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Ken Hirsh
February 24, 2009
As I continue to visit charter schools in Manhattan, I am struck with the prevalence of arrangements in which there are two teachers in a classroom. The classrooms themselves often have between 20 to 30 children, but the kids are frequently split into two groups or some other arrangement in which they seem to be getting more attention than the typical single-teacher approach. A few thoughts on this:
1. Aaron Pallas wrote yesterday “One of the truisms about class size reduction is that, if the student population stays constant, the only way to reduce class size is to increase the number of classes, which requires more classroom space.” This makes sense to me, but is the goal class size reduction, i.e. reducing students per foot of classroom space, or is it to reduce the student-teacher ratio in classroom settings? Is class size important for reasons beyond the student-teacher ratio in classroom settings? How important are these other reasons?
2. In part, charter schools are able to afford lowering the student-teacher ratio because they generally employ younger teachers and they don’t participate in the UFT benefit plan. Since most charter schools roughly follow the UFT salary scale, they can’t afford to compete with salaries for the most senior teachers.
3. Charter schools sometimes utilize junior teachers or apprentice teachers (my invented titles) to work with more senior teachers. These junior teachers often get paid less than first year teachers in traditional public schools. Interestingly, these teachers seem to be getting practical apprentice teacher preparation in the manner suggested by many people in the comment sections from Aaron’s recent post here and mine here. Simultaneously, they are providing additional attention to students, particularly at the lower grades.
What do readers think of these charter school experiments? Are they relevant to traditional public schools?
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February 24th, 2009 1:24 pm
A few questions for you:
1) Are these apprentice teachers, or are they teacher aides? That is, are they qualified — other than experience — to teach?
2) What do these apprentices do? Are they invovled in lesson planning? In assessment? In curriculum and grade-level meetings?
3) What are they actually doing in the classrooms? Providing instruction? Answering questions? Diagnosing children’s difficulties? Are they doing more than repeating teachers’ instructions?
Can you tell us more?
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As for class size vs. faculty:student ratios, well, that’s a good question. I don’t know of any research that actually compared class size to extra adults in the room. I guess, as I implied above, is that it would vary depending on the nature of the additional adults and the nature of their responsibilities.
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February 24th, 2009 3:52 pm
Ken,
My kids are not in charters, so I cannot speak directly.
But my experience from my kid’s “traditional” public school district is that in grades k-1 teaching assistants are frequently used to get two adults into the room with the youngest kids. Many of them (but not all) are pursuing credentials or education to get a teaching job (no “assistant” in front of the title).
Another phenomena is the use of Collaborative Team Teaching (CTT) classes. In this case 60% of the kids have a general education program and 40% of the children have some kids of learning disability as evidenced by an Individual Education Plan (IEP). This kind of class is led by two teachers, one specialized in special ed, and one in gen ed, with one or two paraprofessionals to help out. This approach is used in all grades - right up through 8, so far as I know in our district.
So there are multiple instances of schools lowering student teacher ratios when the physical plant of the building will not allow for further class size reduction by the creation of new classrooms. And yes, in both the early grades and the CTT classes they work on small group activities, where I believe they are placed into more homogeneous groups based on level and then given instruction appropriately.
As the risk of extrapolating from a small sample, I have the impression after 5 years of observation that both parents and teachers are generally happy with both sets of arrangements.
In the case of the CTT classes, it takes a good set of teachers to work together to craft a program that meets the needs of all the children, and doesn’t just half their workload. And it takes parents who are supportive of the idea that kids with milder disabilities can be mainstreamed and everyone will be the more successful for it. But that’s the environment a good administrator creates.
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February 24th, 2009 4:24 pm
Ken raises a good point. I know that Girls Prep on the Lower East Side has a Teaching Assistant (that may not be the title - it’s a recent college grad/career changer who is pursuing a Masters in Education) for each elementary school classroom. I think this is similar to the model at a variety of private schools where there are two adults in the room with younger students. Traditionally, the teaching assistant does share part of the lesson planning and instructing.
I actually worked at a public school (non charter) that had two teachers assigned to each regular class for math and some ELA classes. This way the teachers could break up the students. And one could focus more on circulating while the other led the instruction. Also I think the goal was encouraging team teachers. Because they taught as a team they taught the entire grade (4 different classes). I do know this worked well at this school.
