Cuomo & Emanuel: What Really Matters

When the budget gets tight or the lifeboat is crowded or the villagers are outside the gate, pitchforks in hand, you have to make some choices about what is really important, what you really want to save.

Two pieces of breaking news today underline how that works in politics, and why we have to pay close attention to actions marketed as victories.

In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel's office announced a "compromise" with Dyett High hunger strikers. Well, not with them with them, because they were in no way part of the deal that the mayor's office hammered out.

The mayor was up against the wall. Demonstrators made a shambles out of last night's meeting, and fifteen protesters were arrested for blocking doors, and all of that makes for terrible optics. And so today a mid-level agent of the Chicago Public Schools announced that Dyett High would re-open as an open-enrollment arts school, a move billed as a "compromise" because it includes elements of all three proposals for Dyett-- i.e. 1) from the actual members of the community, 2) from an arts group with no school-running expertise and 3) from a group that put their hand in after the deadline for proposals. The new school will be open enrollment, but operated by some of the private contractors preferred by CPS-- hired guns who have been neither invested nor involved in the development of the school.

This is not what the hunger strikers wanted. Not that anybody in the pretty press conference could find that out directly

MT @OCPress:#FightForDyett hunger strikers not allowed into #CPS to hear decision on school. (photo: @sarahdashji) pic.twitter.com/t0MTi34hCX

— WBEZeducation (@WBEZeducation) September 3, 2015

Emanuel faced an ever-growing mess, and he had to decide what to save, what absolutely could not be sacrificed in salvaging some sort of end to the public hunger strike. And he decided the one thing that he absolutely could not give up was the policy of keeping community voices silent. Okay, let them have open enrollment. But don't let them speak. Don't let them have a say in making any decisions about the school. And just to make it clear, don't use their years of research and planning for the school design-- because that'll make it clear who's still in complete control of what happens in their school.

The press will announce "Dyett will stay open" and many folks will say, "Well, hey-- they won!" which turns out to be a small sacrifice in the name of keeping the Lessers silenced and in their place, which turns out to be the Most Important Goal. They'll get-- probably-- a neighborhood school-- kind of. But they'll still have no say in how it's run. Not exactly a sweeping victory (nor are the strikers fooled). But the news about an open Dyett will strip traction from any continued strike.

Meanwhile, in New York, Andy Cuomo was badmouthing the Common Core. Like Emanuel, Cuomo has been noticing too many barbarians at the gates, with MaryEllen Elia's announcement that she was going to Get Tough with opt-outers being rapidly walked back because, well, the barbarians weren't scared by her threats-- just pissed off. So Elia walked back quick-style, and today Cuomo allowed as how many experts were still saying that the Core and the Big Standardized Test (and EngageNY and a whole raft of other reformster wonderment) have Serious Problems and now he's just going to get on that right away by turning one of his handpicked Education Commissions, previously installed to help rescue his nutburger teacher eval system. The commission will kick up some folks who can defuse criticism of the Core make recommendations about standards, though certainly not by including input from members of the public. Whatever old wine in new skins standards Cuomo gets, he will get them his way, with his people.

And so we find that what matters most to Cuomo is not the Core (by name) or his educational reformster baloney. Nope-- the most important thing is to get the Lessers to Shut Up and Behave.

In Chicago and New York, today's actions are intended to convince a whole lot of folks that the fight is over, the powerful caved, nothing to see here, everybody go home and turn on some Netflix. And in the months (or years) ahead, the battle over the fate of Dyett High and NY Standards will be a long, battle-by-battle slog. Emanuel and Cuomo will have sacrificed some of their stated goals, but not the most treasured goal of all-- keeping the Lessers quiet and voiceless. Maybe they think they'll relax now and quit and go home, leaving the Leaders with what the most want-- power without interference.

That's the immediate lesson today. Nobody stood up for closing Dyett high or New York's Core as a matter of deeply held principle. Both were sacrificed easily and publicly. The immediate lesson is in what Cuomo and Emanuel were not willing to sacrifice. They were and are not willing to make the sacrifice of letting citizens come sit at the table or to have a voice when policy is set. Sacrifice anything, as long as you score a PR outflanking of the commoners without having to let them speak.

