m wondering if Romney would have been the same or worse.
Maybe we have less of choice than we are led to believe.
There were quite a number of us trying rather desperately to make these exact points before the election.
This isn’t the only study of his with problems.
Rogoff Austerity Budget – to paraphrase Twain: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”
Influential Reinhart-Rogoff Pro-Austerity Research Riddled With Errors: Study – Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/reinhart-rogoff-austerity-research-errors_n_3094015.html
I think he needs to be educated and I think he is probably educable if we could just get to him. After all, he changed his view on same sex marriage, why wouldn’t he change it on Education?
He didn’t have billionair buddies profiting off his anti-gay marriage stance.
er, make that billionaire.
He isn’t “part of” the corporate take-over of public schools. He is the DRIVING FORCE BEHIND destroying public education.
And what is a “good” teacher anyway. A good teacher for kindergarten might flounder in high school . A really excellent teacher for moderately mentally handicapped kids was bored stiff and thought she was babysitting in severe-profound. But I was a little afraid with a regular education homeroom though perfectly comfortable with my multihandicapped and physically handicapped students. That is one thing the testing freaks have not begun to deal with: How what is excellent teaching in one kind of class or level of student would be totally inappropriate with another. Plus, you cannot measure quality by test scores if the students don’t take standardized tests.
Somehow I doubt that Romney would have been better on education and Obama is preferable on foreign relations, the environment and financial reform to name a few. It is teachers, parents and students working together that will save education from the venture capitalists. Obama isn’t interested in helping on this issue but I don’t believe that he will actively stand in our way.
It’s not that Romney would have been better, it’s that *we* would have been better. Obama is allowed to get away with a lot of things that a Republican would not get away with simply because Obama is “our guy”.
BTW, could you elaborate some foreign policy differences that would have made Romney worse than Obama? From what I recall, they had an awfully hard time finding anything to disagree on at their foreign policy debate.
That is because Romney decided to go along with Obama’s program and stay out of a debate on foreign policy. The Republican hawks would like nothing better than to start another unfunded war. Iran anyone? Republicans know that their foreign policies under George Bush were very unpopular so they stayed away from the debate. That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t continue to go in the same direction that they have been going in for the past three decades when it comes to foreign policy.
And I don’t agree that “we would have been better”. I have not stopped organizing, educating and agitating just because we have a conservative democrat in the white house. He does not have the political power to fight the corporate education reformers regardless of whether or not he wants to.
It is up to us to figure out the way forward.
The Supreme Court is another important consideration, in fact it is probably the most important consideration when a decision is being made about the person we put in the White House. We could talk about the two Supreme Court Justices that came in under Bush and compare them to who was brought in under Obama.
Believe me, my poor husband has to put up with my ranting and wailing about Obama and education on a weekly basis. I know that my lamentations are a waste of time but he is wonderfully patient when I need to vent my frustration.
In the meantime… I try to follow the advice that I give to others.
Don’t mourn. Organize!!
If you fired “sooner rather than later” all you would have was first and second year teachers and Teach for America temporaries. No teacher is “great” until she gets some experience.
My take on the Chetty et al. sham:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/15/1055120/-Accountability-without-Autonomy-Is-Tyranny
According to that nitwit Hanushek, an entire school district teaching force should be replaced every ten to twenty years.
Can’t let them be allowed to collect a full pension, can we?
Why? Is Walmart goiing to give everyone a pay bump for knowing advanced calculus?
My study says a subaverage study costs the US 247 million dollars per decade. Save the economy, shred the studies, time is of the essence
I once saw a comment that by Mr. (or Dr.?) Hanushek’s calculations, a Kindergartener with great teachers each would get 1.5 years of schooling in one year, and thus, with great teachers every year, be able to graduate high school by 8th grade.
Wow!
Ed harris, just think, in places like Ohio and Wisconsin and Louisiana, the colleges will soon have thousands of 14-year-old freshmen.
Many struggling learners could benefit from accelerated instruction.
No disrespect to the owner of this blog, but how sad can it be that someone who makes no pretensions to being a numbers/stats person can—in the opinion of a genuine numbers/stats person [M.Schneider]—skewer this study?
😦
What sort of learning and working environment supports such shoddy work? It is hard not to come to the conclusion that when ROI, marketing hype and a win-at-any-cost attitude are paramount among the leaders of the charterite/privatizer movement, scholarly integrity and the obligations of responsible citizenship are even more easily shed than a snake’s old skin.
