Dr. Eric A. Hanushek -  High Quality Education: Elements and Implications

David Boulton: I'm interested in formulating and presenting value-case arguments for investing in the health of children's learning. That's where your work comes in.  In order to get society into that conversation we need to have a solid analysis of what affects the ‘quality’ of an individual's learning as well as a larger scale view of what is at stake for all of us in having an education system that facilitates quality learning. So with that as a background I'd like to ask you to start with a short sketch of yourself and how your research came to focus on educational quality. I am particularly interested in your personal learning path and how that led you to the work you are doing at the Hoover Institution.

Personal Background:

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I started as a graduate student participating in a Harvard seminar on what the Coleman Report meant. This was a faculty seminar that Pat Moynihan and Fred Mosteller put together. It led me to write a dissertation in economics on the determinants of achievement, and that got me started looking at education issues. I've been doing it ever since.

Over time, I've become much more attuned to the fact that the real issues are quality of schooling, what kids know, and their achievement levels, not just how many years of school they get and when they finish.

David Boulton: Where quality of instruction meets quality of the learning environment from birth on.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Precisely.  And I've spent a lot of time trying to look at how different aspects of families and schools, affects the learning of kids. But one of the things I've recently done is try to look at the economic implications of different learning outcomes, both for individuals and for society. There are a whole series of dimensions that you obviously are getting into that go beyond just simple economics. But I find the simple economics to be quite compelling.

David Boulton: Yes, that's the where the case rises to a level that people can get their heads around it without requiring them to have an intimate understanding of what's happening inside their children’s minds.

Dr. Eric Hanushek:  I've looked at the economic implications of schooling, and people who know more earn more; nations that do better in school grow faster than other nations. Even if we just look at the economic implications, the quality of our schools is extraordinarily important to us as a society and as individuals.

You brought up the Coleman Report, let’s talk about that.

The Coleman Report:

Dr. Eric Hanushek: The Coleman Report said overwhelmingly that parents were the most important determinant of achievement. There's truth to the extent that parents are very important in the learning of children. But people went on to say that schools could not overcome these differences. That was the part which, I now think, was overstated at the time.

The Coleman Report was right in one sense, but misleading in another. It was right in the sense that all of the common measures of school quality we typically use are not good indicators of student achievement, and if you look at things like whether the teacher has a master’s degree or not, or experience, or certification and so forth, you find that those things are not related to whether students are going to learn a lot or not, so it was right in that dimension.

What it was wrong in is that schools do have a big influence on achievement. Lots of people walk away from the Coleman Report and say, “Well, this shows that schools aren't very important.”  I think that is dead wrong. With the research that you've been doing and others have been doing, the gist is that differences in teachers are extraordinarily important in terms of student achievement. What we found is that schools make a difference and a large difference. It is just that schools are not measured by the things Coleman thought were used to define schools. A good school is not necessarily the one that spends the most. A good teacher is not necessarily the one who has a master’s degree or has the most experience. We found there are big differences across schools and they are not closely related to our common ways of judging the quality of schools.

Comparing Effects:

David Boulton: My question is, looking at the system as it's functioning as a whole now, in terms of the effects that are attributed to school and the effects that are attributed to families, where is that distribution in your mind?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: It's [school effects] very small, because what happens is that we don't insure that many kids get good runs of teachers over time. If you get a good teacher one year, you're just as likely to get a bad teacher the next year. The schools right now don't tend to make up for differences in economic background or racial and ethnic background, and they don't do a very good job at that because they aren't geared to making sure that these kids get really high-quality teaching. They get this average teacher, which, on average, doesn't make up for a family background. So I mean, in that sense, the Coleman view is correct, I think.

David Boulton: I think the Coleman view was roughly 80/20 family/school?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I'm not going to put any number on it because that's really hard to do.

David Boulton: Okay.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I was one of the early people objecting to the way the Coleman Report did it.

David Boulton: Okay. I can appreciate that. Yet, there are clearly some effects that are coming out of the family that's limiting the range of school effects. We know from work like yours and others that it's not that we can't compensate for this...

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Right.

David Boulton: ...but it takes greater energy, effort and intention to compensate for that, in terms of the quality of instruction these children are getting.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Right. It takes different sets of policies to make sure that you get good teachers. Precisely.

I've spent a lot of time trying to look at how different facets of families and schools, affect the learning of kids.  I'll give you a quick summary statement, and then we can talk.

