Last week the Washington Post editorial board came out in favor of No Child Left Behind, headlining it as a moral imperative and inadvertently highlighting one of the problems with journalism these days.
They open with Duncan's story about the illiterate black "B" student. And they follow with this paragraph about the bad old, pre-NCLB days:
In those years, no one was held accountable for student achievement, and schools routinely ignored and concealed the problems of struggling students, especially poor black and Hispanic students. Returning to that way of operating should be unthinkable, but that is unquestionably what will happen if testing and accountability requirements are gutted from federal law.
So once again we get the notion that the only possible way to root out schools that systematically rob poor and minority students of their education, the only possible way that such a situation can be brought to light, is through a standardized test. This is lazy enough reasoning from other folks, but from a major metropolitan newspaper, it's worse. Because you know what else could root out any problems in poor schools?
Journalists.
There are huge problems in our poor urban schools, problems with unsafe conditions and broken down buildings and lacks of resources and a hundred other issues that we would know more about if newspapers only bothered to cover poor neighborhoods with the same fervor that they follow the boardrooms and cocktail part circuit.
The Washington Post is worried that educational failures will be "swept under the rug." A simple antidote that a major newspaper could offer might be to less time talking to chancellors and other members of the power elite and more time talking to the teachers, students, parents and community members who have first-hand knowledge of what's happening in those under-funded, neglected schools.
Hell, instead of simply repeating Duncan's story, some journalist could have done the legwork to find out what has since happened to that student.
Is the Washington Post saying that it wants another government report to simplify the education beat. Is some editor really saying, "We need the government to send us over some numbers so nobody actually has to go into those neighborhoods and visit the actual schools." I'm trying to imagine Woodward and Bernstein calling up the Nixon White House to say, "Yeah, just send us over your thoughts about that Watergate thing and we'll just print 'em." Running tests scores is not reporting on the state of schools, and being a consistent cheerleader for an embattled school chancellor instead of doing some actual investigation and reporting is as huge an example of under-rug sweepage as you'll ever find.
Let me be clear-- schools should be accountable for what they do with tax dollars, and schools should not be allowed to systematically rob any students of their educational opportunities. But for a major newspaper to claim that standardized testing is the answer while ignoring their own role and responsibility for investigation and informing of the public is baloney.
The editorial goes on to offer some other slices of baloney as well. The Post claims that NCLB is threatened by an "unholy alliance" of anti-fed conservatives and teachers unions (because they don't want to be accountable for anything). The Post also boldly asserts that "the law has worked," and weasels around the truth with this carefully crafted sentence:
The performance of poor and minority students has improved in the past 10 to 15 years. The Education Trust, advocates for closing the achievement gap, has catalogued the evidence in the performance of minority and low-income students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress...
Follow the link and read very plainly that the achievement gap has widened, and the Post didn't lie about that-- they just encouraged you to read something between their lines that isn't there.
There's not enough space here to catalog all the ways in which the law has not worked, but has in fact failed on a spectacular level, failings students, teachers, parents, and communities.
There is a moral imperative to make certain that students, particularly poor and minority students who have been underserved for too long, are not ignored. Providing support for those who are already there fighting on those front lines and doing that work on a daily basis as well as making their stories known-- that would be a good place to start. Making sure that those communities are empowered and involved instead of silencing them and ignoring them would be another great step. Shining a light on the ways the system has short-changed them would be another good move.
The Post deserves considerable praise for supporting the work of Lindsey Layton and the indispensable Valerie Strauss. But ordering up another round of tests and offering support for a failed law? That is not the way to meet the moral imperative.
(Note: In the original edit I somehow lost my acknowledgement of Post all-stars Layton and Strauss. It's back in now)
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Monday, January 19, 2015
Spotting Bad Science
This item comes via my old friend and Chicago nursing queen Deb Burdsall. Its original source is Andy Brunning at chemistry site Compound Interest, but it certainly brings to mind some of the "science" that floats around the education world.
So here is the rough guide to spotting bad science:
So here is the rough guide to spotting bad science:
1) Sensationalized headlines are not always the fault of the researchers when their work is glommed up by the media, but when headlines like "Good teachers are as important as small class size" or "Calculus can make you rich?" are not a good sign.
2) Misinterpreting results. How many times have you followed up on an piece of research only to find it doesn't actually prove what the article says it proves.
3) Conflict of interests. As in, funding research specifically to prove that your pet theory is correct. Just google Gates Foundation.
4) Correlation and causation. This one is everywhere, but nowhere has it been more damaging than in all the policy decisions by the current administration deciding that since low standardized test scores and poverty go together, low test scores must cause poverty. And more research that concludes that teachers cause low test scores.
5) Speculative language. Again, we are living with a boatload of policies based on how we think things ought to work. The infamous Chetty study about future earnings is loaded with suppositions.
6) Sample size too small. Is this still a problem? I just remember looking up studies in college and discovering the "research" was performed on thirty college sophomores.
7) Unrepresentative samples. Chalk this one up for every piece of "research" that proves the effectiveness of a charter school.
8) No control group used. A built-in limitation of education research. We can't really assign a group of tiny humans to have no education so we can see what difference a teacher makes.
9) No blind testing used. Also a limitation. I'm not sure I can even think of how to use blind testing of educational techniques. Blind teacher? Students wrapped in plain brown paper? We get a pass on this one, too.
10) Cherry-picked results. Well, yes. Easiest to do if you're doing charter research and you cherry-pick the test subjects to begin with.
11) Unreplicable results. Sort of like the way VAM scores never come out the same way twice. In fact, VAM fills the bill for most of these indicators of bad science.
12) Journals and Citations. My favorite thing about thinky tank "research" is how it provides nice citation pages filled with references to other papers from thinky tanks. Or this ACT report with footnotes from other ACT reports.
VAM is perhaps the leading source of junk science in the education field, but there are so many fine examples. Print out the handy graphic above and keep it nearby the next time your are perusing the latest in educational "research."
Also, I am going to use this as an excuse to post this picture (one of my faves)
The Work We Have To Do
Even if you've only read this blog once or twice, you're aware that I am a noisy supporter of traditional public education in this country. But that doesn't mean my loyalty is unquestioning.
