Honoring Juneteenth

Juneteenth has been around a long time, with some historians placing the first observances back in 1866. But it has only been a federal holiday since 2021 when Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a law making the observance a national holiday.

The holiday is, of course, highly annoying to MAGA and other cultural conservatives who are certain that white men should be the center of everything. But Dear Leader has done his best to clamp down in his general assault on DEI. Consequently many businesses and the armed forces have pulled away from honoring the holiday. If schools were still in session, rest assured that the feds would be making sure that schools did not mark such a holiday that does. not properly center white guys.

My small town is marking Juneteenth with a festival in the park including food and dancing and music. It's a modest fun time and an appropriate way to honor the occasion.

I think painting it a Black or DEI holiday misses some of the point. It's an American holiday first and foremost because Black Americans are, in fact, Americans, and it is appropriate to mark the point at which they received a more complete version of citizenship to which they were always entitled. But it's also an American holiday because it marks a point at which the country tried to change directions and become a better version of what we had always promised to be. 

It's a complicated holiday. In the main, it is joyous in celebrating the freedom from slavery for an entire people. But it also marks the point at which the country stopped tolerating an odious and inexcusable evil. We should be able to celebrate the first part, but for many folks, it's hard to acknowledge what made the freeing of enslaved people necessary.

It's the root of all those laws against teaching divisive concepts or teaching anything that might make some (white) kids feel bad. The preferred culture panic narrative is "Yes, there was slavery but then se stopped, and yes, some bad individuals did some racism, but we stopped that, too." And since we stopped doing the bad things, it would be impolite and divisive to bring up the Bad Things part. That unwillingness to talk about what some of us did to others of us--what was done, who did it, and how they made themselves okay with it-- has given us a long history of wrestling inconclusively with racism problems. Banning the mention of such topics from school (and national parks and anywhere else) is not helping. 

Like many holidays, Juneteenth has the artificial quality of suggesting that an important thing happened all at once on one day. But there is nothing wrong with taking one particular day to honor an important event, even if that event was actually a long process. As a nation, we did some awful stuff, and then after we stopped, some folks had a very hard time getting past the ideas and attitudes that were used to justify the awful stuff in the first place.

Juneteenth reminds some of us that some uncomfortable conversations need to be had, but maybe not today, while some Americans are celebrating their emancipation. I do wish school was in session right now, but we may honor the day as best we can.

AZ: Pushing Vouchers By Ignoring Voters

Arizona has been on the forefront of privatizing education. They're also at the forefront of demonstrating how voucher programs depend on legislators who will ignore the will of the voters. And they're at it again.

Arizona’s first voucher law passed in 2006, but in 2009 that program was thrown out by the state supreme court.

In 2011, the legislature tried again with education savings accounts (ESA), which redirected taxpayer money from public schools to parents who in turn could give the money to private or parochial schools, or spend it on education-related expenses. That extra set of hands in the money chain washed enough of the “public” off the funds to satisfy the courts, and ESA vouchers for special needs were established.

The vouchers were expanded over several years until 2017, when Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill to make taxpayer-funded school vouchers available to any Arizona students. But when legislators moved to make vouchers universal, grass roots group collected signatures and forced the measure to go on the November 2018 ballot.

The proposal to expand vouchers was heavily defeated at the ballot box. The voters had spoken, but the Arizona legislature simply ignored them and in June of 2022 passed the most expansive school voucher program in the nation. (For the moment, we'll skip over the program's history of massive fraud and abuse.)

Save Our Schools Arizona has been an absolute MVP in trying to thwart the voucherphiles in the state that is, after all, the home of privatizing groups like the Goldwater Institute. This year, they teamed up with the Arizona Education Association to launch a ballot initiative to implement some voucher program accountability (because "history of massive fraud and abuse").  Included in the measure:

Safety measures to protect students, including a requirement that voucher-funded schools follow fire and safety codes and require background checks for all staff.

Bans on use of voucher funds for luxury and non-education items.

Return of unused voucher funds to public school district. Currently, families can bank unused voucher funds indefinitely, so those taxpayer dollars can end up filling a family’s college fund. In July 2025, Harris reported that around 10,000 accounts had banked over $10,000; over $440 million was sitting in accounts.

