Small Schools, Tutoring, and Ohm's Law of Education

Last week MDRC released an impact study of New York's small public high school experiment that found graduation rates up by almost 10 percentage points--an enormous effect for such a large experiment. I also came across another experiment, in Florida, in which students who received tutoring demonstrated an astonishing 274-percent improvement on their reading assessments. In both cases, more concentrated attention from adults led to better student outcomes. 

My first job in education was as a tutor, and those days had a profound impact on the way I operated as a classroom teacher. There's no leaving a student behind when it's just the two of you at the tutoring table--you find exactly where the hangup is and try every method you can to explain the material until you find the one that clicks. And after tutoring multiple students on the exact same material you quickly learn how individualized students' learning experiences are, ergo how individualized instruction needs to be.

So my challenge, and every educator's challenge, is to look across my classroom knowing that there are 25 individual learning experiences in front of me, and to figure out how to unlock each of them more or less simultaneously. 

When you can't get feedback from each student on where they're missing you the way you can as a tutor, you have to learn to anticipate the common points of misconception. You try every modality you can think of. And formative assessment becomes your best friend.

When trying to figure out how to bring the 1-on-1 tutoring experience to 25 kids at a time, or as close to it as I could, as efficiently as I could, I came up with what I call Ohm's Law of Education.

Ohm's Law of Education is a modified version of Ohm's Law of Electricity, which states that electrical current across a medium (I) is equal to the electric potential (V) divided by the resistance of the medium (R). To generate more current, you can either increase the voltage or decrease the resistance. 

Ohm's Law of Education takes the same principles to state that the "current" of student learning is a function of the capacity and distractions of the educational environment. 

Capacity represents the richness of the learning environment and includes the teachers' knowledge of the content, their skill in helping students achieve the standards it sets out, the quality of the curriculum, and both the quality of learning opportunities and the time given to explore them. 

On the other hand, distractions include classroom disruptions, student disengagement, lack of order, and a lot of things students bring with them to the classroom such as hunger, illness, stress, and sleep deprivation. These things dilute the power of any level of capacity, and learning suffers.

Even at the level of an individual teacher, we can see how capacity and distraction work together to determine teacher effectiveness. We can each probably remember at least one teacher in our educational career whose incredible knowledge was wasted on their students because he or she could not keep students engaged. Other teachers may not have added any value to the curriculum by way of knowledge or skill but helped us get the most out of books and worksheets by running a tight ship that minimized distraction.

This gets back to my challenge to bring tutoring-level learning to a full classroom. How do I maximize the capacity of the learning environment while trying to bring the level of distraction down to that of the tutoring table, where a drifting mind can be identified and brought back in a second, there are no peers to impress with buffoonery, and the lesson stays at the exact level of the student's mastery?

Within-classroom strategies like differentiation, individualization, blended learning, group learning all try to get at this precise problem, and I think they are successful to the extent that they can replicate the concentrated capacity of the tutoring experience. 

Ohm's Law of Education is also the heart of school improvement. Where learning is the goal, reform efforts either seek to increase the capacity of the educational environment or decrease the distractions. These are the factors that determine the learning current. 

Teachers and Risk Aversion

Daniel Bowen, a graduate of Arkansas' education reform PhD program and now a post-doc at Rice, just published a study demonstrating the risk-aversion of aspiring teachers and a positive association between risk aversion and effectiveness. Education Economics is on an 18-month delay through my library access, so I have not read the full original text yet. A few of his former Arkansas colleagues have plugged the study today (Jay P. Greene on his blog, Michael McShane through AEI), and my comments are mostly based on their second-hand accounts.

Dan Lortie's 1965 ethnography Schoolteacher remains one of the most definitive pieces of research on teachers and teaching culture. His findings, including the risk-averse nature of teachers, inform my perception of almost every educational policy or effect thereof. For example, when I consider a policy involving incentives such as merit pay, I think of how that would interact with the general risk aversion and emphasis on psychic rewards that permeate the teaching workforce. Schoolteacher is fifty years old now, but despite how much the policy landscape has changed, hypotheses grounded in its depiction of teacher culture still predict the effects of education reforms with remarkable consistency. As valuable as that one book continues to be, continued research on the culture of teachers is clearly an undervalued tool in the crafting of more effective and efficient education policy, and I'm happy to see a study like Risky Business gain visibility.

Schoolteacher offers one explanation for the low risk tolerance of teachers, and I offer another also taken from sociological theory. Though they are not competing hypotheses, the policy and reform implications may be quite different.

Fear of the Unknown

Lortie hypothesizes that the aspiration to teach reflects an affinity for the context of teaching seen during one's own time as a student. People who liked their time in schools, liked what they saw their teachers doing, probably feel more drawn to the profession than those who hated it all. 

