Can Schools Play Catch-Up?

From its launch as Campbell Brown's attempt to be a major education player in anti-public ed politics, The74 has become a very mixed bag. Sometimes they publish valuable journalism about education, and sometimes they roll out junk like this article about using AI to help schools get students caught up, an article mostly impressive in how it manages to get so much wrong in such a little space.

Everyone just run faster than that guy-- go catch up

The piece is by Daniel Weisberg. Weisberg has deep reformster credentials; the former lawyer was First Deputy Chancellor of schools in NYC under Joel Klein and David Banks and is a Broad Foundation fellow. He was CEO of TNTP, the sister organization for Teach for America, where he attacked teacher job protections and oversaw blog-posts-disguised-as-reports like The Widget Effect and The Opportunity Myth that lacked substance and accuracy, but which provided cover for reformsters to act like their ideas were grounded in something other their personal preferences. He's no stranger to controversy, having been implicated in a scandal under Banks/Adams. 

Weisberg has never shown a particularly strong grasp of teaching or education, and this article doesn't break his streak. 

"America's schools are terrible at catching kids up" Weisberg says, a sentence he puts in its very own paragraph to help make it pop.

This is just so dumb. The whole discourse around "catching kids up" is just dumb.

What's the hope here? Let's take a student who is behind by, say, three months of material. So to catch that student up, the teacher needs to get that student through three months' worth of material in one month. 

If the teacher could do that, wouldn't she be doing it already?

Do catch-up fans imagine teachers are sitting there thinking, "Well, I could teach this material a lot faster, but I think I'll just poke along instead." Do catch-up fans imagine that teachers aren't already moving as quickly as they can? 

Guys like Weisberg believe in "intervention programs designed to catch kids up," but if educators knew a swifter, more efficient way to teach that material, why would it be an "intervention program" and not a "regular program"?

But Weisberg never has shown much understanding of actual classroom teaching. He argues that schools are bad at catch-up because teachers are being asked to do the impossible-- but he has the wrong idea about what the impossible is.

In a classroom of 25 to 30 students, teachers must determine who is on grade level, who is behind (and why), how to modify instruction for each struggling child and how to extend learning for advanced students — all while delivering grade-level content.

Diagnostic exams, designed to give educators information on how students are progressing, are infrequent and often test different subject matter than what is used in the classroom. Intervention programs designed to catch kids up are purchased but poorly implemented. Students needing intensive help are sometimes segregated into programs with low expectations and weak outcomes.

Sigh. Not exactly untrue, but all beside the point. Weisberg assumes that a great intervention program and intensive help could somehow cause struggling learners to learn material faster than any other students in the system. He talks about a "roadmap to acceleration," but if we had such a roadmap, why wouldn't we have all students on it (and is it possible we already do). He also connects these problems, somehow, to grade inflation. 

Weisberg thinks he know how to do achieve the great catch up miracle. Let's see. First, this:

TNTP’s study identified 1,400 schools where students consistently learned more than a year’s worth of material annually, enabling those who started behind to reach grade level.

No, they did not. They identified some schools where students scored well on the standardized test of math and reading. When someone starts talking about "1.3 years of learning" they are talking about a certain amount of a standard deviation on a test score. Can intensive test prep bring test scores up? Probably. Do we have a shred of evidence that raising that test score will improve the student's life outcomes? We do not.

Weisberg continues with his bold vision:

In other words, the Catch-up Crisis is reversible. But first. we need a bold, shared goal: that students who fall behind grade level will catch up to — or exceed — grade-level standards within two school years, and without fail by high school graduation.

This is lake Woebegone talk-- we can get all students to be above average. You know what happens when all students are at or above grade level? We start talking about "grade level inflation" and how the standards are too low. 

But Weisberg sees three obstacles to implementing his bold vision: "limited real-time insight into student learning, little evidence-based guidance on how to address specific learning gaps and minimal job-embedded coaching."

