If you want to see a story confirming that there are, in fact, limits to what one can accomplish with money, power and connections, look no further that Education Post. It's a giant, dusty monument to some of the differences that truly separate the reformsters from the defenders of traditional public education.
Education Post debuted on September 1st to considerable fanfare, including a nice infomercial on the launch in Washington Post. The head honcho was (and still is) Peter Cunningham. Cunningham is an old Chicago hand who traveled to DC with Arne Duncan to become the voice of Duncan's office (some others characterized him as its brains). The site was bankrolled ($12 million) by money from Bloomsburg, Broad and Walton philanthropies. It proposed to make the education debates more civil and pleasant and reasoned and based on facts-not-anecdotes, and all of that noble purpose lasted about as long as it took to post the first handful of articles that established that Education Post would be shilling hard for the Obama administration's reformster agenda. Fittingly enough, their logo features a bulhorn, not ordinarily a weapon of choice for civil, reasoned conversation.
EdWeek covered the launch and tossed up this detail about the site's function:
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
The Washington Post profile included this:
Cunningham said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
So what we're really talking about is a campaign politics style PR attack office determined to blitzkreig its way into control of the narrative. And they followed through swiftly. The very day I ran my first piece about the site, I had two contributors? employees? operatives? whatever you want to call thems all up in my twitter with some spicy "So when did you stop beating your wife?" challenges. Cunningham called out Jose Luis Vilson within the first week on the site.
Three weeks later the site tried to take on Carol Burris, decided to dial it back, and still mounted a weak non-conversational assault. And after that, things just got quiet.
In the first few days, the site had drawn many dissenting posts in the comments section. Those were swiftly erased. In response to the complaints, EdPost tweeted "Hoping for a better conversation. Stay tuned." But that conversation never happened-- not even a chorus of happy sock puppets to sing the praises of the stable of writers. Education Post became one more demonstration that the opposite of love is indifference.
It certainly wasn't that people on either side of the education debates hate to converse. Mike Petrilli, Andy Smarick, and Rick Hess are just three examples of hard-driving reformsters who are perfectly capable of having intelligent conversations with public school advocates.
But Education Post was not really interested in a conversation. Instead, they revealed themselves fairly quickly to be a twelve million dollar troll. They had said they wanted to amplify the voices of reformy success stories, but they also devoted time to playing gotcha with voices on the side of public education. They added a feature where they marked up pro-public-ed documents with red pen, like a petulant schoolmarm, and that didn't seem like a conversation starter, either. But clearly they had hoped that they could be at the center of education policy firestorms, and they had a box of matches and a tank of gasoline already to go but... well, nobody wanted to play. Time and again they set out the bait, grabbed ahold of their club, and waited under their bridge but.... crickets.
This is not the first time reformsters have tried to harness the interwebs and some of that social medias the kids are all tweetering about, and it's not the first time that reformsters have failed miserably doing so (see Jeb Bush/FEE's now defunct "Learn More Go Further" campaign for another example). But this might be the most expensive.
I thought I'd check to see how big the fail was, and plugged some sites into the admittedly-imperfect site Alexa.com, which ranks all the websites in the world by traffic. Here's what I got (we'll stick with US ranks and ignore the international). This is the rank in America as roughly estimated by Alexa:
EducationPost-- 223,516
Diane Ravitch's blog-- 20,380
So, Ravitch, with a staff of one and a budget of maybe a hundred bucks, cleaned their clocks. Is it their politics? Let's see what the very-reformy thinky tank Fordham Foundation site clocks in at:
EdExcellence-- 67,360
So, no, it's possible to draw some attention from their side of the tracks. Maybe other sites rank higher because they've been around longer? How about Living in Dialogue, a pro-public ed website launched at just about the same time, for considerably less that $12 million.
Living in Dialogue-- 138,616
How do they compare to a simple high school English teacher who (even though I've been online longer) just blogs in his spare time with a budget of $0.00?
Curmudgucation-- 119,612
I've checked other independent public ed bloggers, and the results are similar. We can also check metrics like sites linking in to the site-- EducationPost has 81, which is not an impressive number.
Bottom line-- in money spent per number people getting the message, EducationPost is at the bottom of the heap. It's proof once again that while the reformsters can keep outspending everybody else, that doesn't mean they're actually convincing anybody else. The reformster movement is lifted up by a giant bag of hot air, and that air is heated by constantly burning a giant pile of money. When the money runs out, or is withdrawn, the balloon will deflate and the reformster initiative will float back to earth with the rest of us.
It can seem like the reformsters are winning-- they have the pretty sites, the shiny PR, the well-paid PR rapid response operatives. What they don't have are the people who are pouring their blood and sweat and heart and soul into a cause that is bigger than profit and power.
Meanwhile, EducationPost continues to troll hard, most recently going after activist mom/blogger Sarah Blaine (because you have to stop those moms from messing wit the narrative) and Diane Ravitch herself by pointing out that she used to say different things than she does now, trying to discredit today's education activity by bringing up what she said way back in the day, as if Ravitch hadn't already written a book herself explaining what beliefs changed and why. These trolling runs have not made EducationPost a center of conversation. No firestorm. Not even a smokescreen. Just a short quiet correction from Mercedes Schneider. It is possible that EducationPost could be more efficient by simply posting, "Notice Me, Dammit" as a headline.
But it's a 2015 world, and people mostly understand that you don't feed the trolls (which is why you'll find no links in this story, or any of my newer stuff, to the EducationPost website). More than that, defenders of US public education are coming to understand that not every reformster requires or deserves a response. Paul Thomas once called for Phase Three in the resistance, and perhaps this is it-- a phase in which we realize that we are no longer backed into a corner and no longer have to respond to every cockamamie attack on public education, even as some reformsters try to get us to start up the same old fight. Maybe EducationPost is not about trying to go forward to better conversations, but to actually sucker us into the same old dynamic and thereby preserve the narrative that reformsters are the ones with all the power, while we have to fight and scrape to get our point across. They aren't Goliath. They're just a big troll on life support.
