“Why [states and districts] chose to have tests on top of tests on top of tests” instead of improving instruction “is beyond me”
Those words come from an NCLB architect, lawyer Sandy Kress, courtesy of a quick interview by Politico's Morning Education. It represents one more example of a special brand of clueless that we've seen again and again. Almost a year ago, NCLB co-author George Miller told EdSource the same thing-- can't imagine how NCLB could possibly have led to all this testing frenzy.
These are not dumb guys. But they are making some dumb assumptions.
Kress's comment was directed at the schools who load their students down with practice tests in preparation for the Big Standardized Test (the BS Test). Now, Kress used to work as a lobbyist for Pearson, so I'm betting just a quick look through his own memory bank would reveal to him some of the sales pitches used to convince school districts to buy the very tests he's complaining about.
But even if he had selectively forgotten all of that, he could still figure this out. Here's another quote from Politico:
Kress argues that the federal testing and accountability provisions were
designed to prod district bureaucracies into demanding more qualified
teachers, better instruction and top-notch materials. Instead, he said,
administrators took the easy way out and bought loads of practice tests
and test prep products in a frenzied rush to boost student scores.
There has to be some kind of Rule that covers this, but if not, let's write it now and call it the Kress Rule, so that Sandy can remember it.
Whenever you use brute force to require compliance with a bad proxy for your real goal, you will elicit completely different sets of behavior.
If you decide you want a woman to love you, but you decide that her saying the words will be your proxy for success, and you hold a gun to her head and demand that she say, "I love you," you would be an idiot to be sitting there later, handcuffed in the squad car, saying, "I don't understand why she took the easy way out and lied to me instead of actually falling in love with me."
Tell your thirteen-year-old child, "I expect you to take pride in your room's cleanliness and I'm going to come in there in one hour and see if everything is off the floor. If I can't see the floor, you will be grounded for a month." In an hour, you will probably see a clean floor. Would you like to make a bet about what you'll find in the closet?
There are two problems with Kress's complaint, problems that have been embedded in NCLB since Day One.
Problem one is the idea that you can prod, cajole, threaten, or punish people into agreement. Duress, at best, gets you just one thing-- compliance. And if I'm complying with you under duress, I am looking for the way to make my compliance create the least interference with my own values in particular and life in general.
Problem two is forcing compliance with a proxy that is unrelated to your actual goal. NCLB designers were sure that the BS Test would measure how well schools did all that swell other educational stuff. Schools, by their behavior, have been telling educrats for years that it's just not so.
The stakes have been high. If following the standards, getting great teachers, and using top-notch materials actually resulted in better scores on the BS Test, don't you think schools would be doing it? But schools learned quickly that only one thing reliably raises BS Test scores-- test prep. We've been at this for over a decade-- if test prep didn't work (and work best), we would have stopped doing it!
Kress uses the old, reliable weighing the pig metaphor-- but that's not really it. What we have under NCLB and RttT is a scenario where the government has announce that it's going to weigh the pig by having the pig whistle "Dixie." We could work on getting the pig's weight up, and because we care about the pig and got into the biz because we want to help pigs, we probably will. But at the end of the year, the pig's weight is going to be judged by how well it whistles that damn song and so if we want to pass that test, the pigs had better spend a little less time eating and a little more time puckering up.
I am absolutely dumbfounded that Kress finds any of this remotely mysterious. Lots of reformsters make serious mistakes because they don't understand schools or education, but this kind of baloney requires someone who doesn't understand humans. If this is how well our NCLB architects understand carbon based life forms, it's no wonder federal education policy is a terrible mess.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
What Duncan Got Wrong About Testing
With the whole world of education to talk about, Arne Duncan somehow ended up centering his Big Speech around testing, and indeed, that was picked up as the main story. So what, if anything, did the Secretary of Education get wrong about testing?
Short answer
Pretty much everything.
Long answer
First, Duncan positions assessment in the center of his education universe. He starts out by describing a large vision of education, one that is filled with innovation, meets the needs of every child, promotes equity, provides opportunity, values all subject areas, and provides every school with sufficient support and resources. And somehow considering all those aspects of a grand vision of education leads him to a Big Standardized Test. That's it.
It's like someone who describes the awesome heights and sensations of a gourmet dinner, teasing you with visions of tastes and textures, savory combinations and a palate immersed in gustatorial ecstasy and then, after all that description and anticipation, at the moment of the Big Reveal, draws back the curtain on--- a can opener.
Testing is Chef Duncan's can opener.
Teacher evaluation
After all this time, Duncan still sees VAM as viable and valid. He wants a teacher evaluation system that will "identify excellence and take into account student learning growth." He says that "good" assessments should be only one part of that picture, but he has never endorsed any method of measuring student learning growth other than a Big Standardized Test (let's just call it a BS Test for short).
Testing is still the cornerstone of Duncan's vision of teacher evaluation, despite the endless parade of debunking that VAM has received.
College Readiness
I believe parents, and teachers, and students have both the right and the absolute need to know how much progress all students are making each year towards college- and career-readiness.
It's a weird construction. Parents deserve to know how all students are progressing, or just the students they are the actual parents of?
