Say this for Eric Hanushek: He never gives up on his obsession with paying teachers more if their students get higher test scores. Arne Duncan built this concept into the requirements of his disastrous Race to the Top” program, which caused almost every state to adopt a teacher evaluation plan in which student test scores played a significant role. Harvard economist Raj Chetty wtote a highly-publicized paper with two colleagues, claiming that one good teacher (who raised test scores in the early grades) would raise lifetime incomes (by about $5 a week), reduce pregnancies, and be a life-changer. President Obama cited Chetty in his 2012 State of the Union address, but efforts to turn the theory into reality fell flat. (Read more about this catastrophe in SLAYING GOLIATH.) In fact, every state that imposed value-added measurement learned that it discouraged teachers from teaching in high-needs schools, where their chance of getting a big test score gain was reduced. It did not produce any of the promised benefits.
But forget about reality! Let’s stand by the theory. Hanushek’s new venture at the conservative Hoover Institution is joined by Christopher Ruszkowski, who served as Commissioner of Education in New Mexico after the resignation of Hanna Skandera (who previously worked for the Hoover Institution, Jeb Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger). After eights years of “reform” leadership, New Mexico remained mired at the bottom of NAEP. The state had a harsh, test-based teacher evaluation plan, but the union fought it in court, it was enjoined by a judge, and the New Democratic Governor scrapped it as one of her first executive actions. New Mexico has one of the highest proportions of students living in poverty, but Republican state leaders ignored that inconvenient fact. After a decade of consistent failure, we can safely put test-based teacher evaluation into the category of a Zombie idea. Dead but still stalking the land.
NEWLY FORMED HOOVER EDUCATION SUCCESS INITIATIVE RELEASES PAPER ON TRANSFORMING TEACHER COMPENSATION
Four education policy papers to be released in 2020—addressing how states should consider transforming education in the decade ahead.
STANFORD, CA. (January 30th) – As state legislative sessions begin around the country, the Hoover Education Success Initiative (HESI), a new research program at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has released “The Unavoidable: Tomorrow’s Teacher Compensation”—a policy briefing on the important connections between teacher compensation systems and student achievement outcomes. The research-based policy paper includes both a summary of findings and practical recommendations for policymakers.
The paper highlights often overlooked areas for attention including shifting overall compensation from retirement into salaries, ending the practice of paying for advanced degrees that do not yield changes in student outcomes, addressing teacher shortages in a targeted fashion instead of generally, and paying teachers more when they are effective in higher-need schools. The paper concludes that teachers’ salaries should be significantly increased, but that students will not make achievement gains unless salaries are also linked to teacher quality.
“We need to pay teachers competitively, which we are not doing now,” said Dr. Eric Hanushek, author of the policy synthesis. “But just increasing compensation without recognizing teacher effectiveness is unlikely to lead to improved student outcomes. We should bundle together better pay with a serious recognition of just how important effective teachers are when it comes to influencing student achievement.”
“While we have spent much of the last year reviewing and synthesizing the research, the next phase of our work turns to helping states implement the policy ideas,” said Christopher N. Ruszkowski, executive director of HESI. “There is overwhelming evidence that nothing matters more than teacher quality, and state legislatures and governors should take strong action. Neglecting this responsibility causes harm to our students that may not be immediately visible today but will certainly be reflected in our students’ lives and in our economy tomorrow. It’s a tough issue and it may feel like something we can avoid, but it will catch up with us.”
Click here to read the policy analysis brief.
About the Hoover Education Success Initiative
With passage in 2015 of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states are again in charge of American education policy. To support them in this undertaking, the Hoover Education Success Initiative (HESI), launched in 2019, seeks to provide state education leaders with policy recommendations that are based upon sound research and analysis. HESI hosts workshops and policy symposia on high-impact areas related to the improvement and reinvention of the US education system. The findings and recommendations in each area are outlined in concise topical papers.
