You only have to get one "story at a glance" point into this article to know that this is going to be a freakin' disaster panda, and I have so many wuestions.
New devices can be worn by babies and toddlers to count the number of words they are exposed to each day.
It's a word pedometer, a sensor that you strap onto your child's chest that, well, records all the words tat show up in the area.
They are situated inside a small vest that keeps the tracker positioned on the baby’s chest, not to measure steps or stairs, of course, but to log words, sentences and entire conversations spoken to or overheard by the child.
This is not a new batch of baloney; here are 75 Providence Headstart families being used as a pilot program back in 2014. Because, of course, this is aimed at non-wealthy non-white families, and was mostly about "training parents." The reasoning back then is familiar. According to the program director, "Previous research has shown that the number of words that is heard between ages 0 and 3 is a good predictor for school success." It was backed by the LENA foundation, an outfit that's all about using tech to build early language skills and adult-child talk and pushing the word pedometer. LENA's president came from the aerospace industry, the senior director of research is degreed in linguistics and developmental psychology, and the director of growth strategy has experience taking projects to scale. That pilot was followed by a program called Providence Talks which is still tied to LENA.
This is all about closing the fabled "word gap," the notion that children in poor families hear fewer words. That goes back to a piece of 1995 research that has always been controversial (and has also proven resistant to replication). It's yet another example of confusing correlation with causation. One of my favorite word gap quotes comes from linguist Michael Erard:
Just as solving climate change isn’t about closing the polar bear gap, and preventing environmental degradation isn’t about closing the tree gap, you can’t increase children’s school readiness by closing the word gap.
If you want further examples of why the word gap is not a thing to be basing policy around (and there's agreement on this from many sides of the ed debates), you can look here, here, and here. (For balance, this is a nice, brief, clear debunking debunking.) There's wide agreement that early exposure to language matters a great deal, but the assertion that, somehow, poor folks don't talk to their kids is problematic.
Strapping a microphone to your bahy seems like quite a step to take, and the claims made by the tech seem, well, extreme. Researcher Kenneth Wong (Brown U) says the program is "designed to simply record things like word counts and 'conversational terms,' such as when a new topic is introduced." Anyone who has ever had a fight with Alexa or Siri or a talk-to-text program will have no trouble imagining all the ways this could fail. The article notes that this all sounds creepy, and that could b e because it is creepy.
The word pedometer, like the word gap concept itself, also plays to the absolute worst tendency of technocratic solutions-- it emphasizes reductive measurement that leads easily to focus on exactly the wrong stuff. The article cites one example of a mother who came home and read the real estate ads to her baby, just to get those words in . And the opening example compares word pedometers to fitbits, which is particularly apt, since a fitbit has no idea what kind of step you took--in fact, my old fitbit would give me credit for conducting a pit orchestra, which involved sitting on my butt and periodically waving my arms.
Trying to "fix" babies by exposing them to a bunch of words, as if language were a sort of virus you can catch, is not terribly sound. Giving your baby a microphone-embedded vest to wear (do they say "this conversation may be monitored for quality assurance"?) is just a shiny way to enable a bad approach that also takes the pressure off of things like fixing poverty and jobs and living conditions (all those things that can't be blamed on the poor).
Also, when you're imagining this, don't forget the suggestion is to strap the microphone onto toddlers. I'm pretty sure trying to count the words (as opposed to random noises) coming out of my toddlers as well as tracking their conversational topics would severely tax the limits of any software. This whole business is just a bad idea.
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Monday, December 16, 2019
What Is A Day Of Learning, Anyway?
The measure crops up frequently in discussions of education policies and, sometimes, products. But what the heck does it even mean?
Charter advocates like to point to a CREDO study that shows urban charters giving students an additional 40 days of learning growth in math and 38 in reading (while critics bring up the 2013 CREDO study finding that charter schools provided seven additional days of learning per year in reading and no significant difference in math). Indianapolis, New York City, and other big systems find charter advocates touting additional days of learning.
Meanwhile, one of the widespread criticisms of online schools is a CREDO study which found that cyberschool students lost 72 days of learning in reading and a whopping 180 days in math–that’s a whole year.
Bridge International Academy describes its success in Kenya in terms of added days of learning. Research into the educational effects of variables such as teacher experience is expressed in days of learning. Sales representatives for edu-products will promise additional days of learning.
But what exactly is a day of learning? Classroom teachers know that a Monday is not equal to a Friday or a Wednesday. Surely it’s not the day that students get out early, or the day that is interrupted by an assembly, or the day that the teacher was pulled out for meetings, or the day that the baseball team was dismissed early for an away game. Certainly not the day that everyone in school was reeling and preoccupied because of a local tragedy. A day in September is not the same as a day in April, and certainly not any day in the season that we’re approaching, because from mid-November until the end-of-year break classroom teachers are extra-challenged to get a day out of a day.
So when is it? When does this proto-typical day, this day on which exactly one day’s worth of learning occurs? Where is education’s answer to Lebanon, Kansas (the geographic center of the contiguous U.S.)? Is it a statistical anomaly like the1.9 children being raised by the average U.S. family? Can this measure be broken down more precisely? Can we talk about hours of learning? Minutes? Seconds?
The Learning Policy Institute offers an explanation for days of learning. The short form is that a typical growth on a standardized test score, divided by 180, equals one day of learning. If you want a fancier explanation, LPI looks via CREDO to a 2012 paper by Erik Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann:
To create this benchmark, CREDO adopted the assumption put forth by Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessman (2012) that “[o]n most measures of student performance, student growth is typically about 1 full standard deviation on standardized tests between 4th and 8th grade, or about 25 percent of a standard deviation from one grade to the next.” Therefore, assuming an average school year includes 180 days of schooling, each day of schooling represents approximately 0.0013 standard deviations of student growth.
So in the end, “days of learning” has nothing to do with days or with learning. It’s simply another way to say “this policy or product seems to correlate with an increase or decrease of scores on a standardized test of reading and math.”
Learning can’t be measured in days or minutes or inches or pounds or hectares. Pretending that you can use test scores, assumptions and standard deviations to measure learning the same way you can portion out milk in a measuring cup is not science–it’s rhetorical smoke and mirrors.