Anyway, I guess this means that students who aren't going on to college, who are bound for trade school or the military or stay-at-home parentage don't need to take the test. Duncan also uses this argument to support yearly testing in grades 3 through 8, which again raises the question of college-bound eight-year-olds. I seriously doubt that we can identify as third grader as "on track" for college, but if we can, why not have them fill out college applications on the spot? If the BS Test has that much magical power, why not put it to use. I mean, if your third graders is already accepted to Wassamatta U, you'd have ample opportunity to start financing that college education.
Test Prep
Duncan continues to act mystified by the source of all the time wasting test prep going on.
I am absolutely convinced that we need to know how much progress students are making – but we also must do more to ensure that the tests – and time spent in preparation for them – don’t take excessive time away from actual classroom instruction. Great teaching, and not test prep, is always what best engages students, and what leads to higher achievement.
But "higher achievement" is not what the USED has thrown its weight behind; it has attached all the incentives to higher test scores. The feds have created a system in which the continued existence of school buildings and teaching careers is based on test scores. Duncan is a man who has pointed a gun at schools and says, "Get those test scores up, or else I'll shoot. But don't let the tests distract you from other things." And he still hasn't put down the gun.
A Revealing Quote
We’ll urge Congress to have states set limits on the amount of time spent on state- and district-wide standardized testing...
Yes, Arne Duncan just admitted that test prep is separate from actual education.
The usual narrative is that if we just teach our students really well and follow the standards closely, great test scores will just automatically happen. After all, the tests are supposed to be measuring educational excellence, right?
Well, no. The BS Tests measure how well students take BS Tests, and Duncan just admitted it. He didn't say, "We should make sure schools should have all the resources and tools to teach the standards well so that their scores will just automatically go up." He said that we need to stop letting the business of testing, pre-testing and test prepping take so much time away from actual education.
This shoots a hole right in his central assertion-- that the BS Tests are a measure of how well schools are educating students.
Redundant and Unnecessary
Once again Duncan argues that we need "to urge states and districts to review and streamline the tests they are giving and eliminate redundant and unnecessary tests." Does anybody know what these redundant and unnecessary tests are supposed to be. I mean, my judgment would be that the PARCC, the SBA, my state's Keystone exams, and all the various BS Tests are unnecessary and redundant, and I fully support stopping them today. I'm betting that's not what Duncan means, but since he's never teamed this talking point up with a single concrete, specific example, I don't know what he does mean.
It's not me, it's you
Again, Duncan never takes responsibility for creating a systemic culture of BS Tests focus. Here he is with a typical line--
Sometimes, educators are better at starting new things than we are at stopping things – several decades of testing ideas have sometimes been layered on top of each other in ways that are redundant and duplicative, and not helpful.
You know who didn't mandate test after test after test? You know who didn't decide that we'd better have practice tests, too, since everyone's career is riding on test results? Spoiler alert- not classroom teachers. Not even "educators." I believe the correct answer is "government bureaucrats."
Parents are morons
It wouldn't be a Duncan speech about testing without the presumption that schools are liars and parents are dopes.
Will we work together to ensure every parent’s right to know every year how much progress her child is making in school?
Because only with the intervention and oversight of the federal government can parents have a clue about how their children are doing in school. And only a federally-mandated BS Test can give them a picture of their child's education.
Irony overload
Later in the speech, Duncan suggests that "maybe our only hope is absolute honesty and transparency." It is a great line, and one that I absolutely agree with.
And yet, like most of Duncan's prettiest rhetoric, it's not reflected in any policy that he actually pursues. Doubling down on testing without considering its damaging effects and its utter failure to measure anything it claims to measure-- this is not honest or transparent. The continued investing of BS Tests with powers they don't have and effects they cannot achieve is neither honest nor transparent. The absolute refusal to hear opposing viewpoints is neither honest nor transparent.
Duncan makes much noise about the need to supply quality education to the poor, to minorities, to students anywhere in the country who are not getting the full benefit of public education. He hears the cries for education and equity and justice and having heard them, he is sending... standardized tests (well, and charter schools, for some of those students, anyway).
Regardless of your diagnosis of US educational ills, I don't know how you arrive at the prescription, "We need more Big Standardized Tests driving all major decisions from the federal level." Particularly after we've had a few years to see just how poorly how that actually works. Duncan's speech includes an impassioned plea not to turn back the clock, not to return to a failed past. What he either can't or won't see is that his devotion to a failed test-based education policy is just such a retrograde response to education concerns.
The Big Standardized Test can now takes its place in the gallery of failed educational policies of the past. If Duncan really wanted to move forward, he would leave BS Testing in the past where it belongs.
Short answer
Pretty much everything.
Long answer
First, Duncan positions assessment in the center of his education universe. He starts out by describing a large vision of education, one that is filled with innovation, meets the needs of every child, promotes equity, provides opportunity, values all subject areas, and provides every school with sufficient support and resources. And somehow considering all those aspects of a grand vision of education leads him to a Big Standardized Test. That's it.
It's like someone who describes the awesome heights and sensations of a gourmet dinner, teasing you with visions of tastes and textures, savory combinations and a palate immersed in gustatorial ecstasy and then, after all that description and anticipation, at the moment of the Big Reveal, draws back the curtain on--- a can opener.
Testing is Chef Duncan's can opener.