If that's the case, than the irrelevance of EducationPost (because, really, does it matter whether they close up shop or not?) is one more true sign that Things Have Changed, that money can't win everything, and that we all need to have real conversations about the future of American public education, not simply a battle of rapid-response PR blitzes and stale talking points.
The premise of EducationPost was that the conversation about public education was their conversation to be held at their table under their terms. But now they are sitting at the table alone, while more important conversations are held elsewhere. Good news for the rest of us, but if I were Bloomberg, Broad and Walton, I'd want my $12 million back.
Showing posts with label Carol Burris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carol Burris. Show all posts
Friday, February 6, 2015
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Setting Cut Scores
Benchmark is originally a surveying term. Benchmarks are slots cut into the side of stone (read "permanent") structures into which a bench (basically a little shelf) can be inserted for surveying purposes. We know they're at a certain level because they've been measured in relation to another marker which has been measured in relation to another marker and so on retrogressively until we arrive at a Mean Sea Level marker (everything in surveying is ultimately measured in relation to one of those).
Surveying markers, including benchmarks, are literally set in stone. Anybody with the necessary training can find them always in the same place and measure any other point in relation to them.
This metaphorical sense of unwavering objective measure is what many folks carry with them to their consideration of testing and cut scores. Passing, failing, and excellence, they figure, are all measured against some scholarly Mean Sea Level marker by way of benchmarks that have been carefully measured against MSL and set in stone.
Sorry, no. Instead, cut scores represent an ideal somewhere between a blindfolded dart player with his fingers duct-taped together, and the guy playing against the blindfolded dart player who sets the darts exactly where he wants them.
Writing in the Stamford Advocate, Wendy Lecker notes that the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium members (including Connecticut's own committed foe of public education Commissioner Stefan Pryor) set cut scores for the SBA tests based on stale fairy dust and the wishes of dying puppies.
People tend to assume that cut scores-- the borderline between Good Enough and Abject Failure-- mean something. If a student fails The Test, she must be unready for college or unemployable or illiterate or at the very least several grades behind where she's Supposed To Be (although even that opens up the question "Supposed by whom?")
In fact, SBAC declares that the achievement levels "do not equate directly to expectations for `on-grade' performance" and test scores should only be used with multiple other sources of information about schools and students.
Furthermore, "SBAC admits it cannot validate whether its tests measure college readiness until it has data on how current test takers do in college."
If you are imagining that cut scores for the high-stakes accountability tests are derived through some rigorous study of exactly what students need to know and what level of proficiency they should have achieved by a certain age-- well, first, take a look at what you're assuming. Did you really think we have some sort of master list, some scholastic Mean Sea Level that tells us exactly what a human being of a certain age should know and be able to do as agreed upon by some wise council of experty experts? Because if you do, you might as well imagine that those experts fly to their meetings on pink pegasi, a flock of winger horsies that dance on rainbows and take minutes of the Wise Expert meetings by dictating to secretarial armadillos clothed in shimmering mink stoles.
Anyway, it doesn't matter because there are no signs that any of these people associated with The Test are trying to work with a hypothetical set of academic standards anyway. Instead, what we see over and over (even back in the days of NCLB), is educational amateurs setting cut scores for political purposes. So SBAC sets a cut score so that almost two thirds of the students will fail. John King in New York famously predicted the percentage of test failure before the test was even out the door-- but the actual cut scores were set after the test was taken.
That is not how you measure a test result against a standard. That's how you set a test standard based on the results you want to see. It's how you make your failure predictions come true. According to Carol Burris, King also attempted to find some connection between SAT results and college success prediction, and then somehow graft that onto a cut score for the NY tests, while Kentucky and other CCSS states played similar games with the ACT.
Setting cut scores is not an easy process. Education Sector, a division of the thinky tank American Institutes for Research (they specialize in behavioral sciency thinking, and have a large pedigree in the NCLB era and beyond), issued an "explainer" in July of 2006 about how states set passing scores on standardized tests. It leads off its section on cut scores with this:
On a technical level, states set cut scores along one of two dimensions: The characteristics of the test items or the characteristics of the test takers.It is essential to understand that either way is an inescapably subjective process. Just as academic standards are ultimately the result of professional judgment rather than absolute truth, there is no “right” way to set cut scores, and different methods have various strengths and weaknesses.
The paper goes on to talk about setting cut scores, and some of it is pretty technical, but it returns repeatedly to the notion that at various critical junctures, some human being is going to make a judgment call.
Educational Testing Service (ETS) also has a nifty "Primer on Setting Cut Scores on Tests of Educational Achievement." Again, from all the way back in 2006, this gives a quick compendium of various techniques for setting cut scores-- it lists eight different methods. And it also opens with some insights that would still be useful to consider today.
The first step is for policymakers to specify exactly why cut scores are being set in the first place. The policymakers should describe the benefits that are expected from the use of cut scores. What decisions will be made on the basis of the cut scores? How are those decisions being made now in the absence of cut scores? What reasons are there to believe that cut scores will result in better decisions? What are the expected benefits of the improved decisions?
Yeah, those conversations have not been happening within anyone's earshot. Then there is this:
It is important to list the reasons why cut scores are being set and to obtain consensus among stakeholders that the reasons are appropriate. An extremely useful exercise is to attempt to describe exactly how the cut scores will bring about each of the desired outcomes. It may be the case that some of the expected benefits of cut scores are unlikely to be achieved unless major educational reforms are accomplished. It will become apparent that cut scores, by themselves, have very little power to improve education. Simply measuring a child and classifying the child’s growth as adequate or inadequate will not help the child grow.
Oh, those crazy folks of 2006. Little did they know that in a few years education reform and testing would be fully committed and devoted to the notion that you can make a pig gain weight by weighing it. All this excellent advice about setting cut scores, and none of it appears to be getting use these days.
I'm not going to go too much more into this document from a company that specializes in educational testing, except to note that once again, the paper frequently notes that personal and professional judgment is a factor at several critical junctures. I will note that they include this step--
The next step is for groups of educators familiar with students in the affected grades and familiar with the subject matter to describe what students should know and be able to do to reach the selected performance levels.