The leadership team at HESI engages with its Practitioner Council, formed of national policy leaders, and with interested state government leaders. HESI’s ultimate goal is to spark innovation and contribute to the ongoing transformation of the nation’s K-12 education landscape, thus improving outcomes for our nation’s children.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sure hope we don’t forget about Bloomberg and the Sacklers:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/mike-bloombergs-ties-to-sackler-family-exposed/
“Zombie idea,” indeed! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at Eric Hanushek’s unwavering commitment to these threadbare ideas, for they spring from his reductive technocratic notions about how the world works, and therefore how classrooms work. But, geez, are we going to be subjected to them once again?!
Here is the proper link to the policy paper. https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/hanushek_webreadypdf_revised2.pdf
Eric Hanushek is an economist. He has beating the same set of drums since the 1970s. In this report he makes that argues that teacher pensions should be raided and their health benefits reduced in order to provide raises in pay for “effective teachers.” Effective teachers are those who raise scores on standardized tests and have other metrics that can serve as indicators of quality. Among these are NOT years of experience or advanced degrees.
Also, since you are here Mike, that is a wonderful review of Diane Ravitch’s book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and The Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.
http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com
Diane, you know these people personally. Do you think Hanushek would continue to deeply believe that paying teachers based on their students’ test scores would work miracles IF his paycheck didn’t depend on his deeply believing it?
I’ve known a couple of journalists who weren’t visibly right-wingers at all and who scored financial success when they transformed their image into fiery right-wingers. Did they actually, sincerely become fiery right-wingers? You gotta wonder.
The real question is if Hanushek would continue to call for VAM if his continued employment was determined by the “outcome” of his own VAM experiment.
I bet if he had been ” fired sooner rather than later” like Chetty’s colleague Friedman was calling for, Hanushek would have been the first to cry foul (and Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff would have been a close second)
These people never (ever) have to play by their own rules. It’s always other people and other people’s children who get hurt by their idiotic and/or dishonest schemes.
Had they been forced to play by their own rules, Hanushek and Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff would have been driven out of academics entirely.
Instead, they are “celebrated” economists. Chetty might even yet get a fake Nobel for his infamous paper(s). The committee that gives out the fake Nobel in economics seems to have no standards at all when it comes to the award.
That tells you all you need to know about the current (abysmal) state of mainstream economics.
After I wrote critically about the infamous Chetty paper, he called out of the blue to tell me that his study wax accepted for publication by the American Economics journal, would be published in two issues, and would very likely win him a Nobel prize. I thanked for reading my blog.
The so called “Nobel prize in Economics ” is not a real Nobel, which is why I refer to jt as a ” fake Nobel” be wise that is precisely what it is.
It’s basically a lie which started out as a marketing ploy to boost the reputation of economics and economists.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economics-nobel-isnt-really-a-nobel/
https://www.alternet.org/2012/10/there-no-nobel-prize-economics/
If Chetty wins the Nobel, that will be the end of any credibility that this prize might have achieved.
It never had any legitimate credibility.
It was all quite literally manufactured.
Read the above alternet article.
Orvread what Bank fraud expert William Black had to say in reply to Chetty’s whining in the NY Times about economics not getting the respect it deserves.
“Raj Chetty has written an op ed in the New York Times designed to counter the abuse the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) rightly received for its latest embarrassment. Economics does not have a true Nobel Prize, so a central bank decided to create a near-beer variant. The central bankers have frequently made a hash of it, often awarding economists who got it disastrously wrong and inflicted policies that caused immense suffering. This year, not for the first time, the central bankers decided to hedge their bets – awarding their prize to economists who contradict each other (Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller). The hedge strategy might be thought to ensure that the central bank’s prize winners were right at least half the time (which would be an improvement over the central bankers’ batting average in their awards), but that is a logical error. It is perfectly possible for both of the prize winners to be wrong. I’ll explain why I think that is the case in a future article.”
https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/10/economics-science-economists-scientists.html
The only reason the fake econ Nobel recipients get attention is because people keep falsely repeating that there is a Nobel Prize in economics.
