Brookings Hits the Bathroom Scale

When it comes to amateurs dabbling in education, it's hard to beat the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Perhaps it's inevitable that economists want to weigh in education, since economics is another area in which everybody and his brother believes themselves expert.

But Thomas Kane offers some grade A baloney with a side of ill-considered metaphor with "Never Diet Without a Bathroom Scale and Mirror: The Case for Combining Teacher Evaluation and the Common Core."

Given that title, it's only natural that the essay start with this sentence: "Given the nature of the job, school superintendents are master jugglers." So, now I'm mentally watching myself in the mirror as I juggle on my bathroom scales. Kane goes on to let us know that he knows how tough it is to implement new teacher evaluation systems because he headed up the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

Kane calls education reform "a massive adult behavior change exercise" that requires us to "change what adults do every day inside their classrooms."

Yet, as anyone who has ever tried to lose five pounds or to be a better parent or spouse knows, adult behavior change is hard work.  And it simply does not happen without regular feedback.  When the current attempts to implement new teacher evaluations fall short—as they certainly will, given the long history of box-checking—we must improve them.  

So, the changes teachers allegedly need to make are analogous to losing fat or being a better spouse.

Teaching to higher standards involves much more complex behavior change than simply putting down one’s fork before dessert.  And it will be more difficult to achieve.  Those who propose “more investments in professional development” as an alternative to teacher evaluation are posing a false choice.  Investing in professional development without an evaluation system in place is like launching a Weight Watchers group without any bathroom scales or mirrors.  

The bathroom scale image is brave, given the number of times folks in the resistance have pointed out that you do not change the weight of a pig by repeatedly measuring it. But I am wondering now-- why do I have to have scales or a mirror to lose weight? Will the weight loss occur if it is not caught in data? If a tree's weight falls in the forest but nobody measures it, does it shake a pound?

This could be an interesting new application of quantum physics, or it could be another inadvertent revelation about reformster (and economist) biases. Because I do not need a bathroom scale to lose weight. I don't even need a bathroom scale to know I'm losing weight-- I can see the difference in how my clothes fit, I can feel the easier step, the increase in energy. I only need a bathroom scale if I don't trust my own senses, or because I have somehow been required to prove to someone else that I have lost weight. Or if I believe that things are only real when Important People measure them.

Kane envisions the Core and new evaluations going hand in hand, leading to more successful implementation of the Core (he does not address the question of why a successful Core is a Good Thing, Much To Be Desired). And his vision of how evaluation will provide a connection to standards as well as the kind of continuous feedback by people who don't know what they're doing and whose judgment can't be trusted.

First, curriculum teams will develop, in conjunction with their supervisors, a specific detailed list of instructional changes to address standards gaps. Then...

Schools should focus teacher evaluation and feedback efforts on the specific instructional changes required for the gap standards.  They should schedule classroom observations for the days when the new standards are to be taught.  They should focus post-observation conferences on the adjustments demanded by the new standards. And they should use student performance on interim and end-of-year assessments—especially on the gap standards—to measure progress and to identify and celebrate successes.  Even one successful cycle will lay the foundation for the next round of instructional improvement.

I'm pretty sure that this requires a team of twelve administrators, none of whom spend any time doing any of the other things required to keep a school running. But there's more, predicated again on the notion that we're trying to help teachers who are absolutely clueless about what they or their students are doing. Notes. Copious notes. Videos. And let's throw in student evaluation and feedback as well (plus, of course, test scores).

Finally, the wrap-up:

The norm of autonomous, self-made, self-directed instruction—with no outside feedback or intervention—is long-standing and makes the U.S. education system especially resistant to change. In most high-performing countries, teachers have no such expectations.  The lesson study in Japan is a good example.  Teachers do not bootstrap their own instruction.  They do not expect to be left alone.   They expect standards, they expect feedback from peers and supervisors and they expect to be held accountable—for the quality of their delivery as well as for student results.  Therefore, a better system for teacher evaluation and feedback is necessary to support individual behavior change, and it’s a tool for collective culture change as well.  