Reporting requirement to show how much voucher money is going to the private schools that accept taxpayer-funded voucher money.

Creation of a subsidy cap. Require that taxpayer-funded vouchers be available only to those families with income at or below $150,000.

Require academic measures. Voucher-funded schools would have to administer and report results on the same sorts of standardized tests used by public schools. Currently, private schools have no requirements to show how well they are actually educating the students whose tuition is subsidized by taxpayers.

Privatizers tried a new approach to resist this initiative. Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children launched its own ballot petition under Fortify AZ that promised accountability and transparency but not, you know, too much. Not since the fox offered to reform henhouse security operations has anyone taken such a noble stand. Did Fortify expect their petition to win? Or did they just hope that dual petitions would dilute the thirst for reform enough that neither would go through? 

Doesn't matter, because Fortify has now bowed out. There was almost a deal with legislators to drop all the petitions in exchange for some reform (but not too much), but that didn't happen and now Fortify has dropped its petition and will concentrate on what we can assume has always been its goal: "Fortify is focused on ensuring that the teachers union initiative does not become law,'' said spokesman Barrett Marson.

But don't count those wily legislators out yet. They pushed through their own last-minute initiative that would serve as a poison pill, invalidating the voucher reform initiative even if the majority of Arizona voters voted for it. The heart of their bill is a masterful piece of PR-- the Military Protection Act says you can't confiscate funds from military families. The SOSAZ proposal includes (see above) a requirement to return unused voucher funds (currently, voucher families are banking piles of taxpayer funds, collected to fund K-12 education, as college funds). But that would count as "confiscating" funds from military families' children, thereby invalidating the entire reform package. Now watch [privatizers work hard to make sure that the voters don't understand what is actually happening.

There's a whole lot of energy and money being put into not giving the voters of Arizona an actual say in what their legislature is going to do. But, you know, democracy is such a pain in the butt when you have your own ideas about dismantling institutions and selling off the parts. Stay tuned for the next chapter. 

NY: Replacing Education With Child Labor

If, like me, you had wondered what the point was to adopting fuzzily vague "portrait of a graduate" language at the state level, well, now the another shoe has dropped, and it's not pretty.

Portrait of a Graduate language started to catch on a few years ago, spreading to at least 17 states. The AASA (the School Superintendent's Association) proudly announced a Portrait of a Graduate Academy in 2023 and slapped Portrait branding on all sorts of programs. 

Theoretically, a Portrait is a vision statement "that clearly outlines the skills, competencies, and traits students need to succeed in college, careers, and life."

Here's New York's version of the Portrait language:

A New York State high school graduate who is culturally responsive builds strong, respectful relationships, valuing diverse perspectives as essential to a rigorous, inclusive learning community. New York students who embody responsiveness and academic readiness--demonstrating creativity, critical thinking, communication, reflection, and global awareness--will be prepared to learn, grow, innovate, and contribute meaningfully to society. These graduates will be equipped with the interpersonal and intellectual skills needed to thrive in an interconnected, ever-evolving world.

It's a pleasant salad of education-lite argle bargle, a description by committee, and it fails on the whole "clearly outlines" part. There's little in these broad strokes to draw objections, though I can't help but notice that students' self-direction and personal goals don't make an appearance. But as with the world of social-emotional learning, I question how one provides formal instruction and assessment for many of these qualities. It's all drifting towards educational goals like "the graduate will be a good person" in which "good person" is lifting the entire world on its shoulders. 

Look, my own broad definition of education (Helping the student find their own best selves while grasping what it means to be fully human in the world) is very broad, but I'm not suggesting we design the whole education system of instruction and assessments around it. 

And ordinarily, I would not get excited about something like the Portrait, which reads like one more vision statement that can be ignored because it is so broad it could mean anything. 

Uh-oh.

New York's education leaders have decided that it could mean that the current three-tier system of diplomas (already an ugly idea) would be replaced with an assortment of badges and seals and endorsements. And students could display those "competencies" by means other than seat time and course credits. As reported by FingerLakes.com

Education leaders say the goal is to ensure a diploma reflects what students can actually do rather than simply documenting how many courses they completed.

