Does MORE FUNDING = Better Schools?

[phank]

Assuming we have sensible metrics for school performance, it would be interesting to see the results of a comprehensive factor analysis, to see how various factors group together, and what the correlations are. We might consider expenditure per pupil, size of class, experience of teacher, education of parents, income of parents, ethnic group, rural/suburban/urban setting, participation in sports or other extracurricular activity, and so on and on and on.

Based on cost per pupil alone, I doubt we'd see much correlation with performance metrics. There are good schools both well funded and underfunded, and bad schools in both categories as well.

Tenure doesn't make any sense to me at the K-12 level - it presumably exists to protect research at the state of the art, mainly postgraduate college level and beyond.

[Darth Executor]

Ok, I had some of the details wrong, but here is the story: http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/1...opian-kids.php

"Some of the details" is an understatement, they put a specialized education program on the tablets. Still, it's an excellent argument for the abolition of teachers.

[Cow Poke]

Something I did not expect to see...
http://www.udel.edu/johnmack/researc...ol_funding.pdf

Source: Public School Funding and Performance

Conclusions
This analysis is entirely based on highly aggregate
state-level data, and necessarily overlooks
all the details of individual states’ tax policies,
school funding mechanisms, etc. It also omits all
the broader socioeconomic factors that certainly af
fect NAEP performances and real estate
values. But even this simple, coarse state-level a
nalysis yields some clear findings.
First, America’s public school systems are frequent
ly criticized as wasteful and inefficient, and
the high average SAT scores of some low-spending st
ates are commonly cited as evidence that
public schools cannot be improved with more funding
. But states’ average SAT scores are
largely driven by their participation rates, and co
rrecting for participation, high-spending states
do outscore low-spending states. States with high
per-pupil spending generally outscore states
with low per-pupil spending on the NAEP as well.
Second, how states fund public education makes a di
fference. When funding is decomposed into
federal, state, local property tax and other local
(e.g., county) components, the dominant driver of
NAEP performance is shown to be local funding. Thi
s finding supports the contention that local
funding goes hand in hand with local accountability
: communities that own and control their own
schools tend to demand higher performance from them
, and are likely to be more supportive of
them in turn. Public school systems that are prima
rily dependent on state funding generally have
lower average NAEP performances.
Third, school system quality, indexed by NAEP perfo
rmance, is correlated with higher property
values generally; therefore all residents in a comm
unity benefit from strong schools. The direct
positive correlation between school taxes and prope
rty values is also proved. This positive
correlation between local tax per housing unit and
property values suggests that most of America
is under-investing in public education.

© Copyright Original Source

Sorry for the poor copy/paste, but it was a PDF.

Bottom line --- what interested me was that part of the conclusion says, in effect, when the funding comes from local sources, the performance is higher than when funding comes from "state" sources.

It makes sense, because local money means local accountability.

[seasanctuary]

Yeah, I don't think it's so much "driving away good teachers" as it is the teacher's union preventing the school district from getting rid of the bad apples. So, that's actually a good point --- FIRE the bad teachers, and hire those who are willing to do the job!

From what I hear from teachers, they're not trying to protect the job security of negligent teachers. They're worried that performance metrics will punish good teachers who take on the more challenging students, farther polarizing the quality of education.

[Cow Poke]

From what I hear from teachers, they're not trying to protect the job security of negligent teachers.

Not sure who "they" is ... you mean the unions, or the teachers themselves?

The fact is that the unions protect some pretty vile individuals AS WELL as teachers who are mistreated.... it would be WAY easier if the unions had some APPEARANCE of propriety.

[Jedidiah]

On a more serious note, organized complaints about teacher pay are generally motivated and inspired by creationists looking for a way to remove evolution from public schools, . . .

I think this is a load of crap. Most objections to teachers pay are specifically related to poor results.

[Cow Poke]

I think this is a load of crap. Most objections to teachers pay are specifically related to poor results.

Yeah. And teachers who manage to "get through to" their students should be rewarded, and those who fail, not so much! But the union model doesn't support that at all.

