USED: King's Big Fail

It took Danny Harris's collapse to draw many people's attention. We should have been paying attention sooner.

Harris is the Chief Information Officer for the Department of Education. Prior to taking on that job in 2008, he was with the department's CFO office. He is a government lifer. And he was in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform because the US Department of Education is a big fat cyber-mess.

By late last year, in the wake of the huge security breach at Office of Personnel Management computers, Congress was checking the locks on the doors all around the federal government. And the Department of Education was spectacularly lousy. The Inspector General reported that her office found they could hack their way into USED systems with no particularly great effort. The department's data includes at least 139 million different social security numbers (so, almost half the US population), along with oversight of a trillion dollars.

Congress worked Harris like a chew toy back in November, at which time he did himself no favors by giving his department a 7 out of 10 when everyone else was giving the department F's and D's. So his recent collapse-inducing appearance in front of the House committee is the latest in a series.

The House Oversight Committee is headed by Jason Chaffetz. Chaffetz is an interesting story in his own right. The Utah Representative arrived at Brigham Young as a Jewish Democrat and left as a Mormon Republican. He earned early attention as one of the legislators who slept on a cot in his office rather than renting pricey DC digs. He's the guy who barely let the head of Planned Parenthood get a word in edgewise and ginned up the misleading cancer care vs. abortions chart. He's taken on the Secret Service, and he's also the guy who threatened to have US Marshalls hunt down Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley and drag him before Congress. And he's the guy leading the attempted interrogation of that odious pharma-troll Martin Shkreli this week. All in all, it seems safe to say that Chaffetz isn't afraid of a little tussle, though he is noted by many as a Representative who can play well bipartisanly, particularly within his committee.

All of this bode poorly for the Department of Ed in general and Danny Harris in particular when Chaffetz decided that Harris was the problem, both in terms of managerial skills and professional ethics. This last hearing was an odd mish-mosh of continued grilling about cyber-security, the ethical problems of Harris running a side business, and rigged awarding of department contracts to Harris's friend. Outside vendors are an issue for USED-- of the 184 data systems they manage, 120 are actually run by contracted vendors.

Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King had to put in an appearance and while it has been chronicled in many press accounts, nothing captures just how painful it is to watch King fumble and stonewall. One clip that is making the rounds starts with Harris's attempt to explain that although he was the program manager, he didn't lead the project-- so he was in charge, but not in charge, when his friend landed a contract.

Then he moves on to King. Chaffetz has laid out the contract irregularities, and by this point in proceedings, Harris has admitted that he failed to properly report the income from his side business to either the department or the IRS. Chaffetz will now try to get King to say that Harris's behavior was unethical and illegal (the full video is posted below, if you think you can stand it-- this starts at about the 3:15 mark).

Chaffetz: So Mr. King, how is that not a violation of regulation, policy or the law? He admitted that he had outside income above the two hundred dollar threshold and he did not report it either to the IRS nor on the ethics form. How is that not a violation of law, regulation or policy?

King: As you know the general council's role is to review-- our chief career ethics officer, her job is to review the findings from the inspector general and to determine whether or not there has been a violation of law or regulation or policy. General counsel advised--

Chaffetz: But you're asked to review that. You're the one that's supposed to look at that. You're not just supposed to read and say "Hey, that's what they say" and you still to this day believe that Mister Harris has done nothing wrong?

King: A-As I indicated previously, general counsel may--

Chaffetz: No, I want to know what you believe. All this evidence we've thrown out there, you still believe that there is nothing he's done wrong?

King: My responsibility is to rely on the guidance--

Chaffetz: No, your responsibility is to make a judgment--

King: to review the evidence--

Chaffetz: You're hired for your judgment. You're the acting secretary--

King: And based on the recommendation of the general counsel, based on the review that was conducted Deputy Secretary Miller when these incidents first occurred, Deputy Secretary Shelton, after further review of the inspector general's report, after review of the addendum which indicated that the Department of Justice declined further action, based on all those recommendations and the recommendations of our staff, yes, I believe that the department's actions in this case have been appro--

Chaffetz: I asked you if you believed that he had done anything wrong. To this day, do you believe he's done anything wrong?

King: I believe there were significant lapses of judgment. Counsel--

Chaffetz: To your mind is that doing something wrong?

King: Those significant lapses of judgment-- I counseled him on those and they ended by 2013.

Chaffetz: Is it a violation of policy or regulation or law to have outside income and not disclose.

King: The specific determination of whether--

Chaffetz: No no no no no--

King: evidence--

Chaffetz: Mr. King. With all due respect. You're a smart guy. You're in this position for a reason. I'm asking you, is it appropriate, because everybody at the Department of Education is watching you and what you're doing and there's a reason why you're scoring near the bottom of the heap, bottom ten percent of everybody in government. Every single key metric we look at is going down and it's your leadership that's on the line. I'm asking you is it appropriate, is it a violation of law or regulation or policy to have outside income purposely not disclose it?

King: Based on the recommendation of (our) general counsel I do not believe that there was a violation of law, regulation or policy--

Chaffetz: He admitted that he didn't do it-- he admitted that he didn't do it. You don't think that's--

That's eight times that Chaffetz tries to get an answer pried out of King. On the last attempt, King gets around to trying to defend his department about the charges of sucking at cyber security. Chaffetz will try once more at least to get King to say something like, "Yes, what he did was wrong." But he will try in vain. King will steadfastly assert that the general counsel said this was fine and somebody wrote out this cool talking point that he will hold onto like life itself.

Now, I think it's worth looking at this because I don't just see a guy who is stonewalling to protect one of his career bureaucrats. King here is a guy who clearly thinks that exercising judgment is not part of his job.

That's worth noting. We've seen all along that reformsters envision a world where classroom teachers exercise no personal or professional judgment, but simply follow procedures and structures handed down from faceless authorities. But watching King here, I'm realizing that it's not just a vision of how a classroom should work, but how the whole world should work. As long as your oversight policies don't set off alarms, as long as the program says you're okay, there is no responsibility or even need to look at something and say, based on your own human experience and judgment, "This is wrong."

As long as the bureaucracy is functioning in its bureaucratic way, no actual human thought or judgment, neither moral, ethical, professional or personal-- none of it is either needed or desired. That would seem to be Chaffetz's point-- in a department where nobody wants to talk about right and wrong, it is predictable that all sorts of things would come off the rails.

It's clear that King didn't singlehandedly create this mess (Arne Duncan supposedly only met with Harris about security issues once a month). It's equally clear that King is not the man to clean it up. And it is clearest of all that the Department is a drifting ship loaded with valuable cargo that it has no idea of how to protect.

USED Supports Unicorn Testing (With an Irony Saddle)

Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King has offered further guidance as a follow-up to last year's Testing Action Plan, and it provides a slightly clearer picture of the imaginary tests that the department wants to see.

Here are the characteristics of the Big Testing Unicorn that King wants to see:

Worth taking: By "worth taking," King means aligned to the actual classroom, and requiring "the same kind of complex work students do in an effective classroom and the real world, and provide timely, actionable feedback." There are several things to parse here, not the least of which is "timely, actionable feedback" for whom, and for what purpose? Is King's ideal test a formative assessment, and if so, is the implication that it shouldn't be used for actions such as grading at all?

"Worth taking" is one of those chummy phrases that sounds like it means something until you are pinned between the rubber and the road trying to figure out what it means exactly. In my own classroom, I certainly have standards for whether or not an assessment is worth giving, but that decision rests heavily on my particular students, the particular subject matter, and the particular place we are in our journey, all of which also connects to how heavily weighted the grade is and if, in fact, there will be a grade at all.

But King's vision of a test aligned to both classroom and the real world is a bit mysterious and not very helpful.

