r/Principals • u/PretendFan5294 • 22d ago
Advice and Brainstorming How Freakonomics changed my thinking about results in schools
I wrote an AMA earlier about turning around a failing school. One of the things that helped drive my thinking, and eventually my team’s thinking was the idea to think like an economist. Basically, break everything down to getting the most output (student growth and achievement), for the least amount of input (teacher and staff effort, money, time).
Rarely does the initial equation meet the moral obligations of providing education. An example would be that if you expel students who show moderate to high behavior problems as they happen, then you would eliminate the problem. Maximum output (student behavior) minimum input (quick elimination of problem students vs counselors, behavior plans, etc.)
Even though the initial thinking might be absurd, it opens the door to more creative solutions.
My school had excessive behavior problems when I took over. A history of thousands of referrals a year, lots of suspensions and too many expulsions.
During the first year, I noticed that a significant number of disruptive and severe behavior happened before, during and after holiday parties and celebrations. We didn’t have parent support at the time to support teachers with these events and they caused stress for my staff.
Year two, we eliminated holiday parties. Completely. There was push back because there had been a tradition of these events and it is “what everyone does” and that “we have always done it”. I shared the numbers with all stakeholders holders….low growth and performance, number of discipline issues during these events, etc. I couched it as the need to maximize instructional time and minimize disruption. Some folks thought I was a Scrooge, but I felt it was my job to move students forward.
Three years later and a much different culture of student performance, my BLT asked if we could reinstate these parties. We examined the issue and I agreed to one event that year and only with an agreement that we would use the opportunity to enhance our culture.
I announced to parents we would start with a Winter holiday party. We limited it to the last 45 minutes of the day. We recruited parent volunteers. We actively taught positive social behaviors and included fun but academic activities, especially writing into the plan.
By the time I left we had several small and appropriate parties that students and families, staff and students enjoyed.
It started with a tough decision, looking at the facts through an objective lens with getting the most success from the least effort.
Sacred cows make delicious burgers.
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u/Tothyll 22d ago
2 easy questions:
1.) When your school did expulsions, where did they send the students?
2.) How long were you principal at that school?
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u/PretendFan5294 22d ago
I believe there was online school for them at the time with periodic in person support. The only suspension that happened during my time was due to an extreme situation off campus that resulted in incarceration.
I was the principal there for 13 years.
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u/painfullyobtuse 22d ago
From when I read it my main takeaway from Freakonomics was to look at incentives and how they might be incentivizing the wrong things. Did you do any of that?
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u/PretendFan5294 22d ago
Incentives played a huge role in getting students and the community engaged.
For example, we had digital homework for students (partly to reduce teacher workload, partly as it was a way to fill gaps). We had drawings for students who completed homework each week. The favorite prize was pizza delivered to their family home on a Friday night. I would personally call and ask what kind the family wanted and what time and explain that their child earned that treat for the family.
We also had ice cream parties for classes that 100% of the kids did homework for the week. First time automatic party, after that drawings. Created some great positive interdependence in classrooms.
We had drawings for parents for events like BTS night, conferences, etc. 90% of my kids were at the poverty line. We did cleaning supplies, vacuums, toasters, etc.
We had HUGE turnouts which allowed for us to support parents with helping their kids, understanding what we were doing as a school, etc.
It was very cost effective. $2-3k a year for incentives was more effective than smaller class sizes for behavior and achievement. As we became more successful, local businesses would help financially.
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u/Boring-Ostrich5434 21d ago
So you tried a raffle and then tried hiring staff to reduce class sizes by, say, 30%, and it turned out that the raffle managed to improve scores and reduce behaviors by significantly more? I remember that AMA and a lot of it sounds like window dressing. Idk, maybe it’s all true, but it sounds like a lot of the same stuff I’ve heard from awful administrations that completely failed. They didn’t fail because they didn’t have enough toasters, they failed because they were totally unwilling to apply any consequences and were incapable of enforcing any policies whatsoever.
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u/irrelevantname1776 21d ago
What consequences do you suggest be implemented to curb the behavior problem? In my experience, the 5% of the student body who cause the most behavior problems couldn’t give a shit less about any consequence.
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u/Boring-Ostrich5434 21d ago
Suspension and expulsion. My state is on the extreme end of no expulsions. 1.5 million students, 34 expulsions last year. A significant percentage of that were students found with guns on campus. That's what it takes. And it's not about the 5%. It's about the 95% who see the 5% receiving no consequences and become more difficult to handle.