There is most certainly not and to claim there is knowing there is not is not just a mistake. It is a lie.
The Hoover Institution is aptly named.
Herbert Hoover was a clueless, out of touch elitist and so are the tanker wankers like Hanushek who work at the Institution that Herbert Hoover founded (originally as a library)
More tanker wankers at Hoover: Condoleeza “no one could have foreseen terrorists flying planes into buildings” Rice (even though the congressional report on 911 said just the opposite: “from at least 1994, and continuing into the summer of 2001, the Intelligence Community received information indicating that terrorists were contemplating, among other means of attack, the use of aircraft as weapons.”) and Thomas “global warming will be great” Moore.
It really is a joke.
Hoover was anything but clueless, which is even more frightening than it would be if he was actually ignorant and distant from society as you paint him. His charity work in the wake of the 27 flood demonstrates that he well understood the problems of poverty which assailed the mid-20th century American economy.
What he was is much worse. He was a faith-based economist, whose solutions to the 29 stock market collapse were bound by postulates that worked against the poor people he really cared about in a genuine way. Refusal to discard the postulates that refused to accept governmental regulation of business was what got him I trouble with an electorate that spent four years naming all the symbols of their hardship with his name.
Hoover understood, yet remained attached to laissez faire economics like a Muslim would never give up the idea that Mohammed was the prophet of Allah. Much worse than clueless. Much more dangerous.
I suppose that depends on your definition of clueless.
I would define clueless as sticking to a bankrupt ideology regardless of what the facts show.
I suppose some might call that dishonest rather than clueless, but proving dishonesty is much harder than proving cluelessness.
I feel Hoover denied the reality. Throughout his part of the Great Depression, all he did was to set up a national bank, the first since the days of Andrew Jackson’s assault on Nicholas Biddle. That he was capable of this decision suggests to me that he did not admit the facts accepted by FDR and the New Dealers.
My evaluation of Hoover is that he was incapable of throwing off his almost religious commitment to keeping government out of the business of providing direct aid to the needy. The clues were there, but he was blinded to them by his own beliefs.
Merit pay is an epic fail. This recent Hoover nonsense is terrifying news, given that Buttigieg mentioned the pseudoscientific Chetty study about test score pay in the first debate. The hostile corporate takeover of public education and the ruination of the lives of teachers and students are dead horses that pseudo-liberal, pseudo-academic lapdogs of tech moguls and other rightwing billionaires will pursue as long as there is money for them to spend instead of paying taxes. I hope Hanushek is receiving only merit pay for his effect on student outcomes: zero dollars and zero cents.
Buttigieg strikes me as one of those people who are superficially smart. He seems to question nothing and instead simply repeat the standard mantra.
Bernie, on the other hand, understands that paying teachers, all teachers, enough so that we don’t have to sell blood or take a second job is the right thing to do. He also understands that the way to improve student outcomes (test scores) is to raise the wages of their parents. Union wages.
I agree. Since he has no national or international experience, other than serving in the military, he is a walking, talking Wikipedia page in the debates. I watched him shuffle his index cards before he gave his two cents.
He should shuffle himself off to Buffalo or wherever he came from.
Actually, the one who did the merit pay experiment is Chetty’s former Hawvid colleague (recently fired for sexual harassment) “Roland Nobel-less Ed Lab Fryer”, which blew up his Nobel…
Roland ‘Nobel-less Ed lab’ Fryer” (apologies to the late great Warren Zevon, RIP)
Roland was a warrior from the land of the Crimson sun
An econ man for hire, fighting to be done
The deal was made at Harvard on a dark and stormy day
So he set out for the White House to join the Edu-fray
Through merit pay and testing he fought the Edu-wars
With his finger on the figure, knee-deep in the scores
For days and nights he battled, the unions and their ties
He tried to earn his living, with some help from Condi Rice
Roland the Ed Lab Fryer
Roland the Ed Lab Fryer
His comrades fought beside him, Raj Chetty and the rest
But of all the Ed Lab hires, Roland was the best
But his merit-pay experiment went belly-up to hell
That son-of-a-gun experiment, blew up his Nobel
Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer, Harvard’s bravest hire
They can still see his Nobel-less body stalking through the night
In the brilliant flash of Roland’s Ed Lab fire
In the brilliant flash of Roland’s Ed Lab fire
Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer
Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer
Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer
Talkin’ about the man, Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer
When I spoke to Buttigieg’s last fall, they said their Educatuon advisors were John King, founder of a charter school in Massachusetts, state commissioner in New York, and Secretary of Education in last year of Obama term. Also James Shelton, ex-CZI, ex-Gates, ex-Obama ED dept. That was reassuring.