[Carrikature]

Yeah. And teachers who manage to "get through to" their students should be rewarded, and those who fail, not so much! But the union model doesn't support that at all.

Ehh, that concept is nice but ultimately fails. There's no way to sort out the teacher from the student when it comes to poor performance. How do you prove who is at fault? What if no one is at fault and teaching/learning styles simply do not match?

[Truthseeker]

Success depends on the willingness to learn. It even depends on self-education. Perhaps the teacher's job should be to motivate people

[Cow Poke]

Ehh, that concept is nice but ultimately fails. There's no way to sort out the teacher from the student when it comes to poor performance. How do you prove who is at fault? What if no one is at fault and teaching/learning styles simply do not match?

Sometimes it's incredibly obvious, so you start with those. If you can't even fire somebody who is a sex offender, what hope is there of firing a poor teacher?

[CMD]

There's no way to sort out the teacher from the student when it comes to poor performance.

Sure there is. I had a math teacher in 7th grade who's idea of "teaching" was to first have each kid read one of their answers from the previous days work. As soon as he got to someone who had a wrong answer, he'd embarrass them in front of the class. "That's wrong, tell me the correct answer!" If you attempted to grab a pencil and write the problem down, he'd yell at you. "Don't write it down, just tell me the answer!" Then he'd write the answer out on the board while making it sound like it was a really easy problem and the kid was dumb for getting it wrong. Then when that was over, he'd very quickly go over the next lesson and if you didn't understand, oh well; don't ask him to help.

Several of my other teachers were similar; here's the lesson, if you don't understand, read the book. If you have questions about what's in the book or need any kind of additional help, go screw yourself.

It was a failing school and there was no question who was at fault.

[Epoetker]

organized complaints about teacher pay are generally motivated and inspired by creationists looking for a way to remove evolution from public schools, with methods spanning the gamut from shutting down the public schools in favor of less regulated private schools to demonizing public school teachers directly.

No. Not really. You can't back that up. It's a stupid psychological tic concerning an almost entirely manufactured enemy whose threat has been blown way out of proportion, and seriously claiming that DARK CREATIONIST FORCES are behind complaints about teacher pay is the surest way to drop to zero in anyone's estimation of your judgment.

That said, if you want to know a thing or two about the state of teaching as a profession, why not get it from a guy who used to work for a startup before going into teaching and clearly knows what he's talking about?

Meanwhile, despite this big boost in teacher “academic competency”, which I’ve been writing about for two years, we aren’t seeing a corresponding huge boost in student academic outcomes, and all research continues to show that, at best, the link between teacher cognitive ability and student outcomes is twitchy and unreliable. All research continues to play the Reverse Drinking Game and ignore student cognitive ability. Math professors assure us that the only difference between “math people” and everyone else is effort, and that anyone with an IQ of 70 can learn algebra.

So, here’s what I think, but can’t prove: our teachers are pulled roughly from the same pool as always, which is the 35-50% for elementary and special ed teachers, and 50-75% for secondary content teachers. But the bottom quintile or so is gone because of higher licensure standards, so the average has increased. This has resulted in far fewer black and Hispanic teachers, particularly black teachers. Existing black teachers are also being forced out of the profession by new requirements (hence the Mumford impersonation fraud ring).

Remember, anyone who pushes for improved teacher qualifications is saying, in effect, we need fewer black and Hispanic teachers.

Remember, the reason I so particularly and repeatedly harp on race is because being willfully stupid about it ensures being willfully stupid about every other thing its connected to in varying extents.

[Juvenal]

No, I apologize, Jesse. I was truly amazed that you saw "pedophilia" as even an "important" part of this story. Not only was I quoting (paraphrasing) the administrator, I wasn't even adding my own opinion on that.

I overreacted to your post, plain and simple. And if the apology is still there, I accept it.

Well said, CP, and thanks for the PM letting me know about this post. Now let me ask you to re-read the KABC story and watch the video, with an eye and ear out for any mention of sex offenders. Not there, right? The closest you'll actually find is "grossly inefficient."