If you wonder why classroom teachers are not more engaged with or moved by educational research, here’s one reason–because the euphemisms and constructs of researchers use a frame of reference totally removed from the experience of classroom teachers, designed to hide what they’re really talking about instead of illuminating it. Someone who approaches a classroom teacher and says, “I’ve got a way for you to get more days of learning out of your students,” should not expect to be taken seriously.
Sunday, December 15, 2019
ICYMI: Ed Forum Weekend Edition (12/15)
Yesterday I spent the day in Pittsburgh at the ed forum, then decorating at my in-laws, then banging out a summary. But I still have a few things for you to read from the week. Remember to share!
Common Core: The Rest of the Story
Blogger and ed historian Adam Laats fills in some gaps in the NYT history of everyone's favorite standards.
GRE Fails To Identify Successful PhD Students
Shocked. I am shocked. But the GRE isn't a great predictor of grad school success.
New Filipino Grad Requirement
Well, here's an actual cool idea. Filipino students now need to plant trees in order to graduate.
I Taught At a For-Profit College. They're Predatory Disasters.
From the Guardian, a look inside the world of for-profit higher ed. It is not pretty.
No New Charter Applications In Chicago
If you had any doubts that the charter boom is over, here's a look from Chalkbeat Chicago at a new development-- a year without any charter applications.
An Outright Lie
Remember that Ohio law that says students can't be dinged for getting facts wrong? Turns out that's part of the infamous Project Blitz, as is the legislator who proposed it. The Guardian has the story.
Mayor Pete and Charter Backers
Not from an education site, but Vice. Here's how charter money is bolstering Buttigieg.
Kentucky Ed Commissioner Resigns
Kentucky governor-elect promised to clean house in th education department and replace the old charter-loving crew. He's done it. It's a new day in Kentucky.
DeVos Defends Restricting Debt Relief
Erica Green at NYT with some great coverage of DeVos's latest visit to Congress, and her deep desire not to actually do debt relief.
The $191 Million Settlement with University of Phoenix
Who finally nailed these bunco artists? Not the ed department-- the FCC.
Word Pedometers
From the not-the-onion terrible idea file.
Common Core: The Rest of the Story
Blogger and ed historian Adam Laats fills in some gaps in the NYT history of everyone's favorite standards.
GRE Fails To Identify Successful PhD Students
Shocked. I am shocked. But the GRE isn't a great predictor of grad school success.
New Filipino Grad Requirement
Well, here's an actual cool idea. Filipino students now need to plant trees in order to graduate.
I Taught At a For-Profit College. They're Predatory Disasters.
From the Guardian, a look inside the world of for-profit higher ed. It is not pretty.
No New Charter Applications In Chicago
If you had any doubts that the charter boom is over, here's a look from Chalkbeat Chicago at a new development-- a year without any charter applications.
An Outright Lie
Remember that Ohio law that says students can't be dinged for getting facts wrong? Turns out that's part of the infamous Project Blitz, as is the legislator who proposed it. The Guardian has the story.
Mayor Pete and Charter Backers
Not from an education site, but Vice. Here's how charter money is bolstering Buttigieg.
Kentucky Ed Commissioner Resigns
Kentucky governor-elect promised to clean house in th education department and replace the old charter-loving crew. He's done it. It's a new day in Kentucky.
DeVos Defends Restricting Debt Relief
Erica Green at NYT with some great coverage of DeVos's latest visit to Congress, and her deep desire not to actually do debt relief.
The $191 Million Settlement with University of Phoenix
Who finally nailed these bunco artists? Not the ed department-- the FCC.
Word Pedometers
From the not-the-onion terrible idea file.
Saturday, December 14, 2019
A Look At The Democratic Education Forum
After live-tweeting the day, I've worked up a summary, which you'll find over at my Forbes spot. Sorry to bait and switch, but that's where you can find my take on the day...
Friday, December 13, 2019
When Betsy DeVos Tells You Who She Is, Listen
Yesterday, Erica Green did a masterful job of covering Betsy DeVos's appearance before the House Education Committee to defend her continued efforts to resist any sort of debt relief for students bilked by for-profit schools. The New York Times article isn't accessible to everybody, and that's too bad, because the hearings are a perfect little picture of what values drive DeVos through her work at USED. Green has caught some key quotes that let DeVos tell us who she is. We should listen.
Because DeVos is rich, folks often accuse her of being greedy. I don't think that's true-- past a certain point, money stops being about greed-based utilitarian acquisition of stuff, but about keeping score in other sorts of games. Because DeVos often makes statements that don't make sense from a particular point of view, folks often accuse her of being dumb. I don't think that's true, either.
Here's an absolutely DeVosian quote from the proceedings:
I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.
This is DeVos-- she knows what's right, and she's going to stand up for it. And's what is right is that Those People shouldn't be able to get away with not paying their debts. Those People should not be allowed to stiff their Betters. Because you know that Those People are probably lying about how badly they were hurt, anyway, because Those People are always trying to get things they don't deserve. This "anyone who raises their hand and files a claim" characterization that DeVos has been using is such a flip way to dismiss the damage done by for-profit collges, an d here it matters what DeVos doesn't say-- she doesn't say that there are people out there who played by the rules, tried to bootstrap themselves to a better life through education, and got fleeced, and we should provide those people some real relief. She has never seriously acknowledged that harm.
But that takes us to the other DeVosian value that's on display here.
Ms. DeVos maintained that it was “probably the case” that Corinthian Colleges deceived students, but she also said she believed that the “prior administration basically forced schools like Corinthian out of business” with onerous financial restrictions. She rebuffed questions about an investigation by career staff, unveiled in January 2017 memos published by NPR on Wednesday, that concluded that Corinthian students deserved full loan forgiveness because they received no educational benefit.
Businesses fleecing customers is not outrageous. What's outrageous is government interfering with the operations and practices of businesses. There is an extra layer of irony here-- the Obama administration actually was pretty damn slow to take any useful action against Corinthian, and even helped bail them out for a time, and any good Obama-bashing Trumpian might hammer that point home, but DeVos can't see that because for her there is no greater sin than interfering with the operation of a business.