As much as it pains me to say it, as much as I hate what modern reformsters have brought us in public education, if I'm being honest, I must admit that we asked for some of it. Well, maybe we didn't ask for it-- but we certainly left the door wide open for it to come waltzing in.
It's worth talking about these things because even if the entire reformster movement dried up and blew away today, tomorrow we would still be facing these issues.
Teacher Training
Much of what passes for teacher training is a joke. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that teacher training is in the hands of not-teachers. How many co-operating teachers help their student teacher stage a fake lesson to make the visiting drive-by supervisor happy? How many future teachers' careers have been decided for good or bad by the random luck of the student teaching draw? How many college hours are wasted studying teaching "techniques" developed but untested by somebody who has no idea what he's talking about? How many college ed programs wouldn't flunk a candidate unless he was caught on video feeding chopped up puppies to orphans?
How many teachers are good teachers in spite of their college training instead of because of it? The door for some foolish program like TFA has always been standing wide open.
Quality
Everybody knows that some teachers are better than others. But our line in the profession for decades has been, "That's hard. We aren't going to talk about it."
It's true that assaults on tenure and pushes for stack ranking teachers are all about the money, about making a school a more profitable enterprise for an investor. But those assaults would never have gotten traction if there were not a great untapped well of resentment and frustration out there over a system that doesn't seem to do anything about differentiating or improving when it comes to less-than-awesome teachers.
Equity and Justice
When civil rights groups spoke up last week in favor of keeping a federal testing mandate in ESEA, many folks were shocked and upset. But civil rights groups and community leaders in poor black neighborhoods have been supporting the reformster agenda for years.
Instead of exclaiming "How can they do that" rhetorically, we should be asking, "Why do they do that" critically and sincerely.
The promise of reformsters has been, "We will create a program that gets every kid ready for success, and we will make it federal law that every school in every city must have that program in place. We'll have a test that proves whether that program is in place or not, and we will give exactly the same test to every student, white or black, rich or poor, in this country."
Do not dismiss that promise because it's empty. Recognize that the promise is powerful because our country includes a whole lot of people to whom no such promise has been made before.
Look. If you offer someone a piece of spoiled tofu sculpted to look like a bad piece of fish, and they eat it up quickly, and then you start lecturing them about can't they see it's not really fish and the tofu is actually spoiled and did somebody pay them to eat that awful stuff-- you are missing the most important piece of information. That person was hungry enough to be excited about a bad tofu fish. You can take away the bad tofu fish and feel good about how you're protected that person, but she's still hungry, and until you get her some actual food, you're not helping.
Poor and minority schools need resources and support, the kinds of programs and materials that wealthier schools take for granted. They need support. Their students need to see teachers who look like them in the building (and, I would argue, people who live and grew up in the neighborhood). They need to be in a system that respects their culture and background. They need to be in a system that is neither overtly nor subtly racist.
We can bitch and moan about the reformsters and privateers and charteristas all pretending to care about equity and civil rights as a way to grab some power and money, but we should look in the mirror and ask what it means that Pretending To Care about Equity is enough to make someone stand out these days.
We can sweep the reformsters and their faux solutions away, but unless we're prepared to look for real solutions, we won't be moving forward. We supporters of public education must remember that even if the reformsters are thrown out and shut down, there are still problems in our schools-- problems that nobody was particularly working on when reformsters stepped in to take advantage of real needs. We must always remember that even when the conflict with reformsters is over, there is still work we have to do.
As much as it pains me to say it, as much as I hate what modern reformsters have brought us in public education, if I'm being honest, I must admit that we asked for some of it. Well, maybe we didn't ask for it-- but we certainly left the door wide open for it to come waltzing in.
It's worth talking about these things because even if the entire reformster movement dried up and blew away today, tomorrow we would still be facing these issues.
Teacher Training
Much of what passes for teacher training is a joke. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that teacher training is in the hands of not-teachers. How many co-operating teachers help their student teacher stage a fake lesson to make the visiting drive-by supervisor happy? How many future teachers' careers have been decided for good or bad by the random luck of the student teaching draw? How many college hours are wasted studying teaching "techniques" developed but untested by somebody who has no idea what he's talking about? How many college ed programs wouldn't flunk a candidate unless he was caught on video feeding chopped up puppies to orphans?
How many teachers are good teachers in spite of their college training instead of because of it? The door for some foolish program like TFA has always been standing wide open.
Quality
Everybody knows that some teachers are better than others. But our line in the profession for decades has been, "That's hard. We aren't going to talk about it."
It's true that assaults on tenure and pushes for stack ranking teachers are all about the money, about making a school a more profitable enterprise for an investor. But those assaults would never have gotten traction if there were not a great untapped well of resentment and frustration out there over a system that doesn't seem to do anything about differentiating or improving when it comes to less-than-awesome teachers.
Equity and Justice
When civil rights groups spoke up last week in favor of keeping a federal testing mandate in ESEA, many folks were shocked and upset. But civil rights groups and community leaders in poor black neighborhoods have been supporting the reformster agenda for years.
Instead of exclaiming "How can they do that" rhetorically, we should be asking, "Why do they do that" critically and sincerely.
The promise of reformsters has been, "We will create a program that gets every kid ready for success, and we will make it federal law that every school in every city must have that program in place. We'll have a test that proves whether that program is in place or not, and we will give exactly the same test to every student, white or black, rich or poor, in this country."
Do not dismiss that promise because it's empty. Recognize that the promise is powerful because our country includes a whole lot of people to whom no such promise has been made before.
Look. If you offer someone a piece of spoiled tofu sculpted to look like a bad piece of fish, and they eat it up quickly, and then you start lecturing them about can't they see it's not really fish and the tofu is actually spoiled and did somebody pay them to eat that awful stuff-- you are missing the most important piece of information. That person was hungry enough to be excited about a bad tofu fish. You can take away the bad tofu fish and feel good about how you're protected that person, but she's still hungry, and until you get her some actual food, you're not helping.
Poor and minority schools need resources and support, the kinds of programs and materials that wealthier schools take for granted. They need support. Their students need to see teachers who look like them in the building (and, I would argue, people who live and grew up in the neighborhood). They need to be in a system that respects their culture and background. They need to be in a system that is neither overtly nor subtly racist.