Oh, the assumptions. The assumption that our school culture needs to be changed. The assumption that teacher autonomy is a problem, not a strength. The implication that US teachers don't like feedback or standards or being held accountable-- that's a little snotty as well.

But I am reminded of the management training that suggests that the fewer levels you have between decision making and decision implementation, the better off you are. Kane seems to be suggesting that the classroom teacher needs to be directed from on high, and his ideas are reminiscent of the worker who can't get a project done because he has to keep going to meetings about getting the project done.

My experience is that every good teacher I've ever known is involved in a constant, daily cycle of reflection and self-examination, using a rich tapestry of directly-observed data to evaluate her own performance, often consulting with fellow professionals. It's continuous and instantly implemented, then instantly evaluated and modified as needed. It's nimble, and it involves the professional judgment of trained experts in the field. That seems like a pretty good system to me.

TPM & the Anti-Core Attack Problem

Over at Talking Points Memo, Conor P. Williams uses the pushback against Campbell Brown as a jumping off point for addressing what he diagnoses as an anti-core ad hominem attack problem.

In the attacks sites, the heated rhetoric, the strong language, Williams sees an echo of the virulent opposition to She Who Will Not Be Named. And he draws a line to his own experience, in which he finds anti-core folks tend to personally attack him when they disagree, while pro-core disagreers approach him with rational responses to his arguments.

I can't deny that his experience is his experience, though I suspect his own e-mail inbox disparity reflects how he is perceived by his audience-- reformsters see him as fundamentally friendly, while members of the resistance do not. But there's no question that some of the shots at She Who Will Not Be Named as she left the playing field were just nasty, and some of the attacks against Brown have been unnecessarily personal as well.

Conor thinks that the "rhetorical imbalance reveals something about the current state of intellectual and political momentum in education." He thinks that the resistance is stuck fighting defense, and therefor resorts to ad hominems. I think there's a little more to it than that.


The Other Imbalance. Of course the resistance is mostly on defense. The resistance is not rich; the reformsters movement is rich, and well-connected. When Brown wants to hold a press conference about her cause, people show up. When Brown wants to have a local activist squeezed out of the lawsuit, she can make it happen.

The resistance is financially outgunned by a factor of giant whopping money piles.And they have not sought dialogue or conversation or equal exchange of ideas for most of the reformy cycle, because it didn't suit their needs and besides, they had all the money and the power and they didn't need to bother.

I learned something about running meeting and organizations years ago-- people want to be heard, and if they don't feel heard when they're talking, they will just keep raising their voices louder and louder until they think somebody is hearing them. The reformsters didn't think they had to listen to anybody. Result: a bunch of people screaming at them.

Nor have reformsters been free of ad homniem. Ravitch has been accused of all manner of personal shortcoming. Arne Duncan took to calling everyone who disagreed with him silly. For a while every opponent was labeled a tea party kook. And just this week we got the idiot granddad video.

 Facts aren't ad hominem. It is ad hominem to attack a person, well, personally. But you don't get to cry "personal attack" just because somebody pointed out an inconvenient fact. Attacking a person because of their race or gender is unconscionable, inexcusable. But pointing out that the person said something stupid, or advocated a policy that doesn't hold up, or behaved abominably in the performance of her duty-- those are not ad hominem attacks.

"Pro hominem" attacks. Why is Campbell Brown leading the New York attack on tenure? Is it because she is an educational expert, an experienced thought leader, a person with standing in the world of New York Schools? No-- she's leading the attack because she is a famous celebrity. And when you start out with a stance of "Pay attention to me because of who I am personally," your pushback will necessarily be personal in nature. If you want to discuss your point of view on its merits, then garner attention for its merits, not your personal celebrity.

Motives matter. Conor charges that opponents suggest "Brown’s message shouldn’t be heard—because of who funds her efforts. Brown’s claims can’t be correct—because her husband manages a hedge fund." (He also accuses opponents of dismissing her for being Republican, but given the huge number of anti-reform GOP folks out there, that just doesn't hold water.)