Part of Weisberg's issue is a definite lack of faith in professional educators. "Students generate enormous amounts of work daily — assignments, quizzes, writing, projects," he says, as if human children are some sort of assembly line machine and the work they do descends from nowhere. "No human can analyze all of it for 25 students every day." He should meet secondary teachers who do it for 150-200 students. Is it hard? Sure. Do you find ways to manage it without doing it every single day? Maybe. 

But you know what he thinks the solution is-- magical AI that "can surface patterns quickly and provide teachers with usable, digestible insights." Which can also "generate evidence-informed strategies for specific challenges." Here's his example:

Imagine a fifth grader who is struggling with fractions. His teacher knows he earned a C- on the last test but doesn’t know why or what to do to help. AI can analyze the student’s work in real time and discovers he tends to invert numerators and denominators; it draws on data from thousands of similar children to see what worked best to help those with the same misconceptions and recommends content for a 15-minute tutoring block for the teacher to review and revise.

I'm stuck trying to imagine a fifth grade teacher who can't spot a student who tends to invert numerator and denominator (while doing what, exactly?) Where is this data from thousands of similar children? And how would AI know what worked best? And on what planet do you find a fifth grader who can be retaught successfully in a fifteen-minute block of time? 

Weisberg's working with a manufacturing model here. The assembly line is turning out a flawed product, so we examine all the data from the equipment and figure out how to correct the problem. But there are so many steps in this process that raise huge questions. How did the AI collect data from thousands of students-- did they agree to have every step of their classroom work monitored and recorded, and why is this data available all across the country? Also, given that AI does not actually think or understand in any human sense of the word, how was the instruction modified and shaped so that the AI could spot patterns in a useful way? 

Also, I love that AI-in-education folks always turn to math for examples (even though chatbots are notoriously bad at math). What if the student is having trouble analyzing figurative language in Shakespearean sonnets? What if the student is behind because they were supposed to read The Great Gatsby and they just, you know, didn't? 

Weisberg also wants to deploy AI to coach teachers. "AI-supported coaching tools, used responsibly, could provide timely, standards-aligned feedback on recorded lessons, supplementing human coaching rather than replacing it." Never mind "Teach like a pirate"-- now you can teach like a robot. This dovetails nicely with the suggestions for students, all of which add to the offloading of professional cognitive work for teachers. I wonder how long it would take the AI to deskill the actual human teacher.

Weisberg name-checks some companies doing some pilot work and claims some of these are seeing significant progress, but he only links to corporate sites-- not any "evidence-informed" support.

Weisberg nods to the ideas that teachers should still make final choices and also maybe the district better figure out how badly this adds to their too-much-screen-time problems. So he gets a half a point for that.

But mostly this is one more case of over-promising that AI can do something it can't actually do and maybe we shouldn't be trying to get it to do in the first place and, most of all, that can't really be done. He makes the mistake of imagining that teaching is engineering (read Russell Barkley on being a shepherd rather than an engineer), a view that is doubly problematic as it treats students like pieces of sheet metal waiting to be fashioned into a shape of management's choosing. Students get no agency or choice in his vision.

And all of that in service of the notion that if a runner is lagging in a race, they just need to be properly directed to run faster (faster even than those in the front of the pack) so that they can catch up. No, thank you. 

How You Made Them Feel

They may forget what you said — but they will never forget how you made them feel.

There have been variations on this quote, including one from Maya Angelou. But according to The Quote Investigator, its earliest appearance was in 1971 in Richard Evans's Quote Book in which the quote was attributed to Carl W. Buehner (a muckity muck of the Latter Day Saints). 

Sometimes it is used for speakers in general, but sometimes it is thrown at teachers-- and that's how I've seen it pop up in the past week. And it rubs me the wrong way.

I understand the intent, the idea of saying that teaching is more than just pouring content into young brains, that there is an emotional element to education. But I resist the notion, often attached to this quote, that trying to impart an emotional effect is a teacher's primary job, or that it is somehow separate from teaching actual content and skills. (I'm also not a fan of the idion of "making" someone feel something, but let's let that sit for today.)