“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.” [Mark Twain]
🙂
I speak only for myself, but ‘correcting’ the $5-a-week figure to $20 [remember: that is rounded off slightly upward] is a bit like being at the bottom of the Pit of Ludicrousness and feeling relieved at rising a foot or two up off the floor. One shouldn’t be in that Pit to begin with!
“Laughter is poison to the pompous.”
🙂
Ed Haris references the “research” of Eric Hanushek. Hanushek is a real piece of work. As I pointed out earlier, he dismissed the results of Project STAR, the rigorous, well-designed Tennessee state study that found significant achievement gains as a result of small class size in early elementary grades, because “the kids were not tested before the program began,” that is, BEFORE they even entered kindergarten.
Hanushek said we have to stick with the “reforms” of No Child left Behind, because even if those “reforms” have yet to yield much – if any – return on the huge increases in time and money spent on the “accountability” of high-stakes testing, “over 75 years even a reform that takes effect in 20 year… yields a real GDP that is 36 percent higher ” than without “reform.” Huh? Say what?
Hanushek even makes the claim that gains as small as 0.08 standard deviations result in “trillions of dollars more in the gross domestic production.” And people pay attention to this dude?
Hanushek says that American economic competitiveness is dependent on school “reform.” That canard is easy to take apart.
The World Economic Forum ranks nations each year on competitiveness. The U.S. is usually in the top five (if not 1 or 2). When it drops, the WEF doesn’t cite education, but stupid economic decisions and policies.
For example, when the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
Last year (2011-12), major factors cited by the WEF are a “business community” and business leaders who are “critical toward public and private institutions,” a lack of trust in politicians and the political process with a lack of transparency in policy-making, and “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits, especially deficits and debt accrued over the last decade that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth.” The WEF did NOT cite public schools as being problematic to innovation and competitiveness.
And this year (2012-13) the WEF dropped the U.S. to 7th place, citing problems like “increasing inequality and youth unemployment” and, environmentally, “the United States is among the countries that have ratified the fewest environmental treaties.“ The WEF noted that in the U.S.,”the business community continues to be critical toward public and private institutions” and “trust in politicians is not strong.” Political dysfunction has led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
But Hanushek –– and corporate “reformers,” the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable….and Arne Duncan –– point the finger of blame at schools and teachers.
As to the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff “study, it’s a good example of economists –– and the mainstream press – making causal inferences based on small correlative measures. It is much ado about nothing.
It’s essential finding makes little if any sense.
The essential finding of the study is this: a high-quality teacher creates “more than a quarter of a million dollars” in higher earnings per CLASSROOM of students.
If there are an average of 30 students in these urban classrooms, that amounts to $8,333 per student over a life-time of employment. If that employment career lasts 30 years, then that’s about $278 extra a year, or $23 a month, or $5.75 a week.
More curiously, the authors of the study offer up this gem in their executive summary:
“parents whose children will earn around $40,000 in their late 20s should be willing to pay $10,000 to switch from a below-average to an above-average teacher for one grade, based on the expected increase in their child’s lifetime earnings”
Does it make sense for parents to spend $10,000 in current funds to ensure that their children can make an extra $8,333 over a life-time? Given the current job market, the off-shoring of jobs, immigrant labor, corporate efforts to drive down salaries and destroy unions, the rise in poverty, the decline in the American standard of living, and the increasing lack of social mobility, and this is their recommendation?
One economist recently remarked that “economics is not really a science at all and, if practiced within the political arena, often is just ideology marketed in the guise of science.”
I suspect there’s more than a little truth to that statement.
To “democracy,”
You make excellent points, but I have one quibble. In looking at the chetty study, you assume a work life per person of 30 years. Most people have a work life of 40 years (in my case, it is 50 years). That reduces the annual “gain,” if it exists to a few dollars a week.
@cDiane: I made a generous assumption that FAVORED the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study, though I also assumed a class of 30 students (rather than, say, 25 or 26 or 27).
But no matter how you slice or dice it, the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study amounts to much ado about not very much.
The authors of this study claim that they can detect the impact of good teaching far after students leave school dispite having a poor measure of good teaching (VAM) and a poor measure of the impact of the (income). If correct, it is a powerful argument in favor of having high quality teachers in the classroom. Most here claim they are wrong, that the paper presents no evidence that high quality teaching has a long term impact on student lives. Are there any studies that offer evidence that high quality teaching has a positive long term impact on students? Should we simply not worry about teacher preperation? Teacher experience?