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February 25th, 2009 12:34 pm
What I have most commonly observed is two teachers in a room with about 24 kids. They split the kids into two groups and the kids sit with a teacher in two distinct parts of the classroom. My understanding is that the experience and reporting structure of the two teachers varies from situation to situation. In some classes and in some schools, one teacher is specifically “junior” to the other, but in other cases, the teachers are roughly at the same experience level. In some cases, one teacher is right out of college and is (I think) working towards a master’s degree. It seems to me that many charter schools are hesitant to put a “new” teacher alone in a classroom, but they are comfortable putting one in a classroom with a more experienced teacher. I have seen some cases where a lead teacher is conducting a class while the more junior teacher is walking around helping out individual students either in conjunction with the class lesson or, it would seem, on separate materials. I have also seen instances in which additional teachers occasionally join a classroom to work with individual students or small groups for a while. Finally, there are situations in which individual students are taken outside of the classroom for special attention. I understand that all of these things take place to some degree in some traditional public schools. In some charter schools, though, it seems to be happening in the majority of classrooms for much of the school day, not just with the youngest kids or in special situations.
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February 25th, 2009 1:15 pm
Ken,
You asked, “What do readers think of these charter school experiments? Are they relevant to traditional public schools?”
Sure, they are relevant. But you describe a whole bunch of quite different experiments.
A) Essentially two classes in the same room.
B) Teacher aides (i.e. uncertified, untrained & inexperienced college graduates) given some teaching responsibility in experienced teachers’ classrooms — and that responsibility varying.
C) New teachers (certified and with whatever training that implies), but without experience, co-teaching with experienced teachers in one classroom.
D) Pull in (of teachers) supplemental instruction.
E) Pull out (of students) supplemental instruction.*****************************
There’s a theory out that there charter schools can experiment, and the lessons from those experiments can then be applied in non-charter public schools. It is one of the strongest ideas about how a relatively small number charter schools can benefit all students.
Unfortunately, no one has found mechanisms for or examples of this knowledge transfer. And the political climate has created a situation where non-charter public schools are likely to be resistant to charter school ideas. (Both sides are responsible. Charter proponents for their claims that charters are better simply for being charters, combined with their demonization of teachers with union contracts, for example. I’ll leave it to other to explain how charter detractors are responsible, as well.)
Moreover, I have not seen a lot evidence that charter schools are approaching their work as experiments. Rather, for the most part what I have seen is claims that they have a better answer or a better way of doing things, even before they’ve got any results to examine.
I’m going to go to another Richard Rothstein idea: most experiments fail. We know this in every other field. The idea is that through enough experiments, we can find one that succeeds. But which charter schools proponents expect that most charter schools will fail?
So, in a certain way it is hard to call these experiments. They certainly are not controlled experiments, and they don’t make any attempt to go for that “gold standard” of randomized assignment into different treatment groups. Rather few invite in evaluators to document their actual practices and their actual results — be they quantitative or qualitative. All of this makes it hard to know which about these practices might be responsible for any success they have, let alone draw any generalizable conclusions.
A bit more broadly, I would say that the more similar a charter school is to non-charter schools the more applicable lessons from their efforts might be to non-charter schools. But recognition of those differences is hardly assured, and can even be a political issue (e.g. see Aaron/skoolboy’s recent posts on creaming).
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This should not be taken as blaming charter school founders, administration, employees or parents for failing to treat their schools likes experiments. All of the people are looking for a good alternative to their local public schools, for one reason or another. They are honest in that, and perfectly justified.
Moreover, charter schools are little different in this regard than non-charter public schools, who do not document practice well, or provide good conditions to gather any sort of data about what might be more or less effective.
However, it does present a problem to policy-makers and policy-proponents. Many of the reasons and justifications for charter schools have failed to materialize. These folks should all be more honest about why they want charter schools, or why they don’t. And they should acknowledge when their reasons don’t pan out.
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February 25th, 2009 3:03 pm
ceolaf, you make a lot of excellent points about charter schools and the “experiment” issue. Running a charter school is so difficult, one of the roadblocks is taking the time to cooperate with independent researchers. But I think you would be surprised at the (positive) response if there were a mechanism by which charter schools could be evaluated for what they do and how they do it - without putting undue stress on school operations.