She's made variations of that point again and again, all the way back to the confirmation hearing when she couldn't imagine any misbehavior that would prompt her, as a government official, to step in and say "Stop!" Businesses matter more than people.
It seems at first like a contradiction for her to use rhetoric claiming that choice is all about parenmts and students and families, because what she means by "choice" and "freedom" is that private businesses must have open and unrestricted access to the education market, but I believe that unlike most of the bullshit artists and grifters in this administration, DeVos is a true believer, who really and truly believes that the way to make this country great is to let private businesses roam free and unfettered.
“I don’t agree with that narrative,” she said. “I think there are many students that received a valuable education, just like they do from many other institutions. The question is what students among them were financially harmed.”
"I don't agree with that narrative" is DeVos's nod to this world, a world that she is, in Christian parlance, "in and not of." I get it, she says. You unwashed Godless Lessers like to tell yourselves little stories about things, but I see with God's own eyes, and your made-up stories don't move me.
DeVos is what you get when you combine unmovable righteousness with a belief that the invisible hand of the free market is, in fact, God's hand. If Those People deserved to be rich, well, then, they would be. And if they did not exercise enough care to avoid being fleeced, well, that's their character deficiency, and trying to get the government to change that outcome is to interfere with the natural moral order of the world. No wonder she signed off on loan forgiveness "with extreme displeasure."
It is no wonder that the new DeVos loan forgiveness rules are going to make almost nobody eligible for relief. Watch this clip to understand just how bad the new rules are. These rules essentially argue that if you end up just as poor as you were probably going to be anyway, then no harm has been done and you aren't entitled to a refund. But they are perfectly in keeping with the DeVosian view: Those People should pay the price for their own inadequacies. Taxpayers should not pay a monetary price, and businesses should not pay a regulatory price.
This is why Education Freedom tax credits are the dream-- businesses and rich folks get to fund their favorite private school instead of paying taxes, and those private schools are still free to operate as they wish. Some of Those People may get a choice of school, and those that don't probably don't deserve one. And if some of them use their Education Freedom Bux at a predatory, con job of a school, well, that was your choice and your problem.
Because DeVos is rich, folks often accuse her of being greedy. I don't think that's true-- past a certain point, money stops being about greed-based utilitarian acquisition of stuff, but about keeping score in other sorts of games. Because DeVos often makes statements that don't make sense from a particular point of view, folks often accuse her of being dumb. I don't think that's true, either.
Here's an absolutely DeVosian quote from the proceedings:
I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.
 |
| Ah yes-- the smirk. |
But that takes us to the other DeVosian value that's on display here.
Ms. DeVos maintained that it was “probably the case” that Corinthian Colleges deceived students, but she also said she believed that the “prior administration basically forced schools like Corinthian out of business” with onerous financial restrictions. She rebuffed questions about an investigation by career staff, unveiled in January 2017 memos published by NPR on Wednesday, that concluded that Corinthian students deserved full loan forgiveness because they received no educational benefit.
Businesses fleecing customers is not outrageous. What's outrageous is government interfering with the operations and practices of businesses. There is an extra layer of irony here-- the Obama administration actually was pretty damn slow to take any useful action against Corinthian, and even helped bail them out for a time, and any good Obama-bashing Trumpian might hammer that point home, but DeVos can't see that because for her there is no greater sin than interfering with the operation of a business.
She's made variations of that point again and again, all the way back to the confirmation hearing when she couldn't imagine any misbehavior that would prompt her, as a government official, to step in and say "Stop!" Businesses matter more than people.
It seems at first like a contradiction for her to use rhetoric claiming that choice is all about parenmts and students and families, because what she means by "choice" and "freedom" is that private businesses must have open and unrestricted access to the education market, but I believe that unlike most of the bullshit artists and grifters in this administration, DeVos is a true believer, who really and truly believes that the way to make this country great is to let private businesses roam free and unfettered.
“I don’t agree with that narrative,” she said. “I think there are many students that received a valuable education, just like they do from many other institutions. The question is what students among them were financially harmed.”
"I don't agree with that narrative" is DeVos's nod to this world, a world that she is, in Christian parlance, "in and not of." I get it, she says. You unwashed Godless Lessers like to tell yourselves little stories about things, but I see with God's own eyes, and your made-up stories don't move me.
DeVos is what you get when you combine unmovable righteousness with a belief that the invisible hand of the free market is, in fact, God's hand. If Those People deserved to be rich, well, then, they would be. And if they did not exercise enough care to avoid being fleeced, well, that's their character deficiency, and trying to get the government to change that outcome is to interfere with the natural moral order of the world. No wonder she signed off on loan forgiveness "with extreme displeasure."
WATCH⬇️@RepLoriTrahan reveals the absurdity of @BetsyDeVosED's latest scheme to deny defrauded students the relief they deserve. pic.twitter.com/qJRP0qw3cI— Committee on Education & Labor (@EdLaborCmte) December 12, 2019
It is no wonder that the new DeVos loan forgiveness rules are going to make almost nobody eligible for relief. Watch this clip to understand just how bad the new rules are. These rules essentially argue that if you end up just as poor as you were probably going to be anyway, then no harm has been done and you aren't entitled to a refund. But they are perfectly in keeping with the DeVosian view: Those People should pay the price for their own inadequacies. Taxpayers should not pay a monetary price, and businesses should not pay a regulatory price.
This is why Education Freedom tax credits are the dream-- businesses and rich folks get to fund their favorite private school instead of paying taxes, and those private schools are still free to operate as they wish. Some of Those People may get a choice of school, and those that don't probably don't deserve one. And if some of them use their Education Freedom Bux at a predatory, con job of a school, well, that was your choice and your problem.
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Fordham: Teachers Are Downloading Junk
Fordham Institute, the right-tilted thinky tank and tireless ed reform advocacy group, just released a new study that actually raises some interesting questions. "The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar" takes a look at the materials teachers are downloading, and it finds them, well, not delightful. While I'm only going to argue with their findings a little, there are aspects of their methods that I find, well, not delightful.
The Playing Field
The study looked specifically at materials for high school English (ELA for the core-trained), which is right in my wheelhouse (39 years of secondary English classrooms). So I was prepared to predict the results of this study before reading it. My prediction: the stuff available on line today is much like the stuff available in catalogs and teacher stores twenty yeas ago-- kind of mediocre, but occasionally helpful. So now we can see if Fordham matches my findings.
