New report examines teacher shortage, inflated test results

Leading education researchers have offered a sobering analysis in their latest publication on the state’s schools. Among the conclusions of the group, Policy Analysis for California Education:

-- The progress of many of California’s struggling students has been overstated.

-- California provides relatively few resources per student when compared with other states, and these resources are not always distributed fairly.

-- The state’s governance system for managing schools impedes reform.

-- California has fewer teachers per student and an increasing number of less experienced teachers.

-- California faces a teacher shortage in the coming years.

The publication is called Conditions of Education in California 2008. The entire report consists of chapters from different experts on different issues. PACE is based at UC Berkeley, USC and Stanford University.

Read on for more information about the report and the full press release from PACE.

-- Howard Blume

The report opens by noting that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had once designated 2008 as the Year of Education. Politicians and educators had envisioned “a grand bargain, under which the state would provide a substantial increase in funding for schools while simultaneously requiring significant changes in the way the education system operates,” wrote David Plank, PACE’s executive director, in the introduction to the new report.

That effort collapsed amid the state budget crisis. Instead, the state Board of Education acted to mandate an algebra test for all eighth graders, which Plank criticized: “The Algebra mandate exemplifies California’s search for ‘silver bullet’ reforms, and further undermines the comprehensive reform strategy.”

Chapters in the report cover a wide range. Patricia Gándara and Megan Hopkins call for different ways to look at whether students, especially those on the lower end of the achievement gap, are making progress.

“It’s not just supposed to be about who’s doing best academically,” Gándara said in a conference call with reporters. “We need to be measuring some other things.”

She said that the state needs to measure, for example, access to programs for gifted students and access to college-prep classes. As schools improve on such “opportunity” measures, student achievement will rise, she said.

Overall, academic progress is being overstated, said Berkeley researcher Bruce Fuller, who participated in the same conference call.  Fuller called into question the comparatively rosy recent analysis from state Supt. Of  Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, who had emphasized broad growth on the state’s Academic Performance Index or API.

Fuller countered that the state’s students have made less progress on a national test than on the California test. He also noted that the way the state calculates an API score can, in effect, exaggerate actual academic progress.

“In sum, state test scores for high school students show very little progress in recent years,” Fuller said.

Here’s the PACE release:

PACE report offers insights,
recommendations for
California's public schools

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Berkeley -- State leaders rely on inconsistent barometers of student progress, face a looming teacher shortage and wrestle with staggering and persistent achievement gaps -- yet, these problems all can be addressed, at least in part, without infusions of new money, according to a comprehensive report released today (Thursday, Oct. 2) by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE).

"Conditions of Education in California 2008," a status report produced by leading education scholars with PACE, is being presented at a symposium of education researchers and policymakers in Sacramento. PACE is an independent, non-partisan education research center based at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

"Most observers of California's education system agree that major changes will be needed to bring about significant gains in students' and in the schools' performances," said PACE Executive Director David Plank in the report's introduction.

And while real progress to improve educational quality will require a stronger economy and serious resolution of California's structural budget deficit, Plank said, many of the policy remedies the PACE report proposes do not require any new spending.

Among PACE's recommendations are depoliticizing state educational testing operations, adjusting academic achievement benchmarks, targeting resources to meet the needs of disadvantaged groups, giving local schools more flexibility in allotting their resources, rationalizing public school finance and governance, and encouraging innovation in both school leadership and teacher recruitment. The report also addresses an embarrassing lack of student readiness for the transition from high school to postsecondary education.

So many tests, so little context

State and federal education officials rely on five different tests of student progress in elementary through secondary grades, but according to Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley professor of education and public policy and a PACE director, and Lynette Parker, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in education, those barometer tests are showing contradictory results.

This often leaves parents, educators and employers confused about how schools are doing and whether they meet the federal mandates of legislation such as No Child Left Behind.

For example, the California Department of Education estimated that 51 percent of the state's fourth graders were proficient readers last year. Yet, the broad-based and more demanding National Assessment of Educational Performance (NAEP) exams showed just 23 percent were reading proficiently, the researchers said.

In Sacramento schools, the state Academic Performance Index continues to climb for high school students, even though the share of students testing at proficient levels is declining, Fuller said: "This is terribly confusing for parents and employers who want to know whether progress is real or illusory."