They also are clear that selecting the judges who will set cut scores means making sure they are qualified, have experience, and reflect a demographic cross section. They suggest that policymakers consider fundamental questions such as is it better to pass a student who should fail, or fail a student who should pass? And they are also clear that the full process of setting the cut scores should be documented in painstaking detail, including the rationale for methodology and qualifications of the judges.
And they do refer uniformly to the score-setters as judges, because the whole process involves-- say it with me-- judgment.
People dealing with test scores and test results must remember that setting cut scores is not remotely like the process of surveying with benchmarks. Nothing is set in stone, nothing is judged based on its relationship to something set in stone, and everything is set by people using subjective judgment, not objective standards. We always need to be asking what a cut score is based on, and whether it is any better than a Wild Assed Guess. And when cut cores are set to serve a political purpose, we are right to question whether they have any validity at all.
Surveying markers, including benchmarks, are literally set in stone. Anybody with the necessary training can find them always in the same place and measure any other point in relation to them.
This metaphorical sense of unwavering objective measure is what many folks carry with them to their consideration of testing and cut scores. Passing, failing, and excellence, they figure, are all measured against some scholarly Mean Sea Level marker by way of benchmarks that have been carefully measured against MSL and set in stone.
Sorry, no. Instead, cut scores represent an ideal somewhere between a blindfolded dart player with his fingers duct-taped together, and the guy playing against the blindfolded dart player who sets the darts exactly where he wants them.
Writing in the Stamford Advocate, Wendy Lecker notes that the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium members (including Connecticut's own committed foe of public education Commissioner Stefan Pryor) set cut scores for the SBA tests based on stale fairy dust and the wishes of dying puppies.
People tend to assume that cut scores-- the borderline between Good Enough and Abject Failure-- mean something. If a student fails The Test, she must be unready for college or unemployable or illiterate or at the very least several grades behind where she's Supposed To Be (although even that opens up the question "Supposed by whom?")
In fact, SBAC declares that the achievement levels "do not equate directly to expectations for `on-grade' performance" and test scores should only be used with multiple other sources of information about schools and students.
Furthermore, "SBAC admits it cannot validate whether its tests measure college readiness until it has data on how current test takers do in college."
If you are imagining that cut scores for the high-stakes accountability tests are derived through some rigorous study of exactly what students need to know and what level of proficiency they should have achieved by a certain age-- well, first, take a look at what you're assuming. Did you really think we have some sort of master list, some scholastic Mean Sea Level that tells us exactly what a human being of a certain age should know and be able to do as agreed upon by some wise council of experty experts? Because if you do, you might as well imagine that those experts fly to their meetings on pink pegasi, a flock of winger horsies that dance on rainbows and take minutes of the Wise Expert meetings by dictating to secretarial armadillos clothed in shimmering mink stoles.
Anyway, it doesn't matter because there are no signs that any of these people associated with The Test are trying to work with a hypothetical set of academic standards anyway. Instead, what we see over and over (even back in the days of NCLB), is educational amateurs setting cut scores for political purposes. So SBAC sets a cut score so that almost two thirds of the students will fail. John King in New York famously predicted the percentage of test failure before the test was even out the door-- but the actual cut scores were set after the test was taken.
That is not how you measure a test result against a standard. That's how you set a test standard based on the results you want to see. It's how you make your failure predictions come true. According to Carol Burris, King also attempted to find some connection between SAT results and college success prediction, and then somehow graft that onto a cut score for the NY tests, while Kentucky and other CCSS states played similar games with the ACT.
Setting cut scores is not an easy process. Education Sector, a division of the thinky tank American Institutes for Research (they specialize in behavioral sciency thinking, and have a large pedigree in the NCLB era and beyond), issued an "explainer" in July of 2006 about how states set passing scores on standardized tests. It leads off its section on cut scores with this:
On a technical level, states set cut scores along one of two dimensions: The characteristics of the test items or the characteristics of the test takers.It is essential to understand that either way is an inescapably subjective process. Just as academic standards are ultimately the result of professional judgment rather than absolute truth, there is no “right” way to set cut scores, and different methods have various strengths and weaknesses.
The paper goes on to talk about setting cut scores, and some of it is pretty technical, but it returns repeatedly to the notion that at various critical junctures, some human being is going to make a judgment call.
Educational Testing Service (ETS) also has a nifty "Primer on Setting Cut Scores on Tests of Educational Achievement." Again, from all the way back in 2006, this gives a quick compendium of various techniques for setting cut scores-- it lists eight different methods. And it also opens with some insights that would still be useful to consider today.
The first step is for policymakers to specify exactly why cut scores are being set in the first place. The policymakers should describe the benefits that are expected from the use of cut scores. What decisions will be made on the basis of the cut scores? How are those decisions being made now in the absence of cut scores? What reasons are there to believe that cut scores will result in better decisions? What are the expected benefits of the improved decisions?
Yeah, those conversations have not been happening within anyone's earshot. Then there is this:
It is important to list the reasons why cut scores are being set and to obtain consensus among stakeholders that the reasons are appropriate. An extremely useful exercise is to attempt to describe exactly how the cut scores will bring about each of the desired outcomes. It may be the case that some of the expected benefits of cut scores are unlikely to be achieved unless major educational reforms are accomplished. It will become apparent that cut scores, by themselves, have very little power to improve education. Simply measuring a child and classifying the child’s growth as adequate or inadequate will not help the child grow.
Oh, those crazy folks of 2006. Little did they know that in a few years education reform and testing would be fully committed and devoted to the notion that you can make a pig gain weight by weighing it. All this excellent advice about setting cut scores, and none of it appears to be getting use these days.
I'm not going to go too much more into this document from a company that specializes in educational testing, except to note that once again, the paper frequently notes that personal and professional judgment is a factor at several critical junctures. I will note that they include this step--
The next step is for groups of educators familiar with students in the affected grades and familiar with the subject matter to describe what students should know and be able to do to reach the selected performance levels.