We can bitch and moan about the reformsters and privateers and charteristas all pretending to care about equity and civil rights as a way to grab some power and money, but we should look in the mirror and ask what it means that Pretending To Care about Equity is enough to make someone stand out these days.
We can sweep the reformsters and their faux solutions away, but unless we're prepared to look for real solutions, we won't be moving forward. We supporters of public education must remember that even if the reformsters are thrown out and shut down, there are still problems in our schools-- problems that nobody was particularly working on when reformsters stepped in to take advantage of real needs. We must always remember that even when the conflict with reformsters is over, there is still work we have to do.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Testing Success Stories
If test-based accountability were going to be a great boon to public education, wouldn't we know it by now?
We've been doing this federally-mandated get-good-scores-or-else thing for over a decade now. If it were working, wouldn't we know about it?
I mean, we're teachers. When things work, we pass them around. I can remember the spread of process writing and the six traits approach to writing, both of which entered my corner of the world because somebody tried them, found them useful, recommended them to colleagues. Yes, they eventually they turned up in textbooks-- but that was because the publishing companies had heard from teachers that this was the hot new thing, not because the federal government told them that if they wanted to sell books, they'd have to include these new processes. Or else.
Every classroom is an education laboratory, and every teacher is a scientist, forming hypotheses, experimenting, evaluating and then adopting, adapting or rejecting techniques. And when things work well, our excited and helpful nature means we'll be telling folks. "Wait till you hear about this thing I tried today! It was cool. We were rock stars!"
So where are the breathless tales of standardized test success?
Where are the tales from North Codswallop School District about how they used standardized tests to completely turn the district around?
I don't mean tales of how they used the standardized tests to get better scores on the standardized tests. Those tales are out there, but they're not so much "Wow, I really reached children and had an awesome teachable moment." They're more like "Well, we bought ourselves another year free from one sort of government punishment or another.
I mean, we're graduating students who have never known anything but high-stakes testing, from NCLB through RttT. Shouldn't we be hearing the great groundswell of noise about how this new tested generation is faster, smarter, stronger, happier, better?
Shouldn't we be hearing tales of large urban areas where the achievement gap has been closed and educational equity is an exciting real thing?
Heck, we've even had time to try out Plan B-- when testing doesn't transform a public system, at least it can be used to declare failure and bring in turnaround specialists and charters. Plenty of charter chains have had ample time to build a reputation as educational miracle workers, and yet when we listen not to the ad copy, but the real grapevine where real praises would really spread like wildfire if they actually existed-- crickets. Really sad crickets.
Where's the transformation? Where's the revitalization? The future promised back in 2002 is now here, and yet none of us have to wear shades.
Federally mandated standardized testing has had its chance. Its supporters have had every opportunity to try things their way. They have no successes to point to. Tautological success does not count-- I can say, "I will prove my students are great by counting the number of capital letters they use and then teach them to use capital letters which will prove they've become great" but that doesn't prove a damn thing.
No, if federally-mandated standardized tests were really helping teachers, really fixing schools, really helping students find success and fulfillment in numbers previously unheard of, we'd all know about it.
Tests had their chance. They failed. Time to move on.
We've been doing this federally-mandated get-good-scores-or-else thing for over a decade now. If it were working, wouldn't we know about it?
I mean, we're teachers. When things work, we pass them around. I can remember the spread of process writing and the six traits approach to writing, both of which entered my corner of the world because somebody tried them, found them useful, recommended them to colleagues. Yes, they eventually they turned up in textbooks-- but that was because the publishing companies had heard from teachers that this was the hot new thing, not because the federal government told them that if they wanted to sell books, they'd have to include these new processes. Or else.
Every classroom is an education laboratory, and every teacher is a scientist, forming hypotheses, experimenting, evaluating and then adopting, adapting or rejecting techniques. And when things work well, our excited and helpful nature means we'll be telling folks. "Wait till you hear about this thing I tried today! It was cool. We were rock stars!"
So where are the breathless tales of standardized test success?
Where are the tales from North Codswallop School District about how they used standardized tests to completely turn the district around?
I don't mean tales of how they used the standardized tests to get better scores on the standardized tests. Those tales are out there, but they're not so much "Wow, I really reached children and had an awesome teachable moment." They're more like "Well, we bought ourselves another year free from one sort of government punishment or another.
I mean, we're graduating students who have never known anything but high-stakes testing, from NCLB through RttT. Shouldn't we be hearing the great groundswell of noise about how this new tested generation is faster, smarter, stronger, happier, better?
Shouldn't we be hearing tales of large urban areas where the achievement gap has been closed and educational equity is an exciting real thing?
Heck, we've even had time to try out Plan B-- when testing doesn't transform a public system, at least it can be used to declare failure and bring in turnaround specialists and charters. Plenty of charter chains have had ample time to build a reputation as educational miracle workers, and yet when we listen not to the ad copy, but the real grapevine where real praises would really spread like wildfire if they actually existed-- crickets. Really sad crickets.
Where's the transformation? Where's the revitalization? The future promised back in 2002 is now here, and yet none of us have to wear shades.
Federally mandated standardized testing has had its chance. Its supporters have had every opportunity to try things their way. They have no successes to point to. Tautological success does not count-- I can say, "I will prove my students are great by counting the number of capital letters they use and then teach them to use capital letters which will prove they've become great" but that doesn't prove a damn thing.
No, if federally-mandated standardized tests were really helping teachers, really fixing schools, really helping students find success and fulfillment in numbers previously unheard of, we'd all know about it.
Tests had their chance. They failed. Time to move on.
NJ Charters Play Hardball
A week ago I brought the story of an attempt by the New Jersey Charter School Association to shut down Dr. Julia Sass Rubin (a Rutgers professor) and Mark Weber (grad student and prominent blogger Jersey Jazzman). Rubin and Weber have done research which has produced an assortment of facts which the NJCSA find inconvenient. Rather than try to dispute the facts or their interpretation, NJCSA instead chose to gin up some state ethics charges against Rubin, suppress the report, and force her to keep her qualifications a secret every time she talked about the research.
Now from New Jersey blogger Marie Corfield comes news that the charter association hired a PR specialist, a Darth Vader who has experience in smearing opponents. Michael Turner actually has a history of working for folks in the toxic waste business, so the NJ Charter School Association is really asking for extra mockery here. Exactly who made the connection. Did someone in the NJCSA officed say, "A toxic waste expert would be the perfect guy to make the case for charter schools." Or does somebody working for NJCSA think of Turner because they had previously worked with him back when they were in the toxic sludge business themselves.