To resolve this problem, Fuller and Parker recommend that the state:

Set up an "independent scorekeeper" to measure school and student performance by separating  the state's testing office from the California Office of Education to limit adverse impacts of conflicting and often politically-charged pressure from voters, business leaders, civic groups and other advocates.
Enhance understanding of test results by making the state Office of Education publish federal NAEP test results for reading and math skills in the fourth and eighth grades whenever corresponding state scores are released.

Push for quick development of a strong state data system to track individual student performance over time, rather than recording results for differing cohorts of students.

Looming teacher shortage

Susanna Loeb, a PACE director and an education professor at Stanford, and Stanford doctoral student Marsha Ing report an uneven age distribution for teachers, with the bulk of them in their early 30s or in their 50s.  As the older teachers retire over the next 10 to 15 years, the researchers say the state will face an urgent need to recruit and train new teachers.

Loeb and Ing also found that California's teacher workforce is unbalanced in its ratio of female to male teachers and  its ratio of  non-white teachers to non-white students. It also faces daunting difficulties in filling teacher vacancies in math, special education and music, and in finding teachers who are bilingual.

They propose to:

- Explore alternative forms of compensation, such as housing incentives as well as retention and signing bonuses, to recruit and retain highly qualified teachers.

- Improve working conditions, increase monitoring of teacher effectiveness and strengthen school leadership, which is often as important, or more so, to teachers as pay.

- Support professional development for teachers.

- Tap untraditional routes into teaching, such as the Teach for American volunteer program.

Gaps in achievement and opportunity

Nearly 57 percent of California's K-12 students are African American, Latino or Native American - these three racial/ethnic groups persistently fare the worst on standardized testing. One-quarter of all California's elementary and secondary school students are English learners, and they score the lowest of any group.

These gaps are well known, but Patricia Gándara, a professor of education and director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, and Megan Hopkins, a doctoral student at UCLA, insist in their part of the PACE report that the story doesn't end there.

Along with achievement tests, they recommend that policy makers also consider other, broader indicators that show how schools and students measure up.

Those indicators include consideration of major discrepancies between the access to specialized programs such as Gifted and Talented Education, where white and Asian students are overrepresented by a much as 100 percent relative to their percentages in the population. There also are huge gaps in the access that various ethnic and racial groups have to experienced teachers and materials, in their pass rates for high school exit exams, and in the number of students finishing college preparatory classes and going to college.

"Many high-achieving African American and Latino students begin disengaging from school in the elementary grades..." report Gándara and Hopkins. "There is great debate about the nature and causes of school disengagement among youth, but certainly attending schools with insufficient resources and high rates of teacher turnover ... must be contributing factors."

The researchers contend that it will take more effort and more time to help some of California's students to meet those goals: "Simply exhorting students and teachers to do better, without the tools to accomplish the task, is unlikely to produce significant gains," they write.

They recommend that the state:

- Develop and provide high quality, culturally and linguistically appropriate preschool instruction for low-income, Latino, African American and English learner students.
-Survey students to track the degree to which students are engaged in their schooling and to show where problems develop.

- Institute plans for more equal distribution of qualified and experienced teachers, as well as educational opportunities such as gifted programs.
Add instructional time and summer enrichment programs so students in targeted groups can catch up.

The complete PACE report is available on the PACE Web site at http://pace.berkeley.edu/pace_index.html.

PACE became the nation's first independent, non-partisan education policy research center in the United States when it was established 25 years ago in the wake of property tax-limiting Proposition 13. Other states have followed in PACE's footsteps, including Michigan, Texas, Indiana and Florida, although many centers have been short-lived.

"This is a really powerful idea," Plank said of PACE. "But it turns out this is not such an easy thing to do."

Reforming education isn't easy either, he noted, particularly in a year that had been dubbed "The Year of Education" before the state budget reflected so much red ink.

"But we need to keep working at it, even if it takes another 25 years,"
Plank said.

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Comments

[ellen]

There is and will be no teacher shortage except in math and maybe science. Most education colleges and programs are graduating more teachers than we need, especially at the elementary level.

Now there is a shortage- and it is in creative thought for education. Let's decrease the number of standards and teach deeply instead of a mile wide and an inch deep approach that we have now.

Let's also get all the consultants and education "researchers" out of education. They are taking up valuable oxygen and suppressing teachers natural ability to teach