Brookings: Common Core Will Prevail

Brookings has been running a series of pieces about Common Core and the pushback against it, adapted from a piece by Patrick McGuinn. The first two installments are eminently skippable, comprised of a summary of Common Core opposition that would be familiar to anybody interested enough in the topic to click on the link in the first place.

But Part III, which went up on Wednesday, wants to reach a conclusion which is boldly telegraphed in the title: The complicated politics of national standards: Why Common Core proponents have struggled but are likely to come out on top (Part 3.

In the world of education commentary, Brookings has established itself as a source for analysis that is especially clueless and disconnected, and this declaration of the Core's inevitable triumph is no exception.

Common Core advocates failed to anticipate the political backlash against the standards that emerged in recent years, or to respond to it in a rapid or coordinated manner. 

I don't know how strong a case you can make for this, but there's evidence that reformsters certainly feel that it's true. The $12 million reformster rapid-response flack site Education Post was set up because reformsters felt they were being outgunned and out-organized by the resistance. Calling pro-public ed forces "organized" is kind of hilarious, and the financial balance is definitely tilted against us (I don't know anybody on the pro-public ed side who has a $12 million website). But it is true that as a group, we believe what we say and what we say resonates with many people, while the reformsters have had a hard time, despite their many slick and well-funded advocacy groups, achieving market penetration beyond people who make money loving the Core. Hence the next sentence in McGuinn's piece:

They [CCSS advocates] also have struggled to combat the volume and speed of opponents’ messaging on social media, where information (and misinformation) is being disseminated rapidly and widely, often unbeknownst to proponents. 

To dismiss this problem, McGuinn turns to the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's research report about Common Core discussions on twitter. It was a report that looked to address exactly who was talking to whom about Common Core on twitter while trying to tease out what the networky connections were. It was a challenging piece of  research which yielded some interesting connections and some really cool graphics. But it's ultimately not at all helpful, because it started with the premise that everyone who talks about Common Core on twitter uses the hashtag #CommonCore. It's safe to assume that the project examines only the tiniest sliver of the actual twitter conversations about the standards.

Beyond that, McGuinn somehow reads the research to "reveal" that only a handful of individuals are creating all the anti-Common Core buzz on twitter. Also, there's no actual debate-- just folks in echo chambers.

McGuinn also tosses in the idea that the Core looks like it's having a hard time because of politician turnover (he's talking about pro-Core pols being replaced with less invested successors, not pro-Core pols turning over a new position on the issue). This seems oddly behind the times, particularly given the GOP field's spirited race away from Core-vania.

Why the Core will live on

McGuinn offers a few pieces of evidence for the Core's inevitable survival.

First, since the Core is a proxy for many issues, and a lot of different people hate it for a lot of different reasons, McGuinn believes that they won't come up with "a sustained political alliance or agreement on an alternate vision for American education that can compete with the Core." McGuinn's huge mistake here is assuming that the only way to get rid of the one-size-fits-all national-scale Common Core vision for education is to displace it with some other one-size-fits-all national-scale vision for education.

In fact, the Core is already largely disintegrated. Like bad copies of copies of copies executed on a thousand Xerox  machines, the various Cores are already displacing the Original. The Core that appears on various Big Standardized Tests is not the same as the Core that appears in various textbooks which is not the same as the Core that has been interpreted by various bureaucrats, administrators and professional developers, which is not the same as the Core that has been rewritten and tweaked by various states-- and none of these are the same as the Core that is implemented in actual classrooms. The Common Core as originally envisioned is already dead, and schools across the country are being haunted by a thousand ghost versions of it.

McGuinn also thinks schools and states will not walk away from the sunk costs. That would probably be a more convincing idea if I didn't remember how many sunk costs districts walked away from to install Common Core baloney in the first place.

McGuinn points out that most Americans have not heard of the Core (probably true) and that while the "brand" has been damaged, people still poll in favor of the general idea of strong national standards. Therefor, he reasons, once the Public Relations bugs have been ironed out and "the misconceptions about the Core can be cleared up," everything will be hunky dory.

This notion that people object to the Core because of bad PR and a lack of knowledge is the saddest kind of wishful thinking. It assumes that there is nothing wrong with the Core itself. But love for national standards does not mean that the Core are good national standards. I may really want a car, but that doesn't mean I'll be excited if you try to sell me a busted-down Yugo with a missing wheel and a rusted-out body. CCSS is a busted-down Yugo.

The last reality-impaired hope is pinned on "several steps" that have been taken. Folks announced that the amount of testing will be reduced (but not really), test scores in teacher evals will be postponed (the beatings will occur tomorrow instead of today), the new ESEA is likely to expressly forbid the feds from getting involved (much in the same way the law already forbids it), states should get better at implementation issues like the computerized testing (right after the crop of money trees comes in), and students and teachers will become comfortably numb more fully acclimated to the new regime. And then he wraps up the whole thing with a link to a story from December of 2014.

Brookings is whistling in the dark (which is appropriate, because it seems to arrive at most of its educational insights in the dark). The Core is already on its last legs, abandoned by almost all of its former friends, it's defense led primarily by people who have a vested interest in its survival. Many of its original goals are dead (remember "students will be able to move between states without losing a step" and "we'll be able to compare students across state lines"). McGuinn is kidding himself and convincing nobody.

Brookings Fails To Makes Case For Annual Testing

I kind of love the guys at Brookings. They are such a reliable source of earnest amateur writing about education. They're slick, polished, and professional, and they rarely know what they're talking about when it comes to education.

Like most everybody paying attention, they see the writing on the wall for an ESEA rewrite by the GOP Congress, and the four (!) authors of this piece would like to put their oar in for maintaining the regimen of annual testing.

"The Case for Annual Testing," by Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, Martin R. West, Matthew M. Chingos and Mark Dynarski of the Brown Center on Educational Policy, presents an argument that they contend is composed of four part. And not one of them is correct. The central foundation of the structure is that testing, standards and accountability are discrete and totally separable. So we're in trouble already with this argument. But let's go ahead and look at the four legs of this stool.

