One of the most pernicious yet subtle side effects of test-driven accountability is that it flips the mission of a school on its head.
The proper view of a school is that it exists to serve the students, to help them become the people they can best be, to become better wiser citizens and members of the community. A school's mission is to help with that process.
But under a regime of high stakes testing, that mission is thrown out. The school's mission is to Get Good Numbers out of the students. The institution is no longer there to meet the needs of the students-- the students are there to meet the needs of the institution. The students are there to produce the numbers that the school needs to produce.
Proponents of test-driven accountability will say that there's no problem. The drive to get good test scores out of students will motivate schools to meet the student's needs. This kind of reasoning would also suggest that there's no difference between a person who is your friend because he likes you and a person who is your friend because he wants to get money from you. If you cannot tell the difference between those two relationships, I would rather not be your friend.
In the upside-down world of high stakes testing, schools only need to care about student needs that might affect test scores. They need only give the students what will get the school what it wants-- a good score on a bad test of a narrow sliver of skills.
In the world of test-driven accountability, students are simply vending machines. Put in the correct change. Kick and shake the machine a little if the candy won't fall all the way to the bottom.
If you haven't witnessed this, it's hard to imagine how pervasive the effect can become. Let's assign students to teachers based not on who would be a good fit, but who might get the best scores out of the kid. Let's structure the day, the curriculum, the organization of grades within the district strictly on what will generate the best numbers.
What the students want or need from us doesn't matter. What matters is what we want from them-- good numbers. They are no longer customers or clients; they are employees. Meeting their needs is no longer our goal; their needs are now an obstacle in the path of our goal, which is to get good numbers.
There's no question that not all schools have always embodied my high ideals for schools. But there's no question that test-driven accountability moves us further from that ideal, not closer.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Russ Walsh: Checking the PARCC and SBA
Russ Walsh is a reading specialist who also maintains a mighty fine blog. While Russ is always worth reading, over the last two weeks he has produced a series of posts that you need to bookmark, store, steal, link--whatever it is you do with posts that you want to be able to use a reference works in the future.
Walsh ventured where surprisingly few have dared to tread. He looked at the readability levels of the Two Not-As-Big-As-They-Used-To-Be tests-- the PARCC and the SBA.
The PARCC came first, and he took three pieces to do it justice.
In Part I, Walsh looks at readability levels of the PARCC reading selections, using several of the standard readability measures. That's no small chunk of extra homework to self-assign, but the results are revealing. Walsh finds that most of the selections are significantly above the stated grade level, the very definition of frustration level. Not a good way to scare up useful or legitimate data.
In Part 2, Walsh looks at readability levels of PARCC questions, looking at the types of tasks they involve and what extra challenges they may contain. Again, some serious homework and analysis here. Walsh finds the PARCC questions wanting in this area as well.
In Part 3, Walsh goes looking into PARCC from the standpoint of the reader. Does the test show a cultural bias, or favor students with a particular body of prior knowledge? That would be a big fat yes on both. Plus, the test involves some odd choices that add extra roadblocks for readers.
Walsh followed this series up with a post looking at the SBA. In some ways this was the most surprising post, because Walsh finds the SBA test.... not so bad. While we may think of PARCC (by Pearson) and SBA (by AIR) as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, it appears that what we actually have is Tweedledee and Bob.
These posts are literate, rational, and professional (everything that my feisty but personal reading of PARCC was not) and consequently hugely useful. This is hard, solid analysis presented clearly and objectively, which makes these posts perfect for answering the questions of civilians and administrators alike. I have been reading Russ Walsh for a while, and he never disappoints, but these four posts belong in some sort of edublogger hall of fame. Read them!
Walsh ventured where surprisingly few have dared to tread. He looked at the readability levels of the Two Not-As-Big-As-They-Used-To-Be tests-- the PARCC and the SBA.
The PARCC came first, and he took three pieces to do it justice.
In Part I, Walsh looks at readability levels of the PARCC reading selections, using several of the standard readability measures. That's no small chunk of extra homework to self-assign, but the results are revealing. Walsh finds that most of the selections are significantly above the stated grade level, the very definition of frustration level. Not a good way to scare up useful or legitimate data.
In Part 2, Walsh looks at readability levels of PARCC questions, looking at the types of tasks they involve and what extra challenges they may contain. Again, some serious homework and analysis here. Walsh finds the PARCC questions wanting in this area as well.
In Part 3, Walsh goes looking into PARCC from the standpoint of the reader. Does the test show a cultural bias, or favor students with a particular body of prior knowledge? That would be a big fat yes on both. Plus, the test involves some odd choices that add extra roadblocks for readers.
Walsh followed this series up with a post looking at the SBA. In some ways this was the most surprising post, because Walsh finds the SBA test.... not so bad. While we may think of PARCC (by Pearson) and SBA (by AIR) as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, it appears that what we actually have is Tweedledee and Bob.
These posts are literate, rational, and professional (everything that my feisty but personal reading of PARCC was not) and consequently hugely useful. This is hard, solid analysis presented clearly and objectively, which makes these posts perfect for answering the questions of civilians and administrators alike. I have been reading Russ Walsh for a while, and he never disappoints, but these four posts belong in some sort of edublogger hall of fame. Read them!
ESEA: Time To Speak Out (Again)
Word on the street is that as soon as this coming Friday (February 27), the House of Representatives could be voting on H.R. 5- The Student Success Act. That means it's time for defenders of US public education to speak up. In a few paragraphs, I am going to tell you just how easy it is to speak up this time, but first let me make my case for why you need to do it.