From over here, the "convicted sex offenders" snippet came from out of nowhere, which is why I found it remarkable. I'm not sure where you got that from, but it wasn't from KABC, which makes me think the KABC story was mentioned elsewhere by a source you're not naming.

And considering what you pulled from this Q source, I'm guessing unnamed should have been married to unread, or at least placed into some kind of civil union.

As ever, Jesse

[Carrikature]

Sure there is. I had a math teacher in 7th grade who's idea of "teaching" was to first have each kid read one of their answers from the previous days work. As soon as he got to someone who had a wrong answer, he'd embarrass them in front of the class. "That's wrong, tell me the correct answer!" If you attempted to grab a pencil and write the problem down, he'd yell at you. "Don't write it down, just tell me the answer!" Then he'd write the answer out on the board while making it sound like it was a really easy problem and the kid was dumb for getting it wrong. Then when that was over, he'd very quickly go over the next lesson and if you didn't understand, oh well; don't ask him to help.

Several of my other teachers were similar; here's the lesson, if you don't understand, read the book. If you have questions about what's in the book or need any kind of additional help, go screw yourself.

It was a failing school and there was no question who was at fault.

And that works exactly how? There are usually observations done by the principal or asst. principals, but those are (generally) scheduled in advance. What metric do you use to determine bad teaching? Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware that such exist. The problem is in sorting them out. Even those who are bad teachers to 90% of students can (and do) still make positive impacts on a few students. Some of the teachers I considered the most useless were absolutely adored by other students. I couldn't learn under the teacher, but they could.

This is a different level than on which I was speaking, though. Sure, we could propose random observations of all teachers to check for efficacy, but that also assumes that the observers have the knowledge to know the difference. They don't always, especially since the amount of teaching experience required to become principals isn't always very high. To add to that, how do you discern 'bad teaching' from 'wildly different teaching styles'? The two aren't synonymous.

We tend to use testing scores, but that's not a good indicator either. A teacher who leaves it all on the students could still end up with a sufficient pass rate to be considered acceptable, even if the teaching quality itself is horrible. An excellent teacher with horrible students can end up with an extremely low pass rate. Part of the issue with the current setup is that school funding is tied directly to student performance. The teachers are pushed to teach to the test, ultimately defeating any ability to test general knowledge.

College classes have implemented a survey system wherein the students can report on the professor and give feedback. You could try something similar with K-12 education, but it would have to be sorted through with someone who knows that they're doing. Kids are vindictive, and they can easily mistake 'hard' with 'bad'. Unless the students are citing specific examples (which I'd expect to be rare), it would remain difficult to distinguish "I don't like you" from "you're not any good".

At the end of the day, you've pulled out an anecdotal case study from who knows how long ago. You can't establish any sort of policy based on that. Nobody is disputing that bad teachers exist. The trick is in sorting them out (something you didn't even address).

[Cow Poke]

Well said, CP, and thanks for the PM letting me know about this post. Now let me ask you to re-read the KABC story and watch the video, with an eye and ear out for any mention of sex offenders. Not there, right? The closest you'll actually find is "grossly inefficient."

Jesse, I was watching ABC TV live, and saw this story. I looked for something to quote that was specific to that situation. The superintendent of schools, in the actual ABC coverage I watched, did, indeed, use the example of not even being allowed to fire convicted sex offenders without incredibly expensive litigation. I'll try to find something on that, meanwhile, you'd have to believe I flat out lied.

From over here, the "convicted sex offenders" snippet came from out of nowhere, which is why I found it remarkable.

Understandable - my bad.

I'm not sure where you got that from, but it wasn't from KABC, which makes me think the KABC story was mentioned elsewhere by a source you're not naming.

I saw an actual interview on live TV, and did some digging.

And considering what you pulled from this Q source, I'm guessing unnamed should have been married to unread, or at least placed into some kind of civil union.

As ever, Jesse

I confess you often make comments that are totally lost on me -- this is one.