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The Economist - Education in 2010

Michelle Rhee

Transcript

December 7, 2009

Michelle Rhee

Good Morning. I dont love to spend time outside of the school district talking to large groups of people,but this one I was particularly interested in because people said it was

e Economist

and I was going to be talking to alot of economists and I think economists have an incredibly insight into public education that we need to tap into more.Right now, in particular, I believe in this time of significant financial crisis in this country with all of the talk aboutstimulus packages and bailouts and that sort of thing, whats missing in the conversation is the need to focus on schoolsbecause I believe that in the long term we are never going to regain our positioning in the global marketplace until wefix the problems of public education in our country. If you look at any of the statistics, at 2006, the last piece of results,are an indication of this; were 23

amongst all the OECD nations in terms of our mathematics achievement which waswell below the OECD average. In science, we were 17

; again, below the average.And if you look at those statistics and what our trajectory has looked like over the past few decades, you can onlydetermine from that that we have not solved our problems, that we are only further falling behind the rest of the globein terms of the quality of education that we are providing to our young people. So the question that a lot of people askis -- What do we do? How do we fix this?And I can tell you definitely one thing that is not the answer, which is Lets throw more money at the problem. And thereason is because here in the Washington, DC public schools, we spend more money per child than almost any jurisdiction, urban jurisdiction in the country. And our results are at the absolute bottom.So when I took control of the school district in 2007 because the mayor got mayoral control, I inherited a district wherewe had a 70 percentage point achievement gap between our white students and our black students. 70 percentagepoints. Of all of the 9

graders that began high school with us, only 9% of them would end up graduating from collegewithin 5 years. We had a circumstance where we were the only school district in the country that was on high risk statuswith the US Department of Education. And of all of the 8

graders in the district, according to the NAEP exam which isthe National Assessment of Education Progress, of all the 8

graders in the system, only 8% of them were on grade levelin mathematics, which means that 92% of our young people did not have the skills and knowledge necessary to beproductive members of society.And probably the most disheartening data that we have recently looked at in the system is about our little ones andbasically what that shows is that our children, when they come into the system, they come in relatively on par with kidswho look like them from other urban jurisdictions, so not with their suburban counterparts. We already know that bythe time we get them in kindergarten, theyre far behind their counterparts out in Fairfax County, Montgomery County,etc. But theyre on par with kids that look like them in Philadelphia, in Los Angeles, in Memphis, places like that acrossthe country. The problem is that the longer they stay in our district, the worse off they are. By the time theyre in theirthird grade, theyre far below their urban counterparts. And this is an interesting statistic - the poor black fourth gradersin NYC are operating two full grade levels ahead of the poor black fourth graders in Washington DC. So for everyonewho wants to blame the low achievement levels of the children in DC on poverty, on home environment, on the lack of healthcare, on all those things, the last time I checked, the poverty in Harlem did not look all that different from thepoverty in Anacostia, but those children are operating two full grade levels ahead of ours. So clearly, money is not theanswer.We can throw a lot of money into the school district, which we have here in DC, and those are the outcomes weveproduced. So, if money isnt the answer, the question is  What is? And my proposition has been that we need toradically alter the quality of human capital in the district and so this is what Im going to leave you with. Eric Hanushek,who is an economist, is about to come out with a study that will show that if you were to take the bottom 6-10% of ineffective teachers in this country and replace them with average teachers, so youre taking the worse 6-10% and

youre replacing them with just average teachers, not the highest performers, not the rockstars, we would literallycatapult this country in terms of achievement levels to at least Canada, which I believe is about 6

amongst all of theinternational countries, and potentially to Finland, who is Number 2.That one action, removing the bottom 6-10% of ineffective teachers could have that kind of impact on this country. Sothe question is  Why dont we actually do that? And what Ill say is this, I believe that part of the problem is thatpeople dont like to talk about removing people and even if you look at Hanusheks study, he talks about the deselectionof teachers. I thought that was a very interesting term. The Obama administration and, particularly, Secretary ArneDuncan are doing a tremendous amount about this and in the

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initiative, theyve addressed this issuehead-on by saying that states were going to be eligible for the

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funds only if they can meet certainassurances. And one of the assurances is about ensuring that you can link teacher effectiveness  how well a teacher isdoing, so their evaluation to their student level data.In several states across the country, there are actually laws, there is legislation that prohibits the linking of how yourstudents are doing to how we evaluate you. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Essentially what that means isthat you can in lots of places across this country, be a teacher who not just doesnt meet your goals in terms of howmuch growth we want to see in your student makeover over a particular year, but you could actually be a teacher whoin every year, your students actually go backward and you still remain employed year-in and year-out because theres noability to look at how well your students are achieving.So my prediction for 2010 is that I think we are going to be having a lot more incredibly difficult conversations aboutsome difficult decisions we need to make in this country as it pertains teacher quality and making difficult decisions onbehalf of children. Because at the end of the day when you talk about moving out poor performers and that sort of thing, you get lots of opposition, you get lots of pushback. People dont want to talk about those types of things. Peoplewant to talk about professional development, they dont want to talk about removing people, but at the end of the day,in my opinion, its incredibly important for us as the adults in this country to stop the practice that has been going on fordecades which is that we are all too willing to turn a blind eye to whats been happening to children in classrooms in thename of harmony amongst adults. We all want to get along. We all want to get along with the unions. We all want toget along with this group, that group. And so we all just enable this kind of system to continue on when, in fact, all itsproducing is absolutely dismal outcomes for kids. So hopefully in 2010, particularly with the

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initiatives,were going to have many more meaningful conversations about how we move forward with these efforts.Im going to take a couple of questions.

udience Member 1

Good morning. My name is Esther Mathias. I just had a question. In economics, we havesomething called leading economic indicators. Interest rates, unemployment rates, and so on. What would be some of your leading education indicators?