They also are clear that selecting the judges who will set cut scores means making sure they are qualified, have experience, and reflect a demographic cross section. They suggest that policymakers consider fundamental questions such as is it better to pass a student who should fail, or fail a student who should pass? And they are also clear that the full process of setting the cut scores should be documented in painstaking detail, including the rationale for methodology and qualifications of the judges.
And they do refer uniformly to the score-setters as judges, because the whole process involves-- say it with me-- judgment.
People dealing with test scores and test results must remember that setting cut scores is not remotely like the process of surveying with benchmarks. Nothing is set in stone, nothing is judged based on its relationship to something set in stone, and everything is set by people using subjective judgment, not objective standards. We always need to be asking what a cut score is based on, and whether it is any better than a Wild Assed Guess. And when cut cores are set to serve a political purpose, we are right to question whether they have any validity at all.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
EdPost Dials It Back, Still Whiffs
Over the last forty-eight hours, the rapid responders from Education Post ran into a rapid response of their own. They decided to go after Carol Burris, and while various bloggers called them on their response out in the bloggosphere, Burris and many other responders descended upon the comments section, particularly for the post by the extremely feisty Ann Whalen.
By the end of the day, Whalen was back with a new post and a different tone.
Whalen's first response ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods...") pretty much called Burris a liar who couldn't make an honest case for her position. The response response addressed Burris directly and took a less combative tone.
I appreciate your quick follow-up and willingness to engage in a conversation about how we can support success for all of our students. We may have different approaches and strategies, but I do believe at the core (pun intended), we all want what’s best for children and schools.
And then she tried to address some of the issues that had been re-raised.
The set-in-stone nature of the Core came up, so she tried to once again sell the notion that, gosh, the states "are firmly in the driver’s seat." They can be just a flexible with their college-and-career-ready standards as they want, and several states have used that flexibility which is true in the sense that some states have found it politically expedient to rewrite some of the verbage of CCSS and find new names to call it. She acknowledges that some states have paid a price for not adopting standards that they can sufficiently prove to the feds are CACR enough, but golly, that's not the feds fault. She tries hard to sell the notion of the feds being all handsy offy on the Core, and I just don't understand how she imagines that Burris or any other sentient human who has been paying attention would believe that's true for a second.
The she tosses out the old baloney about how many students arrive at college needing remediation.
Students who are told they have mastered basic skills and are ready for post-secondary work should not find out the dirty truth in college.
Oh, that dirty truth. Of course, many students are arriving at college who were never told they were ready (and how are "mastered basic skills" and "ready for post-secondary work" the same thing, anyway?) I might suggest that it's just as likely that many students who are not college material have been told repeatedly that they must attend college or else they'll be big losing losers.
Here's another conclusion to reach from the remediation numbers-- the reforms that have been forced on public schools over the past ten-plus years have hurt public education more than helping it.
Whalen doesn't try to prop up any of the other ideas that Burris knocked over. But just when I was going to give her credit for adroitly shifting tone and direction, she finishes with this
While I didn’t see many comments on ways we can continue to move forward and improve support and implementation, I do look forward to learning more about your soon-to-be-released solution. Please let us know when we might learn more of this effort.
Oh, Ann. You were doing so well, but then you had to finish up with a big helping of Dolores Umbrage-style snottiness.
Let me repeat this idea for you. It's not up to supporters of public education to propose a solution, because reformsters have never A) proven that there's a problem in need of solving or B) proven that any of their proposals will improve anything about education.
If you want to perform surgery on a patient, the burden is on you to show that you have the right surgery in mind and that you know how to do it. If you want to take money out of someone else's bank account, the burden is on you to prove that you should be allowed to do it.
We've been waiting for years for you guys to back up some-- any-- of your bright ideas with compelling support. It still hasn't happened. You don't get to change the conversation by saying, "Well, what's your big idea, then?" The burden of proof is on you. And really-- why do we need to submit a "solution" for your approval, anyway? The fact that you're on a $12 million website does not mean that you need to be paid attention or that we are answerable to you.
By the end of the day, Whalen was back with a new post and a different tone.
Whalen's first response ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods...") pretty much called Burris a liar who couldn't make an honest case for her position. The response response addressed Burris directly and took a less combative tone.
I appreciate your quick follow-up and willingness to engage in a conversation about how we can support success for all of our students. We may have different approaches and strategies, but I do believe at the core (pun intended), we all want what’s best for children and schools.
And then she tried to address some of the issues that had been re-raised.
The set-in-stone nature of the Core came up, so she tried to once again sell the notion that, gosh, the states "are firmly in the driver’s seat." They can be just a flexible with their college-and-career-ready standards as they want, and several states have used that flexibility which is true in the sense that some states have found it politically expedient to rewrite some of the verbage of CCSS and find new names to call it. She acknowledges that some states have paid a price for not adopting standards that they can sufficiently prove to the feds are CACR enough, but golly, that's not the feds fault. She tries hard to sell the notion of the feds being all handsy offy on the Core, and I just don't understand how she imagines that Burris or any other sentient human who has been paying attention would believe that's true for a second.
The she tosses out the old baloney about how many students arrive at college needing remediation.
Students who are told they have mastered basic skills and are ready for post-secondary work should not find out the dirty truth in college.
Oh, that dirty truth. Of course, many students are arriving at college who were never told they were ready (and how are "mastered basic skills" and "ready for post-secondary work" the same thing, anyway?) I might suggest that it's just as likely that many students who are not college material have been told repeatedly that they must attend college or else they'll be big losing losers.
Here's another conclusion to reach from the remediation numbers-- the reforms that have been forced on public schools over the past ten-plus years have hurt public education more than helping it.
Whalen doesn't try to prop up any of the other ideas that Burris knocked over. But just when I was going to give her credit for adroitly shifting tone and direction, she finishes with this
While I didn’t see many comments on ways we can continue to move forward and improve support and implementation, I do look forward to learning more about your soon-to-be-released solution. Please let us know when we might learn more of this effort.
Oh, Ann. You were doing so well, but then you had to finish up with a big helping of Dolores Umbrage-style snottiness.