They looked at two main sets of questions. 1) what types of materials are being downloaded, and 2) how do "experts" rate the quality. Also, how do the "expert" ratings compare to teacher ratings?
Yeah, about that-- who are these experts, and why is "expert" different from "teacher."
Experts include:
Morgan Polikoff, from USC Rossier, and we've seen him before as a big-time testing supporter. His background is ed policy and math.
Jennifer Dean, freelance educational assessment consultant. She's worked for Student Achievement Partners, was involved in K-122 assessment for "a large assessment company" (looks like maybe ETS). At SAP she developed standards alignment guidelines and sample assessments. She supposedly started her career teaching secondary ELA.
Jenni Aberli is an ELA instructional lead. It's not clear how much actual teaching she does, but she does work hard at that old Core alignment and she is National Board certified.
Sarah Baughman is an educational consultant "with over a decade of middle and high school English teaching experience in public, charter, online and international schools." That's a l;ot of variety for a decade. She's also associated with Student Achievement Partners.
Dr. Bryan Drost. An administrator in Ohio and a big testing guy, including national supervisor of edTPA (boo).
Joey Hawkins is a national literacy consultant. She taught in rural Vermont. Lots of writing background.
So, some actual teachers, heavy on the love of assessment and the core. It is not quite clear to me why they, and not the classroom teachers, are the experts here, but let's forge ahead.
How Were the Materials Judged
The study used the list of commonly consulted sites from a 2015 RAND survey, omitting Google and Pinterest (because there's no way to track what's found there) and Readworks and Newsela (because they are narrowly focused on reading). So that left Teachers Pay Teachers, ReadWriteThink, and Share My Lesson.
For the last two, the study simply used the list of most-downloaded material, sticking to reading, writing, speaking and/or listening lessons. For Teachers Pay Teachers, they used the 15 free units, top 15 free lessons, top 47 paid units, and top 47 paid lessons. Then the evaluators whipped put their rubrics and went to work. Here are the ten areas covered.
1) Basic descriptive data. What's in it, metadata, title, etc.
2) Alignment to Standards. I'm a little fuzzy here/ The question is "does it include standards it aligns to." But the rating is based on whether or not it aligns to the target standard. I'm not sure why I care about either one. We really don't talk often enough about how "alignment to standards" has nothing to do with the level of instructional material suckitude.
3) Depth of Knowledge. Oh, lordy, spare me. DOK is a bunch of baloney that fastened itself, barnical-like, to the back of the standards.
4) Text complexity and quality. In other words, is this unit for Grapes of Wrath and not Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Unfortunately, it includes lexile scores, and according to those, Diary is high school appropriate and Grapes is not.
5) Close Reading and Evidence from the Text. If there's a reading comprehension task, it has to require "close reading and analysis" as well as the use of "evidence from the text." Also, it must focus on the main idea and important details in the text. All of this might be a good sign, if we don't wander too far into the David Coleman version of close reading.
6) Writing Task Quality. Does the task involve writing to a text? Because, of course, writing that isn't about a text is just a waste of time? SMH. This also includes an overall measure of task quality, in which the experts had to decide whether the task was too easy or too unimportant. How long has it been since those experts were in a classroom, I wonder.
7) Speaking and Listening Task Quality. Again, it's only high quality if it's to a text or recording, and it can't be too easy or frivolous.
8) Usability. Is it interesting? Is it free from errors? Is it visually attractive? Does it give clear guidance for teachers? Does it support diverse learners? Is it going to be used by some gormless drone with no personal knowledge of teaching? No, I just made that last one up. But seriously-- if the teacher using this can't figure out how to use it or spot errors in it, then we are already in more trouble than a lesson from an online vendor can solve.
9) Assessment quality. There are plenty of assessment experts on this case, so I'll give them this one.
10) Knowledge Building and Cultural Responsiveness. If this is a full unit, does it involve students showing that they know something. And does it include diverse perspectives, authors, topics.
What They Found Out
The report has some good news and bad news.
Good news: The text quality is good, with only a few hitting the "very low quality" score. The materials also mostly involved text-based evidence.
Good news: The materials are generally error-free and well designed. So, pretty and not filled with goofs. The report takes no position on the use of comic sans.
Bad news: The reviewers thought the materials were mostly mediocre. They particularly criticized the instructional guidance. "If busy teachers are going to take the time to look for supplemental materials," says the report, "they certainly want to know (quickly) how to use them." I am not so sure. Or rather, I'm not so sure that they need someone to spell it out for them. I suspect a teacher, particularly one who knows just what she's looking for, doesn't need someone else to tell her how te material is "supposed" to be used. And as it turns out, the expert ratings was a bad predictor of whether teachers seemed to think the materials were any good or not. Almost as if the academic experts and the actual classroom teachers are using different criteria.
Bad news: Materials have weak alignment to standards they say they're meeting. Well, duh. At this point, "alignment" is a pointless piece of paperwork, and the standards have spread out and been reinterpreted a hundred different times by a hundred different experts. They're a set of numbers that you have to slap on unit and lesson plans to make administrators happy, and few districts are teaching exactly what each standard means because nobody is certain they know. The good news or all those folks is that after ten years, thee isn't a lick of evidence that the standards are actually linked to life outcomes or college and career readiness.
Bad news: Writing, speaking and listening task quality is weak.It's a sign that we're in Coleman territory is that one "sign" that an assignment is weak is that it is "largely focused on personal feelings." The evil of all evils is to not be text-dependent, as if the only way a piece of writing can be legitimate is for it to be about a text. Writing in response to a text is an excellent path to take-- I won't argue that for a minute. But to argue that it is the only path to a good writing assignment is nuts, and again without a shred of evidence.
Bad news: Assessments are weak because they don't always cover key content and "rarely provide the supports needed to score student work." A recurring issue in this study is that it seems to assume that the end user of these materials is some shmoe off the street and not an actual classroom teacher. The study says that quality material includes an assessment rubric. No, thanks. If I'm bringing it into my classroom, i'll decide how I want to assess it.