Teacher evaluation
After all this time, Duncan still sees VAM as viable and valid. He wants a teacher evaluation system that will "identify excellence and take into account student learning growth." He says that "good" assessments should be only one part of that picture, but he has never endorsed any method of measuring student learning growth other than a Big Standardized Test (let's just call it a BS Test for short).
Testing is still the cornerstone of Duncan's vision of teacher evaluation, despite the endless parade of debunking that VAM has received.
College Readiness
I believe parents, and teachers, and students have both the right and the absolute need to know how much progress all students are making each year towards college- and career-readiness.
It's a weird construction. Parents deserve to know how all students are progressing, or just the students they are the actual parents of?
Anyway, I guess this means that students who aren't going on to college, who are bound for trade school or the military or stay-at-home parentage don't need to take the test. Duncan also uses this argument to support yearly testing in grades 3 through 8, which again raises the question of college-bound eight-year-olds. I seriously doubt that we can identify as third grader as "on track" for college, but if we can, why not have them fill out college applications on the spot? If the BS Test has that much magical power, why not put it to use. I mean, if your third graders is already accepted to Wassamatta U, you'd have ample opportunity to start financing that college education.
Test Prep
Duncan continues to act mystified by the source of all the time wasting test prep going on.
I am absolutely convinced that we need to know how much progress students are making – but we also must do more to ensure that the tests – and time spent in preparation for them – don’t take excessive time away from actual classroom instruction. Great teaching, and not test prep, is always what best engages students, and what leads to higher achievement.
But "higher achievement" is not what the USED has thrown its weight behind; it has attached all the incentives to higher test scores. The feds have created a system in which the continued existence of school buildings and teaching careers is based on test scores. Duncan is a man who has pointed a gun at schools and says, "Get those test scores up, or else I'll shoot. But don't let the tests distract you from other things." And he still hasn't put down the gun.
A Revealing Quote
We’ll urge Congress to have states set limits on the amount of time spent on state- and district-wide standardized testing...
Yes, Arne Duncan just admitted that test prep is separate from actual education.
The usual narrative is that if we just teach our students really well and follow the standards closely, great test scores will just automatically happen. After all, the tests are supposed to be measuring educational excellence, right?
Well, no. The BS Tests measure how well students take BS Tests, and Duncan just admitted it. He didn't say, "We should make sure schools should have all the resources and tools to teach the standards well so that their scores will just automatically go up." He said that we need to stop letting the business of testing, pre-testing and test prepping take so much time away from actual education.
This shoots a hole right in his central assertion-- that the BS Tests are a measure of how well schools are educating students.
Redundant and Unnecessary
Once again Duncan argues that we need "to urge states and districts to review and streamline the tests they are giving and eliminate redundant and unnecessary tests." Does anybody know what these redundant and unnecessary tests are supposed to be. I mean, my judgment would be that the PARCC, the SBA, my state's Keystone exams, and all the various BS Tests are unnecessary and redundant, and I fully support stopping them today. I'm betting that's not what Duncan means, but since he's never teamed this talking point up with a single concrete, specific example, I don't know what he does mean.
It's not me, it's you
Again, Duncan never takes responsibility for creating a systemic culture of BS Tests focus. Here he is with a typical line--
Sometimes, educators are better at starting new things than we are at stopping things – several decades of testing ideas have sometimes been layered on top of each other in ways that are redundant and duplicative, and not helpful.
You know who didn't mandate test after test after test? You know who didn't decide that we'd better have practice tests, too, since everyone's career is riding on test results? Spoiler alert- not classroom teachers. Not even "educators." I believe the correct answer is "government bureaucrats."
Parents are morons
It wouldn't be a Duncan speech about testing without the presumption that schools are liars and parents are dopes.
Will we work together to ensure every parent’s right to know every year how much progress her child is making in school?
Because only with the intervention and oversight of the federal government can parents have a clue about how their children are doing in school. And only a federally-mandated BS Test can give them a picture of their child's education.
Irony overload
Later in the speech, Duncan suggests that "maybe our only hope is absolute honesty and transparency." It is a great line, and one that I absolutely agree with.
And yet, like most of Duncan's prettiest rhetoric, it's not reflected in any policy that he actually pursues. Doubling down on testing without considering its damaging effects and its utter failure to measure anything it claims to measure-- this is not honest or transparent. The continued investing of BS Tests with powers they don't have and effects they cannot achieve is neither honest nor transparent. The absolute refusal to hear opposing viewpoints is neither honest nor transparent.
Duncan makes much noise about the need to supply quality education to the poor, to minorities, to students anywhere in the country who are not getting the full benefit of public education. He hears the cries for education and equity and justice and having heard them, he is sending... standardized tests (well, and charter schools, for some of those students, anyway).
Regardless of your diagnosis of US educational ills, I don't know how you arrive at the prescription, "We need more Big Standardized Tests driving all major decisions from the federal level." Particularly after we've had a few years to see just how poorly how that actually works. Duncan's speech includes an impassioned plea not to turn back the clock, not to return to a failed past. What he either can't or won't see is that his devotion to a failed test-based education policy is just such a retrograde response to education concerns.
The Big Standardized Test can now takes its place in the gallery of failed educational policies of the past. If Duncan really wanted to move forward, he would leave BS Testing in the past where it belongs.
