From Audrey Amrein-Beardsley at Vamboozled comes a report on a piece of research about SAS EVAAS, the granddaddy of VAM systems, beloved in several states including my own home state. Amrein-Beardsley has a guest post by Clarin Collins, author of the study and former doctoral student under Amrein-Beardsley (if you don't follow this blog, you should). I was interested enough to go read the actual paper, because in Pennsylvania we just lovvvvve PVAAS to pieces.
If you don't live in VAAS state, well, you're missing out on some of the fun. We have a nifty website where we are supposed to find out oodles of data about how we're doing, how our students are doing, and what is supposed to be happening next in our classroom. Periodically some of us are sent off for professional development to show us which nifty charts are there and how we can crunch numbers in order to achieve teacherly awesomeness. SAS (the owner-operators of this business) also include a database of terrible lesson materials, because that helps them sell the site. I have literally never met a single human being who used a lesson from the SAS site.
At any rate, when you hear reformsters talking about how data can be used to rate teacher effectiveness and help teachers design and tweak instruction, this site is what they think they are talking about. Funny thing, though-- prior to Collins's research, nobody went out to talk to teachers in the wild and ask if they were getting any real use out of VAAS, and so VAAS's reputation among educrats and reformsters has rested entirely on its well-polished marketing and not what it actually does in the field. So let's see what Collins found out, shall we?
The Subjects
Collins used an un-named district in the Southwest that is heavily invested in VAAS, has a strong union presences, and 11K teachers. By using a researchy randomizer and digging down to teachers who are actually directly evaluated by VAAS, the research ended up with 882 responders. The responders were mostly female, with a wide range of ages and ethnicities (the oldest was 78!) Collins speaks fluent researchese and if you want to evaluate the solid basis of the research, everything you need is there in the paper. We're just going to skip ahead to the civilian comprehensible parts.
Reliability
Collins first set out to see if, from the teacher perspective, VAAS results seemed reliable. The answer was... not so much. Teachers reported fluctuating from year to year. One teacher drew the gifted student short straw and so showed up on VAAS as a terrible teacher but "the School Improvement Officer observed my teaching and reported that my teaching did not reflect the downward spiral in the scores." The repeated story through the various responses was that a teacher's effectiveness was most directly related to the students in the classroom, except when scores fluctuated year-to-year for no apparent reason.
Validity
For a smaller percentage of teachers, the usual horror stories applied. About 10% reported that they'd been evaluated for scores for subjects in which they were not the teacher of record. Almost 20% reported being VAASed for students for whom they were not the teacher of record, including those like the student who arrived late in the year and left soon thereafter for alternative school. "I'm still considered the teacher of record even though he spent 5-6 months out of my classroom."
Over half of the teachers indicated that their VAASified scores did not match their principal evaluation. Most commonly the principal rated higher, but some teachers did report that VAAS gave them some help with bucking a principal with a personal beef against the teacher. At the same time, a large chunk of the teachers reported that they were getting an award of some sort for teacherly swellness at the same time VAAS was calling them stinky.
Formative Use
We are told repeatedly that VAAS info is formatively useful-- that peeking in there should help inform our remediation and help us fine-tune our instruction. In fact, that is what several of our regional college teacher prep programs teach aspiring teachers.
Well, baloney. 59% of the responders flat-out said they don't use VAAS for that, at all. One teacher noted that by the time the data is up, it's for students you don't teach any more, and to find data for the students you do have requires a long student-by-student search (feel free to work on that in your copious free time).
Of the teachers who said they do use VAAS to inform instruction, further questioning indicated that what they meant was "but not really."
The most common response was from teachers who responded that they knew they were “supposed to” look at their SAS EVAAS® reports, so they would look at the reports to get an overview on how the students performed; however, these same teachers called the reports “vague” and “unclear” and they were “not quite sure how to interpret” and use the data to inform instruction.
Even teachers who made actual use of the reports (commonly to do ability grouping) couldn't really explain how they did that. This puts them on a par, apparently, with many principals who reportedly shared VAAS scores with teachers "in a manner that was 'vague,' 'not in depth,' and 'not discussed thoroughly.' "
Does it deliver on its promises
SAS EVAAS makes plenty of promises about how it will revolutionize and awesometize your school district. Collins did a quick and simple check to see if teachers on the ground were seeing the marketing promises actually materialize. Here's the list of promises:
EVAAS helps create professional goals
EVAAS helps improve instruction
EVAAS will provide incentives for good practices
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for very low achieving students
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for students
EVAAS helps increase student learning
EVAAS helps you become a more effective teacher
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to my school
EVAAS reports are simple to use
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to me as a teacher
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to the district
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for very high achieving students
EVAAS will identify excellence in teaching or leadership
EVAAS will validly identify and help to remove ineffective teachers
EVAAS will enhance the school environment
EVAAS will enhance working conditions
Collins just asked teachers whether they agreed or disagreed. The list here puts the items in ascending amount of disagreement, so the very first "professional goals" item is the one teachers disagreed with least-- and still more than 50% of the respondents disagreed. From there it was just downhill-- at the bottom of the list are items with which almost 80% of teachers disagreed.
Unintended consequences
Did teachers report any effects of VAAS that were not advertised? Yes, they did.
There was a disincentive to teach certain students. ELL students in a transition year and gifted students with their ceiling effect were both unloved. Given the choice, some teachers reported they would choose not to teach those students.
Teacher mobility-- moving from one grade level to another-- was also a casualty of the VAAS model, particularly in those schools that use looping (staying with one group of students for two or more years).
Gaming the system and teaching to the test. Angling for the best students (or having the worst packed into your classroom by an unfriendly principal) seem common. And, of course, as we all already know, the best way to get good test results is to drop all that other teaching and just teach to the test.
Numerous teachers reflected on their own questionable practices. As one English teacher
said, “When I figured out how to teach to the test, the scores went up.” A fifth grade teacher added,
“Anything based on a test can be ‘tricked.’ EVAAS leaves room for me to teach to the test and
appear successful.”
Distrust, competition and low morale also rose in these schools, where VAAS is linked to a "merit" system. Why share a good teaching technique if it's only going to hurt your own ranking? It is bad news for you if the teachers who are the feeders for your classroom do well-- their failure is the foundation of your own success. All of this is predictably bad for morale, and Collins's research supports that.