H.R. 5 is the House GOP proposal for rewriting ESEA, and while the Legislation Currently Known As NCLB desperately needs to be rewritten, this is the not the rewrite we've been looking for.
The proposal is almost 600 pages long; even so, many smart people have read through that monster (Mercedes Schneider got through 52 of the more important pages and you should look at what she found). But the four big fire engine red flags are:
1) A requirement for Big Standardized Testing in every year from grade 3 through grade 8, plus once in high school. This gives the BS Testing the force of law, enshrining what we know to be unproven, unnecessary, and unhelpful.
2) Title I funding would be portable, which is a less-alarming way to say that Title I would become a student voucher, inevitably making poor schools even poorer.
3) Cuts way back on Title II funding for class size reduction. Because if we're going to support BS Testing, for which there's no proof of benefits, why not even things out by unsupporting smaller classes, for which there is proof of benefits.
4) Expands support for charter schools and charter school companies. Because politicians hate throwing money at public schools, but throwing money at charters is awesome.
So. It's time, again, to write your Representative. I know you're a teacher and it's not really your thing to be politically active. I know you have a lot of other things to take care of. But you know who doesn't have anything else to worry about except politics and legislation? Lobbyists.
This is part of why we struggle uphill on this reformster stuff. We've got classes to teach and papers to grade and lessons to plan and lunch money to collect and school plays to direct and paying attention to politics, following politics, speaking out to our politicians-- those are all things we have to squeeze in around the edges. But meanwhile, there are people out there who literally have absolutely nothing to do all day except agitate for their causes.
If we are going to counterbalance an army of corporate shills and well-paid lobbyists who spend every single day explaining to legislators why America really needs to support test corporations and charter companies and everyone else trying to divert public education tax dollars into private corporate pockets-- if we're going to be a counterforce to those people, we have to speak. And speak. And speak.
Because, I have to tell you, this is not the last time we'll be called on to speak up. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and the reauthorization of ESEA is going to spawn a long windy parade of bad ideas auditioning for the role of Actual Law, and we're going to have to speak up every single time one rolls its parade float past our door. And we have to be tough and relentless because there will always be those paid lobbyists for the corporations getting up every morning with nothing to do except try to move legislation to their employers' benefit.
We can't count on someone else to do it. It wish we could count on our national teachers' unions, but they keep getting confused about what they support.
Fortunately, this time there's an easy approach.
The Network for Public Education, a group of public education supporters to which I proudly belong, has set up a quick an easy way to make your voice heard. Follow this link. Don't know for sure who your rep is? You'll type in your zip code and automatically get a form addressed to your representative's email. Not sure what to say or how to say it? The letter is already written; send it as is, edit it to suit, or erase it and write your own. And while you're at it, you can join NPE if you haven't already. Which you should.
Heaven only knows how long it will take to get an ESEA rewrite through both houses, or how long it will be before the next rewrite. But whatever comes out of this round will be the law we live with for years. It will be hard to get Congress to listen to us, and we may not succeed in all the ways we want to. But nobody is going to hear us if we don't speak. Raise your voice now.
H.R. 5 is the House GOP proposal for rewriting ESEA, and while the Legislation Currently Known As NCLB desperately needs to be rewritten, this is the not the rewrite we've been looking for.
The proposal is almost 600 pages long; even so, many smart people have read through that monster (Mercedes Schneider got through 52 of the more important pages and you should look at what she found). But the four big fire engine red flags are:
1) A requirement for Big Standardized Testing in every year from grade 3 through grade 8, plus once in high school. This gives the BS Testing the force of law, enshrining what we know to be unproven, unnecessary, and unhelpful.
2) Title I funding would be portable, which is a less-alarming way to say that Title I would become a student voucher, inevitably making poor schools even poorer.
3) Cuts way back on Title II funding for class size reduction. Because if we're going to support BS Testing, for which there's no proof of benefits, why not even things out by unsupporting smaller classes, for which there is proof of benefits.
4) Expands support for charter schools and charter school companies. Because politicians hate throwing money at public schools, but throwing money at charters is awesome.
So. It's time, again, to write your Representative. I know you're a teacher and it's not really your thing to be politically active. I know you have a lot of other things to take care of. But you know who doesn't have anything else to worry about except politics and legislation? Lobbyists.
This is part of why we struggle uphill on this reformster stuff. We've got classes to teach and papers to grade and lessons to plan and lunch money to collect and school plays to direct and paying attention to politics, following politics, speaking out to our politicians-- those are all things we have to squeeze in around the edges. But meanwhile, there are people out there who literally have absolutely nothing to do all day except agitate for their causes.
If we are going to counterbalance an army of corporate shills and well-paid lobbyists who spend every single day explaining to legislators why America really needs to support test corporations and charter companies and everyone else trying to divert public education tax dollars into private corporate pockets-- if we're going to be a counterforce to those people, we have to speak. And speak. And speak.
Because, I have to tell you, this is not the last time we'll be called on to speak up. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and the reauthorization of ESEA is going to spawn a long windy parade of bad ideas auditioning for the role of Actual Law, and we're going to have to speak up every single time one rolls its parade float past our door. And we have to be tough and relentless because there will always be those paid lobbyists for the corporations getting up every morning with nothing to do except try to move legislation to their employers' benefit.