Either way, making a direct connection between standing up for charter schools and defending polluters seems like a bad first PR step.
Turner has been part of some great NJ stories. When the Diamond Shamrock Chemical Company was found guilty of two decades of deliberately, intentionally, and illegally polluting the Passaic River, it was Michael Turner who, twelve years later, was leading the PR battle to make sure they never had to do a thing about it.
In 2006, Alexander Lane at the Star-Ledger wrote a profile of Turner (despite the fact that Turner's boss twice tried to talk the Star-Ledger out of writing it). It's not easily locatable on line-- if you've got a Yahoo account, you can get to a copy of it here. The article (which starts with the now oft-quoted characterization of Turner as Darth Vader) is pretty thorough. I'm just going to hit some highlights.
After graduating from Roger Williams University in 1992 with a poli sci/history degree, Turner went to work in political campaigns before landing at MWW. He rose to become the head of their brownfield redevelopment business (a brownfield is a contaminated site; redevelopers like them for being cheap to acquire, but work to keep their cleanup costs down while making sure the public feels secure). Brownfield developments sites in NJ include a golf course and a mall. Turner is quoted in the story saying that he truly believes in his clients, and will not work for clients in whose goals he does not believe. Lane notes that on a board from earlier brainstorming are the words "No fear... destroy opposition."
Jeff Tittel, state head of the Sierra Club, characterized Turner as "very pushy, very aggressive and very arrogant." Joe Morris of the Interfaith Community Organization, another Turner opponent, "said it's difficult to know how effective Turner's advocacy is, but it's certainly aggressive." Another Turner foe ultimately cut a deal, with a company handing over some land to the Meadowlands Conservative Trust in exchange for an endorsement of a development elsewhere.
MWW is also in the new in NJ because they were the creators of the "Stronger than the Storm" ad campaign, which has become part of the federal audit of Christie's NJ because it looks (and without any great deal of squinting) as if Hurricane Sandy relief money bought Christie a nice ad campaign promoting the governor in an election year.
MWW itself is a full-sized operation. They have "full-service" offices in LA, Seattle, DC, and New York, and an impressive list of clients including Continental Airlines, Bethlehem Steel, Kaiser Aluminum, and Verizon/New Jersey. Many websites will tell you that, "the MWW Group is among the top 20 public affairs and strategic communications agencies in the U.S. and is known for its results-driven approach to public relations."
So that's what the New Jersey Charter Schools Association hired to take care of a college professor and a school teacher. My first thought is that, wow, they must have a pile of money if they can just up and hire an outfit like MWW. My second thought is that Rubin and Weber must really scare the crap out of them.
I mean, think of how much cheaper and easier it would have been to just pop up saying, "We believe that Rubin and Weber have their facts wrong, and here are the numbers to prove it" or "We believe their reasoning is incorrect and here's where they made a mistake" or even, "Here's a picture of a cat riding a unicycle; your argument is invalid." I mean, if NJ charters were magically successful, there would be oodles of just-plain-factual material to mount a counter-argument instead of having to throw a bunch of money at a high-powered shark-attack PR firm. So much for magical charter school success.
Now from New Jersey blogger Marie Corfield comes news that the charter association hired a PR specialist, a Darth Vader who has experience in smearing opponents. Michael Turner actually has a history of working for folks in the toxic waste business, so the NJ Charter School Association is really asking for extra mockery here. Exactly who made the connection. Did someone in the NJCSA officed say, "A toxic waste expert would be the perfect guy to make the case for charter schools." Or does somebody working for NJCSA think of Turner because they had previously worked with him back when they were in the toxic sludge business themselves.
Either way, making a direct connection between standing up for charter schools and defending polluters seems like a bad first PR step.
Turner has been part of some great NJ stories. When the Diamond Shamrock Chemical Company was found guilty of two decades of deliberately, intentionally, and illegally polluting the Passaic River, it was Michael Turner who, twelve years later, was leading the PR battle to make sure they never had to do a thing about it.
In 2006, Alexander Lane at the Star-Ledger wrote a profile of Turner (despite the fact that Turner's boss twice tried to talk the Star-Ledger out of writing it). It's not easily locatable on line-- if you've got a Yahoo account, you can get to a copy of it here. The article (which starts with the now oft-quoted characterization of Turner as Darth Vader) is pretty thorough. I'm just going to hit some highlights.
After graduating from Roger Williams University in 1992 with a poli sci/history degree, Turner went to work in political campaigns before landing at MWW. He rose to become the head of their brownfield redevelopment business (a brownfield is a contaminated site; redevelopers like them for being cheap to acquire, but work to keep their cleanup costs down while making sure the public feels secure). Brownfield developments sites in NJ include a golf course and a mall. Turner is quoted in the story saying that he truly believes in his clients, and will not work for clients in whose goals he does not believe. Lane notes that on a board from earlier brainstorming are the words "No fear... destroy opposition."
Jeff Tittel, state head of the Sierra Club, characterized Turner as "very pushy, very aggressive and very arrogant." Joe Morris of the Interfaith Community Organization, another Turner opponent, "said it's difficult to know how effective Turner's advocacy is, but it's certainly aggressive." Another Turner foe ultimately cut a deal, with a company handing over some land to the Meadowlands Conservative Trust in exchange for an endorsement of a development elsewhere.
MWW is also in the new in NJ because they were the creators of the "Stronger than the Storm" ad campaign, which has become part of the federal audit of Christie's NJ because it looks (and without any great deal of squinting) as if Hurricane Sandy relief money bought Christie a nice ad campaign promoting the governor in an election year.
MWW itself is a full-sized operation. They have "full-service" offices in LA, Seattle, DC, and New York, and an impressive list of clients including Continental Airlines, Bethlehem Steel, Kaiser Aluminum, and Verizon/New Jersey. Many websites will tell you that, "the MWW Group is among the top 20 public affairs and strategic communications agencies in the U.S. and is known for its results-driven approach to public relations."