Motive matters. If somebody announces that he wants to devote millions to debunking claims that cigarettes cause cancer, it matters if all his funding is coming from R J Reynolds. If someone wants to fix public schools, and all their backing is coming from people who want to dismantle public schools and profit from the pieces, that matters.

Policy is personal. I'm often bemused that reformsters can be so taken aback by teacher response to some of their policy ideas. "I don't understand," they say. "All I did was suggest that you are lazy and ineffective and probably a liar and certainly have no professional expertise worth consulting, and all I want to do is make it ten times harder for you to pursue your life work as a career. Why are you taking this so personally??"

Maybe it's that policy makers are usually better-insulated from the people affected by their policy ideas, like button-pushers who don't ever have to actually see the people they drop bombs on, or like business school students who are told to live fifty miles away from their company so that they never have to see the people whose employment they affect.

But they need to understand something-- these policy changes and reformy initiatives affect teachers in their students in profoundly personal ways. Teachers and parents and students who become the lab rats for these grand ideas do take it personally.

I completely and absolutely get the value of keeping discussions about policy focused on policy. But when you punch somebody in the face, their first response does not tend to be "Let's have a discussion about the uses of violence in civilized society." I can believe that many reformsters simply don't get that they are figurative face-punchers (though I think She not only knew it, but relished it, and that's what made her such a lightning rod). But that doesn't make anybody's figurative face feel better.


Useful policy discussions are possible. I frequently manage to have civil, respectful, interesting, illuminating conversations with persons with whom I disagree. But the first step in having such conversations is to check yourself-- ask yourself what conversation you are starting, and what does your side of the conversation look like. There will always be whack jobs on the edges of conversations (on the internet, you can find people who are violently opposed to cute puppies). But if the bulk of your conversation is ugly and unproductive, your next step is to take a good look in the mirror. Even if you are famous.

Choice Finance Fantasies (Part II)

I love the internet. In particular, I love the way it allows for conversations to break out between people who would never meet or interact in real life. This is one of those conversations.

First, I wrote this piece about what I see as some fallacies in the ideas behind choice financing. Soon afterwards, Neerav Kingsland wrote this response at the blog Relinquishment. Kingsland is the former CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, so it is safe to say that we come at these issues from widely different perspectives. But here I am responding to his response, because, yay, internet.

Kingsland suggests that I've fallen into "accounting like a state," in which "finances are viewed through the lens of government program solvency, not outcomes." Or, if I understand correctly, institutions can become more worried about their own continue existence than about making sure their missions are accomplished. I agree that's a thing.

Kingsland restates my argument thus:

1. Public education benefits from economies of scale; specifically, charter schools are highly inefficient and they end up reducing teacher salaries and pensions to make up for these inefficiencies.

2. Public school districts have a high fixed costs, so when funds “follow” the student, districts often lose more in revenue than they can save in costs.

3. Public accountability over taxpayer funds for education is best accomplished through elected school boards (where all citizens can vote for societal ends) rather than choice (where public school parents pursue their own individual ends).

I'd quibble with #1-- I wouldn't call it inefficiency so much as simply large aggregate expense. And I also mention that the gap can be closed by fundraising, contributions, and tuitions. But otherwise, that's about right.

Here are Kingsland responses:

1. I didn't consider academic outcomes. If charters do a better job with less funds, that's something. Kingsland suggests there's evidence that they do, and a mountain of problems with what anybody means by "better." I'm unconvinced that the evidence is even sort of conclusive.

2. Kingsland observes that state pension systems are a fantasy fueled mess verging on insolvency. This is, in many cases, the result of serious state level mismanagement, and in other cases, the result of mis-stating the actual level of crisis.

3. Schools have fixed costs. So do lots of businesses. Schools should develop business plans that keep students from jumping ship. That assumes that schools can best compete by doing a good job.

4. Accountability can be achieved many ways, including non-profits providing school services under the control of an elected board. I don't disagree with this.