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February 25th, 2009 3:25 pm
KitchenSink,
Do you mean that if it were easier for charter schools to work with evaluators many/most would be happy to do so?
If so, I agree with you that few are afraid of sharing their results with others. However, evaluation can be bit invasive, and requires the cooperation and time of those being evaluated. The challenge is whether that would constitute — to use your phrase — “undue stress on school operations.”
And then there’s the very serious challenge of who might pay for it.
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March 6th, 2009 11:59 am
For the Caroline Hoxby lottery in-lottery out study all but one charter school agreed to give direct access to its data, I believe. And that school expressed a distrust of the intermediary and wanted to share its data absent the intermediary. Many schools would want to work with a non intrusive researcher, and I think particularly the CMOs. In any event most of the data is public, and you may even be able to get the Hoxby data set which is a 5 year study. You could certainly contact the NYC Charter Center and see if they wanted to try to coordinate schools, CEI-PEA also has sever schools involved in its PICCS project which looks at teacher incentives and achievement as does New LEaders for New Schools in their Teachers incentive Fund grant.
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March 6th, 2009 1:16 pm
Dirk,
The issues that I have had with Hoxby’s work in the past is not how she analyzes the data, but rather what data she elects to use. In my view, she cherry picks the ones that work for her, and arbitrarily decides to exclude the that do not. (That is, they are removed because they might not give her the answers she wants, not because there is a predetermined and objective reason to do so systemically.) The real problem is that she is (was) so careful in including the the charter schools that fit her criteria, and was not as careful for the non-charter school data.
If you are comparing apples to oranges, you cannot pick through the apples an make sure you choose the unblemished ones, while simply grabbing the most convenient oranges.
I think that her past work has shown that she does not understand the importance of robust sampling as the foundation upon which statistical inferences are made. And this has led to to biased results. (Bias in the technical sense, that of a systemic impact on the results that is not caused by the underlying construct you are attempting to measure.)
Frankly, she has been dismissive of the work of those who are more careful about sampling, and shown no awareness that her selection criteria needs to be addressed as a limitation of her work.
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March 6th, 2009 1:23 pm
Here’s another truism: regardless of the ratio of teachers to students in a given classroom, for every classroom that used to house say 27-30 mainstream kids that now houses 22-25 alternative (or charter) school kids… that’s FIVE NET KIDS they’ve just displaced into OTHER mainstream schools.
Those five net kids do not simply vaporize — they ADD to one of the biggest problems we’re trying to mitigate: overcrowding. To date, no one has characterized the problem as “under-ratio-ing.”
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March 6th, 2009 1:31 pm
Appreciate the critique of her work, while I have not peered behind the numbers of the lottery in lottery out study, the data set is not really open to selection bias by the researcher (presumably). It tracks the seemingly random assignment of students who applied in charter school lotteries (some get in some dont) and then their prior demographics and ed statistics and looks at how the two groups compare (is the lottery balanced) and how they do in terms of subsequent achievement based on standardized test scores (effect on math and ELA scores). Presumably the data set is public info and it would be great to have different people working with it as it can provide some evidence of effect in a quasi experimental context that might be absent the real or perceived researcher bias
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March 6th, 2009 1:55 pm
Dirk,
Actually, there are still a lot of possible issues to address in these kinds of studies. Again, I have not read this one, so I cannot address how Hoxby dealt with them.
1) Do you include all kids who got in to the school, or do you just include the ones who stayed for the whole run? If the former, how do you treat kids who moved mid-year, as opposed to those who moved are a less disruptive period of the year?
2) When looking at the kids who did not get into the school, do you include kids who did not stay in a single school for the whole run? That is, they stayed in the district, but moved schools. (This is known to bias the results, as Aaron/Skoolboy as addressed.)
3) How do you account for kids who did not get into the schools, but did not end up going to the traditional district school? (i.e. went to private school, moved out of district before the first year started, etc.)
4) If you exclude kids from one side or the other — or both — how do you explain the generalizability of your results? If you don’t, how to you know you’re really capturing the impact of the “treatments” (i.e. charter or non-charter school)?
(Those are some quick ones, right of the top of my head when I should be working on a paper for a conference. There are plenty of others.)