One of the feelings that a teacher can give students to remember is the feeling of having mastered the content of the course. What I wanted my students to feel was that they were smart and capable of writing and reading well. In other words, most of my "feelings" teaching was conveyed directly through my content teaching. As my youngest kids work their way through school, I want them to feel good about themselves, and my expectation is that their teachers will not simply teach them to feel good about themselves, but teach them to read and write and math and other stuff so that the boys have something to feel good about. 

The feelings teaching and the content teaching are inextricably linked. If you hammer a student with the message that they are stupid and incapable of learning, it will be hard to teach them. If you give them simple work that teaches nothing and expects little of them, they will understand that you have low expectations and a corresponding low opinion of their abilities, it will be hard to teach them.  If you give them challenge-free puffballs in hopes of building their self-esteem, that will also fail; they are young, but they aren't stupid. They know when they've met a challenge and when they haven't.

But give them a real challenge and the support and encouragement to meet it, and they will both learn and feel like someone who is smart and tough. 

It is one the challenges of teaching--maybe one of the most important ones. To hit that sweet spot between Too Easy To Keep Students Awake and Too Difficult For Students To Bear. But between boredom and frustration levels is an energizing valley from which students emerge feeling pretty damned good.

Nobody ever mistook me for a particularly warm and fuzzy teacher, but when they came out of my course, most of them had accomplished something and also (important to me) knew they had accomplished something. My job was to chart a path up the mountain, walk with them up the mountain, and offer some combination of words of encouragement and the kind of kick in the ass that says "You can do this" rather than "You suck." 

Help your students feel smart and capable, and do it by helping them actually be well-educated. The best way to make a student feel like a reader is to teach them to read. I bet they'll remember that. 

Defending the Early Years To Close Up Shop

Defending the Early Years was founded in 2012 to respond to the new wave of bad reformy ideas and has ever since been a powerful and helpful voice in the world of early childhood education. They have stood up for the littles, the small children who are often overlooked in the midst of various education debates. And now they have announced that they are at the end of their road.

I've brought up their work many times over the years. Early on, they were leaders in responding to the Common Core insistence that we should be jamming more reading instruction into five-year-old brains. In January 2015 Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Childhood released a report about the use of Kindergarten reading instruction. Authored by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin, and Joan Wolfsheimer Almon, the report tipped its hand in its title: "Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little To Gain, and Much To Lose." The report put some weight behind the conclusion that forcing reading instruction on kindergartners was not a great idea, and in fact was not even a neutral idea, but an idea that could cause actual harm.

When academic pre-K heated up as a growth sector, DEY published a short piece by Lilian Katz that provides a useful framework for explaining and understanding why some approaches to early childhood education are not useful-- "Lively Minds: Distinctions between academic versus intellectual goals for young children." It was brief but great, distinguishing between academic and intellectual growth goals; I liked it a lot.

Looking back through my DEY pieces, I note that part of their evolution has involved responding to increasingly crazy pants ideas. By 2018, states were talking about cyber-preschool-- parking three-year-old's in front of a computer screen. This was a dumb idea, and DEY and their partners said so. This statement from the group captures their passionate protection of littles:

Recognizing the estimated $70 billion a year “preschool market,” an increasing number of Silicon Valley companies with names like “K12 Inc.” and “CHALK" are selling families and policymakers the idea that kindergarten readiness can be transmitted through a screen. What these companies offer is not preschool, but a marketing scheme designed to sell a virtual facsimile of real preschool. By adopting online pre-k, states are selling out kids and families for the benefit of private industry.

All of our knowledge about human development demonstrates that children learn best through exploratory, creative play and relationships with caring adults. As the American Academy of Pediatrics notes, “Higher-order thinking skills and executive functions essential for school success, such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and creative, flexible thinking, are best taught through unstructured and social (not digital) play.” By contrast, there is virtually no evidence showing that online preschool improves outcomes for kids.

Online pre-K may expose kids and families to new types of risks. Research shows that screen overuse puts young children at risk of behavior problems, sleep deprivation, delays in social emotional development, and obesity. Extended time on screens diminishes time spent on essential early learning experiences such as lap-reading, creative play, and other social forms of learning.