The incentive program is not an incentive. For something to be an incentive, you need to know what you have to do to get the incentive. All we know is that as a teacher you have to improve your scores more than the other teachers. You can make improvements each year, but if other teachers improve the same amount, you have made no gains according to the system. It is a constantly moving target. You don't know what you need to do to get the "prize" until after the "contest" is over.
Conclusion
SAS EVAAS® and other VAMs, by themselves, are sophisticated statistical models that purportedly provide diagnostic information about student academic growth, and represent teachers’ value-add. In other words, SAS EVAAS® and VAMs are tools. It is what teachers, schools, districts, and states do with this information that matters most. However, for the teachers in this study, even for those participating in training sessions on how to use the data, the SAS EVAAS® data alone were unclear and virtually unusable. For SSD, not only are teachers not using the “product” that costs the district half a million dollars per year, but teachers are aware that SAS EVAAS® inputs can be manipulated based on the student makeup of their classroom, and some teachers even confess to teaching to the test and cheating in attempt to increase their SAS EVAAS® scores.
Collins hasn't found anything that reasonable teachers haven't talked about and predicted for these models, but now we all have a real research paper we can link to for people who have to have those sorts of things for proof. The view from ground zero is clear-- the system is unreliable, invalid, unable to produce the results it promises, and all too capable of producing toxic effects.
It's true that this paper deals a great deal in sheer accumulation of anecdote. I'm struck by just how brutal all the findings are for VAM, because with this type of survey instrument I'm certain that the teacher tendency to be a good little soldier and give the answers you're supposed to give (look back at the formative question) and so a certain percentage of teachers are inclined to just say, "Why, yes! The emperor's new clothes are beautiful and grand," and then go back to the lounge and make comments about the emperor's shocking nakedness.
A teacher of my acquaintance took an on-line course that included some portion about the awesome usefulness of SAS-PVAAS; the teacher was reluctant to openly say how useless the site was for that teacher. When the awful statement was finally out there, many other teachers finally broke down and said, yeah, me too. Nobody tried to defend it. Too many times teachers stand by quietly while the house burns down because they don't want to be impolite or rock the boat.
So when I see research like this that brings forth a whole bunch of boat-rockers, my immediate suspicion is that this is only the tip of the iceberg. I've just hit the highlights here; I recommend you go read the whole thing and get the full picture. But once again, the challenge is to get people in power to actually listen to teachers. Maybe that will happen if it comes in the form of actual research.
Monday, December 29, 2014
Choice and Disenfranchising the Public
School choice is one of those policy ideas that just never goes away, and it probably never will. For some people, it is an irresistible way to unlock all those public tax dollars and turn them into private profits. For some people, it's a way to make sure their children don't have to go to school with Those People. And some people have a sincere belief that competition really does create greatness.
I'll save my disagreements with those folks for another day. Because there is a huge fault with school choice that we discuss way too rarely.
School choice disenfranchises the public.
Our public school system is set up to serve the public. All the public. It is not set up to serve just parents or just students. Everybody benefits from a system of roadways in this country-- even people who don't drive cars-- because it allows a hundred other systems of service and commerce to function well.
School choice treats parents as if they are the only stakeholders in education. They are not. We all depend on a society in which people are reasonably well-educated. We all depend on a society in which people have a reasonably good understanding of how things work. We all depends on a society in which people have the basic abilities needed to take care of themselves and the people around them. We all depend on dealing with doctors and plumbers and lawyers and clerks and neighbors who can read and write and figure. We hope for fellow voters who will not elect a politician because he promises to convert straw to gold by using cold fusion. We all depend on a society that can move forward because it is composed of people who Know Things.
This is why everybody votes for school board members-- not just the people who have kids in school. Everybody has a stake in the students who come out of schools, and every taxpayer has a stake in the money spent on schools.
A choice system says no-- you only get a say in how education works if you have a kid.
Reformsters like to make the argument that schools need to be more responsive to what employers and businesses are looking for in graduates, but in a choice system, these folks have even less say. Charter operators and other choice beneficiaries don't have to listen to anybody except the people who affect market share.
This has the potential of serious long-term harm for the choice schools themselves. Most notably, disenfranchising the public literally moves them from the list of stakeholders. It will vastly increase the list of people saying, "Well, I don't have a kid in school. Why do I have to pay taxes, anyway?" The day those people make a large enough group is the day that choice school operators suddenly find the pie shrinking as voters decide they're tired of paying for a system they've been cut out of.
But the biggest damage will come to communities themselves, because choice and charter systems are based on business principles, not education or community principles. And the most basic business principle is, when you aren't making money, close up shop.
There has been a lot of shock and surprise around the country as charter schools just close their doors. People tend to assume that part of being a school means staying open in your community, and they keep being surprised to discover that a charter school is not a school-- it's a business. Charter and choice systems don't just disenfranchise the public in saying how schools in the community should work-- charter and choice systems also take away any choice about whether there are schools in the community or not.
A public school system cannot suddenly just close its doors, even just a few of its doors, without answering to the taxpaying and voting public. But when it comes to decisions about whether to stay open or not, even the parents themselves are disenfranchised. A choice system in your community doesn't only mean that the public has lost the ability to decide what kind of schools they'll have today. A choice system also means they've lost control over how much longer they'll have any schools at all.
That's the trade. A few people get to have a choice about schools today, and in return, nobody gets a choice about what schools, if any, to have in the community tomorrow.
I'll save my disagreements with those folks for another day. Because there is a huge fault with school choice that we discuss way too rarely.
School choice disenfranchises the public.
Our public school system is set up to serve the public. All the public. It is not set up to serve just parents or just students. Everybody benefits from a system of roadways in this country-- even people who don't drive cars-- because it allows a hundred other systems of service and commerce to function well.
School choice treats parents as if they are the only stakeholders in education. They are not. We all depend on a society in which people are reasonably well-educated. We all depend on a society in which people have a reasonably good understanding of how things work. We all depends on a society in which people have the basic abilities needed to take care of themselves and the people around them. We all depend on dealing with doctors and plumbers and lawyers and clerks and neighbors who can read and write and figure. We hope for fellow voters who will not elect a politician because he promises to convert straw to gold by using cold fusion. We all depend on a society that can move forward because it is composed of people who Know Things.
