Why the ‘market theory’ of education reform doesn’t work

Modern education reform is being driven by people who believe that competition, privatization and other elements of a market economy will improve public schools. In this post, Mark Tucker, president of the non-profit National Center on Education and the Economy and an internationally known expert on reform, explains why this approach is actually harming rather than helping schools.

Years ago, Milton Friedman and others opined that the best possible education reform would be one based on good old market theory. Public education, the analysis went, was a government monopoly, and, teachers and school administrators, freed from the discipline of the market, as in all government monopolies, had no incentive to control costs or deliver high quality. That left them free to feather their own nest. Obviously, the solution was to subject public education to the rigors of the market. Put the money the public collected for the schools into the hands of the parents. Let them choose the best schools for their children. Given a genuine choice among schools, parents would have a strong incentive to choose the ones that were able to produce the highest achievement at the lowest possible cost, driving achievement up and costs down.

At first, there was little appetite among the public for this approach. But, in time, many people, both Republicans and Democrats, seeing the cost of public education steadily rise with no corresponding improvement in student performance, began to blame the school bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions. They saw charter schools as a way to get away from both. All of these people, both those driven by ideology in the form of market theory and those driven by anger at the “educrats” and the teachers unions, found that they could agree on charter schools. A coalition of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Wall Street investors put their money behind the cause and the die was cast. The U.S. Department of Education then jumped in with both feet. Choice and markets, in the form of the charter movement, began to drive the American education reform agenda in a big way.

The theory is neat as pin and as American as apple pie. But what if it is not true? What if it does not predict what actually happens when it is put into practice?

For the theory to work, parents would have to make their decisions largely on the basis of information about student performance at the schools from which they can choose. But it turns out that they don’t do that. American parents seem to care most about their children’s safety. Wouldn’t you? Then they prefer a school that is close to home. At the secondary school level, many appear to care a lot more about which schools have the most successful competitive sports programs, rather than which of them produce the most successful scholars. How many trophies in the lobby of the entrances to our schools are for academic contests? If the theory was working the way it is supposed to, you would expect that the first schools to be in trouble would be the worst schools, the ones with the worst academic performance. But any school superintendent will tell you that the most difficult task a superintendent faces is shutting down a school — any school — even if its academic performance is in the basement. How could this be? Does it mean that parents don’t care at all about academic performance? I don’t think so.

But it does mean that, if they have met teachers at that school that seem to really care about their children, take a personal interest in them and seem to be decent people, they are likely to place more value on those things than on district league tables of academic performance based on standardized tests of basic skills, especially if they perceive that school to be safe and it is close to home.

The theory doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in theory (because most parents don’t place academic performance at the top of their list of things they are looking for in a school) and it doesn’t work in practice, either. How do we know that? Because, when we look at large-scale studies of the academic performance of charter schools versus regular public schools, taking into account the background of the students served, the results come out within a few points of each other, conferring a decisive advantage on neither. It is certainly true that some charter schools greatly outperform the average regular public school, but it is also true that some regular public schools greatly outperform the average charter school.

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Experience Counts

Among the more bizarre trends in education reform debate has been the emergence of an argument that experience doesn’t really matter. The problem appears to be that some researchers have not found ways to measure the importance of experience very effectively, and so, cheered on by cost-cutting and union-bashing allies, they tell us that after the first few years, teacher experience doesn’t matter. They have the test scores to prove it, they say.

I’m not here to argue the opposite. I’ve seen new teachers who have a skill set that rivals some of their veteran colleagues. However, I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t believe they could still improve. After all, we’re in the learning business. With experience comes not only time to learn more content and more pedagogy, but also to learn more about children, psychology and brain neurology, about working effectively with peers, administrators, and the community.

Think of other professions, and let me know if you know of any where experience isn’t valued. If education research isn’t showing the value of experience, then I think we should be asking questions like, “What’s wrong with their research methods? What’s wrong with the measures they’ve chosen? What’s wrong with schools and education systems that they can’t put experience to better use?”