Michelle Rhee

So we have a lot of them. We look at dropout rates. We look at graduation rates. And we look a lot atproficiency rates. Every state across the country, unfortunately, we have 50 different sets of standards and 50 differenttests evaluating those standards and I think one of the other things that Duncan and the Obama administration aremoving toward that I think is incredibly important is a set of core common national standards and a national test.Because at the end of the day, the children in Washington, DC, when they become a working age are not going to becompeting for jobs with kids in Nashville and in San Francisco, theyre going to be competing for jobs with kids in Indiaand China and so we have to be able to gauge how they are performing compared to their counterparts that theyregoing to be competing against.So a really clear movement towards national standards and a national assessment are incredibly important. But for themost part, here in DC, were looking very closely at proficiency rates and were also looking at the achievement gap. Itold you earlier that I inherited a 70 percent racial achievement gap. So at both the district level and the school level,were looking very closely at whether were able to close that gap and were moving towards ensuring that every child isgetting a quality education and that the race and income level of our children and of our students is not the determiningfactor for their educational attainment levels.

udience Member 2

Hi, my name is Pamela Sorenson and my mom is a teacher, actually. And you said in 2010, youllbe addressing the conversation of quality of teachers in America. When will you be addressing the payment of teachersin America?

Michelle Rhee

I am trying. Not too long ago, we introduced a proposal that would call for a radically differentcompensation system here in Washington, DC. It was really interesting. Basically what we called for was a two-tiercompensation system. Every teacher would have their choice of which one to go on to. You had the red tier and on theread tier you got a 24% raise in base pay, a $10k cash bonus and your rights and privileges essentially stayed the same.Or you could take a 45% raise in base pay, $10k in cash, and a bonus possibility based on your student achievement levelgrowth that were huge.So, just as an example, a first year teacher here in DC, right now makes $40k a year. We structured this so that sameteacher who decided to go on Green, who saw the greatest achievement gains for their kids, could make up to $78k ayear. And at our most senior levels, our teachers make a base of $68k a year. That same teacher, who chose Green,who was seeing significant progress for their kids, could make up to $131k a year. In this new structure, by your seventhyear of teaching, you would make a guaranteed base salary of $100k a year. So this I thought, when my staff broughtthis to me, was brilliant. Right? Everybody has a choice. Everybody says that teachers dont make enough money. Imgoing to pay teachers six figure salaries. Im going to be the hero of the Washington, DC teachers.I could not have been more wrong. This thing went down like a lead balloon. Why? Because we said, in order to go onthe green tier, teachers had to give up their tenure. And it caused this firestorm across the city and the nation of peoplesaying that you cant differentiate, you cant make people give up their tenure, all these sorts of things. It wasinteresting because we put something incredibly aggressive on the table to radically change the way how teachers arecompensated, away from input differentiation, whether you have your masters degree, national certification, orwhatever, to output differentiation that were much greater in scale. And right now we have been in ongoingnegotiations with the union now for two years because we cannot move forward on this.

udience Member 3

Amanda Ellis from the World Bank. Quick question on student-teacher ratios. I have a little boywho is in first grade in the DC public system. Im a big support of the public schools, but theres 28 kids in the class andthe school has just put in a new playground at a cost of $1.2 million. I understand that perhaps budget allocations maybe coming from different areas, but think how many great teachers could have been hired to lower that student-teacherratio. The playground was pretty good before. Its fabulous now, but I wonder if you could comment on that.

Michelle Rhee

I think part of the reason why if you look over the last couple of decades, the schools and the facilitiescame into such significant disrepair was because of that exact calculation. People saying, well, lets put more of ourmoney into people and not these sort of infrastructure issues and that is what has led to the absolutely decrepitconditions of many of our school facilities across the nation. And I do think that really significant investment ininfrastructure at the front end now which is going to last for years and years and years. You cant see at it as a one-timeexpenditure vs. a one-time expenditure. Its going to be incredibly important.If you look at the Im a parent and so I know that all parents love the idea of smaller classes because they think theirkids are getting individualized attention, but the data just doesnt bear it out. It just doesnt. It does not show that classsize has at all a significant impact on student achievement levels and, particularly, when you dont have effectiveteachers in the classroom. In some of our schools where we have the lowest student-teacher ratios, its schools werethe enrollment has declined precipitously over the last ten years because the schools are not doing well. And in thoseschools, the student-teacher ratio is incredibly positive, but if you look at the student achievement levels, theyreabsolutely deplorable.

udience Member 4

Hello, my name is Katie Louvis from the US Chamber and this whole topic, I know, is verycomplicated. One of my friends, former HBS guy, real estate developer, left his career and is now teaching in one of your schools and the classroom, hed probably kill me for bringing this up, but anyways, and what hes facing - theclassroom is falling apart and hes actually been abused by students. Hes teaching a class of what they call repeaters.