PA Cyber Charters Failing

Let me be clear up front-- I reject the use of standardized tests to measure the education of students, the effectiveness of teachers, and the quality of schools. The best predictor of student results on standardized test remains their socio-economic class.

Oh, no, wait. In Pennsylvania, there is apparently one other factor that can predict how poorly a student will do on the Big Test.

Whether or not he attends a cyber charter.

Here's a chart that tells the story

SPP stands for School Performance Profile, the data that the state keeps to judge the schools within the Commonwealth. The "quality threshhold" is 70 or higher.

Research for Action did some number crunching for a report about charter performance in PA.

The validity of SPP as a measure of school quality is suspect due to its heavy reliance on test scores that are highly correlated with socioeconomic characteristics of students that are beyond the control of schools. Indeed, RFA’s analysis of the 2012-13 SPP scores revealed that SPP scores were heavily correlated with the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in a school building.

And yet, cyber charters still couldn't outperform the brick-and-mortar schools-- even those serving large low-income populations. And cyber-charters low-income population percentages are lower than even the charter school numbers.

The RFA report notes that while cyber-charters hit low percentages for English Language Learners, they have grown significantly in special education population. Perhaps that is related to the fact that cyber charters get about $8K for regular students and $23K for special education students. Do you suppose that has affected their marketing and recruiting at all?

Data is no longer available on turnover rates at cybers in PA, but the RFA report concludes that given cyber-charter's consistently terrible performance by the state's standards, the state would be crazy to authorize further cyber charter operations in the state. As I said, I reject SPP as a true measure of education quality, but if that's the rule we have to play by, then cyber charters have earned a severe benching.

The report is a good one, with more charts for those who like such things. Follow the link and read the whole thing.

Ohio: CCSS on the Ropes, Maybe

The Ohio PTA has called an all-hands-on-deck because it looks like HB 597, the "Get That Damn Commie Core Out of Our Schools" bill is rumored to be on the lame duck legislature's plate.

It is possible that this is all part of an Ohio scheme to put on a last-minute surge to try for the 2014 State Most Hostile to Public Education medal. They've been really working it, from the attempt to cut elementary specialists off at the knees to the proposal to trash teacher pay scales. So how did this bill end up back on the big pile of crazy?

HB 597 has been around since the summer, pitting the two wings of the GOP against each other. Its sponsors come from Glen Beck wing of the party. The bill's stated intention is to rid Ohio of the Common Core, which is embedded somewhere within Ohio's more expansive more-than-just-ELA-and-math standards.

But the bill has turned out to come with plenty of fun extras. Originally it included a provision that 80% of all works taught in 8-12 English classes be from English and American authors prior to 1970. The sponsors called that a "drafting error" which I suppose means "crazy thing we decided to take out before we submitted this." The bill also required phonics and... oh, did I forget to mention that this didn't just remove the Common Core, but replace it with a new set of standards. Those appear to be based somewhat on the old Massachusetts standards, but include some tweaks. So something pretty much like CCSS, only with some cool chrome accents.

One controversial tweak is a replacement of old science standards with standards that include a provision to "prohibit political or religious interpretation of scientific facts in favor of another." Some people, including, apparently the bill's sponsors, seem to think the new science standards open the door to teaching intelligent design. It also bizarrely restricts science teaching to scientific facts, but puts the kibosh on teaching scientific method. Apparently, science teachers are supposed to just teach facts and leave students to assume that these facts were delivered in a vision or straight from wikipedia.

Social studies would be restricted to "real" knowledge, which-- what the hell? Since we're no longer aware of the scientific method, I'm not even sure how real knowledge is constructed. One thing it apparently is not is "designed to avoid perpetuating gender, cultural, ethnic or racial stereotypes" because that language was scraped off the MA standards when they came to Ohio.

Then there's the provision that says that the state cannot impose any financial penalties on a school district just because it chooses to ignore the state's standards. Which of course means that the local districts could adopt any damn standards they want. When these guys say "local control," the by damn mean it. 

The Republican head of the Senate education committee, State Senator Peggy Lehner has characterized the repeal attempt as "a circus." Before you start cheering for her, note that she thinks the repeal effort is terrible because the Common Core are the greatest thing since critical thinking was used to slice a loaf of bread into a state of college and career readiness.

