Education Matters
by Samina Uddin, Features Editor on October 1, 2008 in Features
Prof. James Kim, assistant professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and former middle school teacher, weighs in on the challenges facing education today.
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Q: During last week’s education policy forum at HKS, surrogates for the Obama and McCain campaigns discussed six important issues in education. What, in your view, is the most pressing issue in education policy today?
A: It’s probably not an answer most people would give, but the most pressing issue is whether policymakers and practitioners are going to use the results of experimental studies funded by the Department of Education (for example, on the efficacy of Reading First) to improve current policies and practices.
Will state and local programs, deemed effective by the research, be expanded? Will the ineffective ones be modified or canceled? These are important questions because education tends to be very faddish and often ideological. Some people want it to be more like medicine; in other words, evidence-based.
Q: Stephanie Robinson, Obama’s education surrogate, declared that only 1% of federal education dollars are spent on research and development – an amount which is, in her view, an “abomination.” Do you feel the same way?
A: I agree with her. People always say that education research is lacking in quality. But if you look at the percentage of federal education money that goes to funding research, it’s miniscule. And you can’t do rigorous research unless it’s funded extremely well.
A tension exists, however. On the one hand, people want better research. On the other, they don’t want to give money to an endeavor they think is lacking in rigor.
Since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was enacted, a larger portion of the 1% has been directed toward experimental research. That’s a huge change for the better. A lot of questions at the federal, state, and local levels concern which education policies are working. Experimental research is the best methodology for addressing them.
Q: Apart from determining which policies and programs are working, what is the primary role of the federal government in education policy?
A: The government’s role is to advance equal opportunity in education by redistributing resources.
Title 1 of NCLB, for instance, is a compensatory education policy. Under Title I, the federal government is redistributing tax dollars to districts with a higher percentage of children in poverty. A subset of these schools, in which more than 40% of children receive free lunch, are eligible for additional funds through Reading First (a program that requires funded schools to use science-based reading methods of early reading instruction).
The federal government also plays a role in strengthening evaluation. NCLB contains very strong levers to ensure that progress is regularly measured. Among other things, the statute requires schools to test children in reading and math in Grades 3 through 8, and in Grade 10.
Q: Reviews of NCLB are mixed. Some believe it forces teachers to teach to standardized tests, rather than provide students with a broader curriculum of skills and knowledge. Is NCLB broken? Or does it actually work?
A: The answer to your question — is NCLB working — depends on which outcome you want to use. One way to frame the question is to ask, is NCLB improving the achievement outcomes of all children?
That question is virtually impossible to answer because every state is subject to the treatment, since every school in every state is subject to the same accountability standard under NCLB. If we could do a hypothetical experiment in which 25 states are randomly assigned to meeting NCLB’s accountability standard and 25 are not, we could probably answer the question. But this is not the case, so we have to do a bit of detective work to determine whether, overall, achievement is improving.
My sense is that the results are mixed. Under the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), random samples of American children in Grades 4 through 8 are administered standardized tests. If you compare the growth in achievement of children in Grades 4 through 8 post-NCLB (for example, from 2002 to 2006) with the growth in achievement of a cohort of children pre-NCLB (say, from 1996 to 2000), the findings demonstrate that children post-NCLB are no better off than children pre-NCLB.
The more salient question, however, is whether NCLB has helped narrow the achievement gap. There is evidence that, today, fourth grade minority children, relative to white children, are doing better in math and reading than they were right after NCLB was enacted. At the eighth grade level, however, minority children have not made progress.
Q: What accounts for this discrepancy in progress among fourth and eighth grade minority students?
A: A lot of people argue that elementary education in the United States is actually pretty good. If you go to an urban district and walk into a second-grade classroom, the quality of reading instruction is adequate to excellent. After fourth grade, however, we’re having a lot of difficulty.
Although it’s difficult to teach children how to read, it’s actually a fairly manageable task. For example, one essential goal is to teach 26 letters of the alphabet and 44 different speech sounds in the English language. That’s a very doable, focused task. After fourth grade though, kids transition from learning how to read to reading to learn; that is, using reading as a tool for learning. Reading then becomes much harder. Children have to deal with thousands of vocabulary words and concepts, and improving literacy becomes a more challenging task in all academic subjects.
Q: Both presidential candidates advocate school choice. According to Robinson, however, Obama doesn’t want to abandon traditional public schools. What is the potential for improving these schools?
A: You need two things. First, you need to pressure schools to improve. The mere threat of competition is likely to force any organization to improve. This we know from microeconomic theory. And that theory, I think, holds pretty true for public schools. If you’re losing kids to private and charter schools, you’re going to lose dollars.
Second, you need policies that improve the instructional capacity of schools. High poverty schools are plagued with teacher turnover. If you don’t have a stable core of teachers who trust each other, who can work together, who have consistency in their instruction across grades and subjects, it’s very hard for kids to get a coherent education.
Q: How do we attract and retain quality teachers?
A: Alternative certification programs like Teach for America are a big part of the solution.
Currently, teachers in high poverty schools tend to have graduated from the least competitive colleges and universities. They tend to have the lowest SAT scores. They tend to have very weak skills themselves. So it’s not surprising that their children don’t actually learn as much. I’m not saying those are the only indicators of teacher quality, but they’re pretty decent proxies.
So how do we get an infusion of really talented people in schools? You have to tap into the idealism of young people. Teach for America is successful because these teachers want to advance equal opportunity. And they believe in justice. We should promote the idea that teaching in high-need schools is a form of public service.
Most economists who do research in this area argue that you have to double, triple, and sometimes quadruple salaries to attract the most talented teachers to high-need schools. Money is certainly a part of the solution. But it’s not the entire solution, because teachers will not stay in schools that are incoherent.
You need a principal who is a good leader. You need an appealing workplace; a well-run, disciplined school. If you asked teachers, would you rather be paid three times as much, or be paid a little bit more but have a much better working climate, a lot of teachers would choose the latter option.
Q: Governor Jane Swift said McCain wants kids to arrive at school ready to learn. Is Early Head Start effective in getting kids ready?
A: The best scholarship suggests that the benefits of investing in early childhood education far outweigh the costs. The best, most intensive early childhood programs have a huge impact on kids’ social-cognitive outcomes. They also lead to reductions in anti-social and criminal behavior – which are costly to society – in later life.
If the question, however, is whether Early Head Start is a good investment in children’s human capital, whether it prepares them to later succeed in the labor market, then it’s not enough to only think of Early Head Start.
You have to follow these kids through later grades. Research finds that eight years later, children who received early intervention often perform no better academically than children who did not participate in these programs. Why? Partly because these kids end up going to inferior schools. Early childhood education would be a better investment if there were additional supports (inside and outside schools) as children got older.
Q: Should the government encourage parents to take more responsibility for their children’s educational progress?
A: Yes, I would argue that the federal government should support policies which promote greater parental responsibility.
Not many people know this, but NCLB provides that Reading First dollars can also be used to provide “training in the essential components of reading instruction to a parent . . . to be a student’s reading tutor.”
You have to think about it this way. How much time do kids spend in school versus home? They spend 9% in school, 91% at home. The 9% is important because policy can do something. But if that’s all you’re going to do, a lot of problems will go unaddressed.
Prof. Kim is an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This fall, he is teaching “Major Issues in Federal Education Policy” at HKS.
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