Federal control of standards and accountability is unnecessary, but the provision of valid and actionable information on school performance is a uniquely federal responsibility.

Information on school performance in education is a public good, meaning that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from using the information once it exists. Because it is impossible to prevent consumers who have not paid for the information from consuming it, far too little evidence will be produced if it is not required by the federal government.

IOW, local districts won't produce information because they are afraid that someone will see it, so only the federal government can force the production. And, the authors continue, only the feds can produce the high-grade top-quality stuff. The argument is some combination of "nobody else as good as the feds" and "others can do it, but they won't unless the feds make them.

The states, they argue, are perfectly capable of setting standards and holding schools accountable. But somehow, only the feds can get good information. How does that even make sense? States are perfectly capable of making a good pancake and telling if it's any good, but only the feds can go to the store for the ingredients? How would states set standards or hold schools accountable if they couldn't also come up with the information implicit in each of those activities?

Nevertheless, Brookings says sternly, "If the federal government doesn't support it,  it will not happen."

Note: they have made another bad assumption here, but I'll wait a bit to bring it up.

Student learning impacts long-term outcomes that everyone should value, and test scores are valid indicators of such learning.

Neither half of this sentence is correct.

The first half of the sentence is supported entirely and only in the article by the work of Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff. This is the infamous study asserting that a good teacher in elementary school will make a difference of $250,000ish dollars in future earnings. Disproving the study is a popular activity, made extra popular because much of the proof is right there in the original study's own data set. If you'd like to read a scholarly takedown, try this. If you'd like one with plain English and a Phineas and Ferb reference, try this. Either way, the study is bunk.

But while the first half is substantially wrong, but still kind of right (yes, student learning results in stuff that people should care about), the last half is just silly.

The authors try to shoe-horn some Chetty et al in to prove the second as well, but it doesn't. This whole argument boils down to, "There's one paper that shows some teeny tiny correlation between test scores and doing well later in life."

But in terms of offering support for the assertion that test scores are a valid measure of important learning, they offer nothing at all. Nothing. At. All.

And here's the other thing-- even if they were a valid measure, so what? What is the purpose of knowing before the fact which students are headed for greater success as adults?

Many school management and improvement functions depend on annual measures of student growth.

The functions they're talking about include marketing charter schools and "differentiating" teachers. They assert, with a straight face, that you can't run VAM systems without test data, which they suggest is important by alluding again to Chetty, thereby managing to cram two discredited and debunked pieces of work into a single paragraph.

They also assert that test results are needed to evaluate policies that are foisted on schools (because, I guess, the schools themselves don't know or won't say). And they are looking out for the schools, which won't be credited for their success (credited? by whom? who is out there giving schools credits for doing a good job?).

Finally, you can't disaggregate data for subgroups if you don't have data.

Most of the opponents of federally imposed standards, testing, and accountability should be in favor of federally imposed annual testing shorn of standards and accountability.

Brookings' fourth and final point is that everybody really ought to love annual testing once you remove accountability and standards from the mix (if I could insert a Jon Stewart "Do tell" gif here, I surely would).

Conservatives should love it because testing data can be used to feed school choice. And to assuage their fears of federal oversight, the writers offer this astonishing assertion:

And it doesn’t have to be the same test across the nation to provide this information, or even a single end-of-the-year test as opposed to a series of tests given across the year that can be rolled-up into an estimate of annual growth.  All that is required is something that tests what a school intends to teach and is normed to a state or national population.

I have no words. Apparently this entire article is a waste of time because when they say they're in favor of annual testing, they just mean that at least once a year teachers should give some sort of test. Well, hey! Done!! I will leave it to you guys to figure out how those tens of thousands of tests will be normed up so that all of those schools doing testing a completely different way can somehow be legitimately compared. Get back to me when you sort that one out, in a decade or two.

For progressives, we offer the argument that disagregated test data is a useful tool for lobbying on behalf of whatever subgroup you're concerned about. I've contemplated this argument before, and while I understand the appeal of keeping groups from disappearing, I have serious ethical issues with using students as tools to generate talking points. If your argument for testing is, "Well, no, it doesn't really serve the kids. It might even be damaging for the kids. But it generates some real good lobbying material for advocates," I think you're on shaky ground, indeed.

And parents? Well, there's this:

Surely, such parents no more want to be in the dark about a K-12 school’s academic performance than they would want to ignore the quality of the college to which their child will eventually seek enrollment.

Because, of course, all students will eventually seek enrollment in a college. Beyond that, I'm wondering as always-- where is this great mass of parents clamoring for and demanding federal testing? Where are all these parents who have no idea how well their child's school is doing and so are desperately demanding federal test results so they will know?

Brookings finally notes that teachers unions might be a lost cause on this issue because 9and they use very nice fancy language to say this) teachers are all afraid of being evaluated and punished for the results. But teachers should be practical enough to see the value in trading an end to test-linked evaluations in exchange for keeping the annual tests themselves.

To wrap up

As always, Brookings really captures the point of view of economists who haven't an actual clue about what goes in actual schools.

The biggest gaping hole in their proposal is an unfounded belief in the validity of The Big Test. They believe that The Big Test is a valid measure of learning, and that is an assumption that nobody, anywhere has backed up. The closest these guys come is throwing around the infamous Chetty results, and all that Chetty shows is that there is a slight correlation between test scores and later financial success (thereby creating supremely narrow definitions of learning and success). For their purposes, that means nothing. I'll bet you that there's a correlation between how nice a student's shoes are and how successful that student is later in life, but that doesn't mean buying nice shoes for every student would make the student successful later in life.

But every piece of the Brookings argument rests on that foundation-- that a narrow bubble test with some questions about math and some reading questions somehow measures the full depth and breadth of a student's education. Brookings assumes that people are just upset about the High Stakes part of High Stakes Testing; they fail to grasp that a major reason for being upset about the High Stakes portion is that the Testing is crap. You can play with the data from the crap test all day, but at teh end of the day, you'll just have crap data in a shiny report.