This is why everybody votes for school board members-- not just the people who have kids in school. Everybody has a stake in the students who come out of schools, and every taxpayer has a stake in the money spent on schools.
A choice system says no-- you only get a say in how education works if you have a kid.
Reformsters like to make the argument that schools need to be more responsive to what employers and businesses are looking for in graduates, but in a choice system, these folks have even less say. Charter operators and other choice beneficiaries don't have to listen to anybody except the people who affect market share.
This has the potential of serious long-term harm for the choice schools themselves. Most notably, disenfranchising the public literally moves them from the list of stakeholders. It will vastly increase the list of people saying, "Well, I don't have a kid in school. Why do I have to pay taxes, anyway?" The day those people make a large enough group is the day that choice school operators suddenly find the pie shrinking as voters decide they're tired of paying for a system they've been cut out of.
But the biggest damage will come to communities themselves, because choice and charter systems are based on business principles, not education or community principles. And the most basic business principle is, when you aren't making money, close up shop.
There has been a lot of shock and surprise around the country as charter schools just close their doors. People tend to assume that part of being a school means staying open in your community, and they keep being surprised to discover that a charter school is not a school-- it's a business. Charter and choice systems don't just disenfranchise the public in saying how schools in the community should work-- charter and choice systems also take away any choice about whether there are schools in the community or not.
A public school system cannot suddenly just close its doors, even just a few of its doors, without answering to the taxpaying and voting public. But when it comes to decisions about whether to stay open or not, even the parents themselves are disenfranchised. A choice system in your community doesn't only mean that the public has lost the ability to decide what kind of schools they'll have today. A choice system also means they've lost control over how much longer they'll have any schools at all.
That's the trade. A few people get to have a choice about schools today, and in return, nobody gets a choice about what schools, if any, to have in the community tomorrow.
The First All-Charter District
As news continues to come out of York, PA about plans to hand the entire school district over to a for-profit charter company, you'll see the prospect referred to as making York the "first in Pennsylvania" and "the only one in the country." That's because, as one of my readers reminded me, we have in fact tried this before.
Muskegon Heights, Michigan, owns the distinction of first all-charter district in the nation. Muskegon Heights is a city of about 10,000 located on the western side of Michigan; the nearest large city is Grand Rapids. Its school district was handed over to emergency manager Donald Weatherspoon who in July of 2012 hired Mosaica to operate the district's four buildings because, with $16 million in debt, the school district would not be able to open in the fall.
At age 70, Weatherspoon is not your typical education wunderkind. He grew up with eight siblings in a family with ties to the underground railroad. His resume is long and varied-- college football star, semi-pro player, assistant to director of department of corrections, deputy director of department of commerce, police officer in California, and, somewhere in there, assistant state superintendent of schools. And that's just a sampling. But Gov. Rick Snyder sent him to Muskegon Heights, he landed hard, laying off the entire staff and privatizing the district.
By the end of its first year, documents obtained by Michigan Live (a news outlet that covered this story pretty regularly and thoroughly, and whose reporting I leaned on heavily to produce this post), showed the relationship was already testy. Weatherspoon's expectations were plenty reformy-- one of his objections was that Mosaica had not, in one year, closed up the three-to-five year achievement gaps in the high school students. Weatherspoon told Mosaica that their progress was "far less than satisfactory" and basically told them if they didn't shape up they would be shown the door.
The door was easy to find because so many teachers were walking out of it. Mosaica's mostly-new mostly-young staff experienced hefty turnover; within the first three months of Mosaica's operation, twenty of their eighty new hires quit. Within a year, just one teacher was left at the high school from the "old" staff, and she left for a job in Grand Rapids. Mosaica president Gene Edelman said, "We hired the best teachers we could find but some people were just not expecting how tough it's going to be." Regional Mosaica chief Alena Zachery-Ross said that turnover was higher than they had planned, saying that first it was the disciplinary challenge of low-income inner city kids, and later it was the low pay ($35K base with 10K benefits).
Teachers who left cited a lack of clear discipline policies, resources and supplies, and work expectations. Many were so frustrated that they quit without another job lined up. Meanwhile, students achievement was in the pits and attendance was in freefall. Enrollment dropped steadily as students looked to escape the chaos, and lower enrollment means less money form the state.
By the fall of 2013, Donald Weatherspoon had resigned his post in Muskegon Heights to move on to do some financial slashing in Pontiac. He was replaced by his brother-- Gregory Weatherspoon. A few months later, Mosaica was looking for the door on their own.
In spring of 2014, it was announced that the charter board for Muskegon Heights and Mosaic had decided to part ways. Why did Mosaica walk away from this "historic opportunity"?
"They came here to do a service for the children," Weatherspoon said. "They got the job done, but it didn't fit their financial model... The profit just simply wasn't there."
I will give Mosaic credit for one thing-- as things fell apart financially in the last year, they waived their one million dollar management fee. But they also arranged to get out of the final three years of their contract. As always, the charter commitment to education lasts only as long as the money is coming in.
What has happened this year in Muskegon Heights? Well, the academy board (the charter board that operates the system now) closed a building and reconfigured the remaining students. They have taken steps to get enrollment back up. They hired a superintendent of their own and instead of farming out the entire district function, hired an outside staffing agency to handle personnel. They started the year with most of the same personnel they finished last year with. As on objective measure, the number of news stories on the general topic of "What the hell is going on over there" has dropped dramatically.
So what are the two takeaways from the Story of Muskegon Heights? What can York schools learn about Life Under a For Profit Charter Chain?
First, Mosaica didn't know what the hell they were doing. There are vague hints of protestations that they couldn't be expected to fully staff and supply a system so quickly, but that's exactly what they said they could do. They failed to recruit an adequate staff, and then they failed to retain them. They failed to provide the teaching supplies needed for the setting, and they failed to establish an environment of order and safety in the schools. The only thing Mosaica knew how to do was crunch numbers and manage cash flow (and that they did in ways that damaged every other part of their mission).