So that's what the New Jersey Charter Schools Association hired to take care of a college professor and a school teacher. My first thought is that, wow, they must have a pile of money if they can just up and hire an outfit like MWW. My second thought is that Rubin and Weber must really scare the crap out of them.
I mean, think of how much cheaper and easier it would have been to just pop up saying, "We believe that Rubin and Weber have their facts wrong, and here are the numbers to prove it" or "We believe their reasoning is incorrect and here's where they made a mistake" or even, "Here's a picture of a cat riding a unicycle; your argument is invalid." I mean, if NJ charters were magically successful, there would be oodles of just-plain-factual material to mount a counter-argument instead of having to throw a bunch of money at a high-powered shark-attack PR firm. So much for magical charter school success.
Feds To Maine: Make Teacher Evals Worse (Or Else)
Maine joins the list of states that have received a spanking from the US Department of Education.
Maine came to the waiver party with the other last-minute slackers of the third wave, still working on passing a plan that they could submit for federal approval in the summer of 2013. The account of that work (including eleven months of negotiation with the USED) is a reminder of how completely state ed departments have become focused not on figuring out the best plan for students of their, but on achieving compliance with the federal USED.
Those negotiations had hit some snags as they came down to the wire. Internally, lawmakers could not agree how to handle the requirement that states base a significant portion of teacher evaluations on student test results.
It seemed that all that was settled, but according to Maine's NPR last week, the work has come undone. The waiver acceptance had included a promise by the Maine legislature to hammer out the details of a fed-acceptable teacher eval system. But after the work was completed last spring and sent off to the Us Department of Education, it came back (albeit slowly) with a big red F. Maine now faces the risk of joining Washington on the list of Naughty States That Didn't Do Exactly What USED Wanted.
"The federal government looked at those and said they don't meet the standard they expect," says Tom Desjardin, who says word of the U.S. Department of Education's misgivings about the state's approach came in a recent letter to former Maine Education Commissioner Jim Rier. Desjardin took over as acting commissioner in December.
Says Desjardin, when it comes to teacher eval, "The big rub is that the federal government wants student assessment scores to be a significant factor - 20, 25 percent."
Maine's evaluation system has the support of its teachers union. MEA president Lois Kilbey-Chesley says the Maine plan "represents what Maine wanted." She also expresses concern that the Maine plan has already begun implementation.
Pro-testing advocates were also happy with the Main plan
State Sen. Brian Langley, an Ellsworth Republican, chairs the Legislature's Education Committee. Langley says those who favor the use of standardized tests in teacher evaluation didn't want to lock districts into a 20 percent threshold either.
Granted, Langley wants to see a system where local districts can go higher than 20% if they wish, so clearly there's some disagreement in the state about the role of testing in teacher evaluation. But the point is that Maine worked out a system that its legislature got behind and which left some flexibility for local control by school districts.
It appears the Maine legislature will get back to the important job of making the US Department of Education happy, though some legislators aren't sure they're ready to get to work yet.
Democratic state Sen. Rebecca Millett, who serves with Langley on the Education Committee, says she finds parts of the U.S. Education Department's letter vague. Millett is asking Congresswoman Chellie Pingree to intervene and find out exactly what changes the federal government wants to see.
And so another state in the union gets to experience the inefficiency of a system in which the USED tries to control state education programs without looking too much like it's controlling state education programs. Maine has to scrap its work and rewrite it to better include a failed policy for teacher evaluation, because state autonomy is so last-century.
Update: Rep. Brian Hubbell has another view of what the letter from USED actually requires (h/t to reader Nancy Hudak).
Recently, the state has received a letter from the federal Department of Education seeking clarification about Maine’s implementation of the compromise amendment on the rules for teacher evaluations that I helped to negotiate last session.
The Maine Department of Education is concerned that this notice jeopardizes the state’s waiver from the onerous and outdated federal requirements of No Child Left Behind. The Department’s immediate suggestion is to amend the rules to incorporate more uniform standardized assessments and remove the provisions for local flexibility.
But, after consultation with other state educators and staff from Senator King’s office, I believe that the USDoE concerns may be addressed more productively simply by clarifying Maine’s process and providing better explanation of Maine’s efforts to improve both proficiency-based learning and professional development for educators
So, in response to the USDoE letter, in collaboration with the Maine School Management organization and the new state Commissioner of Education, I hope to have a better proposal ready for federal consideration in the next week or two.
Maine came to the waiver party with the other last-minute slackers of the third wave, still working on passing a plan that they could submit for federal approval in the summer of 2013. The account of that work (including eleven months of negotiation with the USED) is a reminder of how completely state ed departments have become focused not on figuring out the best plan for students of their, but on achieving compliance with the federal USED.
Those negotiations had hit some snags as they came down to the wire. Internally, lawmakers could not agree how to handle the requirement that states base a significant portion of teacher evaluations on student test results.
It seemed that all that was settled, but according to Maine's NPR last week, the work has come undone. The waiver acceptance had included a promise by the Maine legislature to hammer out the details of a fed-acceptable teacher eval system. But after the work was completed last spring and sent off to the Us Department of Education, it came back (albeit slowly) with a big red F. Maine now faces the risk of joining Washington on the list of Naughty States That Didn't Do Exactly What USED Wanted.
"The federal government looked at those and said they don't meet the standard they expect," says Tom Desjardin, who says word of the U.S. Department of Education's misgivings about the state's approach came in a recent letter to former Maine Education Commissioner Jim Rier. Desjardin took over as acting commissioner in December.
Says Desjardin, when it comes to teacher eval, "The big rub is that the federal government wants student assessment scores to be a significant factor - 20, 25 percent."
Maine's evaluation system has the support of its teachers union. MEA president Lois Kilbey-Chesley says the Maine plan "represents what Maine wanted." She also expresses concern that the Maine plan has already begun implementation.
Pro-testing advocates were also happy with the Main plan
State Sen. Brian Langley, an Ellsworth Republican, chairs the Legislature's Education Committee. Langley says those who favor the use of standardized tests in teacher evaluation didn't want to lock districts into a 20 percent threshold either.
Granted, Langley wants to see a system where local districts can go higher than 20% if they wish, so clearly there's some disagreement in the state about the role of testing in teacher evaluation. But the point is that Maine worked out a system that its legislature got behind and which left some flexibility for local control by school districts.
