Merryl Tisch Shows How Test Supporters Get It Wrong

New York Chancellor of the Board of Regents Meryl Tisch stopped by All In with Chris Hayes to avoid answering some pointed questions about high stakes testing and the opt out movement in New York. She had the additional disadvantage of sitting beside Diane Ravitch, who did answer questions and made Tisch look even slipperier by comparison, but I think Tisch's appearance is a quick, capsuled look at what promoters of high stakes testing get wrong.

After opening with some background (Atlanta convictions, rising parent opposition, left-and-right wing hatred for Big Standardized Tests), Hayes notes that New York's opt out numbers are huger than ever and turns to Tisch.

Hayes: When you see the reports of opting out, including the high strong numbers from some areas, do you think "People are crazy" or "We are doing something wrong"?

Tisch does not think people are crazy (phew!) and believes that people "should act in what they perceive to be the best interests of their children." That's an important construction because like many BS Test fans, Tisch is also a charter school fan, which puts her in the awkward position of believing that parents should opt out of public school, but not public school testing. Choice is only okay sometimes.

So why the push back? "Perhaps we have not been clear enough in describing the intent of the test." So, opt out is a PR problem, because if people disagree with us, it could only be because they don't understand how right we are. So what is the intent of the test?

"The intent of the test is to give a snapshot of performance and allow parents to know where their children are at any given point in their educational career as compared to their peers."

And there's your first problem, because that doesn't even make sense. "Snapshot" and "at any given point in time" do not go together. I can't see how my child is doing at any point in time because I only have a snapshot from one particular point in time.

Tisch moves on immediately to asserting that income inequality is directly tied to the achievement gap (which is actually the BS Test score gap) for our poor students, and she starts waving the Wait Let Me Speak hand at Hayes because he is completely ready to call her on that piece of baloney, so she squeezes in that poor students can't make more money unless they have access to high quality education. Hayes calls her on her correlation-causation fallacy, but I'd like to call her on her fallacious equating of high quality education and high stakes snapshot testing. What does taking the BS Test have to do with access to high quality education?

The reformster answer (which Tisch doesn't get to) is that BS Test results allow us to target the students who are struggling. The problem here is that 1) we already know where they are and 2) after years of targeting them with BS Testing, we have yet to actually get them additional resources to help them do better.

Ravitch gets her turn and uses it to point out that tests are not vaccinations and these tests are not useful because the results provide no useful information. "There is no diagnostic value to the test," somehow prompts Tisch to smirk, like she has caught the help trying to act like they know how caviar really tastes. Hayes notes that Tisch clearly has something she wants to share with the rest of the class, and she unveils Test Purpose #2.

The tests are a diagnostic tool for curriculum and instruction development on the state level, and a way of making sure the taxpayers get their money's worth.

In other words, a completely different purpose for the tests than the one she offered about two minutes earlier. It's now a snapshot of how our children, schools, and systems are doing-- for the taxpayers. So that business about info for the parents was, what-- just spitballing? Because if this is the actual purpose of the test then 1) what's wrong with the NAEP and 2) why is it necessary to test every child every year?

Hayes points out that Tisch gave a non-response to the observation that the tests are not diagnostically useful for students, parents or children, and she insists that she be allowed to insert a non-response to that point. When parents opt out it messes things up. Also, she was in a doctor's office where a parent wanted to compare their child to a growth chart. Like the vaccination analogy, this is bogus for many reasons. I'll just pick one: When I weigh my child, I get a full picture of how much my child weighs, but when my child takes a BS Test and I get just the score, I get only the tiniest sliver of a slice of how well my student is doing in school.

As for the diagnostic value of the tests, Tisch asserts (with her asserty hand waving before her) that school districts report "all the time" that they make decisions about curriculum around the test results. Which certainly proves that schools will teach to the test as best they can, particularly when threatened with punitive responses to the results. This does not prove that either test results or the following curriculum adjustments serve the educational interests of the students. She also says words about how the ability to glean specific info from these tests is really important, which is not remotely the same as proving that it can actually be done.

Hayes asks Ravitch if there's a right way to do test-driven accountability or if it's just the wrong tree at which to be woofing. "Wrong tree," says Ravitch. You can't do the wrong thing the right way. The model is wrong. We are the most overtested nation in the world.

What would Tisch like to say to parents?

Tisch would like parents to understand that this is all the union's fault, and that if teacher evals hadn't been linked to the tests, they would all be testing away happily. Children have just been trapped in a labor dispute between the governor and teacher.