Kingsland (and a couple of writers in the comments section) help crystalize for me where one of the big conflicts between choice fans of economic school reforminess clash with (for lack of a better word) traditionalists. Both want to operate inefficient systems. Both insist that their inefficient system will work just fine as long as they can have access to That Pile of Money Over There. But Kingsland et al want the pile of money to include tax dollars that are already being spent on other things; in particularly, they would like the pile to include money that is being spent on teacher salaries and pensions. Traditionalists want access to tax revenues.

Kingsland makes the point that charters have to balance their books (as if traditional public schools somehow do not). The implication is that charters are more fiscally responsible or efficient, but charters balance the books by transferring expenses back to the public school system, including the expenses of educating more costly-to-educate students and even, in cases like the Moskowitz schools, the costs of owning and maintaining the building itself. Charters are, at times, like a college student who is proud of supporting himself and Living Within His Means while his parents are still paying all his tuition, room and board bills.

It's not that I believe public school systems are a model of financial efficiency for all the world to follow. It's that I think choice systems are almost always going to be worse. If you could run turn a public system into a public/non-profit hybrid system without having to spend a single dollar more or cut a single service, I would not squawk a bit. And I believe that such a system is probably theoretically possible in a select few places. But mostly it can't be done, and even Kingsland and his boosters are saying they could totally do it-- if you just gave them access to that pile of money over there. And that desire to drain salary and benefit funding in order to make the system work means you must now convince me that you can somehow maintain a quality teaching force with a fast food style compensation structure. That's an argument for another day, but I'm more likely to become convinced that rainbow-pooping unicorns exist.

More importantly, I'm pretty sure that financial efficiency is not a worthwhile goal for a school system. Not that I think it should be disregarded. But it can't be the goal. Efficiency is not excellence.

Kingsland suggests I'm laboring under four fantasies.

1. School districts are efficient because they use economies of scale to deliver a strong educational experience for students.

2. States funded teacher pension systems are based on sober predictions of market returns.

3. The high fixed cost of operating a school district is a good reason to prevent competition.

     4. Democratic accountability is incompatible with giving choice to the users of government services


#1 is beside the point. Public schools must educate all students who show up. The moment you accept that as part of the mission, you can kiss efficiency goodbye. Kingsland says productivity is important in figuring efficiency, and that's true, but some students will always really hurt your numbers-- they still get an education. Providing a one-size-fits-most product is also good for efficiency, but it's not what schools are for.

#2 Unfortunately, state teacher pension funds are based on political buffoonery, and currently they are still suffering the effects of the economic crash that all those sober economists and bankers and regulators saddled us with six or seven years ago.

#3 No. It's a good reason to prevent fake competition. The charter systems being tried around the country are not anything like a real free and open market, even if they start with the premise that every student is a customer with a cost-per-pupil stipend to "spend" at the school of his choice (a premise that my first essay was written to address). There are other big problems with market forces in education, but we're already running long here.

#4 Probably not. But what charter and non-profit (which, c'mon-- "non-profit" just means "we don't have to share our income with shareholders) seem to want is a system without any such oversight. Remember Reed Hastings explaining that schools would work so much better if we did away with school boards? That would seem to be the choice ideal.

Elected school boards are ugly and messy and political (unlike corporate boards which never have those problems). And they are often forced to respond to exactly the community concerns that make schools less efficient. But that's the gig.

This is another area where we find some pretty fundamental differences of opinion about schools. I believe that schools are meant to represent the will of the entire community, and to educate each child as best they can without breaking the bank, but without writing off any children either. I don't believe that they are meant to be engines of business-style efficiency, because that creates a host of economic pressures that run counter to the mission and are eventually bad for students. And I believe that, even though their intentions may in some cases be pure, choice advocates are not being honest about the true costs of a choice based system.

Efficiency vs. Excellence

We've all been discussing efficiency lately, thanks largely to the release of the GEMS report on educational efficiency, and while there's one critical point that has appeared tangentially in much of the discussion (including the original GEMS paper), I think it's worth pulling it out and looking at it by itself.