It appears the Maine legislature will get back to the important job of making the US Department of Education happy, though some legislators aren't sure they're ready to get to work yet.
Democratic state Sen. Rebecca Millett, who serves with Langley on the Education Committee, says she finds parts of the U.S. Education Department's letter vague. Millett is asking Congresswoman Chellie Pingree to intervene and find out exactly what changes the federal government wants to see.
And so another state in the union gets to experience the inefficiency of a system in which the USED tries to control state education programs without looking too much like it's controlling state education programs. Maine has to scrap its work and rewrite it to better include a failed policy for teacher evaluation, because state autonomy is so last-century.
Update: Rep. Brian Hubbell has another view of what the letter from USED actually requires (h/t to reader Nancy Hudak).
Recently, the state has received a letter from the federal Department of Education seeking clarification about Maine’s implementation of the compromise amendment on the rules for teacher evaluations that I helped to negotiate last session.
The Maine Department of Education is concerned that this notice jeopardizes the state’s waiver from the onerous and outdated federal requirements of No Child Left Behind. The Department’s immediate suggestion is to amend the rules to incorporate more uniform standardized assessments and remove the provisions for local flexibility.
But, after consultation with other state educators and staff from Senator King’s office, I believe that the USDoE concerns may be addressed more productively simply by clarifying Maine’s process and providing better explanation of Maine’s efforts to improve both proficiency-based learning and professional development for educators
So, in response to the USDoE letter, in collaboration with the Maine School Management organization and the new state Commissioner of Education, I hope to have a better proposal ready for federal consideration in the next week or two.
Testing: What Purposes?
As the Defenders of Big Standardized Tests have rushed to protect and preserve this important revenue stream this monster program, they have proposed a few gazillion reasons that testing must happen, that these big bubbly blunt force objects of education serve many important purposes.
The sheer volume of purported purposes makes it appear that BS Tests are almost magical. And yet, when we start working our way down the list and look at each purpose by itself...
Teacher Evaluation.
The notion that test results can be used to determine how much value a teacher added to an individual student (which is itself a creepy concept) has been debunked, disproven, and rejected by so many knowledgeable people it's hard to believe that anyone could still defend it. At this point, Arne Duncan would look wiser insisting that the earth is a giant flat disc on the back of a turtle. There's a whole argument to be had about what to do with teacher evaluations once we have them, but if we decide that we do want to evaluate teachers for whatever purpose, evaluations based on BS Tests do not even make the Top 100 list.
Inform Instruction: Micro Division
Can I use BS Tests to help me decide how to shape, direct and fine tune my classroom practices this year? Can I use the BS Tests results from the test given in March and sent back to us over the summer to better teach the students who won't be in my class by the time I can see their individual scores? Are you kidding me?
BS Tests are useless as methods of tuning and tweaking instruction of particular students in the same year. And we don't need a tool to do that any way because that's what teachers do every single day. I do dozens of micro-assessments on a daily basis, formal and informal, to determine just where my students stand on whatever I'm teaching. The notion that a BS Test can help with this is just bizarre.
Inform Instruction: Macro Division
Okay, so will year-to-year testing allow a school to say, "We need to tweak our program in this direction." The answer is yes, kind of. Many, many schools do this kind of study, and it boils down to coming together to say, "We've gotten as far as we can by actually teaching the subject matter. But test study shows that students are messing up this particular type of question, so we need to do more test prep--I mean, instructional focus, on answering these kinds of test questions."
But is giving every single student a BS Test every single year the best way to do this? Well, no. If we're just evaluating the program, a sampling would be sufficient. And as Catherine Gerwitz pointed out at EdWeek, this is one of many test functions that could already be handled by NAEP.
Measuring Quality for Accountability
It seems reasonable to ask the question, "How well are our schools doing, really?" It also seems reasonable to ask, "How good is my marriage, really?" or "How well do I kiss, really?" But if you imagine a standardized test is going to tell you, you're ready to buy swampland in Florida.
Here's a great article that addresses the issue back in 1998, before it was so politically freighted. That's more technical answer. The less technical answer is to ask-- when people wonder about how good a school is, or ask about schools, or brag about schools, or complain about schools, how often is that directly related to BS Tests results. When someone says, "I want to send my kids to a great school," does that question have anything to do with how well their kid will be prepped to take a narrow bubble test?
BS Tests don't measure school quality.
Competition Among Schools
"If we don't give the BS Test," opine some advocates, "how will we be able to stack rank all the schools of this country." (I'm paraphrasing for them).
The most obvious question here is, why do we need to? What educational benefit do I get in my 11th grade English classroom out of know how my students compare to students in Iowa? In what parallel universe would we find me saying either, "Well, I wasn't actually going to try to teach you anything, but now that I see how well they're doing in Iowa, I'm going to actually try" or "Well, we were going to do some really cool stuff this week, but I don't want to get too far ahead of the Iowans."
But even if I were to accept the value of intra-school competition, why would I use this tool, and why would I use it every year for every student? Again, the NAEP is already a better tool. The current crop of BS Tests cover a narrow slice of what schools do. Using these to compare schools is like making every single musician in the orchestra audition by playing a selection on oboe.
The Achievement Gap
We used to talk about making the pig fatter by repeatedly measuring it. Now we have the argument that if we repeatedly weight two pigs, they will get closer to weighing the same.
The data are pretty clear-- in our more-than-a-decade of test-based accountability, the achievement gap has not closed. In fact, in some areas, it has gotten wider. It seems not-particularly-radical to point out that doubling down on what has not worked is unlikely to, well, work.
The "achievement gap" is, in fact, a standardized test score gap. Of all the gaps we can find related to social justice and equity in our nation-- the income gap, the mortality gap, the getting-sent-to-prison gap, the housing gap, the health care gap, the being-on-the-receiving-end-of-violence gap-- of all these gaps, we really want to throw all our weight behind how well people score on the BS Tests?
Finding the Failures
Civil rights groups that back testing seem to feel that the BS Test and the reporting requirements of NCLB (regularly hailed as many people's favorite part of the law) made it impossible for schools and school districts to hide their failures. By dis-aggregating test results, we can quickly and easily see which schools are failing and address the issue. But what information have we really collected, and what are we actually doing about it?