Were today's announcements no victory at all? No, the Big Guys sacrificed some peanuts. Dyett will be open, and that's not nothing. And for all their big talk about education and reforms and bringing communities what they need, Cuomo and Emanuel showed their true goals-- keep the people in those communities voiceless and in their place. That's what really matters to these guys. When the house is on fire, what people grab tells you what really matters to them, and these guys grabbed scepters of power and boots for stomping on citizens.

Tribune Discovers Dyett Hunger Strike

It only took eight days for Chicago's leading "news" outlet to discover that Dyett High twelve community members were staging a hunger strike. But yesterday afternoon, the Chicago Tribune finally covered the story.

Mind you, they didn't cover it all that well. They reported the 13-student enrollment class without any context, as if it were the result of "plunging enrollment" and not a phased closure (with CPS encouraging students to get out of Dodge).

They reported the two other proposals uncritically. They didn't explain Little Black Pearl's non-past operating schools, and I am becoming really curious about who is behind the athletic school proposal which is always only linked to Charles Campbell, the Dyett interim principal. They did not mention that CPS entertains his proposal even though it was late.

The Trib reported the community proposal, but put "leadership and green technology school" in quotation marks as if this were some sort of crazy idea that community members just pulled out of thin air, as if it were like a school for chinchilla ranchers or underwater basket weavers. And Trib-- you left off "global."

And the Tribune made sure to note that the group on hunger strike has always been tied to the Chicago teachers' union (you know-- Those People).

Still, they did report on many of the group's major concerns-- and they acknowledged that the hunger strike is going on.

Now-- here's what you need to do.

1) Click on over to the article. Remember, every click on an article is a vote saying "I want to read more coverage of this."

2) Comment. I'm not sure if any comments are actually getting through, but make sure the comment section includes the rest of the story.

An action like a hunger strike is only as effective as the public reaction to it, and that depends on the public hearing about it, so the Tribune's end of their news blackout of the event means that progress is being made. Keep the pressure on. Spread the word. And remind the Tribune that the worlds needs to know about what's going on.

The Not So Friendly Skies

Blogging will be sporadic this weekend, as I'm coming to you from the Drake Hotel in Chicago, quite possibly the fanciest hotel I have ever stayed in in my life, but still in an earlier century when it comes to wi-fi (everyone remembers the steam powered wi-fi of the 1890s). Also, I'll be composing on my surface, so be prepared for even worse typos than usual.

The plane was delayed in Cleveland last night, and as we finally taxied down the runway, there was some soft of rhythmic thudding as if a large moose were caught in the wheels, or possibly a Studebaker. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on how calming it is to know that as we defy the laws of gravity and fling our frail little bodies through miles of sky, we are in a fragile tin can designed, built, maintained and piloted by people who are actual trained professionals, not amateur dabblers.

If you are going to fly me somewhere, I need more than your good intentions or really cool ideas that came to you in the shower. It will not comfort me to know that you were really successful at playing shuffleboard or running a widget factory or just moving money around into it swelled into a giant pile.

Nor do I need you to stand next to me at the airport and berate me for not having enough grit to propel myself through the air. Nor is it useful to tell me that I have no business using gravity as an excuse and don't I believe that people can fling themselves from Cleveland to Chicago.

The "friendly skies" motto is powerful precisely because we know the sky is not friendly-- particularly when there are tens of thousands of feet of it between us and the hard, hard ground. Toni Morrison wrote in Song of Solomon that if you surrender to the air, you can ride it, but I like that more as a metaphor than as practical advice. If I'm going to surrender to the air, it will be in the company of trained professionals using tools created by trained professionals. The very least we can do for our children when we try to connect them with an education is to promise them the same.

Opt In and Think of England

As we enter testing opt-out season with its ever-increasing rising tide of test opposition, the
fans of test-driven accountability have had to use every weapon in their arsenal to try to beat back the non-testing hordes who threaten modern educational progress (and corporate revenue streams).

Sometimes the infidels can be combated locally. The head of the Ken-Ton School Board, a district near Buffalo, NY, roused a bunch of local rabble by calling for New York to stop holding money hostage and demanding pointless testing for teacher evaluations and threatening that the district just wouldn't give the tests. The superintendent was able to scare the board into compliance  speak reason to the board by suggesting that the state might cut funding, defrock board members, and decertify teachers if such crazy talk led to crazy action. But the motion, which had been tabled till April, just passed!  