The proposal would also expand the role of project-based learning, career-connected experiences, internships, portfolios and capstone projects. Students could demonstrate mastery through a body of evidence developed over time instead of relying primarily on exams and course completion.

We've seen this before-- called The Ledger it was a plan to just collect a bunch of "competencies" through "life experiences" and your "credentials" could be stored on blockchain so that corporate overlords could go shopping for exactly the meat widgets they were looking for. 

It will, unfortunately, dovetail nicely with the federal vouchers that New York's governor thinks are super cool. Want to get some extra badges to lift you off the meat widget track and work your way up to an office drone seal on your diploma? Start applying for that federal voucher!

I can't wait to see how this works. "Hey, my shift manager at McDonalds signed off on my Got Critical Thinking paperwork-- let me have that badge now."

This is not an education system designed to lift up all students-- it's a system designed to sort them into different classes before they even get a diploma. "You're on the meat widget track?" says the friendly guidance counselor. "Then you need to chuck all this book learning and go get started on your child labor career!" You don't need a diploma or a transcript-- you just need your list of badges certifying the various "skills" that will be of use to your future employers (or, I guess, your present employers).  Honestly, I did not have on my Bingo card "New York goes all in on catching up with states that have been implementing child labor." 

Do I think students develop plenty of useful skills and areas of knowledge outside the classroom? I do. Do I think that work experience can be an important component of education? Absolutely-- I taught CTE students my whole career. Do I think these factors should be used to shortchange some students of a full education in service of some vague and ill-defined objectives? I do not. 

The plan currently calls for implementation to begin in the fall of 2027. Here's hoping something derails it before then. 

Hanushek Plays The Hits (Chicken Littling The NAEP)

The NAEP scores have inspired a great deal of handwringing and navel gazing and at least one more addition to the edu-panic vocabulary (make way for a "learning recession"). And it provides another round of attention to economists who specialize in education blarney.

So the Washington Post's consideration of NAEP math scores, comes the headline "Math scores remain lower than a decade ago. It's a bad sign for the economy."

The second part of that headline signals the return of Eric Hanushek, the economist who has followed fellow economist Raj Chetty to the assertion that getting the right elementary school teacher will lead the student to make oh so much more money as an adult. A decade ago, this was a popular argument for those who wanted us to use Value-Added Measures to find all the Bad Teachers so schools could fire their way to excellence. That was a dumb idea.

One might ask how, exactly, any scientist could come up with evidence that the right teacher would lead to adult riches. Was it some sort of empirical anecdotal evidence, like multiple class reunions where everyone noticed that all of Mrs. Swellteach's former students were rich and all of Mrs. Dullbutt's students were poor? It was not, though one would think that if Chetty and Hanushek were correct, such anecdotes would be easy to come by.

This may sound like a silly notion, but Hanushek has been pushing it for at least fifteen years. Here's a paper from 2011 where he lays out a very specific connection between a teacher's percentile and the exact number of lifetime dollars that a student will gather. Seriously. See for yourself:

Take a good but not great teacher, one at the 69th percentile of all teachers rather than at the 50th percentile (that is, a teacher who is half a standard deviation above the average). She produces an increase of $10,600 on each student’s lifetime earnings. Even a modestly better than average teacher (60th percentile) raises individual earnings by $5,300, compared to what would otherwise be expected. While those numbers are not trivial, they burgeon dramatically once we recognize that every student in the class can expect such increases in earnings. Consider, for example, a teacher with a class of 20 students. Under such circumstances, the teacher at the 60th percentile will—each year—raise students’ aggregate earnings by a total of $106,000. The impact of one at the 69th percentile (as compared to the average) is $212,000, and one at the 84th percentile will shift earnings up by more than $400,000. But there is also symmetry to these calculations. A very low performing teacher (at the 16th percentile of effectiveness) will have a negative impact of $400,000 compared to an average teacher.

This was music to the ears of the nominally-Democrat crowd of reformsters, the folks in the Obama/Duncan axis who insisted that if everyone in the country got an advanced degree, nobody would be poor. ("Masters degree??!" exclaims the Walmart manager. "Then we'll start paying you $35 an hour!"). 