The issue here is that we don’t have good ways to track individual students across districts. Heck, some districts don’t have good ways to track kids across schools, and some schools don’t have good ways to track individual students across grades. When I was growing up, I had a state student ID and a district student ID — I remember that I had to fill them in on standardized tests back in 1970’s and 1980s. But not all states and districts do that. And even if they did, there is no central database from which one can get all the data for a particular set of kids. You would have to contact each district to find it, quite hard to do if you don’t know where they went, and rather impossible if they went to private school.
So, the data is not really out there to top notch analysis. That means that the researcher/analyst has to make some judgement calls about what to do in response to those deficiencies. Every one of those judgement calls will either bias your results or hurt your generalizability — or both. But researchers generally are not as good about making these limitations prominent in their own write ups, and the various media out there even less so. (Hoxby and Peterson are especially bad at this, in my view.) Aaron/Skoolboy is quite good at pointing out these kinds of issues, and that one of the things I love about what he writes.
Let me try to be a bit more clear: this is NOT about researcher bias, per se. This is about bias in the data, in the technical sense. That is, systemic impacts on the data that do not come from what you are trying to measure. Accounting for those biases is part of the skill and art of research.
Of course researcher bias can impact how one deals with bias in the data or the analytical methods, but that is not what I am referring to here.
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March 6th, 2009 2:15 pm
Agreed on the out of district attrition skewing, but the Hoxby study tracks the students by individual identifiers anywhere they go in the public school system for 5 years, so if they attrit, that is tracked and their academic results are followed wherever they go. I really am not sure about the Private school issue, and presumably if they drop out altogether or move out of state they fall off the grid too. Not a perfect data set but a pretty good one in education, for providing evidence on a limited set of questions.
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March 6th, 2009 3:35 pm
Dirk,
I’m going to list the kinds of limitations I think might exist in this data set and explain how they would, in my opinion, bias the data.
1) Excluding lottery losers who got to private school. Bias in FAVOR of charter schools.
2) Include lottery losers that change school during the time period, but kids who left the charter schools — a really common problem with these analyses. Bias in FAVOR of the charter schools.
3) Including lottery losers who drop out of school but not those who drop out of charters. Bias in FAVOR of the charter schools.
4) Not include individual demographic information. UNKNOWN impact. (Note: these things do not automatically cancel out by the lottery winner-loser comparison. Rather, this approach ignores the potential differences to “luck” that year. (i.e are we sure that the lotteries are not fixed? who audits that? If they are fixed, then I would say that the bias in FAVOR of charter schools, as those getting in by fix have more social capital available to them.))
5) Including lottery winners and losers, but not other students. NO bias, but it really hurts generalizability to the wider student population.
(I’m sure that Aaron/Skoolboy could think of others. I am running out of steam as the weekend approaches.)
You believe that this is a good data set. I think that it is likely biased in favor of charter schools — that is the kind of problems that I have seen in the past with this particular researcher — and not generalizable to the larger population of kids (i.e. those who never applied for the lottery).
Now, you make an interesting point, that this is a pretty good data set for education. That might be true, though I’m not so sure. I would say, however, that if it showed that charter schools were not as good as traditional public schools, that would be a very strong finding for this population because the biases in the data go the other way. However, if it shows that charter schools are better than traditional public schools then it’s not so useful. If the finding might be do to the known biases in data, the finding is not credible.
What I am trying to say here is that the data is not inherently good or bad. Rather, it is the questions asked of the data that makes it particularly strong or not. That is, appropriate questions for the particular data set, or inappropriate questions for the data set.
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March 6th, 2009 4:26 pm
ceolaf,
Beyond the issues you raise - some of which are dealt with in the Hoxby study, some of which are not - the take home point is that charter school effects in NYC are quite small once you compare apples to apples. The NYC charter effect on math scores is .09 standard deviations, while the effect on reading scores is .04 standard deviations (for a year spent in a charter school). -
March 6th, 2009 4:31 pm
I dont want to belabor this but, the individual school level data showed that some charters had significant value add, some didnt have enough data to tell, and a few had a negative value add compared to the effect on achievement of kids who lotteried out. I guess I dont understand the bias issue. This study does not compare kids who never applied (and should not be used to say anything about that separate question). It basically says here are 200 kids who applied for 50 spots, and were randomly chosen by olttery, now lets look at the student achievement (as measured by math and ELA scors) and student characteristics of these 200 kids over the next 5 and hopefully 10 years. Assuming they were comparable when they applied (which is measured based on prior student achievement and student demogrpahics) then the resulting relative achievement gains should tell us something about the effect of the school relative to achievement at teh other schools where kids went. Wherever they go, as long as the public records system can track them, their data is included, whetehr they got in the lottery, did not, or susbsequently left that for another school. There may well be issues in the interpretation of the data, but what is a more experimental design approach that could be ethically imposed that is better?