Bad news: Lessons do a bad job of building content knowledge and are not cognitively demanding. They looked for units to introduce and sequence content knowledge, which means if you are downloading a unit to use as review, you're in trouble here. They also slam "skill building," which has, of course, been the major focus under Common Core and its attendant testing regime. Given the close association these experts have had with Core-pushing groups, it seems a b it disingenuous for them to get religion about rich content and background knowledge without acknowledging that they helped fuel the movement that drove these things underground in the first place.
This carries through with their examples of "bad" units (e.g., a unit on Romeo and Juliet without any reference to Elizabethan England or a unit on The Great Gatsby without any reference to the Roaring Twenties). These are exactly the sort of units that David "Stay Within The Four Corners of the Text" Coleman endorsed when he was pushing his ELA standards. Exactly.
Bad news: Super-lousy job on the whole sup0port or diverse learners thing. Few units offered differentiation.
Bad news: Potential to engage students, low on cultural diversity. Once again, the end user here is a classroom teacher, and I can't remember a single thing I taught in 39 years for which I said, "Oh well, this unit is so super-engaging on its own I can just nap.' The engaging part comes from the human who presents it. Nor am I sure how you rate how interesting something is without asking "interesting to whom?" Diversity? Yes, that's an issue.
What they didn't ask about
The report actually does pull in some teacher quotes about things like why teachers search out these sites for supplemental material, but there are still some things they don't/can't know.
In particular, it's impossible to know how much modifying teachers do to these materials. Do they pick and choose parts? Do they modify activities and assessments to suit their classes? I'll bet they do plenty of both. I'd also be curious to know how often teachers adopt the materials ("I'm going to use this again next year) and how often not (Well, that was worth a try, but never again).
What they want to do about it.
The researchers have some "policy implications."
1) Supplemental ELA materials on these sites have "a long way to go." Yeah, we got that from the rest of the findings.
2) The supplemental materials market "begs curation." Somebody needs to sort this stuff out. I'm not sure who would be in a position to do that, really. The teacher knows her classes better than anyone.
3) More materials need to provide "soup-to-nuts" supports. Meh. Maybe. But the things is, these are supplemental materials, and so it's going to make a difference exactly what the teacher is supplementing. One size fits all is not going to be helpful. More materials to adapt could be.
4) More cultural diversity, diverse authors, culture of pluralism. Well, yeah. Not exactly an issue confined to supplemental materials.
5) School and district leaders need to decide whether and how to monitor this stuff. Nah. They need to leave their teachers alone, or maybe even ask how they can help. Further teacher surveillance and micro-management is not helpful ("Can't get this run off until I pass it through the Office of Worksheet Review").
So in the end
Teachers look for supplemental materials wherever they can find them, because all schools hand us are textbook sets and those are almost universally mediocre (I had one good lit series in my career, and it went out of print when the company was bought). One of the ongoing jobs of teaching is to make silk purses out of sows' ears, and the ears don't have enough material, so you're always looking for some sows' nose lining and cows' liver casing and whatever else you can get your hands on, then modifying it for the students you have.
This is an ongoing process. No teacher worthy of the title teaches exactly the same stuff exactly the same way two years in a row (this is just one of the reasons that scripts and teacher-proof programs in a box are absolutely junk). The dream is not supplemental material that does the work for you; it's material that includes little gems that you can use. If teaching is house-hunting, teachers never expect to buy a place that's move-in ready; they're just looking for a place with good bones and a nice floor plan that they can renovate without too much trouble.
What we used to have to depend on-- supplemental materials from publishers via teacher stores, catalogs, and the filing cabinet that the last lady who taught in this room left behind-- were never super. Created by people nowhere near a classroom, they were always an ill fit, always in need of adapting, trimming, cutting. The Common Core revolution brought a tidal wave of this crap-- workbook after workbook of short reading excerpts bundled with multiple choice quizzes. Your best source for extra material was always the teacher up the hall who used to teach this same thing, who knows the kinds of students you have, who had field tested the material in her own classroom laboratory. The internet just made that hall a lot bigger. Internet teachers are less familiar with your school and classroom, and not al of them are necessarily teachers you would aspire to imitate. But some teaching ideas from a fellow professional are at least as useful as publisher junk.
We could have a whole other discussion about why so much-- so very, very much-- of what teachers are given is junk (that it's created by non-teachers who think that alignment to bad standards has something to do with quality is probably on the list). But the question this study didn't ask might be the most important one-- if the online materials are junk, are they any more junky than what publishers crank out? Maybe next time.
The Playing Field
The study looked specifically at materials for high school English (ELA for the core-trained), which is right in my wheelhouse (39 years of secondary English classrooms). So I was prepared to predict the results of this study before reading it. My prediction: the stuff available on line today is much like the stuff available in catalogs and teacher stores twenty yeas ago-- kind of mediocre, but occasionally helpful. So now we can see if Fordham matches my findings.
They looked at two main sets of questions. 1) what types of materials are being downloaded, and 2) how do "experts" rate the quality. Also, how do the "expert" ratings compare to teacher ratings?
Yeah, about that-- who are these experts, and why is "expert" different from "teacher."
Experts include:
Morgan Polikoff, from USC Rossier, and we've seen him before as a big-time testing supporter. His background is ed policy and math.
 |
| I think I see a good Hamlet unit in there |
Jenni Aberli is an ELA instructional lead. It's not clear how much actual teaching she does, but she does work hard at that old Core alignment and she is National Board certified.
Sarah Baughman is an educational consultant "with over a decade of middle and high school English teaching experience in public, charter, online and international schools." That's a l;ot of variety for a decade. She's also associated with Student Achievement Partners.
Dr. Bryan Drost. An administrator in Ohio and a big testing guy, including national supervisor of edTPA (boo).
Joey Hawkins is a national literacy consultant. She taught in rural Vermont. Lots of writing background.
So, some actual teachers, heavy on the love of assessment and the core. It is not quite clear to me why they, and not the classroom teachers, are the experts here, but let's forge ahead.
How Were the Materials Judged
The study used the list of commonly consulted sites from a 2015 RAND survey, omitting Google and Pinterest (because there's no way to track what's found there) and Readworks and Newsela (because they are narrowly focused on reading). So that left Teachers Pay Teachers, ReadWriteThink, and Share My Lesson.