In about six minutes, Tisch manages to showcase a full range of pro-test arguments, all specious.
If the goal is to give parents information about their student, why does the test return so little data? And what difference does it make if other students opt out?

If the goal is to give teachers and schools actionable data to inform instruction, why return so little data, so late?

If the goal is to give taxpayers and policymakers feedback about how the system is doing, testing every child every year is by far the least cost-effective method.

If the goal is to identify and diagnose troubled schools for intervention, why don't bad scores trigger a release of additional resources for the identified school?

And why do pro-testers never, ever provide solid data about how well the tests actually measure any of the things they supposedly measure?

Tisch can blame the opt out movement on the union and politics all she wants; the reality on the ground is that more and more parents have had enough. The BS Test boosters are going to need better talking points.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

NY: Shut Up, Parents

The reports keep rolling in. New York families are opting out of the Big Standardized Test in unprecedented numbers, massive numbers, numbers that will make virtually all of the "data" about school performance "gleaned" from the BS Test suspect.

The state has responded by, well, trying to get the problem to shut up and go away. On Tuesday's All In with Chris Hayes, Chancellor Merryl Tisch tried valiantly to make the problem go away. "We didn't explain the purpose of the test well enough," said Tisch, who proceeded to botch her gazzillionth attempt in at least three years to explain the purpose of the test. Then she shifted over to explaining the opt out movement as a byproduct of a "labor dispute," the result of teachers leading poor parents and children astray.

That would be exactly backwards.

Teachers are, by nature, good little soldiers. We are regular apologists for bad national, state and local policies. We are on the front lines where students and their parents say, "So why do we have to do this? It seems like a stupid waste of time." That's when, time after time, use our reassuring teacher voice and bring our charges to peaceful coexistence with policies and procedures that we might not even love, but they are the rules, and as teachers, we're generally fans of the rules.

So when teacher leaders in NY threw their weight behind opting out, what happened was not a state-wide brainwashing by teachers. I don't believe for a moment that NY teachers started poking holes in the dike that was holding back the opt out floodwaters. The floodwaters were already high, near to bursting at places like tiny Ken-Ton school district where the board wanted to lead a face-on charge against the state and the voters showed up to egg them on. I'll bet you anything that in school after school it was teachers who had been standing there with their fingers in the dike. All Karen McGee had to say was, "We're done. Just step back."

Meanwhile, GOP Senator Jack Martins is trying to put another of Tisch's bright ideas into play. She suggested that top NYC schools could be exempted from teacher evaluation rules; Martins would like to make that law for the whole state. Under his proposal, the schools in the top 20% of test results would be exempt from using the tests to evaluate their teachers. This is only a good idea if

1) You believe that the only purpose of the test is to find and fire "bad" teachers, and all the rest of that baloney about the benefits of the test was actually baloney.

2) You are hoping that this will somehow make the teachers union happy enough to go back to being good little dike-plugging soldiers.

3) You are hoping that this will shut up the parents for those top schools.

I'm willing to bet that the top 20% schools are also the schools which serve the more affluent, better-connected, most knowledgeable-about-how-to-give-the-system-a-headache parents. In other words, the parents that Tisch most wishes would shut up.

It remains to be seen what the fallout of from Optoutmageddon is going to be, but it's a sure bet that continued attempts to dismiss, marginalize, and silence opt-outers will not be enough to make Tisch and Cuomo happy campers again. When people want to say something important, they keep raising their voices until they feel they are heard. Albany had better start listening soon.

Cuomo to Teachers: Drop Dead

If you have not yet seen the letter from Cuomo aid Jim Malatras to ed leaders Tisch and King, you can find a copy right here. If you want to see just how direct and ugly an attack by a governor on his own state's public education system can be, you should read it. If you are a teacher in New York, you should read it twice.

I'll hit the highlights, not because the letter's particularly hard to parse, but because some things are just so ugly, they need to be held up to the light as much and as often as possible.

It opens with the observation that New York's low success percentages for proficiency on the Big Test are simply "unacceptable" and therefore Cuomo will make sure that the cut scores are set at more acceptable levels as determined by educators and not politicians. Ha! Just kidding. He's going to pretend that those proficiency numbers represent something other than political gamesmanship by the governor's office.

Speaking of proficiency, the next paragraph opens with this sentence:

Governor Cuomo believes in public education it can open up unlimited opportunity to our students.

I believe Malatras he is not a careful proofreader. I sympathize. I am the king of speedy mistakes, as my readers can attest. But I'm not on the state payroll, writing documents of record.