Jessica Poiner, writing over at the Fordham blog in the summer, noted with alarm the lack of any state control of districts under this bill. She also unfurled one of the Fordham's favorite talking points from the summer-- it would be really expensive to throw away all those fine investments made in the Core and start over. You can call this the "stay the course" talking point, or the "throw good money after bad" talking point.

It is, in short, a stupid reason for sticking with the Core. "We spent a bunch of money on a bad piece of equipment that doesn't do what it's supposed," is not logically the first part of a sentence that ends with "so let's spend even more money on it and never replace it." When the engine in your car blows up, you don't say, "Well, let's buy new tires for it."

So what's a supporter of public education to do? Well, for one thing, the kerfluffle is a fine reminder that in all things political, sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, too. Also, when educational amateurs go head to head with educational amateurs, it's education that gets punched in the face.

The Ohio PTA wants everyone to call and write their legislator and tell it to vote no (a sample letter template appears below), and I think that's maybe probably the correct answer, though passage of the bill would inevitably result in such a massive crash-and-burn debacle that the Ohio legislature might be forced to get help from actual grown ups and professional teacher persons. The letter is not a winner because it is A) making the stay-the-course money argument and B) suggesting that educational experts really want to protect the lovely Core. I wouldn't send the damn thing without rewriting it. Something simple like "Dear legislator: Common Core is terrible crap, but this bill probably makes matters worse. And if anybody over there has any more stupid ideas about screwing with public education, please just keep them to yourself until forever."

I'm not sure I'm rooting for either side in this clusterfinagle; there are no heroes here. I have a hard time imagining the legislature passing this, even if some GOP folks were spanked in the election for not hating Common Core enough. It's hard to envision a responsible government leaping into such a stupid set of rules, but for the past few years, every time I've "Surely they wouldn't do something that stupid" I've turned out to be wrong. Best wishes to Ohio on their medal quest. May you do your teachers and children a favor and lose.





Sample letter:

Dear Representative _____________

I live in _____________ and I urge you to oppose H.B. 597.

Our local school district, like many other districts across the state, has invested a significant amount of time, effort, teacher education, and money toward the implementation of Ohio’s New Learning Standards since 2010.

If Ohio halts the implementation of Ohio’s Learning Standards, this investment will be lost in more ways than monetary! H.B. 597 jeopardizes the future of Ohio’s public schools and educational opportunities for Ohio’s children.

Forcing an ongoing upheaval in Ohio’s academic standards is reckless and is in no one's best interests. This legislation is bad for Ohio and is bad for our schools.

Please listen to the education experts in your constituent school districts and oppose H.B. 597.

Next Generation Accountability: A Misbegotten Heritage

Last summer, the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the Fordham Institute had a little get-together to discuss accountability systems for public education. The conversation involved charter school mavens, a law firm, some college folks (like Morgan Polikoff), more charteristas, and not a single person directly connected to public schools. Just so you know, right up front, what we're in for here.

The results of this conversation were boiled down into eight pages. It's an interesting read if you want to get a sense of where the big chartery mess is headed.

The Problem

Give these folks partial credit for sort of facing reality. After looking back to the National Governor's Association accountability summit twenty five years ago, we survey the crossroads:

Skepticism and political pushback have emerged from the left and the right as state accountability systems, school turnaround strategies, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and standardized assessments have been conflated by skeptics into one overwhelming, unwieldy system with limited results and a host of unintended consequences.

Whether critics’ perceptions are right or wrong, growing criticism—including an emerging “mom and dad revolt”—may undermine and ultimately upend the entire concept of state-based accountability unless responsible changes are made, and made quickly. As one policy expert lamented, “We could lose this thing.”

"This thing." Hmmm. At any rate, these are practical people who recognize the optics are killing them. On the other hand, these are also severely deluded people who believe that "first-generation accountability systems" have accomplished the following things:

* contributed to improved academic outcomes for all students
* "provided unprecedented school-, teacher-, and student-level data that has been brought to bear on interventions in schools with the highest needs, and broader instructional improvement elsewhere."
* led to "understanding" that teachers are "the key levers of school improvement."