Final verdict? Brookings has completely failed to make a case for annual testing.

Brookings to Poor: Stop Fornicating, Dammit

Oh, Brookings. Some day I want to travel to the happy, warm, comfortable planet that your institute headquarters sit upon.

Yesterday Ron Haskins, Co-Director of Center on Children and Families (not "for," but "on") and a senior fellow of economic studies in Brookingsland, dropped some wisdom about income inequality ("about," not "on"). You will never guess whose fault it is.

Okay, it's Brookings so you probably will. The income gap is the fault of the poor. Honest to goodness, the Onion could not write this stuff.

First, Haskins notes that while, yes, the figures about how the top 1% saw their share of the wealth pie jump from 10.5% in 1979 to 21.3% in 2007 (Why he stops in 2007 I don't know? Has anything significant happened since then? Like, I don't know, an economic crash that wrecked the poor but from which the wealthy bounced back stronger than ever? Anybody? I'm sure there must be something I could find with a two-second google.)

But-- not so fast, young whipper-snappers. Those figures fail to account for the effects of wealth distribution by Uncle Sugar, which made the poor practically wealthy and serious cut into the wealth of the actually wealthy. So, you know, income gap so not wide, really. Great news for everyone in the bottom 90%.

But Haskins is just warming up. He correctly notes that A) nobody really knows what an optimal wealth redistribution would be and B) the Republicans are in charge so talking about how to redistribute wealth is like talking about the best way to shine unicorn horns. He mentions that the GOP will use current high tax rates on the rich to justify their stance. Hmm. If only there were some way to add some context to that claim, just in case it's, you know, bogus.

So, Haskins says, since DC won't be doing anything about the gap, there are only two things to fix it.

Education

Education has always been a major key to economic mobility for individuals and demographic groups, but despite almost permanent reform since publication of the Nation at Risk report in 1983, schools are doing little to equalize opportunity across income groups. Recent research shows that children from poor and minority families come to school already behind their classmates from more affluent homes, and the schools actually increase these differences in achievement.

I had to emphasize that last part. Yes, schools cause students to fall behind and not learn stuff. Also, having firemen come to your house increases the likelihood that your house will be on fire, so if you want your house to never catch on fire, make sure that firemen never, ever come there.

Poor People Should Make Better Choices

Do you know how I found this article in the first place? Because Brookings put the following quote in a graphic on twitter, because apparently they are actually proud they said this!!

Inequality and poverty could both be substantially reduced if more adults were married and had two incomes, but the trends in declining marriage rates and growing rates of nonmarital births have been progressing for four decades with no reversal in sight.

Yes, you lazy fornicating poor people! You would have more money if you were properly married. From this one can only assume that every single member of the 1% is currently married-- and not just married, but married to somebody who also works, because that is the road to prosperity! Haskins does not comment on whether the rise of gay marriage might offset some of this; now that The Gays can all get married, I can only assume they will also get rich. Good for you, The Gays!

Nothing Else?

That's it. Haskins figures that unless education can suddenly propel lower-wealth people up into (not "onto") the non-existent middle class, or "unless individuals and families can make better choices about their own education, work, and marriage," this massive income inequality will continue and the government won't be able to do a damn thing about it. Sorry, irresponsible fornicating poor people.

As God is my witness, he actually said this stuff.

Somehow this economist, this senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, seems to have overlooked the possibility that other factors could influence the distribution of wealth in this country. I mean, I'm just an English teacher, but isn't the whole corporate-business-employment-wages thing supposed to be a natural engine for moving money around? I feel like we're overlooking some obvious ideas, like if Glut-Mart paid its workers enough to shop at Glut-Mart, Glut-Mart would sell more stuff and have to hire more people and then more wages would be paid etc etc etc.

I don't expect a Brookings economist to suggest things like getting the government involved in business matters, but couldn't he even muster a simple, "If corporate leaders would start pumping some of their huge profits back into the economy instead of jamming coin into their already stuffed pockets, that might help."

Instead we've got to go with the Magic of Education! Yes, if we just got poor kids to do better on standardized tests, they could go to college, rack up some massive debt, and find out that nobody is hiring in their field. If I just teach harder, companies will just start hiring more people and paying them more? Try as I might, I just can't figure out the cause and effect on this one.

I mean, I believe in education. I believe in it big time. Kind of why I went ahead and became a teacher and, like some kind of sucker, stuck with it for decades instead of quitting after two years to go work in a brokerage firm. But how can an actual economist for a living look at the vast complex engine that is our economy and conclude that the only thing wrong here is Not Enough Education and Too Many Poor Fornicators. I'm beyond amazed (that's "beyond," not "beneath.")

Brookings: "Poor Kids Suck"

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When it comes to slick-looking research of questionable results in fields outside their area of expertise, you can always count on the folks at Brookings. They have a new report out entitled The Character Factor: Measures and Impact of Drive and Prudence, and it has some important things to tell us about the kinds of odd thoughts occupying reformster minds these days.

The whole report is thirty-five pages long, but don't worry-- I've read it so that you don't have to. Fasten your seatbelts, boys and girls (particularly those of you who can be scientifically proven to be character-deficient)-- this will be a long and bumpy ride.

Character Is Important

Yes, some of this report is clearly based on work previously published in The Journal Of Blindingly Obvious Conclusions. And we announce that in the first sentence:

A growing body of empirical research demonstrates that people who possess certain character strengths do better in life in terms of work, earnings, education and so on, even when taking into account their academic abilities. Smarts matter, but so does character. 

In all fairness, the next sentence begins with "This is hardly a revelation." That sentence goes on to quietly define what "character" means-- "work hard, defer gratification, and get along with others." But we push right past that to get to Three Reasons This Field of Study Is Now a Thing.

1) There's concrete evidence to back it up, a la Duckworth et. al.
2) That evidence suggests that character is as important as smartness for life success
3) Given that importance, policymakers ought to be paying more attention to "cultivation and distribution of these skills."

