{"id":1741,"date":"2009-10-14T11:19:04","date_gmt":"2009-10-14T15:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1741"},"modified":"2009-10-14T11:19:04","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T15:19:04","slug":"the-comparability-fly-in-the-ouchiprincipal-autonomy-ointment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1741","title":{"rendered":"The comparability fly in the Ouchi\/principal-autonomy ointment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday from a “stakeholders” meeting (I think at the USDOE), Charlie Barone tweets<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Richard Laine of Wallace Foundation: forthcoming Rand study will show [principal] autonomy in hiring a key factor in student achievement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve been expecting something like this for a while, not because I’m connected to a RAND insider (I’m not) but because this is the obvious new version of decentralization form that would marry the 1980s-90s site-based management fad with new managerial fads in education. <\/p>\n

To some extent I am attracted to Bill Ouchi’s argument about principal autonomy leading to lower total student load. Ouchi’s claims about total student load is essentially one of Ted Sizer’s central arguments from Horace’s Compromise<\/i>, that the number of students a teacher sees is a key factor in the ability to push student achievement. But… and here’s a fairly important but<\/i>… Ouchi’s work is tantalizing rather than definitive (because it has not be replicated substantially in terms of total student load), and the temptation to manage large urban districts as “portfolios” with quasi-independent school-level management may push a single form of decentralization at the cost of comparability in expenses and access to great teachers.<\/p>\n

What the heck do I mean by that? In a sentence, we may not want principals to have complete autonomy in a task where they have relatively weak skills: knowing which novice teachers are going to be great teachers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

Everyone and her or his grandmother is focusing on the problem of
\nwhere senior teachers work. This is an intellectual sleight of hand if
\nyou simultaneously argue that teachers with seniority are taking
\nadvantage of contracts with seniority privileges on transfer to avoid
\nschools who need them and also insinuate that experience means nothing.
\nLet me get this straight: we need to prevent experienced teachers from
\nexploiting labor-market choice to move to schools with more comfortable
\nteaching situations because… they’re not inherently any better than
\nteachers with only a few years of experience? This is an inconsistency
\nripe for Jon Stewart-like treatment. <\/p>\n

More important than
\nthe intellectual sleight of hand is the way that this argument ignores
\nan opportunity for a simple but politically sensitive intervention we
\ncould make that could simultaneously improve the lives of poor children
\nand new teachers: create regional new-teacher clearinghouses and
\nmatching services. Here’s the thought experiment: Far from
\ndecentralizing, I think it would be a healthy system for schools to
\nrequire new teachers go into a large regional market where vacancies
\nfor relatively new teachers (e.g., those with fewer than three years of
\nexperience) would be balanced with a matching process akin to matching
\nof med-school graduates to residencies. This would require collective
\nbargaining and regional agreements between districts (or changes to
\nstatute), but here’s the idea:<\/p>\n

Brand-new teacher’s perspective: A
\nnew teacher registers with the regional teaching market clearinghouse,
\nwith all of the stuff you’d want applicants to provide. The
\nclearinghouse is directly tied to vacancies in the region, and that
\nwould probably include multiple districts in most parts of the country.
\nThe clearinghouse matches teachers to jobs for the first year. The
\nteachers and administrators are told, explicitly, “This is a one-year
\narrangement. In the second year, the teacher is headed to a new school,
\nand the administrator provides an evaluation knowing that the teacher
\nis not coming back to that school until at least two years down the
\nroad.” And that’s what happens. At the end of the first year, the
\nclearinghouse matches jobs to teachers who want to continue teaching
\nand whom the first-year administrators recommend continue. Same with
\nthe end of the second year. And the clearinghouse’s job is to make sure
\nthat by the end of a new teacher’s third year, that teacher has worked
\nin multiple settings, with different characteristics of students (at
\nleast within the range of the region), in areas of the teacher’s
\ndocumented expertise (i.e., no out-of-field matches). <\/p>\n

At the end
\nof Year 3? Open market in the spring, in most places, and
\nadministrators wanting to hire on the open market must hire teachers
\nwith at least three years’ experience — in other words, teachers for
\nwhom there is a record of evaluations from different administrators and
\nfor whom there is a record of performance for students in different
\nsettings (within the range of the region’s student population). Schools
\nare allowed to hire teachers who worked in their schools before… if
\nthe now-third-year teacher wants to work there again. <\/p>\n

