Sunday, February 14, 2016

The Flawed Premises of Reform

In Friday's Washington Post, Mike Petrilli and Chester Finn, the current and former chiefs of the right-tilted thinky tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, set out to create a quick, simple history of modern education reform. It's aimed mostly at saying, "Look, we have most of the bugs worked out now!" But it also lays bare just what failed assumptions have been behind fifteen years of failed reformster ideas.

They start by throwing our gaze back a decade to when "US education policies were a mess." Then:

At the core of the good idea was the common-sense insight that if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning, measure whether our kids are meeting them and hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.

And there are most of the problems with the reformsters approach, laid out in one sentence.

if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning

Yeah, that sounds sort of sensible, but the problem that first lurked in the background and then erupted with the advent of Common Core is that the way to make expectations clear is to make them specific, and before you know it, you have one-size-fits-all standards, and one-size-fits-all standards suck in the same way that making all US school students wear a one-size-fits-all uniform and eat one-size-fits-all food.

It is like saying that we can fix the divorce problem in this country by setting clear expectations for getting married and holding everyone to those expectations. Fordham sages tried to get around this with their "tight-loose" formulation, but they failed. Meanwhile, the standards themselves are amateur-hour constructions that take a definite side in arguments that experts don't find at all as neatly settled as the standards assume (e.g. is reading a complex relationship between reader and text, or a set of skills and behaviors-- the Core insists on  the latter, but actual educators favor the former). 

if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... measure whether our kids are meeting them 

Also sounds sort of sensible, and yet we do not know how to do it. It really is as simple as that-- we do not have a large-scale, standardized instrument that can measure all learning for all students in a standardized, one-size-measures-all manner. Instead of asking, "What's the best way to measure critical thinking" test manufacturers have asked "What's something we could do on a standardized mass-administered test that would pass for a critical thinking measure?"

The Fordham has just released a report that tries to argue that the latest next-generation tests are achieving great feats of measurement. They aren't. And trying to measure student learning as if it occurs in just two dimensions on a single track is just such a meager, inadequate, stunted approach as to be useless. Well, worse than useless, because doing it leads some people to think they're actually accomplishing something.

if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.

"Outcomes" just means "test scores," and that, again, is such a truncated, inadequate vision of the mission of US public schools. Ask a taxpayer, "What are you paying schools and teachers to do?" I doubt that you will hear the answer, "Why, just to have students get good test scores. That's it. That's what I'm paying them to do."

This is not to claim or pretend that there are not schools that are failing to fulfill the promise of public education. But that failure belongs not to the schools alone-- student success exists at the confluence of teachers, schools, communities, and local, state, and national leadership. Reformsters have been enthusiastic in their calls to hold teachers and schools accountable, but when it's time to hold state and federal governments accountable for bad regulations, unfunded mandates, and grotesquely inequitable funding of schools, reformsters fall silent. The fans of ed reform could, for instance, devote themselves to ferreting out districts where local and state authorities have underfunded schools to the point that students attend in unsafe crumbling buildings, but that's just not happening.

We know beyond the remotest shadow of a doubt that poverty is a huge factor in education. Not insurmountable, not inescapable, not hopelessly overpowering-- but still a major factor. We know that teachers are a large factor inside schools. But somehow we want to a big accountability hammer to land on teachers, but when it comes to holding anyone "accountable" for poverty, reformsters have nothing to say (well, except for those who suggest that the only people accountable for poverty are poor people).

And about that common-sense insight...

The notion that all of these things-- the clear and specific standards being measured by a test leading to "accountability" measures taken against the schools that come up short-- are common sense? Well, we have to call them "common sense" because we can't call them "evidence based" or "scientifically proven" or even "sure seemed to work well over in Location X" because none of those things are true. They haven't worked anywhere else, and now that we've been trying it for over a decade, we can see pretty clearly that they don't work here, either.

The best we get from reformsters is a circular argument-- "this tool is a valid measure and means of improvement, because when I measure the progress of this tool by using this tool, I see success."

There are other unfounded assumptions underlying the reformster approach that depend on these other bad assumptions. For instance, the whole idea that the power of the free market can be unloosed to improve education rests on the idea that we can measure definitively which are the best schools producing the best students who are taught by the best teachers. But we can no more do that than we can list the hundred best marriages in America, or the hundred best friends.

They remain convinced that we must have one-size-fits-all standards so that we can measure all students against them so that we can compare all students and schools so that we can.... what? We still don't have a real answer. It's common sense. It's something you just have to do, because not doing it clashes with reformsters beliefs about how the world is supposed to work. They literally do not understand how education works, and when they approach the world of education, they feel like OCD sufferers in a museum where all the paintings are hung crooked. They want to "fix" it, and they want to ask the people who work there, "How can you possibly function like this?" They can't see that the paintings aren't crooked at all.

The whole reformster approach is based on measuring a cloud with a meter stick, measuring the weather with a decibel meter, measuring love with a spoon.