High quality: This means we hit the full range of standards and "elicits complex student demonstrations of knowledge" and is supposed to measure both achievement and growth. That is a huge challenge, since complex constellations of skills and knowledge are not always easily comparable to each other. Your basketball-playing child got better at foul shots and dribbling, but worse at passing and footwork. She scores more points but is worse at teamwork. Is she a better player or not?

Time-limited: "States and districts must determine how to best balance instructional time and the need for high-quality assessments by considering whether each assessment serves a unique, essential role in ensuring all students are learning."

So, wait. The purpose of an assessment is to ensure that all students learn? How exactly does a test ensure learning? It can measure it, somewhat. But ensure it?  Do you guys still not get that testing is not teaching?

This appears to say, "Don't let testing eat up too much instructional time." Sure. Of course, really good testing eats up almost no instructional time at all. On this point, the Competency Based Learning folks are correct.

Fair: The assessments are supposed to "provide fair measures of what all students, including students with disabilities and English learners, are learning." So this uber-test will accurately assess all levels of ability, from the very basement to the educational penthouse. King doesn't have any idea of how to do this, but he does throw the word "robust" in here.

Fully transparent to students and parents: King lists every form of transparency except the one that matters-- showing exact item by item results that include te question, the answers, and an explanation of why the test manufacturer believes their answer is the correct one. What KIng wants to make transparent is the testing PR-- reasons for the test, source of the mandate for the test, broad ungranulated reports of results, what parents can do even though we won't tell them exactly how their child's test went.

BS Tests currently provide almost no useful information, primarily because the testing system is organized around protecting the intellectual property rights of the test manufacturers. Until we address that, King's call for transparency is empty nonsense.

Just one of multiple measures: No single assessment should decide anything important. I look forward to the feds telling some states that they are not allowed to hold third graders back because of results on the BS reading test.

Tied to improved learning: "In a well-designed testing strategy, assessment outcomes should be used not only to identify what students know, but also to inform and guide additional teaching, supports, and interventions." No kidding. You know what my unattainable unicorn is? A world in which powerful amateurs don't make a big deal out of telling me what I already know as if they just discovered it themselves.

And your saddle of irony: Every working teacher reading this or the original letter has had exactly the same thought-- BS Tests like the PARCC and SBA and all the rest of them absolutely fail this list. The BS Tests don't measure the full range of standards, don't require complex, higher-order responses, suck up far too much time, cannot measure the full range of student ability, are supremely opaque, are given way too much weight as single measures, and are useless as tools for improving instruction. They are, in fact, not worth taking at all. Under this test action plan, they should be the first to go.

More swell ideas.

The letter comes with a five-page PS, ideas from the feds about how to improve your testing picture, or at least ways to score money from the department for that alleged purpose.

You could audit your state tests. You could come up with cool data-management systems, because bad, useless data is always magically transformed when you run it through computer systems. You might train teachers more in "assessment literacy," because we am dummies who need to learn how to squint at the ugly tests in order to see their beauty. You could increase transparency, but you won't. You could increase the reliability and validity of the tests-- or at least check and see if they have any at all to start with.

Or you could just take a whole bunch of testing materials and smack yourself over the head with them. Any of these seem like viable options for running your own personal state-level unicorn farm.

USED Goes Open Source, Stabs Pearson in the Back for a Change

The United States Department of Education announced at the end of last month its new #GoOpen campaign, a program in support of using "openly licensed" aka open source materials for schools. Word of this is only slowly leaking into the media, which is odd, because unless I'm missing something here, this is kind of huge. Open sourced material does not have traditional copyright restrictions and so can be shared by anybody and modified by anybody (to really drive that point home, I'll link to Wikipedia).

Is the USED just dropping hints that we are potentially reading too much into? I don't think so. Here's the second paragraph from the USED's own press release:

“In order to ensure that all students – no matter their zip code – have access to high-quality learning resources, we are encouraging districts and states to move away from traditional textbooks and toward freely accessible, openly-licensed materials,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “Districts across the country are transforming learning by using materials that can be constantly updated and adjusted to meet students’ needs.”

Yeah, that message is pretty unambiguous-- stop buying your textbooks from Pearson and grab a nice online open-source free text instead.

And if that still seems ambiguous, here's something that isn't-- a proposed rules change for competitive grants. 

In plain English, the proposed rule "would require intellectual property created with Department of Education grant funding to be openly licensed to the public. This includes both software and instructional materials." The policy parallels similar policies in other government departments.

The represents such a change of direction for the department that I still suspect there's something about this I'm either not seeing or not understanding. We've operated so long under the theory that the way government gets things done is to hand a stack of money to a private company, allowing them both to profit and to maintain their corporate independence. You get federal funds to help you develop a cool new idea, then you turn around and market that cool idea to make yourself rich. That was old school. That was "unleashing the power of the free market."

But imagine if this new policy had been the rule for the last fifteen years. If any grant money had touched the development of Common Core, the standards would have been open source, free and editable to anyone in the country. If any grant money touched the development of the SBA and PARCC tests, they would be open and editable for every school in America. And if USED money was tracked as it trickled down through the states- the mind reels. If, for instance, any federal grant money found its way to a charter school, all of that schools instructional ideas and educational materials would have become property of all US citizens.

As a classroom teacher, I find the idea of having the federal government confiscate all my work because federal grant money somehow touched my classroom-- well, that's kind of appalling. But I confess-- the image of Eva Moskowitz having to not only open her books but hand over all her proprietary materials to the feds is a little delicious.

Corporations no doubt know how to build firewalls that allow them to glom up federal money while protecting intellectual property. And those that don't may just stop taking federal money to fuel their innovation-- after all, what else is a Gates or a Walton foundation for?

And realistically speaking, this will not have a super-broad impact because it refers only to competitive grants, which account for about $3 billion of the $67 billion that the department throws around. 

So who knows if anything will actually come of this. Still, the prospect of the feds standing in front of a big rack of textbooks and software published by Pearson et al and declaring, "Stop! Don't waste your money on this stuff!" Well, that's just special.

And in case you're wondering if this will survive the transition coming up in a month, the USED also quotes the hilariously-titled John King:

“By requiring an open license, we will ensure that high-quality resources created through our public funds are shared with the public, thereby ensuring equal access for all teachers and students regardless of their location or background,” said John King, senior advisor delegated the duty of the Deputy Secretary of Education. “We are excited to join other federal agencies leading on this work to ensure that we are part of the solution to helping classrooms transition to next generation materials.”

The proposed change will be open for thirty days of comment as soon as it's published at the regulations site. In the meantime, we can ponder what curious conditions lead to fans of the free market declaring their love for just plain free. But hey-- we know they're serious because they wrote a hashtag for it.

New Teacher Attrition Report: Better Than You Thought

The USED National Center for Education Statistics today released a "first look" at a new report looking at public school teacher attrition and mobility (entitled, with typical bureaucratic poetry, "Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First Five Year")

Our data set is centered on around 155,000 teachers who began teaching in 2007-2008, looking at them through 2011-2012, so this is a data slice that shows us what has happened to the profession most recently, but not, it should be noted, since the CCSS test bomb dropped on classrooms all over the country.

The "first look" is brief and loaded with charts, so you should really go take a look at it yourself, but here are some highlights to whet your appetite.

The basic raw attrition rate is far better than the conventional wisdom about half of new teachers leaving within the first five years. NCES figures say that by year five, 17.3% of the Class of 07-08 has left the classroom.

When you break that attrition down by categories, you find

* men left in a higher percentage than women
* non-white teachers left in higher percentages than white
* teachers with a base pay of over $40K left at a vastly lesser rate than everyone else

A third of teachers with less than a bachelor degree left within the first year, but almost half of the teachers with "higher than a master's degree" left immediately.