Let me repeat this idea for you. It's not up to supporters of public education to propose a solution, because reformsters have never A) proven that there's a problem in need of solving or B) proven that any of their proposals will improve anything about education.
If you want to perform surgery on a patient, the burden is on you to show that you have the right surgery in mind and that you know how to do it. If you want to take money out of someone else's bank account, the burden is on you to prove that you should be allowed to do it.
We've been waiting for years for you guys to back up some-- any-- of your bright ideas with compelling support. It still hasn't happened. You don't get to change the conversation by saying, "Well, what's your big idea, then?" The burden of proof is on you. And really-- why do we need to submit a "solution" for your approval, anyway? The fact that you're on a $12 million website does not mean that you need to be paid attention or that we are answerable to you.
Friday, September 19, 2014
EdPost Flexes Rapid Response Muscles
Well, it turns out that Education Post will be good for one thing. Its rapid response function (in which apparently a cadre of hired bloggists are ready to grab their keyboards from their mantles and launch like internet minutemen) will allow the rest of us to see when Pro-Public Education folks have scored a palpable hit.
By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams column (on the heels of her online debate win), because EdPost has rapidly deployed three bloggists to spank Burris by name the very next day. How do these rapid responders do? Even though the irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has already taken a look, I can't resist taking one, too.
Headliner AnnWhalen wins the Well That Didn't Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost's highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris") but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
And then she tries to refute Burris's arguements by lying. (Hey-- I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).
She tries to argue that the copyrighted CCSS can and have been changed. She would have been further ahead to point out the obvious-- though the standards are copyrighted and states did agree not to change them, nobody in the current political climate is going to enforce that. Instead, she tries to pretend that the truth is not true and that no such copyrights or agreements exist.
Whalen also tries to argue that the Core do not dictate curriculum, and then best she can do here is go anecdotal with some hand-picked teachers from some hand-picked states. Trying to get in an anecdote war over CCSS is a bad choice. We could get into the whole standards vs. curriculum argument here, but let's just observe that since Core fans argue it's a great idea to have the CCSS nationally because it will make all schools the same and students will be able to switch districts without missing a step-- come on. This is such an intellectually dishonest argument that we can only conclude that Core supporters are not interested in having a real conversation with anybody.
Whalen punts the "internationally benchmarked" and "based on research" issue to Fordham. They aren't. There's not a whit of research to say they are. But she pretends not to get Burris's actual argument here.
Whalen also pretends not to understand any of the arguments about the achievement gap and high-poverty schools, at one point weirdly arguing that the Mass Insight report shows the top students are the toppiest, which is not something I'd bring up when trying show the achievement gap is closing.
And she really earns her Big Fat Liar stripes by pushing the same old tired bullshit about how the standards are not national standards and states totally volunteered to adopt the standards that they totally created and seriously, you know Whalen is fresh from government work because I don't think anybody except a career bureaucrat could type this unvarnished horse pucky with a straight face.
Whalen labels Burris's most inexcusable argument that she didn't propose a solution. Holy crap! Okay, I am going to break into your house at night and start stealing your furniture. You wake up and catch me and tell me to stop and I turn to you and say, "Okay, then. Why don't you offer a better solution?" That's how stupid this argument from Whalen is.
So, EdPost's headliner fails.
Erin Dukeshire takes on the curriculum argument. Her argument is....curious. Burris pointed out in her column that specifying specific skills in the standards did make them awfully lot like a curriculum, but Dukeshire seems to want to say that since the CCSS are really specific, it gives her more freedom and makes them less like a curriculum. She also throws in a bit of "before the Core I was lost" baloney, but basically her argument is that since she can have order a Model A in any color, as long as it's black, she's really free.
I actually find that it’s easier to design a variety of successful learning experiences when the standards name both content and skills. During the past few years, I’ve developed several lessons around a Common Core standard that requires students to integrate text with visuals. Because the Common Core lists important literacy standards for students to develop in the science classroom, I don’t spend precious planning periods guessing at how to incorporate reading into my lessons in a meaningful way.
I think I see her problem. Where she is wasting time guessing about how to incorporate reading into her lessons in a meaningful way, I'm over here using my professional judgment and experience and knowledge of my students to figure that out in a non-guessy way.
Maricela Montoy-Wilson will also stand up for the Core. Like Dukeshire, she is an America Achieves Fellow, and she's been teaching the Core for three years, so she knows what's up. She has a great command of reformster baloney-speak, as witnessed by this fluffernuttery:
The standards do not tell me how to teach, contrary to your point, but rather they serve as a guidepost for me, as the educator, to determine the best instructional strategies to attain the standards. The standards guide me in selecting instructional methods that facilitate true understanding of the fewer, deeper standards. They help me focus on clear-cut needs, which help me identify instructional practices through collaboration, strong coaching, and feedback.
So the standards do not tell her what to do-- they just guide and help, help, help her.
Ultimately, the Common Core standards help us prepare students to enter colleges and the ever-changing workplace. We know that our nation is not up to par in mathematical reasoning, and our classrooms are not adequately responding to the fast-evolving needs of the innovative and technological workplace. Therefore, a shift from doing to understanding was imperative in creating innovators. The Common Core standards offer such a shift.
Well, except we don't actually know any of those things. We don't know that we're not up to par-- we don't even know what par is, or what the consequences of being up to it actually are. Nor do we know about the adequancy of responses (adequate for what purpose) nor do we have any authority to declare an imperative need for innovators. And no, we have absolutely no basis for believing that the Core prepares students for college or the workplace. So, very pretty, and all without foundation.
Montoy-Wilson decides to take on the four flim-flams one at a time.
The standards are a guide, she repeats. Since the standards don't tell her how to teach composing and decomposing numbers (Burris's example), they are just a guide. But she's wrong, because teaching composing and decomposing numbers is what the standards present as how teachers are supposed to teach basic math functions. Montoy-Wilson herself repeats the magic phrase "foundational to deeper understanding"-- which means that the point of learning this technique is because it's a how to understand the functions. So, the point still goes to Burris.