Ten Moments in Duncan's ESEA Speech
Much will be written about Arne Duncan's January 12 speech about ESEA. I'm not going to attempt any big analysis (for reasons I'll get to), but I can't pass up a chance to register some quick impressions.
Opening with a shout out to Kaya Henderson, chancellor of DC schools. Just in case you're still wondering whether Arne is fully aligned with reformster interests or not.
Duncan throws in the LBJ story of taking a break from college to teach in a tiny underfunded elementary school. This means, I guess, that LBJ was actually the first Teach For America volunteer. So that's some historical perspective.
*********************************************************
Duncan uses LBJ's story to set up a black-and-white choice on ESEA rewrite-- Congress faces the choice LBJ faced. "One path continues to move us towards that life-transforming promise of equity; the other walks away from it." Because it's that kind of all-or-nothing thinking that has always made American government super-effective. Either that or Duncan's opening with a bid that he doesn't even believe himself. Either way, not an auspicious beginning to the political wrangling that is coming.
**********************************************************
Duncan can still talk pretty at times.
What we, as parents, want for our kids is an education that isn’t just about knowledge – it’s about those moments of excitement that we hear about at dinner at the end of the day, about creativity and wonder and curiosity.
Fundamentally, we want our kids to have wonderful choices in their lives.
But after so many years of hearing meaningless mouth noises, I still don't know if Duncan is a cynical liar or truly doesn't grasp the disconnect between the word salad he serves up and the policies that he pursues. I mean, how do you parse this-- "We want our kids to have wonderful choices, which is why we must subject them all to one-size-fits-all programs and testing that only measures one narrow sliver of the great breadth of human knowledge and achievement"?
**********************************************************
The speech hits me as confused. It's the Elementary and Secondary act, but Duncan wants to talk pre-school. We are making very real progress on a list of great achievements (one or two of which are actually true), but "everyone in this room knows we are not even close." And Duncan can't decide whether he thinks NCLB is a terrible mess or a wonderful achievement.
He has a long list of things he believes, and again, they are a very pretty list in some places ("every single child is entitled to an education that sets her up for success in careers, college and life") and the same old baloney in other places (states should choose high standards "as they always have").
**********************************************************
Duncan offers a new, extraordinarily limited rationale for The Big Standardized Test. Students need to take a test so they know if they're ready for college, because too many are getting to college and discovering that they aren't, and that's sad.
So congratulations, future tradespersons and stay-at-home parents! You don't need to take the Big Standardized Test at all! Woo hoo!
********************************************************
Man. Duncan is so full of baloney on testing that it will take a whole separate post just to deal with it. Incredibly, pretty much nothing that he says about testing here is 1) connected to reality or 2) not transparently crap. It's an impressive when a major government official can be so thoroughly and relentlessly wrong.
**********************************************************
Duncan is happy to report that everybody is a fan of charter schools. Great. Nice to know that there's bipartisan support for privateers getting rich off of public tax dollars.
**********************************************************
Duncan makes an impassioned pleas-- well, a string of questions, anyway (some intern really loves him some parallel structure)-- for working together, which hints at his biggest problem in this speech.
********************************************************
Man. The writing bot must have been tired after a while, because after many pretty sentences, Duncan drops this clunker into the mix:
This country can’t afford to replace “the fierce urgency of now” with the soft bigotry of “It’s somehow optional.”
If you're going to make an impassioned plea for "the federal government should totally tell the states what to do without allowing room for argument, dissent or difference," you're going to need a way better sentence than that one.
**********************************************************
Duncan reminds us that turning back the clock would be Very Bad, because back in the day things were Terrible. So let's all work together to do what Duncan wants us to.
Which again brings us to the central problem of Duncan's speech. Nobody cares.
Seriously. Is there a Republican anywhere in DC who thinks that he really needs to sit down and talk turkey with Duncan? Is there anybody of any part in any place in country who thinks of Duncan as an important leader in the field of education? If Obama is a lame duck, Duncan is plucked and stuffed and ready to serve.
Opening with a shout out to Kaya Henderson, chancellor of DC schools. Just in case you're still wondering whether Arne is fully aligned with reformster interests or not.
Duncan throws in the LBJ story of taking a break from college to teach in a tiny underfunded elementary school. This means, I guess, that LBJ was actually the first Teach For America volunteer. So that's some historical perspective.
*********************************************************
Duncan uses LBJ's story to set up a black-and-white choice on ESEA rewrite-- Congress faces the choice LBJ faced. "One path continues to move us towards that life-transforming promise of equity; the other walks away from it." Because it's that kind of all-or-nothing thinking that has always made American government super-effective. Either that or Duncan's opening with a bid that he doesn't even believe himself. Either way, not an auspicious beginning to the political wrangling that is coming.
**********************************************************
Duncan can still talk pretty at times.
What we, as parents, want for our kids is an education that isn’t just about knowledge – it’s about those moments of excitement that we hear about at dinner at the end of the day, about creativity and wonder and curiosity.
Fundamentally, we want our kids to have wonderful choices in their lives.
But after so many years of hearing meaningless mouth noises, I still don't know if Duncan is a cynical liar or truly doesn't grasp the disconnect between the word salad he serves up and the policies that he pursues. I mean, how do you parse this-- "We want our kids to have wonderful choices, which is why we must subject them all to one-size-fits-all programs and testing that only measures one narrow sliver of the great breadth of human knowledge and achievement"?
