Tag: teacher effectiveness

Outsourcing in Schools (how to focus on improving instruction)

Education Sector released a new report on school design last week titled Teachers at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design (free pdf download).  The report focuses on a new type of school design getting some traction in NYC, the Generation Schools.  These schools are focusing specifically on improving instruction by giving teachers more time to focus and prepare their lessons.  It seems like a great model (I’m still partial to the Rhee plan for teacher effectiveness though).

Another model highlighted in the article was a lot more exciting.  Why? Because it basically outsourced all non-critical, non-instructional tasks to other NPOs in the area.  The school is the Gardner Pilot Academy outside of Boston, MA.  This is what the report had to say about it.

The Gardner Pilot Academy, an elementary school serving the mostly low-income Latino community of Allston, Mass., just outside of Boston, is teeming with adults.  The leadership of Gardner includes and extended services director, whose job is to coordinate the work of all the various people and programs serving students and families.  The school has more than 15 community partners, including Young Audiences, which offers arts  and enrichment; Sports4Kids, which rounds out the physical education program run by the school’s part-time teacher; and a local branch of the YMCA, which serves as the fiscal agent for Gardner’s after-school program.  In all, there are more than 40 additional people who play a variety of roles and work a variety of schedules to support core teaching staff inside and outside of the classroom.  This kind of support, where aides and interns are assigned to oversee recess, lunch, and before- and after-school programs, means that teachers’ work at Gardner can be designed almost entirely around improving instruction.

Eureka!  You mean if we let teachers focus only on improving their instruction (by removing/outsourcing the other “school” distractions) they might help students achieve more?  I love this model for two reasons.

  1. it readjusts a teacher’s role to instruction (and not a hodge podge of other duties as assigned).  In web app building I call that “feature creep”, which is to say that the teacher job descriptions has been continuously added to (including recess duty, managing after-school projects, lunch duty, arts, etc.)
  2. it takes a comparative advantage point of view of educational services and embraces the idea that a school may not be best equipped to provide all common services.  By outsourcing them to partners in education you can help lighten work loads, consolidate services and improve overall efficiency in the system.  A YMCA already running after-school programs may be better able to offer services to a student body than if  the school went about it independently (and therefore would incur less expenses by relying on an organization already with the management and means in place to offer quality programs.

The main objection to this, as far as I can see would be that a school’s overall budget may shrink (because of the outsourced services), but I don’t necessarily see that as a negative if it brings down per pupil costs while increasing quality instruction.  On another note, this might be harder (but not impossible) to achieve in rural areas where such services are dispersed over large areas.

Student Load vs. Teacher Quality

The debate continues.  As a master’s student at UVM my thesis focused on Vermont’s historical trends in educations which contributed to and set the stage for our high ranking public school system (at the time, according to certain resources).  I placed particular emphasis on the fact that Vermont’s long standing traditions and demographic arrangements had contributed to very small class sizes (the pupil to teacher ratio is still around 10:1, one of the lowest in the nation).  Subsequently this also means that VT has one of the most expensive education system on a per pupil basis in the country as well.

It’s nice to think that Vermont has the best public education system in the country, but that’s hotly debated with each of the number of sides, resources, experts, etc. pointing to a diverse array of statistics: class size, student achievement, teacher pay, graduation rate, unemployment, etc.  It all depends how you define “outcomes”.

I’ve been swayed from my original assertion that VT had it good because of the low class size (which was more caused by geography and population density than any public initiative).  And it seemed that a lot of other individuals had been too, even Bill Gates who threw a lot of money behind the small schools movement has largely backed away from it.

In my opinion, the debate swung to teacher quality and effectiveness and is partially being driven by Michelle Rhee and others (the question of merit pay has also been wrapped into this discussion, though I think that effectiveness/quality is and should be the focus).  There are plenty of questions remaining (like how to measure effectiveness in real time, rather than retroactively) but I like where the debate is going.

It’s interesting to see though that the Total Student Load theory¹ is still getting attention.  Could it be both?  From personal experience, it was much harder to get lost in a small class (just think back to your senior seminar courses in college).  But from the other side I can also remember big classes where the teacher was awesome and their instruction was lasting.  It’s no wonder we can’t make up our minds.

¹note that the article might be password protected at Edweek.org, but it’s basically a write up on William G. Ouchi and his new book The Secret of TSL.  If you really want to read up on class size and the debate against it, Eric Hanushek’s research is well known in education as an opponent to the class size argument (he says it’s bunk).