Yikes!
Good thing he withdrew this weekend
Does Hanushek know about cognitive load theory and the constructivist teaching fallacy? Understanding these offers hope for school improvement. Of course not: Hanushek is an economist. He latches on to a simplistic and false notion of what ails schools –teacher laziness. Letting economists guide education is as foolish as letting them guide the COVID-19 response.
Hanushek obviously knows a lot about “Cognitive Load of Manure” theory and practices it on a daily basis.
There is nothing remotely innovative about testing, VAM, or privatization. This is not “transformation.” It is merely disruption. Our public schools have had far too much of unvetted, top down, demoralizing, meddlesome initiatives from the clueless business world. Our schools need more investment, funded libraries, more support staff and smaller class sizes.
But testing VAM and privatization are “winnowvative” , winnowing out certain people and certain schools.
W’s for Winnowing, wheat from the
chaff
“School Deform from A to Z”
A is for Avarice, driving the Huns
B is for Billions, from public school funds
C is for Coleman, the Core of the trouble
D is for Duncan, who made it all double
E is for Eva, a charter school nut
F is for Failure, for those who are cut
G is for Gates, who has bankrolled
deform
H is for Hack, the Deformian norm
I is for Ignorance, willful and not
J is for Journey, to Plunderland spot
K is for Kopp and her front, TFA
L is for Loopy, the Common Core way
M is for Money, the ultimate goal
N is for Nihilist, standardized soul
O is for Onerous, testing in schools
P is for Pearson, for tests and for tools
Q is for ‘Quality’, gauged by a score
R is for Rigor, of zombies and more
S is for Standards, established by hacks
T is for Testing irrelevant facts
U is for Unicorns, fairies and rest
V is for VAM, which is random, at best
W’s for Winnowing, “wheat” from the
“Chaff”
X is for X-out, of schools and of staff
Y is for “Y’all better do as we’ve said”
Z is for Zimba, quite clueless ‘bout ed
Great acrostic poem!
Bravo, SomeDAM! Now my favorite abecedarian poem!
Good morning class! Today we are going to learn our ABCs. Repeat after me: “PRESIDENT TRUMP IS. . .
Amoral,
Backward,
Criminal,
Demagogic,
Embarrassing,
Fascist,
Gauche,
Humorless,
Indolent,
Jingoistic,
Knavish,
Loathsome,
Moronic,
Narcissistic,
Orange,
Predatory,
Quarrelsome
Racist,
Sexist,
Thuggish,
Uninformed,
Vulgar,
Wrong,
Xenophobic,
Yellow-bellied,
and
Zaftig.”
Well, we now know why his belly is yellow instead of orange. It doesn’t get enough ultraviolet radiation when he takes his daily exercise nap inside the tanning bed.
What a wonder Abcdarian exercise!
After all that, I had to end by saying one nice thing about him. LOL.
“…the Hoover Education Success Initiative (HESI), launched in 2019, seeks to provide state education leaders with policy recommendations that are based upon sound research and analysis.”
Policy recommendations based on sound research and analysis? I wish these people would shut up and attack elsewhere. Teachers are the experts but they never are asked what is important or what is needed to improve education. Why doesn’t this ‘sound research’ ever come up with something like smaller class sizes, increased funding for poverty schools or updated textbooks? There are only so many ways that teachers can be beaten up before they quit.