That was their trademark-- passionate yet professional responses to crazypants ideas most firmly rooted in extracting dollars from state and parents (including responses to bogus studies meant to produce science-flavored marketing).

And when the nation needed information about how the pandemic was affecting education, DEY had that covered, too. 

They created training sessions and informative videos. They provided a mountain of resources soi that parents, teachers, and advocates who knew in their gut that something was wrong with a new child-targeting policy had materials they could use to help make their point. They even put me on their facebook page a time or two.

I have met Executive Director Denisha Jones, and she is everything you would want from a person to run an organization like this-- smart, incisive, knowledgeable, and still warmly human. They were lucky to have her.

But a recent announcement on the website tells us that DEY is headed into the sunset.

Though the need for this work has not gone away, we have reached a point where it is time to say goodbye to Defending the Early Years. We recognize that this may feel sudden, but it is a decision we have been grappling with for the past two years. And one we have not made lightly, but one that we believe is in the best interest of the staff and the board. It is well known that securing funding for early childhood advocacy is not easy. Foundations and corporations rarely prioritize early childhood education and care, and when they do, there is never enough to fund everyone who applies. And though we have received many wonderful individual donations over the years, that is not enough to sustain an organization. The reality is that we need a dedicated funding stream to continue being the voice for just, equitable, and high-quality early childhood education and care. And without one in sight, we have decided to bring DEY’s admirable run to an end on June 30, 2026.

Damn. Once again, the tiniest humans, and the people who work with them and stand up for them and raise them-- those folks the short end of the stick. It's a little rage-making-- in the midst of a new wave of moaning about how not enough Americans are making babies, the powers that be still can't figure out how to help the "under-babied" of this country actually raise babies. Is there any country that makes more noise about valuing family and children and devotes fewer actual resources to making life easier for families and children. 

But I digress. There is some good-ish news, in that the vast library of resources created and collected by the group will still be available. And if you want further evidence of their reach and impact, a page is set up for messages from friends, supporters, and beneficiaries.

DEY has been an invaluable organization; the landscape surrounding early childhood education will be a bit more bare without them. Thanks to all the folks who worked in the organization; may you all land somewhere that allows you to continue your important work on behalf of education and tiny humans. 

ICYMI: Final Final Stretch Edition (5/31)

By the end of the coming week, school will have wound down for the year for the Board of Directors and the CMO here at the Institute, and summer will officially begin. Oh, the adventures! I spent Friday as a volunteer for the annual carnival day, which in my case involved standing outside helping small humans deal with various yard games, point being I have already achieved my first sunburn of the summer, so we are hitting the ground running here. May your summer unfold happily, too.

Here's some reading from the week. 

The Conservative ‘plan’ to Dismantle Public Schools is Entering the Home Stretch

The latest from independent journalist Jeff Bryant. It's not pretty.

The First School Year Under a Texas Law Targeting LGBTQ+ Students

Bekah McNeel at The 74 reports on one Texas student whose senior year was hit by the new anti-LGBTQ law, and what that student did about it. 

Property tax cuts sound great — until your city can’t fund schools or police

Speaking of which, Florida is now entering the "end property taxes" stage of dismantling public education. As the Miami Herald editorial board points out, there are many problems with that idea.

Honesty for Ohio Education Will Launch Statewide “Voucher Accountability Project”

Jan Resseger reports on an attempt in Ohio to inject a little accountability into the school voucher program.

Why learning a musical instrument could stave off ‘brain rot’ and help concentration

Cool article. It's a small study with a small effect, but still cool to read about, Rebecca Whittaker reports for the Independent.

Tennessee school district reverses ban on Alex Haley ‘Roots’ novel

A reminder that making a bunch of noise over stupid decisions really can help. Knox County Schools in Tennessee became famous for banning Roots. They've decided maybe that wasn't a great choice. The superintendent believes they were trying to make a good faith attempt to follow the state law, which is a reminder of how much trouble is stirred up by bad censorship laws.