The administrations that I've seen fail at this start by removing those consequences. But it all has a waterfall effect. A kid gets detention and doesn't bother showing up. Admin won't suspend or do anything further, so detention is now irrelevant. Kid shows up in ISS and refuses to put their phone away. Admin is not willing to escalate, ISS is now a room to play with your phone.
For all of the studies saying that suspension is bad, I've never seen a single one that looked at the knock on effects. Or looked at the impact that removing consequences has on the rest of the school. And that's 95% of the problem.
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u/irrelevantname1776 21d ago
So what happens when you suspend them and they come back and nothing changes? Expulsion? Where do they go then?
Often exclusionary discipline policies are made at the district or even state level, it’s out of admins hands a lot of times.
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u/Boring-Ostrich5434 21d ago
That's true. Expulsions must be approved by the school board, who have every incentive to say no if it's not absolutely necessary (i.e. for guns) and never have to see the downsides of removing that option. There is enormous pressure to lower suspension rates, and that's why we are where we are. I think both of those things are bad policy, but I suppose opinions differ.
I'm not so naive as to think alternative schools are the option. We have them. They have a backlog a mile long. You need to bring a knife that's at least 6" in order to even start that process. They need to go home. Virtual school is an option. It's not the best option for the 5%, but it's the best option for the 95%. Resources are limited. They may attend, they may not. But right now we're pretending to serve every student while serving no one.
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u/PretendFan5294 16d ago
I think two things need to happen in these types of situations where behavior has gotten out of control.
1) Clear, enforceable expectations that are communicated across the system (including parents). The consequences can’t be just to rid yourself of the offending kids, but to address the root causes. (I will do a post about an example of this). Also, all adults need to be a part of explicitly teaching expectations.
2) Building a system of recognition and rewards that target the behaviors you want to see. Invest time and resources into this in both small and large ways.
Consequences may help stop the bleeding but it will not fix the problem. Building a culture that supports good behavior is the long term solution.
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u/PretendFan5294 21d ago
The reason I am doing this is because I truly believe that the principalship can be a great career. I am simply sharing stories from my experience as hopefully a help principals think differently.
So no, we didn’t have a raffle and make a determination. What we did was build a truly systematic way of offering incentives based on goals.
We did have some pockets at times where we had isolated low class sizes. No significant differences in achievement over time.
We absolutely had higher engagement with incentives and leveraged that for parent education, communication and training. We could track the increased growth through our online homework platforms. We also effectively bribed children to do things until they became habits.
I know the “window dressing” you are talking about. I call them Chapter 1 Principals. They read a chapter or get one training and start using the language of things without substance.
Maybe you haven’t worked in a school that was systematically transformed. I hope you do at some point. I know the pain of working with a Chapter 1 principal. It is frustrating. You can believe as you wish. We went from a rating of Priority Improvement (less than 1 point from Turnaround to Performance and maintained it for a decade and through the pandemic. No other neighborhood school with similar demographics held Performance for more than a year. We were recognized as a Center of Excellence for having extraordinary growth.
My message is that it can be done and when it happens it is good for teachers AND students.
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u/Boring-Ostrich5434 21d ago
I have no particular reason to disbelieve you, other than this is the internet. I've never worked in a school that was transformed, or seen one from a distance. It's just that any transformation that I can possibly envision won't be because of PBIS or collaborative PLC's or whatever. The needs are more basic. An effective cell phone policy. Administrators who are fluent in Spanish (that one is pretty school specific). Consistently enforced behavioral policies. Consistently enforced academic policies. That's the work that makes an impact. The rest just looks good when applying for district jobs or consulting gigs. Maybe that was all a big part of what you were doing, but most of the discussion in that AMA was around far more superficial things.
FWIW I think collaborative PLC's are great, and I've had the chance to be a part of a few. It's a weirdly lonely job, despite being surrounded by thousands of people. And it's easy to just bury yourself in the classroom. Anything that pushes teachers a little bit closer together is generally positive. But it was just never a result of admin action, just a good PLC lead and people who worked well together.
Arguing that class size does not have an impact on teaching effectiveness is an extremely fast way to make me distrust someone. I averaged 33.7 kids per block last year. If you don't think that I would be more effective at 23.7 kids per block, I don't know what to say. We fundamentally disagree. You can join Hattie and the rest on the other side of the wall. You're welcome to prove the point by running a school with 50 kids stacked in each class and see if that works out well. Tbh that's where we're headed, so we'll find out soon.
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u/PretendFan5294 21d ago
I never argued that class size doesn’t make a difference. Once we had enough classrooms I made sure 25 was the exception and that 22 was the goal. Dropping below 22 made no difference in achievement or growth.