So, on the one hand, they are ready to face cold, hard reality. And on the other hand, they are entertaining fantasies about what accountability has accomplished so far. The first two "achievements" are bunk. And I'm pretty sure the third one just means "we've sold the public on the idea that everything that goes wrong in a school is the teachers' fault."

They've broken down the conversation into several topics. Let's take a look.

Limitations, Contradictions, and Unintended Consequences

Systems are supposed to drive school improvement and inform the public. Doing both at once is hard.
Test fatigue is a key driver of public crankiness with the whole mess, which makes improving the system hard.

"Teachers don't consider annual standardized tests helpful in improving instruction," which is true in the same way as "Teachers don't consider unleashing rabid bats in the classroom helpful in improving instruction" or "Humans don't consider being shot at close range helpful in maintaining health."

To get the kind of granular data that our Data Overlords claim, really, really complex instruments are needed, which may reduce the degree to which anyone is willing to take either the collection process or its results seriously.

States lack capacity for these systems, because states aren't as rich as, say, Pearson. So states just do the bare minimum. The conversants seem to have missed another important part of this-- when you force either a person or a state to do something through extortion (aka Race to the Top), they don't really put their whole heart and soul into it. Go figure.

Unintended consequences include driving compliance rather than innovation. Somebody said, "Being overly directive will lead to teachers who want to follow steps and mandates, not innovate. It cascades down and looks like a lack of creativity from here, but it's a direct response to the regulatory environment." Correct, anonymous person.

The summary writer concludes "Top-down accountability systems may not be the appropriate way to encourage innovation and ground-level improvements." Yes. Also, violent threats may not be the appropriate way to make someone love you. An insight so blindingly obvious that it has even penetrated the veil of fog that surrounds reformsters. Yes, yes, and yes.

An Emerging Framework for Change

If the accountability monkey is to stay balanced on the back of public education, it will have to make some adjustments. The broad consensus was that the next-generation accountability system should have the following traits:

* Be built around the child and his/her family
* Keep beating the equity drum
* Emphasize objectives for schools and opportunities for students
* Also beat the "schools are accountable to government for tax dollars spent" drum
* Emphasize information that drives student choice and improvements in teacher instruction and capacity
* Be transparent, fair, valid
* Be a means to driving motivation and learning
* Come with infrastructure for supporting struggling schools and creating options for students

Let's be clear-- this is not a framework for a good accountability system. This is a framework for using accountability as a means of marketing charters and choice. It could not be any clearer-- we are not talking about how to hold schools accountable for quality education. We are talking about how to frame the system so that it fosters charter school proliferation, marketing and access to the market.

In keeping with that, participants also argued for a lighter touch from the state. "Let's make most of the decisions at the building level," said a room full of charter operators. They would like the power and information to make "human capital decisions" at the building level. They want lots of measures and data, and they are of the opinion that assessments drive curriculum and instruction, and so should drive it towards good stuff. Common Core was used as an example, because gaming it apparently involves writing research papers. Also, participants paused for a break while pigs flew out of their butts.

Resolving Key Issues

If there is a time to suggest sweeping changes to accountability systems, it may be now, as the Common Core and the upcoming round of ESEA waivers provide unprecedented opportunities for states to reframe accountability around providing support to their schools.

These immediate needs mirror a broader, long-term vision of an effective next-generation accountability system in which states provide a formal structure for a far richer decisionmaking process, often led by those who know each school—and the capacity of its leaders to bring about change—best. 

In other words, we have a chance to get the state to back charters' play while giving charters freedom to do whatever the hell they want. Particular issues of concern:

Should states focus accountability efforts on all schools, or just the suckiest ones? If we focus on school-level accountability, what does that mean to district administrations that make the decisions that help or hurt on the building level (good question, actually)? Will local leaders make the right kind of "human capital decisions" about their ineffective teachers (because we're sure they're everywhere, and responsible for all school failures)? How do we work out the mechanics of choice or vouchers-in-everything-but-name (because clearly it's not "if" or "why," but "how")?

Are we collecting data for informational purposes or as a trigger for consequences? Should we publish everything, or just the simplified data that won't confuse people?