For the last two, the study simply used the list of most-downloaded material, sticking to reading, writing, speaking and/or listening lessons. For Teachers Pay Teachers, they used the 15 free units, top 15 free lessons, top 47 paid units, and top 47 paid lessons. Then the evaluators whipped put their rubrics and went to work. Here are the ten areas covered.
1) Basic descriptive data. What's in it, metadata, title, etc.
2) Alignment to Standards. I'm a little fuzzy here/ The question is "does it include standards it aligns to." But the rating is based on whether or not it aligns to the target standard. I'm not sure why I care about either one. We really don't talk often enough about how "alignment to standards" has nothing to do with the level of instructional material suckitude.
3) Depth of Knowledge. Oh, lordy, spare me. DOK is a bunch of baloney that fastened itself, barnical-like, to the back of the standards.
4) Text complexity and quality. In other words, is this unit for Grapes of Wrath and not Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Unfortunately, it includes lexile scores, and according to those, Diary is high school appropriate and Grapes is not.
5) Close Reading and Evidence from the Text. If there's a reading comprehension task, it has to require "close reading and analysis" as well as the use of "evidence from the text." Also, it must focus on the main idea and important details in the text. All of this might be a good sign, if we don't wander too far into the David Coleman version of close reading.
6) Writing Task Quality. Does the task involve writing to a text? Because, of course, writing that isn't about a text is just a waste of time? SMH. This also includes an overall measure of task quality, in which the experts had to decide whether the task was too easy or too unimportant. How long has it been since those experts were in a classroom, I wonder.
7) Speaking and Listening Task Quality. Again, it's only high quality if it's to a text or recording, and it can't be too easy or frivolous.
8) Usability. Is it interesting? Is it free from errors? Is it visually attractive? Does it give clear guidance for teachers? Does it support diverse learners? Is it going to be used by some gormless drone with no personal knowledge of teaching? No, I just made that last one up. But seriously-- if the teacher using this can't figure out how to use it or spot errors in it, then we are already in more trouble than a lesson from an online vendor can solve.
9) Assessment quality. There are plenty of assessment experts on this case, so I'll give them this one.
10) Knowledge Building and Cultural Responsiveness. If this is a full unit, does it involve students showing that they know something. And does it include diverse perspectives, authors, topics.
What They Found Out
The report has some good news and bad news.
Good news: The text quality is good, with only a few hitting the "very low quality" score. The materials also mostly involved text-based evidence.
Good news: The materials are generally error-free and well designed. So, pretty and not filled with goofs. The report takes no position on the use of comic sans.
Bad news: The reviewers thought the materials were mostly mediocre. They particularly criticized the instructional guidance. "If busy teachers are going to take the time to look for supplemental materials," says the report, "they certainly want to know (quickly) how to use them." I am not so sure. Or rather, I'm not so sure that they need someone to spell it out for them. I suspect a teacher, particularly one who knows just what she's looking for, doesn't need someone else to tell her how te material is "supposed" to be used. And as it turns out, the expert ratings was a bad predictor of whether teachers seemed to think the materials were any good or not. Almost as if the academic experts and the actual classroom teachers are using different criteria.
Bad news: Materials have weak alignment to standards they say they're meeting. Well, duh. At this point, "alignment" is a pointless piece of paperwork, and the standards have spread out and been reinterpreted a hundred different times by a hundred different experts. They're a set of numbers that you have to slap on unit and lesson plans to make administrators happy, and few districts are teaching exactly what each standard means because nobody is certain they know. The good news or all those folks is that after ten years, thee isn't a lick of evidence that the standards are actually linked to life outcomes or college and career readiness.
Bad news: Writing, speaking and listening task quality is weak.It's a sign that we're in Coleman territory is that one "sign" that an assignment is weak is that it is "largely focused on personal feelings." The evil of all evils is to not be text-dependent, as if the only way a piece of writing can be legitimate is for it to be about a text. Writing in response to a text is an excellent path to take-- I won't argue that for a minute. But to argue that it is the only path to a good writing assignment is nuts, and again without a shred of evidence.
Bad news: Assessments are weak because they don't always cover key content and "rarely provide the supports needed to score student work." A recurring issue in this study is that it seems to assume that the end user of these materials is some shmoe off the street and not an actual classroom teacher. The study says that quality material includes an assessment rubric. No, thanks. If I'm bringing it into my classroom, i'll decide how I want to assess it.
Bad news: Lessons do a bad job of building content knowledge and are not cognitively demanding. They looked for units to introduce and sequence content knowledge, which means if you are downloading a unit to use as review, you're in trouble here. They also slam "skill building," which has, of course, been the major focus under Common Core and its attendant testing regime. Given the close association these experts have had with Core-pushing groups, it seems a b it disingenuous for them to get religion about rich content and background knowledge without acknowledging that they helped fuel the movement that drove these things underground in the first place.
This carries through with their examples of "bad" units (e.g., a unit on Romeo and Juliet without any reference to Elizabethan England or a unit on The Great Gatsby without any reference to the Roaring Twenties). These are exactly the sort of units that David "Stay Within The Four Corners of the Text" Coleman endorsed when he was pushing his ELA standards. Exactly.
Bad news: Super-lousy job on the whole sup0port or diverse learners thing. Few units offered differentiation.
Bad news: Potential to engage students, low on cultural diversity. Once again, the end user here is a classroom teacher, and I can't remember a single thing I taught in 39 years for which I said, "Oh well, this unit is so super-engaging on its own I can just nap.' The engaging part comes from the human who presents it. Nor am I sure how you rate how interesting something is without asking "interesting to whom?" Diversity? Yes, that's an issue.
What they didn't ask about
The report actually does pull in some teacher quotes about things like why teachers search out these sites for supplemental material, but there are still some things they don't/can't know.
In particular, it's impossible to know how much modifying teachers do to these materials. Do they pick and choose parts? Do they modify activities and assessments to suit their classes? I'll bet they do plenty of both. I'd also be curious to know how often teachers adopt the materials ("I'm going to use this again next year) and how often not (Well, that was worth a try, but never again).
What they want to do about it.