Efficiency and excellence are not the same thing.

In fact, excellence and efficiency generally cannot go together (unless you are the kind of person who defines excellence as efficiency).

Here's another way to understand efficiency. The point of highest efficiency in any business is a point that meets the following two requirements:

1) If we create higher quality, it will require a greater proportional dedication of resources.

2) If we devote fewer resources, it will result in a proportionally greater drop in quality.

Efficiency is the not the best possible result we can achieve, But to get a little bit closer to Best Possible Result would require a whole lot of time and money.

In the business world, this is somewhat related to our old favorite, Return On Investment. This is where I could make the product better, but I would be spending an additional $10 on the product and getting only $10 or less value out of it. This is when you're going to sell your house and you realize that it would cost you another $1,000 to fix the bathroom, but fixing the bathroom would probably only get you another $500 on the selling price.

Past a certain point, it lowers efficiency in your operation to improve the quality of your product. This is how car companies end up saying, "We could fix that flawed feature, but it would cost us $10 a unit and we couldn't charge more for it. So let's not fix it."

The pursuit of excellence and the pursuit of efficiency are two different things. Top ivy prep schools, like the Philps' academies, are grossly inefficient. Philips Exeter seats students at Harkness tables, limiting class size to twelve, which is grossly inefficient. Faculty could handle classes of double the size with no notable drop in quality.

Well, maybe they could. The thing about quality is that it's perception. Efficiency can go hand in hand with marketing. If we drop resources by a quantity of X, quality will drop by Y-- but can we get the customers to think that the new normal is just as good as the old one? In schools, can we convince people that a class of three hundred taught by one teacher on the other end of a computer link-up is just as good as one teacher in a room with only twelve students?

The pursuit of excellence is expensive-- usually prohibitively so. But if we use efficiency as our guiding star, we will be led inexorably to the Land Of Just Good Enough, a place that almost nobody wants to send their children to. It does make sense to discuss efficiency in education-- how to make the best use of finite resources. It does not make sense to make efficiency our goal, certainly not to make it our very definition of excellence. McDonalds is efficient. But nobody goes there strictly for excellence.

Granddad Learns About The Common Core

[Update: As you can now see, the video has gone away. The Youtube account "Common Core," a group of filmmakers from around the country, has shut down after only three days. Probably their best move, all things considered. If I can find a link to the video anywhere on the interwebs, I'll be sure to repost.]

[Update: We'll see how long this lasts, but God bless stlgretchen for preserving this piece of video idiocy. So now, you, too, can enjoy this piece of self-defeating PR]

[Well, that was fun while it lasted. But Six One Seven is apparently determined to bury this!]





As your grandad would not say, "OMG!"

The media group 617 has produced a video in support of the Core that is apparently intended to embarrass its opponents into silence. It has decidedly not worked out that way-- you will have a hard time finding the video, which seems to have suffered its own attack of embarrassment, but you can read about the reaction over at Missouri Education Watchdog. They were not pretty.

The video features a Cartoon Old Guy, who's insulting on so many levels. He's dismissive of the kid. He is wrapped up in his own stupid stories. He can't remember the teacher's name (aging brain function-- hilarious). He's ethnic. He's an ignorant war vet of some war-- he looks like a stereotypical WWII vet, but that would make him ninety-ish. Could be Korea, which would make him seventy-ish. He thinks Gates runs Apple (har!) and he measures the value of his grandson's ability to "figure" in how it can calculate money. Oh, and he plays the lottery.

He's worried about the Common Core stuff he's heard about on TV, and I'm wondering where on TV he's hearing bad things about the Core, because Core proponents have that media pretty well locked up.

The message here? Common Core critics are uninformed fools. Note that the nice teacher lady does not actually offer a single piece of fact-based data about the Core to contradict Old Bat-brained Granddad. She doesn't have to (though she might have mention that Hector will have to put a stop to figuring out math problems in his head). He's so obviously a dope that we are meant to simply discount his complaints because, well, he's a dope. He is truly the most wondrous animatronic straw grampaw ever.