Sometimes the big guns must be called out. Chicago Public Schools had threatened to give the Big Standardized Test to only 10% of their students. The feds told the state to tell CPS that they would take a gigantic financial hit, and the district reluctantly gave in, much to the disappointment of many who had backed the testing slowdown.

In recent days, test-o-philes have also unleashed the power of ridicule. Mike Thomas, over at reform-loving FEE, put up a blog post that artfully wrapped the technique known in the sales biz as "assuming the sale" in a carpet of wacky mockery.

"I Wish I Could Opt-Out of Writing This" makes the same old point-- some things in life are unpleasant but necessary, and whiners should just suck it up and do what they have to. In fact, oddly enough, Thomas suggests that he would rather not write this blog post in favor of testing, but he's being paid to do it, so he must. Way to show your deep support of testing, Mike.
Thomas presents (and borrows from a Twitter thread that Amanda Ripley started in a similar vein) a list of unpleasant things that people have to do even though they don't want to. The list includes colonoscopies, teeth cleanings, lice checks, braces, lockdown drills, and watching romantic comedies with your wife, and it's a swell list. It's just that the list has nothing to do with the Big Standardized Test.

The items on the list only occur when there is a particular reason for them. You get a colonoscopy when your doctor, a trained medical professional, says it's time. You get braces when a trained professional says they're needed. You go see a movie with your wife when she asks you to (though if that's a chore for you, you have other problems). And like all the other items on the wacky list, these are annoyances you endure because you know there is some good reason to endure them.

The "well, you just have to suck it up and do some unpleasant but necessary things in life" argument assumes the sale. It focuses on the "unpleasant" rap on testing so that it can pretend that the "necessary" part is not in doubt. But of course it's the notion that the Big Standardized Test is necessary that is at the heart of the opt-out movement.

Why are Big Standardized Tests necessary? BS Test fans have lost some of their classic arguments. For instance, they can no longer say that test results are needed to do national comparisons that run across state lines because the dream of a single national test is dead, dead, dead. VAM has been debunked far and wide. From the test quality to test validity to every justification given for testing-- as ESEA has heated up, they've all been subject to responsible, data-based, professional attack.
Writers like Thomas have been reduced to justifications like this:

And that's why I'm an opt-in on testing. I want to know how well my kid is doing in algebra. I want to know how smart she is compared to all the other kids in the state. The same goes for reading, writing and science...This information will let me know if she is on track for being first in line when the University of Florida opens its doors to incoming freshman.

Is Thomas suggesting that all students everywhere should be tested so that he can brag about his own daughter? Or is he suggesting that his daughter's teachers keep all her grades, school work and achievements a secret from him? And does he really mean to suggest that he's an opt-in, because if that's what he wants, I'm sure we can find support for a system where people can opt-in to testing if they wish, but would otherwise be in a no-testing default.

That system would have great support, but it's not what Thomas and FEE and other reformsters and testing corporations want-- they want a system in which all students are compelled to test, not one where they have a choice (though oddly enough, they are huge fans of choice when it comes to charter schools).

Here's the other thing about colonoscopies and braces-- the government doesn't compel you to have them, whether your professional expert thinks you need one or not. You opt-in, voluntarily, weighing the advice of trained experts and the advantages of the procedure. You don't need to come up with a justification for not having a root canal today-- you only have one if someone (or your tooth) presents a reason to opt in.

Reformsters would like us to skip all of that. Just take their word for it that tests are a necessary unpleasantry, like vaccination shots for babies or sex for Victorian ladies. Don't ask why. Don't question the necessity. Just lie back and think of England.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

- See more at: http://excelined.org/2015/03/09/wish-opt-writing/#sthash.oACr3jPH.dpuf

The Heavy Federal Hand

Chicago Public Schools caved.

The district's CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett was holding out for a limited rollout of the PARCC, administering the widely unloved Big Standardized Mess of a Test to only 10% of CPS students. But the Chicago system has backed down.

It has not backed down because leaders saw the error of their ways. There was no 11th hour meeting in which test designers hunkered down with school officials to show them how the test is actually swell. There was no last-minute visit from educational experts to help Chicago schools see how the PARCC has great educational advantages and will serve the needs of Chicago students.