David Boulton: Good.

The Economic Implications of Education Quality:

Dr. Eric Hanushek: If we look at performance on standardized tests that we’re giving for accountability purposes today, if somebody performs at the 85th percentile on these tests as opposed to the 50th percentile, in other words, if they're above average on this, they can expect to earn something like 12 percent per year more, each and every year of their working life. It accumulates to a large amount of economic impact on individuals.

If you translate what knowledge means to the economy, you get more startling results. In the comparisons of math and science the U.S. has always performed around the middle or below in international comparison of performance. If the U.S. were to perform at the level of a middle European country, which is not the tops on this test, but doing better than we are, the nation as a whole could expect to have growth rates of around a half of one percent higher per year.

David Boulton: You're talking about GDP?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I'm talking about GDP growth per capita. A half of a percent sounds like a small number, but it turns out to be a huge number. It has enormous implications for the financial well-being of the U.S. citizens in the future. The reason why we are the richest nation in the world today is that we've had the fastest growth rates in GDP per capita over the last century of any other country in the world, and growth rates accumulate to a big number. What my research suggests is that the quality of schooling is really very important, and we shouldn't neglect this when we look at international comparisons. In the U.S., it is typical to ignore the fact that we don't do well on these tests, and say, “Ah, well, the economy is doing fine anyways.”

David Boulton: But they're not in time sync in that way. How well our education system is doing and how well our economy is doing - their relationship correlates but it’s hard to perceive because of the lag time.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: You've got it. This is a statement about what happens in the long run. The U.S. has grown well in the past, because it has lots of things going for it. It has free and open markets, unregulated markets for labor and products. It has little regulation. These are things that affect growth rates.

We've ignored the growing importance of school quality, so other nations are catching up in terms of opening up their markets, cutting down on regulations, and providing more quantity of schooling.  Few people in society realize that the U.S. is only at the middle of the developed countries in terms of the quantity of schooling our population gets. European and Asian nations pushed hard at increasing how much schooling people get, and they've done it while maintaining quality.

The U.S. is starting to face a situation where we are not that competitive, in terms of either the quantity or quality of schooling that we're providing our population.

David Boulton: Yet, there will be a significant lag time before the correlation will be apparent to most.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: People confuse these things by saying, “Well, we have low unemployment rates, or this, that, and the other thing,” and miss the whole fact. We're talking about the long run and what happens over the next twenty to thirty years, as opposed to what happens six months from now.

David Boulton: Have you or anybody else you know of developed a map to co-register this data so as to show the correlations over time?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I could actually send you a quick paper on it.

David Boulton: Please do. Speaking to this difference and focusing on quality, do we have reliable econometrics to compare or to give ourselves the instrumentation we need to focus on improving quality?

No Child Left Behind:

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I think that we're getting there with "No Child Left Behind." And the accountability things are things that I'm very much in favor of. They're not perfect. No Child Left Behind, you've probably heard everybody complain about that.

David Boulton: Sure.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: But in reality, states that have introduced the accountability sooner have done better in terms of performance on these tests. And so you know...

David Boulton: It's not that we have some perfect or even well defined threshold out there, but the idea of moving towards improving in itself, gives a base reference for everything.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Exactly, exactly. And so you can spin out the implications for what happens over time if we could improve our schooling, and what are the economic implications, which I've spent some effort trying to do.

David Boulton: I'm just getting into this dimension of things, and I am delighted to find you.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: It sounds like you've gotten quite far into it though. I went to your website and I was quite impressed.

David Boulton: Well, thank you. We have an important mission. And underneath it all is stewarding the health of children's learning. I think that's the thing we're missing metrics on.  What's happening from the time they're born that is creating the cognitive, emotional, linguistic foundations that radiate throughout learning thereafter? How do schools help or hinder early learning trajectories? And so on.

The Equity Implications of Quality:

We gave a presentation for the Community Literacy Initiative in Oakland, in a church, with a number of people representing the African-American community. People there are trying to light a fire about literacy and its importance. As we started to share certain pieces of research, we found there were a lot of people in that community who feel that the mainstream research informing governmental policy and education's direction seems to be insensitive to them.

It is a big generalization to hurl out, but in reflecting on your work, you seem to champion the equity issues, trying to help people understand what the data is saying about what works and what doesn't, about accountability, and how that is radiating to create benefits for disadvantaged groups.