Teachers who were not assigned mentors left at roughly twice the rate of teachers with mentors.

So if you're hiring teachers, a black man with a PhD who's going to be paid less than $40K is your worst bet for classroom longevity.

I'm not surprised to see that teachers with alternative certificates or no certificates at all were more likely to have left. Elementary teachers stuck around in greater percentages than secondary teachers (proving either high school jobs are harder or elementary teachers are tougher; as a high school teacher married to an elementary teacher, I am prepared to offer no theory on this matter).

But I was surprised to see that the attrition rate for city/suburban vs. town/rural was almost exactly the same. Town/rural starts out losing faster, but by year five had evened out.

Less surprising-- finding that schools with over 50% free and reduced lunch rates had higher attrition rates. But the difference was not as huge as you might have predicted (18.6% vs 15.7%)

Folks will poke through this data for a variety of purposes. For instance, this may be the place to ask if young teachers are fleeing or being pushed out. For this groups movers (changing to a new job), 2 in 5 were involuntary after five years. For leavers, it's more complicated. Involuntary departures varied from year to year, with a peak of 35.5% after the second year and a low of 19.9% after the fourth. I'd be curious to see if that means that pre-tenure departures through counseling or firing are actually happening out there, but it appears there's more number crunching and data diddling to do.

There's plenty of appendage regarding methodology and technical explanations that yield paragraphs like this one:

For the BTLS first wave, weights are obtained directly from the 2007–08 SASS, since all interviewed beginning teachers in SASS were eligible for BTLS. On the BTLS data file, the final weight for the first wave is called W1TFNLWGT, which is called TFNLWGT on the SASS data file. 

So I'll leave it to wiser data crunchers to pry this apart a bit more. This is data that appears to be worth a careful, considered look.

Did the rate get better after the former 50% rate was bandied about, or was that rate (which was always an estimate) just not right? Have the forces of reform changed the ebb and flow of the profession? And have attrition rates been changed by the past three years of test-and-punish? Does this mean that the fear of displaced young teachers is misplaced, or are we over-worried about chasing people away? And exactly how does this new data really supports or attacks any of the old arguments? I don't think we know any of these things yet, but now that we have actual hard data, we can start to figure them out and move past our "best guesses" of the past.

In the meantime, I would be pleased to find that my beloved profession is not hemorrhaging as badly as has been presumed. There are too few male and/or minority teachers-- that doesn't seem to have "changed." But I don't really care if this data make it easier or harder for reformsters or the rest of us to make our cases-- I want to see teaching be a stable, satisfying profession, and I want to deal with the issues that we actually have, and not the ones we imagine. Losing 1 in 5 teachers is nothing to brag about. So let the dissecting of this report begin.

Paying Your Bills & The Corinthian 100

The slow-motion train wreck that is the unspooling of the Corinthian for-profit college chain has just dumped one more car off the tracks. Students have announced that they will not repay the debt they incurred attending the nation's top contender for the Predatory College gold medal. While the group launched as a collective fifteen, they have now rounded themselves off at an even 100.

This is not an easy issue to parse. Most of us in the adult world understand a few basic financial principles, including "If you don't want to pay back a huge loan, don't take out the huge loan." But there are other factors at play here.


Corinthian's history is less than exemplary. Founded in 1995, they have since glommed up twenty other post-secondary institutions. They have been called "the nation's worst private college chain" and have been sued many, many, many times; California's attorney general charged them with false and predatory advertising as well as securities fraud. Huffington Post caught them using the practice of hiring their own graduates to help keep their post-grad employment numbers inflated.

One would think that when the USED announced that they were going to shut down predatory colleges that used students as conduit for borrowed money, leaving those students with crushing debt and no marketable job skills-- one would think that just such a pronouncement would leave Corinthian shaking in its boots. That crackdown was announced in March of 2014. By June of 2014, the USED was announcing a plan to keep Corinthian in business. Undersecretary Ted Mitchell (who came to the department carrying strong ties to Pearson, NewSchools Venture Fund, and other investor ties to the private education biz) announced that Corinthian would receive an influx of cash, permission to keep admitting students, and a government overseer to keep an eye on them (powered, I supposed, by the threat of-- I don't know. Stern looks? More cash?). This, apparently, is what Too Big To Fail looks like in the college world.

Next up was selling off parts of the chain-- to Educational Credit Management Corporation, a group specializing in shaking down college students for their loan debts. They have been the subject of more than a few horror stories about overzealous collecting, but they did immediately (as in, December of 2014) set up a new subsidiary named Zenith Education Group to run the schools. Putting a debt collection agency in charge of a college doesn't make a lot of sense, unless you understand that the purpose of the "college" is to recruit "students" to use as carriers for transporting loan dollars from lenders to the "college." The students shoulder all the interest and fees associated with the loans, while everyone else makes the profit. Or as Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn) put it in the Washington Post:

"To prop up a school whose main purpose seems to be to get federal money is a misguided use of federal funds," Cohen said. "When a school like [Corinthian] that has a checkered history is on the mat, throw in the towel. It's over."

Of course, when I say "everyone makes a profit," that's a longer list than you expect. Jump back to November of 2013 with me to read this report about the $41.3 billion dollars in profits on student loans made by the US government. Even if there's a decimal point misplaced, that's an obscene profit to make on the backs of students. If the feds are worried about the cost of college, they need only look in the mirror. Arne Duncan had a sort of non-response response to the report at the time, but the botom line here is that the feds are among the folks with incentive to keep the college debt machine grinding away.

Which brings us back to the issue of the Corinthian 100 and their resolution not to pay back the debt (some of which hits the six-figure range).

On the one hand, I fully sympathize with folks who say, "When you borrow money, you pay it back. Doesn't get any simpler than that. If you borrow more money than you can pay back, that's just dumb. If you don't pay back your debts, somebody else pays the price. Other people should not pay for your dumb."

On the other hand, it's easy to make dumb choices people are lying to you.

Folks who find themselves in debt for Corinthian educations, but without any marketable skills that would allow them to make money-- those folks got in this mess by driving past a dozen corners where there should have been big bright neon red flags. But there were no flags there, because the gatekeepers had taken the flags down and stuffed them in their back pockets.

Corinthian has a repeatedly gotten in trouble for lying, false advertising, misrepresenting itself, and promising what it could not deliver. But the feds did not shut them down, did not demand they put a warning label on their applications, did not publicly chastise them in a manner that might have given applicants pause. And when Corinthian actually started to suffer the free-market consequences of bad behavior, the feds stepped in to protect not the students, but the investors and operators. They actually crafted a plan to allow Corinthian to draw in more students!

And the loans? If I go to buy a house, and I visit the bank for a mortgage loan, generally speaking the bank (excepting the years between, say, 2002-2008) will make sure that they don't lend me more than I can pay, and they will also demand an assessment of the house so that they know I'm getting their money's worth in my purchase. Who was exercising such oversight of these college loans? Apparently, nobody.

Corinthian students have racked up over a half billion dollars in federal loans. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has already asked the courts to grant relief, and the Department of Justice has reportedly said that the Department of Education has "complete discretion" to make the loans evaporate. Back in February, a $480 million relief package was announced which would help (about 40%) with the private loans that students took out, but those are separate from the half billion in federal loans. Yesterday the USED released a "heightened cash alert" list of institutions that are under extra scrutiny, but given the department's history, it's not clear what the "extra scrutiny" could lead to, since the scrutinizing that has gone on so far has been pretty unimpressive.

Since I originally posted this piece, Corinthian has been slapped with a $30 million fine by the USED, for the same old shenanigans including lying about job placement (counting in some cases two day jobs at the school itself). Corinthian remains unbowed and claims this is just unfair and unfounded. If I were a cynical man, I might read into the article that the feds finally got fed up with fakery on the principle that it's okay to lie to students, but not to us. Or maybe the relentless coverage finally got to them. At any rate, Corinthian did finally get spanked a bit.