We already know that the BS Tests correspond to family income. We haven't found out anything with BS Tests that we couldn't have predicted by looking at family income. And how have we responded? Certainly not by saying, "This school is woefully underfunded, lacking both the resources and the infrastructure to really educate these students." No, we can't do that. Instead we encourage students to show grit, or we offer us "failing" schools as turnaround/investment opportunities for privatizers. Remember-- you don't fix schools by throwing money at them. To fix schools, you have to throw money at charter operators.
Civil Rights
For me, this is the closest we come to a legit reason for BS Tests. Essentially, the civil rights argument is that test results provide a smoking gun that can be used to indict districts so steeped in racism that they routinely deny even the most rudimentary features of decent schooling.
But once again, it doesn't seem to work that way. First, we don't learn anything we didn't already know. Second, districts don't respond by trying to actually fix the problem, but simply by complying with whatever federal regulation demands, and that just turns into more investment opportunities. Name a school district that in the last decade of BS Testing has notably improved its service of minority and poor students because of test results. No, instead, we have districts where the influx of charter operations to fix "failing" schools has brought gentrification and renewed segregation.
BS Testing also replicates the worst side effect of snake oil cures-- it creates the illusion that you're actually working on the problem and keeps you from investing your resources in a search for real solutions.
Expectations
On the other hand, one of the dumbest supports of BS Testing is the idea, beloved by Arne Duncan, that expectations are the magical key to everything. Students with special needs don't perform well in school because nobody expects them to. So we must have BS Tests, and we must give them to everyone the same way. Also, in order to dominate the high jump in the next Olympics, schools will now require all students to clear a high jump bar set at 6' before they may eat lunch. That includes children who are wheelchair bound, because expectations.
Informing parents
Yes, somehow BS Test advocates imagine that parents have no idea how their children are doing in school unless they can see the results of a federally-mandated BS Test. The student's grades, the students daily tests and quizzes and writing assignments and practice papers provide no information. Nor could a parent actually speak to a teacher face to face or through e-mail to ask about their child's progress.
Somehow BS Test advocates imagine a world where teachers are incompetent and parents are clueless. Even if that is true in one corner or another, how, exactly, would a BS Test score help? How would a terrible teacher or a dopey parent use that single set of scores to do... anything? I can imagine there are places where parents want more transparency from their schools, but even so-- how do BS Tests, which measure so little and measure it so poorly, give them that?
Informing government
Without BS Testing, ask advocates, how will the federal government know how schools are doing? I have two questions in response.
1) What makes you think BS Tests will tell you that? Why not just the older, better NAEP test instead?
2) Why do the feds need to know?
Bottom Line
Many of the arguments for BS Testing depend on a non sequitor construction: "Nutrition is a problem in some countries, so I should buy a hat." Advocates start with a legitimate issue, like the problems of poverty in schools, and suggest BS Testing as a solution, even though it offers none.
In fact there's little that BS Tests can help with, because they are limited and poorly-made tools. "I need to nail this home together," say test advocates. "So hand me that banana." Tests simply can't deliver as advertised.
The arguments for testing are also backwards-manufactured. Instead of asking, "Of all the possible solutions in the world, how could we help a teacher steer instruction during the year," testing advocates start with the end ("We are going to give these tests") and then struggle to somehow connect those conclusions to the goal.
If you were going to address the problems of poverty and equity in this country, how would you do it? If you were going to figure out if someone was a good teacher or not, how could we tell that? How would you tell good schools from bad ones, and how would you fix the bad ones?
The first answer that pops into your mind for any of those questions is not, "Give a big computer-based bubble test on reading and math."
Nor can we say just give it a shot, because it might help and what does it really hurt? BS Tests come with tremendous costs, from the huge costs of the tests to the costs of the tech needed to administer them to the costs in a shorter school year and the human costs in stress and misery for the small humans forced to take these. And we have yet to see what the long-term costs are for raising a generation to think that a well-educated person is one who can do a good job of bubbling in answers on a BS Test.
The federal BS Test mandate needs to go away because the BS Testing does not deliver any of the outcomes that it promises and comes at too great costs.
The sheer volume of purported purposes makes it appear that BS Tests are almost magical. And yet, when we start working our way down the list and look at each purpose by itself...
Teacher Evaluation.
The notion that test results can be used to determine how much value a teacher added to an individual student (which is itself a creepy concept) has been debunked, disproven, and rejected by so many knowledgeable people it's hard to believe that anyone could still defend it. At this point, Arne Duncan would look wiser insisting that the earth is a giant flat disc on the back of a turtle. There's a whole argument to be had about what to do with teacher evaluations once we have them, but if we decide that we do want to evaluate teachers for whatever purpose, evaluations based on BS Tests do not even make the Top 100 list.
Inform Instruction: Micro Division
Can I use BS Tests to help me decide how to shape, direct and fine tune my classroom practices this year? Can I use the BS Tests results from the test given in March and sent back to us over the summer to better teach the students who won't be in my class by the time I can see their individual scores? Are you kidding me?
BS Tests are useless as methods of tuning and tweaking instruction of particular students in the same year. And we don't need a tool to do that any way because that's what teachers do every single day. I do dozens of micro-assessments on a daily basis, formal and informal, to determine just where my students stand on whatever I'm teaching. The notion that a BS Test can help with this is just bizarre.
Inform Instruction: Macro Division
Okay, so will year-to-year testing allow a school to say, "We need to tweak our program in this direction." The answer is yes, kind of. Many, many schools do this kind of study, and it boils down to coming together to say, "We've gotten as far as we can by actually teaching the subject matter. But test study shows that students are messing up this particular type of question, so we need to do more test prep--I mean, instructional focus, on answering these kinds of test questions."
But is giving every single student a BS Test every single year the best way to do this? Well, no. If we're just evaluating the program, a sampling would be sufficient. And as Catherine Gerwitz pointed out at EdWeek, this is one of many test functions that could already be handled by NAEP.
Measuring Quality for Accountability
It seems reasonable to ask the question, "How well are our schools doing, really?" It also seems reasonable to ask, "How good is my marriage, really?" or "How well do I kiss, really?" But if you imagine a standardized test is going to tell you, you're ready to buy swampland in Florida.