Hanushek's whole shtick is to slice test scores into pieces of standard deviation. It's Hanushek and friends who came up with the "days of learning" which is just a slice of standard deviation on a test score. 

So how did he come up with this connection between good teachers and lifetime earnings? I'm going to over-simplify here, because we're talking about economist stuff here, but it goes pretty much like this: We know that a better teacher is better because their students get higher test scores, and we know that students with higher test scores go onto have generally wealthier life outcomes.

Hmmm. Well, first we've got to ignore the fairly small teacher effect on student success in school. And maybe high test scores cause higher earnings, or maybe it's that (as we already know) students from wealthier backgrounds do better on standardized tests, and that students from wealthier backgrounds tend to grow up to be wealthy adults? At this point, we can also call out the data that aren't there. We've had plenty of time to follow the students of high and low VAM teachers to compare how they're all doing and see if there's a pattern then. And somebody could have pursued the biggest question of all-- is there a shred of evidence that raising a student's test score raises their life outcomes? 

You would think all of that is more than enough to retire this baloney. But Hanushek has adapted to the new educational preoccupations. In February of 2020 (aka The Last of the Before Times) there he was, insisting that NAEP scores showed we'd have to get better teachers in classrooms soon, issuing a full-on policy analysis from the Hoover Education Success Initiative-- "The Unavoidable: Tomorrow's Teacher Compensation." The Initiative is a gathering of the usual suspects-- the executive committee is Hanushek, Chester Finn (Fordham Institute boss-emeritus), Paul Peterson, and Margaret Raymond (CREDO chief and Hanushek's wife). Only by using test scores to select and recruit the best teachers can we usher in an era of prosperity.

Now, six years later, for some reason Lauren Lumpkin gave Hanushek a call so that he could explain that today's graduates will earn an average of 8% less through their lifetimes. Because they have fewer skills, a thing he knows because of the NAEP math scores ("Oh, you're one of those," groans the Walmart manager. "We'll start you at 8% less than these older guys.")

And that's not all--

He estimated the combined effect of those losses will cost the U.S. $90 trillion through the year 2100.

He explains

“People don’t get very concerned about this, in part because it’s sort of like blood pressure. It’s the silent killer you don’t notice until you notice it,” Hanushek said of the way math achievement will affect the economy. “What it comes out to is a huge number that we have to pay attention to because it affects our position in the world, frankly.”

 And I shouldn't just pick on Hanushek, because other economists are out there chicken littling about this, too. 

Thomas Kane and a crew at the National Bureau of Economic Research are predicting a lifetime earning loss of $900 billion for all the students enrolled in the 2020-21 school year. Kane is the Harvard GSE guy who stumped hard for Common Core and testing and once published a terrible analogy about how you can't diet without a bathroom scale and a mirror (really). 

These guys all have big ole credentials and big-time jobs, so maybe I'm just not smart enough to follow their lines of reasoning. But it sure looks like a big old pile of baloney to me. And yet somehow it just keeps coming back, floating on zombie air. 

The Fundamental Challenge To Public Education and School Choice

There has always been an obstacle to public education in this country. It's real, its effects are punishing and far-reaching, and school choice doesn't provide the slightest solution.

Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Jessica Poiner is recycling an old reformster falsehood that is baloney wrapped around a kernel of truth. "Traditional public schools aren't open to everyone," she declares. The "So there!" is mostly silent. 

Poiner spins the pro-public ed statement into a "falsehood" by interpreting it as "All traditional public schools are open to all students," and she is absolutely correct that such a statement is absolutely false. Her assertion, however, doesn't really advance the argument because nobody has ever tried to make that argument.               

Poiner goes on to make the argument that between different schools and school districts we find considerable difference in quality and resources, and that access to the "better" schools is inequitable because of the American system ties school attendance to buying a house. Economic inequity is bakes into the US public education system; doubly so in areas where redlining (historically explicit or currently implicit). Poiner appears to be super-pissed that Ohio's voucher program, EdChoice, has been successfully challenged in court by public school districts, suggesting that districts hypocritically trap families so that adults can enjoy the benefits of the public system; students can't just go to the better schools because their parents didn't buy a house in the right place. 