This morning, I heard an interesting story about the oil industry, and the experience gap that is emerging among its engineers and other workers. To my untrained eye, this seems like an industry where experience wouldn’t matter. You’re dealing with physics, chemistry, machinery, manual labor – does the oil rig know or care how old or how experienced the workers are? Is there any chance that the properties of oil are unpredictable? If you can build, repair, or operate machinery in another industry, is the oil industry machinery so different?

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As teacher merit pay spreads, one noted voice cries, ‘It doesn’t work’

Merit pay for teachers, an idea kicked around for decades, is suddenly gaining traction.

Fervently promoted by Michelle A. Rhee when she was chancellor of the District’s public schools, the concept is picking up steam from a growing cadre of politicians who think one way to improve the country’s troubled schools is to give fat bonuses to good teachers.

The Obama administration has encouraged states to embrace merit pay, highlighting it as one step that states could take to compete for more than $4 billion in federal funds through the Race to the Top program. Indiana and Florida passed legislation that requires merit pay for teachers; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) announced a few weeks ago that he wants the same.

The most recent convert: New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I). “This is an idea whose time has come,” Bloomberg declared at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting last month. “I’m confident that if the teachers are allowed to decide the matter for themselves, they’ll support it in New York City just the way they did here in Washington, D.C.”

What if they’re all wrong?

Meet Daniel Pink, author of the 2009 bestseller “Drive.” He’s a former White House speechwriter, a student of social science, a highly sought-after lecturer and an influential voice when it comes to what motivates Americans in the workplace.

What does he think of merit pay for teachers?

“It doesn’t work.”

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This Daniel Pink TED talk from 2009 has more than 1,000,000 views on YouTube.com. In it, Pink discusses how traditional incentives aren't effective in the modern workplace.

Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts

Consider this scenario. You have a serious illness. Your doctor prescribes an intrusive, painful, and expensive treatment— and you have to pay for it. What she doesn’t tell you—because she has not consulted the research – is that most studies show the treatment is ineffective and fraught with negative side-effects. You go through the procedure, suffer severe pain, and spend a lot of money. Unfortunately, as with most patients, the procedure proves ineffective. You later uncover the research your doctor failed to consult. When you ask why she didn’t use this evidence, she answers, “Who pays attention to studies? I have years of clinical experience. Besides, the protocol seemed like it ought to work.”

Does that sound like malpractice? It does to us. Fortunately, pressures to practice evidence-based medicine are reducing preventable errors. Not so in most of our workplaces, where failure to consider sound evidence repeatedly inflicts unnecessary damage on employee well-being and organizational performance. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

No workplace practice is as important—and apparently vexing—as pay. Many people believe that pay for-performance will work in virtually any organization, so it is implemented again and again to solve performance problems -- even in settings where evidence shows it is ineffective. Consider the recent decision to end New York City’s teacher bonus program after wasting three years and 56 million dollars. As this newspaper reported in July, a Rand Corporation study found this effort to link incentive pay to student performance “had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.” This bad news could have been predicted before squandering all that time and money.The failure of such programs to boost student performance has been documented for decades. A careful review of pay for performance in schools in the 1980s showed these programs rarely lasted more than five years and consistently failed to improve student performance. The 300 page Rand report emphasizes that (although exceptions exist) evidence against the efficacy of teacher incentive pay in U.S. schools continues to grow stronger and is especially evident in the most rigorous studies.

This practice doesn’t just waste money. As Chicago economist Steve Levitt and others show, strong incentive programs can entice – or scare -- teachers and administrators to “cheat” on the tests, either by providing students with questions and answers in advance or changing student’s answer sheets to increase apparent performance. Recent well-publicized cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and elsewhere could have been foreseen by anyone who read and heeded this research. Building a culture of cheating in schools corrupts both students and teachers for no good purpose.

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