Second, they brought no commitment, no ties, no roots, no intention of fighting to the end. They came to make money. When they couldn't make money, they left.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that making money is inherently evil, a dirty motivation from the dark side of the soul. What Mosaica and other profitable charters (which include both those explicitly for-profit and the non-profits that are pocketing profits personally) do is perfectly normal, natural and rational for a business. It is normal and correct for a business that can't make money to close up shop.
And that is why school and business do not mix. A public school is a long-term commitment that stretches across the generations. It is a promise that a community makes to its children, past, present and future. That is not a reasonable expectation for a business, but it is the only acceptable expectation for a public school system.
Muskegon Heights was an historic first, but not one that the charter biz talks about much because it's not a success story. Instead, it highlights all the reasons that handing over public schools to private business interests is a lousy idea.
Muskegon Heights, Michigan, owns the distinction of first all-charter district in the nation. Muskegon Heights is a city of about 10,000 located on the western side of Michigan; the nearest large city is Grand Rapids. Its school district was handed over to emergency manager Donald Weatherspoon who in July of 2012 hired Mosaica to operate the district's four buildings because, with $16 million in debt, the school district would not be able to open in the fall.
At age 70, Weatherspoon is not your typical education wunderkind. He grew up with eight siblings in a family with ties to the underground railroad. His resume is long and varied-- college football star, semi-pro player, assistant to director of department of corrections, deputy director of department of commerce, police officer in California, and, somewhere in there, assistant state superintendent of schools. And that's just a sampling. But Gov. Rick Snyder sent him to Muskegon Heights, he landed hard, laying off the entire staff and privatizing the district.
By the end of its first year, documents obtained by Michigan Live (a news outlet that covered this story pretty regularly and thoroughly, and whose reporting I leaned on heavily to produce this post), showed the relationship was already testy. Weatherspoon's expectations were plenty reformy-- one of his objections was that Mosaica had not, in one year, closed up the three-to-five year achievement gaps in the high school students. Weatherspoon told Mosaica that their progress was "far less than satisfactory" and basically told them if they didn't shape up they would be shown the door.
The door was easy to find because so many teachers were walking out of it. Mosaica's mostly-new mostly-young staff experienced hefty turnover; within the first three months of Mosaica's operation, twenty of their eighty new hires quit. Within a year, just one teacher was left at the high school from the "old" staff, and she left for a job in Grand Rapids. Mosaica president Gene Edelman said, "We hired the best teachers we could find but some people were just not expecting how tough it's going to be." Regional Mosaica chief Alena Zachery-Ross said that turnover was higher than they had planned, saying that first it was the disciplinary challenge of low-income inner city kids, and later it was the low pay ($35K base with 10K benefits).
Teachers who left cited a lack of clear discipline policies, resources and supplies, and work expectations. Many were so frustrated that they quit without another job lined up. Meanwhile, students achievement was in the pits and attendance was in freefall. Enrollment dropped steadily as students looked to escape the chaos, and lower enrollment means less money form the state.
By the fall of 2013, Donald Weatherspoon had resigned his post in Muskegon Heights to move on to do some financial slashing in Pontiac. He was replaced by his brother-- Gregory Weatherspoon. A few months later, Mosaica was looking for the door on their own.
In spring of 2014, it was announced that the charter board for Muskegon Heights and Mosaic had decided to part ways. Why did Mosaica walk away from this "historic opportunity"?
"They came here to do a service for the children," Weatherspoon said. "They got the job done, but it didn't fit their financial model... The profit just simply wasn't there."
I will give Mosaic credit for one thing-- as things fell apart financially in the last year, they waived their one million dollar management fee. But they also arranged to get out of the final three years of their contract. As always, the charter commitment to education lasts only as long as the money is coming in.
What has happened this year in Muskegon Heights? Well, the academy board (the charter board that operates the system now) closed a building and reconfigured the remaining students. They have taken steps to get enrollment back up. They hired a superintendent of their own and instead of farming out the entire district function, hired an outside staffing agency to handle personnel. They started the year with most of the same personnel they finished last year with. As on objective measure, the number of news stories on the general topic of "What the hell is going on over there" has dropped dramatically.
So what are the two takeaways from the Story of Muskegon Heights? What can York schools learn about Life Under a For Profit Charter Chain?
First, Mosaica didn't know what the hell they were doing. There are vague hints of protestations that they couldn't be expected to fully staff and supply a system so quickly, but that's exactly what they said they could do. They failed to recruit an adequate staff, and then they failed to retain them. They failed to provide the teaching supplies needed for the setting, and they failed to establish an environment of order and safety in the schools. The only thing Mosaica knew how to do was crunch numbers and manage cash flow (and that they did in ways that damaged every other part of their mission).
Second, they brought no commitment, no ties, no roots, no intention of fighting to the end. They came to make money. When they couldn't make money, they left.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that making money is inherently evil, a dirty motivation from the dark side of the soul. What Mosaica and other profitable charters (which include both those explicitly for-profit and the non-profits that are pocketing profits personally) do is perfectly normal, natural and rational for a business. It is normal and correct for a business that can't make money to close up shop.
And that is why school and business do not mix. A public school is a long-term commitment that stretches across the generations. It is a promise that a community makes to its children, past, present and future. That is not a reasonable expectation for a business, but it is the only acceptable expectation for a public school system.
Muskegon Heights was an historic first, but not one that the charter biz talks about much because it's not a success story. Instead, it highlights all the reasons that handing over public schools to private business interests is a lousy idea.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Christmas Truce (Part II)
As a guest blogger over at Rick Hess's EdWeek blog (everyone still with me?), Mike McShane started last week with a call for a Christmas truce. You can find a link to that original piece here in my response to it.
McShane promised a follow-up, and he delivered. It was kind of a disappointment; if the first truce call wasn't really a call for a truce, the second is even less of one.
McShane is an edu-guy at AEI, home of conservative market-style education advocacy. You can see him walk-and-talk his way through some ideas about how to gut public education right here.
In Part I, McShane floated the idea that people on different sides of the education debate share a desire to disempower large stupid impersonal institutional approaches to education. In Part II, he's going to offer some concrete steps to turn that philosophical alignment into real world action. It's a couple of winners and a huge whiff.
