An expert's view of education: TCTA talks with Dr. Darvin Winick

The nameplate on the desk reads, in somewhat gothic lettering, “Ancient Sage of Public Education,” so we had clearly come to the right place to get a broad and expert view of the meaning of recent and heightened criticism of public education and teachers. TCTA recently met with renowned education researcher Dr. Darvin Winick. Dr. Winick’s work at the national level includes serving as a member and former chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Closer to home, Dr. Winick helped found the Texas Business and Education Coalition, an Austin-based group that has played an influential role in shaping and promoting education legislation in the state, and currently serves on the board. He also serves as president of Winick & Associates and is a senior research fellow in the college of education at the University of Texas at Austin. A psychologist and career organizational consultant, he has been active in Texas education policy since the early 1980s, and graciously agreed to meet with TCTA to discuss trends and share his observations.

TCTA: Is public education in the United States, and particularly in Texas, performing as poorly as some critics would have us believe?

DW: If you look at national trends over the last 30 years, which the National Assessment Governing Board has done, you will find that students generally perform better now than they did 30 years ago, with 9-year-olds (4th grade) showing the most improvement. That’s particularly impressive given the significant demographic changes over the same time period, since the overall trend lines are an average.

Additionally, there’s no evidence that other countries perform better than the U.S. This is largely because no other country disaggregates its student performance data like the U.S. does (reporting student performance results by student subgroup). So, really the best we can do at this point is to look at how, for example, Asian-American kids do in American schools compared to Asian kids in Hong Kong and Singapore; where we can get comparable data, we find that they do about the same.

TCTA: What about student performance in Texas?

DW: There are two answers to that question. One is “pretty good” when speaking about how well Texas does compared to other states. [Note: Among the 18 urban districts that participated in the 2009 reading NAEP, the Austin ISD and Houston ISD scores were higher than the scores for 4th and 8th graders in large cities nationally.] The other, though, is not so good, in that the achievement gap is still wide and is not shrinking dramatically.

Also noteworthy is that Texas is so far ahead in terms of disaggregating data and accountability, that other states are just now starting to catch up, making it look like Texas is losing its edge.

TCTA: Do you find that the recent rounds of teacher bashing are more vitriolic than in the past?

DW: I think it’s certainly more public. I don’t think bashing teachers is constructive. Teachers, for the most part, are doing the best they can.

What I think has happened, though, is that we’ve had this convergence of three factors that make it look like public education is performing more poorly than it is. The first is that education entitlement expectations have risen dramatically in a short period of time. It used to be that all that was expected was an elementary school education, and now the expectation is college. In that same time period, the demographics of our country have also changed dramatically, as reflected in our student population. Lastly, due to the loss of a captive market for teachers when opportunities for women increased, you have spread the talent pool over more opportunities.

TCTA: What about the recent focus on schools being “dropout factories”?

DW: Dropouts have been a problem in education for a long time. It’s just that we didn’t perceive this as a problem or know enough about it. This is similar to what I was talking about regarding the rise in education entitlement expectations – it used to be that an 8th grade education was adequate for many students, so if a student disappeared after 8th grade, no one questioned that and the kids usually went out and found jobs. Now, they can’t get jobs with that level of education.

TCTA: Back to teachers, what do you think of the recent push to evaluate, pay and fire teachers based on student performance?

DW: Like most other work situations, it’s very difficult to place the success or failure of the “product” on any one person. That’s why, in the private sector, performance pay is typically done on a “unit” basis, not an individual basis. Translated to education, that would look something like a grade-level team of teachers being paid based on how well the students in that grade performed that year. The teacher impact on student performance is about 1/3, and in industry you only pay people for what’s within their control. Another point to make about pay in the private sector is that it is differentiated based on differing responsibilities – this is not so much the case in education.

I really think one of the biggest problems for teachers is that they’re being constantly barraged with wave after wave of the next big education program/initiative, very little of which has been grounded in research. So they’re constantly trying out one thing and then hit with another, and none of it works very well. We don’t have a good system to research the good things and the negative side effects of various programs. Ideally, managers should set goals, then teachers should figure out how to reach them.

TCTA: If you could make a change in Texas public schools, what would it be?

DW: “Function follows funding.” We need to take a more serious look at school productivity, including better information on what works economically as well as what works educationally. Financial accountability in schools is still random, though it’s likely to be the next wave of reform.

Posted: 06/10/10