How do we handle goal setting? Good quote here-- “We confuse aspirational goals—all kids will be career and college ready—with achievable goals,” one participant said. Good job, anonymous participant. Can we really talk about growth goals? “I’m deeply suspicious of growth measures that don’t end up at the point of college readiness,” one participant said. Go to the back of the class, less wise anonymous participant.

Participants hated the idea of sampling-- testing only occasionally-- because then you lose the ability to track students and rank and sort individual teachers and programs. Apparently those are "must-haves" for this crowd. Current tests may not be great, but they're what we've got, said some. Others felt that more complex tests would be worth it because they would drive instruction in the right direction. You really cannot read this report without being hit in the face with the idea that standards are to drive tests and tests are to drive curriculum. Nobody here was even pretending to pretend that "Common Core is not curriculum" baloney.

Their Conclusion

Next-generation systems can give us the opportunity to return the focus of accountability to students, families, and the public good. They can move states and districts away from checklist compliance and toward fostering innovative approaches to improving teaching and learning.

My conclusion

What we're talking about here is top-down imposed punishment-enforced accountability. As long as your goal in accountability management is to control curriculum and instruction and the make decisions (aka hiring, firing and pay) about your "human capital" you will never foster anything except By The Numbers compliance.

There are clearly portions of this conversation that were insightful and potentially useful, but the degree of delusion seriously interferes with any functional outcomes here. There is no real way to say, "Okay, you must follow the programs I'm imposing on you and hit the numbers that are being set for you, and if you don't there will be consequences, and by the way, be creative and innovative."

You can force compliance. You cannot force creativity and innovation, nor can you coerce enthusiastic embrace of your programs. The "tensions" that this report keeps referring to are the tensions between "How you want to make people behave" and "How live humans actually behave." When I read reports like this, I'm forced to conclude yet again that while many of these folks may have the power and the money, they are not snarling villains or towering evils, but simply garden variety bad managers.

National Test Refusal for Pre-Teens

If you are up on your various privacy acts, you might already know about COPPA. The idea behind COPPA is that we all need to be extra-cautious about what sort of on line information people try to collect from pre-teens (twelve and under).

It was a fairly unassuming and sensible piece of legislation when it was passed by Congress back in 1998. We just wanted to protect children from unscrupulous data collectors on line. Those were simpler days, more cyber-fearful days, days when we couldn't imagine that the government would require five-year-olds to sit at a computer and answer questions about themselves.

When it comes to student privacy, mostly we've been talking about FERPA, and all the ways that the Department of Education has tied its shoelaces together to better allow corporations to hoover up valuable data to better serve the educational needs of America's youth, somehow.

But COPPA isn't under the jurisdiction of the Department of Education. COPPA is the FTC's baby, and that means it's still fully functional. And it could be a real game changer for the test-crazy wing of the reformster movement, because it arms every parent with what looks to be a hefty monkey wrench.

The reading by the folks at United Opt Out and Student Privacy Matters is pretty simple. If your pre-teen child's schools is having them take any sort of test that involves entering any sort of personal information on line, you are entitled to full information about it, and you are entitled to have them not participate. (COPPA does not apply to any program where an adult collects the information and enters it into the program.)

United Opt Out has a site with a template for a letter that you can send to your school. This has the potential for a nation-wide action that could really gum up the works for the computer-based PARCC and SBA tests (unless you're in Pennsylvania, where we do all our testing the way God intended, with paper and pencil). It would also be interesting to see, when push comes to shove, what exactly qualifies as "personal information." Sure, that covers explicitly asking about address, family income, and household composition. But would "personal information" also describe, say, test questions aimed at evaluating the elusive non-cognitive areas-- questions designed to measure the child's personality. Personally, as far as I'm concerned, the question of "How good is this kid at math" is also personal information that ought to be covered by this. But baby steps.

If you are the parent of a pre-teen, and you've been itching for a way to get your child out the way of the testing juggernaut, here's your path. Check out United Opt Out for more details.

Ed Lessons from Athletics

Mark McClusky started out as at Sports Illustrated as a writer, then editor. He moved to Wired, and now is the editor of Wired.com, but his interest in the intersection of athletics and science has stayed with him, and so he just released a book: Faster, Higher, Stronger: How sports science is creating a new generation of superathletes-- and what we can learn from them.  The book is a highly accessible, thoroughly researched, and filled with wit and sharp-eared high quality journalism. McClusky is an enormously engaging writer. He's also one of my former students.