**********************************************************
The speech hits me as confused. It's the Elementary and Secondary act, but Duncan wants to talk pre-school. We are making very real progress on a list of great achievements (one or two of which are actually true), but "everyone in this room knows we are not even close." And Duncan can't decide whether he thinks NCLB is a terrible mess or a wonderful achievement.
He has a long list of things he believes, and again, they are a very pretty list in some places ("every single child is entitled to an education that sets her up for success in careers, college and life") and the same old baloney in other places (states should choose high standards "as they always have").
**********************************************************
Duncan offers a new, extraordinarily limited rationale for The Big Standardized Test. Students need to take a test so they know if they're ready for college, because too many are getting to college and discovering that they aren't, and that's sad.
So congratulations, future tradespersons and stay-at-home parents! You don't need to take the Big Standardized Test at all! Woo hoo!
********************************************************
Man. Duncan is so full of baloney on testing that it will take a whole separate post just to deal with it. Incredibly, pretty much nothing that he says about testing here is 1) connected to reality or 2) not transparently crap. It's an impressive when a major government official can be so thoroughly and relentlessly wrong.
**********************************************************
Duncan is happy to report that everybody is a fan of charter schools. Great. Nice to know that there's bipartisan support for privateers getting rich off of public tax dollars.
**********************************************************
Duncan makes an impassioned pleas-- well, a string of questions, anyway (some intern really loves him some parallel structure)-- for working together, which hints at his biggest problem in this speech.
********************************************************
Man. The writing bot must have been tired after a while, because after many pretty sentences, Duncan drops this clunker into the mix:
This country can’t afford to replace “the fierce urgency of now” with the soft bigotry of “It’s somehow optional.”
If you're going to make an impassioned plea for "the federal government should totally tell the states what to do without allowing room for argument, dissent or difference," you're going to need a way better sentence than that one.
**********************************************************
Duncan reminds us that turning back the clock would be Very Bad, because back in the day things were Terrible. So let's all work together to do what Duncan wants us to.
Which again brings us to the central problem of Duncan's speech. Nobody cares.
Seriously. Is there a Republican anywhere in DC who thinks that he really needs to sit down and talk turkey with Duncan? Is there anybody of any part in any place in country who thinks of Duncan as an important leader in the field of education? If Obama is a lame duck, Duncan is plucked and stuffed and ready to serve.
York Catches a Break
The school board of York, PA, has a chance to convince a court that it is not just a useless appendage. Monday Judge Stephen Linebaugh, the same judge who ruled that York schools should go into receivership, ruled that they get a chance to appeal that action.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had argued that since the previous ruling stripped the board of all power (except the power to tax), they did not have the power to appeal being stripped of their power. The stakes are high because the receiver appointed by the state has already made it clear that his plan is to hand York schools, lock, stock and barrel, to for-profit charter operator Charter Schools USA.
The appeal process will take a while. Specifically, it will take more than enough time for all education-related eyes in the state to turn toward Harrisburg and say," Well......?"
New governors don't always get a chance to be tested right out of the gate, but that's where Tom Wolf finds himself now. Wolf has been pretty quiet on the subject, and only spoke up in opposition when 1) it looked like some teacher support would help his electoral chances and 2) reporter Colleen Kennedy called him out. From Wolf's perspective, this is a big fraught mess-- his home town, his old friends, his new alliances, and his education stance as governor are all tied to this mess.
Come January 20th, Wolf's office could put the kibosh on this state sponsored yard sale of local school power and property, or he could do nothing, or he could put corporate interests ahead of local ones. He has no choice but to show us what kind of education governor he's going to be. Unfortunately, the final line of pennlive's coverage of the story yesterday is this:
A Wolf spokesman did not respond to messages seeking comment on the governor's plans.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had argued that since the previous ruling stripped the board of all power (except the power to tax), they did not have the power to appeal being stripped of their power. The stakes are high because the receiver appointed by the state has already made it clear that his plan is to hand York schools, lock, stock and barrel, to for-profit charter operator Charter Schools USA.
The appeal process will take a while. Specifically, it will take more than enough time for all education-related eyes in the state to turn toward Harrisburg and say," Well......?"
New governors don't always get a chance to be tested right out of the gate, but that's where Tom Wolf finds himself now. Wolf has been pretty quiet on the subject, and only spoke up in opposition when 1) it looked like some teacher support would help his electoral chances and 2) reporter Colleen Kennedy called him out. From Wolf's perspective, this is a big fraught mess-- his home town, his old friends, his new alliances, and his education stance as governor are all tied to this mess.
Come January 20th, Wolf's office could put the kibosh on this state sponsored yard sale of local school power and property, or he could do nothing, or he could put corporate interests ahead of local ones. He has no choice but to show us what kind of education governor he's going to be. Unfortunately, the final line of pennlive's coverage of the story yesterday is this:
A Wolf spokesman did not respond to messages seeking comment on the governor's plans.
Monday, January 12, 2015
Testing as Target Acquisition
One of the areas shaping up as a key part of the Big Fight over ESEA/NCLB rewriting is the issue of testing, an aspect of modern ed reformsterism that the public mostly hates, but which various advocacy groups love.