There were just threats. Threats from Arne Duncan's Department of Education. Threats from the federal government.

Duncan's USED likes to adopt a stance that they are just uninvolved bystanders in the Great Ed Reform Discussion. Common Core and the other reformster programs like charter boosting and Big Standardized Tests were voluntarily adopted by the states. Says Duncan's office, "Federal overreach wielding a big fat stick? Moi?? Surely vous jests."

But just as Dolores Umbridge occasionally snaps and drops her cheery facade to reveal the raging control freak underneath, the USED occasionally puts its foot down and demands obedience, or else.

They did it to Washington State when legislators refused to install a teacher evaluation program that Duncan approved of. And now they've done it to Chicago schools.

"Give the test we want, the way we want it given," comes word from DC, "Or we will take away $1.4 billion from your system. Do as we say, or the big stick comes out."

And so CPS folded, and I can't say that I blame them. Taking a stand is a great thing, but making he students of your district take a $1.4 billion dollar cut to do it is a heck of a big stand to take, and probably not responsible behavior for district leaders.

Was their principled stand a waste? Not at all. For one thing, people have seen one of America's largest school systems cast a huge vote of No Confidence in the Big Standardized Test. For another, Americans have one more chance to see the heavy hand of the feds revealed again. There's no pretending that anything happened here other than federal extortion-- do as we say, or we cut you. It's one more clear picture of where modern ed reform really came from and what really keeps it alive, and it's one more motivator for Congress to get ESEA rewritten.

It is true that the meanest, craziest person in the room gets to control the conversation. But they can only do it by revealing how mean and crazy they are, and in the long run that earns them neither friends nor allies. To use their heavy hand, they had to show their true face. They may win the battle, but they position themselves badly for the war.

Punishing Teachers More Effectively

David Brooks' column praising small miracles made note of a new piece of research from Harvard that argues that while carrots may work better than sticks, the best way to use the carrot is to jam it into the horse's eyeball. (h/t to edushyster for the tip, not the carrot)

Our magic term for the day is "loss aversion," which is a fancy term for "people hate to give stuff up." The paper we'll be looking at is "Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Loss Aversion:A Field Experiment" written by Roland G. Fryer, Jr. (Harvard University), Steven D. Levitt (The University of Chicago), John List (The University of Chicago), and Sally Sadoff (University of California San Diego). Let's learn some stuff, shall we?

Intro

Sigh. We know we're in just great shape when we lead with references to the baloneyfied research that "proves" that a measurable improvement in teacher quality creates the same measurable improvement in student achievement as a decrease in class size (the old "we don't need small classes-- just great teachers" research) and follows it up with Chetty's silly "a good teacher means your kid will grow up to make more money" research. And that's just the first paragraph.

In the second, we get the sideways assumption that VAM is a good measure of teacher quality and that unions make it too hard to get rid of bad teachers. In the third, we lament that merit pay hasn't done any good. "Good" of course means "has students with high test scores." Because when people talk about "good teachers," all they're thinking of is students scores on standardized tests. That's all we want from teachers, right?

On this foundation of sand and jello, our intrepid researchers set out to build a mansion of teacher improvitude.

The experiment (oops-- "field test") was performed in Chicago Heights. Teachers were randomly assigned to one of two groups-- either they were in the Gain group, working toward a possible end-of-year bonus, or they were in the Loss group, receiving a bonus up front which they would lose if their students didn't achieve bonus-worthy results. Bonuses for both groups were the same. Additionally, the researchers used the "pay for percentile" method developed by Barlevy and Neal, which is basically a stack and rank system where there are winners and losers. One would think that might have some significant effects on the field test, but apparently we're just going to barrel on assuming that it's a great idea and not a zero-sum dog-eat-dog approach that might shade the effects of a merit pay system.

Their findings were that there was a significant gain in math scores for Loss teachers' students (the significance was between 0.076 and 0.129, so make of that what you will) and, as expected, no significant affect for Gain teachers' students.


To the library

Part two of the paper is the review of the literature. If you're interested in this, you're on your own.