I suppose we could argue that young adults should know better than to trust colleges, loan companies and the federal government, and that grown-ups in the US should know not to trust anybody at all ever. But it's hard for me to look at this mess and not conclude we could do better. Certainly we can do better than to get to the point where 100 young Americans decide that only by publicly trashing their own credit ratings can they hope to get somebody's attention.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Senate Proposal Cuts Duncan Off At Knees

The bipartisan proposal from the Senate Education Committee is settled and ready to see the light of day. There's some good news for public education and some bad news for the Obama administration.

Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) expressed a big ole bi-partisan hug of support for this baby, un-euphoniously entitled The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 (just once I would like to send a poet to DC). Let's look under the hood (you can find a handy summary of the bill here).

The (Partial) Defanging of Testing

Tests are still mandated entirely too often (every grade 3-8 and once in high school), but the bill leaves it to the states to decide what to do with the "data" that tests generate. States must use them in their accountability system, somehow, but it's up to the state to decide how. States will also be given flexibility "to pilot innovative assessment systems." The dream of a single national test, which was already for all intents and purposes dead-- that dream now has a fork in it.

States must keep parents informed and disaggregate data so that subgroups are not lost, so critics who are afraid that nobody would know that poor urban schools are in trouble without test results can now relax. But states must design their own system for intervening in failing schools, and as long as those systems fall within federal parameters, the states can do as they please. In fact, the feds are forbidden to interfere in the whole process. "The federal government is prohibited from determining or approving state standards."

Suck It, Arne

That "Hands off, feds" attitude runs throughout the bill. State plans are acceptable unless proven naught by the USED, and the feds only have 90 days to do so. The Secretary must approve a state plan within the 90 days unless the department "can present substantial evidence that clearly demonstrates that such State plan does not meet the bill's requirements." To whom will such evidence be presented? A peer review board composed of "experts and practitioners with school-level and classroom experience."

Yes, unlike the waiver system that requires state bureaucrats to bow and scrape for Duncan's official okey-dokey, now the secretary must go before actual educators and prove to their satisfaction that a state plan is not acceptable. And if they say it's not, the state still gets to appeal and resubmit. This strikes me a huge shift of the balance of power.

Also, "the bill affirms that states decide what academic standards they will adopt, without interference from Washington." The feds can't mandate a set of standards, and they can't "incentivize" one, either. "States will be free to decide what academic standards they will maintain in their states."

And! The bill does away with any federal requirement for states to develop and implement a teacher evaluation system. It even axes the definition of a highly qualified teacher.

State May Not Slack

The Title IV section appears to say, in brief, that this federal hands-offiness is not license for states to do a half-assed job providing education to their citizens.

Charter Chain Christmas

While the ECAA does include some language encouraging strong charter laws and strong charter transparency and strong charter community connection, the cheers in charter headquarters have to be for the strong and unequivocal endorsement of charters as part of the education landscape. It puts three charter grant programs into law.

Two endorse the launching of charters, with particular attention to "replicating" the successes of "high-quality" charter schools, which of course means that charter chains are hearing the merry ka-ching-a-ling-a-ling of Christmas morning.

The third grant program is also awesome if you are a charter profiteer-- the feds would like a grant program to help pay for the buildings that charters squat in. No word on whether Senators Alexander and Murray considered a bill to cut up charter operators food for them or hire federal agents to wipe the charter CEO's chin when he's drooling with glee.

Oh, Also, Bite Me, Arne

Down among the less-exciting Titles we find support for rural schools (basically releasing them from spending requirements that don't make sense in rural schools). Under Title IX we have additional assurance that states use federal money to help shore up state and local spending.

Also under Title IX, this:

This bill prohibits the Secretary from mandating additional requirements for states or school districts seeking waivers from federal law. The bill also limits the Secretary’s authority to disapprove a waiver request.

And For the Children

An extra point-- federal money may be used for early childhood education. So any and all of the above can be applied to Early Childhood education. So not the requirement for Pre-K that some folks were hoping for, but full permission to turn the federal money hose on the little ones.

So, What Do We Think?

All in all, this is a more pointed rebuke of the Obama administration's ed farfegnugen than I might have expected, but while it still keeps those stupid, worthless Big Standardized Tests enshrined, it frees states to make their own peace with them (and that testing requirement might reduce the possibility that the test manufacturers would loose their lobbying dogs to oppose the bill-- they can rest happy now because their payday is intact). Now, that will mean different things in different states-- I'm pretty sure Andrew Cuomo will be a giant ass to education whether the feds are pushing him to or not.

And while Common Core is all but dead, this certainly frees everyone up to slap it around some more. This bill wouldn't end the ongoing education debate, but it would break it up into fifty little arguments and if that doesn't do anything more than divide up the reformsters money and forces, that's a good thing.

Of course, we still have the onslaught of amendments and the bill from the House and the President's desk to get past. And the enshrinement of the rapacious charter school industry is not good news. So this is by no means perfect.

But most of all, a new ESEA completely chops the back-door lawmaking of USED waivers off at the knees. If Congress can actually pull this off, it will be a gamechanger. There's much to hate about the new game, but there are some pieces of hope as well. Let's just see what happens next.

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.

No National Test

As fans of test-driven accountability (as well as test-generated profits) continue to argue vigorously for the continued repeated use of Big Standardized Testing, there is one argument you won't hear much any more.

Today, there is no easy and rigorous way to compare the performance of individual students or schools in different states....If students take the same assessment under the same conditions, a given score in one place has the same meaning as it does in all others.

That's a from a joint paper issued by ETS, Pearson, and the College Board back in 2010. Back in 2011, USED's National Center for Educational Statistics released a report complaining that fifty different states had fifty different measures of student achievement.

The dream of Common Core was that every state would be studying the same thing. A student in Idaho could move to Alabama and pick up math class right where he left off, and the only way to insure that was going to be that Idaho and Alabama would be measuring their students with the same yardstick. Schools and students would be comparable within and across state boundaries.

That is not going to happen.

The attempt to create a national assessment is a failure. States continue to abandon the SBA and the PARCC; SBA is down to twenty-ish states and PARCC is under a dozen. The situation is messy that I have to give you approximations because it depends on who's counting and when-- Mississippi just pulled out and several other states are eagerly eying the exits and I can't find any listing of in's and out's that is reliable and up-to-date. (And that is before we even talk about how many students within testings states will opt out of their test.)

But what's important is this-- whether the number of states participating is a little over thirty or a little under, it is not fifty. It is not close to fifty. And to the extent that the number is changing, it is not moving toward fifty.

Now, granted, the number is also a bit of a lie. As with the Common Core standards, several states have abandoned the national assessments in name only. Utah, for instance, dropped out of the SBAC, and then promptly hired the same company to produce their new non-SBA test as was producing the SBA test itself. Pennsylvania dropped out of the PARCC, and yet our new tests are very, very PARCC-like.

So many states are, in fact, quietly sticking close to the beloved national assessment-- but because they are politically unlikely to ever admit it, the damage is the same for the lovers of national assessment, because the anti-nationalist states won't allow themselves to become part of the national testing.

Of course, if we wanted a national testing program, we could always go back to paying attention to the NAEP, but it's due for an upgrade and in today's climate, it's hard to imagine how such a job could be done. And it's a pre-existing product, so it certainly doesn't represent a new opening into the testing market. The current test-driven accountability wave has driven billions (with a b) of dollars into test corporation coffers. But the dream of one simple open market has fallen apart. Pearson and AIR and the rest have been forced to do business the old, messy way.