This explanation could be reinforced by risk aversion, since exposure to the work of teachers breeds a greater familiarity with teaching than any other profession during most students' young lives. For naturally risk-averse youngsters, the greater "fear of the unknown" presented by literally every other profession could make teaching the most attractive line of future work by default; they only have to like it enough prefer it to uncertainty. To the extent that familiarity with the nature of the work drives the relationship between teaching and risk tolerance, we may anticipate teachers to be resistant to any reform that challenges this familiarity (McShane's "implication #3"). 

Social Reproduction

Upwardly mobile individuals from lower-middle-class families, including first-generation college students, may seek low-risk professions like teaching out of necessity. These individuals may not be able to take on the risk of loans accrued in medical, law, or business schools, or the greater costs associated with moving to where these jobs are. Careers in these fields are competitive to begin with, but the risk of not finding a job only increases for individuals with little social capital. Large amounts of economic capital can help insulate more wealthy students from any financial risks created by loans or a protracted job search, while their greater social capital makes it more likely that they have influential contacts in their desired field as well as fields they see as fall-back opportunities.

By contrast to these other professions, teaching presents fewer barriers to entry, involves less debt, offers opportunities in almost every city (which opens the potential to live with family while getting established), and every high school graduate knows several teachers to serve as contacts and mentors even if they have few contacts in other fields. Seen this way, risk tolerance may be more of a reflection of one's socioeconomic circumstances than a static psychological trait. But the Risky Business study considers risk tolerance in a game with monetary consequences. This is a narrow conceptualization of risk tolerance that may not generalize to non-pecuniary outcomes like curricular change or experimenting with classroom technologies. 

Perhaps more importantly, consider the comparison group: the experiment compares aspiring teachers to students in law and business school, groups who have selected into massive amounts of initial debt and cut-throat job markets. It's not surprising that these students demonstrate greater risk-tolerance, but that may be because they come from environments that make it easier to take on such risks. This is certainly something I'll look to see if the authors address when I get access to the full article.

Takeaways

As this entire post shows, I think the relevant issues related to teachers' characteristic levels of risk tolerance have greater significance with regard to teacher recruitment than teacher performance.  

It is hard to tell if McShane's suggestion that "risk-loving" teachers might be enticed to the profession by merit pay scales and increased threat of accountability sanction is merely to provide a counter-point or something he actually believes could happen. Hopefully it is the former, as risk is something that is merely tolerated in return for potential gains. Given the choice of a guaranteed $100, or the chance to either win or lose $100, no one is "enticed" by the addition of risk. So, how much does the latter figure have to be before the risk becomes "worth it"? That depends on your risk tolerance; the more risk averse you are, the larger that number has to be.

This is the important point. If, as McShane acknowledges, merit pay scales and the increased threat of contract terminations for teachers and schools adds risks, the increases in freedom or earning potential have to be large enough to offset teachers' intolerance to the loss of certainty. That may involve increases in public costs in any environment, as even a highly risk-tolerant teacher will place some value certainty and expect any loss in this area to be offset by corresponding increases in other areas of value like earning potential or autonomy. The more a teacher values certainty, the greater the increases in other perks must be to offset an introduction of risk. The natural risk-aversion of our current teaching force, then, suggests that we've been able to get this labor at a discount by attracting teachers who put a relative premium on stability, which costs less to offer than salary increases.

This post has attempted to explain that discount. The familiarity with teaching that students gain during their K-12 careers might be the most effective recruiting tool the profession currently has, and the stability offered by the profession may help it compete for talented individuals in risk-averse socioeconomic positions. 

But I fear the current trajectory of education reforms, especially regarding teacher compensation and evaluation, is only likely to make the pool of aspiring teachers more risk-tolerant through a process of attrition, not addition. That is, these reforms add uncertainty to the future of the profession of teaching that may reduce the interest of more risk-averse candidates without pulling a single thrill-seeker from law, business, or medicine.

James' 2014 MLB Playoff Preference List

Wherein I rank the eight ALDS/NLDS teams in order from the team I'd most like to see win the World Series to the team I'd most hate to see win it. Explanations follow. Skip to the end for the simple list.

#7 vs. #8: The lesser-est of two evils

This annual exercise started in 2012, when the Texas Rangers failed to make the playoffs* after two straight World Series appearances. Naturally, the two teams that beat them in those series have trouble finding any love in my heart.

If you have enough baseball cognizance to read this post in the first place, you know that the 2011 World Series went quite differently than the 2010 World Series and would naturally engender a much deeper hatred for the opponent. You probably also know that the St. Louis Cardinals have the David Brent (Michael Scott) of fanbases--deluded by their own sense of greatness, desperate for affirmation and incapable of seeing how insufferable everyone else finds them.