Let us unpack the role of education in creating more equal opportunity for children, regardless of their backgrounds, and what your work has brought to light about what is making a difference and what is not.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Throughout my academic career I have been concerned with a variety of distributional issues: Why is it that black students and black workers do worse than whites on average? What is it, and what are we doing to try to take care of that? With a lot of concern about the distribution of income in society, we know it is closely related to the skills we have given workers over their lifetimes.

If we want to do something about making the outcomes more equal in our society, we have to concentrate on the skills we provide people. Just giving money to people when they don't have as much money doesn't always solve the problem. It does not lead to long-run solutions that lead to better operation of the economy and more equitable outcomes. We concentrate on the skills.

David Boulton: Like the Chinese proverb, “I'd rather teach them how to fish than give them a fish.”

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Our society has done well by rewarding people for the skills and work they have. That led to great accomplishments in the U.S. economy, which can be traced back to the skills of the U.S. workers and the ability to innovate, introduce new technology, and increase productivity over time. We don't want to deal with equity issues in ways that harm the outcomes of the economy.

In the Lyndon Johnson Presidency, we thought of the war on poverty, not as giving more money to people in poverty but solving poverty by changing the skills and the abilities of the people in the economy. Those arguments were right. At the same time, we haven't done a good job of making sure we equalize the opportunities and skills that are given.

Part of that relates to problems we have in the debate about how to improve schools. Much of the debate about equalizing skills and the quality of schooling has come down to: Are we spending as much in this school as we are in that school? Somehow, people believe that if we spend the same amount we equalize the opportunities and skills in all schools. The research we've done over a long period of time shows that is not a good measure. We want to make sure that we provide the best opportunities. Just providing the money has not worked very well at providing the high quality schools we need. When we go to inner cities, the debate over whether we should spend more money or not may be important at some point, but there is a prior debate about how we make sure we have the very best high-quality teachers in these schools, and that is not always related to how much we spend per student.

David Boulton: We need to have a better scientific consensus that more people in education understand about the criteria we are using to allocate our resources.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: We have to worry about how we wisely spend those resources. We are making a lot of progress in setting the right background for these questions. We have now started to provide detailed information about the performance of students.

If we want to talk about equity and equalized opportunities, we should focus on what the distribution of learning is, what people know, and what the black students in Oakland know compared to the white students in Oakland or in Brooklyn. Once we establish that, then we can get down to the business of making them equal and figuring out how to improve our schools and provide the resources and background that lead to equalizing the outcomes. It has been a long time getting to the point where we can talk about equity in terms of the things we care about and what students know.

David Boulton:  As indicated by the various assessment mechanisms that we're employing to tell us how students are doing, what is making the big differences?

Teacher Quality and Student Achievement:

Dr. Eric Hanushek: The quality of teachers is essential and has a huge impact on student achievement, but this is hard to measure. People want to measure teacher quality in simple terms, by their backgrounds or other easily observed characteristics. They are not good measures of teacher effectiveness. The phrase "quality of teachers" means a person who gets higher rates of achievement out of students than other teachers. There are teachers who get high rates of learning out of their students each year, and some do not.

We are getting better at measuring what students know. What you want to look at is: How fast does the knowledge that students have increase over time?  We look at students who start fourth grade a little behind. Do they end up at the end of the fourth grade still behind, or do they end up farther ahead than they started? That is the importance of teachers, in my opinion.

David Boulton: You see their shift in the probable trajectories; you see the performance increase in a way that you can correlate with the teacher, rather than the other variables.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Behind all my statements about teacher quality are complicated statistical analyses designed to make sure we know it is the teacher and not other characteristics of the classroom. We look at the same teachers with different groups of students and see if they consistently get achievement improvements. We look at individual students and see whether they learn more with some teachers than with others. By looking at those two things, we narrow the variables to the impact of teachers, as opposed to the impact of the students themselves.

David Boulton: You are not speaking from an ungrounded theory; you are not a philosopher. You're dealing with data sets and refined scientific methodologies for mining data, to develop hypotheses and conclusions that feed into the opinions which you are sharing now. This is different than many of the opinions that get bandied about.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Much educational research involves people going into classrooms and sorting out what teachers are doing, what students are doing, and making judgments from observations. We have had problems generalizing that to all of the teachers we see. The work I have done has taken available information about the reading, math, and science abilities of students, then looking at what factors led some kids to learn more and some to learn less. We know parents are very important, but we realize that high quality schools can make up for deficiencies children bring to classrooms.