The AFT issued its own re-authorization wish list, which included praise for the NCLB innovation of disagregating data by sub-groups. They call for testing "that provides parents and communities with real evidence of how their children are learning, and that holds the system accountable for the kids we know the system is not serving well." (My emphasis).
A fairly distinguished list of twenty civil rights groups, including the ACLU, Easter Seals, NAACP, and the United Negro College Fund issued a call yesterday for the feds to stay firmly entrenched in the education biz. That included
Annual, statewide assessments for all students (in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school) that are aligned with, and measure each student’s progress toward meeting, the state’s college and career-ready standards, and
Are valid and reliable measures of student progress and meet other requirements now in Sec. 1111(b)(3) of Title I.[i]
I can understand the appeal here. And for further understanding, I can recommend this excerpt from Jesse Hagopian's excellent book More Than a Score. The Big Standardized Test can look fair (everyone takes it). But it's not.
I also get that since NCLB's call for disaggregation, it has been much harder for states and districts to simply hide their low-income, minority, low-achieving students. The lousy scores of low-income students have been a way to target our problem areas.
But target it for what? X may mark the spot, but what exactly is the big X going to attract? Advocates seem to believe that the target will draw assistance. but that's not what everyone is thinking. You can see it subtly in the ESEA advice from the Business Roundtable, who are also huge testing fans.
The Business Roundtable says, "There has been talk that some members will use the ESEA reauthorization to push for an end to the federal requirement for annual testing for reading and math. This is something the business community cannot get behind." They further assert that "supporting effective teachers and school leaders goes hand-in-hand with testing..." Of course, they also say that tests must be internationally benchmarked, so it's possible they don't know what they're talking about.
But the problem is even more clear in this post from Rachel Burger at The Hill last week. "America Is Secretly Number One" starts out sounding like a great rebuttal to all the Chicken Littles who declare, "The scores are falling! The scores are falling!" and despair of the US ever reigning supreme over the test-taking giants like Shanghai and Estonia. But Burger quickly heads somewhere else. She establishes that our poor schools are the ones having trouble, and then...
But, contrary to what many experts say, the solution is not simply pouring more money into failing schools. The more fundamental problem is that American students are set up to underachieve because they must attend these failing schools. Most students do not have an option not to.
She then goes on to make a more baldfaced version of the privatizer argument-- low test scores help us identify the schools that are ripe for takeover.
So (to grossly oversimplify) we have one group of advocates saying, "We must slap loud test-based labels on these high-needs schools so that they can be easily spotted," while another group rubs their hands together and smiles, "Yes, please, by all means-- label those schools." We have farmyard advocates saying, "Chickens must not be ignored," and demanding big neon signs marking the henhouse, while the wolves salivate and say, "Yes, you should definitely do that." We have people who believe they are targeting schools for assistance when they are actually targeting those schools for destruction.
We could also say that to some activists, the test results are like flares being sent up from otherwise-ignored lifeboats lost at sea. And (this absolutely must be said) too many districts have a long, sad, always inexcusable and often racist history of ignoring and underserving large portions of their student population for no reason other than those students were a little too poor or a little too not-white. Nobody can make the argument that districts like Philly or Detroit were doing a fantastic job of looking out for their poor and minority students before reformsters messed everything up, and everything would be great again if we just went back to those days.
If charters did, in fact, have a proven plan to go into "failing" schools and rescue all the students, I would be an outspoken supporter of choice-charter-voucher solutions for these areas. I might even support the continued use of standardized tests as a way of targeting the areas of need. But that's not what's happening. Here are my biggest problems with this targeting by test:
1) Sending up the flare from the lifeboats isn't bringing rescue; it's attracting sharks. Charters do not rescue all students; they only rescue some of them (and in the process often become instruments of segregation). They are not closing the achievement gap. They are not serving the entire community. They are not making long-term commitments. They are simply cashing in. And "failing schools" have always been the foot-in-the-door of choice systems (We must rescue students from these failing schools.)
2) Tests are designed for failure. They correlate directly to family income, not any true measure of academic ability or achievement. They are almost unnecessary-- I'll bet that anybody well-versed in testing could predict a school's scores before the test was even administered, based simply on demographic information. These tests are useful in generating targeting data for poor schools, but not for helping diagnose and deal with the real problems of the school.
3) The testing process is in and of itself toxic and corrosive to education. The very business of preparing for, taking, and responding to the testing regimen comes with enormous costs in terms of time, resources, educational opportunities lost, and wear and tear on the students themselves.
Even if the test results were actually targeting schools for assistance, we'd still need to ask if that was even worth the cost.
Arguing that annual standardized testing must be continued in order to keep low-income and minority students from disappearing into the data mix is like arguing that we should keep feeding babies cake for breakfast, because cake is made with eggs, and the babies need to get some protein. You may have a real problem, and you may really need to solve it, but this is not an actual solution. In fact, not only is it not an actual solution, but it comes with side-effects so bad that you're creating more problems to go with the original problem that you're not solving.
If we want to find and help the schools that need to do a better job of serving their students and their communities, there have to be better ways than subjecting students to bad tests in order to generate bad data to be used by politicians and privateers so that resources can be stripped from the community in the name of solutions that aren't really solutions at all.