The Math Was Within Us All Along

Jose Luis Vilson celebrates a moment in which it turns out the people do too have math within them.

Explainer: What is "Teacher Tired?"

Matt Brady tries to explain that special end-of-the-year teacher exhaustion.

Everyone in Edtech Should Show Their Cards

Dan Meyer has more love for ed tech than I, but it is a clear-eyed sort of realistic love. Here he talks about the need for transparency in the ed tech world.

Maybe There Really Is a Learning Recession. But It’s Not What You’re Thinking.

Nancy Flanagan looks into the "learning recession" -- the timing, the framing and the conclusions we might draw.

The New York Times Mistaken Ideas About NCLB!

All sorts of reformy types are sure that if we had just stayed the course with NCLB, we wouldn't be in this mess. They are full of it. Nancy Bailey explains just some of the ways this thinking is mistaken.

The Return Of The Reformers

Gary Rubinstein has also noticed the return of these yahoos, and reminds us of some of their many flaws

Texas School Police Pepper-Sprayed, Tackled and Tasered Students

The New York Times visits Texas, where every misgiving you ever had about putting police in schools has come true. This is a pretty depressing piece, but a cautionary tale for other states. (Well, it's cautionary for Texas, too, bless their authoritarian hearts, but they aren't going to pay attention).

La. Gov.’s May 2026 Presser on a Teacher/Staff Pay Raise via MFP Dollars

Louisiana teachers haven't had a raise from the state in 18 years. The governor has made noise about fixing that, and the indispensable Mercedes Schneider is transcribing it all for the record. Not that politicians take stuff back or anything. Worth a look at what kinds of noises are being made.

Automata & Paradox

Benjamin Riley considers economics, education, and AI. An interesting thought experiment.

‘Lobotomized’: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like

Turns out when companies try to make their AI profitable, customers get cranky.

The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI

Excellent piece by Eve Fairbanks for The Atlantic. Come for this paragraph:

The problem is that the efficiency and frictionlessness that make AI appealing to writers are the same qualities that make it feel untrustworthy to readers. And readers are right not to trust it. No matter how much we may tell ourselves that AI is just a tool like spell-check, it isn’t. When we use AI to flesh out ideas, we lose the most important part of the writing process: thinking.

Even Ansel Adams Isn't Sacred Anymore

A gallery used AI to color Ansel Adams prints, then tried to sell them, all without talking to the Dams estate. This is part of the trouble with AI-- it empowers the kind of idiot who would look at an Ansel Adams print and think, "What this needs is some color."

Franklin Silver Cornet Band opens their 170th season with anniversary concert

How I spend part of every summer. 

This Beatles song translates perfectly into bluegrass, starting all the way back with Arlo Guthrie. I don't have a good video clip, but this is so tasty, I'm including it anyway. 

 

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TN: School Takeover Amnesia

Now that reformsters have been at it for over a decade, there has been plenty of time for amnesia to set in about previous attempts to Fix Schools with Very Clever Ideas. We can talk another day about the curious delusion leading many reformsters to insist that we should go back to NCLB test-and-punish because that was awesomely successful (spoiler alert: it was not). Today, let's go to Tennessee, a state that really ought to Know Better when it comes to this One Weird Reformy Trick and yet, apparently, does not.

Long ago, Tennessee installed Kevin Huffman, as the Tennessee Grand High Commissioner of Education, representing a reformster milestone of his own. Huffman's career path took him to Swarthmore, which led to a TFA posting, which led to law school, which led to practicing education law in DC, which led back to TFA, first as general counsel and later as various VP executive titly things. Then, a few years later, Governor Bill Haslam tapped him for Tennessee Educational Poobahdom. Which made him the first TFA temp to get to run an entire state's education system.

One of the ideas that bubbled up during Huffman's time was the Achievement School District. The idea was that the state would take over a bunch of failing Memphis schools. State educrats were confident they could totally turn the schools around, promising that these schools in the bottom 5% would be moved directly to the top 25% of schools in the state. 