I've been doing a lot of work in Texas schools trying to learn why some kids in Texas learn more than others. We went out to find how much variation there is in teacher quality, where we measure teacher quality by the gains that students have in classrooms with individual teachers. We bent over backwards to make sure that we didn't inflate these numbers, to make sure that we took into account all the facts, that the better parents tend to select certain schools. If you make the most conservative estimates possible, we find that if you have a good teacher, meaning a teacher that's at the 85th percentile or one standard deviation above the mean. If you had a good teacher five years in a row, you could completely make up for the difference between low-income and middle income achievement, on average. Having good teachers a number of years in a row can offset the disadvantages that some kids have from being less prepared coming to school and from their families not giving them the same start.

Family Effects:

David Boulton: This is an important point. Can schools make a difference in compensating for these varied backgrounds children come to school with? My understanding from others is that student performance is predominantly the result of the effects of experiences happening outside of school, but school is where the greatest opportunity is to make a difference that equalizes opportunities.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Sure, absolutely. Parents prepare children at different rates. Some kids come to school much less prepared than others. It turns out to be highly correlated with the socioeconomic backgrounds of parents. That is one of the things that we hope to deal with. How can we deal with differential backgrounds and overcome the fact that some kids get a bad draw, in terms of the knowledge they get from their parents? 

There is enough leverage in schools to change where children are, even if they come less prepared to school. Part of the problem we have is that schools don't systematically make sure there are always top-rated teachers available to every child. Schools provide a really good teacher one year, then the next year, they go the opposite way, so we don't always add up to a set of schooling experiences that overcome background differences.

A Critical Window:

David Boulton: As you know we are interested in how learning to read affects learning in general, how it affects attitudes about learning, attention span, emotional frustration and confusion tolerance. Drawing from research in the neurosciences, linguistics, and early childhood development, people like Dr. Jack Shonkoff show there is a sensitive period in the trajectory of developmental readiness. It seems as if children who aren’t ready for the challenges encountered in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, can get in trouble in a way that not only knocks them out of sync with where the curriculum is heading but knocks them out of sync with themselves in a psychological way. There is a critical window in the front end of education, where it is necessary to assess, meet, and read where children are, then give them the scaffolding they need to get into the code before they are get lost in a dangerously negative trajectory.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: The work I have done has tried to look at the growth patterns of students and how we can change their trajectory of learning. What we know is that children come to school, at the very earliest part of school, in kindergarten and first grade, with huge differences in terms of their background and learning. We know their vocabularies are very different. This is associated often with the education and background of the parents.

Reading:

When we go through the early reading years and get into the tougher business of comprehension of reading materials, how fast we read complicated materials, and how much of it we understand, we see that it is important to be prepared at that point. That is the point where the mathematics curriculum takes off, the social studies curriculum takes off, and the science curriculum. If students aren't prepared in their reading and comprehension abilities, they fall back in all areas.

When I look at the data on performance later in school, as students get into secondary grades, these scores are highly correlated for any individual. People who read well know more science and mathematics. Part of that might be innate ability, but part of it is the ability to build upon what they know and get to new points.

David Boulton: And also their confidence in learning and frustration tolerance for confusion and others variables. To summarize this point, you are bringing your lens between how well somebody is reading as they come into these more complex areas of curriculum and how well the rest of their school unfolds.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Absolutely, all these things matter. But the ability to pick up a textbook in any area and figure it out relies upon having high levels of comprehension, which relies upon having high levels of knowledge in general: knowledge of history, politics, and society. We are finding that basic comprehension requires lots of basic knowledge, so it all fits together.

David Boulton: So you are seeing a correspondence between reading, student performance in general, worker skills, and life-long economic opportunity.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Absolutely, absolutely. One of the things that economists have looked at in great detail is how skills differ across individuals and how they're rewarded in the labor market. Economists have spent a lot of time thinking about how much schooling somebody has. Recently, we've found that how good the schooling is, is also very important. As we've started to measure the quality of what people know, how much they comprehend and how much they know, we find that is related to the performance in the labor market.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: My interpretation is that if we really look at what differences in teacher quality mean, you see they can overcome pretty severe deficits.

David Boulton: One of the things that I know you've spent significant time studying is class size effects.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Yeah.

David Boulton: This plugs back in, as many of these pieces do, to the quality argument.