We can't count on someone else to do it. It wish we could count on our national teachers' unions, but they keep getting confused about what they support.
Fortunately, this time there's an easy approach.
The Network for Public Education, a group of public education supporters to which I proudly belong, has set up a quick an easy way to make your voice heard. Follow this link. Don't know for sure who your rep is? You'll type in your zip code and automatically get a form addressed to your representative's email. Not sure what to say or how to say it? The letter is already written; send it as is, edit it to suit, or erase it and write your own. And while you're at it, you can join NPE if you haven't already. Which you should.
Heaven only knows how long it will take to get an ESEA rewrite through both houses, or how long it will be before the next rewrite. But whatever comes out of this round will be the law we live with for years. It will be hard to get Congress to listen to us, and we may not succeed in all the ways we want to. But nobody is going to hear us if we don't speak. Raise your voice now.
PARCC Loves Monsanto?
It's been two weeks since I ploughed through the PARCC sample test items, and the swelling in my brain has mostly subsided. But there has been one thing that has nagged at me ever since, and today I'd like to revisit that.
The first set of questions deal with a selection about the use of DNA with crops-- not, as you might guess, strictly with developing better crops through genetic manipulation, which is its own kettle of two-headed fish, but through something else...
DNA testing, the technique which has helped solve high-profile murder cases, may now help to solve crop crimes.
You might well ask-- what the hell is a crop crime? Did somebody find a bunch of cows pummeled to death with no evidence except traces of corn stalks? Are there unsolved bank robberies out there where the only clue is a small pile of wheat? The selection doesn't provide much of a hint, other than to mention theft in passing.
But for several years I've had my students read Fast Food Nation and we follow it up with Food, Inc-- so the idea of a crop crime definitely rang a bell. Here's a clip from the film.
Because Monsanto owns certain crops, it reserves the right to track down anyone they think might be using their patented seeds without having paid for it. This would include someone who has had GMO pollen blown into their field by the wind.
But of course corn and soybeans just look like corn and soybean. If Monsanto thought you had grabbed some of their DNA, how would they prove it (so they could take you to court and stomp on you)? They would need some DNA testing to catch you perpetrating this crop crime.
PARCC has been criticized for including "product placement" in its testing, with brand names and logos included in the questions. But this is even creepier-- a selection that includes a whole corporate philosophy. The issues here are huge and difficult and complex-- Should a corporation own a life form, or the DNA of a life form? Should the legal system let itself be used as corporate cops? Does our need for plentiful food justify extra protections for food corporations? And that's before we get into How the Justice System Works questions.
But the PARCC question slips right past that and buries a host of challenging assumptions in this reading test. For my money (and hey-- I'm a taxpayer, so it is my money), this is far creepier than the root beer logo, and adds a whole extra problematic level for students who are knowledgeable about the issues the reading selection blithely raises.
Maybe it's simply that Monsanto has done its job so well that PARCC writers included the selection without question. Or maybe this is just how the corporate club helps keep its own point of view out there. But for me it's just one more huge PARCC fail.
The first set of questions deal with a selection about the use of DNA with crops-- not, as you might guess, strictly with developing better crops through genetic manipulation, which is its own kettle of two-headed fish, but through something else...
DNA testing, the technique which has helped solve high-profile murder cases, may now help to solve crop crimes.
You might well ask-- what the hell is a crop crime? Did somebody find a bunch of cows pummeled to death with no evidence except traces of corn stalks? Are there unsolved bank robberies out there where the only clue is a small pile of wheat? The selection doesn't provide much of a hint, other than to mention theft in passing.
But for several years I've had my students read Fast Food Nation and we follow it up with Food, Inc-- so the idea of a crop crime definitely rang a bell. Here's a clip from the film.
Because Monsanto owns certain crops, it reserves the right to track down anyone they think might be using their patented seeds without having paid for it. This would include someone who has had GMO pollen blown into their field by the wind.
But of course corn and soybeans just look like corn and soybean. If Monsanto thought you had grabbed some of their DNA, how would they prove it (so they could take you to court and stomp on you)? They would need some DNA testing to catch you perpetrating this crop crime.
PARCC has been criticized for including "product placement" in its testing, with brand names and logos included in the questions. But this is even creepier-- a selection that includes a whole corporate philosophy. The issues here are huge and difficult and complex-- Should a corporation own a life form, or the DNA of a life form? Should the legal system let itself be used as corporate cops? Does our need for plentiful food justify extra protections for food corporations? And that's before we get into How the Justice System Works questions.
But the PARCC question slips right past that and buries a host of challenging assumptions in this reading test. For my money (and hey-- I'm a taxpayer, so it is my money), this is far creepier than the root beer logo, and adds a whole extra problematic level for students who are knowledgeable about the issues the reading selection blithely raises.
Maybe it's simply that Monsanto has done its job so well that PARCC writers included the selection without question. Or maybe this is just how the corporate club helps keep its own point of view out there. But for me it's just one more huge PARCC fail.
Cabin Fever and Search for Real Differences
Over the last two weeks, Rick Hess (conservative thinky tank AEI) and Peter Cunningham (former official Duncan voice) ran series called Cabin Fever at both EdWeek and Cunningham's reformerster PR flack attack machine Education Post. The premise was a conversation between two friends on opposite ends of the political spectrum considering aspects of ESEA reauthorization.
It's not news that public education is under attack from both self-identified liberals and conservatives, so it's interesting to read a side-by-side comparison and see whether real differences, or if we're simply in a Coke vs. Pepsi situation here. So let's take a quick look at each entry in the series.