This is not much of a coup for whoever hired Six One Seven Studios, a production company located just outside Boston and dedicated to "providing our clients with the most innovative, engaging and authentic visual content. We combine our artistry with the latest technology and a deep understanding of your work to create powerful stories"

The video broke over at Politico, and one has to assume that someone associated with the video sent it to politico hoping for some buzz. According to Politico, the firm made this epic video all on its own:

Executive Producer Bryan Roberts said the firm self-funded the video after learning about the Common Core debate through work with clients including the New York and Rhode Island state education departments and EngageNY, a website that provides curriculum resources to New York teachers. “Too many of the pro-Common Core videos were PowerPoints and talking heads,” Roberts said. “So we put out this video to help folks see the power of telling a fun but simple story with real people.” He has more planned.

More? The mind reels.

The studio has many swell clients. You know who one of those clients is?

The Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Yup. An almost-as-hilarious video of exTREMEly earnest teachers (wait-- is that Miss Jenkins??!!) produced by the company is featured on the MTA website in their promo for the Teacher Leadership Initiative. My favorite part-- the very last teacher, who says "Teacher" and then pauses (Wait a beat. Waaaiiiit a beeeat)  and finally lands on "Leading." Though I enjoy the part where several of the teachers appear to have been jolted to life by cattle prods.

I don't know who really prompted Bryan Roberts to create this masterpiece of terrible. Maybe it was one of the reformy conversation changers. But we've sailed way past "hugely insulting" all the way to "ridiculous." I hope Roberts didn't pay himself much, and I hope it hasn't taken up too much time to scrub the negative comments off their various pages. I look forward to more entries in the Granddad series, such as "Granddad Learns About Fluoridation," "Granddad Sets The Clock on His VCR," "Granddad Finds Out Where Grandma Went When She Went For Groceries Forty Years Ago and Didn't Come Back," and "Granddad Finds Out About That Those Gay Fellas Won't Give Him Cooties." There's no limit to how ignorantly patronizing this could get.

The Antidote to Money

Money has poisoned many of the conversations in this country, shaping the debates about everything from wars in foreign lands to the future of American public education. Money has an unprecedented power to control the public discussion simply by taking control of the major media (which are, after all, contained within just six corporations).

Ironically, today there is also unprecedented power for ordinary citizens to circumvent the major media. And if you're reading me, you've seen it in action.

I produce this blog with a budget of $0.00, and yet every day, there are several thousand reads on these pages. And I'm not one of the big dogs in the education conversations. Diane Ravitch, Mercedes Schneider, Anthony Cody, Jose Luis Vilson, and I would go on and on but there are so many names I would break my blog-- so many people who have energized and informed the discussion of public education on a budget somewhere between slim and none.

Meanwhile, the Big Guns of Reformsterdom can whip up $12 million to start yet another in a long line of astro-turf faux activist reform-shilling websites in Education Post, claiming that they just want to renew the conversation. In just a few years, Common Core and its attendant circus of reform clown cars has gone from a sure thing and done deal to a subject so contentious and toxic that politicians who want a national profile can't back away from it fast enough (sorry, ex-next-President Jeb Bush). And the amazing part of that shift is that it represents a battle between heavily financed forces and a bunch of citizens with computers.

That's the one cool thing about this debate-- we don't have to raise money; we just have to raise awareness.

There are challenges. The folks standing up for public education represent a broad, broad, broad group, and it's no small challenge to represent every viewpoint within that wide band. While that can be a point of contention, it also, to me, represents the strength of pluralism which stands in contrast to the sometimes-BORGlike appearance of the reformsters. Add in the people who stand against the reform movement, but not necessarily in favor of public education, and you're talking about a large and varied group of viewpoints.


But the beauty and terror of the internet is that all these voices cannot be silenced. Not even as, time and time again, the major media fail to give them a voice.