So we can't compare the students of Idaho to the students of Florida. We can't stack-rank the schools of Pennsylvania against the schools of Texas. We cannot measure how the Common Core is doing in every corner of the nation. There is no national, common assessment, and there never will be. On this point, at least, the reformsters have failed.

USED Continues To Support Predatory Colleges

The Department of Education is pleased to announce that their program to preserve the school-to-debt pipeline is proceeding apace.

You may recall that the USED once declared they would crack down on predatory for-profit flim-flam artists masquerading as colleges. You may also recall that, when presented with an exceptional example of a chain of egregious sharks, the USED finally stepped in to preserve the interests of everyone except the students involved in the massive scame.

I've covered the story of the USED and Corinthian Colleges before; the more detailed version is here. Let's look at what today's cheery press release actually says.

Zenith Education Group has announced that they have finished glomming up fifty-some campuses from Corinthian College, in a deal that has been under construction since November.

Zenith is a subsidiary of Educational Credit Management Company. ECMC is a debt collection company, specializing in chasing down student loan repayment. Apparently they have pursued those debts a bit overzealously at times, but here they are, cutting out the middle man. Exactly what expertise the "newly created" Zenith has in operating colleges (other than chasing the debts that students run up paying tuition to them) is not clear. But the removal of the middle man allows Zenith to turn these for profit schools into non-profits. After all, I don't have to make money collecting tuition from you if I can make money from selling you the loan for the tuition money.

When they call Zenith "newly created," they aren't kidding. Bizapedia shows them forming in December of 2014. The company is filed in Florida, but it operates out of Oakdale, Minnesota (the six principals are Gary M. Cook, John F. Depodesta, Daniel S Fisher, David L. Hawn, James V. McKeon, and Gregory A. Van Guilder) at 1 Imation Place in the same building as the other ECMC offices reside, plus Premiere Credit of North America LLC. Cook was or is the director of ECMC Technology Services Corporation. DePodesta is the ECMC chairman of the board.

Zenith's interim president is Troy A. Stovall, who "comes to the position with eight years of leadership experience in nonprofit higher education administration and a distinguished background serving in various management consulting and advisory roles." So he totally knows about education. Most recently he was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Howard University, but he also runs his own consulting firm; his LinkedIn profile includes a plug for Time Driven Activity Based Costing, so apparently he speaks fluent consultantese. He's also a principal at something called Oak Forest Ventures, "a solutions firm dedicated to substantially improving the profitability of its clients."

Are you getting the impression that this is way more about business and money than about education and a future for students?

Zenith has a chirpy new website. It touts the qualities of, but does not list by name, its "employees." So, not a faculty, I guess. And they have a whole tab devoted to their partners:

We intend to graduate high-performing, highly skilled students from our schools, and our new partnership program will identify high-quality employers in industries with clear local workforce needs that are sufficiently equipped to support students as they work to embark upon their new careers.

One can hope that will become a bit more concrete and nailed down, as one of Corinthian's many scam-related issues was its tendency to create fake employment for its students to hide its lousy job placement record. This is not great for schools specifically devoted to preparing students for a place in the workforce.

A look at the "our schools" tab confirms what news reports imply-- Zenith has no schools in its chain other than the ones it just grabbed from Corinthian.

That grabbage depended hugely on the USED's involvement. So when they said that they would drop the hammer on predatory colleges, apparently by "hammer" they meant "big fluffy hammer sculpted out of money." Truthout tells the story and makes the case that the USED is saving a chunk of its own bacon. If Corinthian had simply gone belly up or been shut down by the feds, some students would have had the option of a get-out-of-loans free cards, which could have cost the USED a few hundred million bucks. The USED has reportedly been making big bucks from student loans, so anti-shark measures may not be in their business interests.

As part of the deal, "the parties agreed to pay the Department $12 million in an up-front payment, and up to an additional $17.25 million earn-out over the next seven years that will be used to benefit Corinthian students." The Department is announcing a $480 million loan forgiveness plan for borrowers who paid their way to Corinthian with high-cost private loans. Who this covers is not clear from the USED press release, but in any version, it's not much help. If the $480 mill is split over the 30,000 students who just became assets traded from Corinthian to Zenith, that's about $16K. If we add in current Corinthian students as well, it's closer to $7K. The press release says this money will also help past Corinthian students get a fresh start, so that $480 mill is looking tinier and tinier.

The USED also cheerfully reports that Zenith has agreed to all manner of swell things, like voluntarily hiring an independent monitor, which is right up there with politicians setting up ethics committee to oversee their own behavior, under their own direction. I'm not impressed.

Also, "in the months since the announcement of the sale" (which would be December and January) "Zenith has agreed to implement a series of improvements to improve outcomes, strengthen career training, and ensure accountability and transparency." Yes, boys and girls, in just two months (with, presumably, time off for to celebrate Christmas and the big fat present Santa Duncan was delivering) Zenith managed to retool an entire college system that was previously designed to fraudulently use students as straws through which to suck up delicious loan money. Given an organization run by guys who have no actual college-running experience, that is a managerial feat of amazing skill and bullshittery.

Here's the big finish to the federal PR notice:

Throughout, the Department has sought a wind down of Corinthian Colleges that protects students, protects the investment taxpayers have made in their success, and creates opportunities for students to finish what they started. The Department has also sought a resolution that, where possible, establishes a strong and ongoing platform for high quality career education in the future. Today’s announcement by Zenith and Corinthian is a major and positive step in these directions.

And here's how I described this story the last time I covered it

Short version: feds threatened to shut down predatory loan-sucking for-profit scam schools, but decided to bail them out instead. Kind of like finding people in a burning building and saying, "You guys just stay there inside. We're going to hire someone to paint the place."


Once again, we see that zealous federal oversight is for public schools. For privately operated school-flavored businesses, the feds are there to make sure that nothing interrupts the sweet. sweet stream of money flowing to private pockets. It is always possible that Zenith will turn out to be awesome stewards of education, I suppose. But for students, it's a caveat emptor world. For businesses, don't worry-- the government will always watch your back. And don't forget-- this deal was only for a portion of the Corinthian chain-- the rest is still out there, still in business, still preying away. Caveat emptor, indeed.

Congress and Your Homework

Congress must not abdicate its responsibility to help all children succeed.

That's Arne Duncan, responding to the proposed Lamar Alexander remix of No Child Left Behind. It's an interesting construction, an inspiring line.

The first picture that popped into my head was an old white guy in a suit, knocking on some family's front door. When a parent answers, he says, "Hello. I'm Senator Bumswoggle, and I'm here to help Chris study for the big algebra test tomorrow."

Okay, that's probably not what Duncan means. But it does raise the question-- what exactly can Congress do to help all children succeed? If we went into classrooms and asked the students, "What do you need from your Congressperson to help you succeed this week?" what would they say?

Would they say that they really, really need to take a bunch of standardized tests? "I think I'm getting better at reading," will say some bright-eyed eight-year-old, "but until I take a standardized test from Congress, I just don't know." Is that what would happen?

Would they say, "Please don't give any more resources to this school. Instead, give the money to some charter operator to set up a completely different school. Yes, I realize they might not let me go to that school, and I'll have to stay in this one scraping by with fewer resources, but I'll sleep better knowing that entrepreneurs have had the opportunity to unleash innovation while making good ROI."
It is sweet that Duncan and Congress want to help. The desire to help, particularly to help those who are most vulnerable, is a basic human impulse, and a credit to every person who feels it. But the desire to help does not automatically confer the ability to help.

Suppose one of my children is injured and rushed to an operating room. I would want to help. I would want to wave a magic wand and fix it, right now. But if I grab a scalpel and dash into the operating theater declaring, "I really want to help. What can I do?" they would have to throw me out, because as someone with zero surgery-related skills, the most useful thing I can do is get out of the way. Even if I am obscenely rich and incredibly powerful, I still don't have the skills.