1. Dig deeper than the party label
Win. "If you are interested in understanding where the real fault lines are in education debates, party ID will probably not help you." Many of us have said as much in a variety of ways. There are plenty of reformsters wearing a Democrat label, and there are plenty of Republicans who actually value the traditional institution of public education. You have to pay attention to what people actually do if you are going to identify your allies.
2. Argue on the right terms
Win. McShane argues that the debate about what works has become a hopeless mess with the toxic side-effect of testing run amok. We need to refocus on the question of who needs to know what and how we could best collect and distribute that information. I suspect McShane and i have huge disagreement about the answers to that question, but I agree that it's a better to start with that question than to continue insisting that a couple of high stakes tests will provide useful information about students, teachers, schools, programs and educational techniques that can be put to good use by teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, government agencies and parents.
3. Let old wounds heal
Win. This is really another version of #1. Being opposed to anything that Talky McBlabsalot says because you've decided he's always wrong, and besides, that son-of-a-bitch once wrote something that really hurt and pissed you off-- that's always a mistake. It is always a mistake to evaluate what somebody says before they actually say it. There are reformsters who I suspect are going to be wrong 99.9% of the time, but I will still hear them out. Ideas should rise and fall on their own value, not on the value of their source.
4. Choice might be the answer
Fail. After all this fairly well-reasoned and thoughtful writing, McShane wraps up by veering off into choice territory. In other words, the final part of McShane's argument is "The way to achieve truce is for you to recognize that my side is actually correct." His analysis of the argument over choice is fair:
But, in order to find common ground, liberals have got to internalize that many conservatives support charter schools and school vouchers because they see them as an opportunity for community organizations to get involved and create new schools in neighborhoods. They like churches and non-profits and want to empower them to help serve kids. To put it another way, in school choice they see Edmund Burke, not Gordon Gekko. It would also help if more conservatives understood that most liberals oppose school choice programs for the exact same reasons. They think that school boards are a better guarantor of community input and values than markets are. They worry that for-profit companies or even far-away non-profit entities are trying to invade communities and instill their values and their vision on children, whether families like it or not. They see charter schools or voucher systems as cold, impersonal, and destructive.
He has missed a point or two here. First, while "many conservatives" may pursue choice out of these values, many conservatives are, in fact, Gordon Gekkoing all over the ed business. The biggest players in the charter school biz are not community groups-- they are hedge fund operators. And that has led to the spread of charter and choice schools that are devoted to making money, and specifically by making money by serving only a portion of the community. There is a huge gulf between the mission of serving some students and serving all students, and public and choice systems sit on opposite sides of that gulf.
McShane offers three "safeties" to make charters more palatable and representative of the shared values he believes are there.
First, vouchers or stipends or whatever we're going to call the money that follows kids around has to be scaled to the kids. In other words, the high cost students that charters currently dump would come with more money to make them less dump-likely. Second, community groups get "first crack" at charters, before the outside operators come in. Third, schools should be free to do as they wish pedagogically; students will vote with their feet.
Why that doesn't work for me
That still doesn't close the gap for me, though I'm going to keep mulling over that sliding cost scale for students. I've written tons about this, but let me see if I can hit my main objections in short lines.
In my universe, any charter operator must contract for an extended period. Twenty, thirty, fifty years-- I'm not sure I can think of a period that would be too long. No shutting down after two years or one year or six months because it just isn't making enough money any more. Public schools don't just promise to educate every child-- they promise to be there for every child that ever lives in that community in the years to come. "We'll be right here as long as it suits us," is an unacceptable vision for a public school.
In my universe, we do not disenfranchise the taxpayers. Every choice and voucher system ever created has one thing in common-- it tells all childless taxpayers that they are no longer stakeholders in public education. That's wrong. Dead wrong, completely wrong, absolutely unjustifiable. Every citizen of this nation is a stakeholder in public education. Are parents stakeholders? Certainly. Are they the only stakeholders? Absolutely not. Charter advocates keep trying to shade this with the market-tested idea of having the money follow the child so that families can choose the educational option they prefer. That's baloney.
Christmas is over
So, I don't think we're getting a truce, exactly. Personally, I'll keep reading and listening and trying to make sense of people all over the map on the issue of public education, so maybe I've already been observing a kind of truce all along (and that may also be affected by the fact that I have no real power or ammunition other than whacking away at this blog).
I appreciate the effort, Mr. McShane, and I think you've drawn some important connections, but no truce yet.
McShane promised a follow-up, and he delivered. It was kind of a disappointment; if the first truce call wasn't really a call for a truce, the second is even less of one.
McShane is an edu-guy at AEI, home of conservative market-style education advocacy. You can see him walk-and-talk his way through some ideas about how to gut public education right here.
In Part I, McShane floated the idea that people on different sides of the education debate share a desire to disempower large stupid impersonal institutional approaches to education. In Part II, he's going to offer some concrete steps to turn that philosophical alignment into real world action. It's a couple of winners and a huge whiff.
1. Dig deeper than the party label
Win. "If you are interested in understanding where the real fault lines are in education debates, party ID will probably not help you." Many of us have said as much in a variety of ways. There are plenty of reformsters wearing a Democrat label, and there are plenty of Republicans who actually value the traditional institution of public education. You have to pay attention to what people actually do if you are going to identify your allies.
2. Argue on the right terms
Win. McShane argues that the debate about what works has become a hopeless mess with the toxic side-effect of testing run amok. We need to refocus on the question of who needs to know what and how we could best collect and distribute that information. I suspect McShane and i have huge disagreement about the answers to that question, but I agree that it's a better to start with that question than to continue insisting that a couple of high stakes tests will provide useful information about students, teachers, schools, programs and educational techniques that can be put to good use by teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, government agencies and parents.
3. Let old wounds heal
Win. This is really another version of #1. Being opposed to anything that Talky McBlabsalot says because you've decided he's always wrong, and besides, that son-of-a-bitch once wrote something that really hurt and pissed you off-- that's always a mistake. It is always a mistake to evaluate what somebody says before they actually say it. There are reformsters who I suspect are going to be wrong 99.9% of the time, but I will still hear them out. Ideas should rise and fall on their own value, not on the value of their source.
