Today in Washington (DC, US) the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute launch a public service Web site that allows visitors to learn about the healthiness of localities on a county-by-county basis across the US. The news got me thinking—Danger!—about the possibility of creating a similar resource for consumers of education: Providing a scientifically credible metric for the quality of teaching in each local education agency around a country.
By aggregating data about mortality, morbidity, health behaviors, clinical care, social and economic factors, and the physical environment, the County Health Rankings generates an index along which localities can be ordered. These data come largely from publicly accessible sources such as the US Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
I’m still toying with what data ought to go into the education index. (Please make suggestions in the comments.) Direct observation by some well-trained observers using a well-designed instrument would be ideal…and out of the question. Of course, one could collect less direct data (e.g., survey), but doing so at the level of the local education agency (LEA) would also cost prohibitively (e.g., randomly sampling each LEA in the US!?). What is more, such data would only reflect people’s opinions.
What clean, objective metrics reflect the quality of teaching, of education? For example drop-out rates might be in there, but we’d have to acknowledge that they reflect other features of the locality (e.g., poverty). What data would be useful, consistently accessible, trustworthy, etc.? Class size? National Assessment of Education Progress scores? We probably need both process and product data.
A few years ago, Cathy Griffith ferreted out a host of indices that she hypothesized might be related to variation in the identification rates for Learning Disabilities. Because some of them may be helpful and, especially, because she showed me how much data related to education are available in public sources, I’m thinking that developing a education metric analogous to the county-by-county health index might be beneficial direction to go.
Food for thought. I’ll go for a run and reflect on it.
Meanwhile, for those interested in the county health data: County Health Rankings.
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Hi John,
I think finding “clean” data is going to be tough. The behaviorist in me (when I’m not acting like a social learning theorist) would want direct observations or some permanent product of some sort that documents the effects and quality of the instruction going on in the school/classroom. The restricted observations I’ve made in my experience in LEAs (and also echoed by some teacher, school psych, and admin friends) concerns the administrative and specialists turn-over rate in districts, and perhaps the teacher/admin turn-over rate at various schools. It’s a type of “drop-out” data, but instead of it being the students, it’s faculty and it gives a sense for the political/emotional climate of the LEA. Rats leave a sinking ship for a reason: their own safety and life! Some of the most difficult and horrid districts I’ve ever worked for had such terrible turn-over going on with administrators and teacher and specialists who were fed up with the hostile/harrassing political climate and the insane control over teachers and their teaching (especially for SPED teachers who dare to question Full Inclusion). Not sure how one can obtain this type of data set, though; it’d have to be indirect to some extent via survey reports by parents, teachers, and admin about their own LEA. It may not be the central evidence to rely on but I wonder faculty turn-over data might have some additive value. The district I worked for in Phoenix (and many others did this, too) relied on Teach for America Teachers to fill the general and special ed teacher vacuum at schools where no teacher in their right mind wanted to work. Maybe that could also be an indicator: whether districts are hiring 2-yr contract TFA teachers, lol!
Interesting, I just saw a news report that CA just passed a bill (or is about to) that gives parents power to sanction and/or fire a principal or teacher (or shut down a school!) when that school and its educators continue to “fail” to meet standards. I’ll have to track down that report and see what it entails.
Anyway, I’ll keep thinking, and asking around.
Cheers,
Rollen
The School and Staffing Survey provides data about turnover, but I fear it’s not possible to disaggregate them at the level of the LEA. I’ll have to look into it.
Tnx!