Eric Hanushek
Eric Alan Hanushek is a US economist who has written prolifically on public policy with a special emphasis on the economics of education. Since 2000, he has been a Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank located at Stanford University in California. He was awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2021.
Hanushek advocates using economic analysis to improve student performance. He has authored numerous, highly cited articles on the effects of class size reduction, high-stakes accountability, Parental Education, teacher effectiveness, and other education related topics. In a 1971 paper he introduced the concept of evaluating teacher effectiveness on the basis of student learning gains. This idea is the basis of value-added assessments of teacher quality. In his most recent book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations, Hanushek concludes that the quality of education is causally related to economic growth.
Hanushek is a periodic contributor to the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal and also appears in court cases as a paid expert witness testifying for the state in lawsuits brought by plaintiffs attempting to equalize disparities in funding of school districts.
Activities, appointments, and awards
Hanushek received a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Air Force Academy in 1965 and a PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1961 to 1974. Hanushek held teaching positions at the U.S. Air Force Academy and at Yale University and was named professor of economics and public policy at the University of Rochester from 1978 to 2000.Hanushek is a member of the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, whose members, including Caroline M. Hoxby and Paul E. Peterson, support school accountability, teacher incentives, and charter schools and vouchers. Hanushek was a presidential appointee to the Board of Directors of the National Board for Education Sciences that approves the research priorities of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences and was the board chair from 2008 to 2010. From 2011 to 2013, he served on the Equity and Excellence Commission of the U.S. Department of Education. He is a research professor at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research and is the area coordinator for Economics of Education, CESifo Research Network. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor. In the U.S. federal government, Hanushek has served as deputy director of the Congressional Budget Office, senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, and senior economist for the Cost of Living Council. At the state level, he has been appointed to state education advisory commissions by the governor of California and of Texas.
Hanushek was the recipient of an award for scholarship from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2004.
Personal life
Hanushek is married to Margaret Raymond, director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. CREDO has issued numerous studies of the performance of charter schools in the United States.As expert witness
Since the early 1970s, when plaintiffs have filed lawsuits seeking to overthrow school funding based on local property taxes as inequitable, Hanushek has been called to testify as an expert witness in defense of the state. He testifies that the problem with schools is not so much lack of funds as inefficiency and asserts that increasing appropriations can be wasteful, since his analyses show that more funding produces inconsistent outcomes. Instead of seeking to equalize funding among districts, Hanushek recommends introducing value-added testing to identify and remove underperforming teachers, greater accountability, and vouchers and charter schools to introduce market-based parental choice. He labels those who oppose these measures as wanting to protect special interests and sacred cows and accuses them of wanting to maintain the status quo. In particular, Hanushek identifies teachers' unions among the entrenched or special interests that oppose the measures he recommends. The 20 school funding trials at which Hanushek has testified over the years include Serrano v. Priest in California, Somerset County Board of Education v Hornbeck in Maryland, and Abbott v. Burke in New Jersey. His amicus brief was cited in the 2009 five-to-four U.S. Supreme Court decision of Horne v. Flores. Citing Hanushek and Lindseth in a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court held that in evaluating the actions of the state, attention should focus on student outcomes rather than on inequalities of spending and other inputs to schools.In 2011 Hanushek was the central expert witness for the defense in the highly publicized case of Lobato vs. State of Colorado, named for Taylor Lobato, who in 2005 was a middle-school student when her parents filed a suit that claimed her San Luis Valley school district was underfunded compared to wealthier districts. In that case, Denver District Judge Sheila Rappaport issued a 189-page decision rejecting the state's arguments, writing that: "Dr. Hanushek's analysis that there is not much relationship in Colorado between spending and achievement contradicts testimony and documentary evidence from dozens of well-respected educators in the State, defies logic, and is statistically flawed." In 2013, the Colorado Supreme Court reversed Judge Rappaport's opinion and overturned the lower court's opinion in its entirety.
For his part, Hanushek maintains that state and federal court decisions "of the type we describe" may be justified because they "may persuade the legislature to adopt the more ‘disruptive’ reforms that may actually lead to improvements in student achievement."