So if Congress's message to children is going to be, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you" the question remains-- what can Congress actually do to help children succeed?

Not teach the children-- neither Congress nor the Department of Education contains barely any people with skills and expertise in actually teaching children. Congress doesn't know how to build schools or run a sceince fair or assess an essay. Nor would I want to watch a Congressman take a shift or two of lunch duty (okay, I might want to watch a little). With few exceptions, Congresspersons do not know how to do any of the things directly related to helping a child achieve success in school. So they won't help the children succeed that way.

In fact, Congress doesn't even know the individual children that it's talking about. This means that it has no idea what individual strengths and weaknesses the children have. It also means that neither Congress nor Secretary Duncan knows what each individual child means by "succeed." So the actual working with children is best left up to the people who are right there with them-- teachers and parents.That work includes defining and measuring success; Congress lacks the skills and expertise to do either of those tasks.

Congress does have the expertise to deal with the money and politics portion of the picture. Congress can do its part to make sure that every school has the resources that it needs, and Congress has a responsibility to do that honestly, without damaging fictions such as, "We can fund ten different excellent schools for the same money that's now spent on just one." Congress has a responsibility to do its homework, so that it's not making choices based on the lies in charter school PR materials.
Congress has the expertise and skills to make sure that states do not create funding formulas that treat some children like second-class citizens. Congress has the expertise and skills to require that states and school districts remain transparent.

Neither Congress nor the Department of Education has the expertise and skill to determine when a school is failing or what should be done with that failing school. They have been told that expertise in business, politics and money are sufficient to identify and cure failing schools; this is simply not true, any more than my expertise in teaching English means I belong in an operating room or a board room.

Congress's responsibility to help children succeed is not a bad measure. But if we're going to be honest and truthful about the matter, Congress's ability to help children succeed is nearly non-existent. Great responsibility can come with great power, but in this case, Congress's most important power is to step back and let the people with expertise, training and skills do their jobs.

Speak Up for the Profession Now

We're coming down to the wire on your chance to speak out about one of the dumbest ideas to come out of a Department of Education that breeds bad ideas like bunnies.

This particular bad idea is the idea that VAM should be used to evaluate teacher prep programs. In other words, after we get done evaluating my performance based on my students' test results as processed by a piece of junk science that has been soundly rejected both by experts in education and experts in the science of measuring stuff, we will go ahead an use MY made-up evaluation results to evaluate the college education program that gave me my teaching degree in the first place.

This is a dumb idea. It is the emperor of dumb ideas. If dumb ideas were a country, this would be the capital city.

Do not just sit and sputter. Do not go fume in the teachers' lounge. Do something.

I'm kind of amazed-- there are several million teachers in this country, most of whom have to know that this is a dumb idea. There are many colleges of education in this country, all of which are staffed by a variety of people who have to know this is a dumb idea.

And yet, as I type this, the federal website shows 2062 comments on the proposed alterations. 2062.

So here's the link. I'm going to once again make it huge so that you can't miss it. We are talking about the programs that are the gatekeepers of our profession, and what we're talking about is making the gatekeepers stupid. This is fundamental to determining which people will be joining us in our schools, working side by side with us. We cannot sit silent.

We only have until Monday, February 2, to speak up. If you like, you can be part of a crowdtasked mark-up of the bill here at the wire. If you're not sure what to say, just be brief. Copy and paste or link to your favorite commentary on the subject. But don't just sit silent.

Yes, I know the odds do not favor the administration actually listening to what we have to say. But we can be absolutely guaranteed that they won't listen to us if we don't speak. What they're proposing is wrong, and we need to say so. Time's running out. Take the minutes to leave a comment.

The Great Chain of Effectiveness

The USED is ready to forge the next link in the Great Chain of Effectiveness.

We're already familiar with the two links. The very first chain is the testing link-- a standardized test covering narrow slices of two subject areas is forged as a measure of the full education of a child. The second link is from that test to the teacher. Soaked in magic VAM sauce, that second chain says that the test results are the responsibility of the teacher, and so the second link measures how effective that teachers actually is.

Link number three is on the way. That link will stretch from the classroom teacher back to the college department that trained her to be a teacher. The USED is proposing a heaping side order of VAM sauce for colleges and universities.If a student's results for bubbling in answers on questions about certain narrow areas of math and reading are too low, that is clearly the responsibility of the college department that certified the student's teacher. They should be rated poorly.

But why stop there?

That college education department is composed of professors who are clearly ineffective. The institutions that issued their advanced degrees should be rated ineffective. And their direct oversight comes from college administration-- so let's include their ineffectiveness of the college president's evaluation.

And where did that guy come from? This is more complicated, but we'll need to cross-reference his salary, because we know from Chetty et al that a good elementary teacher would have made a difference of several hundred thousand dollars in salary. So if our ineffective college president is also not super-well-paid, we can clearly conclude that his first grade teacher was ineffective-- let's hunt her down and downgrade her evaluation.

Of course, that raises another problem in our great chain of accountability. College presidents aren't generally young guys, so it's possible that his first grade teacher is dead. But now that we've located her, we can locate all the students she ever taught. Now, it's possible that some of her students went on to have successful careers even though she was ineffective-- we can discard those from the sample and assume that those are all students with grit. The rest of her former students who are not making big bucks must be the result of her ineffective instruction, and the government has an obligation to send letters to all of their employers indicating that federal government has determined that, due to an ineffective first grade teacher, those employees are losers.

Now if, any of those students went on to become teachers, we have a bit of a bind. If that teacher turns out to be ineffective, do we blame his college or his first grade teacher?

But back to our ineffective college president. Somebody hired him, so those people must also be rated ineffective. Those university trustees and directors are usually folks with successful careers, but their hiring of the president who ran the department that trained the teacher who taught the child who bubble in several wrong answers on his test reveals them to be actually ineffective. Good government oversight requires that any products produced by their companies should be stamped with a warning: "Warning. This product was produced by a company run in part by an ineffective human being."

Of course, some of those college presidents are in charge of public universities. These state schools are ultimately run by state level bureaucracies, and those are of course ultimately answerable to a governor. So the governor would have to be rated ineffective as well.

But the ineffective governor was elected by the people. I realize that it would require a breach of values that we've long held dear, but I think we've established that in the pursuit of effectiveness labels for education, long-held American values can go straight into the dumpster. So-- let's find out exactly who voted for that ineffective governor, and let's rate them ineffective voters and maybe we should take away their votes in the future and just bring in a charter voting company to do the voting for all those people, who in the meanwhile, have to be Great Chained back to their own first grade teachers who are clearly responsible for their ineffective voting.

You may say that the Great Chain of Effectiveness is built out of tin foil and tenuous connections, and that it violates laws of common sense and decency. Just watch it. That's the kind of talk that gets a person's first grade teacher on a list.

Speak Up Now for Teacher Prep Programs

The holidays are over, life is back to normal(ish), and your classroom has hit that post-holiday stride. It is time to finally make your voice heard on the subject of teacher preparation programs.

As you've likely heard, the USED would like to start evaluating all colleges, but they would particularly like to evaluate teacher preparation programs. And they have some exceptionally dreadful ideas about how to do it.

Under proposed § 612.4(b)(1), beginning in April, 2019 and annually thereafter, each State would be required to report how it has made meaningful differentiations of teacher preparation program performance using at least four performance levels: “low-performing,” “at-risk,” “effective,” and “exceptional” that are based on the indicators in proposed § 612.5 including, in significant part, employment outcomes for high-need schools and student learning outcomes.

