What Informs Your Decisions?
Mike Mathieson
August 30, 2022
Although Duane and I would like to move on, it’s impossible not to write an article about our District leadership’s myopic focus on constructing a new building. In our Substack, we intend to research and explore different ideas from around the country and apply them locally: issues like how and if charter schools work, is it possible to create a Khan World School in Decatur, if new research from Roland Fryers should influence our learning environment, and what other districts are doing about cell phones (phew – at least we got this one in!). But, and we’ve said it before, this is 70 frickin’ million dollars we’re talking about – more money than our little district has ever seen, so even though we’d love to move in other directions, we just can’t get away from this conversation.
Additionally, comments like “a new building will help us raise test scores” and “a new building will help us recruit teachers to the district” makes us bristle. We certainly come with our own biases, but a lexicon of the last few years is “follow the science”, so what in “the science” could lead someone to make either of these claims? Intuition tells me that once a teacher gets in front of the classroom, the age of the building doesn’t really matter much, but anyone that knows me understands I have a bias towards frugality. Others, I assume, have a bias towards looking for easy answers for difficult questions. And others still, probably have a bias towards wanting to leave their (physical) mark on Decatur Public Schools and be able to point to a building and say, “I did that”. But what does the science say…
Let’s take the latter statement (“a new building will help us recruit teachers”) first because it’s easy address. There’s a lot of research lately on what motivates people to take and keep specific jobs. But while a good work environment, from a structural perspective, is important, it’s very low on the list. Location, money, community, autonomy, mastery, and purpose show up on lists created in the last decade in one form or the other, of why people take certain jobs, but, from my research, polished handrails simply are not that important. Furthermore, keep in mind that once a teacher gets into their classroom – the classroom is their work environment, and it hardly matters whether the building is 5 or 50 years old when you have 28 eleven-year-olds sitting in front of you.
OK, so what about the more important claim that a new building will help our students succeed? This is the bottom line, and if there’s significant evidence that this is true, I’d be one of the first people on board the Build-It bandwagon. One paper with a high number of citations regarding academic interventions to facilitate the success of low socioeconomic status students (SES) is a meta-analysis of most of the important studies in the area. The chart below summarizes the findings.
The blue dots show the weighted effect of the tested intervention, and the red bars show the margin for error. So, if a bar crosses over the zero-axis we cannot be statistically certain a given intervention works. It’s important to notice from this meta-analysis that:
Very few studies have shown any interventions help.
“Increased Resources” – which I assume to include things like new construction - seems to matter very little, less than 0.1 standard deviation, and the margin for error bumps up against zero.
The interventions – THE BEST FOUR – all require more and better teachers. The only thing you need to spend money on for these four interventions is more and improved teaching.
Another meta-analysis by R.L. Stewart in 2014, specifically looking for a correlation between school building condition and student achievement analyzed 42 studies and can be summarized by:
50% of the studies analyzed did not reveal a significant difference in student scores.
Additionally, moving kids to “better” school buildings (however you want to define that) has been studied extensively to determine if this type of intervention helps low SES students succeed. The results are mixed, and most of what I could find – and please trust me that I’m not cherry picking here - are not good. There are a few studies that show better/newly constructed schools help temporarily, but they’re not randomized and show small results – results that while positive, aren’t statistically significant. I think you would have to be in the architectural or construction industry to tout these results as significant. This article seems to sum up these type of study results better than I can:
Some studies have found positive associations (between new construction and improved leaning) while many others have failed to find such connections. Constructing new school buildings is often a multi-year project, affects only a subset of students in a district, and leads to changes in the school environments that affect students in ways that may not be immediately measurable. For these reasons, much of the prior work is very limited in its ability to determine the causal effects of new school buildings.
Then to get to the crux of what I want everyone to think about – what informs your decision? For the people that believe we should build another school, is it simply your intuition that a new school will allow the 15% of our elementary school population (who are lucky enough to attend the newly built school) to achieve better outcomes, or am I missing something in my research? From the academic research, I’m sure that more and better teachers will help our students have an increased opportunity for success. So, can you say with equal certainty that we should use our CARES money on new construction?
I’m guessing some people will read this article and say, “OK, it’s easy to sit in your house and complain, and I agree that we need more teachers, but what about the nationwide Teacher Hiring Crisis?” Well first, we don’t have as much of a hiring crisis in Decatur as we do a retention crisis. We’ve written about this before and we haven’t seen any evidence yet that anything is being done to address the retention issue. In the Decatur’s Teacher Retention Problem article, we mentioned two solutions, with the second one asking the administration to use CARES money to help with the hiring. We now believe that along with an increased budget for hiring, we should do something to raise teacher’s wages – a complicated proposal given the CARES money funding cliff (so read on) - but more money will help alleviate the teacher shortage problem. Also, there’s some evidence that the narrative that we are in a national teacher shortage crisis may be overblown. Just last week, The Atlantic published an article titled There is No National Teacher Shortage, and makes the claims that “The public narrative (of a shortage) has gotten way ahead of the data and is even misleading in most cases.”
To wrap up and be fair, I don’t want to complain without giving you an opportunity to criticize me for what I would do if I had a leadership position in our district, so here’s my plan:
I would designate one person on my staff, probably the CFO, to spearhead research into how to annuitize as much of the $70 million as possible. In this context I mean - find ways to spend the money now so we can reduce our expenditures in the future, allowing more money for the line item that matters most for the success of our students – more and better teachers.
Create an excel spreadsheet of how every other district in the state has spent their CARES money. There are some creative things being done in the state and across the country with CARES money and we should understand all of them. For example, Anna-Jonesboro asked the legislature if they can use $700,000 of their funding to pay “most of the school’s non-certified employees for one year to help balance the school’s budget”. This is clearly a way to annuitize the CARES money so their future income can be used in other ways.
Meet with government representatives – State legislative branch staff – to help determine how we can creatively annuitize the money by taking care of maintenance costs well into the future - pre-paying any expenses, etc. so we can afford to pay bonuses to help hire new teachers and increase the pay of existing teachers without going into debt.
Use this information to determine how and how much we can spend on the things that matter most to help low SES children succeed. More teachers = more opportunity for success. Better teachers = more opportunity for success. Happier teachers = more opportunity for success. There is simply no doubt in my mind that the best thing the state of Illinois could do is allow us to annuitize the $70 million (in some form) to yield 6% a year and help us pay $10,000 more per teacher per year. This would allow us to attract and retain more and better teachers to our district. That’s it – someone at the district level and the state government level needs to champion this cause. Imagine if we had a $10,000 per year payment advantage on other districts.
Finally, look at your foundational principles – what do you want to accomplish? Is it to leave a legacy of turning a low SES district with relatively poor test scores into one that offers hope for the children to flourish, or is it a building you can point to and say, “I built that”? The first one is very, very hard, and the second is much easier (well, it turns out, not that easy – right New Dennis School Advocates?).
And even though I said “finally” on my last item, I’m going to add this one caveat… If the Board can’t be convinced (it is the Board’s role as elected representatives of the community to set the broader direction for the district) to put time and effort in the hard job of creatively moving money to hire more teachers and pay existing teachers more, or if there is a significant amount of money left after the teacher work is done and after doing all the necessary repairs to all of the buildings in the district, then and only then would I acquiesce to building a new building.