I don't know of anyone who denies that some schools are better supported than others (though there's a whole discussion to be had about how we "know" that East Egg schools are better than West Egg). This points us to one of the most fundamental, long-standing problems of education-- how are we going to provide a good (enough) education for Those People's Children?

There have been a variety of solutions on the table:

1) Guarantee that every single child, no matter where they live, falls within a school district that must provide that child with an education. The use a system of state and federal taxation to even out the disparities between local tax bases.

2) Attach to every family some money and let them search out a school that they'd like to attend, public, private or charter. 

3) Do nothing. Let people sort it out on their own. And maybe cut everyone's school taxes.

Well, 3 is not an actual solution, but it's the MAGA way. Cut all government support for health care, food and nutrition, and education. Some people will end up on the bottom-- sick or ignorant or even dead-- but that's just nature's way of separating the meritorious from the undeserving, and we should not be interfering with God's Plan. But we need to acknowledge 3 because it is not only current federal policy, but it can also easily infect solutions 1 and 2. 

The trouble with 1 and 2 is that they share a critical problem-- both of them require taxpayers with money to help pay the education freight for families with much less money. When that doesn't happen in the public system, the result is schools without enough resources to fully serve their students. When that doesn't happen in a choice system, students just don't get a choice. Which is really the choice supporters' complaint. After all, we have always had school choice; the choice movement has not been about creating choice, but about getting tax dollars to subsidize it. Well, some of it. For some students.

The obstacles to school choice are not policy or bureaucrats or teachers unions or entrenched adult interests. The main obstacles have always been high cost and discriminatory policies.  

Poiner puts it this way:      

The bottom line is this: If you’re rich enough to buy or rent a home in a high-performing district, your kid gets to go to an excellent school. The world is your oyster. If, however, you can’t afford to pay your way into one of these districts, then most—if not all—high-performing public schools are closed to you.

She's not wrong. My problem is that modern taxpayer-funded school choice programs don't really change that at all. Your voucher dollars aren't enough to get you into East Egg Academy. Worse, East Egg can reject you for any reason. The public school system promise is that wherever you are, there is a public school that must provide for your education; wherever you live, there is no charter or private school that has to provide for your education.

I posted that last bit on the dead bird app, and Derrell Bradford replied with an alternative reformster view. 

Wherever you live there is a public school with the power of compulsory attendance and the ability to tax based on your inability to leave or choose no matter how near or far you are from it.

Bradford leads choice advocacy group 50CAN and works with pretty much every other pro-choice group out there, and he's about the most civil reformster out there (sort of the anti-DeAngelis). And here he pretty much encapsulates the point of view that views a local public school as a "have to" instead of a "get to," an infringement on rights rather than a means of exercising them. On this, we disagree. 

What I see as a commonality between the two views is the need for more resources. I've seen one true school choice program in the country, in tiny Croyden, NH, where the deal was that, lacking a local high school, the district would pay full tuition to any school of a student's choice. But I only learned about the program because the local Libertarians were trying to chop its budget. Meanwhile, voucher programs

A choice program that fulfilled the promise of an good education for every child, would A) cost a bunch of money, B) require charter and private schools to stop discriminating against students they wanted to reject and C) require useful measures of "good education." A public school program that fulfilled its promise would take whatever steps necessary to make sure that every school in every was providing a good job, which would A) cost a bunch of money and B) require useful measures of "good education."

Both visions are up against the same challenge-- people whose approach to education is some version of, "Yeah, education is important, but can't we do it for a lot less?" And if you let them keep talking, some version of, "I don't mind educating my own kid, and I welcome government help to do that, but I don't want to pay taxes to make a nice school for Those Peoples' Children." Also, a suggestion that compulsory education is a bad thing.

It has never not been an issue, going back to the days when many folks just didn't need a fancy education for anything (in 1950, 34.3% of Americans over age 25 had a high school diploma) all the way through to the days when Brown v. Board of Education spurred white taxpayers to bitch and moan about the Communist plan to take their money to educate Those Peoples' Children all the way up through recent history when states argued that students on the McDonald's track don't need courses like algebra. As a culture, we wave vaguely in the direction of the importance of education, but we'd rather not pay for it for Other People (see also: health care, food, families, and children). 