I don't take any credit for Mark-- there are some students who are going to excel even if they're taught by wolves-- but that connection moved me to pick up his book, where I discovered many interesting things, several of which have real implications for education. Allow me to share.

Timing

Nearly three-quarters of the best athletes in the world at the senior level weren't among the best in the world when they were younger.

Displaying skills (or the lack thereof) at a young age doesn't necessarily mean much when it comes to predicting future excellence. Oddly enough, a good predictor of future performance is being a younger sibling. There's a great deal of research to indicate that young athletes get an edge by constantly reaching just beyond their current ability (but not too far).

The beloved 10,000 hour rule? Probably bunk. The desire to start athletes young and push them hard has unfortunate consequences. 3.5 million children under fourteen are injured annually playing sports, and almost half of those injuries are from overuse. So taking young children and pushing them in hopes of forcing excellence is both unproductive and bad for the child. So maybe teaching three-year-olds to recite quadratic equations and flunking third graders who can't yet pass a standardized reading test is not such a great idea!

Blocked Practice

Coaches have often been big fans of blocked practice--training a series of discrete skills. So a basketball team might drill passing, then drill shooting foul shots, and so on, skill after skill. It makes for neat, orderly, purposeful practice sessions. But a body of research says it's not the best way to prepare a team.

McClusky notes an experiment performed by John Shea and Robyn Morgan at University of Colorado in 1979. Students were given three tasks to repeat. One group practiced in blocked and orderly manner. The other practiced in a random chaotic manner. The orderly practices were better at learning and practicing, but even after as little as ten minutes, the chaotic practices had better retention.

Richard Schmidt, an expert on motor learning, asks volleyball coaches, "Are you practicing for practice, or are you practicing for performance?" John Kessel, director of sport development of USA Volleyball, says, "Practice shouldn't look good." Studies of hammer throw practice techniques concluded that the best way to improve was to throw the hammer. Kessel also says, "The game teaches the game. "Experts have concluded that the best way to learn for performance is to do something that's a close to performance and performance conditions as possible.

We can teach writing, for instance, in a manner that is blocked and orderly and tests well-- but will that produce writers who can actually write usefully in the real world?

Sleep Is Huge

It was a small study, but a striking one. A basketball team agreed to be subjects in a sleep experiment. After being measured under their usual sleep patterns, they switched to "extra" sleep. With extra sleep, they improved 11.4% on free throws and 13.7% on three point shots.

Data

It is no news that sports folks love to track data. But the history of data crunching in sports, particularly in the past decade or two, is instructive.

Baseball started out tracking batting averages, in no small part because they were "easy to calculate and understand." But baseball stats dorks have since found better things to measure. Basketball has been revolutionized by a cartographer who has mapped 700,000 shots taken in basketball games to come up with data pictures more rich and valuable than ever available than ever before.

One of the things that draw many to sports is that final evaluation of your performance is clear-cut-- just look at the scoreboard or the results sheet. Every day most of us go to work and do our jobs the best way we know how. But there's no immediate sense of how well we've done...

Sport has the opposite problem: the focus  on the competitive outcome can sometimes overshadow real progress and improvement.

The contrast between the mountains of data now being collected and analyzed to tell which sports figures are really excelling and the tiny little molehill of data produced by a standardized test is striking. What sports are learning to do reminds me of what classroom teachers do every day-- miles away from a standardized snapshot of one moment. It's also a reminder of how important it is to measure the right thing. Basketball is being reshaped as coaches and players learn to focus on the data that makes a difference, rather than the old data that might not have been important, but was easily measurable.


There's lots more in the book that will be interesting to coaches and athletes and anybody at all interested in sporty stuff. It's a good read, even if you're not being hugely gratified by the fact that it was written by a guy who once sat in your classroom.

Nobody Owns the Beach

In Hawaii, nobody owns the beach.

Nobody can own the beach. Lots of people and hotels own land right next to the beach, but they can't own the beach. There are sections of waterfront in Hawaii that are rather isolated and rugged, like a beautiful blasted moonscape. A private investor, given the chance, could probably make something cool out of them. And there are periodically flaps in Hawaii when some private property owner tries to interfere with access to the beach (military bases feel the need, as one might expect, to control access to the beaches that are part of the base). But nobody owns the beach in Hawaii.