Testing and Transparency
This one is easy. Hess and Cunningham started with a subject on which they fully agree-- keep all that testing in place and provide lots of data and transparency. That includes a requirement to report everything schools have spent and what they've spent it on (I'm not sure what we're after here-- here in Pennsylvania any taxpayer can walk into their school district office and demand a financial report or, actually, pretty much any document the district possesses that's not an issue of, say, student privacy.)
We'd also like to see states required to provide a broader bucket of consistent metrics on school and system outcomes like numbers of students taking and passing Advanced Placement courses or completing career certifications, and operational factors like turnover, experience, and benefit costs.
So, on this issue, no difference.
Should the USED set goals for adequate school performance?
Cunningham is sure that states will screw it all up, lie and cheat and fake their way to adequate performance levels if the feds aren't on their case. But he acknowledges that top-down fed goals have been a bust, so he recommends "negotiations." The feds don't dictate, I guess, but still have to be satisfied. How that doesn't turn into "the feds dictate" he does not make clear.
Hess has several good lines in this series, and here's one of them:
The problem with federal involvement is that federal officials have no responsibility for meeting the goals they insist upon and no accountability if schools fail to do so. All the blame falls on local educators and on local and state officials. The result is that it's all too easy for D.C. officials to insist upon ridiculous goals.
E.g., 100% proficiency for NCLB. Then this:
The NFL season just ended. Over the next couple months, coaches should sit with their executives and owners in order to set goals regarding the kind of performance they expect to see. That process is valuable and I heartily endorse it. At the same time, I don't think it would be constructive for the Pennsylvania legislature to declare that the Eagles and Steelers need to go at least 11-5 next year.
What Hess doesn't address is the question of what difference it makes whether that unrealistically specific goal comes from federal, state or local authorities, other than the implication that such a goal best comes from someone who will lose his job if the goal is not met.
Should the feds tell states how to turn schools around?
Cunningham likes the School Improvement Grants, and he thinks conservatives and liberals should, too. He thinks conservatives don't because it's federal intrusion and liberals don't because it will get teachers fired. He fails to note that because it's a competitive grant, it's a federal commitment to help only some schools.
"Children only have one chance for an education," opines Cunningham. He fails to explain why that chance should rest on a local administrator's ability to fill out paperwork to fed's satisfaction.
Hess's argument is simply that the feds have no business dictating how schools should be turned around because the feds don't have the faintest clue how to do it.
Should Title I fund follow students (aka vouchers 3.12)?
Cunningham says no, which frankly surprises me, given Education Post's deep love for charter schools, which live only by draining the funds of traditional public schools through one portability mechanism or another. Maybe I'm missing something here, but Cunningham says A) even though we know it costs more to educate poor kids than rich kids, we spend the other way around and B) if poor kids pool their funds, it allows those funds to get more done.
Hess is an unequivocal yes, which does not surprise me.
Neither questions the assumption that once education dollars leave taxpayers hands, those dollars somehow attach or belong to individual students, as if schools are service provided for individual students and their parents and not a public service provided for the benefit of all members of a community. And neither brings up the question of how the federal could or should guarantee full funding for schools across the country.
Should the feds have a role in teacher evaluation?
Teacher evaluation that includes some measure of student growth on tests simply would not be happening without federal pressure. If we remove the federal role, it will disappear. The losers will be not only children who desperately need more effective teachers, but also the teachers themselves. Absent real accountability, teachers will be denied the resources, recognition, and respect they need and deserve.
That's Cunningham, encapsulating every wrong argument about teacher evaluation in the reformster canon. Well, okay-- he's correct that test-based evaluation wouldn't exist without federal pressure, but that's because every single respectable authority on the matter recognizes that such value-added test-based measures are evaluatory crap. So the federal insistence on them is a big fat fail for the feds. I suggest Cunningham look at the story of Sheri Lederman, a top NY teacher who is actually a terrible failure according to New York's test-based system. Then Cunningham can explain how Lederman and her students are benefiting from this federally-pushed malarkey.
His argument just gets worse. "Just as annual assessments help parents and teachers understand where students are at and how to get them where they need to go--" and you can just hold it right there, because annual assessments don't actually do that.
Hess agrees that anything that helps teachers be better is a Good Thing. But as always, he argues that the feds don't know jack squat about how to do that, so they should stay out of it.
Should the feds support education innovation?
No real separation on this issue. Both believe that the feds should fund innovation; they just express a disagreement about how carefully directed such innovation searching should be. In other words, should the feds be telling innovators what sort of innovation they should be innovating, or should they just look for people who are Doing Good Stuff and throw money at them?
There's probably a good conversation to be had about how much money to spend and what else we could otherwise be spending it on. At the very least, it would be nice to acknowledge that the search for a startling new idea that will all by itself revolutionize education is an exercise in unicorn farming. There are always ways in which public education can grow and strengthen and become better, but if you tell me you've come up with something that will completely change the face of public education and radically improve schools, I'm going to assume that you're either smoking something or selling something.
What is the proper role of the feds in education?
Cunningham just can't keep himself from speaking bite-sized chunks of PR baloney.
My view is clear: the core federal role is to protect kids.
Well, that's a pretty thought-- but what does it actually mean.
Returning oversight to the states will put millions of at-risk kids at even greater risk. The notion that getting the feds out of the way will suddenly trigger a renaissance of innovation, accountability, and equity is a fairy tale.