And just to be clear, here's a quick summary from 612.5

Under proposed § 612.5, in determining the performance of each teacher preparation program, each State (except for insular areas identified in proposed § 612.5(c)) would need to use student learning outcomes, employment outcomes, survey outcomes, and the program characteristics described above as its indicators of academic content knowledge and teaching skills of the program's new teachers or recent graduates. In addition, the State could use other indicators of its choosing, provided the State uses a consistent approach for all of its teacher preparation programs and these other indicators are predictive of a teacher's effect on student performance. 

Yes, we are proposing to evaluate teacher prep programs based on the VAM scores of their graduates. Despite the fact that compelling evidence and arguments keep piling up to suggest that VAM is not a valid measure of teacher effectiveness, we're going to take it a step further and create a great chain of fuzzy thinking to assert that when Little Pat gets a bad grade on the PARCC, that is ultimately the fault of the college that granted Little Pat's teacher a degree.

Yes, it's bizarre and stupid. But that has been noted at length throughout the bloggosphere plenty. Right now is not the time to complain about it on your facebook page.

Now is the time to speak up to the USED.

The comment period for this document ends on February 2. All you have to do is go to the site, click on the link for submitting a formal comment, and do so. This is a rare instance in which speaking up to the people in power is as easy as using the same device you're using to read there words.

Will they pay any attention? Who knows. I'm not inclined to think so, but how can I sit silently when I've been given such a simple opportunity for speaking up? Maybe the damn thing will be adopted anyway, but when that day comes, I don't want to be sitting here saying that I never spoke up except to huff and puff on my blog.

I just gave you a two-paragraph link so you can't miss it. If you're not sure what to say, here are some points to bring up-

The National Association of Secondary School Principals has stated its intention to adopt a document stating clearly that they believe that VAM has no use as an evaluation tool for teachers.

The American Statistical Association has stated clearly that test-based measures are a poor tool for measuring teacher effectiveness.

A peer-reviewed study published by the American Education Research Association and funded by the Gates Foundation determined that “Value-Added Performance Measures Do Not Reflect the Content or Quality of Teachers’ Instruction.”

You can scan the posts of the blog Vamboozled, the best one-stop shop for VAM debunking on the internet for other material. Or you can simply ask a college education department can possibly be held accountable for the test scores of K-12 students.

But write something. It's not very often that we get to speak our minds to the Department of Education, and we can't accuse them ignoring us if we never speak in the first place.

USED Calls Parents and Teachers Dopes, Again

At Politico, Caitlin Emma took a pretty thorough look at the state of high stakes testing in this country, with a particular eye toward the Republicans who are making noises about rolling the testing juggernaut back a step or two (place your bets now on what kind of warm, friendly holiday greeting those guys have gotten from Pearson and friends in the last week).

Emma notes that the testing pushback has created some unusual allies from the left and right, and she notes that AFT and NEA have both come down on testing (she does not note the significance of this being pretty much the only aspect of reformsterism that the two unions have actually spoken up against). Emma also notes some of the staggering numbers of school hours spent on testing that are getting out to the public.

While they won’t back down on annual tests, Duncan and Obama recently responded to pressure to do something. They’re supporting a new effort to reduce testing led by state education chiefs and large urban-district leaders. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools will soon release findings that show where tests can be eliminated or improved. And they’ll announce a task force to develop recommendations for states and districts looking to cut back.

Yeah, we talked about that back when it first happened, and I feel safe predicting that the substantive part of that new effort-- the generating of optic-improving PR-- is already done, and we can expect to see nothing else of significance coming out of it.

Emma also gives a decent summary of the opt-out responses that have sprung up. Really, the whole article is worth your attention-- I just want to highlight one particular aspect.

”We’re responsible for student learning every single day and every single year,” an Education Department official said. “I want us to never back away from the fact that it’s our responsibility … Parents have a right to know how their students are progressing. Students have a right to know how they measure up.”

We've heard this from the feds before. It's one more translation of a driving idea for this administration that we could express more directly thus:

Parents are dopes and schools are filled with teachers and leaders who are some mix of liars and incompetents. Only with national high stakes testing will anybody know how students are doing.

The feds envision a world where a family gathers at home, befuddled. "So," asks Mom. "Are you learning how to read?" Junior shrugs and replies, "I don't know. I think so. Maybe. Maybe not." But Dad reassures them. "Don't worry. In a few months we'll get the test results from the state and then we'll know how you're doing."

Meanwhile, teachers huddle in staff rooms. "Do you have any idea whether your kids are learning anything or not," asks Mr. McNumbgnutts. His colleagues shrug. "Guess we'll just have to wait to get the test results back."

This, say the feds, is why testing must happen annually.

“If you’re waiting every three years to measure student learning, then what happens when a student has been falling behind?” the [unnamed Education Department] official said. “Do you wait until that third year to figure out what their interventions ought to be?”

The folks at the department of Education want testing because everybody else are dopes. Teachers, parents, students themselves-- nobody has a clue how students are doing in school without the wise intervention of Our Friends at Pearson (who are more than ready to step in -- they would like to tell us what the child should eat for breakfast and what kind of human being she is). 

"Do you wait until that third year to figure out what their intervention ought to be?" No, Sherlock. Most of us don't wait until the end of the week. In fact, a recent study of actual live human teachers tells us just how much use they get out of this nifty test data-- pretty much none. These quotes tell us, once again, just what stunningly low regard the guys in DC hold the (mostly female) teachers in classrooms.

This, perhaps more than anything the feds have done since the President arrived in DC, has been the biggest federal contribution to the destructive wave of reformsterism that has hit public education-- they have thrown full federal weight behind the idea that public education is an unmitigated failure and that nobody who's actually involved in it has a clue about anything at all.

Remember-- the feds didn't just agree to be facilitators for the reform plans of CCSSO, Achieve, Coleman, Pearson, et al. They also didn't say anything at all along the lines of, "You know, there are millions of trained, experienced, education professionals in the field. Maybe we should call a couple." It's understandable from the corporate reformsters-- teachers would only gum up their works, and they have no obligation to represent anybody but their own stockholders. But our political leaders simply cast a quick vote of no confidence in public education and let the bulldozers have at it. And they are still at it, buttressing each reformy idea with an argument that boils down to, "We have to do something because teachers and parents are dopes."

I sure hope we can remember this all the way into 2016. And in the interim, maybe Democrats should come up with a better campaign platform than the cartoonish, "We're going to tell you how it should go because you don't have a clue."

A Teaching Ambassador!

I've been looking at the application materials for the Department of Education's teacher ambassadorship. After all, I am always up to Learn New Things, and I feel that I have a few things to share with Arne Duncan and the USED (Exhibit A: Any of the last seven hundred or so posts). So let's take a look at what would be required.

First, we actually have a choice of two programs. 

For Washington Fellowships, teachers head to DC to become full-time employees of the department (a deal has to be cut between the feds and your employer). This requires a teacher who is ready, willing and able to be uprooted-- and not just to anywhere, but to Washington DC (Moto: Mostly Not Swamp Now). "They contribute valuable school and classroom level knowledge and perspective to the Department, collaborate to provide specific outreach to other teachers, and greatly increase their knowledge and understanding of federal education policies and programs in order to share with other teachers."

There are also Classroom Fellowships. For these, the teacher stays put at her regular gig, earning an hourly rate for the 20-40 hours per month of gummint work she would do. This fellowship appears to be mostly doing outreach and marketing for department policies out in the hinterlands, although, like the DC fellowship, this gig supposedly involves telling the department what you think. See? I could totally do this!

The eligibility requirements are simple enough. To qualify for one of the fellowships, you need to

• Anticipate employment in a teaching position (including instructional coaches/specialists) during the 2015-2016 school year in a United States school (including traditional public, charter, virtual, military, tribal and/or private schools) that serves any grade, preschool through twelfth.
• Have a minimum of five (5) years of teaching experience.
• Be a United States citizen or permanent resident.
• Be able to obtain school/district support to sign an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) agreement at the point of selection for participation in the program.

