Audrey Amrein Beardsley patiently waded through a report produced by the George W. Bush Institute in Texas and discovered an argument that the language of the Texas State Constitution leads inexorably to high-stakes testing and value-added-modeling for teachers. The key word is “efficiency,” you see, and Texas can’t have an “efficient” education system without measuring everything. Some people would argue that a system cannot be “efficient” unless it has adequate resources to accomplish its purposes. But no, the folks at the GWBI think that what the writers of the Constitution had in mind was measurement.

Beardsley writes:

The Texas Constitution requires that the state “establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools,” as the “general diffusion of knowledge [is]…essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people.” Following this notion, The George W. Bush Institute’s Education Reform Initiative recently released its first set of reports as part of its The Productivity for Results Series: “A Legal Lever for Enhancing Productivity.” The report was authored by an affiliate of The New Teacher Project (TNTP) – the non-profit organization founded by the controversial former Chancellor of Washington DC’s public schools Michelle Rhee; an unknown and apparently unaffiliated “education researcher” named Krishanu Sengupta; and Sandy Kress, the “key architect of No Child Left Behind [under the presidential leadership of George W. Bush] who later became a lobbyist for Pearson, the testing company” (see, for example, here).

Authors of this paper review the economic and education research (although if you look through the references the strong majority of pieces come from economics research, which makes sense as this is an economically driven venture) to identify characteristics that typify enterprises that are efficient. More specifically, the authors use the principles of x-efficiency set out in the work of the highly respected Henry Levin that require efficient organizations, in this case as (perhaps inappropriately) applied to schools, to have: 1) Clear objective outcomes with measurable outcomes; 2) Incentives that are linked to success on the objective function; 3) Efficient access to useful information for decisions; 4) Adaptability to meet changing conditions; and 5) Use of the most productive technology consistent with cost constraints.

The authors also advance another series of premises, as related to this view of x-efficiency and its application to education/schools in Texas: (1) that “if Texas is committed to diffusing knowledge efficiently, as mandated by the state constitution, it should ensure that the system for putting effective teachers in classrooms and effective materials in the hands of teachers and students is characterized by the principles that undergird an efficient enterprise, such as those of x-efficiency;” (2) this system must include value-added measurement systems (i.e., VAMs), as deemed throughout this paper as not only constitutional but also rational and in support of x-efficiency; (3) given “rational policies for teacher training, certification, evaluation, compensation, and dismissal are key to an efficient education system;” (4) “the extent to which teacher education programs prepare their teachers to achieve this goal should [also] be [an] important factor;” (5) “teacher evaluation systems [should also] be properly linked to incentives…[because]…in x-efficient enterprises, incentives are linked to success in the objective function of the organization;” (6) which is contradictory with current, less x-efficient teacher compensation systems that link incentives to time on the job, or tenure, rather than to “the success of the organization’s function; (6), in the end, “x-efficient organizations have efficient access to useful information for decisions, and by not linking teacher evaluations to student achievement, [education] systems [such as the one in Texas will] fail to provide the necessary information to improve or dismiss teachers.”

The two districts highlighted as being most x-efficient in Texas, and in this report include, to no surprise: “Houston [which] adds a value-added system to reward teachers, with student performance data counting for half of a teacher’s overall rating. HISD compares students’ academic growth year to year, under a commonly used system called EVAAS.” We’ve discussed not only this system but also its use in Houston often on this blog (see, for example, here, here, and here). Teachers in Houston who consistently perform poorly can be fired for “insufficient student academic growth as reflected by value added scores…In 2009, before EVAAS became a factor in terminations, 36 of 12,000 teachers were fired for performance reasons, or .3%, a number so low the Superintendent [Terry Grier] himself called the dismissal system into question. From 2004-2009, the district
fired or did not renew 365 teachers, 140 for “performance reasons,” including poor discipline management, excessive absences, and a lack of student progress. In 2011, 221 teacher contracts were not renewed, multiple for “significant lack of student progress attributable to the educator,” as well as “insufficient student academic growth reflected by [SAS EVAAS] value-added scores….In the 2011-12 school year, 54% of the district’s low-performing teachers were dismissed.” That’s “progress,” right?!?

The other exemplary district, according to the report, is Dallas. It may or may not be relevant that the superintendents who led these two districts are now gone (Mike Miles of Dallas) or on their way out the door (Terry Grier of Houston).

The current Texas State Constitution was adopted in 1876. Do you think the Founding Fathers of the Lone Star State gave a tinker’s dam about VAM? As a native Texan, I say no. Do you think those rough-and-ready guys could have passed a high-stakes test? Sorry, but I think they had plenty of smarts, but not the kind that the George W. Bush Institute treasures. My thought: Why not ask Sandy Kress and the other GWBI fellows to take the 11th grade math test?