Program details

Chicago Heights is about thirty miles south of Chicago. They have a 98% free and reduced lunch population in elementary and middle school. The program was implemented with the cooperation of both the superintendent and the union. Of 160 teachers, 150 opted in. Maximum possible bonus pay was $8,000.

Working out the assignments of teachers was hard. So hard that apparently the researchers kind of gave up on tracking the reading side of this experiment and focused on the math. This was further complicated in that the design called for some teachers to be up for bonus on their own, while others were bonusing it up in team fashion.

And while the researchers keep saying that the teachers were assigned randomly, it turns out they were re-randomized with an algorithm that kept swapping teachers based on a set of rules until they were best aligned with the selection rules. So, unless I'm missing something, this was kind of like saying, "We randomly assigned people to groups of people with identical hair color and gender. So, we put all the blond women randomly in one group."

Teachers in the Loss group were given $4,000 at the beginning of the year and signed a contract stating they would give back the difference if their earned bonus came in below that amount. If they earned more, they got more. The tests used were the ThinkLink tests, which are described as otherwise low stakes tests, which again strikes me as a fairly critical factor that the researchers breeze right past.

Data and research design

Basically, these guys went in the back room and whipped up a big kettle of VAM sauce. You know. The same kind of thing that has been so widely discredited that the National Association of Secondary School Principals has come out against using it as a means of evaluating individual teachers. Also, they use some more math to deal with the event of a student having mixed teachers (on Loss group, one Gain group) during the day.

Results

You've already heard the big take-away. Other interesting bits of data include a much higher effect for K-2 students (though, since the VAMsauce depends on data going back four years, I'm wondering how exactly we crunched the little kids' numbers). There is a bunch of statistics-talk here as well, but much of it boils down to fancily-worded "Nothing to see here." There are charts for those who enjoy charts.

Interpretation and pre-emptive kibbitzing

The interpretation is simple. Merit pay will yield better test results if you let teachers hold it in their hands for nine months and threaten to take it back if their students don't do well on the Big Test.

The researchers anticipate three areas that might be used to dispute their results, so they address them ahead of time.

First, attrition. They anticipate the complaint that teachers will find other ways to improve their test scores including getting Little Pat McFailsalot out of their classroom, at least on test day. They tran some numbers and decided this didn't happen to any notable degree.

Second, liquidity restraints. We're talking about teacher money here. Teachers might spend their own money in the classroom to improve their bonus-earning chances, which would be a level playing field if all teachers were wealthy, but in a world where teachers have very little extra money to spend in the classroom (or Wal-mart or anywhere else), an extra $4K in September might tilt the field. In other words, did the group that got a $4K run out and spend it to make sure they kept it? Survey says no. Interesting sidelight-- when asked in March, 69% of the Loss teachers had not cashed their bonus checks yet.

Third, cheating. They decided that wasn't a factor because, reasons. Seriously-- isn't the whole hypothesis here that the bonus will motivate teachers to raise test scores any way they can? I have no reason to believe these teachers were cheating, but if this were my experiment, that would certainly be something I'd look for. What kind of pressure and temptation do you suppose will will be felt by a teacher who has already spent his "bonus" on house payments and groceries?

But it gets better. They argue that the proof that no cheating occurred is that results on the state test-- which had nothing to do with their incentive program-- came out about the same. So, the test results from the incentivized program were pretty much the same as the results that they got with no incentives at all. Maybe that means that test prep for the one test is also good test prep for the state test. Or maybe it means that the incentive program had no effect on anything.

Wrapping it up

I see enough holes in this very specific research to drive a fleet of trucks through. But let's pretend for a moment that they've actually proven something here. What would we do with it?

First, we'd need to convince a school district business office to let teachers hold a big pile of district money for nine months, thereby giving up a bunch of interest income and liquidity. At the same time, we'd have to get the administration and board to budget a merit pay line item for "Somewhere between a small amount and a huge mountain." These are great ideas, because if there's anything business managers love, it's letting someone else hold their money, and they only love that slightly less than starting a year with an unknowable balloon payment of indeterminate size next June.

When school districts talk about merit pay, they talk about a merit lump sum set aside at the beginning of the year so that teachers can fight over a slice of the already-set merit pie. As I've said repeatedly, no school board in this country is ever going to say to the public, "Our teachers did such a great job this year that we need to raise taxes to cover all the well-earned merit pay bonuses we owe them."