Now, at first I thought point 3 meant that policymakers need to develop better character themselves, and I was ready to get on board-- but no. Instead, Brookings wants character building to be something that policymakers inflict on other people (and they have a whole other article about it). I am less excited about that.

Also, "non-cognitive skills" is nobody's idea of what to call this stuff.

Narrowing Our Focus, Muddying the Water

Let's further define our terms, and distinguish between moral character (qualities needed to be ethical) and performance character (qualities needed to " realize one's potential for excellence").  Some scholars apparently argue that the distinction is not clear cut and/or unhelpful. It appears to me that performance character could be defined as "the kind of character one could have and still be a sociopath," which, in terms of anything called "character," seems problematic.

For this report, Brookings is going to go with performance character. Specifically, they're going to stick with Duckworth's work, defining performance character as a composite of the tendency to stick with long term goals and self control. They reference her revered grit scale and other products of Grittological Studies .

At any rate, for the purpose of this report, we are going to pretend that sticktoitivity and self-control are the key to understanding character. Or, alternately, we could say that we are going to study these two small qualities and do our damndest to pretend that they have broader implications. And to complete this process of obfuscatorial magnification, we're going to give these two qualities new names-- "drive" and "prudence."

We'll define "drive" as the ability to apply oneself to a task and stick to it. We'll define "prudence" as the ability to defer gratification and look to the future. And we will establish the importance of our definitions by, I kid you not, putting them in table form.

Bizarre Side Trip #1

Brookings uses a footnote to cover why they call these things "character strengths" instead of traits. It is totally NOT because that attaches a positive value judgment to them, but because it shows they are deeper than skills and more malleable than traits. Not quite simply born with them, but deeper than simple learned behavior. Remember that for later.

The footnote also has this rather sad observation: "It is hard to learn kindness, but somewhat easier to learn self-control." No particular research base is offered for that extraordinary observation, but it is sheer poetry in terms of efficiently describing the sad inner lives of some folks. Dickens could not have better described the broken soul of Ebenezer Scrooge. But here, as throughout pretty much the whole report, we're going to take the personal experience of one select sampling and assume it to be true for all human beings.

How Much Does Drive Matter?

Here Brookings will throw a bunch of research projects at the wall to see what sticks. They include, for instance, the classic grittological studies that showed that people who tend to complete long projects will tend to complete long projects (because every Department of Grittology needs a Professor of Tautological Studies). "Drive appears to be related to college completion," they observe, and back it up by saying it does better at predicting college completion that SAT or ACT scores, which is a mighty low bar to clear. We're a little fuzzy on how we determined drive ratings for the individuals in these studies; if they have anything to do with high school GPA, then of course they're good predictors. It's like saying that knowing how far your eyeballs are above the ground is a good predictor of your height.

They do have some interesting data from the ASVAB test, which includes some sections that test a student's resistance to mind-numbingly dull tasks (really). And they cite themselves in another paper to prove that non-cognitive skills (sorry-- they backslid, not I) correlate to economic mobility. If I personally had a higher drive rating, I would go read that paper too and report back, but alas, I am not that drivey.

And What About Prudence?

Can I just say how much I love that we're talking about prudence, because it's such a lovely word, steeped in the aroma of maiden aunts and pilgrims. Prudence. Just breathe it in for a moment.

K. For this, we're going to trot out the old four year olds vs. marshmallows research. There has been some great research in the last forty years to parse out what this hoary old study might actually mean and might actually miss. I like this one in particular from Rochester, because it finds a huge difference factor in the environment. Some researchers behaved like unreliable nits, while others proved true to their words, and the result was a gigantic difference in the children's wait time. This is huge because it tells us something extremely important--

It's much easier to defer gratification till later if you can believe that you'll actually get it later. If you believe that deferring gratification means giving it up entirely-- you are less likely to defer. Brookings does not include the new research in their report.

Brookings concludes this section with

Drive and prudence contribute to higher earnings, more education, better health outcomes
and less criminal behavior.And as long as we're just making stuff up:

We can also easily imagine that they are important for marriage, parenting, and community involvement.

Plus, we can imagine that they give you better hair, firmer muscle tone, and fresher smelling breath. Plus, you probably won't get cancer. But as unsupported as these suppositions are, they are still a critical part of the foundation for what comes next.

Yes, Rich People Really Are Better

Brookings now bravely turns to the question of how class is related to these character strengths. And I can't accuse them of burying the lede:

If character strengths significantly impact life outcomes, disparities in their development may matter for social mobility and equality. As well as gaps in income, wealth, educational quality, housing, and family stability, are there also gaps in the development of these important character strengths?

This is followed by some charts that suggest that poor kids do worse on "school-readiness measures of learning-related behavior." Another chart shows a correlation between income and the strengts of persistence and self-control through the school years.

About Those Numbers

Brookings moves straight from the charts to a whole section addressing the fact that there aren't any "widely accepted tests for character strengths." So here's some of the measures and data that they massaged, including some cool stuff from KIPP, "a highly successful national network of charter schools" which-- surprise-- currently employs one of the authors of this paper. Anyway, KIPP has those cool character report cards, so you know they must have a handle on this whole character thing. Well, performance character. Moral character is outside our scope here.

Anyway, they used surveys, behaviors and tests. They also figured out how to crunch large data sets with a nifty punnett square that crosses direct-indirect with broad-narrow, to get four sorts of character markers. Indirect and broad, which is something like "risky sexual behavior" is a one start marker, while direct and narrow, like the grit scale, is the tops.

Using that rating system, they ploughed through acres of US Data Sets, rating each one based on how well it would indicate character strengths (or the lack thereof), and created a few pages worth of charts. I am impressed by the amont of drive and prudence it must have taken to do all this. Bottom line-- most of these from the Fragile Families Survey to National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Adults, don't provide the kind of awesome data that standardized subject tests provide for cognitive skills (choke). So they would like more direct acquisition of data please. We need more standardized character tests in schools.