Here's a great article that addresses the issue back in 1998, before it was so politically freighted. That's more technical answer. The less technical answer is to ask-- when people wonder about how good a school is, or ask about schools, or brag about schools, or complain about schools, how often is that directly related to BS Tests results. When someone says, "I want to send my kids to a great school," does that question have anything to do with how well their kid will be prepped to take a narrow bubble test?
BS Tests don't measure school quality.
Competition Among Schools
"If we don't give the BS Test," opine some advocates, "how will we be able to stack rank all the schools of this country." (I'm paraphrasing for them).
The most obvious question here is, why do we need to? What educational benefit do I get in my 11th grade English classroom out of know how my students compare to students in Iowa? In what parallel universe would we find me saying either, "Well, I wasn't actually going to try to teach you anything, but now that I see how well they're doing in Iowa, I'm going to actually try" or "Well, we were going to do some really cool stuff this week, but I don't want to get too far ahead of the Iowans."
But even if I were to accept the value of intra-school competition, why would I use this tool, and why would I use it every year for every student? Again, the NAEP is already a better tool. The current crop of BS Tests cover a narrow slice of what schools do. Using these to compare schools is like making every single musician in the orchestra audition by playing a selection on oboe.
The Achievement Gap
We used to talk about making the pig fatter by repeatedly measuring it. Now we have the argument that if we repeatedly weight two pigs, they will get closer to weighing the same.
The data are pretty clear-- in our more-than-a-decade of test-based accountability, the achievement gap has not closed. In fact, in some areas, it has gotten wider. It seems not-particularly-radical to point out that doubling down on what has not worked is unlikely to, well, work.
The "achievement gap" is, in fact, a standardized test score gap. Of all the gaps we can find related to social justice and equity in our nation-- the income gap, the mortality gap, the getting-sent-to-prison gap, the housing gap, the health care gap, the being-on-the-receiving-end-of-violence gap-- of all these gaps, we really want to throw all our weight behind how well people score on the BS Tests?
Finding the Failures
Civil rights groups that back testing seem to feel that the BS Test and the reporting requirements of NCLB (regularly hailed as many people's favorite part of the law) made it impossible for schools and school districts to hide their failures. By dis-aggregating test results, we can quickly and easily see which schools are failing and address the issue. But what information have we really collected, and what are we actually doing about it?
We already know that the BS Tests correspond to family income. We haven't found out anything with BS Tests that we couldn't have predicted by looking at family income. And how have we responded? Certainly not by saying, "This school is woefully underfunded, lacking both the resources and the infrastructure to really educate these students." No, we can't do that. Instead we encourage students to show grit, or we offer us "failing" schools as turnaround/investment opportunities for privatizers. Remember-- you don't fix schools by throwing money at them. To fix schools, you have to throw money at charter operators.
Civil Rights
For me, this is the closest we come to a legit reason for BS Tests. Essentially, the civil rights argument is that test results provide a smoking gun that can be used to indict districts so steeped in racism that they routinely deny even the most rudimentary features of decent schooling.
But once again, it doesn't seem to work that way. First, we don't learn anything we didn't already know. Second, districts don't respond by trying to actually fix the problem, but simply by complying with whatever federal regulation demands, and that just turns into more investment opportunities. Name a school district that in the last decade of BS Testing has notably improved its service of minority and poor students because of test results. No, instead, we have districts where the influx of charter operations to fix "failing" schools has brought gentrification and renewed segregation.
BS Testing also replicates the worst side effect of snake oil cures-- it creates the illusion that you're actually working on the problem and keeps you from investing your resources in a search for real solutions.
Expectations
On the other hand, one of the dumbest supports of BS Testing is the idea, beloved by Arne Duncan, that expectations are the magical key to everything. Students with special needs don't perform well in school because nobody expects them to. So we must have BS Tests, and we must give them to everyone the same way. Also, in order to dominate the high jump in the next Olympics, schools will now require all students to clear a high jump bar set at 6' before they may eat lunch. That includes children who are wheelchair bound, because expectations.
Informing parents
Yes, somehow BS Test advocates imagine that parents have no idea how their children are doing in school unless they can see the results of a federally-mandated BS Test. The student's grades, the students daily tests and quizzes and writing assignments and practice papers provide no information. Nor could a parent actually speak to a teacher face to face or through e-mail to ask about their child's progress.
Somehow BS Test advocates imagine a world where teachers are incompetent and parents are clueless. Even if that is true in one corner or another, how, exactly, would a BS Test score help? How would a terrible teacher or a dopey parent use that single set of scores to do... anything? I can imagine there are places where parents want more transparency from their schools, but even so-- how do BS Tests, which measure so little and measure it so poorly, give them that?
Informing government
Without BS Testing, ask advocates, how will the federal government know how schools are doing? I have two questions in response.
1) What makes you think BS Tests will tell you that? Why not just the older, better NAEP test instead?
2) Why do the feds need to know?
Bottom Line
Many of the arguments for BS Testing depend on a non sequitor construction: "Nutrition is a problem in some countries, so I should buy a hat." Advocates start with a legitimate issue, like the problems of poverty in schools, and suggest BS Testing as a solution, even though it offers none.
In fact there's little that BS Tests can help with, because they are limited and poorly-made tools. "I need to nail this home together," say test advocates. "So hand me that banana." Tests simply can't deliver as advertised.
The arguments for testing are also backwards-manufactured. Instead of asking, "Of all the possible solutions in the world, how could we help a teacher steer instruction during the year," testing advocates start with the end ("We are going to give these tests") and then struggle to somehow connect those conclusions to the goal.
If you were going to address the problems of poverty and equity in this country, how would you do it? If you were going to figure out if someone was a good teacher or not, how could we tell that? How would you tell good schools from bad ones, and how would you fix the bad ones?
The first answer that pops into your mind for any of those questions is not, "Give a big computer-based bubble test on reading and math."
Nor can we say just give it a shot, because it might help and what does it really hurt? BS Tests come with tremendous costs, from the huge costs of the tests to the costs of the tech needed to administer them to the costs in a shorter school year and the human costs in stress and misery for the small humans forced to take these. And we have yet to see what the long-term costs are for raising a generation to think that a well-educated person is one who can do a good job of bubbling in answers on a BS Test.
The federal BS Test mandate needs to go away because the BS Testing does not deliver any of the outcomes that it promises and comes at too great costs.
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