The achievement gap. All these arguments make my brain glaze over because they all depend on smoke and mirrors and pretty words because there is not a single fact to back up what Core fans are trying to say. What specifics Montoy-Wilson mentions are, predictably, things like project based learning that any competent teacher can do and did do for years without any Common Core.
Montoy-Wilson is another Core booster who is seeing magical tests somewhere that none of the rest of us see, tests with performance tasks and other fine features that replace the rote memorization that standardized tests were never about anyway. They're standardized tests. They will create a new test prep industry. They don't measure anything but test-taking skills and, indirectly, socio-economic class.
We are at a crossroads in education policy. We can heed calls to make things “easy” and fail to get at the heart of what our students deserve — or we can buckle down together, accept that there are challenges, that the going is tough, but ultimately the promise of these standards are worth it.
Pretty sure that they aren't. Also pretty sure that there's nothing in these three blogs to convince me otherwise. Lots of things are hard. Shoving a post into your eyeball is hard. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. And promising your children a trip to Disneyland is a great promise, but if you're really driving them to a bombed-out playground, your promise doesn't really matter.
As a rapid-response exercise, EdPost is, at last, fast. But hey-- I often provide next day service and I do my writing at times like 5:30 AM and on my lunch break. Surely $12 million will get you the same level of service that my readers get for $0.00.
Beyond the speed, EdPost continues to reveal its true colors. Completely aligned with the US DOE party line. Just as dismissive and condescending and nasty as anybody in the education debates has ever been, which is not a crime-- it's noteworthy only because EdPost launched with the promise that they would change the conversation.
This is not a new conversation. It's the same old bullshit. Talking points repeated ad infinitum, even if they've been previously debunked and abandoned by thinking people on both sides. Personal attacks and dismissive language. Anecdotes and fancy language to make points (which, again, is not a terrible crime, but EdPost launched claiming it would be all facts and calm rationality).
I mean, damn-- if you're going to go after Carol Burris with accusations of being a liar and a cheat and not understanding how education works, you had better be better armed with something other than high dudgeon and government briefings. EdPost has show us what they're about, but they've also shown how good they are at it, and boy, if that were my $12 million, I'd want some of it back.
[Update. I've refrained from linking to Ed Post for the same reason that I stopped naming She Who Will Not Be Named, but you really need to watch Carol Burris take Whalen to school in the comments section, so here's a link.]
By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams column (on the heels of her online debate win), because EdPost has rapidly deployed three bloggists to spank Burris by name the very next day. How do these rapid responders do? Even though the irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has already taken a look, I can't resist taking one, too.
Headliner AnnWhalen wins the Well That Didn't Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost's highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris") but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
And then she tries to refute Burris's arguements by lying. (Hey-- I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).
She tries to argue that the copyrighted CCSS can and have been changed. She would have been further ahead to point out the obvious-- though the standards are copyrighted and states did agree not to change them, nobody in the current political climate is going to enforce that. Instead, she tries to pretend that the truth is not true and that no such copyrights or agreements exist.
Whalen also tries to argue that the Core do not dictate curriculum, and then best she can do here is go anecdotal with some hand-picked teachers from some hand-picked states. Trying to get in an anecdote war over CCSS is a bad choice. We could get into the whole standards vs. curriculum argument here, but let's just observe that since Core fans argue it's a great idea to have the CCSS nationally because it will make all schools the same and students will be able to switch districts without missing a step-- come on. This is such an intellectually dishonest argument that we can only conclude that Core supporters are not interested in having a real conversation with anybody.
Whalen punts the "internationally benchmarked" and "based on research" issue to Fordham. They aren't. There's not a whit of research to say they are. But she pretends not to get Burris's actual argument here.
Whalen also pretends not to understand any of the arguments about the achievement gap and high-poverty schools, at one point weirdly arguing that the Mass Insight report shows the top students are the toppiest, which is not something I'd bring up when trying show the achievement gap is closing.
And she really earns her Big Fat Liar stripes by pushing the same old tired bullshit about how the standards are not national standards and states totally volunteered to adopt the standards that they totally created and seriously, you know Whalen is fresh from government work because I don't think anybody except a career bureaucrat could type this unvarnished horse pucky with a straight face.
Whalen labels Burris's most inexcusable argument that she didn't propose a solution. Holy crap! Okay, I am going to break into your house at night and start stealing your furniture. You wake up and catch me and tell me to stop and I turn to you and say, "Okay, then. Why don't you offer a better solution?" That's how stupid this argument from Whalen is.
So, EdPost's headliner fails.
Erin Dukeshire takes on the curriculum argument. Her argument is....curious. Burris pointed out in her column that specifying specific skills in the standards did make them awfully lot like a curriculum, but Dukeshire seems to want to say that since the CCSS are really specific, it gives her more freedom and makes them less like a curriculum. She also throws in a bit of "before the Core I was lost" baloney, but basically her argument is that since she can have order a Model A in any color, as long as it's black, she's really free.
I actually find that it’s easier to design a variety of successful learning experiences when the standards name both content and skills. During the past few years, I’ve developed several lessons around a Common Core standard that requires students to integrate text with visuals. Because the Common Core lists important literacy standards for students to develop in the science classroom, I don’t spend precious planning periods guessing at how to incorporate reading into my lessons in a meaningful way.
I think I see her problem. Where she is wasting time guessing about how to incorporate reading into her lessons in a meaningful way, I'm over here using my professional judgment and experience and knowledge of my students to figure that out in a non-guessy way.
Maricela Montoy-Wilson will also stand up for the Core. Like Dukeshire, she is an America Achieves Fellow, and she's been teaching the Core for three years, so she knows what's up. She has a great command of reformster baloney-speak, as witnessed by this fluffernuttery:
The standards do not tell me how to teach, contrary to your point, but rather they serve as a guidepost for me, as the educator, to determine the best instructional strategies to attain the standards. The standards guide me in selecting instructional methods that facilitate true understanding of the fewer, deeper standards. They help me focus on clear-cut needs, which help me identify instructional practices through collaboration, strong coaching, and feedback.
So the standards do not tell her what to do-- they just guide and help, help, help her.