Straw man. I've read few writers who suggested that there is a state ed renaissance waiting to emerge from under the federal boots. That's not the point. The point is that the feds aren't helping, at all. Plus the notion that federal bureaucrats are somehow more wise, virtuous, and corruption-free than state ones is simultaneously hilarious and insulting.
Hess redefines the question.
I'd say that our discussion has been about what Washington can do usefully and well within our federal system. The question is when federal activity will help schools, given all of their complexity, layers of governance, and dependence on personal relationships and local cultures, and when it's more likely to fuel rigidity, bad decisions, and counterproductive compliance.
Of course, a couple of their ideas for DC do rather match up. From Cunningham
Choice is an effective but limited strategy. Charters and vouchers will never serve all kids. We must also get better at improving traditional schools.
From Hess:
Play an active role in "trust-busting" and bureaucracy-taming—freeing up educators and enabling promising new providers to get a fair shot.
What did they miss?
I don't see much here that highlights a difference between the "conservative" or "liberal" position, because this conversation stayed clear of the area where these guys most agree. Modern education "reform" is the application of government principles pioneered by the military-industrial complex and later moved into social program arenas from the treatment of adults with mental issues to the management of the food system.
First, we declare that the government has an obligation to make sure that widgets are provided to all citizens who need them. Nominal liberals nod and say, that's great. Government should do something about the widget problem. Then policymakers create an assortment of widget-related programs that are co-created by folks in the widget industry; these are sold as solutions to the widget problem. Then the administration of these programs is handed over to corporations, and nominal conservatives nod because, hey, free market private sector solutions.
From that point on, it's simply an ongoing negotiation between government and corporate functionaries about how the money is going to flow. The corporate interest is in functioning with minimal government interference, while the government's only source of power is its ability to control that money flow. Add a revolving door so that it's hard to keep track of which offices the players are working out of, and you have the system in place.
It plays out in public as a battle of virtuous idealism versus heartless pragmatism, and that's reflected in this series of posts. Hess wins in terms of practical, specific, pragmatic, smart comments. Cunningham puts out more pretty thoughts with high moral purpose with no hint of how to really make it happen.
But all in all, this is a discussion that assumes more than it debates and it reads more like to VP's from the same corporation discussing the best distribution of corner offices than a deep-level discussion of the corporations fundamental direction. The two agree on what should be done-- charters, privatization, test-driven accountability-- they're just arguing over who should get to say exactly how these things should be done, and not whether these things should be done in the first place. This is all about tweaking the ESEA-- neither is proposing any serious large transformation.
When it comes to "liberals" and "conservatives" and ed reform, we really are in a Coke and Pepsi world, with public schools the RC Cola of the marketplace. Or maybe we're actually milk-- a good healthy alternative that nobody even talks or thinks about until we finally come up with a cheesy PR campaign of our own.
It's not news that public education is under attack from both self-identified liberals and conservatives, so it's interesting to read a side-by-side comparison and see whether real differences, or if we're simply in a Coke vs. Pepsi situation here. So let's take a quick look at each entry in the series.
Testing and Transparency
This one is easy. Hess and Cunningham started with a subject on which they fully agree-- keep all that testing in place and provide lots of data and transparency. That includes a requirement to report everything schools have spent and what they've spent it on (I'm not sure what we're after here-- here in Pennsylvania any taxpayer can walk into their school district office and demand a financial report or, actually, pretty much any document the district possesses that's not an issue of, say, student privacy.)
We'd also like to see states required to provide a broader bucket of consistent metrics on school and system outcomes like numbers of students taking and passing Advanced Placement courses or completing career certifications, and operational factors like turnover, experience, and benefit costs.
So, on this issue, no difference.
Should the USED set goals for adequate school performance?
Cunningham is sure that states will screw it all up, lie and cheat and fake their way to adequate performance levels if the feds aren't on their case. But he acknowledges that top-down fed goals have been a bust, so he recommends "negotiations." The feds don't dictate, I guess, but still have to be satisfied. How that doesn't turn into "the feds dictate" he does not make clear.
Hess has several good lines in this series, and here's one of them:
The problem with federal involvement is that federal officials have no responsibility for meeting the goals they insist upon and no accountability if schools fail to do so. All the blame falls on local educators and on local and state officials. The result is that it's all too easy for D.C. officials to insist upon ridiculous goals.
E.g., 100% proficiency for NCLB. Then this:
The NFL season just ended. Over the next couple months, coaches should sit with their executives and owners in order to set goals regarding the kind of performance they expect to see. That process is valuable and I heartily endorse it. At the same time, I don't think it would be constructive for the Pennsylvania legislature to declare that the Eagles and Steelers need to go at least 11-5 next year.
What Hess doesn't address is the question of what difference it makes whether that unrealistically specific goal comes from federal, state or local authorities, other than the implication that such a goal best comes from someone who will lose his job if the goal is not met.
Should the feds tell states how to turn schools around?
Cunningham likes the School Improvement Grants, and he thinks conservatives and liberals should, too. He thinks conservatives don't because it's federal intrusion and liberals don't because it will get teachers fired. He fails to note that because it's a competitive grant, it's a federal commitment to help only some schools.
"Children only have one chance for an education," opines Cunningham. He fails to explain why that chance should rest on a local administrator's ability to fill out paperwork to fed's satisfaction.
Hess's argument is simply that the feds have no business dictating how schools should be turned around because the feds don't have the faintest clue how to do it.