So, Let's Just Go There

So after sorting through all those data sets, they selected some faves. Their first choice was perhaps unfortunate-- from the Behavior Problems Index, they plucked the hyperactive scale. Now, they would like us to know that this does not certainly does not "necessarily indicate that a child is medically hyperactive (that is, has a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). In this sense, the terminology here is unhelpful."

Well, yes. Suggesting that a behavior problem (particularly one tied to a medical problem) is a sign of a character deficit would be unhelpful. Is there any way we could make this even more unhelpful?

Sure there is. Let's link scoring low on the hyperactive scale and therefor demonstrating a lack of character-- let's link that to socio-economic class! Yes, this character deficit ties most closely to being born into the bottom quintile-- also teen mom, especially if she's a high school dropout. (The good news, I suppose, is that the researchers see no link in their meta-analyses to race as a factor.)


They also worked backwards, starting with good outcomes and looking to see how the data feeding into those incomes looked. The same picture emerged-- good things (including not getting pregnant and finishing school) were less likely to happen to the poor kids.

Micro-Macro

The study notes that the BPI hyperactivity rating connected to five specifics

• Has difficulty concentrating/paying attention
• Is easily confused, seems in a fog
• Is impulsive or acts without thinking
• Has trouble getting mind off certain thoughts
• Is restless, overly active, cannot sit still

These five very specific traits connected to the BPI hyperactivity score (a small slice of the larger BPI) which we used as a marker of the two qualities that we picked as representative of the one kind of character that we're studying as the stand-in for the full range of non-cognitive skills. So basically we're doing that thing where we look at an elephants eyelash and use it to make pronouncements about the status of all endangered animal species on the African continent.


Oops

Brookings, who don't always seem to get all of the reformster memos, go a page too far now by suggesting (with charts!) that their prudence and drive measures (which would be a half-decent band name) are as good a predictor of success as cognitive/academic measures. Which means that we can totally scrap the PARCC and the SBA tests and just check to see if the kid is able to sit still and wait fifteen minutes for a marshmallow. I will now predict that this is NOT the headline that will be used if leading reformster publications decide to run this story.

What Does It All Mean?

Brookings is not going to put their other foot in it, so it is not clear whether they want to say that lack of character strengths causes poverty or if poverty causes a character strength deficit. They are clear once again at the conclusion that character is a necessary element of success.

Character matters. Children who learn and can exhibit character strengths attain more years of education, earn more, and likely outperform other individuals in other areas of life. Of course, many other factors matter a great deal, too – most obviously cognitive skills, but also a host of cultural, social and education attributes.

Also, capabilities don't automatically equal motivation to act. And there's other stuff that could be important, too. Including, I kid you not, self-esteem. But we need more data for research. Also, we can build character, so we need more programs to do that, too.

Did I Miss Something?

Well, somebody did. Best case scenario-- we've re-demonstrated that people who come from a high socio-economic background tend to be successful in school, and those who don't, don't. Stapel on some tautologies as a side show and call it an insight.

Or maybe this is a report that buttresses old farts everywhere by suggesting that if your kid can't learn to sit still, he probably lacks character and is likely to fail at life.

And remember up above when we decided to call these "character strengths." That meant these behaviors are deeper than simple learned behaviors, but not quite genetically hardwired. So we're stopping just short of saying that poor kids are born with a lack of character.

But at worst-- at worst-- this is codified cultural colonialism. This is defining "success" as "making it in our dominant culture, which we will define as normal for all humans." And then declaring that if you want to make it as (our version of) a normal human, you must learn to adopt our values. This is going to Africa and saying, "Well, of course these people will never amount to anything-- they don't wear trousers."

Whether character strengths can be developed through explicit public policy is quite another, and here the answer appears to be: we don’t know. Policymakers often fall into the trap of what philosopher Jon Elster describes as ‘willing what cannot be willed.’ But as we learn more about the importance of character strengths, and disparities in their development, the need to move forward – if only through more research and evaluations of existing character-development programs – becomes more urgent, not least in terms of boosting social mobility. For greater mobility, we need not only to increase opportunities, but also to insure that people are able to seize them.

The authors miss a third, important need-- the need to increase opportunities which can be grasped by the people who we'd like to see grasp them. You don't really increase cutting opportunities for left handed children by setting out a larger supply of right-handed scissors. Nor do you help them out by trying to beat them into being right-handed. The best solution is to meet them where they are-- buy some left-handed scissors.

There are so many things wrong with this report-- sooooooo many things-- and I'm about stumped for wrapping it all up in a neat conclusion. It is such a thin tissue of supposition, weak arguments, cultural biases, part-for-the-whole fallacies and poorly reasoned conclusions that I get rather lost in it myself. I can only hope that as of this post, I'm the only person who's really paid this much attention to it.

Brookings Hits the Bathroom Scale

When it comes to amateurs dabbling in education, it's hard to beat the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Perhaps it's inevitable that economists want to weigh in education, since economics is another area in which everybody and his brother believes themselves expert.

But Thomas Kane offers some grade A baloney with a side of ill-considered metaphor with "Never Diet Without a Bathroom Scale and Mirror: The Case for Combining Teacher Evaluation and the Common Core."

Given that title, it's only natural that the essay start with this sentence: "Given the nature of the job, school superintendents are master jugglers." So, now I'm mentally watching myself in the mirror as I juggle on my bathroom scales. Kane goes on to let us know that he knows how tough it is to implement new teacher evaluation systems because he headed up the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

Kane calls education reform "a massive adult behavior change exercise" that requires us to "change what adults do every day inside their classrooms."

Yet, as anyone who has ever tried to lose five pounds or to be a better parent or spouse knows, adult behavior change is hard work.  And it simply does not happen without regular feedback.  When the current attempts to implement new teacher evaluations fall short—as they certainly will, given the long history of box-checking—we must improve them.  

So, the changes teachers allegedly need to make are analogous to losing fat or being a better spouse.

