Assignment: Make K-12 Education Better

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Mayoral control of large, urban school systems, teacher pay based on a market compensation model, vouchers to allow special education students to attend the public or private school of their choice. These were a few of the ideas a group of leading education researchers came together recently to discuss.

The department of education reform at the University of Arkansas invited university researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Brown, Vanderbilt and the University of Missouri-Columbia to spend a day at the Kauffman Conference Center in Kansas City, Mo., to talk about ways to improve student performance in the K-12 education system. Faculty members of the endowed UA department, which is a little more than a year old, also contributed papers or led discussions at the conference sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship and improving the education of children and youth.

The grant funding the conference will also support the publication of a book from the papers submitted.

“The conference brought together a diverse group of academics, legislators, state agency representatives and educators from both coasts and across the nation,” said Reed Greenwood, dean of the College of Education and Health Professions. “The education reform department will offer more opportunities for people to talk about ideas to improve this country's public education system.”

Jay Greene, head of the education reform department, opened the conference with a brief history of education spending in the United States. Greene, the author of Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools — And Why It Isn’t So (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), explained that spending on education has increased significantly without a corresponding rise in student achievement.

“The central problem in K-12 education is productivity,” Greene said. “The problem is we are spending more and more money, yet the results are the same. How can we provide school systems with the incentives to make better use of education spending to produce higher student achievement?”

Kenneth Wong, the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Professor in Education Policy at Brown University, examined changing a district’s governance as a way to improve schools. The director of a new master’s program in urban education policy at Brown, Wong has been studying and writing since 2000 about school districts in which mayors exercised control over operations.

Wong and his associate, Francis X. Shen, a doctoral student of government and social policy at Harvard University, conducted case studies and statistical analyses using a multiyear database on a sample of 100 urban districts, examining mayoral leadership in cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, Cleveland and Philadelphia. They found academic improvement in the districts led by mayors as compared to districts under traditional school governance structures.

According to their research, mayors hold a broader mandate than an elected school board and, when granted power to appoint a school board, can use political capital to mobilize electoral support for school reform. Their paper also cited mayors' ability to leverage commitments and resources from nonpartisan institutions such as universities and museums to improve public schools and to apply fiscal discipline and accountability to the school system in both formal and informal ways.

Greene’s paper on school vouchers for special education students proposed that overdiagnosis of students as disabled would lessen if students could take the additional federal funding supplied with such a diagnosis to the school of their choice. He studied a similar program in Florida that resulted in better outcomes for disabled students in private schools than in their previous public schools.

“The only way to overcome the barriers to policy change is to try market approaches in more places, carefully collect information on the consequences of a market approach, and use that evidence to convince people about what will best serve disabled students while controlling costs,” Greene wrote.

According to Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, standard pay policies in educational systems do not ensure that high-quality teachers are recruited and retained, and he advocated a teacher-pay system that emphasizes performance. He cited evidence that a teacher’s overall experience and graduate education, two primary features of existing single salary schedules, bear little consistent relationship to student performance.

Michael Podgursky, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Kauffman Foundation scholar-in-residence, described several merit pay plans being used around the country, including the Teacher Advancement Program developed by the Milken Family Foundation. More long-term studies are needed, he said, and they should be designed in such a way that they can be effectively evaluated.

In examining ideas for reform, the researchers who attended the Oct. 20 conference also identified promising directions for future research. Several people in attendance lamented the lack of scientific data upon which to base decisions about implementing reform measures.

James W. Guthrie, chair of the department of leadership, policy and organizations at Vanderbilt University and director of Vanderbilt’s Peabody Center for Education Policy, noted that very few schools of education at U.S. universities have funds to conduct research. Carolyn Herrington, dean of the College of Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia, described the education departments in some state governments as data rich but curiosity poor, lacking systematic analysis of the data.

Greenwood said he detects a sea change among practitioners and schools of education toward large-scale studies. He cited the half-dozen doctoral students and research associates who accompanied the UA faculty members to the conference.

“The mission of the education school is evolving,” Greenwood said. “Consider these pre-professionals in the field. They will continue the study of best practices, and deans of education schools are more openly embracing the research.”

The UA education reform department’s $20 million endowment funds not only six endowed faculty chairs with money for research but also provides scholarships for teachers in training and 10 prestigious doctoral fellowships for students in related degree programs.

“There are so few education schools where members of the faculty have any capacity to undertake the research you all describe,” Guthrie observed. “It’s very rare.”

Other members of the education reform department faculty and its Technical Advisory Board presented papers:

• Guthrie, “A Modern Data System for Modern Schools”
• Paul Peterson, Harvard University, “The Case for Curriculum-Based, External Examinations that Have Significant Consequences for Students”
• Patrick J. Wolf, University of Arkansas, “Academic Improvement through Regular Assessment”
• Herrington, “Revisiting the Importance of the Direct Effects of School Leadership on Student Achievement: The Implications for School Improvement Policy,” with Stephen M. Nettles of Florida State University
• Rebecca Maynard, University of Pennsylvania, “The Case for Early, Tailored Intervention to Prevent Academic Failure,” with Irma Perez-Johnson, University of Pennsylvania
• John Witte, University of Wisconsin, “A Proposal for State, Income-Targeted Preschool Vouchers”