“Inconvenient Facts”
Has anyone published a book with that title yet?
Al Gore made a movie inconvenient Truths.
But Kelly Anne Conway coined the term Alternate Facts, which would be an even better name for a book.
Of course, alternate Facts implies there are actually no true facts and that everyone is entitled to their own.
Imagine if physics worked that way.
One of Lloyd’s want-to-be Alternative Facts: Lloyd buys a Frisby. The first time he throws it, the Frisby comes back as a flying saucer the size of a football stadium. Lloyd climbs in his new interstellar, faster than light spacecraft, is greeted by the AI that flies it and tells him the ship is ready to explore the universe.
But, Lloyd doesn’t leave alone. In this alternative-fact universe, with help from his AI spacecraft, they raid the Muslim harem that supplies 72 virgins for each Islamic suicide bomber and takes all those virgins along for the journey.
Not perfect, but the concept of National Board principles and certification was the way to go. Teachers invested hundreds of hours in introspection, watching videos of their own teaching for continue improvement of practice, collaborating with peers, working with a mentor, and being part of a bona fide Professional (capital P) learning community.
And… they got a one time stipend or % salary increase to last a career. AND they gained a sense of confidence and pride… and stayed in the classroom (not administration).
Some districts implemented similar models to scale. NOT a career ladder. NOT merit pay. NOT better = test score. Rather…Paths or other formats based on Professional Learning and putting it in practice.
Test scores? No. Rather… Teacher artifacts of student work that children are learning.
Back to National Board concept…. “Evidence” and artifacts that 1. Teachers know their students and how they learn. 2. Teachers know their content and how to teach it. 3. Teachers monitor and respond to student progress. 4. Teachers establish a climate and culture that is relevant and culturally reaponsive….
Teachers should be paid a lot more…. a whole lot more. Not based on scores… rather based on what professionals do and garner authentic results.
Corporate folks make widgets and compensate based on counting production and sales of widgets. We teach children… all children
Many districts were working towards portfolio assessment of students prior to 2000. Most of this work got derailed once NCLB was imposed. The great dystopian disruption put teachers and public schools on the defensive through scapegoating and the blame game.
“….teacher compensation systems and student achievement outcomes.” Orwellian language gives Orwellian results. Hide your meaning. Ruin society.
These idiots assume that the high-stakes standardized tests are valid measures. In ELA, they definitely are not.
All the states publish sample release questions from the publishers of these tests. Doubtless, the publishers try to put their best foot forward when they publish these sample questions. However, even a cursory review of the sample questions will reveal that they are incredibly sloppy. Often, the question, as written, isn’t actually answered, or answered well, by ANY of the answers provided. Often, the answer to the question, as written, is arguably one of the distracters, not the answer that the publisher considers correct. Often, more than one answer is, arguably, correct. Commonly, selections are chosen from the public domain and use a lot of archaic language because the publishers are too cheap to pay permissions fees. Often, the questions, as written, are unintentionally ambiguous. Often, the questions refer to something in the passage that isn’t actually in the passage because the writers of the question arguably misinterpreted something. These are common problems, but there are more.
And all of this is quite easily demonstrable. I have long considered putting together a book of analyses of these sample questions to illustrate just how sloppy and ill conceived these tests are.
However, the publishers have made it clear that they reserve the right to sue anyone who reproduces their questions, and such reproduction is, of course, necessary if readers are going to follow the analyses.
So, I’ve gone around and around about this. I am certain that I could demonstrate, beyond any doubt, that these tests are a bad joke and a scam.
People like Hanushek haven’t a clue what they are talking about. The devil is in the details, and they don’t know these. In this respect, they are very like IQ45, the current inhabitant of the now Offal Office in the now Whiter House. Profoundly, critically, essentially ignorant.
