Politicians Pretend
The heart of Nevada’s public-school problem
By Steven
Miller
BusinessNevada
If Nevada’s teacher
union ran an NFL franchise for the Silver State,
coaches wouldn’t be allowed to evaluate running-back prospects
by looking at their rushing stats.
Moreover, if pure chance nevertheless provided some faster, sharper, more talented
players, who showed real
ability on the field, those stars, by union rule, couldn’t be
paid more than any unmotivated mediocrities. Instead, all team
players—stars and doofuses alike—would have to be paid by
seniority.
Given the pathetic roster that would result, pretty soon even
many of the talented few would depart. Aghast at the
institutionalized indifference to excellence, their
self-respect and aspirations would take them elsewhere.
When the team remnants ended their first season with the
lowest rating in the entire nation—amazingly parallel to
Nevada’s K-12 government schools—the teacher union would
publicly “explain” that the franchise’s real problem was
selfish Nevada taxpayers who refused to compensate players at
“the National Average.” Whereupon Dina Titus, Barbara Buckley
and Kenny Guinn would all rush to propose various
taxpayer-bleeding schemes that studiously evaded the real
structural problems.
These musings arise after learning how the Nevada Legislature
knowingly sabotaged its own self-proclaimed educational
“accountability” legislation in 2003. Needed to qualify for
federal dollars under No Child Left Behind legislation, Senate
Bill 1 of the 19th Special Session had been in the works for
over two years. Nevertheless, because of the demands of a
flock of teacher-union lobbyists, the legislation at the last
minute was crippled to nullify its single most important
accountability provision.
Throughout all its incarnations, SB 1 required what was called
“an automated system of accountability information for Nevada”
to allow the classroom achievement of individual pupils to be
tracked over time as they went from teacher to teacher.
Such data is incredibly important. As the education chair of
the Carnegie Corporation of New York recently explained,
widely replicated research has shown “the single most important factor in
determining student performance is the quality of the teacher”—which
varies enormously. And what allows school systems to identify
the really good—or bad—teachers is the year-to-year records on
individual student learning.
Speaking to the Education Commission of the States two years
ago, Daniel Fallon explained how what has come to be called
“value-added assessment” has triggered a massive paradigm
shift in education-related social science. Researchers at the
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, once given access to
thousands of state records linking students, teachers and
schools, discovered that what has been called the “teacher
effect” was not only real, but massive.
“[William]
Sanders and [June] Rivers,” reported Fallon, “discovered that
students matched in performance on assessments at the
beginning of the third grade were separated by more than 50
percentile points in comparable assessments by the end of the
fifth grade, as a direct result of the quality of the teaching
they received in the intervening years.
“Their results showed that … the effects of good
teaching are profound and appear to be cumulative.”
The value-added assessment research also
demolishes one of the major excuses always trotted out by
apologists for public school failure. Because the method
compares a student’s performance at one time with the same
student’s performance earlier, “the student serves as that
student’s own ‘baseline’ or control, [and] the experimental
design removes virtually all of the influence of genetic or
socio-economic factors.”
Regardless of the kinds of students assigned to them, found Sanders, some teachers
consistently produced large gains in student achievement,
while others did not. The research also documented that
“African-American children were significantly more likely to
be assigned to ineffective teachers than white children were.
But when poor children, or African-American children,
encountered effective teachers, their academic performance
showed extraordinary increases.”
Fallon noted that “These findings have since
been widely replicated in a variety of different settings with
several different kinds of experimental designs and
techniques.” The late Harvard economist John Kain, for
example, analyzing data in Texas, showed that the gain in
student achievement scores arising from “teacher quality is
20 times greater than that from any other variable,
including class size and socioeconomic status.”
Thus, anyone at all serious about improving
Nevada public schools will demand that value-added assessment
data be applied to rewarding teaching stars and weeding out
teacher deadheads.
Yet, state lawmakers and our “education”
governor jettisoned this critically important tool in 2003
when faced by teacher union grousing. Nor did they rectify the
error in 2005.
The conclusion is unavoidable: Despite all their
blather about Nevada education, these people are, finally,
unserious.
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Steven Miller is editor of BusinessNevada and policy director
for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