Research
Hanushek's Ph.D. thesis introduced a model that he termed an "educational production function" into the analysis of education issues. This model postulated a clear distinction between inputs to education – including family, neighborhood, and peer factors – and outcomes of education – typically measured by student achievement, continuation in school, or ultimately income and employment. According to Hanushek, when placed in the common value-added form, his model identifies the impact of added resources, given prior achievement and other non-school factors.The relationship between resources and class size and academic performance
His 1986 paper, "The Economics of Schooling", reported finding an inconsistent relationship between school resources and student outcomes. It provoked numerous responses. For this reason he is associated, especially by his detractors, with the slogan "money doesn't matter". One critic, Larry Hedges, used meta-analysis of Hanushek's own figures to contend that $100 spent per pupil would in fact raise student achievement by one-fifth of a standard deviation. Between 1990 and 2010, however, spending per pupil adjusted for inflation rose by $3500, while reading scores of 17-year-olds actually fell. Hanushek responded to critics in "Money might matter somewhere." Hanushek maintains that how money is spent is more important than how much money is spent, now a commonly accepted interpretation of the data. He suggests that money allocated ought to be spent implementing the policies with proven efficacy, such as replacing teachers who fail to raise test scores and closing schools which persistently fail to produce reasonable student achievement. Citing with approval Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, he argues that court decisions over funding adequacy, may create a policy ‘window’ in which "judicial cover is provided for legislative activities and a variety of remedies are put forward. These ‘windows’ have been mainly used to push through higher funding, but there is no reason that court decisions could not also open a ‘window’ during which other reforms, such as those discussed in this book, might also be enacted."Hanushek's other claim, that class size has no consistent effect on educational performance, is vehemently disputed by Alan Krueger, among others. The debate is summed up in Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein The class size debate. See also the peer-reviewed assessment of the evidence in Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Dominic J. Brewer, Adam Gamoran, and J. Douglas Willms, "Class size and student achievement." Psychological Science in the Public Interest 2, no. 1 1–30
Hanushek explains his position this way:
The discussion whether school resources are systematically related to school quality and to school achievement has tended toward a battle of slogans "Money matters" or "Money doesn't matter."... It is tautological to say that we will get good performance if we spend the money wisely. Today the existing knowledge base does not ensure that any added funds will, on average, be spent wisely. That is true even if some schools may spend their funds wisely.As an alternative to increasing funding for public schools as a way to boost student performance, Hanushek recommends holding schools accountable and assessing teacher effectiveness.
Effect of teacher and administrator quality on learning gains
Hanushek concludes that teacher quality is by far the most important factor in raising student achievement and, moreover, that teacher quality is not closely related to such factors as teacher salaries, educational background, or experience. In considering teacher policies, test scores should be one metric by which the quality of teachers should be measured, Hanushek contends.In contrast to James Coleman, who in the 1960s had suggested that schools and teachers had little effect on student performance, Hanushek introduced the idea of judging teacher effectiveness based on the learning gains of students. Hanushek's 1992 study of inner-city children showed that disadvantaged pupils taught by good teachers gained one-and one-half years of learning, as opposed to only six months when taught by poor teachers – that is, a difference of a full school year. This finding he maintained had highly significant policy implications.
Hanushek's approach underlies the development of "value-added assessment" methods of teacher effectiveness, which uses statistical analysis of student achievement information to evaluate teacher performance. When applied in teacher personnel decisions, value added assessment has been highly controversial. In 2010, the value added rankings for more than 6,000 teachers were published in the Los Angeles Times, resulting in complaints by teachers and their unions that they were being subjected to public shaming. The New York Times also subsequently published such measures for their local teachers. Nonetheless, a significant number of states now require that teacher evaluations include consideration of student achievement and in some cases require the use of value added measures.
In a series of papers, Hanushek argued that replacing the least effective 5–8 percent of teachers with an average teacher could lead to dramatic gains in achievement for U.S. students. By his calculations, average U.S. PISA scores would increase to the level of Canada, or maybe even Finland, and that higher U.S. growth would lead to substantial economic gains. These arguments have led to a continuing and contentious debate. One side has argued that this analysis supports arguments for improving teacher evaluations and for eliminating teacher tenure. The other side has argued that it is not possible to fire yourself to the top.
Hanushek's analyses of teacher value-added and of the impact of teacher effectiveness on economic outcomes of students were central to the California court case of Vergara v. California, a case in which he subsequently testified for the plaintiffs. That court case challenged the constitutionality of the teacher tenure and the teacher dismissal statutes in California. In June 2014 Judge Ralph M. Treu issued his ruling in the case, finding that the statutes in question were unconstitutional. This ruling was subsequently appealed by the California Teachers Association and by Governor Jerry Brown. A follow-on suit was filed in New York State.
Princeton University economist Jesse M. Rothstein has described the use of value-added measurement for evaluating teacher performance, recommended by Hanushek as early as 1971, as conceptually deeply flawed, since value-added scores assume that students are randomly assigned to teachers, whereas in the real world it is almost never the case for students to be randomly assigned to teachers or schools. "Non-random assignment of students to teachers can bias value-added estimates of teachers’ causal effects," Rothstein writes. Daniel F. McCaffrey and Thomas Kane of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had published studies supportive of Hanushek's contentions, as have Raj Chetty et al.
In addition to measuring teachers, Hanushek has also applied his outcome-based approach to measuring the effectiveness of school principals, whom he states also greatly impact student achievement – through their role in selecting and retaining good teachers. This research appeared as working paper "Estimating the effects of leaders on public sector productivity. The case of school principals", published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The same authors also issued a more general article, "School Leaders Matter", explaining their conclusions in the Hoover Institute magazine Education Next 13: 1. In a review, Margaret Terry Orr agreed that principals can have positive effects but she questioned whether value added methods could ever adequately measure their performance, faulting the authors for using "sloppy terminology" and ignoring "a large body of research."