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March 6th, 2009 5:18 pm
Dirk,
A couple of things.
1) The lottery winners-losers analysis only works — to the extent that it works at all — if the lottery is in no way fixed. That is, if there is no way for anyone on the inside to ensure that a particular kids gets in. If the lotteries are not public and/or audited, this assumption might not hold true.
2) Hoxby is not interested in evaluating individual schools, and that’s not really the point here. No one is questioning whether or not there are some great charter schools out there. Everyone knows that there are. The question that these kinds of studies aim to look at is whether charter schools generally are better than non-charters. Does the average charter school produce better outcomes than the average traditional school?
The big argument for charter schools is that the traditional public schools do not produce the kind of educational outcomes we want — and that the source of the problem is that they are part of the old mess that is the old school district. The idea is by opening schools that are not part of the district that they can produce better outcomes. The question of whether we should continue this charter school thing, expand it, narrow it, otherwise modify it or shut it down is tied to whether or not charters schools are generally better than traditional public schools.
Hoxby wants to show that they are better, so we should have more charter schools. I want to slow down (stop?) the opening of charter schools until we see really strong evidence that they are better, on average, than traditional public schools.
Why does “on average” matter? Well, we expect the next charter school to be about average for a charter school. Some will be better, some will be worse, and it will average out to average. If the next charter school is more likely to be worse than the average traditional public school, then we should open it. That would be making a bad bet. But if the average charter school is better than the average traditional public school, well that’s a good bet.
(Actually, what should be compared is another question. Some would argue that they should be compared to the really bad public schools that might be closed. Others would argue that it should be to new public schools. And still others would argue something else.)
This is a policy question. Hoxby wants to influence policy in a certain direction, and (tends to) uses data that will enable her to do that.
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March 7th, 2009 7:44 am
CEOlaf, I don’t think the point is to show that charters are better, but to show that some charters are better. Many people do, in fact, deny that there are some good charter schools; or rather, they assert that the results of the good charters are due to serving a different population. This study showed that the good charters actually push their kids to achieve better results than the district does with the same kids. That’s significant inasmuch as it has been denied by the anti-charter crowd.
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March 7th, 2009 4:04 pm
Personally, I have no problem with charter schools as long as they seek out and build and pay for their own space, pay for their staff and equipment and furniture and software and testing systems with their own money. Leave public money alone and leave it strictly for public schooling. If Gates and Broad and Bloomberg and the Daily News want it this way, that’s okay. Don’t touch our money, use yours. Now, that’s philanthropy!
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March 7th, 2009 7:17 pm
Pogue,
Charter schools ARE public schools. They are publicly funded and are regulated in ways that private schools are not. Their employees are public employees. They are not subject to local district regulation, but they are subject to whatever federal or state regulations exist, unless there are specific exclusions for one reason or another.
So, whether or not you think that charter schools should get money that otherwise would go to traditional public schools, they ARE public schools.
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March 7th, 2009 7:27 pm
Socrates,
When people — like me, for example — challenge whether charter schools are better than traditional public schools, or say that charter schools are as successful as they are because of different student bodies, we are not saying that there are not good charter schools or that no charter schools are better than any traditional public schools.
We don’t question that there is variation among traditional public schools or that there is similar variation among charter schools.
I might write or say something like, “There is no good or rigorous evidence that charter schools are any better than traditional public schools.” I can cop to that. But I am NOT saying that there are no charter schools or that all charter suck or that all charter schools would be beaten by a regular public school if given the same student body. Rather, I am saying that when we look at charter schools generally, and we control for various differences. we do not find that charter schools are better.
Can you point me to someone who said that no charter schools are better than any traditional public schools? I’ve never seen that before.
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