The Resistance depends on us, all of us, to amplify each others' voices and to spread the word. It also depends on us to keep talking and growing and building toward newer and better understandings, even when we have disagreements, missteps, mistakes, and people in our corner that we wish would go away. It's much harder to do that than to simply pick up and pass along the latest think tank talking point. We have to keep talking, sharing, amplifying, and bringing the conversation back to what matters, even if the Big Bucks Media aren't with us. And with that in mind, here comes something special.

On Saturday, October 11, the Network for Public Education will present a live, on line event, featuring many of the prominent voices in the education debates speaking on many of the toughest issues of the field. See and hear many of the faces and voices that have not been included in education "conversations" in places like NBC's Education Nation.

This is not the change in conversation that many reformsters are asking for (though I believe that many reformster-minded folks will tune in and watch, with interest). But it will further the conversation. And it won't take $12 million dollars to make it happen, and even $120 million dollars couldn't keep it from happening. I encourage you to check out the details, make a contribution if you're so inclined, and plan to keep at least part of October 11 open to click in and watch and listen to people who aren't being paid huge amounts of money to talk about what they believe.

Education Next Plugs Research Proving Not Much of Anything

This week Education Next ran an article entitled "The First Hard Evidence on Virtual Education." It turns out that the only word in that title which comes close to being accurate is "first" (more about that shortly). What actually runs in the article is a remarkable stretch by anybody's standards.

The study is a 'working paper" by Guido Schwert of the University of Konstanz (it's German, and legit) and Matt Chingos of Brooking (motto "Just Because We're Economists, That Doesn't Mean We Can't Act Like Education Experts"). It looks at students in the Florida Virtual School, the largest cyber-school system in Florida (how it got to be that way, and whether or not it's good, is a question for another day because it has nothing to do with the matter at hand). What we're really interested in here is how far we can lower the bar for what deserves to be reported.

The researchers report two findings. The first is that when students can take on-line AP courses that aren't offered at their brick and mortal schools, some of them will do so. I know. Quelle suprise! But wait-- we can lower the bar further!

Second finding? The researchers checked out English and Algebra I test scores for the cyber-schoolers and determined that their tenth grade test results for those subjects were about the same as brick-and-mortar students. Author Martin West adds "or perhaps a bit better"  but come on-- if you could say "better" you would have. This is just damning with faint praise-by-weasel-words.

West also characterizes this finding "as the first credible evidence on the effects of online courses on student achievement in K-12 schools" and you know what? It's not. First, you're talking about testing a thin slice of tenth graders. Second, and more hugely, the study did not look at student achievement. It looked at student standardized test scores in two subjects.

I know I've said this before. I'm going to keep saying this just as often as reformsters keep trying to peddle the false assertion used to launch a thousand reformy dinghies.

"Standardized test scores" are not the same thing as "student achievement."

"Standardized test scores" are not the same thing as "student achievement."

When you write "the mugwump program clearly increases student achievement" when you mean "the mugwump program raised some test scores in year X," you are deliberately obscuring the truth. When you write "teachers should be judged by their ability to improve student achievement" when you mean "teachers should be judged by students' standardized test scores," you are saying something that is at best disingenuous, and perhaps a bit of a flat out lie.

But wait-- there's less. In fact, there's so much less that even West has to admit it, though he shares that only with diligent readers who stick around to the next-to-last paragraph.

The study is based on data from 2008-2009. Yes, I typed that correctly. West acknowledges that there may be a bit of an "early adopter syndrome" in play here, and that things might have changed a tad over the past five years, so that then conditions under which this perhaps a bit useless data was generated are completely unlike those currently in play. (Quick-- what operating system were you using in 2008? And what did your smartphone look like?)

Could we possibly reveal this research to be less useful? Why, yes-- yes, we could. In the last sentence of that penultimate graf, West admits "And, of course, the study is also not a randomized experiment, the gold standard in education research." By "gold standard," of course, we mean "valid in any meaningful way."

So there you have it. Education Next has rocked the world with an account of research on six-year-old data that, if it proves anything at all, proves that you can do passable test prep on a computer. And that is how we lower the bar all the way to the floor.