Curriculum vs. teacher quality and Success for All

Andy Rotherham (www.eduwonk.com) replied to my last email with some wise comments:

On the teacher quality point, it might actually be some of both: Curriculum and teacher quality.  E.D. Hirsch argues in his new book “The Knowledge Deficit” that other countries that outperform us don’t have markedly better teacher quality than we do but do have a more explicit curriculum.   Hirsch says, in other words, that you can have more uniform outcomes if you work along both dimensions:  Teacher quality and curriculum.   The extent of each is ultimately an empirical question and at either extreme it would be absurd (e.g., a system of the brightest just tossed out there or the dumbest trying to deliver even the most explicit and rich curriculum) but perhaps there is a “sweet spot” and he’s right that improving curriculum could lessen the “hunt for heroes” that we’re doing now and provide more scalable policies in the context of today’s teacher labor market and probably the likely labor market in the future even if we do make some strides on quality.

Andy is right and I did not mean to underemphasize the importance of a good curriculum.  In fact, to the extent that a program like Success for All is primarily a curriculum-based one, getting the right curriculum may be as important -- and, practically speaking, much more DO-ABLE in the short term -- than making dramatic improvements in the quality of teachers and principals. 

 

As an example of the impact Success for All can have in a short period of time, see the article I sent around in February about Joel Greenblatt's program at one public school in Queens, How Is a Hedge Fund Like a School?: http://www.newyorkmetro.com/news/businessfinance/15958/index.html

Today, thanks to Joel Greenblatt’s friendly takeover, P.S. 65Q is a turnaround story worthy of a Harvard B-school case study. Perhaps no school in New York City has ever bounded so swiftly from abject failure to unqualified success. From 2001 to 2005, the proportion of fourth-graders passing the state’s standardized reading test doubled, rising from 36 to 71 percent of the class—and since then, the students’ performance has only gotten better. Nearly every child who has been at the school for three years or more now reads and does math at their proper level or beyond—even the special-ed kids. Last spring, the school was one of fourteen statewide to win the public-school version of the Nobel Prize: a Pathfinder Award for improved performance. The city schools that usually win are in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods like the Lower East Side or Fort Greene—what one P.S. 65Q administrator calls “God’s country.”...

But Greenblatt’s plan is more ambitious. He wants to create an effective and affordable public-school prototype that could be franchised citywide—and fast. “I’m an investor,” he says. “I spend my time trying to figure out whether a business model works or not. I wanted to find a model that worked and roll it out.”

P.S. 65Q is the first school off the line. There, Greenblatt has expanded the Success for All program, brought in sophisticated data-analysis tools to track each child’s progress, and hired a staff of outside tutors to step in quickly when kids need help. But what makes the success of P.S. 65Q especially remarkable is how little, relatively, it has cost. The extra $1,000 per child Greenblatt has invested amounts to less than a 10 percent increase over the approximately $12,500 that the city spends on average per child—and well below what some private schools pay for the same kind of results. “Given all the negative costs of not educating the kids—more crime, fewer taxpayers, less productive people—it was less than free,” Greenblatt says.