4. Choice might be the answer
Fail. After all this fairly well-reasoned and thoughtful writing, McShane wraps up by veering off into choice territory. In other words, the final part of McShane's argument is "The way to achieve truce is for you to recognize that my side is actually correct." His analysis of the argument over choice is fair:
But, in order to find common ground, liberals have got to internalize that many conservatives support charter schools and school vouchers because they see them as an opportunity for community organizations to get involved and create new schools in neighborhoods. They like churches and non-profits and want to empower them to help serve kids. To put it another way, in school choice they see Edmund Burke, not Gordon Gekko. It would also help if more conservatives understood that most liberals oppose school choice programs for the exact same reasons. They think that school boards are a better guarantor of community input and values than markets are. They worry that for-profit companies or even far-away non-profit entities are trying to invade communities and instill their values and their vision on children, whether families like it or not. They see charter schools or voucher systems as cold, impersonal, and destructive.
He has missed a point or two here. First, while "many conservatives" may pursue choice out of these values, many conservatives are, in fact, Gordon Gekkoing all over the ed business. The biggest players in the charter school biz are not community groups-- they are hedge fund operators. And that has led to the spread of charter and choice schools that are devoted to making money, and specifically by making money by serving only a portion of the community. There is a huge gulf between the mission of serving some students and serving all students, and public and choice systems sit on opposite sides of that gulf.
McShane offers three "safeties" to make charters more palatable and representative of the shared values he believes are there.
First, vouchers or stipends or whatever we're going to call the money that follows kids around has to be scaled to the kids. In other words, the high cost students that charters currently dump would come with more money to make them less dump-likely. Second, community groups get "first crack" at charters, before the outside operators come in. Third, schools should be free to do as they wish pedagogically; students will vote with their feet.
Why that doesn't work for me
That still doesn't close the gap for me, though I'm going to keep mulling over that sliding cost scale for students. I've written tons about this, but let me see if I can hit my main objections in short lines.
In my universe, any charter operator must contract for an extended period. Twenty, thirty, fifty years-- I'm not sure I can think of a period that would be too long. No shutting down after two years or one year or six months because it just isn't making enough money any more. Public schools don't just promise to educate every child-- they promise to be there for every child that ever lives in that community in the years to come. "We'll be right here as long as it suits us," is an unacceptable vision for a public school.
In my universe, we do not disenfranchise the taxpayers. Every choice and voucher system ever created has one thing in common-- it tells all childless taxpayers that they are no longer stakeholders in public education. That's wrong. Dead wrong, completely wrong, absolutely unjustifiable. Every citizen of this nation is a stakeholder in public education. Are parents stakeholders? Certainly. Are they the only stakeholders? Absolutely not. Charter advocates keep trying to shade this with the market-tested idea of having the money follow the child so that families can choose the educational option they prefer. That's baloney.
Christmas is over
So, I don't think we're getting a truce, exactly. Personally, I'll keep reading and listening and trying to make sense of people all over the map on the issue of public education, so maybe I've already been observing a kind of truce all along (and that may also be affected by the fact that I have no real power or ammunition other than whacking away at this blog).
I appreciate the effort, Mr. McShane, and I think you've drawn some important connections, but no truce yet.
More Fantasy from NYT
In yesterday's New York Times, reformster David Kirp tried to stand up for the Common Core, instead displaying just how weak the argument for the Core has become. It's a short piece, and it won't take long to spot the holes in his argument.
Our first clue of where he's headed comes from his source for the history of Common Core-- the Allie Bidwell puff piece from last February in US News which tried to argue that CCSS was a "carefully thought out educational reform." So Kirp reduces the history of the Core to the idea that in the mid-90's, "education advocates" began arguing that national standards would level the playing field for students. So in 2008, the governors and state school chiefs spearheaded a drive to create "world-class standards." This is perhaps the most stripped-down creation story of the Core yet, omitting Coleman, Gates, and imaginary teachers writing the standards. So both facts and fictions have been pared down.
Kirp also likes the old "CCSS = critical thinking" line, because nobody ever taught critical thinking before. Let me just renew my usual request for somebody, anybody, to point out the critical thinking portion of the standards. Is it right next to the singing unicorns portion?
Kirp belongs to the Blame Obama crowd, saying that administration backing of the standards. "The mishandled rollout turned a conversation about pedagogy into an ideological and partisan debate over high-stakes testing." This is baloney. The Core was created and pushed through ideological and political means. It has ideology and partisanship in its DNA. Without political gamesmanship and ideological leverage, Common Core would not even be a twinkle in someone's eye. The conversation about Common Core was never "turned into" something political and ideological-- it was political and ideological from the first moment. At no point was the push for Common Core fueled by pedagogy. At no point did the CCSS initiative involve educational experts discussing the educational or pedagogical merits of how to launch it.
Kirp also offers this: "The misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread." This is a distinction without a difference. Standards and tests are different things, but CCSS and testing were designed to be strapped together from day one. The Core are standards chosen specifically for their testability, and I don't believe that anyone pushing the Core considered doing it without high stakes testing attached for even five seconds. Advocates of the standards routinely talked about how testing would allow them to enforce the standards and drive curriculumn. Tests and the Core were meant to go hand in hand, and so they have. Without the testing, the standards are pointless bad suggestions. Without the standards, testing would be revealed as the invalid punitive crapshoot that it is. In short, there really is no misconception involved, other than the original conception of national standards and testing that would go hand in hand to control education.
Kirp goes on to catalog the backlash from conservative to lefties, and he includes acknowledgment that VAM is a baloney. But he'd like to work his way around to further indictment of the Obama administration:
The Obama administration has only itself to blame. Most Democrats expected that equity would be the top education priority, with more money going to the poorest states, better teacher recruitment, more useful training and closer attention to the needs of the surging population of immigrant kids. Instead, the administration has emphasized high-stakes “accountability” and market-driven reforms. The Education Department has invested more than $370 million to develop the new standards and exams in math, reading and writing.
He goes on to note that trying to buck the administration's priorities can get you some trouble, and he hits some highlights from Arne Duncan's Great Moments in Attacking Critics (white suburban moms, anyone?).
