Liberal Talk Radio

Former Seattle Times education reporter Dick Lilly takes to the pages of Crosscut to argue for class-based tiebraking in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling:

As always with education, there’s no simple answer, but the Seattle School District has, broadly, two ways to increase efforts on behalf of low-income students who enter school academically behind, from the first day of kindergarten. The first, and a fairly direct, replacement for the race-based policy the Roberts court rejected would be school assignment preferences for the children from low-income families. The second would be significantly increasing the money spent in schools in low-income neighborhoods. The latter would require significant changes in the way the schools do business but might in the end be more effective.

Dramatically varying school quality among Seattle schools and schools throughout the region, as measured by student test scores, correlates closely with the income of families whose kids are enrolled. The higher the percentage of children qualifying for free- or reduced-price school lunches, with notable exceptions here and there, the lower the test scores. This has been a given since the Seattle Times laid out the data in the first of its annual school guides 10 years ago. The increasingly urgent question for education is how to serve low-income children, especially those enrolled in schools serving areas of concentrated poverty. How can these kids be brought up to middle-class achievement levels, at least in the basic skills of reading and math?

The question is part of a constant conversation in the education world. The answer you hear among parents, school administrators, and school board members is the good-hearted and wonderfully ambitious “make all schools good schools.” In Seattle, the Southeast Initiative to pump $1 million-plus into Aki Kurose Middle School, Rainier Beach High School, and others, as part of a new assignment plan expected to be in place by 2008-09, grows from that unassailable sentiment: Every neighborhood deserves good schools. The new plan could limit transfers out of Southeast Seattle neighborhoods.

You can’t just “make all schools good schools.” You need to actively change the incentive structure for the staff so that the hardest schools to fix also have the greatest rewards attached to improvement. As it is, the best teachers often flock to the suburbs, where the pay is better and the kids are mostly white, middle-class, and easy to teach: in other words, the best teachers go where they’re needed the least.

So you’d have to change those incentives, perhaps via merit pay. Merit pay is sort of controversial because it (a) induces teachers to “teach to the test” and (b) assumes that the tests are themselves accurate predictors of achievement to begin with. Barak Obama recently told a teachers union (which opposes the concept) that he’d like to try to find a way to make it work. Chris Dodd punched back, but his response was telling:

I fear that instituting a merit pay system may encourage teaching to the test and discourage teachers from working in schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students.

In other words, the incentives are wrong. So what you’d have to do is have some kind of conversion rate, whereby the merits are multiplied for poorer schools. For example, the Seattle Schools could implment a system whereby a teacher gets, say, a $1,000 bonus for improving test scores by, say, 10 points. But that $1,000 is then multiplied by the percentage of students on free or reduced-price lunches. If 75% of the kids are on reduced-price lunch, the teacher gets $750. If only 25% are, then he or she gets $250. Now all of a sudden you’d have teachers fighting to get the most disadvantaged kids in their class. And that’s how it should be.

Update: Mickey Kaus points to a NYT article on the increasing support for merit pay among teachers in certain states.