We can do better, and we certainly don't need to waste money by throwing it a testing corporations in order to do it. Let's stop pretending that The Big Standardized Test is the key to anything other than power and riches for corporate interests, and work on real solutions, instead.
Schneider on Evaluation
Regular readers here know that I'm a huge fan of Mercedes Schneider, whose attention to detail, relentless research skills, and sharply analytical mind are an inspiration. Also, she once called me the Erma Bombeck of education bloggers, so I kind of love her for that, too.
I read her blog regularly and repeatedly, and while all of it is indispensible, a recent post of hers about Doug Harris and the promotion of VAM contains these pure gold paragraphs about teacher evaluation. I'm copying them out here mostly so that I can find them whenever I want to, but you should read them and take them to heart, to.
Point systems for “grading” the teacher-student (and school-teacher-student) dynamic will always fall short because the complex nature of that dynamic defies quantifying. If test-loving reformers insist upon imposing high-stakes quantification onto schools and teachers, it will backfire, a system begging to be corrupted by those fighting to survive it.
It is not that I cannot be evaluated as a teacher. It’s just that such evaluation is rooted a complex subjectivity that is best understood by those who are familiar with my reality. This should be true of the administrators at one’s school, and I am fortunate to state that it is true in my case.
There are no numbers that sufficiently capture my work with my students. I know this. Yes, I am caught in a system that wants to impose a numeric values on my teaching. My “value” to my students cannot be quantified, nor can my school’s value to my students, no matter what the Harrises of this world might suggest in commissioned reports.
I read her blog regularly and repeatedly, and while all of it is indispensible, a recent post of hers about Doug Harris and the promotion of VAM contains these pure gold paragraphs about teacher evaluation. I'm copying them out here mostly so that I can find them whenever I want to, but you should read them and take them to heart, to.
Point systems for “grading” the teacher-student (and school-teacher-student) dynamic will always fall short because the complex nature of that dynamic defies quantifying. If test-loving reformers insist upon imposing high-stakes quantification onto schools and teachers, it will backfire, a system begging to be corrupted by those fighting to survive it.
It is not that I cannot be evaluated as a teacher. It’s just that such evaluation is rooted a complex subjectivity that is best understood by those who are familiar with my reality. This should be true of the administrators at one’s school, and I am fortunate to state that it is true in my case.
There are no numbers that sufficiently capture my work with my students. I know this. Yes, I am caught in a system that wants to impose a numeric values on my teaching. My “value” to my students cannot be quantified, nor can my school’s value to my students, no matter what the Harrises of this world might suggest in commissioned reports.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Parents Demanding Testing
Given the rhetoric in the world of education, there are some things that I would expect to see, and yet don't. For example:
The Chetty Follow-up
Chetty et al are the source of the infamous research asserting that a good elementary teacher will results in an extra coupe of hundred thousand lifetime dollars for the students in their classroom.
Where are the follow-up and confirming studies on this? After all-- all we need are a pair of identical classrooms with non-identical teachers teaching from the same population. Heck, in any given year my own department has two or three of us are teaching randomly distributed students on the same track. All you'd have to do is follow them on through life.
In fact, I would bet that where the Chetty effect is in play, it's the stuff of local legend. For years people have been buzzing about how Mr. McStinkface and Ms. O'Awesomesauce teach the same classes with the same basic sets of kids, but her students all grow up to be successful, comfortably wealthy middle class folks and his students all grow up to a life of minimum wage jobs and food stamps.
I can't think of anything that would more clearly confirm the conclusions and implications of Chetty's research. So where is that report?
Parents Demanding Testing
To listen to testing advocates speak, one would think that our nation is filled with parents desperate for some clue about how their children and their schools are doing.
So surely, somewhere, there is a Parents Demand Tests group. Somewhere there must be a group of parents who have banded together to demand that schools give standardized tests and release the results, so that at last they know the truth.
"I just don't know," says some unhappy Mom somewhere in America. "I have no idea if Chris is learning to read or not. If only I had some standardized test results to look at."
"Dammit," growls some angry Dad somewhere in America. "I've had it with that school. Tomorrow I'm going down there to the principal's office to demand that Pat get a standardized test so we know if the kid can add and subtract or not."
But I can't find any such group on Facebook. Googling "Parents demanding testing" just gets me a bunch of articles about parents who are demanding tests of asbestos, air quality, other safety issues.
This is a striking gap. After all, we have plenty of robust-ish astro-turf groups to convince us that parents are, for example, deeply incensed over tenure-related policy. We are shown that parents really, really want tests to be steeped in VAM sauce and lit afire, so that terrible teachers can be roasted atop them.
And yet, as the crowds increasingly call for the standardized tests to be tossed out with last week's newspapers, it's chirping crickets from parent-land. Not CCSSO, not Arne Duncan, not any of the test-loving advocates has punctuated their pro-test protestations with a moment of, "And I'd like you to meet Mrs. Agnes McAveragehuman who will now tell you in her own words why she thinks lots of standardized testing is just totes swell."
But the reformsters must know plenty of people like Agnes. After all, they keep insisting that we need the tests or else people will not know how well students are learning, what schools are teaching, what progress is being made. Why, just Friday, there was Charles Barone, policy director for Democrats for Education Reform (which I am going to call DERP because somebody ought to) in the Washington Post opining, "I don’t know how else you gauge how students are progressing in reading and in math without some sort of test." Now maybe he imagines that there's a danger of schools in which no tests are being given whatsoever, but my own use of context clues leads me to believe that he is speaking of standardized testing.