Chris Barbic, a charter guy, was brought in to run the ASD, wielding all the hubris and arrogance confidence and optimism that Teach for America products tended to muster, secure in the knowledge that they could do the education so much better than traditional teachers and career educators. This is the basic premise of every state takeover of schools-- We Smart People know so much better than educators how to make schools work. And takeover artists give themselves an edge with the premise that "success" is narrowly defined as "get those test scores up." 

And yet, in 2015, after three years of ASDing his heart out, Barbic was heading for the door. They had redefined the goals for ASD, given themselves new deadlines, and yet even with the goalposts on wheels, Barbic was moving on, and while some of his analysis of his failure was not very insightful, he mostly got the important parts: 

Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment. I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD. As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.

Barbic was replaced by a Broadie, who also failed to do anything other than move some goal posts (no more of that "top 25%" stuff). Huffman couldn't close the deal on selling the model to other states. And the ASD just kept failing. Subsequent education chiefs tried a variety of ASD heads and an array of ever-vaguening goal statements, and yet by 2024, they were still nowhere. 

Under four different state education commissioners, helmed by five different leaders, and aimed at shifting sets of goals and strategies, the Achievement School District never accomplished the kind of dramatic school turnarounds that its supporters aspired to.

State takeovers mostly fail. They use the wrong metric for failure, the wrong diagnosis, the wrong pool of "expertise," the wrong motivation, and the wrong timetable, and Tennessee's ASD, with its dogged over-a-decade unsuccessful flailing, provides one of the most thorough debunking of takeovers.

And yet.

The Tennessee legislature has decided to take over the Memphis school district. 

Test scores have been low-- but the district has the highest possible growth score. There will be a new board that will be in charge of everything from teacher evaluation to superintendent contract to curriculum to finances. The board includes local folks from business and politics and, of course, nobody with an actual background in education. Plus David Mansouri, head of the reformy Tennessee SCORE, with plenty of reformster credentials. 

To some folks, this sure looks like a bunch of white Republicans usurping a mostly Black board in order to take over a largely Black district. Coming on top of the gerrymandering that will dilute the Black population of Memphis and likely end any Black representation in the legislature--well, it's not a great look. But Tennessee GOP has a super-majority, and I'm not sure they give a rat's ass how any of this looks.

Melissa Brown has been covering this for Chalkbeat, though I haven't seen her yet address what ought to be the big question: the state tried taking over Memphis schools for over a decade, and it failed. It failed a lot, and it failed hard. So what do these folks imagine they know this time that will make a difference? 

Maybe they don't care. Maybe they just want to dismantle the district and privatize the parts. We'll see what happens, but I feel confident predicting that Memphis schools will not be catapulted into the top 25% of the state.

PA: Looks Like This Cyber School Is Doing Okay

When Pennsylvania passed some rudimentary cyber charter school funding reforms, the cybers squealed like impaled porkers. "This is terrible," they hollered. "We will have to lay people off! Some schools will close!"

CCA HQ. Really

So now it's six months later, and the Education Voters of PA have continued the hard work of filing and pursuing Right To Know requests (because although cyber charters pretend to be public schools and run on taxpayer dollars, they fight hard to avoid actual transparency and accountability). They've been checking to see how much cyber charters have had to scale back, now that they're in the grip of these new reforms. 

Apparently they're doing okay.

Ed Voters reports that PA Cyber has approved the following field trips since the reforms (and, presumably, the associated belt tightening) went into effect. (You can read the actual receipts here.)

$28,800 for a field trip to the Kalahari Resort, including 400 waterpark passes and meal vouchers that cost $62 per attendee,

$13,375.70 for 192 tickets ranging from $25 to $92 for a field trip to the Sight and Sound Theatre in Lancaster County. As a bonus, this is a theater that aims to present "powerful stories from the pages of Scripture and history."

$6,18.80 for parties at five different Urban Air locations, another sort of indoor adventure park

$5,088.00 for 125 students to enjoy two hours of snow tubing at the Seven Springs Mountain resort.