Ultimately, the Common Core standards help us prepare students to enter colleges and the ever-changing workplace. We know that our nation is not up to par in mathematical reasoning, and our classrooms are not adequately responding to the fast-evolving needs of the innovative and technological workplace. Therefore, a shift from doing to understanding was imperative in creating innovators. The Common Core standards offer such a shift.
Well, except we don't actually know any of those things. We don't know that we're not up to par-- we don't even know what par is, or what the consequences of being up to it actually are. Nor do we know about the adequancy of responses (adequate for what purpose) nor do we have any authority to declare an imperative need for innovators. And no, we have absolutely no basis for believing that the Core prepares students for college or the workplace. So, very pretty, and all without foundation.
Montoy-Wilson decides to take on the four flim-flams one at a time.
The standards are a guide, she repeats. Since the standards don't tell her how to teach composing and decomposing numbers (Burris's example), they are just a guide. But she's wrong, because teaching composing and decomposing numbers is what the standards present as how teachers are supposed to teach basic math functions. Montoy-Wilson herself repeats the magic phrase "foundational to deeper understanding"-- which means that the point of learning this technique is because it's a how to understand the functions. So, the point still goes to Burris.
The achievement gap. All these arguments make my brain glaze over because they all depend on smoke and mirrors and pretty words because there is not a single fact to back up what Core fans are trying to say. What specifics Montoy-Wilson mentions are, predictably, things like project based learning that any competent teacher can do and did do for years without any Common Core.
Montoy-Wilson is another Core booster who is seeing magical tests somewhere that none of the rest of us see, tests with performance tasks and other fine features that replace the rote memorization that standardized tests were never about anyway. They're standardized tests. They will create a new test prep industry. They don't measure anything but test-taking skills and, indirectly, socio-economic class.
We are at a crossroads in education policy. We can heed calls to make things “easy” and fail to get at the heart of what our students deserve — or we can buckle down together, accept that there are challenges, that the going is tough, but ultimately the promise of these standards are worth it.
Pretty sure that they aren't. Also pretty sure that there's nothing in these three blogs to convince me otherwise. Lots of things are hard. Shoving a post into your eyeball is hard. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. And promising your children a trip to Disneyland is a great promise, but if you're really driving them to a bombed-out playground, your promise doesn't really matter.
As a rapid-response exercise, EdPost is, at last, fast. But hey-- I often provide next day service and I do my writing at times like 5:30 AM and on my lunch break. Surely $12 million will get you the same level of service that my readers get for $0.00.
Beyond the speed, EdPost continues to reveal its true colors. Completely aligned with the US DOE party line. Just as dismissive and condescending and nasty as anybody in the education debates has ever been, which is not a crime-- it's noteworthy only because EdPost launched with the promise that they would change the conversation.
This is not a new conversation. It's the same old bullshit. Talking points repeated ad infinitum, even if they've been previously debunked and abandoned by thinking people on both sides. Personal attacks and dismissive language. Anecdotes and fancy language to make points (which, again, is not a terrible crime, but EdPost launched claiming it would be all facts and calm rationality).
I mean, damn-- if you're going to go after Carol Burris with accusations of being a liar and a cheat and not understanding how education works, you had better be better armed with something other than high dudgeon and government briefings. EdPost has show us what they're about, but they've also shown how good they are at it, and boy, if that were my $12 million, I'd want some of it back.
[Update. I've refrained from linking to Ed Post for the same reason that I stopped naming She Who Will Not Be Named, but you really need to watch Carol Burris take Whalen to school in the comments section, so here's a link.]
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Brown Presents NY Lawsuit Talking Points
In the June 24 NY Daily News, Campbell Brown presented the basic talking points for the newly-manufactured NY road show version of the Vergara trial. Here we go.
A Stirring Anecdote
Her story centers on the Williams family
One of their children... felt so strongly about the lack of instruction she was getting at her Rochester school that she wrote an essay about her experience. Instead of getting help, Jada was confronted about it, and her mom received harassing calls from teachers. Subjected to unfair treatment, Jada eventually had to transfer school.
This "ordeal," says Brown, began with a student's "request for sound teaching."
It's a good story because it underlines exactly what is problematic about this sort of narrative as a model of teacher evaluation. This could in fact be the story of a student who made a reasonable request, wrote an essay about it, and was unfairly hounded by multiple teachers. While I'd like to say that I can't imagine that ever happening, it's certainly not impossible (though the harassing phone calls from plural teachers is hard to imagine).
But this could also be the story of a student who decide she knew better than a trained professional how the teacher should do his job, got called on it, and had the whole thing blow up when the school tried to deal with her insubordination and disrespect.
Either version of the story could be the truth. If we put in student hands the nuclear option of ending a teacher's career, we are certainly, as Brown says she wants to, changing the balance of power. But I'm not sure how we get to excellence in teaching by way of a student smiling and saying, "Mrs. DeGumbuddy, my lawyer and I think you really want to reconsider my grade on this essay."
The Three Basic Underminers
Brown's lawsuit (there really is no need to pretend that this is the students' lawsuit) asserts that three policies of the State of New York undermine the presence of quality teachers in the classroom.
Seniority-- "last in, first out" is bad. It's also a sign of how carefully this is all crafted, because for years I never heard the policy called anything by FILO (first in, last out). But since we need to focus on the young teachers unjustly terminated by this policy, LIFO suits us better.
Tenure-- NY makes teachers wait three years and eighteen observations for tenure. This is the most obvious difference between the New York case and Vergara (California was awarding tenure after less time). This is a hard argument to make-- if an administrator can't tell whether or not she's got a keeper after three years and eighteen observations, that administrator needs to go get a job selling real estate or groceries, because, damn!
On the plus side, I look forward to Brown's accompanying argument that all New York schools should be barred from ever again hiring Teach for America two-year contract temps. If it takes more than three years to determine if a teacher is any good, then clearly TFA is a waste of everybody's time. Do let me know when Brown brings that up.