And, of course, there are other, more generally validity problems with these purported tests of the puerile Gates/Coleman “standards.” Typically, on a given test, there are one are two questions for each “standard” on the bullet list. However, the “standards” themselves are almost completely content free, as though English were a content-free subject, and they are so vague and broad that it is quite literally IMPOSSIBLE to write one or two multiple-choice questions that will validly test proficiency on that standard IN GENERAL. Try this yourself. Try to write ONE multiple-choice question that will tell you whether a student can make any kind of inference from any kind of text (CCSSELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.1. Or try to write TWO questions that will tell you whether a student can analyze any kind of development of any kind of central idea over the course of any text (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.2). OF COURSE, this cannot be done. But somehow, all this invalidity in the testing of each of these “standards” is supposed to add up to overall test validity.
Insane, on the face of it.
There are many, many other general problems of this kind. I could go on and on. For example, testing of explicit ability to recognize one grammatical form does not tell you that a child has proficiency in the grammar of a language.
And, of course, the tests don’t test content knowledge AT ALL, either procedural or descriptive, and proficiency in ELA involves a LOT of both.
The devil is in the details. But the Deformers/Disrupters are ignorant of the details, and the discussions of these tests almost always take place at incredibly high levels of generality that assume that the “standards” are “higher” and that the tests are valid.
On both counts, they are not.
“even a cursory review of the sample questions will reveal that they are incredibly sloppy.”
I can validate this observation. When we began to get geometry questions in the wake of one of the many changes I lived through in the 29 years I taught that subject, your observation exactly parallel my memory of the questions we got. As a matter of observation, I began to wonder if the questions we saw were just rejected questions that had been thrown off by the test makers due to the problems you enumerate above.
Students would invariably ask questions about the test after it had been given, and the occasional student could and would describe the question perfectly and even recall the exact figure. From these interactions, it became obvious that the test questions were no better than the practice problems we were allowed access to.
Saying that these things measure something is ridiculous even beyond Mr. Swacker’s logical protestations. Even if you subscribed to the idea of testing as measurement, these questions would be like trying to build a cabinet using a knotted cord. No accuracy here, beam me up.
So you would think that the companies providing these high stakes tests might be held accountable by the release of the questions, along with data on how many children were able to answer them over a period of the two or three years of their usage. That way a board of teachers might be employed to evaluate the test and see if the state had been ripped off or not, and thus the company that produced the questions might have to reimburse the state for its malpractice and compensate the students whose educational career was negatively impacted by their malpractice.
I bet none of that made any sense, because I am laughing too hard. I bet the pernicious purveyors of this tripe are laughing too, all the way to the bank, where they must be writing checks to their congressmen.
I’d like to sell you are car, Roy. It’s a very good car. $30K. No, I’m sorry. You can’t see it first. Or later. Or ever.
They always claim that the questions are reviewed by teachers. But I can find someone to OK just about anything. These people are scam artists. They pay their marketing people a LOT more than they do the folks who write the questions. LOL. After all, they are key to the scam. They cook up the lies that sell this crap to state department officials who then get lucrative consulting contracts or jobs when they shuffle out of feeding at the state government trough.
Secrecy is inimical to science.
There is no legitimate reason to keep things secret because one should simply not be recycling questions, which itself renders the test unfair to the first ones who took it.
The whole secrecy issue is also why VAM is not science and never will be.
Science depends on full transparency so that others can repeat ones experiments and replicate ones claimed results.
The mere fact that the VAMmers keep their stuff under wraps is a sure sign that they are up to no good.
And a sure sign that they are most definitely NOT scientists.
In fact, they have no clue what science is.
True. If an independent audit can’t review the process or replicate the outcomes, it’s not science.
It’s actually the height of absurdity and illegaility that teachers should be evaluated based on a secret process that only the evaluators have access to.
And several judges have ruled as much.
The secrecy behind VAM brings to mind “The Trial” by Franz Kafka.
the publishers try to put their best foot forward when they publish these sample questions. However, even a cursory review of the sample questions will reveal that they are incredibly sloppy.”
Well, putting their foot in their mouth is definitely putting their foot forward, so perhaps the two only seem to be incompatible.