Teaching to higher standards involves much more complex behavior change than simply putting down one’s fork before dessert.  And it will be more difficult to achieve.  Those who propose “more investments in professional development” as an alternative to teacher evaluation are posing a false choice.  Investing in professional development without an evaluation system in place is like launching a Weight Watchers group without any bathroom scales or mirrors.  

The bathroom scale image is brave, given the number of times folks in the resistance have pointed out that you do not change the weight of a pig by repeatedly measuring it. But I am wondering now-- why do I have to have scales or a mirror to lose weight? Will the weight loss occur if it is not caught in data? If a tree's weight falls in the forest but nobody measures it, does it shake a pound?

This could be an interesting new application of quantum physics, or it could be another inadvertent revelation about reformster (and economist) biases. Because I do not need a bathroom scale to lose weight. I don't even need a bathroom scale to know I'm losing weight-- I can see the difference in how my clothes fit, I can feel the easier step, the increase in energy. I only need a bathroom scale if I don't trust my own senses, or because I have somehow been required to prove to someone else that I have lost weight. Or if I believe that things are only real when Important People measure them.

Kane envisions the Core and new evaluations going hand in hand, leading to more successful implementation of the Core (he does not address the question of why a successful Core is a Good Thing, Much To Be Desired). And his vision of how evaluation will provide a connection to standards as well as the kind of continuous feedback by people who don't know what they're doing and whose judgment can't be trusted.

First, curriculum teams will develop, in conjunction with their supervisors, a specific detailed list of instructional changes to address standards gaps. Then...

Schools should focus teacher evaluation and feedback efforts on the specific instructional changes required for the gap standards.  They should schedule classroom observations for the days when the new standards are to be taught.  They should focus post-observation conferences on the adjustments demanded by the new standards. And they should use student performance on interim and end-of-year assessments—especially on the gap standards—to measure progress and to identify and celebrate successes.  Even one successful cycle will lay the foundation for the next round of instructional improvement.

I'm pretty sure that this requires a team of twelve administrators, none of whom spend any time doing any of the other things required to keep a school running. But there's more, predicated again on the notion that we're trying to help teachers who are absolutely clueless about what they or their students are doing. Notes. Copious notes. Videos. And let's throw in student evaluation and feedback as well (plus, of course, test scores).

Finally, the wrap-up:

The norm of autonomous, self-made, self-directed instruction—with no outside feedback or intervention—is long-standing and makes the U.S. education system especially resistant to change. In most high-performing countries, teachers have no such expectations.  The lesson study in Japan is a good example.  Teachers do not bootstrap their own instruction.  They do not expect to be left alone.   They expect standards, they expect feedback from peers and supervisors and they expect to be held accountable—for the quality of their delivery as well as for student results.  Therefore, a better system for teacher evaluation and feedback is necessary to support individual behavior change, and it’s a tool for collective culture change as well.  

Oh, the assumptions. The assumption that our school culture needs to be changed. The assumption that teacher autonomy is a problem, not a strength. The implication that US teachers don't like feedback or standards or being held accountable-- that's a little snotty as well.

But I am reminded of the management training that suggests that the fewer levels you have between decision making and decision implementation, the better off you are. Kane seems to be suggesting that the classroom teacher needs to be directed from on high, and his ideas are reminiscent of the worker who can't get a project done because he has to keep going to meetings about getting the project done.

My experience is that every good teacher I've ever known is involved in a constant, daily cycle of reflection and self-examination, using a rich tapestry of directly-observed data to evaluate her own performance, often consulting with fellow professionals. It's continuous and instantly implemented, then instantly evaluated and modified as needed. It's nimble, and it involves the professional judgment of trained experts in the field. That seems like a pretty good system to me.

Education Next Plugs Research Proving Not Much of Anything

This week Education Next ran an article entitled "The First Hard Evidence on Virtual Education." It turns out that the only word in that title which comes close to being accurate is "first" (more about that shortly). What actually runs in the article is a remarkable stretch by anybody's standards.

The study is a 'working paper" by Guido Schwert of the University of Konstanz (it's German, and legit) and Matt Chingos of Brooking (motto "Just Because We're Economists, That Doesn't Mean We Can't Act Like Education Experts"). It looks at students in the Florida Virtual School, the largest cyber-school system in Florida (how it got to be that way, and whether or not it's good, is a question for another day because it has nothing to do with the matter at hand). What we're really interested in here is how far we can lower the bar for what deserves to be reported.

The researchers report two findings. The first is that when students can take on-line AP courses that aren't offered at their brick and mortal schools, some of them will do so. I know. Quelle suprise! But wait-- we can lower the bar further!

Second finding? The researchers checked out English and Algebra I test scores for the cyber-schoolers and determined that their tenth grade test results for those subjects were about the same as brick-and-mortar students. Author Martin West adds "or perhaps a bit better"  but come on-- if you could say "better" you would have. This is just damning with faint praise-by-weasel-words.

West also characterizes this finding "as the first credible evidence on the effects of online courses on student achievement in K-12 schools" and you know what? It's not. First, you're talking about testing a thin slice of tenth graders. Second, and more hugely, the study did not look at student achievement. It looked at student standardized test scores in two subjects.

I know I've said this before. I'm going to keep saying this just as often as reformsters keep trying to peddle the false assertion used to launch a thousand reformy dinghies.

"Standardized test scores" are not the same thing as "student achievement."

"Standardized test scores" are not the same thing as "student achievement."

When you write "the mugwump program clearly increases student achievement" when you mean "the mugwump program raised some test scores in year X," you are deliberately obscuring the truth. When you write "teachers should be judged by their ability to improve student achievement" when you mean "teachers should be judged by students' standardized test scores," you are saying something that is at best disingenuous, and perhaps a bit of a flat out lie.

But wait-- there's less. In fact, there's so much less that even West has to admit it, though he shares that only with diligent readers who stick around to the next-to-last paragraph.