Malatras goes on to say that "virtually everyone" thinks the system must be reformed and improved, and I wonder if he's counting the people who believe that reformation and improvement start with getting Cuomo's grabby hands off public education's neck. But no-- three guesses where efforts to fix schools must be focused:

Part of the package will be to strengthen one of our most important professions teaching. While some seek to demonize teachers, Governor Cuomo believes the exact opposite wanting to reward excellence in teaching and by recruiting the best and brightest into the profession. 

(Yes, the letter is riddled with mistakes. No further comment). Those damn teachers. those stupid incompetent teachers that Cuomo loves so very much.

Malatras goes on to note that the governor doesn't have a lot of control over education, and that this represents a wise and rational distribution of power in running a state. Ha! No, kidding again. Cuomo doesn't have that kind of power, so he's going to use the budget process to just take it. He's asking Tisch and King for their input on Cuomo's ideas as matter of policy (leave the politicking to the legislature). Here are Cuomo's Twelve Awesome Thoughts, with a bit of translation. You're welcome.

1) The teacher evaluation system sucks because it's not failing enough teachers. How can we jigger it so that more teachers are failed by it?

2) It's too hard to fire bad teachers. Hard work is hard. How can we make it less hard to get rid of the teachers that we'll be failing more of once we straighten out the evalouation process?

3) How can we make becoming a teacher harder? Because if we make it really hard to become a teacher, then teachers will be better. Can we give them all a competency test? Recruiting best and brightest would be cool.

4) Cuomo would still like to get merit pay up and running, because the fact that it has never worked anywhere doesn't change his love for how it would reduce payroll costs. Because recruiting teachers (point 3) goes better when you tell them they might get well paid if you feel like paying them more.

5) Could we make the pre-tenure period longer, and could we make their certification temporary so that they have to get re-approved every couple of years. We need to make them stop thinking of teaching as a lifetime career, because that's how you recruit the best and the brightest.

6) What can we do about schools that suck? Particularly Buffalo, because we would really like to accelerate the hand-over of Buffalo schools to charter operators, who make much better campaign contributions than low-paid teachers.

7) Charters? Charters charters charters. Can we just increase the cap in NYC? A whole lot?

8) Education special interests have resisted using courses delivered by computer. Could we just go ahead and do that anyway? Because one college instructor with a computer = 143 high school teachers we could fire.

9) What about mayoral control? It looked like a great idea in NYC until they elected some bozo who didn't get the deal with charters until Cuomo had the legislature rough him up a bit. Mayoral control is better than a damn elected board, but mayors are also elected and those damn voters are a pain in my ass.

10) Should we combine some of the 700 school districts in New York? (This might be the only thing on the list that isn't either evil or stupid. I would make fun of 700 different school districts in New York, but I'm in PA and we aren't any better).

11) The damn regents are appointed by the legislature. Do you think we should fix that, because having to work with people not under his direct control is a real problem for the governor.

12) We're about to replace Dr. King. Is there a way to have a transparent process to replace him with someone I pick?

Oddly enough, the Cuomo office has no interest in looking at rampant testing, craptastic canned curriculum, or widely unpopular standards. I would have said that it was hard to blame these not-beloved-by-teachers programs on teachers, but since Rudy Giuliani found a way to blame the death of Eric Garner on teachers, I'm going to accuse Cuomo of slacking on this department.

Several weeks ago Governor Cuomo said that improving education is thwarted by the monopoly of the education bureaucracy. The education bureaucracy's mission is to sustain the bureaucracy and the status quo and therefore it is often the enemy of change. The result is the current system perpetuates the bureaucracy but, fails our students in many ways.Tackling these questions with bold policy and leadership could truly transform public education and finally have it focus on the student as opposed to the bureaucracy. 

Because having power centered in places that aren't the governor's office is just, you know, bad.

In a charming coda, Malatras notes that King might now give even better advice now that he is unshackled from the political demands of his office, because you know that John King-- he was always so constrained by his deep concern about public opinion, and his willingness to listen to the public just tied him up. Now as a federal bureaucrat hired outside any sort of approval system, he'll be free to disregard public opinion entirely. Because A) that's a good thing and B) it's not at all how he conducted himself in his New York job.

Man, I just hope all those New York teacher union officials who carried Cuomo's water throughout the primary season are really enjoying this unfettered direct attack against the profession and the public schools. Tisch and King are supposed to get back to Cuomo with their advice on how best to kick New York's teachers in the teeth by December 31, so to all my NY teacher neighbors, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Enjoy the holidays, because 2015 will bring open season on public school teachers in the Empire State.