So for the third straight year, my 8th-ranked team out of eight is the St. Louis Cardinals, and they are planted in that ranking so much more strongly than my #1 team is in theirs that no matter who the Cards would play in the World Series my primary interest will be to see them lose. That worked out OK for me last year. Simply put, the St. Louis Cardinals are my least favorite part about baseball.

The San Francisco Giants land in 7th, so the only way I'm pulling for them is if they meet the Cardinals in the NLCS, in which case I'm painting my body black and orange.

#5 vs. #6: The inescapable narrative

The next two teams on my preference list are the Nationals and Angels. While I have nothing against the Nationals/Expos, love that baseball is back in the capital, and dislike more about the Angels than any other Rangers' rival, there's no way that a series between the two could overcome the Trout vs. Harper hype narrative that's surrounded those two guys since they were both rookies (and Rookies of the Year) in 2012. And accepting now that I could never escape that polemic, I would absolutely be #TeamTrout. Except for the nights CJ Wilson pitched; I had a hard enough time rooting for that guy when he was on the Rangers. And I'd also want Pujols and Hamilton to go 0-for-50. But in a close call, I've got the Los Angeles Angels in my 5th spot, just ahead of the #6 Washington Nationals.

#3 vs. #4: Be true to your school
I'd be perfectly happy to see either the Angels or Nationals as MLB champions, but each of the teams in my top four are clubs that I'd be really excited about, and each for a number of reasons. But with this second tier, even if the reasons are deeper, there just aren't as many of them.

The Baltimore Orioles are carried into the top half of this list almost entirely by former Vanderbilt shortstop Ryan Flaherty. Flash was a personal favorite while he was at Vandy from 2006-2008. The six-foot-twenty shortstop played rock solid defense, hit for power and average, and always moved with the made-for-the-game swagger and grace you hear old Yankee fans describe when they talk about DiMaggio. After Flash, you have some guys I really respect in JJ Hardy and Adam Jones... and Nelson Cruz, who... well let's just not get into it. Their ballpark is great, though overrated in my opinion, and I struggle to listen to Gary Thorne on their TV broadcasts without hearing the phantom sounds of slapshots and bodychecks even if it's been 20 years since he called playoff hockey on ESPN.

And then there's the Detroit Tigers. It would be hard to pick between David Price and Ryan Flaherty as a Vanderbilt alumnus, but Detroit also has my favorite ballpark in all of baseball, nearly perfect uniforms, and several players I like. But the cases for those players are pretty weak. I loved Kinsler's defense in Texas, but his hitting popping out and baserunning getting picked off drove me nuts. Avila's alright, Martinez is alright... Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander are both all-time greats, and I like seeing Cooperstown plaques written in real time. But it all adds up to a lot of only moderately positive feelings.

In my head, I see this going to the Tigers. But these teams are actually playing each other in the ALDS, and I can't stop myself from cheering for the Orioles so far. That might change when David Price pitches in Game 3, but on the whole I've got the Orioles in number three and Tigers just behind them in fourth.

#1 vs. #2: 
I've loved listening to Vin Scully my entire baseball life, starting with Los Angeles Dodgers radio broadcasts in Arizona back before I could even read. When I first got MLB.tv in 2008, I'd usually put on Dodgers home games after the Rangers wrapped up just to have baseball on a little longer. The years since have included the rise of Kershaw, Kemp, Ethier and Gordon, Mannywood, the last few years of Orlando Hudson's golden glove, the rescue of Hanley from Miami, the arrivals of two of the most under-appreciated players of the 2000's in Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford, and Puig. Those have each been exciting developments and made the Dodgers an increasingly intriguing and likable team to me. But they are number two.

A 29-year drought is going to make the Kansas City Royals' bandwagon one of the hottest tickets in the country this fall, and the defensive, ex post facto justifications for jumping on it ("My favorite G.I. Joe was from Kansas City!") are going to grow insufferable if the Royals go on a run. And it's hard to tell where my reasons might fall, so I'll spare you all but one--my wife is from Kansas City and my in-laws still live there. That probably doesn't earn me a reserved seat on the bandwagon, but I'm happy to stuff myself in the luggage bin for this ride.

* One game play-in games are exciting, but they are not "the playoffs." If Peter turns you away from the Pearly Gates, you did not "go to heaven." I don't count the Rangers' 2012 play-in game as a playoff appearance, and I'm don't bother ranking teams until after the play-in games are over.

LIVE RESULTS (last updated 10/7)
1. Kansas City Royals
2. Los Angeles Dodgers
3. Baltimore Orioles
4. Detroit Tigers
5. Los Angeles Angels
6. Washington Nationals
7. San Francisco Giants
8. St. Louis Cardinals