Should Title I fund follow students (aka vouchers 3.12)?
Cunningham says no, which frankly surprises me, given Education Post's deep love for charter schools, which live only by draining the funds of traditional public schools through one portability mechanism or another. Maybe I'm missing something here, but Cunningham says A) even though we know it costs more to educate poor kids than rich kids, we spend the other way around and B) if poor kids pool their funds, it allows those funds to get more done.
Hess is an unequivocal yes, which does not surprise me.
Neither questions the assumption that once education dollars leave taxpayers hands, those dollars somehow attach or belong to individual students, as if schools are service provided for individual students and their parents and not a public service provided for the benefit of all members of a community. And neither brings up the question of how the federal could or should guarantee full funding for schools across the country.
Should the feds have a role in teacher evaluation?
Teacher evaluation that includes some measure of student growth on tests simply would not be happening without federal pressure. If we remove the federal role, it will disappear. The losers will be not only children who desperately need more effective teachers, but also the teachers themselves. Absent real accountability, teachers will be denied the resources, recognition, and respect they need and deserve.
That's Cunningham, encapsulating every wrong argument about teacher evaluation in the reformster canon. Well, okay-- he's correct that test-based evaluation wouldn't exist without federal pressure, but that's because every single respectable authority on the matter recognizes that such value-added test-based measures are evaluatory crap. So the federal insistence on them is a big fat fail for the feds. I suggest Cunningham look at the story of Sheri Lederman, a top NY teacher who is actually a terrible failure according to New York's test-based system. Then Cunningham can explain how Lederman and her students are benefiting from this federally-pushed malarkey.
His argument just gets worse. "Just as annual assessments help parents and teachers understand where students are at and how to get them where they need to go--" and you can just hold it right there, because annual assessments don't actually do that.
Hess agrees that anything that helps teachers be better is a Good Thing. But as always, he argues that the feds don't know jack squat about how to do that, so they should stay out of it.
Should the feds support education innovation?
No real separation on this issue. Both believe that the feds should fund innovation; they just express a disagreement about how carefully directed such innovation searching should be. In other words, should the feds be telling innovators what sort of innovation they should be innovating, or should they just look for people who are Doing Good Stuff and throw money at them?
There's probably a good conversation to be had about how much money to spend and what else we could otherwise be spending it on. At the very least, it would be nice to acknowledge that the search for a startling new idea that will all by itself revolutionize education is an exercise in unicorn farming. There are always ways in which public education can grow and strengthen and become better, but if you tell me you've come up with something that will completely change the face of public education and radically improve schools, I'm going to assume that you're either smoking something or selling something.
What is the proper role of the feds in education?
Cunningham just can't keep himself from speaking bite-sized chunks of PR baloney.
My view is clear: the core federal role is to protect kids.
Well, that's a pretty thought-- but what does it actually mean.
Returning oversight to the states will put millions of at-risk kids at even greater risk. The notion that getting the feds out of the way will suddenly trigger a renaissance of innovation, accountability, and equity is a fairy tale.
Straw man. I've read few writers who suggested that there is a state ed renaissance waiting to emerge from under the federal boots. That's not the point. The point is that the feds aren't helping, at all. Plus the notion that federal bureaucrats are somehow more wise, virtuous, and corruption-free than state ones is simultaneously hilarious and insulting.
Hess redefines the question.
I'd say that our discussion has been about what Washington can do usefully and well within our federal system. The question is when federal activity will help schools, given all of their complexity, layers of governance, and dependence on personal relationships and local cultures, and when it's more likely to fuel rigidity, bad decisions, and counterproductive compliance.
Of course, a couple of their ideas for DC do rather match up. From Cunningham
Choice is an effective but limited strategy. Charters and vouchers will never serve all kids. We must also get better at improving traditional schools.
From Hess:
Play an active role in "trust-busting" and bureaucracy-taming—freeing up educators and enabling promising new providers to get a fair shot.
What did they miss?
I don't see much here that highlights a difference between the "conservative" or "liberal" position, because this conversation stayed clear of the area where these guys most agree. Modern education "reform" is the application of government principles pioneered by the military-industrial complex and later moved into social program arenas from the treatment of adults with mental issues to the management of the food system.
First, we declare that the government has an obligation to make sure that widgets are provided to all citizens who need them. Nominal liberals nod and say, that's great. Government should do something about the widget problem. Then policymakers create an assortment of widget-related programs that are co-created by folks in the widget industry; these are sold as solutions to the widget problem. Then the administration of these programs is handed over to corporations, and nominal conservatives nod because, hey, free market private sector solutions.
From that point on, it's simply an ongoing negotiation between government and corporate functionaries about how the money is going to flow. The corporate interest is in functioning with minimal government interference, while the government's only source of power is its ability to control that money flow. Add a revolving door so that it's hard to keep track of which offices the players are working out of, and you have the system in place.
It plays out in public as a battle of virtuous idealism versus heartless pragmatism, and that's reflected in this series of posts. Hess wins in terms of practical, specific, pragmatic, smart comments. Cunningham puts out more pretty thoughts with high moral purpose with no hint of how to really make it happen.
But all in all, this is a discussion that assumes more than it debates and it reads more like to VP's from the same corporation discussing the best distribution of corner offices than a deep-level discussion of the corporations fundamental direction. The two agree on what should be done-- charters, privatization, test-driven accountability-- they're just arguing over who should get to say exactly how these things should be done, and not whether these things should be done in the first place. This is all about tweaking the ESEA-- neither is proposing any serious large transformation.