The researchers have some "policy implications."
1) Supplemental ELA materials on these sites have "a long way to go." Yeah, we got that from the rest of the findings.
2) The supplemental materials market "begs curation." Somebody needs to sort this stuff out. I'm not sure who would be in a position to do that, really. The teacher knows her classes better than anyone.
3) More materials need to provide "soup-to-nuts" supports. Meh. Maybe. But the things is, these are supplemental materials, and so it's going to make a difference exactly what the teacher is supplementing. One size fits all is not going to be helpful. More materials to adapt could be.
4) More cultural diversity, diverse authors, culture of pluralism. Well, yeah. Not exactly an issue confined to supplemental materials.
5) School and district leaders need to decide whether and how to monitor this stuff. Nah. They need to leave their teachers alone, or maybe even ask how they can help. Further teacher surveillance and micro-management is not helpful ("Can't get this run off until I pass it through the Office of Worksheet Review").
So in the end
Teachers look for supplemental materials wherever they can find them, because all schools hand us are textbook sets and those are almost universally mediocre (I had one good lit series in my career, and it went out of print when the company was bought). One of the ongoing jobs of teaching is to make silk purses out of sows' ears, and the ears don't have enough material, so you're always looking for some sows' nose lining and cows' liver casing and whatever else you can get your hands on, then modifying it for the students you have.
This is an ongoing process. No teacher worthy of the title teaches exactly the same stuff exactly the same way two years in a row (this is just one of the reasons that scripts and teacher-proof programs in a box are absolutely junk). The dream is not supplemental material that does the work for you; it's material that includes little gems that you can use. If teaching is house-hunting, teachers never expect to buy a place that's move-in ready; they're just looking for a place with good bones and a nice floor plan that they can renovate without too much trouble.
What we used to have to depend on-- supplemental materials from publishers via teacher stores, catalogs, and the filing cabinet that the last lady who taught in this room left behind-- were never super. Created by people nowhere near a classroom, they were always an ill fit, always in need of adapting, trimming, cutting. The Common Core revolution brought a tidal wave of this crap-- workbook after workbook of short reading excerpts bundled with multiple choice quizzes. Your best source for extra material was always the teacher up the hall who used to teach this same thing, who knows the kinds of students you have, who had field tested the material in her own classroom laboratory. The internet just made that hall a lot bigger. Internet teachers are less familiar with your school and classroom, and not al of them are necessarily teachers you would aspire to imitate. But some teaching ideas from a fellow professional are at least as useful as publisher junk.
We could have a whole other discussion about why so much-- so very, very much-- of what teachers are given is junk (that it's created by non-teachers who think that alignment to bad standards has something to do with quality is probably on the list). But the question this study didn't ask might be the most important one-- if the online materials are junk, are they any more junky than what publishers crank out? Maybe next time.
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Privatization Is Their North Star
Remember when ed reform was complicated, when it felt as if the whole business was a perfect storm of hydra heads, and it was all a public school supporter could do to try to track all the heads, let alone the body of the beast to which they were all attached?
Things have changed. And the change tells us a lot about the body of the beast, as the many heads of the hydra have become neglected or even abandoned.
Oh, Common Core. Once upon a time it looked like some folks really, truly wanted to lash all of US education to a single set of standards. But one of the first signs of Maybe Not was when the very guys who wrote the thing immediately moved on to new gigs, rather than sticking around to watch over their baby. And when the political winds shifted and conservatives turned on what had been essentially a conservative idea (except that it was being pushed by That Black Guy In The White House, and it turns out that sensitivity to federal overreach has a lot to do with who's doing the reaching)-- at any rate, besieged from both sides, the Core was abandoned. It was not, it turns out, the most critical priority of the disruptive reformster movement.
Nor have they stuck around to keep defending high stakes testing. Remember when they were pitching it so hard, comparing it to bathroom scales and medical check-ups and, hey, you have to take tests your whole life. But pushback has been steady for HST, with parents and teachers and students fed up with the whole test-centered schooling thing. And while disruptive reformsters have managed to get HST enshrined in law, they've mostly stopped arguing for it and fighting to keep it front and center. Turns out it's not the major priority, either.
Of course, the Core and high-stakes testing have accomplished one thing-- they've gotten plenty of parents and journalists convinced that "students achievement" and "score on a single narrow standardized test" are synonyms, that you can look up test scores and judge the quality of a school.
Another head of the hydra was going after the fabled Bad Teacher. Use VAM to judge them, mark the bottom 5, 10, even 15 percent and then just fire your way to excellence. Of course, to do that you have to first get rid of job protections ("tenure") and seniority rules. But-- as they kept telling us-- a teacher is the most important (in school) factor in a child's education (cue Raj Chetty's BS about how a bad first grader teacher will cost you millions in lifetime earnings). And yet this deep concern with high quality teaching never really got beyond getting rid of bad ones. How would we create and retain good ones? Nobody was talking so much about that. Sure, there were pitches for merit pay and bonus systems, but that was just pretty side of getting rid of job protections and slashing ay for everyone who wasn't getting a bonus. There was some talk of moving the best teachers to the worst schools, but nobody ever really tried to come up with a serious plan to make that happen. And of course we also threw in Teach for America, proof that actual training didn't matter, and once the mysterious teacher shortage hit the news, that was en excuse to throw any warm body in a classroom.
It's almost as if out of all that discussion of teacher quality, the only real priority was to get rid of pay, benefits and job protections for teachers, to make teachers less like gourmet chefs and more like the guy who drops the fry basket at McD's. Cheaply paid, easily fired, easily replaced.
We heard about making students ready for the future, for the jobs that will be appearing, for global economic competition. But somehow that has always been framed in terms of what corporations want, as if the purpose of schools should be to provide meat widgets for employers. Talk about students as product and companies as consumers. That sort of thing. Almost as if providing students with a better, broader, deeper education was not actually the priority at all. And this talk always comes with the idea of harvesting data-- lots and lots of data, which is in and of itself plenty valuable. As if students are a resource to be tapped and not young citizens to be served. With all the For The Children talk, doing things For The Children doesn't seem to be much of a priority.