There are many many more issues to wrestle with in the larger education debates, but I'm trying to focus on just one point. Economic inequity is manifest in our education system. Modern choice programs, welded to free market ideology, do not offer a real solution to that inequity, and in many ways promise to make it worse. 

ICYMI: Counterclockwise Edition (6/14)

Several decades ago, my brother and I played in a strolling dixieland band at Conneaut Lake Park, a delightful small amusement park that has since fallen on difficult times, and one of the things we noticed at the time was that small children would "dance" to our music by running in little counterclockwise circles. Lo and behold, researchers have discovered that turning counterclockwise is an unexplained but real human thing. We humans truly are a mysterious species. 

Here's your reading list for the week. Read it in whatever direction you like.

Why Schools Keep Relearning the Same Lessons

Matt Brady on how schools have an unfortunate tendency to simply lose expertise and institutional history.

Excerpts over excellence: How Seattle Public Schools is preventing middle school teachers from teaching full-length books

Julie Letchner provides a specific, local example of how one district confuses compliance with quality, and how full length books are kept out of the classroom.

The Screen Time Lies Powering i-Ready's Ed-Tech Crisis Response

Part 4 in series of posts at Epostasy looking at how i-Ready is a mess, and how they are trying to spin their way out of trouble.

K-12 Educational Reform: Always a “Silver Bullet”

Greg Wyman takes a look at reform history all the way back to A Nation At Risk, and the search for an education silver bullet.

What About All Those ONLINE Science of Reading Programs?

Nancy Bailey questions the use of more screen time to improve reading.

Florida AG Says School Boards Must Let Students Leave Class For Religious Instruction

Lifewise has come for Florida's students, and the state is only too happy to hand them over. 

Education voucher funds for college? Arizona ESA spending raises new questions for growing program

Craig Harris continues to be an absolute beast in covering Arizona's voucher grift. Here's yet another variation on this theft from taxpayers.

ACT and SAT---Sophist Wastes

Thomas Ultican looks at the resurgence of standardized testing support in California.

The ‘Generational Collapse’ in Literacy

Nancy Flanagan responds to the complaint from college professors that their students can't read. 

Ohio Legislature Keeps Advancing School Reforms that Don’t Work but Fails to Fund the Public Schools

Jan Resseger keeps track of Ohio education shenanigans, including the legislature's fondness for leaning into failed policies while refusing to support the public school system.

The One-Room Schoolhouse

TC Weber is a busy guy this week, with observations about everything from discipline to nostalgia

(Teacher) Life Work

Adrian Neibauer spins off from Donald Hall's book Life Work, into a layered and layered look at life, work, and teaching. Quite a nice read.

Tough Times for an Education Budget Hawk

Not sure I've seen this take from anyone on any side. Frederick Hess asks why bother with education cuts if we're just going to blow a mountain of money and saddle the next generation with mega-debt?

AI Ain’t So Smart

Russell Frank, columnist for StateCollege.com, thinks maybe his AI devices are not doing great work. Best line:

The Machine can do a lot of things that we mere mortals cannot. But it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, which means it may be artificially intelligent, but it isn’t artificially wise.

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

Nothing like a good rant. This rant by Brian Phillips is pretty delightful. Thanks to Benjamin Riley for highlighting this in his fine Punk is anti-AI post.

The Federal Assault on History

The Organization of American Historians has released a report that attempts to summarize all of the current administration's attempts to rewrite or erase history.

This week at Forbes.com I took yet another pass at explaining why federal school vouchers are bad news. It's not just the money-- it's the fundamental change to the public education mission. I'd be delighted if you shared this one with your favorite elected state official. 

If you were a band kid in the early seventies, you listened to Maynard. We were lucky enough to see him live at Edinboro University every summer for a buck. When he scored a semi-hit with "Gonna Fly Now" that marked the end of MF Horn Maynard (concert closer: "Hey Jude") and the beginning of disco Maynard (concert closer: "Maria") but we didn't begrudge him his success, and later he moved back around to cool stuff like this:

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Fordham Institute Almost Figures Out Testing

When someone from the other side of debate announces that they Get It finally, you can find yourself torn between reactions. A sarcastic "No shit, Sherlock" wrestles with a sincere, "Why that's an excellent insight. Good job."