Class Size:

Dr. Eric Hanushek: My study suggests that reducing class size is a very ineffective way of improving student achievement. Without fighting too hard, I mean -- even if we take the magnitude of estimates, that the proponents of class size reduction say there are -- these are very small effects, and they're very expensive. The effects of class size reduction are dwarfed by variations in teacher quality. From a policy viewpoint, if you looked at what's the right way to improve the achievement of students, I would always go toward teacher quality, as opposed to trying to take the current average teacher and spread them over fewer kids.

The dilemma faced by policy makers, parents and other decision makers is: How do we insure high quality schools and how do we measure them? How do we know when we have achieved something? The problem is that once we have said we want high quality schools, we go to simplistic measures of the resources available in schools. We look at what the class sizes are. We look at what the teachers are paid. We look at the degrees of teachers.

Unfortunately, these are bad metrics. They are bad ways to measure quality. As much as we do not like to believe it, none of these are closely related to student performance. When we go too quickly into the debate about these issues, we lose sight of the fact that we are really concerned about what the students know and student outcomes.

David Boulton: That was really important and well said. We almost have to de-mythologize our general society's sense of what we have thought makes the difference and learn to come to a new list of what is important. Right now, that is still in the fog. It is people like you whose work is bringing that to attention with a certain quality of scientific rigor that makes it less arguable than all of the general fuzziness out there.

Deeper into Teacher Quality:

David Boulton: If it’s not the class size and it’s not the degrees of the teacher, and it’s not how many dollars per student is being spent, what is it?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: People throw up their hands, because they say: If you can not tell me precisely what it is, what can we do about it? The answer is we can not say precisely what it is. We know there are great teachers who are starting out and do not have master’s degrees or much experience, and we know there are great teachers who have lots of experience and masters degrees. We also know the opposite; there are very poor teachers in both of those situations.

Everybody is looking for an answer that is much simpler than reality, which is that teaching is a complicated business. Classroom instruction and learning, the interaction between the teachers and student, is a difficult business.

To get similar levels of learning out of students, many teachers approach the situation in different ways. Our research methods are currently incapable of sorting out the various ways in which learning goes on in classrooms and the characteristics that are important.

Many people achieve the same results from different avenues and with different backgrounds of the teachers. Our research looks for these ways that lead to better performance. It hasn't allowed for the complexity of what actually goes on.

Some people compensate for less subject matter knowledge by more preparation and better presentation materials. Other people don't think much about preparation because they have the background and subject matter knowledge, and they just go in and wing it. In both cases, you can have very good learning going on. You can also have dreadful learning when people are unprepared or do not know their subject matter. It's hard to pick out the single elements that add up to a good teacher.

The real problem is developing policies based on insuring that certain characteristics are met. When we certify teachers, we have a list of backgrounds and attributes they should have in order to be acceptable.

The economist has a different perspective on this. The economist would say: Let us define what we want to achieve, what our measure of knowledge in learning is, then we will reward more of that, and penalize less of that. Teachers who are able to get more learning in their classrooms should be rewarded or provided incentives to do that and to stay in teaching. Teachers who cannot get the levels of achievement and outcomes in students that we care about should not be encouraged. We should not have incentives for them to stay in teaching, but we should have incentives for them to do other things where they might be more productive.

David Boulton: That makes perfect sense at a high altitude policy level. It sounds like black-boxing. Look inside this box. We're not telling you what to do, but your box has got to be productive. If it is not sufficiently productive, then we are going to consider that your box isn't working very well, and you just take your box somewhere else. That creates a motivational pressure on the teacher to have a better box, but it is not informing them in the same way about how to vary their practices or learn ways to be more effective. That has to come from other angles.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: To be sure. How teachers get to be good at this is a little unclear. We have some bits and pieces from research that others have done. Others looked at the effects of varying curricula, on learning; others looked at the effects of different amounts of subject matter, different pedagogy.

We have not been good at getting universal truths in these areas, the things that always work and indicate failure if you don't have them. That is partly why the economist is more happy with the black box, because if somebody can do well without having all of this background, fine. We will let them do it. Others may be helped by getting some of this material and may become good teachers.

We do not know how malleable anybody is in teaching. There is imperfect information about whether we can take people and make them into high quality teachers with the right professional development, with the right pre-service training. We don't have that information now about how malleable people are. I don't want to lean on that as much as I would like to also be more serious about the selection of teachers.