The study is based on data from 2008-2009. Yes, I typed that correctly. West acknowledges that there may be a bit of an "early adopter syndrome" in play here, and that things might have changed a tad over the past five years, so that then conditions under which this perhaps a bit useless data was generated are completely unlike those currently in play. (Quick-- what operating system were you using in 2008? And what did your smartphone look like?)

Could we possibly reveal this research to be less useful? Why, yes-- yes, we could. In the last sentence of that penultimate graf, West admits "And, of course, the study is also not a randomized experiment, the gold standard in education research." By "gold standard," of course, we mean "valid in any meaningful way."

So there you have it. Education Next has rocked the world with an account of research on six-year-old data that, if it proves anything at all, proves that you can do passable test prep on a computer. And that is how we lower the bar all the way to the floor.

Brookings Whips Up Some Teacher Eval Research

The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings (the folks who remind us that teachers are everything wrong with education) has released a new report, "Evaluating Teachers with Classroom Observations,"  a study intended to Tell Us Some Things about teacher evaluation and how to do it best. Is this going to be a trip to the unicorn farm? The very first sentences tell us where this report's heart is:

The evidence is clear: better teachers improve student outcomes, ranging from test scores to college attendance rates to career earnings. Federal policy has begun to catch up with these findings in its recent shift from an effort to ensure that all teachers have traditional credentials to policies intended to incentivize states to evaluate and retain teachers based on their classroom  performance.

We are off once more to search for ways to perfect the teacher evaluation system. Grover J. Whitehurst, Matthew M. Chingo, and Katherine M. Lindquist have laid down twenty-seven serious pages of unicorn farming. Let me do my best to take you on a condensed tour.

Focus on the Human Observation

Their big take-away is this: "Nearly all the opportunities for improvement to teacher evaluation systems are in the area of classroom observations rather than test score gains." In other words, the VAM side of evaluations is as good as it can be, but that pesky human-observing-human piece needs to be tightened up. Yikes.

You see, only some teachers are evaluated on test score gains, but all teachers are observed. And here's one thing they get right-- the human observation can provide feedback that's actually good for something, while test results are too late and too vague to be of any use to teachers at all.

But that leads us to this curious thought: Improvements are needed in how classroom observations are measured if they are to carry the weight they are assigned in teacher evaluation. Human observation needs to be measured in a more sciency way. Their big support for this is the finding that teachers with top students tend to get top observation scores. Their reasoning makes sense-- Danielson, for instance, wants you to show off your teaching of higher-order questioning skills. Would you rather do that with your Honors class, or the class where you're hoping the students just remember what you covered yesterday?


The solution? Make human observations more like VAM. The authors suggest that the same sort of demographic factoring adjustments that are used for VAMs should be used for human observation. And if that strikes you as a lousy idea-- well, it only gets better.

History of Bad Evaluation

The authors run down the history of teacher quality pursuits. NCLB defined "highly qualified" as "possessing certain qualifications," but then researchers figured out how to attache numbers to teacher quality and that made things better because, science. Recap of some of the iffy research claiming that a good second grade teacher will help you grow up to be rich. This has laid groundwork for new, federally-approved-and-pushed-but-not-actually-mandated-because-hey-that-would-be-illegal eval systems. Which can still allow for great variety between school districts, and as we all know, variety is bad juju.

So they decided to go study four districts to see if they could find unicorns there.

FINDINGS OF THE STUDY

1) Evaluation systems are sufficiently reliable and valid to be swell. There is strong year-to-year correlation between scores. They are just as reliable as (I am not making this up) systems used to predict season-to-season performance in professional sports.

I am not a statistics guy, but I have to note that the study drew on "one to three years of data from each district drawn from one or more of the years from 2009 to 2012." Am I crazy, or does that not seem like very much data with which to determine year-to-year consistency?

2) Only some teachers are evaluated by VAM. So none of these four districts were in a location where the art teacher gets credit for third grade math scores.

3) Observation scores are more stable from year to year than VAM. Don't get excited-- that's a bad thing, apparently. The fact that your administrator knows you and your work gives him a preconceived notion of how effective you are. So a long-standing relationship with a boss who knows you and your work is not helpful-- it's just a bias.

They have no absolutely answer for a VAM-to-observation ratio in evals, but they recommend properly handled observations be at least 50%.

4) School VAM scores throw things out of whack. Good school VAMs hide bad teachers; bad school VAMs hurt good teachers. These should be scrapped or minimized.

5) Better students = better observation ratings. I can think of a zillion reasons for this, but I don't think many teachers disagree. "Please come observe me when I'm teaching my lowest class of the day," said no teacher ever. Then follows several pages of charts and numerical wonkery to reach the conclusion I mentioned above-- observations should be subjected to the same kind of demographic adjustical jim-crackery that goes into VAMs.

6) That kind of adjustment calls for large sample sizes. Which means getting that data-laden legerdemain on a state level. There are charts and graphs here as well.

7) Outside observers are more predictive of next years VAM scores than inside ones. Principals are influenced by what they know. What's called for is an outside observer who doesn't know anything. Well, not anything except how to observe characteristics that are predictive of VAM scores.  This produces the most hilarious recommendation of all-- two-to-three annual classroom observations of each teacher. Before principals decide to go hide in an ashram, note that at least one of these should be conducted by a no-nothing outsider.

There are certainly Bad Principal situations where some relief from bias would be a Good Thing. But if we are accepting the premise that a principal's knowledge and understanding of her staff is somehow an obstacle to be avoided, we are approaching again the reformy place where human interactions are bad for education and the people who work in public education are all dopes. This isn't a trip to the unicorn farm; it's a trip to the robot unicorn factory. Where money trees grow.

Conclusion

A new generation of teacher evaluation systems seeks to make performance measurement and feedback more rigorous and useful.

Could be worse. They could have brought up grit. But we're going to wind up by reminding everyone that even though variations in a system may be useful in that they offer the chance to study lots of variables in action, mostly they are bad because, chaos.

Their final paragraph starts with this sentence: 

A prime motive behind the move towards meaningful teacher evaluation is to assure greater equity in students’ access to good teachers.

Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. Equal access to great teachers may be the stated motivation for the move toward "meaningful" (a meaningless word in this context) teacher evaluation, but what is still missing is the slimmest shred, the slightest sliver, the most shrunken soupcon of proof that a teacher evaluation system would take us one step closer to that goal. Hell, we haven't even proven that "equal access to great teachers" doesn't exist right now! For all we know, we may be following thinky tanks on these ridiculous field trips to the unicorn farm while actual unicorns are back home, grazing in our front yard.

Brookings Wins Gold in "Most Clueless CCSS Commentary" Olympics

Brookings Institution released a paper yesterday by Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West entitled "In Defense of the Common Core Standards." Do they have anything useful to add to the conversation? And will I be able to understand a paper written by economists?

Their starting point is simple. The CCSS "are under attack from the right and the left. Liberals fear that policy makers will use the standards to punish teachers. Conservatives believe the Common Core is an attempt by the federal government to take over schools." Oversimplified version of the opposition, but okay. Their goal is to mount "a fresh defense of the Common Core."

They explain how educational standards are supposed to work in paragraphs that seem designed to explain human schools to Martians (or, perhaps, economists). They summarize many of the objections to the CCSS, and get most of the major ones into a few sentences, including referencing the research that shows no connection between standards and student achievement.

And then this "fresh defense" goes off the rails.

"Common Core will succeed where past standards based reform efforts have failed," they boldly declare. Why, you ask? Sadly for this "fresh defense," you already know all the answers.

The CCSS were designed with teacher, researcher, and pedagogy expert feedback. This is duly cited with a reference to the CCSS website, so you know it must be true. A recent analysis of standards show that the Core are better than many states (citing the Fordham Institute research bought and paid for by CCSS backers).

The CCSS assessments are better. You can even take them on computers! The authors argue that this is better because computer testing is cheaper (!), it eliminates written answers (hard to score!) and can include accommodations for special needs students (someday, probably). And those tests can be adaptive so that they match the skill level of the student. Not a word about test validity, but hey-- at least they're cheap, right?

The cost of CCSS implementation is difficult to predict. I would recommend addressing it in an easily-scorable multiple choice tests; select between a) a bunch, b) very much, c) holy smokes, and d)Oh my God!! Brookings here repeats the talking point about how states currently buy separate tests, and their combined buying power will totally drive costs down. You know-- like buying standardized tests at Costco.

Next comes a technical discussion of economics and standards. This involves a long explanation of how standards work in many fields, leading up to a conclusion I'll summarize as "Educational standards don't work anything like all these others." So thanks for that explanation, Brookings. Also, standards' effects on books can be better predicted than their effect on teaching. I'm beginning to suspect these boys may be better with books than with carbon-based life forms.

Next come the benefits of standards. This again begins with a general discussion of how standards work in economics, which leads to some writing about the Great Baltimore Fire which is quite zippy and seems to have been written by an actual live human being, in contrast to the rest of the paper. The fire was an unnecessary mess because of 600 different fire hose couplings in the country. So, standards.

Eventually we arrive at a point. "Standards...are meant to simplify complicated problems." And here's our next standard talking point. "We ask too much of teachers. It is unreasonable to give them a classroom full of students and take full responsibility for teaching them on their own." And I'll take a moment here to get a glass of water so I can do a spit take. Yes, teachers-- we need CCSS because our jobs are too hard for us. Why, gosh, thanks, boys.

There will be indirect network effects for individuals and for district who adopt the standards. I think we're back to massive buying power because we're all getting the same textbooks at Costco. And this sentence: "Minimum quality standards can help ameliorate information asymmetries." I can't tell if districts will have better info for buying books, or students will have better info for selecting schools. Maybe both. Myself, I'm just excited about going out this weekend with the wife and ameliorating some information asymmetries, if that's what the kids are calling it these days.

Standards can help because we'll reach a tipping point and then everybody will have the standards. So standards are good because they'll get people to have them? Also, personalized learning systems will be totally awesome and perhaps the best thing to come out of standards. [Insert standard PR about personal learning systems here.]

Finally, some policy recommendations.

1) Common Core should enforce their licensing so that textbook publishers can't randomly slap "CCSS aligned" on anything and everything. Protect your brand. Try not to think about SONY and Betamax.

2) The feds should offer more money for CCSS adoption. Ideally they could put this in a reauthorized version of the ESEA. Great idea, Brookings. You should probably call for the reauthorized ESEA to include ponies for everyone, plus snowmobiles for traversing hell (because that's when ESEA will be reauthorized by Congress-- har!).

3) Government (all levels) should be curriculum agnostics and standards fundamentalists. Give schools more money for implementation, if they need it. Can I have a show of hands for needing it?

4) "The leaders of the Common Core need to engage teacher unions." Wait-- there are leaders of Common Core? Is that a real job description. Because if we could find guys who would actually claim that title, I think it might be kind of awesome. Oh no wait-- it gets better. "Formal support of the Common Core from the NEA and the AFT would serve as a huge boon to the process of national standards. Government officials ought to make the compromises necessary to gain such support."

Okay, first I'm going to get a bucket of water so I can do a triple spit take. Then, I will borrow from my colleague from South Carolina, look at these Brookings boys and say, "Oh, aren't you sweet." How can you not know that the unions have been giving CCSS big wet kisses, or that government compromise wasn't nearly so necessary as Giant Gates Foundation Grants. I'm beginning to imagine that Brookings Institute is just a big collection of guys like the ones on Big Bang Theory.

I actually scrolled back to make sure I wasn't accidentally reading something from five years ago. But no-- yesterday's date. So with that, I award Brookings the gold medal for Most Clueless CCSS Commentary of 2014. Boys, sadly. your "fresh defense" is a collection of time-worn, over-used, discredited CCSS talking points. I mean, it does have the virtue of cramming as many of them into one space as I have ever seen. But fresh? I've seen fresher things on the Sci-Fi channel on a Saturday afternoon.