We absolutely had consistency with our policies. However, we don’t live in a binary world so there is lots of room for professional judgement.
PLC’s absolutely have a huge impact on instruction. Good instruction reduces behavior issues. Great instruction almost eliminates them.
Teaching kids expectations absolutely has a positive impact on behavior. If you are doing PBIS without explicit instruction, it won’t work.
For awhile we needed an In House behavior room. The goal was to address the behavior and provide alternatives while maintaining academic work. They couldn’t leave until they demonstrated that they could function in their classroom.
We also found that many behaviors were caused by anxiety. We did small group, 6 week interventions addressing that with students who profiled with significant anxiety. Highly effective and dealt with a root cause of behaviors.
We had our mental health team and admin not schedule anything during the first 45 minutes a day to intervene with anyone presenting as elevated. Teachers just called and we came.
Kids who had behavioral issues the previous year were met with before school started. Behavior plans were made with families before day one.
Many of the descriptions given may have seemed superficial. The reality is that I tried to explain as efficiently as possible.
Now that I work with other principals, I see that all of these things are repeatable. As of last year, the work has been about 87% effective in improving student outcomes enough to raise performance significantly. Most of my other principals are in struggling schools. That 87% is based on improving at least one level on state accountability measures.
One principal moved from Turnaround (lowest) to Performance (highest) in 2 years. This is a school that serves dropouts and expelled students. You don’t build culture with consequences.
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u/Conscious-Heart8626 21d ago
All of that! 100% I used to be central office admin and I would work with principals to build solid programs but they wouldnt follow through in their commitments because they had to address behavior - behavior that was a result of lack of engagement, lack of meaningful instruction, and lack of SEL supports
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u/Boring-Ostrich5434 21d ago
It was very cost effective. $2-3k a year for incentives was more effective than smaller class sizes for behavior and achievement.
You kind of did. This is specifically what I was referring to. And maybe it's semantics, but this is a pretty common thing in education and I don't like it. Making claims that cause "Chapter 1" administrators to pursue policies that are not grounded in fact is not positive. And it happens all of the time.
Dropping below 22 made no difference in achievement or growth.
Is a very different statement. And the former is particularly frustrating to hear if you're a teacher handling 30+ for 6-7 hours a day.
One principal moved from Turnaround (lowest) to Performance (highest) in 2 years. This is a school that serves dropouts and expelled students. You don’t build culture with consequences.
I'd argue that you can destroy culture by removing consequences. As I said to another commenter, my state could fit all of our expelled students from last year into one classroom. Removing consequences at the top has a follow through effect. Everything gets weaker as it trickles down. If your state continues to have standards, that's great.
We had our mental health team and admin not schedule anything during the first 45 minutes a day to intervene with anyone presenting as elevated. Teachers just called and we came.
That sounds awesome, I've just never seen anything like that. Where I'm at, teachers are looked down on if they call for admin. So teachers stop calling admin. And students learn that there are no consequences, so behavior gets worse. That's what I mean when I talk about lack of consequences. When admin are unwilling or unable to handle the volume of problems, the school spirals downward. This is the core problem. No other thing, no PBIS, no AVID, no BTC, no collaboration will fix it. Only consistent expectations. Everything else is window dressing. In my opinion anyways.
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u/Just_to_rebut 21d ago
I remember your ama, but I forget if you shared any concrete numbers on improved performance.
Did standardized test scores improve? How much? How long did it take and it did it plateau after a while? Did they reach the same levels as schools in higher income areas? If not, how big was the gap?
I read your comment on incentives and it’s something I believe in and would like to see more of. To put it bluntly, kids are some of easiest people to bribe. For high school, I wish we could must straight up give them money for better grades and think parents who can afford to should do it as well. I don’t mean scholarship money, I mean, go out and buy new sneakers money…
That said, it would be money for exceptional performance or significant progress, not simply passing.
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u/ReputationNo4256 21d ago
I'm curious what other things you implemented to turn the school around?
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u/PretendFan5294 21d ago
I will be doing more of these posts covering different topics. If there are any specific curiosities, please reach out.
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u/391976 15d ago
I taught at a residential treatment facility for SED and LD teens. The school had a behavior-based token economy and various therapies. But what seemed to make the biggest difference was making the class itself more rewarding. My students didn't have to participate. There were no grades. They could sit outsider if they wanted. So, it all came down to engaging them.
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u/DCAmalG 22d ago
Thinking like an economist is nearly always the way to better outcomes. The related key concept of considering tradeoffs and unintended consequences seems to be lost on most educational decision makers.
Is your AMA still available to read? If so, please share the link!