One view of providing incentives is that we make teachers work harder, make them put in more effort, make them do things differently. There's another view of the incentives which is:  We want to use incentives to encourage the good people to stay in teaching, to continue doing well. We want to discourage the others who are not doing well. For one reason or another, either they do not have the right background and training or they do not have the right traits to do this complicated job.

David Boulton: Right. And what are the primary attributes of teacher quality that you track?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Well, this has been the Holy Grail of research, and it's been about as successful as our searches for the Holy Grail. It turns out that none of the measured attributes of teachers that we commonly use are very closely tied to differences in teacher quality, as seen from what happens in the classroom.

David Boulton: You mean, trying to match attributes of teacher quality to attributes of student learning outcomes?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Yes, whenever I say "teacher quality," it's synonymous with the rate of achievement scores of kids in classrooms.

David Boulton: I just want to make sure we're using the same language. 

Dr. Eric Hanushek: This is a little bit confusing, but it sounds like you're used to speaking in my terms. 

David Boulton: I'm trying to learn my way into speaking on the same level with you in these terms because I appreciate the distinctions that you're bringing in.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: None of the measured attributes that we've always used for teacher quality are very closely related to what the student achievement outcomes are in classrooms. My own view of what that implies is that we should just pay attention to what happens in the classrooms. If we're interested in student achievement, we ought to focus on student achievement, reward those who are good at getting more student achievement, and not reward those that are bad.

David Boulton: I had an interview with Richard Allington who was recently President of the International Reading Association. He is frowned on by many because he, for the longest time, has been a whole language advocate. I'm not a whole language advocate, but I am interested in trying to understand every perspective here. One of the things that came up was that he conducted the country's largest survey of teachers, relative to how various attributes of teachers correspond to increases in student learning outcomes. Not surprisingly, he found that it wasn't the knowledge expertise of the teacher, and it wasn’t the self-esteem centricity of the teacher in terms of trying to make the children feel good, it came down to the quality of the teacher's interaction with students at the level of: constantly recursively calling the child back into inquiry, back into learning.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: That may be true. My own view is idiosyncratic on this. It has been thoroughly researched. I have an explanation for what I've seen.

David Boulton: Good. I'd love to hear it.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: My explanation of what we see is that the teaching process is complicated, and it has all kinds of interactions. People behave differently in the classroom, and different behaviors can get the same gains, so that some people can do it one way and other people another way. What all of our research methods do is get a linear model of what contributes to student achievement. If we take a little bit of subject matter knowledge, a little bit of master’s degree, a little bit of experience, and so forth, we can add up to what a good teacher is.  In reality, I think that's wrong. I like to think of it as innate ability, which we might find in our human genome project here. Some people are good at getting students to learn, and other people aren't. We aren't able to describe it either in the way Allington does, where he's looking for which linear factor or what linear measures contribute most to achievement, more systematically because I just don't think it's that way. People with the same measure of characteristics produce very different achievement.

David Boulton: That speaks to a certain limitation in the granularity of our understanding of what constitutes good teaching.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I think it's that. It's all very nonlinear. I know that I can never tell jokes in the classroom, and so I never try to get their attention by telling jokes.

David Boulton: Right.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I substitute other things, you know. Some people are very warm and loving to kids, and they get their attention. You get kids who want to learn. Some like teachers who are real jerks, but they're good teachers. Good teachers play to their strengths and do the things that are important. Bad teachers don't know how to make these substitutions or to get the kids' attention. They keep doing things that aren't effective. That's an idiosyncratic view. I don't know how to test this. What I have is an explanation for why none of the attempts to find the characteristics have worked well.

David Boulton: There isn’t ‘one right way’.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: That's exactly it. That's what the research does. It looks for the one right way to do it. It says, if we could make every teacher do this, then we would be good. We don't find that right way very often, so anybody who finds any shred that's statistically, significantly related to achievement, they say, “Here's the right way.” The research I've done and others have done on these variations in teacher quality don't indicate that's the way.

David Boulton: It fits well with what we know about student learning, in the sense that there isn't a right way; the right way is the way that works right for the one who is learning.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I think that is a good analogy.

Performance Based Teacher Incentives:

Dr. Eric Hanushek: What I go to, then, is the policy implications of this and I just lay them out. I mean, the common argument is: if we need better teachers, we have to pay them more. My view is that's not correct at all. We do have to compete for people who are good in the classroom, but paying everybody the same amount more doesn't mean that you'll get better teachers. You know, bad teachers like more salary as much as good teachers, as far as I can tell.