So here's part of the opening paragraph from a recent post by Dale Chu at the ever-reformy Fordham Institute. It opens with a discussion of a new drive by states to come up with what we're calling "through-year" assessments. 

Through-year assessment is appealing because it promises to address multiple longstanding frustrations with existing state tests. But growing enthusiasm for it rests on a shaky assumption: that a single assessment can simultaneously satisfy accountability requirements, improve instruction, provide timely feedback, reduce testing burden, preserve local flexibility, and produce valid statewide comparisons. It slices, it dices, it even juliennes!

No shit, Sherlock. I mean, that's an excellent insight. One of the major problems with the state Big Standardized Tests, from all the way back in the No Child Left Behind era, is that they are advertised as slicing dicing and juilienning. 

The BS Test is supposed to provide teachers with information about how students are doing and where there are "gaps" in instruction. They are supposed to provide schools with data on how well their curricula are designed and working. They are supposed to provide an accurate instrument for evaluating both teacher and school performance. They are supposed to provide useful "customer" information for parents choosing a school. They are supposed to provide "accountability" information for at least three different constituencies-- taxpayers, state and federal. They are supposed to provide a measure that facilitates comparison across space and time. And that's all before we get to less-explicitly-discussed purposes like exerting control over local curricular choices.

As Chu writes-

It is the same dilemma captured in the classic Saturday Night Live commercial for “New Shimmer,” a product advertised as both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Through-year assessment has something of a New Shimmer problem: It is being asked to function simultaneously as an accountability instrument and an instructional tool, as a system for comparability and a system for flexibility—design goals that do not naturally coexist in a single product.

Chu also points out, "Assessment experts have been warning about this dynamic for years." If by "assessment experts" he means "assessment experts, actual teachers, and plenty of parents," then sure. That's an excellent insight. 

More instructional utility often comes at the expense of comparability across students and schools. Additional testing windows may yield more information but increase logistical complexity. Faster feedback requires sacrifices elsewhere in the system, most commonly in the depth and breadth of what the assessment can cover.

These tradeoffs are not simply technical problems that can be papered over through more sophisticated psychometric design.

What an excellent insight. 

Look, teachers have been saying this for year, all the way back to NCLB and then the Common Core tests that were designed by prioritizing could be measured over what was important to measure. Teachers have pointed out now for decades that when they are literally forbidden to see the questions that students answered or to know what the students responses were, but are simply given a single score, usually months after the students have left their classroom-- that is an absolutely useless test from an instructional standpoint (but hey--protecting testing companies' valuable IP is more important than any educational goals).

Chu frames this whole piece as a discussion of what states are trying to set up for the future. But he comes really close to the most important insight. 

The challenge, then, is not a lack of good intentions or even a lack of innovation. It is that state assessment systems are being asked to solve multiple problems at once, requiring choices that satisfy no purpose fully and inevitably sacrifice elements of each. In the process, states may be required to spend more time, money, and resources on unproven assessment models—and probably add to students’ total testing burden—at a time when there is little, if any, appetite for doing so.

Yes, these limits of testing utility and accuracy are a hurdle, and states may "mistake an unavoidable tradeoff for a design problem that can be engineered away."

But Chu isn't describing a possible pitfall for future testing-- he is describing the fatal flaw of the state testing that is going on right now. The current program of BS Testing in the states has not even pretended to grapple with the problem of balancing different purposes for the testing, and so we've been saddle with a tradeoff that exchanges the generation of easily-managed numbers masquerading as data for -- well, everything. In pretending to do everything, state tests do pretty much nothing useful at all. 

So yeah-- these are some great insights. Please catch on to the other implications, and could somebody please forward these testing insights on to all the people who think we can fix the "learning recession" by leaning harder into test and punish policies of the past. Because when your tests are too multipurpose to be useful, "test and punish" feels a lot like "punish randomly." And I don’t want to wait years for some folks to have that insight.