Kirp is correct to note that these are all stupid things the administration has done. He is incorrect to suggest that somehow these actions were the administration somehow horning in on an otherwise robust and healthy reform party. They are not. Duncan appears to get just as many marching orders from the leaders of reformsterdom as he does from Obama, and the administration has faithfully performed as leaders of the reformy movement wanted them to, adopting as policy the reform framework laid out by NGA and Achieve.
It’s no simple task to figure out what schools ought to teach and how best to teach it — how to link talented teachers with engaged students and a challenging curriculum. Turning around the great gray battleship of American public education is even harder. It requires creating new course materials, devising and field-testing new exams and, because these tests are designed to be taken online, closing the digital divide. It means retraining teachers, reorienting classrooms and explaining to anxious parents why these changes are worthwhile.
Go ahead and try to count all of the assumptions piled into that paragraph about what is "required" by public education. Kirp uses it to wind around into his finish-- that this would all be going great if the administration had just listened to the calls for a high stakes testing moratorium. Really? There was one of those during the CCSS rollout? did it happen somewhere between the unicorn choir singing "Somewhere over the rainbow" and the ballet of the dancing ferrets? Because I stepped out then, so maybe I missed it. The only call for a moratorium came last summer when panicked reformsters thought they could manage pushback on their favorite initiatives by pretending to endorse a testing pullback (but not really).
In Kirp's world, that imaginary testing moratorium at roll-out time would have reduced resistance to the Core. Now it will be a "herculean task to get standards back on track." Which gives us one last false assumption, because standards can only get "back" on track if they were ever on track to begin with, or that they have somehow left the tracks they were traveling on.
Nope. Standards got to this place of pushback and association with toxic testing because that is exactly the track they were placed on from day one. There is no right track to get "back" on because the Core were never on that right track to begin with.
But is interesting to see this minimalist stripped-down version of the CCSS narrative and argument. The reformsters are running out of tools, which will make the "herculean task" of saving the Core even harder. We can only hope.
Our first clue of where he's headed comes from his source for the history of Common Core-- the Allie Bidwell puff piece from last February in US News which tried to argue that CCSS was a "carefully thought out educational reform." So Kirp reduces the history of the Core to the idea that in the mid-90's, "education advocates" began arguing that national standards would level the playing field for students. So in 2008, the governors and state school chiefs spearheaded a drive to create "world-class standards." This is perhaps the most stripped-down creation story of the Core yet, omitting Coleman, Gates, and imaginary teachers writing the standards. So both facts and fictions have been pared down.
Kirp also likes the old "CCSS = critical thinking" line, because nobody ever taught critical thinking before. Let me just renew my usual request for somebody, anybody, to point out the critical thinking portion of the standards. Is it right next to the singing unicorns portion?
Kirp belongs to the Blame Obama crowd, saying that administration backing of the standards. "The mishandled rollout turned a conversation about pedagogy into an ideological and partisan debate over high-stakes testing." This is baloney. The Core was created and pushed through ideological and political means. It has ideology and partisanship in its DNA. Without political gamesmanship and ideological leverage, Common Core would not even be a twinkle in someone's eye. The conversation about Common Core was never "turned into" something political and ideological-- it was political and ideological from the first moment. At no point was the push for Common Core fueled by pedagogy. At no point did the CCSS initiative involve educational experts discussing the educational or pedagogical merits of how to launch it.
Kirp also offers this: "The misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread." This is a distinction without a difference. Standards and tests are different things, but CCSS and testing were designed to be strapped together from day one. The Core are standards chosen specifically for their testability, and I don't believe that anyone pushing the Core considered doing it without high stakes testing attached for even five seconds. Advocates of the standards routinely talked about how testing would allow them to enforce the standards and drive curriculumn. Tests and the Core were meant to go hand in hand, and so they have. Without the testing, the standards are pointless bad suggestions. Without the standards, testing would be revealed as the invalid punitive crapshoot that it is. In short, there really is no misconception involved, other than the original conception of national standards and testing that would go hand in hand to control education.
Kirp goes on to catalog the backlash from conservative to lefties, and he includes acknowledgment that VAM is a baloney. But he'd like to work his way around to further indictment of the Obama administration:
The Obama administration has only itself to blame. Most Democrats expected that equity would be the top education priority, with more money going to the poorest states, better teacher recruitment, more useful training and closer attention to the needs of the surging population of immigrant kids. Instead, the administration has emphasized high-stakes “accountability” and market-driven reforms. The Education Department has invested more than $370 million to develop the new standards and exams in math, reading and writing.
He goes on to note that trying to buck the administration's priorities can get you some trouble, and he hits some highlights from Arne Duncan's Great Moments in Attacking Critics (white suburban moms, anyone?).
Kirp is correct to note that these are all stupid things the administration has done. He is incorrect to suggest that somehow these actions were the administration somehow horning in on an otherwise robust and healthy reform party. They are not. Duncan appears to get just as many marching orders from the leaders of reformsterdom as he does from Obama, and the administration has faithfully performed as leaders of the reformy movement wanted them to, adopting as policy the reform framework laid out by NGA and Achieve.
It’s no simple task to figure out what schools ought to teach and how best to teach it — how to link talented teachers with engaged students and a challenging curriculum. Turning around the great gray battleship of American public education is even harder. It requires creating new course materials, devising and field-testing new exams and, because these tests are designed to be taken online, closing the digital divide. It means retraining teachers, reorienting classrooms and explaining to anxious parents why these changes are worthwhile.
Go ahead and try to count all of the assumptions piled into that paragraph about what is "required" by public education. Kirp uses it to wind around into his finish-- that this would all be going great if the administration had just listened to the calls for a high stakes testing moratorium. Really? There was one of those during the CCSS rollout? did it happen somewhere between the unicorn choir singing "Somewhere over the rainbow" and the ballet of the dancing ferrets? Because I stepped out then, so maybe I missed it. The only call for a moratorium came last summer when panicked reformsters thought they could manage pushback on their favorite initiatives by pretending to endorse a testing pullback (but not really).
In Kirp's world, that imaginary testing moratorium at roll-out time would have reduced resistance to the Core. Now it will be a "herculean task to get standards back on track." Which gives us one last false assumption, because standards can only get "back" on track if they were ever on track to begin with, or that they have somehow left the tracks they were traveling on.