David Boulton: Sure.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: It says that you have to pay attention to the quality in the classroom, and...

David Boulton: And index that to incentives in some way.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Exactly, exactly. But this kind of overview of different incentives does conflict with the views of people in the schools. Some people in the schools are doing an extraordinary job, and we want to keep them there. Other people in the schools are not doing well and their perspectives on whether we should reward performance or not are different.

David Boulton: They are the ones we encounter who are quick to say: “Well, there is a bell curve, and a lot of kids just are not going to make it.”

Cori Stennet: “And I need my job’s medical insurance.”

David Boulton: That's one of the things Haberman is really good at, talking about, the incentives that support teachers towards not being good teachers.

The difficulty is that the high-level system view of improvement does not connect to the lower-level teacher training, teacher development track. Have you encountered Martin Haberman's work?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I've seen a little bit about it. As I understand it, the evidence is not completely clear. He has these different selection devices, right?

David Boulton: I am not an advocate for him, Allignton or any of the other people we’ve talked to, but it seems there is a remarkable parallel between researchers focused on ways of parenting and researchers focused on ways of teaching.  For example, the language engagement that children get early on from their parents affects how well they take off in reading later on in school. There is a certain way parents relate to children that seems to be helpful for getting them up the road.

Allington, Haberman and others studying teacher behaviors seem to be finding similar attributes in good teachers. Both good teachers and good parents meaningfully engage children and support them while pulling them into greater complexity – they help them ‘learn to participate in the learning’ rather than ‘broadcasting at them’.  

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Well. That's is getting a little bit more detailed on the black box. We try to stay away from too much speculation.

David Boulton: All right. I appreciate that. Yet, we do want to learn through these various perspectives and if we want to go from the black box to the quantum probabilities inside of it, it seems these kind of orientations play a role.

The Importance of Early Language Development:

David Boulton: One aspect of our work is trying to correlate a number of different fields that show the importance of what's happening to children from birth until they get to school. There is one plane of that research which is coming from neuroscience, talking about how neurons wire and fire. Another has to do with the frequency of language engagement and the use of complex and different vocabulary which is exercising the brain’s cognitive-linguistic processing. Are you familiar with Hart & Risley's work?

Dr. Eric Hanushek: No, not by their name.

David Boulton: They performed a study across the socioeconomic spectrum that studied the language exposure children were experiencing from birth until...

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Oh, this is 3,000 words versus 20,000 words.

David Boulton: Well, actually, the difference across the spectrum over four years is like 30 million words.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Oh, is that right?

David Boulton: Yeah, it's staggering. 

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I mean, I haven't seen the numbers, but I know there are huge differences, particularly as correlated with SES.

David Boulton: Although the main correlation is less with SES and more with the degree of talkativeness of parents, in terms of how language exposure/participation predicts IQ, how it predicts picture/vocabulary recognition, and how it predicts third and fourth grade reading scores. It strongly suggests language that's developing before four years old is having about an 80 percent effect on reading scores in the fourth grade.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: Really? That's a staggering correlation. I've seen those answers, and they do condition the way I think about it, although it's at a different level and different focus than my work.

David Boulton: I understand that. I'm just saying that this is kind of a backdrop. On the one hand, we've got the neuroscientists saying something about what's effective for the brain’s ecology of learning. On another level, disconnected from the neuroscience directly, are these observations made with researchers actually coming into the home and recording and counting and assessing the words and vocabulary, and then correlating that with other research. These seem to overlap and dovetail well, they describe the criticalness of this early developmental window, in terms of the language exercise that is creating the brain's capacity but also in terms of what you might call the threshold of affect, the degree to which the child can handle frustration and confusion later in life without ‘shaming out’ - without becoming self-negative. Those are powerful pieces, and they're not well understood in education, yet.

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I believe some of this on an intuitive level and have seen a little bit of the research, but mainly summaries. I haven't looked at the research in any detail. I'm not sure that I have anything specific to say about it.

David Boulton: I understand. This seems to correlate with the effect of families and the effect of schools, and they seem to line up with each other in a certain way, even though that wasn't their intention, and they're coming from such different “scopes.”

Dr. Eric Hanushek: I'm willing to believe that. We do know there are huge differences in how well prepared kids come to the schools.