When it comes to "liberals" and "conservatives" and ed reform, we really are in a Coke and Pepsi world, with public schools the RC Cola of the marketplace. Or maybe we're actually milk-- a good healthy alternative that nobody even talks or thinks about until we finally come up with a cheesy PR campaign of our own.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
No National Test
As fans of test-driven accountability (as well as test-generated profits) continue to argue vigorously for the continued repeated use of Big Standardized Testing, there is one argument you won't hear much any more.
Today, there is no easy and rigorous way to compare the performance of individual students or schools in different states....If students take the same assessment under the same conditions, a given score in one place has the same meaning as it does in all others.
That's a from a joint paper issued by ETS, Pearson, and the College Board back in 2010. Back in 2011, USED's National Center for Educational Statistics released a report complaining that fifty different states had fifty different measures of student achievement.
The dream of Common Core was that every state would be studying the same thing. A student in Idaho could move to Alabama and pick up math class right where he left off, and the only way to insure that was going to be that Idaho and Alabama would be measuring their students with the same yardstick. Schools and students would be comparable within and across state boundaries.
That is not going to happen.
The attempt to create a national assessment is a failure. States continue to abandon the SBA and the PARCC; SBA is down to twenty-ish states and PARCC is under a dozen. The situation is messy that I have to give you approximations because it depends on who's counting and when-- Mississippi just pulled out and several other states are eagerly eying the exits and I can't find any listing of in's and out's that is reliable and up-to-date. (And that is before we even talk about how many students within testings states will opt out of their test.)
But what's important is this-- whether the number of states participating is a little over thirty or a little under, it is not fifty. It is not close to fifty. And to the extent that the number is changing, it is not moving toward fifty.
Now, granted, the number is also a bit of a lie. As with the Common Core standards, several states have abandoned the national assessments in name only. Utah, for instance, dropped out of the SBAC, and then promptly hired the same company to produce their new non-SBA test as was producing the SBA test itself. Pennsylvania dropped out of the PARCC, and yet our new tests are very, very PARCC-like.
So many states are, in fact, quietly sticking close to the beloved national assessment-- but because they are politically unlikely to ever admit it, the damage is the same for the lovers of national assessment, because the anti-nationalist states won't allow themselves to become part of the national testing.
Of course, if we wanted a national testing program, we could always go back to paying attention to the NAEP, but it's due for an upgrade and in today's climate, it's hard to imagine how such a job could be done. And it's a pre-existing product, so it certainly doesn't represent a new opening into the testing market. The current test-driven accountability wave has driven billions (with a b) of dollars into test corporation coffers. But the dream of one simple open market has fallen apart. Pearson and AIR and the rest have been forced to do business the old, messy way.
So we can't compare the students of Idaho to the students of Florida. We can't stack-rank the schools of Pennsylvania against the schools of Texas. We cannot measure how the Common Core is doing in every corner of the nation. There is no national, common assessment, and there never will be. On this point, at least, the reformsters have failed.
Today, there is no easy and rigorous way to compare the performance of individual students or schools in different states....If students take the same assessment under the same conditions, a given score in one place has the same meaning as it does in all others.
That's a from a joint paper issued by ETS, Pearson, and the College Board back in 2010. Back in 2011, USED's National Center for Educational Statistics released a report complaining that fifty different states had fifty different measures of student achievement.
The dream of Common Core was that every state would be studying the same thing. A student in Idaho could move to Alabama and pick up math class right where he left off, and the only way to insure that was going to be that Idaho and Alabama would be measuring their students with the same yardstick. Schools and students would be comparable within and across state boundaries.
That is not going to happen.
The attempt to create a national assessment is a failure. States continue to abandon the SBA and the PARCC; SBA is down to twenty-ish states and PARCC is under a dozen. The situation is messy that I have to give you approximations because it depends on who's counting and when-- Mississippi just pulled out and several other states are eagerly eying the exits and I can't find any listing of in's and out's that is reliable and up-to-date. (And that is before we even talk about how many students within testings states will opt out of their test.)
But what's important is this-- whether the number of states participating is a little over thirty or a little under, it is not fifty. It is not close to fifty. And to the extent that the number is changing, it is not moving toward fifty.
Now, granted, the number is also a bit of a lie. As with the Common Core standards, several states have abandoned the national assessments in name only. Utah, for instance, dropped out of the SBAC, and then promptly hired the same company to produce their new non-SBA test as was producing the SBA test itself. Pennsylvania dropped out of the PARCC, and yet our new tests are very, very PARCC-like.
So many states are, in fact, quietly sticking close to the beloved national assessment-- but because they are politically unlikely to ever admit it, the damage is the same for the lovers of national assessment, because the anti-nationalist states won't allow themselves to become part of the national testing.
Of course, if we wanted a national testing program, we could always go back to paying attention to the NAEP, but it's due for an upgrade and in today's climate, it's hard to imagine how such a job could be done. And it's a pre-existing product, so it certainly doesn't represent a new opening into the testing market. The current test-driven accountability wave has driven billions (with a b) of dollars into test corporation coffers. But the dream of one simple open market has fallen apart. Pearson and AIR and the rest have been forced to do business the old, messy way.
So we can't compare the students of Idaho to the students of Florida. We can't stack-rank the schools of Pennsylvania against the schools of Texas. We cannot measure how the Common Core is doing in every corner of the nation. There is no national, common assessment, and there never will be. On this point, at least, the reformsters have failed.
