Billions down the drain

There was some freaking out dressed up as fact-checking over President Trump's inaugural reference to billions of dollars dumped into failing schools for no benefit to students.  No need to take his word for it; here's the outgoing administration's analysis of the very expensive "School Improvement Grant" program.  A direct quote from the Executive Summary:
Overall, across all grades, we found that implementing any SIG-funded model had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.
* * *
The SIG program aimed to support the implementation of school intervention models in low-performing schools. Although SIG was first authorized in 2001, this evaluation focused on SIG awards granted in 2010, when roughly $3.5 billion in SIG awards were made to 50 states and the District of Columbia, $3 billion of which came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. States identified the low-performing schools eligible for SIG based on criteria specified by ED and then held competitions for local education agencies seeking funding to help turn around eligible schools.
No doubt the Keynesian spending stimulus was crackerjack, but funneling resources to the schools that are failing the most egregiously, while merciful to the struggling schools, doesn't seem to be very merciful to the kids trapped there. Maybe rewarding failure gets you more failure.  It's interesting that the money ostensibly was spent on a variety of techniques associated with change and reform.  Something tells me they were reforming the wrong things.

There's a lot of gobbledegook about "comprehensive instructional reform strategies, teacher and principal effectiveness, and operational flexibility and support," but it's not obvious to me what really changed in the schools that got the money.
One goal of SIG is to promote the use of instructional practices that have the potential to increase academic rigor and student achievement. The SIG application criteria focused on practices to reform instruction in seven subtopics: (1) Using Data to Identify and Implement an Instructional Program; (2) Promoting the Continuous Use of Data to Identify and Address the Needs of Individual Students; (3) Conducting Periodic Reviews of the Curriculum; (4) Implementing a New School Model; (5) Providing Supports and Professional Development (PD) to Staff to Assist Both English language learners (ELLs) and Students with Disabilities; (6) Using and Integrating Technology-Based Supports; and (7) Tailoring Strategies for Secondary Schools. We collected data on five of these subtopics through school survey questions that asked about eight practices aligned with SIG objectives in these areas (Table IV.1). Because none of the questions from the school surveys aligned with the third or fourth subtopic, we excluded these subtopics from the analysis.
What I'd love to see is a study of contrasting schools with differing percentages of graduates of teaching colleges versus practically any other background, and taking into account the school's freedom to remove incurably disruptive students from the classroom or even from the school. I'm afraid many of these radical "turnaround" and "transformation" models were only pushing the food around on the plate.

7 comments:

Grim said...

I'd like to see an evaluation of the knowledge bases of those with education degrees versus those who majored in the subject they teach. Pedagogy is important, but you can only teach what you know.

ColoComment said...

Arnold Kling had a post on that yesterday. As one commenter noted from the article: "The Education Department did not track how the money was spent, other than to note which of the four strategies schools chose.”

So, what can anyone learn from a study that fails to identify how those strategies were implemented? They could have picked a "strategy" and flushed the money down the toilet for all the useful information anyone can derive from how this was done.

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/null-hypothesis-watch-6/#comments

raven said...

The students have to want to learn. This is innate in young children, but somehow the system and culture, seems to grind it out of them.
"give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man".
The ghetto thug culture is absolutely to blame for a lot of this.

What a unique chance we lost. It is enough to make one cry.





Anonymous said...

A family member double majored in history and education. The Education Department at that college penalized the three dual-degree students by making them take extra examinations and certification tests. Having a field as well as an ed degree was strongly frowned upon. And I regret to say that the least prepared and least competent grad student I encountered was a sweet lady working on a Masters of Ed in curriculum development. She could not write a coherent book review or historical synopsis, and didn't know how to skim a book for the thesis. She couldn't even write a coherent paragraph. I felt seriously sorry for her, because the undergrad poli-sci student taking the grad course did better than she did.

Any respect I had for Big State U's Department of Education disappeared that semester.

LittleRed1

douglas said...

Sounds like funding for lots of seminars so the teachers could be out of the classroom for a day here and there, and to employ more subs. Nothing really of value to the students. shocker.

Tom said...

I'd like to see an evaluation of the knowledge bases of those with education degrees versus those who majored in the subject they teach.

Yeah, I think we all know what the result of that would be.

Pedagogy is important, but you can only teach what you know.

Interestingly enough, today's view toward teaching reminds me of some stuff in Plato. Didn't Plato believe we knew everything already but had forgotten? So learning is really remembering. And now we have "student-centered learning" where the kids teach each other everything they "recollect" from some Platonic plane. /sarcasm

To be fair, the older students get, the more "student-centered learning" is useful (it becomes project-based learning), but it's being applied far too broadly, and I really think it becomes a substitute for what to do when the teacher doesn't know anything.

The students have to want to learn. This is innate in young children, but somehow the system and culture, seems to grind it out of them.

Yep, and most teachers naturally want to teach, but that too is ground out of them, if they stay.

LittleRed1, I'm sorry to say that I think that is probably typical of most departments of education. I've seen Harvard Ed.D.s complain that their degrees aren't taken seriously.

Note the ELL part of the grant. In some rural areas the majority of students do not speak English. We haven't even started talking about this as a nation, because it would be racist.

And the bit about technology. Our kids aren't literate, but they can use tablets to find stuff they're interested in, so it's all good.

Gringo said...

No need to take his word for it; here's the outgoing administration's analysis of the very expensive "School Improvement Grant" program. A direct quote from the Executive Summary:Overall, across all grades, we found that implementing any SIG-funded model had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.

I am reminded of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Barack Obama chaired back in the 1990s. Obama was in charge of doling out grant money focused on school improvement. Bill Ayers, that exemplary example of Ed School professors, got him the job.

Cato Institute: The Wreck of the Annenberg.
Thanks to Bill Ayers, a great many people now know that Barack Obama chaired the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 1999. Ayers, erstwhile member of the 60s’ terrorist group, the Weather Underground, was the driving force in bringing Annenberg’s millions of education reform dollars to Chicago, and he worked with Obama once the project was up and running.

It was inevitable that political hay would be made from this link, but in the process a more fundamental insight has been overlooked: The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a total failure. And to this day, Senator Obama remains committed to its failed approach.

But instead of being in a position to waste tens of millions of private dollars, as he was then, Obama is now asking voters for the power to waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Before granting him that power, Americans should understand what went wrong....


It failed not just in Chicago, but around the country. The first problem was that many of the “model” schools and districts lacked results worthy of replication. The final report of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for instance, noted that, overall, students in its model schools had learned no more than students in regular public schools. Classroom behavior and other non-academic measures “were weaker in 2001 than before the Challenge.” And even the schools that did show meaningful improvement couldn’t be consistently replicated within the Challenge districts themselves, let alone around the nation.


Surprise, surprise. Failure in Annenberg Challenge, which Obama chaired. Failure in the Obama Administration's SIG grants.