School reform was about equity and helping the non-white non-wealthy students. But then Trump entered office and a whole bunch of free market reformsters said, "We can't just walk away from reform just because its major spokesperson now seems kind of racist."
School choice, in its many forms, has been a theme of disruptive reformsterism, yet it has been a shifting one. We need choice so that free market competition will make schools better. We need it so students can escape the regulations that we ourselves imposed on schools. We need laboratories of innovation. We need it to provide equity. We need it because fairness and freedom.
In fact, choice has been its own many-headed beast within a beast, but one thing has stayed constant-- the method of providing what's wanted.
Think about it. We could provide choices, freedom, options, innovation, even competition in a hundred different ways. If we are concerned that your neighborhood determines your school quality, we could decouple school districts from neighborhoods, or force neighborhoods into economic desegregation. We could (and in many cases do) provide educational choice under one roof. We could step in with funding and resources for poor schools in poor neighborhoods.
But alternatives have never been discussed. The choice conversation sticks to the premise that all choice must involve schools that are privately owned and operated, that put public funds in private pockets. We have now seen dozens of models for charter schools and choice programs, but they all stick to that premise-- the choices must be privately owned, operated and controlled.
This and this alone has been the constant, the north star of disruptive reformsterism. Accountability and teacher quality and standards and models for choice may wax and wane, but the drive for a privatized education system, operated like a corporation and for the benefit of corporations-- that particular part of the reform vision has never wavered. It has been and remains consistent. As with any vision, there are those who sincerely believe in it and, in this case, many many more who steer by it because of a venal desire for money and power (you can spot them because they are sure that teachers and their unions are only interested in money and power). Everything else can be compromised or even abandoned, but privatization is the hydra head that will not fall, that belongs to the main body of the beast. This is what the last twenty-five years have been all about.
This is why charters have emerged as a main issue in discussing Democratic candidate education platforms-- because while other things like testing and pay matter, charters and choice come closest to the real heart of reform, the push for privatization.
Things have changed. And the change tells us a lot about the body of the beast, as the many heads of the hydra have become neglected or even abandoned.
Nor have they stuck around to keep defending high stakes testing. Remember when they were pitching it so hard, comparing it to bathroom scales and medical check-ups and, hey, you have to take tests your whole life. But pushback has been steady for HST, with parents and teachers and students fed up with the whole test-centered schooling thing. And while disruptive reformsters have managed to get HST enshrined in law, they've mostly stopped arguing for it and fighting to keep it front and center. Turns out it's not the major priority, either.
Of course, the Core and high-stakes testing have accomplished one thing-- they've gotten plenty of parents and journalists convinced that "students achievement" and "score on a single narrow standardized test" are synonyms, that you can look up test scores and judge the quality of a school.
Another head of the hydra was going after the fabled Bad Teacher. Use VAM to judge them, mark the bottom 5, 10, even 15 percent and then just fire your way to excellence. Of course, to do that you have to first get rid of job protections ("tenure") and seniority rules. But-- as they kept telling us-- a teacher is the most important (in school) factor in a child's education (cue Raj Chetty's BS about how a bad first grader teacher will cost you millions in lifetime earnings). And yet this deep concern with high quality teaching never really got beyond getting rid of bad ones. How would we create and retain good ones? Nobody was talking so much about that. Sure, there were pitches for merit pay and bonus systems, but that was just pretty side of getting rid of job protections and slashing ay for everyone who wasn't getting a bonus. There was some talk of moving the best teachers to the worst schools, but nobody ever really tried to come up with a serious plan to make that happen. And of course we also threw in Teach for America, proof that actual training didn't matter, and once the mysterious teacher shortage hit the news, that was en excuse to throw any warm body in a classroom.
It's almost as if out of all that discussion of teacher quality, the only real priority was to get rid of pay, benefits and job protections for teachers, to make teachers less like gourmet chefs and more like the guy who drops the fry basket at McD's. Cheaply paid, easily fired, easily replaced.
We heard about making students ready for the future, for the jobs that will be appearing, for global economic competition. But somehow that has always been framed in terms of what corporations want, as if the purpose of schools should be to provide meat widgets for employers. Talk about students as product and companies as consumers. That sort of thing. Almost as if providing students with a better, broader, deeper education was not actually the priority at all. And this talk always comes with the idea of harvesting data-- lots and lots of data, which is in and of itself plenty valuable. As if students are a resource to be tapped and not young citizens to be served. With all the For The Children talk, doing things For The Children doesn't seem to be much of a priority.
School reform was about equity and helping the non-white non-wealthy students. But then Trump entered office and a whole bunch of free market reformsters said, "We can't just walk away from reform just because its major spokesperson now seems kind of racist."
School choice, in its many forms, has been a theme of disruptive reformsterism, yet it has been a shifting one. We need choice so that free market competition will make schools better. We need it so students can escape the regulations that we ourselves imposed on schools. We need laboratories of innovation. We need it to provide equity. We need it because fairness and freedom.
In fact, choice has been its own many-headed beast within a beast, but one thing has stayed constant-- the method of providing what's wanted.
Think about it. We could provide choices, freedom, options, innovation, even competition in a hundred different ways. If we are concerned that your neighborhood determines your school quality, we could decouple school districts from neighborhoods, or force neighborhoods into economic desegregation. We could (and in many cases do) provide educational choice under one roof. We could step in with funding and resources for poor schools in poor neighborhoods.
 |
| But I'm going to own the damned ship, and anybody who doesn't like how I run it will be thrown over the side. |
This and this alone has been the constant, the north star of disruptive reformsterism. Accountability and teacher quality and standards and models for choice may wax and wane, but the drive for a privatized education system, operated like a corporation and for the benefit of corporations-- that particular part of the reform vision has never wavered. It has been and remains consistent. As with any vision, there are those who sincerely believe in it and, in this case, many many more who steer by it because of a venal desire for money and power (you can spot them because they are sure that teachers and their unions are only interested in money and power). Everything else can be compromised or even abandoned, but privatization is the hydra head that will not fall, that belongs to the main body of the beast. This is what the last twenty-five years have been all about.
This is why charters have emerged as a main issue in discussing Democratic candidate education platforms-- because while other things like testing and pay matter, charters and choice come closest to the real heart of reform, the push for privatization.
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