When Arne Duncan spoke up to pretend to join the CCSSO initiative to pretend to roll back testing, he made his case for standardized testing by saying, "Parents have a right to know how much their children are learning," implying that only a standardized test could provide that answer.
It is possible that Arne's theory is that parents think they know what's going on with their school and their own children, but are actually deluded and misled (as witnessed in his classic genius quote from late 2013). But by now, over a year later, don't you think we'd have some converts, some parents saying, "Thank you, Mr. Duncan. Now that I have seen some test results, the scales have fallen from my eyes and I realize that merely living with and raising this tiny human has blinded me to a truth that only a standardized test could reveal. Don't let them take those tests away, sir!! I need them to tell me who my child is!" And yet, they don't seem to have appeared.
Maybe these parents are simply disorganized. Maybe they're uniformly shy. Maybe they use some of those underground web thingies so they can operate with cyberninja-like stealth. Or maybe they are raising snipes on a special farm where the ranch-hands ride unicorns and the pumps run on cold fusion. Maybe this world where parents are clamoring for standardized tests to reveal the truth about their children is a world that doesn't actually exist.
The Chetty Follow-up
Chetty et al are the source of the infamous research asserting that a good elementary teacher will results in an extra coupe of hundred thousand lifetime dollars for the students in their classroom.
Where are the follow-up and confirming studies on this? After all-- all we need are a pair of identical classrooms with non-identical teachers teaching from the same population. Heck, in any given year my own department has two or three of us are teaching randomly distributed students on the same track. All you'd have to do is follow them on through life.
In fact, I would bet that where the Chetty effect is in play, it's the stuff of local legend. For years people have been buzzing about how Mr. McStinkface and Ms. O'Awesomesauce teach the same classes with the same basic sets of kids, but her students all grow up to be successful, comfortably wealthy middle class folks and his students all grow up to a life of minimum wage jobs and food stamps.
I can't think of anything that would more clearly confirm the conclusions and implications of Chetty's research. So where is that report?
Parents Demanding Testing
To listen to testing advocates speak, one would think that our nation is filled with parents desperate for some clue about how their children and their schools are doing.
So surely, somewhere, there is a Parents Demand Tests group. Somewhere there must be a group of parents who have banded together to demand that schools give standardized tests and release the results, so that at last they know the truth.
"I just don't know," says some unhappy Mom somewhere in America. "I have no idea if Chris is learning to read or not. If only I had some standardized test results to look at."
"Dammit," growls some angry Dad somewhere in America. "I've had it with that school. Tomorrow I'm going down there to the principal's office to demand that Pat get a standardized test so we know if the kid can add and subtract or not."
But I can't find any such group on Facebook. Googling "Parents demanding testing" just gets me a bunch of articles about parents who are demanding tests of asbestos, air quality, other safety issues.
This is a striking gap. After all, we have plenty of robust-ish astro-turf groups to convince us that parents are, for example, deeply incensed over tenure-related policy. We are shown that parents really, really want tests to be steeped in VAM sauce and lit afire, so that terrible teachers can be roasted atop them.
And yet, as the crowds increasingly call for the standardized tests to be tossed out with last week's newspapers, it's chirping crickets from parent-land. Not CCSSO, not Arne Duncan, not any of the test-loving advocates has punctuated their pro-test protestations with a moment of, "And I'd like you to meet Mrs. Agnes McAveragehuman who will now tell you in her own words why she thinks lots of standardized testing is just totes swell."
But the reformsters must know plenty of people like Agnes. After all, they keep insisting that we need the tests or else people will not know how well students are learning, what schools are teaching, what progress is being made. Why, just Friday, there was Charles Barone, policy director for Democrats for Education Reform (which I am going to call DERP because somebody ought to) in the Washington Post opining, "I don’t know how else you gauge how students are progressing in reading and in math without some sort of test." Now maybe he imagines that there's a danger of schools in which no tests are being given whatsoever, but my own use of context clues leads me to believe that he is speaking of standardized testing.
When Arne Duncan spoke up to pretend to join the CCSSO initiative to pretend to roll back testing, he made his case for standardized testing by saying, "Parents have a right to know how much their children are learning," implying that only a standardized test could provide that answer.
It is possible that Arne's theory is that parents think they know what's going on with their school and their own children, but are actually deluded and misled (as witnessed in his classic genius quote from late 2013). But by now, over a year later, don't you think we'd have some converts, some parents saying, "Thank you, Mr. Duncan. Now that I have seen some test results, the scales have fallen from my eyes and I realize that merely living with and raising this tiny human has blinded me to a truth that only a standardized test could reveal. Don't let them take those tests away, sir!! I need them to tell me who my child is!" And yet, they don't seem to have appeared.
Maybe these parents are simply disorganized. Maybe they're uniformly shy. Maybe they use some of those underground web thingies so they can operate with cyberninja-like stealth. Or maybe they are raising snipes on a special farm where the ranch-hands ride unicorns and the pumps run on cold fusion. Maybe this world where parents are clamoring for standardized tests to reveal the truth about their children is a world that doesn't actually exist.
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