Nobody is totally satisfied with Canadian  or American education results, parents, teachers, media, students, whoever, notwithstanding the fact that Canada and South Korea compete heavily, for the highest percentage of people with a post secondary degree or diploma in the world. Canada is usually in the top 10 countries on international test scores as well, but apparently, if your own child is not a brain surgeon or sitting on the Supreme Court by age 30, the system has failed them. Well, who was it who failed them then? The thesis of this newsletter is that although many would love to blame the teachers, there is zero evidence that teachers are the problem. Dedicating our efforts to endless hours of PD may offer little gain. 

 

We can thank the Americans for most of the research in this area. Since  they launched the ill-fated No Child Left Behind NCLB in 2001 under George W Bush, the Yanks have been obsessed with data and standardized testing, which conveniently arrived along with  the internet. Most researchers intuitively understood that comparing teachers' results from middle class or bourgeois neighbourhoods to results from working class and poor neighborhoods was fraught with problems from the start, but some felt they now had ‘’value added’’ tools to compare yearly gains of each teacher. Some even tried to tie this to ‘’merit pay’’, the perennial issue that never works, but also never dies. 

 

So, for example teacher A in an upper middle class school might have an average class gain of 1.3 on test scores which would mean that during one school year, her students gained one full year in reading or math plus 3 months. Teacher B in a poorer school might have an average gain of 0.8 which meant that although his students were with them for 10 months, they only gained 8 months in reading or math and if that continued the students would eventually fall 1 or maybe 2 years behind before high school. 

 

Although this might be interesting to a system that was actually interested in compensatory education, for example, it is highly problematic if you attempted to use it for merit pay, job security or promotion purposes. 

 

Educational psychologists like Daniel Willingham were among the first to say this was particularly unfair because if you switched teacher A with Teacher B, the results were unlikely to change. Teachers are important but the factors that led to lower results had little to do with the teacher. 

 

Notwithstanding the likelihood that Willingham and others were right, researchers and systems seemed fixated on the idea of what would happen if you could find a way to shift teachers with excellent data into schools with disappointing results to see if they could make a significant difference. 

 

The first attempt was known as TTI for Teacher Transfer Initiative. (Glazerman et al 2013) was a TTI research multi site project, random experiments, considered the gold standard trial in 10 districts in 7 States paying teachers with high value added scores a $20 000-$30 000 bonus to move to low value added schools. 

 

The first thing they noticed was a high reluctance to move, notwithstanding the bonus’. This indicated that if the policy was broadly adopted in school systems, voluntary switching would be strongly resisted. The more important conclusion was that improvement in results was statistically speaking, insignificant, perhaps 4-10 percentile points. 

 

Put in simple terms, shifting the best ‘’value added’’ teachers they could incentivize to shift had an insignificant effect on results, often no effect at all. It had zero effect in middle schools and no effect on retention after the bonus ended. 

 

Officially stated: ‘’Large financial incentives can move a small number of teachers but effects on outcomes are limited and inconsistent.’’

 

In 2014 the National Education Policy Center called the results ‘’not encouraging’’. ‘’It produced low participation, modest to zero gains outside some elementary classes. The long term cost effectiveness is dubious at best.’’

 

These results were  repeatedly found in similar research. (Dee & Wyckoff 2013-2015) Impact System Washington DC. Strong incentives were tied to teacher evaluation. Results were ‘’mixed evidence, Moving low performers out made modest gains only if the teachers remained. 

 

Other studies largely concluded the same thing. (Cowan & Goldhaber -2018) Washington State research  noted little gain.’ Increased incentives to work in high poverty schools led to recruitment of more certified teachers as opposed to uncertified, but no student gains.’’ 

 

There have been similar studies in Chile, and in Nashville TN, Conclusions ‘’It made no significant difference to pay very successful teachers to go to disadvantaged schools. Any perceptible differences were either small or short lived.
 

Research on the impact of giving large teacher bonuses to highly successful teachers to switch to inner city or hard to staff schools have very mixed results. Bonus of $30 000 will help with teacher retention but they do not seem to yield improved results. 

 

At the risk of repeating concepts from previous issues, we have known what follows, since the Coleman Report officially titled Equality of Educational Opportunity in 1966. Coleman et al traced the source of education’s problems in poor schools directly to the home life of the students and the effects of the surrounding community. This is not a ‘’blame the victim’’ finding. Coleman blamed the system that generated the poverty, some would be tempted to call it capitalism. Bowles and Gintis 1976 explained that the particular form of capitalism in America, and by extension Canada, requires an underclass of poorly paid workers to function which causes schools to reproduce workers like the student’s parents otherwise the system cannot function. 

 

The late professor emeritus David Berliner, of  Arizona State U, explained why poor kids do badly in school. The USA has the widest income gaps of any developed nation. This underpins a whole series of effects like hunger and poor nutrition, poor physical health, inability to focus, lost school days due to illness, mental health struggles, high parental stress, environmental factors, limited cognitive stimulation, residential instability, frequent moves, unaddressed dental and vision issues, lower expectations, peer effects, work requirements, repeated trauma, and less confidence 

 

This is what teachers are up against in difficult, usually poorer school settings. Now factor in since 2010, the effects of social media, the lack of consequence in schools which has caused discipline to nearly collapse, not to mention covid 19, and we have a very long list of sublethal toxins that when combined, create very difficult situations. 

 

The idea that a slightly better teacher in second grade is going to turn the ship around and produce results that compete with a school full of doctors and lawyers kids, only a short distance away is as ridiculous as it sounds. Many consultants like Michael Fullan focus on how to ‘’fix the teachers’’.The teachers are not the problem. Poverty is the problem. Until we can seriously reduce poverty, we all press on, doing our very best but don’t expect miracles.