Dismissals-- Too long, too hard. I'm not in New York, so I don't know the real numbers here. This was the weakest part of the state's case in Vergara-- while you can't rush through these proceedings, there's no excuse for dragging them out for months and years. It's not good for either party.
Brown Is Stumped
Brown's clincher is a sign that either she's playing dumb for rhetorical purposes, or she really doesn't understand schools at all.
...last year, nearly 92% of the state’s teachers outside New York City were deemed effective or highly effective. If this is the case, how can 69% of students fail to show they are proficient in math or English Language Arts testing?
The strictly factual answer of course would be the studies indicating that teachers account for 14% tops of student learning. I don't know if I buy that exact number personally, but it's out there. Certainly it can't be hard for Brown to imagine that some students are capable of sitting in a classroom with an awesome teacher and still not learn from her, either because of distraction, personal issues, or simple defiance.
But the other reason that 69% of NYS students came up short on math and ELA proficiency? Because they were supposed to. Because the NY cut scores (the line between passing and failing) were not set by using some scientific study of what a "sufficient" display of skill would be, but by determining distribution ahead of time. By saying, let's draw the pass-fail line so that 30% are above it, and the rest are below it. You can read a pretty thorough run-down of these tests by Carol Burris and John Murphy here.
And nice touch on calling the fail rate 69% instead of the 70% more commonly reported. 69% sound much more inexact and therefor more "real" than 70%, which in its very tidiness reveals its made-up origins.
I feel bad once again for the prop plaintiffs who are shown in the photo looking out at the crowd, shoulders hunched, like they are seeing a huge raging river that they have to cross. But the Vergara prop plaintiffs were well taken care of, and I'm sure these will be as well. But there is a special corner of hell reserved for adults who use children as tools to further their own agenda.
In the meantime, teachers here in the East can now look forward to a PR blitz tearing down teachers in support of a lawsuit designed to dismantle teaching as a profession. We can only hope the ultimate result will be better than the California version of this traveling circus.
A Stirring Anecdote
Her story centers on the Williams family
One of their children... felt so strongly about the lack of instruction she was getting at her Rochester school that she wrote an essay about her experience. Instead of getting help, Jada was confronted about it, and her mom received harassing calls from teachers. Subjected to unfair treatment, Jada eventually had to transfer school.
This "ordeal," says Brown, began with a student's "request for sound teaching."
It's a good story because it underlines exactly what is problematic about this sort of narrative as a model of teacher evaluation. This could in fact be the story of a student who made a reasonable request, wrote an essay about it, and was unfairly hounded by multiple teachers. While I'd like to say that I can't imagine that ever happening, it's certainly not impossible (though the harassing phone calls from plural teachers is hard to imagine).
But this could also be the story of a student who decide she knew better than a trained professional how the teacher should do his job, got called on it, and had the whole thing blow up when the school tried to deal with her insubordination and disrespect.
Either version of the story could be the truth. If we put in student hands the nuclear option of ending a teacher's career, we are certainly, as Brown says she wants to, changing the balance of power. But I'm not sure how we get to excellence in teaching by way of a student smiling and saying, "Mrs. DeGumbuddy, my lawyer and I think you really want to reconsider my grade on this essay."
The Three Basic Underminers
Brown's lawsuit (there really is no need to pretend that this is the students' lawsuit) asserts that three policies of the State of New York undermine the presence of quality teachers in the classroom.
Seniority-- "last in, first out" is bad. It's also a sign of how carefully this is all crafted, because for years I never heard the policy called anything by FILO (first in, last out). But since we need to focus on the young teachers unjustly terminated by this policy, LIFO suits us better.
Tenure-- NY makes teachers wait three years and eighteen observations for tenure. This is the most obvious difference between the New York case and Vergara (California was awarding tenure after less time). This is a hard argument to make-- if an administrator can't tell whether or not she's got a keeper after three years and eighteen observations, that administrator needs to go get a job selling real estate or groceries, because, damn!
On the plus side, I look forward to Brown's accompanying argument that all New York schools should be barred from ever again hiring Teach for America two-year contract temps. If it takes more than three years to determine if a teacher is any good, then clearly TFA is a waste of everybody's time. Do let me know when Brown brings that up.
Dismissals-- Too long, too hard. I'm not in New York, so I don't know the real numbers here. This was the weakest part of the state's case in Vergara-- while you can't rush through these proceedings, there's no excuse for dragging them out for months and years. It's not good for either party.
Brown Is Stumped
Brown's clincher is a sign that either she's playing dumb for rhetorical purposes, or she really doesn't understand schools at all.
...last year, nearly 92% of the state’s teachers outside New York City were deemed effective or highly effective. If this is the case, how can 69% of students fail to show they are proficient in math or English Language Arts testing?
The strictly factual answer of course would be the studies indicating that teachers account for 14% tops of student learning. I don't know if I buy that exact number personally, but it's out there. Certainly it can't be hard for Brown to imagine that some students are capable of sitting in a classroom with an awesome teacher and still not learn from her, either because of distraction, personal issues, or simple defiance.
But the other reason that 69% of NYS students came up short on math and ELA proficiency? Because they were supposed to. Because the NY cut scores (the line between passing and failing) were not set by using some scientific study of what a "sufficient" display of skill would be, but by determining distribution ahead of time. By saying, let's draw the pass-fail line so that 30% are above it, and the rest are below it. You can read a pretty thorough run-down of these tests by Carol Burris and John Murphy here.
And nice touch on calling the fail rate 69% instead of the 70% more commonly reported. 69% sound much more inexact and therefor more "real" than 70%, which in its very tidiness reveals its made-up origins.
I feel bad once again for the prop plaintiffs who are shown in the photo looking out at the crowd, shoulders hunched, like they are seeing a huge raging river that they have to cross. But the Vergara prop plaintiffs were well taken care of, and I'm sure these will be as well. But there is a special corner of hell reserved for adults who use children as tools to further their own agenda.
In the meantime, teachers here in the East can now look forward to a PR blitz tearing down teachers in support of a lawsuit designed to dismantle teaching as a profession. We can only hope the ultimate result will be better than the California version of this traveling circus.
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