That's because your government recognizes that certain resources are a public good and need to be maintained as public goods. So even when somebody offers to "manage" that public good for you, just for a cut of the take, that doesn't happen. Because as soon as a public resource becomes a way of enriching private interests, the public interest in that resource takes a back seat.

So nobody owns the beach.

Oddly enough, by keeping the beach a public good, lots of private interests can benefit. Hundreds and hundreds of businesses set up within arm's reach of the water, many and varied in size and style. Development in Hawaii is a tricky thing-- businesses jockey for position and an old friend told me that the International Market in Honolulu was finally going to be squeezed out by big money. When that kind of rapacious development gets going, the battle for marketable square feet gets fierce, and small players get pushed aside by the people with the big money and power. And of course the more money and power you have, the more money and power you get.

But nobody can own the beach.

Suppose the state starting slicing up the beach, offering special charters to private beach operators. Would that make the beaches better? Would the public be served by charter operators scrambling to get the best sand? Or would they be reduced to marketing themselves as the beach where you found the kind of people you like, but none of Those People? Would charter operators scramble to buy each other out, to raise the stakes so that small operators with good ideas could never get involved? Would the public good be pushed back by operators who were irritated and resentful every time these customers Wanted Something, cutting into the charter beach's profits? Think about resort areas where nobody can so much as look at the ocean without paying somebody to do it. How well does that serve the public?

Thank goodness nobody can own the beach.

Are public beaches a perfect metaphor for public schools? I'm going to say no before I have to explain which part of the beach I am. But Hawaiian beaches are a good example of the challenges of preserving and protecting a public resource, a trust that exists for the public good. And that idea of a public resources, public service and public trust-- that's not a metaphor for public education. It is public education.

Administration Wants To Lock in Testing Forever

The US Department of Education this week released the guidelines for states getting ready to fill out those waiver applications. Just add this to my "I Told You So" list regarding last months supposed signal of a change in direction by education leaders and Arne Duncan. Once again, what we're seeing is not so much Change of Direction as it is Jam Foot Down On Gas Pedal.

The new guidelines are essentially like the old guidelines, with a hard line emphasis on basing evaluation of teachers, schools, students, principals, bus drivers, landscaping artists and the guy who delivers paper supplies to the school on standardized tests. It was just a month ago that Duncan was shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Dang. I don't know why the heck everyone got so obsessed with testy stuff. I guess it was all of us, huh?" Now he's back to "You will all eat, breathe, live and die by the tests. Or else."

The feds have tightened up the old sub-group requirements. We all remember this from the NCLB days-- a subgroup of twenty-or-so students (depending on your location) will carry the fate of the entire building in their test scores. Students who belong to subgroups may once again look forward to Special schedules featuring five hours of steady test prep. Congratulations, subgroup students.

The new waivers also feature a super-extended feature which will allow states to exist in whatever extra-legal limbo the waivers create well past President Obama's expiration date. This is a really novel stretch of a really novel idea. There is already some debate about whether the waivers are legal in the first place; now we get to ask if they can be made binding on a subsequent administration. I suppose we're fortunate that they didn't try to lock testing in until the tri-centennial.

Perhaps it's an attempt to weight state's consideration about whether to bother or not ("We could just skip the waiver application, and by the time the feds had gotten around to actually doing anything, we'd already be getting new rules from a new President anyway"). Or it could just be a mark of how deeply committed this administration is to the idea that an untested child is a wasted young life. maybe they're sincerely dedicated to making sure that every test maker gets to sell lots of product every child gets to experience the joys of soulcrushing standardized testing. Maybe they are trying to further confirm that it will make no difference how we cast our votes in 2016.

Or maybe they're just trying to give extra inspiration to movements like the one that rendered testing of seniors in Colorado completely moot. Imagine that-- students smart enough to figure out that the testing is a complete waste of time! I guess we're doing something right.

Whatever the case, this new set of waiver guidelines is great news for testing companies and terrible news for everyone who actually cares about public educations and the students who attend public schools. So, thanks a lot, Department of Education.