Nope. Standards got to this place of pushback and association with toxic testing because that is exactly the track they were placed on from day one. There is no right track to get "back" on because the Core were never on that right track to begin with.
But is interesting to see this minimalist stripped-down version of the CCSS narrative and argument. The reformsters are running out of tools, which will make the "herculean task" of saving the Core even harder. We can only hope.
John Green on Public Education
If you teach high school, you are probably familiar with John Green, Author of Various Novellic Weepfests That Your Students Carry Around. He's the author of the highly popular Looking for Alaska and the even more popular The Fault in Our Stars. But John Green is also a high school teacher, and he and his brother are highly popular vloggers. Their Crash Course series on youtube presents just about everything (though mostly science and history-- their subject areas) in rapid-fire and engaging style.
In the midst of those videos, one finds John Green's "Open Letter to Students Returning to School," and it is worth four minutes of your life.
Green gives some simple perspective on public education's place in history, and he delivers a fine response to the eternal students complaint- "My teachers are stupid."
Yes, your teachers may be stupid. So are you. So am I. So is everyone, except Neil Degrasse Tyson. The whole pleasure of being a human being is in being stupid but learning to be less stupid together.
And then he goes on to make the big point-- school is not about you. Green addresses a point I believe is critical-- schools are for all of society. They are not, as modern charter operator marketing departments would have us believe, a service provided for parents and parents alone, but an important service provided for the entire nation, for all of society.
This video makes as good a case for public education as anyone could make in under four minutes. Perfect thing to watch before you head back to school in the new year.
Correction: I incorrectly called Green a high school teacher. That's what I get for writing before I eat my morning bagel. For my money, he's still a teacher, albeit through unconventional means. But not a public school teacher.
In the midst of those videos, one finds John Green's "Open Letter to Students Returning to School," and it is worth four minutes of your life.
Green gives some simple perspective on public education's place in history, and he delivers a fine response to the eternal students complaint- "My teachers are stupid."
Yes, your teachers may be stupid. So are you. So am I. So is everyone, except Neil Degrasse Tyson. The whole pleasure of being a human being is in being stupid but learning to be less stupid together.
And then he goes on to make the big point-- school is not about you. Green addresses a point I believe is critical-- schools are for all of society. They are not, as modern charter operator marketing departments would have us believe, a service provided for parents and parents alone, but an important service provided for the entire nation, for all of society.
This video makes as good a case for public education as anyone could make in under four minutes. Perfect thing to watch before you head back to school in the new year.
Correction: I incorrectly called Green a high school teacher. That's what I get for writing before I eat my morning bagel. For my money, he's still a teacher, albeit through unconventional means. But not a public school teacher.
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Why For Profit = Anti Student
Let me offer a simple explanation for why for-profit charters (like the one slated to take over the York PA public school system) are bad news for education.
You are leaving your child with a babysitter. You hand the babysitter ten dollars and say, "Use this to get lunch for my child. Everything you don't spend on her lunch, you get to keep."
Do you think your child is going to eat steak or baloney sandwiches?
Granted, schools are more complicated. Let's add a layer to our analogy.
You are part of a neighborhood co-op. You all put in money together to pay for babysitting for everybody's kids. Your neighbor Swell McGotrocks is in charge of the system, and Swell makes that same deal with the sitter-- only Swell stops by every day and picks up his own kid and takes her to Red Lobster for lunch.
You ask for accountability, so Swell says, "Fine. I will require the sitter to weigh the food and make sure that your child is getting at least eight ounces of food a day."
Do you think your child is getting eight ounces of steak, or eight ounces of baloney?
You would feel better if the deal were, "Here are ten dollars. Spend all of them on my child's lunch. I'll see that you're well paid, but spend all ten dollars on my child's lunch."
The anti-public school crowd is going to say, "That gives me no guarantee that the sitter won't buy ten dollars' worth of baloney and skittles." And they are correct. We will still need to keep an eye on the sitter. But with the spend-it-all-on-lunch system, we have the possibility of a good steak for my child. At the very least, we have not created a system with the strong perverse incentive to screw over my child's meal in order for the sitter to stay in business. In a for-profit charter, the students are the enemy, the obstacle to making money. The main management problem remains, "How do we keep these kids from sucking up too much of our money."
Note: It's not really any different for most modern charter non--profits, if the operators pay themselves outsize salaries, like Eva Moskowitz at $500,000+ or Deborah Kenny at Harlem Village Academy at $475,000).
You are leaving your child with a babysitter. You hand the babysitter ten dollars and say, "Use this to get lunch for my child. Everything you don't spend on her lunch, you get to keep."
Do you think your child is going to eat steak or baloney sandwiches?
Granted, schools are more complicated. Let's add a layer to our analogy.
You are part of a neighborhood co-op. You all put in money together to pay for babysitting for everybody's kids. Your neighbor Swell McGotrocks is in charge of the system, and Swell makes that same deal with the sitter-- only Swell stops by every day and picks up his own kid and takes her to Red Lobster for lunch.
You ask for accountability, so Swell says, "Fine. I will require the sitter to weigh the food and make sure that your child is getting at least eight ounces of food a day."
Do you think your child is getting eight ounces of steak, or eight ounces of baloney?
You would feel better if the deal were, "Here are ten dollars. Spend all of them on my child's lunch. I'll see that you're well paid, but spend all ten dollars on my child's lunch."
The anti-public school crowd is going to say, "That gives me no guarantee that the sitter won't buy ten dollars' worth of baloney and skittles." And they are correct. We will still need to keep an eye on the sitter. But with the spend-it-all-on-lunch system, we have the possibility of a good steak for my child. At the very least, we have not created a system with the strong perverse incentive to screw over my child's meal in order for the sitter to stay in business. In a for-profit charter, the students are the enemy, the obstacle to making money. The main management problem remains, "How do we keep these kids from sucking up too much of our money."
Note: It's not really any different for most modern charter non--profits, if the operators pay themselves outsize salaries, like Eva Moskowitz at $500,000+ or Deborah Kenny at Harlem Village Academy at $475,000).
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