Hidden Costs of Choice + NY: Eval Overhaul In Scary Hands - CURMUDGUCATION

CURMUDGUCATION: Hidden Costs of Choice:

Hidden Costs of Choice

I'm going to set aside my several issues with a charter school system (say, the pitting of student educational interests against the charter operator's business interests) and pretend that I have other beefs with charters so I can focus on just one concern-- the extra costs of a charter-choice system.

If you run a restaurant, offering a buffet can be tricky and costly. You have to be prepared to offer a full range of dishes, so that your Beloved Diner can have a full choice-- even though your beloved diner will leave some of those choices unused. Either you will have to absorb the cost of the extra food, or you will have to offer a buffet that doesn't really offer many choices.

A charter must have extra capacity built in. If I'm going to offer Chris a choice of three schools, each one of those schools must have a seat available for Chris-- and Chris will only occupy one of them. But every empty seat represents a cost to the system.

The plan will be that Happychoice Academy can offer fewer seats than would be needed to accommodate every single student who could conceivably choose to attend. Instead of three schools preparing three seats each for Chris, Pat and Taylor, each school will prepare just one seat and hope that Chris, Pat and Taylor distribute themselves evenly between the schools.

But that ideal is unlikely to happen, so charter-choice schools have to manage their excess capacity, which means taking control of how many of which students come to fill those seats. The only way to guarantee a full open free-choice system would be to have multiple schools which all have the capacity to handle all the students-- and that amount of excess capacity would be hugely expensive. The only way such a system can hope to be remotely economically viable is for choice to actually be limited. So, choice controlled by the schools.

Even if the schools become good at predicting the amount of capacity they need, or they use very tight controls, the no-backfill rule creates more unused capacity which creates more excess cost. Success Academies, the extreme example, jettison more than half of their students between 3rd and 8th grade which means either A) they plan to wash out that many students or B) somebody has to pay the overhead costs of all those empty seats. That sloughing off of students also means that somebody somewhere has to maintain the capacity that allows them to absorb the students who return from Happychoice Academy.

Of course, the part of the system that is obligated to maintain much of this excess capacity is the traditional public system, which must take every student that shows up at its doors.

Bottom line-- if we treat a charter-and-public school combo system as one school system, we arrive at one of two options.

A) A system that, for each 1,000 students, must maintain and finance a total 1,400 (ish-- I'm just spitballing here) seats. That is economic wastage of huge proportions.

B) A system that, for each 1,000 students, maintains say, 1,200 seats, with the full 1,000 in public school and the charter-choice capacity all tightly controlled and not really very choicey at all.

This is one of the mysteries of the conservative support of charter-choice systems for me-- the CURMUDGUCATION: Hidden Costs of Choice:

NY: Eval Overhaul In Scary Hands

The expert names for the New York teacher evaluation high speed overhaul panel are in, and it is, at best, a mixed bag.

* Thomas Kane, an economist from Harvard. Kane thinks that evaluation should be directly linked to the Common Core via high stakes testing; he likes to compare this to using a bathroom scale when dieting. He thinks too few NY teachers were evaluated as sucky last year, and he imagines that maybe video-based observation would be swell. And he was an expert witness for the Vergara trial (can you guess on which side?) He headed up the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching study, and he thinks Cuomo is pretty much on the right track.

* Catherine Brown, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, a thinky tank invariably billed as "left-leaning" despite their general on-boardedness with assaults on the teaching profession. CAP has issued any number of sloppy and ill-supported attempts to push Common Core and VAM.

* Sandi Jacobs, vice-president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group that has taken the position that US teachers are low-quality hacks. These are the guys who help US News and World rate college teacher programs (including programs that don't actually exist) and who cobbled together a report on the rigor of college teacher prep programs by sitting in their offices andlooking through a stack of commencement programs.

* Leslie Guggenheim of TNTP (The New Teacher Project), a group that really wants to see more personnel decisions, including pay, based on test results. They'd kind of like to get rid of tenure,too. Their big claim to fame is a paper called "The Widget Effect," that argues that teachers are not interchangeable widgets, but are in fact interchangeable widgets of varying degrees of quality.

I will go out on a limb and predict right now, today, that these four will declare that Cuomo's evaluation plan is okee dokee. But in the interests of not-entirely-kangaroo courtage (and perhaps additional entertainment value), the group also includes:

* Jesse Rothstein is a professor at Berkeley who has spent some time shooting holes in the research of both Kane and Raj Chetty. Starting with the same data, he found far less to love about VAM.

* Stephen Caldas is a professor at Manhattanville College who tagged the NY evaluation system with the delightful term "psychometrically indefensible."

* Aaron Pallas of Teachers College. He's been busily pointing out the problems with VAMmy systemsfor a few years now.

Those of you who have scored proficient in counting will notice that the majority of the committee http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/05/ny-eval-overhaul-in-scary-hands.html