Benefit
\nto teachers: first-year teachers stuck with horrible administrators (or
\ngenerally toxic environments) know that they’ll be moving on if they
\nsurvive. They’ll get experience with multiple settings where they’ll be
\nable to demonstrate their chops. At the end of their third year,
\nthey’ll have some variation in experience with administration to be
\nable to judge people better when applying in an open-market situation.
\nDisadvantage to teachers: if you happen to get lucky and get a great
\njob in Year One, you have to move on…. and let another new teacher
\nget the benefit of that experience. <\/p>\n

Benefit to
\nadministrators: because new teachers are forced to move on after a
\nyear, honest evaluations are less likely to result in social
\nbacklashes. When you hire on the open market, you’ll know you’ll have
\nevaluations and (where this is gathered) other performance data that is
\nfrom school settings with a range of student populations. Disadvantage:
\nyou don’t get to hire absolutely new teachers; you get whom you get,
\nand if you were great spotters of talent, or you think you’re better
\nthan the average principal at spotting good talent, you’ll be upset. <\/p>\n

(Personally, I think I would prefer this as an administrator: if you’ve read Moneyball<\/i>,
\nyou know the sabremetricians’ rule of thumb: you can predict a baseball
\nplayer’s professional performance from college experience, but someone
\nstraight out of high school is just a raw bet without college
\nexperience. Why would you want<\/i> the authority to make hires in a
\nsituation where you’re almost guaranteed to be a worse judge of
\ntalent\/skill than any other personnel situation? Then again, I’m sure
\nmany principals think of themselves like the [very poorly-predicting]
\nold scouts of baseball, making seat-of-the-pants judgments.)<\/p>\n

Advantages
\nfor systems: See advantages for administrators above. In addition, you
\nhave lower risk with variation in administrators’ skills in talent
\njudgment, while principals would still have the autonomy to pick more
\nexperienced teachers, after they pick up enough of a record for
\nadministrators to see who has more talent. You could also get
\ndevelopment of evaluation skills in a regional context without
\ndiseconomies of scale. If clearinghouses have to track teachers, they
\ncould also be tasked with additional evaluation responsibilities across
\na region. Advantage for relatively poor systems: you know that
\nwealthier districts will not be able to be as much of a magnet for new
\nteachers, because of regional rotation, and you could push
\nadministrators to do what is necessary to convince teachers that they
\nwant to return to your district after their initial three-year rotation
\nis done. Disadvantages: there would need to be legal agreements to
\ncover this, and there would be some logistical challenges in
\nidentifying vacancies (and making sure those vacancies are reported
\naccurately and promptly) as well as the operation of a clearinghouse.
\nSchool districts would have to delegate hiring authority for some of
\ntheir jobs to a regional body, and if school systems really thought
\nthat they were hot stuff in terms of talent scouting, that might be
\nhard to swallow. (See above and Moneyball<\/i> on the egos of baseball scouts and possibly school administrators.) Disadvantage for wealthy districts: poof<\/i>
\ngoes your advantage in recruiting brand-new and relatively-new
\nteachers, because they’ll spend some time in your districts but also
\nsome time in poorer districts.<\/p>\n

Now, the payoff in terms of
\ndebates about comparability: a regional new-teacher
\nclearinghouse\/matching process would instantly equalize a significant
\npart of the teaching staff across a region, because of rotation among
\njobs and districts. Yes, there would still be an advantage of wealthier
\ndistricts in attracting teachers with three or more years of
\nexperience, but poorer districts would know that they at least have a
\nshot of persuading new teachers that they can make a good career inside
\na district… if the relatively new teachers have an experience that is
\nsupportive. <\/p>\n

Remember that this is a thought experiment: I don’t
\nknow of any places with regional new-teacher clearinghouses\/matching
\nservices, and I dreamed it up out of whole cloth (plus some inspiration
\nfrom what happens with med-school students). But I think it points out
\na structural problem with giving principals entire autonomy: with
\ncomplete autonomy, there is no balancing out of regional needs.
\nEquality of opportunity would depend entirely on the skills of
\nindividual principals, and while principals are extraordinarily
\nimportant, that’s putting a heck of a lot of eggs in a single basket.
\nIf you care about making sure that a broad range of students have
\naccess to great teachers, there are serious dangers in the Ouchi
\nprincipal-autonomy approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday from a “stakeholders” meeting (I think at the USDOE), Charlie Barone tweets, Richard Laine of Wallace Foundation: forthcoming Rand study will show [principal] autonomy in hiring a key factor in student achievement. I’ve been expecting something like this for a while, not because I’m connected to a RAND insider (I’m not) but because this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-s5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}