Is it terrible for a school to wrap up the year with a field trip to some place fun? Not at all. At my old high school, we took seniors on a trip every year-- and they paid for it with four years of fundraising leading up to that. I'm pretty sure that if our district had started asking taxpayers to fork over money to send seniors to an amusement park, there would have been complaints (and even more if we asked taxpayers to foot the bill for some Biblical "entertainment").

Perhaps it would fly better in other districts. But what seems clear is that PA Cyber is not struggling to deal with the financial fallout of Pennsylvania's cyber charter reforms.

Growth or Proficiency

Some of us are apparently still having this debate.

Jill Barshay wrote a piece for Hechinger Report about the DC school district, which is apparently awesome at growth but not so great at actual achievement levels. The piece does a good job of revisiting the debates about these two sorts of measures; I'd just like to add a point or three.

First, let me point out for the gazillionth time that we are not talking about student achievement and we are certainly not (as Barshay unfortunately does) talking about years of learning.  A "year of learning" or "month of learning" or "fortnight of learning" or an "afternoon of learning" is just a journalist-friendly way of packaging test results. 

We are talking about scores on a Big Standardized Test. That's it.

Barshay notes that "A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind." Well, yes. Which students have more room for improvement-- those who are already at the top of their game, or those who are scoring in the basement?

Students who are bringing up the rear academically can be given more test prep, instruction that goes straight to what the test covers as well as instruction on how to take the test itself (Here's how to avoid being tricked by distractors in multiple choice questions). Students at the top of the game may well be growing and developing, but the BS Test measures such a sliver of skills (and no knowledge at all) that their growth doesn't register (You've been developing insights into quantum theory? That's will not raise your test score). 

This was always part of the debate over tying teacher evaluation to student scores. Focus on growth, and teachers of honors classes are in trouble, because a student who's already at the 98th percentile isn't going to grow at all. Focus on proficiency scores, and the teachers who are assigned the low-achieving students are in trouble, because no matter how well they teach those students, they will still lag (no, Virginia, there is no magical technique for "catching up" students quickly-- if there was, teachers would use it all the time). 

Worse, when policy bases teacher or school evaluation on proficiency, it turns the lowest achievers into hot potatoes. We've seen this in action where charter and voucher schools work hard to avoid those low-scoring students who would mess up their numbers. When Steven Wilson is cited in the article pointing to charter schools with low-income students and high levels of proficiency, he's simply pointing to the effects of creaming, where schools do their best to avoid having their numbers damaged by low-scoring students. There is no magic trick there that can be applied "at scale" for the public system. 

Ultimately, schools can not win playing the growth measurement game because schools cannot raise student scores every year forever, as if somehow each cohort of students was smarter than their older siblings. Test scores are not a stock market ticker.

But schools also cannot win the proficiency game. BS Test scores and "grade levels" are scaled and normed (curved). If the BS Test were truly standards based, students taking the test could be scored instantly after they clicked the last answer. But the scores have to be computed and compared and scaled and then some state bureau sets the cut scores. But curves have to have a bottom. If, after years of intensive effort, every child tested above grade level for reading, we would not conclude that a reading education moonshot had occurred-- we would conclude that "grade level" had been set too low. If every child was rated "proficient," we would conclude that the requirements for "proficient" had been made too easy (just check every piece complaining about grade inflation). 

Does test score growth tell us something? Absolutely. Does it tell us everything, or even most of the things? Absolutely not.

Do test score levels tell us something? Absolutely. Do they tell us everything, or even most of the things? Absolutely not.

The growth vs. proficiency debate is in many ways a debate about how to make the best use of a tiny, noisy slice of data. Instead, I wish we were talking about what we really should be measuring, how we can measure it, and how we are going to deal with the fact that there is much about educational quality that cannot be measured in any way that will satisfy our data overlords. Some days we are wasting way too much energy arguing about whether we should cut baloney into slices or cubes when we'd be better off figuring out how make a healthier meal.