Reformsters want to drive the school bus by setting a brick on the gas pedal and strapping the steering when into place, and every time the bus hits a tree, they say, "Oh, well, we just need a next-generation brick, and to fine-tune where we strap the steering wheel into place." They will tweak and improve and re-tweak, and they will keep failing because their approach is fundamentally wrong.

7 comments:

  1. I am not as pessimistic about our ability to measure our students achievement. After all, in our classes we measure achievement all the time, sometimes assigning life altering grades based on our measures of achievement.

    More broadly, we do measure literacy rates nationally, so we are somehow able to test to see who is literate and who is not. We talk about students who do or do not read at grade level. Do these statistics about literacy rates and statements about reading at grade level have no meaning? I have often seen people post about the Common Core State Standards as being "age inappropriate". How do we know that a certain concept is age inappropriate without large scale investigation of the appropriateness of a concept across different ages?

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    1. "How do we know that a certain concept is age inappropriate without large scale investigation of the appropriateness of a concept across different ages?"

      TE, a lot of that research has been done by Early Childhood researchers. We already know, and have done for some time (as in decades, in some cases well over a century!), what are and aren't reasonable expectations at what ages/stages.

      Do we really need to re-(re-re-)invent the wheel just to show where Common Core doesn't match? Or could we just look at the research that's been done, the newer research that is being done NOW? Could we not speak to researchers, to ECE teachers in classrooms? I'd bet that you could walk into a high-quality preschool yourself, ask the teachers why they're doing what they're doing (playing, singing, hands-on messy arts & crafts) and why they aren't doing Something Else (like formal - as opposed to exploratory or to NO! - academics) and get these answers yourself and write up a good solid treatise inside a week - just the same kind of bare-bones consideration of ECE that Coleman And Crew didn't bother to take into account, let alone actual formal research.

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    2. It sounds that you are also optimistic that we do know how to measure student achievement. Peter did not say that the CCSS did not measure student achievement, he said that we do not know how to measure student achievement. If Peter is correct, the validity of almost all the research on learning is put in doubt.

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    3. "I am not as pessimistic about our ability to measure our students achievement. After all, in our classes we measure achievement all the time, sometimes assigning life altering grades based on our measures of achievement."

      Two wrongs don't make a right.


      " We talk about students who do or do not read at grade level."

      That's what misinformed people talk about, yes. "Grade level" is an arbitrary fabrication. At its premise is the false idea that humans must progress through a specific, arbitrary goal each year of their lives.

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    4. Ed Detective,

      My point is more fundamental than one about reaching certain goals at a particular time. If we have no ability to measure our student's achievement, we really have no idea if any of our students have progressed at all, much less progressed at a particular rate.

      I am no fan of tracking students by age, but our school system is set up on that basis. My middle child had to leave K-12 education at 15 because the school put a ceiling on what he could learn in science and mathematics.

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    5. Progress can be noted by using your brain; observation and judgement. Depending on how many students you're observing at one time. I'm not against measurement for what can be measured and as a check for judgement, but measurement can't always substitute for judgement. It might depend on what particular skills you're assessing and what the field is. There are many types of assessment, and they don't all involve measurement. Progress in writing can be translated into numbers using a rubric if you feel the need, but it takes judgement to analyze the progression.

      I'm a high school teacher, so I trust the judgement of early education practicing experts on what is age-appropriate for young children. I don't assume, like Bill Gates, that I'm an expert on things outside my field of expertise.

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    6. TE-- I believe you are pointing out that even though "we do not have a large-scale, standardized instrument that can measure all learning for all students in a standardized, one-size-measures-all manner," we seem to know how to measure degree of literacy, grade-level of reading. Yes, but, we do not as you say 'measure literacy rates nationally' as far as I know. i cannot count CCSS-ELA-aligned tests. CCSS-ELA jumps over basics like reading comprehension, purporting to establish stds by which to measure 'critical thinking'. Though some of the early reading stds are good, the aligned tests jump ahead to testing whether a child can, for example, tease out the lesson of the passage, distinguish main from ancillary details, even compare two or more passages (incl video version!) Testing first whether the reader has understood the passage & its vocabulary-- the sort of thing routinely tested on Iowa & Stamford basics of yore-- has gone by the boards.

      As to measuring 'grade-level' reading, most might agree on using Lexile levels, but grade-level reading expectations encompass a span of several Lexile levels. That reflects the simple fact that most kids learn to read somewhere between the ages of 4-8, which does not neatly fit into grade-levels. As reflected in the early-childhood research to which crunchy refers.

      The bottom line is that grade-span testing of reading basics-- which we had in public schools as recently as my kids' ps ed in the early '90's-- aligns best with decades of research on how/ when kids learn to read. 'Age-inappropriate', when applied to CCSS-ELA-aligned early-grades testing (by now administered to K-2 as well in some states), means that the reading passages have been found to be several Lexile levels (amounting to two grades) above normal expectations.


      asking, "What's the best way to measure critical thinking"

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