So basically any US citizen who has called him- or her-self a teacher in any capacity for the last five years whose employers are willing to do without the applicant for a year. The complete application will include:

Five essays that will cover

        * Your contributions to student learning, including how you work with your particular demographic. You should have some qualitative and quantitative evidence of your learning impact. I don't see anything that specifically requires you to submit your VAM scores, but I'm sure they'd be acceptable..
        * Your leadership experience. Show some experience that highlights your style, approach and achievements. The USED needs to know that when you start selling, somebody will be buying.
        * Written and oral communication skills. Show some examples of where you have presented about ed stuff or "led discourse." What professional networks are you already plugged in to? It's not clear if blogging meets this requirement.
        * Other skills. "Ambassador Fellows work in a fast-paced and ambiguous environment in which they must quickly focus, digest complex information, and network with a wide variety of education stakeholders." Do you suppose playing tailgate trombone or jazz tuba count here?
        * Interests and expertise. What can you do for the department, and what do you hope the department will do for you. And here's the money quote: "Include relevant experience with Federally-funded or key initiatives addressing: the transition college and career ready standards and instruction; support for great teachers and leaders; turning around chronically low performing schools; or providing access and opportunity for all students from cradle to career." In other words, show us how much you love everything we love here at the USED-- this is the same list of priorities you can find in Race to the Top and waiver requirements.

Employer letter of recommendation

Has to be signed and on letterhead, and indicate that administration is aware that they are handing one of their teachers over to the borg collective. It should back up whatever the applicant said in those essays, and it should highlight the specifics of how the applicant gets things done in the school and is plugged into the community. Is this someone that people will listen to when she starts pushing the party line?

Current Resume

This seems like a low bar, which makes sense because if you know classroom teachers, you know that most of us don't have very snazzy resumes."Resumes are used to help verify eligibility and should be consistent with or able to enhance information contained within your narrative responses." So, don't catch yourself lying in these.

Competition is tight because, let's face it-- this would be a pretty interesting gig, even for those of us who think the USED is pretty much wrong about many, many things. We have till January 20th to get our application in, and you can find all the pertinent information at the department's website. I suspect that, despite my communication skills and my leadership experience (president of striking local) and my professional network (if you're reading this, I'm probably counting you) and my bitchin' low brass skills-- despite all that, I am probably not a good fit for the department. But I bet we could all do a little something to help the department find just the right folks.

College Ratings Framework

Folks who are invested in the education debates can be excused for getting two issues slightly confused in the last month. Arne Duncan's Department of Education has been floating two college related proposals. One is the foolish and unsupportable proposal to rate colleges of education on the test scores of their former students' students. The other is to rate all colleges and universities according to...well, that's what's being discussed.

This factsheet about the college ratings framework will give you a good idea of what's going on. It opens with some stirring words from the Dunc-meister himself.

As  a  nation,  we  have  to  make  college  more  accessible  and  affordable  and  ensure  that  all students graduate  with  any  education  of  real  value.  Our  students  deserve  to  know,  before  they enroll,  that  the  schools  they’ve  chosen  will  deliver  this  value.    With  the  guidance  of thousands  of  wise  voices,  we  can  develop  a  useful  ratings  system  that  will  help  more Americans  realize  the  dream  of  a  degree  that  unleashes  their  potential  and  opens  doors  to  a better  life.

Every time this administration talks about making college more affordable, I'm forced to remember the reports that the Department of Education is making huge profits from college loans. If the feds could show even half the interest rate love to students that they show to banksters, the "more affordable" part of Dunckie's dream would get somewhat closer. But this is a pretty standard pattern for this business-friendly administration-- we want to get SATs and AP tests and college and health care to every Ameican, as long as we don't have to ask corporations to give up any of their profit margin to do it.

Since the administration's premise is that education is the only thing that will help fix financial and social inequity (again, anything that would bite into corporate profits is off the table), they've got to somehow camouflage the evidence that our current post-secondary system reinforces the Walls Between the Classes rather than breaking them down.

The factsheet lists some of the administration's "achievements," including increasing Pell grants and Opportunity Tax Credits. They're also proud of capping student loan payments at 10% of monthly income, guaranteeing that students will be able to keep paying those loans off until they are eligible for Social Security (whether they'll get any or not is another discussion).

But the administration also wants to put pressure on colleges, because if there's notenough social mobility in America, the only possible explanation is that some colleges suck. So we'd like to rate colleges on many qualities, including but not limited to, enrolling students from many backgrounds, focusing on affordability, and good graduation rate. Here's what the feds think they know so far about rating access, affordability, and outcomes.

Rating categories. Lots of folks have told the Dunc-inator that rankings and false precision would be a bad idea, so the department is leaning toward three ratings: high-performing, low-performing, and those in the middle. This is a bit of a weasel because the choice on what to call those in the middle will be telling. "Adequate," "well-performing," and "meh" would all fit the descriptor, but provide much different impressions to consumers.

Institutional grouping. A system that allows consumers to compare Harvard Law School and Bob's Truck Driving Academy isn't particularly useful to anybody. The department agrees that taking the goals and type of institutions into account would help ratings make more sense.

Data. They'll start out using data from federal systems, IPEDS and NSLDS. They will keep it just as safe and secure as... well, let's not think about that.

Metrics being considered? What percentage of students are Pelling? Expected family contribution. Family income quintiles. First-generation college students. These would be a measure of how diverse the school population is. Average net price and net price by quintile would look at affordability.  Completion rates and transfer rates would speak to successful completion, and labor market success would be another outcome measure. The department is thinking about measuring labor market success not just in job placement, but in income above a certain threshold.  Grad school attendance would fit in the outcomes. And for fun, let's throw in  how graduates do at repaying their loans.

Yes, let me back up, in case you missed it-- maybe we should evaluate colleges on how much money their graduates make.

It's an interesting assortment, since many of these are beyond the control of the college in question. But some of these would be good things to know, even as many of them will just demonstrate that rich people who go to rich people colleges grow up to be rich people. Boy, that was useful. Unfortunately, the department thinks there is one more step to take here.

Next Steps, College Ratings Website, and Transparency Tools

It's not clear why, having collected this data, we would need a rating system. The government currently requires food companies to list nutritional information on their packaging, but it does not assign a rating based on that data. Nutritional labeling remains one of my all-time favorite examples of government in action-- I get the information I need to make the choices that best suit me. I don't need the feds to label the food "Good" or Healthy" or "Fatty Fat Fat." I can interpret the data in the way that best suits my needs, beliefs, and inclinations.

If the feds want to give students and families more information about colleges, that would be fine. I don't need the feds to interpret the data for me, based on what they think I should want and need. But as Under Secretary Ted Mitchell notes in his closing comments, the feds also like the idea of awarding money (or not) based on their own rating system. So once again we have the administration acting like cartoon versions of what non-liberals hate about liberals-- the idea that people just shouldn't be left to make up their own minds about things because federal bureaucrats can make much wiser choices for them than they can make for themselves.

Add that on top of the bitter irony that this is the federal government that announced its intention to bring the hammer down on predatory for-profit colleges, and yet, when the biggest offender in the pack turned up, these same feds mostly protected the financial interests of the owners. In short, these guys who want to get super-involved in determining the best interests of students already have a lousy record in looking out for the best interests of students. In really short, if you're going to insist on federal overreach, at least show some aptitude for it.

The  Department  invites  comment  from  the  public  on  the  draft  framework  by  Tuesday,  Feb.17, 2015. Submissions  can  be  submitted  through  the online  form at  http://www.ed.gov/blog/collegeratings or by  email  to  collegefeedback@ed.gov

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