Of course, somebody would have to figure out the merit system. How many Harvard grad students work in your district? And how exactly will you figure out the math score bonus for your phys ed teacher? 

Districts could manage the financial challenges of this risk aversion model by pre-determining the aggregate merit pay in the district. This, combined with "pay for percentile," would absolutely guarantee open warfare among staff members, who would be earning their merit bonuses by literally ripping them dollars out of colleagues' hands. Boy, I bet teaching in that school would be fun.

The largest thing they haven't thought through

Instituted, this system will not play out like a merit bonus at all. If I start every year with an "extra" $4K (or whatever amount), I've gotten a raise, and every year I don't make my numbers is a year that I get a punitive retroactive pay cut.

In no time at all, this system morphs from a merit pay bonus system of rewards to a bad score DEmerit system of punishments. Rather than a bonus that really lifts up teachers, these folks have come up with a way to make punishment for low results even more painful and effective. A miracle indeed.

Chicago Schools Caught Cooking the Charter Books

Back in September, Chicago Principoal Troy A. LaRaviere used the Chicago Public School systems own MAP test numbers to show that public school students were outpacing charter schools in the same neighborhoods.* The findings were published in the Sun Times, complete with linkage to the CPS website where the numbers were all laid out. The Sun Times conducted and published their own analysis, confirming LaRaviere's findings.

Then a funny thing happened. The numbers changed.

The Administrator’s Alliance for Proven Policy and Legislation in Education (AAPPLE) discovered "at some point between the publication of our findings and the release of school ratings, CPS removed the original file containing school growth data and replaced it with a different version." Fortunately, they had saved the original, so they could see the differences that had mysteriously appeared. You can read their report here. But the basic scoop is this;

The main fiddling occurred with pre-test scores, generally lowering them so that school growth would be more awesome. AAPPLE found that this change was made for "nearly every charter school" while fewer than twenty public schools were affected (yes, I hear you out there hollering "but charter schools are public schools" and all I can say is, do shut up). The altered scores gave some charters growth scores increased by as many as fifty points (the biggest change for the public schools was a whopping two points).

Not all charters were winners. CICS chain charters were big winners in up-scoring, while schools like Shabazz Charter took a negative twenty point hit. AAPPLE notes that the charters that were given the fake growth results were largely in gentrifying areas.

AAPPLE did ask for a meeting with the CPS Accountability Office (another exhibit in the How Accountability Makes Education Way More Expensive display) and got one very quickly, in which the office explained that yes, they did change the scores. They offered two justifications.

First, that charters took the 2013 MAP (the "pre-test" or baseline) in the fall of 2013 instead of the spring of 2013. Why this requires a fiddling of scores is unclear, possibly because there is no earthly reason for it.

Second, students took different versions of the same test, so, adjustments are-- really? The AAPPLE report gives the response to these lines of argument, but the bottom lines, as near as I can tell is that only one of two things can be true here. Either 1) the MAP test and growth model system is such a wretchedly invalid system that a stiff wind off the lake is enough to throw its results into question or 2) CPS decided to cheat in order to make some charters look successful. If there's a third possible explanation, I can't see it.

AAPPLE concludes, with what I would call admirable restraint, that lack of transparency is a bit of a problem, and CPS is not using a level playing field. Since I don't have to work in Chicago, I can go ahead and make my own assessment, which is that this is the kind of lying, cheating bullshit that you can only get away with when you work behind closed doors.



* Personally, I am not inclined to evaluate any schools anywhere based on standardized test scores, but that's the game reformsters choose to play, and I do think it's not unfair to judge whether they are winning in the game they chose under the rules they set.

Bad News from Philadelphia

 The news from Philly today is that the SRC (the government appointed board that replaced the elected school board about a decade ago) has okayed suspension of various school code rules, most notably the seniority rule. So now they can hire back whatever teachers they wish. Want to bet that the list is short on teachers near the top of the pay scale?

We've seen how academic "crises" can be used to break open public schools. Philly and Chicago show how a financial crisis can be used as well.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/SRC_suspends_seniority_other_rules.html

For bonus points, want to guess how long it will now take them to "solve" the crisis, now that they have the rules changes that they want?