The PARCC Fairy Tale
The fairy tale surrounding PARCC and the other Big Standardized Tests has been tweaked and rewritten and adapted, but some folks still enjoy telling it, and every once in a while I come across (like the brothers Grimm searching the countryside for classic old material) a particularly simple and straightforward version of the old classic. That's what we're looking at today.
Andrea Townsend describes her job as coordinating services for students with special needs in the schools of Greenville, Ohio (northwest of Dayton), but her LinkdIn profile shows a broader range of responsibilities (like food service). She was previously an elementary principal, and before that nine years as an intervention specialist.She started her career as a satellite instructor connected to a vocational school for three years. She has a bachelors in Vocational Agriculture Education and a Masters in Educational Leadership.
Townsend thinks the PARCC is getting a bad rap, and she took to a community website to share that view in a piece that was later picked up by some other regional media.
I feel the need to make an unpopular statement of my opinion. Here goes… I support the new statewide tests.
So she knows she's out on a limb here. Her piece provides a testament to the mis-information that still persists and the false narrative that reformsters are still trying to sell.
Educators and legislators in our state adopted new standards to guide the instruction for public schools several years ago. These standards are focused on the skills students need to be successful in college or their career or both. The standards look at critical thinking and problem solving skills as well as developing a student’s ability communicate clearly. These skills are paramount to success in our ever changing, global and technology driven world.
Chapter One of the Tale of Test-Driven Accountability remains the same. "Once upon a time, we adopted the magical Common Core." You'll note that even though Townsend is willing to be controversial and unpopular, she's not crazy enough to promote the Common Core by name, but she does support it with the usual unproven assertions. How does anyone know that the standards cover objectives needed for career or college success? "The standards look at critical thinking"? I looked at a zoo once; that doesn't make me an elephant. Nor do I see any standards that address communicating clearly. Nor do we have a whit of evidence of exactly what skills are paramount to success.
According to the PARCConline.org website, “The new tests also are being developed in response to the longstanding concerns of educators, parents and employers who want assessments that better measure students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills and their ability to communicate clearly.”
Come on, Ms. Townsend-- you're better than this. According to Budwesier ads, drinking beer will make me attractive to hot blondes. According to Tony the Tiger, Frosted Flakes will make me great. As an administrator, you've had to deal with numerous vendors-- when they're trying to sell you something, do you just take their word for it, or do you check things out and verify? PARCC is just a big test vendor. Do you have any proof of their test's awesomeness beyond their own word?
Next she raises the issue of a diverse student population, specifically considering students with special needs. Again, with no back-up other than a quote from PARCC, she asserts that PARCC totally handles a wide range of students-- without ever altering the content. PARCC just allows for different ways to interact with the test, but it is great for assessing students at the far reaches of the scale-- which is really difficult to do. Much has been written about the inadequacy of PARCC's accommodations (here's one example), so we'll need more than just PARCC's word for it here, too.
Acquiring skills begins with a clear understanding of two things. First we must clearly understand what skill we want. Second we must clearly understand the skills we already have. When we have those two pieces of information, we are able to learn, practice and apply skills between those we have and those we want. It is important in education that we have the clearest understanding of the skills each student has and the skills each student needs.
Chapter Two of the Tale includes the story of how the magical PARCC will let us know exactly what our students do and don't know. Again, we know this because PARCC says so. But the PARCC is not a formative assessment, and its results are neither fine-grained enough nor quickly returned enough nor transparent enough (remember, teachers aren't allowed to so much as look at the test questions) to help any teacher-- certainly not to give the kind of help that a teacher gets from her own assessmenbts and data in the classroom.
Change is hard, says Townsend. And some of the process of change has been problematic. But she still supports the PARCC. And she has a quote from somebody's facebook page to back that up.
The lead line says that Townsend wrote this with the support of Greenville City School's Central Office, so it's unclear exactly how much this represents the district's point of view. But It does represent the fairy tale that continues to be the supporting narrative for PARCC:
Common Core Standards are magical and will make all students ready for college and career. To know if they're really acquiring those skills, we must have a magical test that can measure exactly how skilled each student has become, so that teachers can fine tune their instruction. The PARCC is that test.
That's the story, and every single sentence of it is riddled with unproven, unsupported assertions. Townsend has given us a fairly straightforward retelling of the classic, but it still rests on magical standards, magical testing, and magical thinking.
Andrea Townsend describes her job as coordinating services for students with special needs in the schools of Greenville, Ohio (northwest of Dayton), but her LinkdIn profile shows a broader range of responsibilities (like food service). She was previously an elementary principal, and before that nine years as an intervention specialist.She started her career as a satellite instructor connected to a vocational school for three years. She has a bachelors in Vocational Agriculture Education and a Masters in Educational Leadership.
Townsend thinks the PARCC is getting a bad rap, and she took to a community website to share that view in a piece that was later picked up by some other regional media.
I feel the need to make an unpopular statement of my opinion. Here goes… I support the new statewide tests.
So she knows she's out on a limb here. Her piece provides a testament to the mis-information that still persists and the false narrative that reformsters are still trying to sell.
Educators and legislators in our state adopted new standards to guide the instruction for public schools several years ago. These standards are focused on the skills students need to be successful in college or their career or both. The standards look at critical thinking and problem solving skills as well as developing a student’s ability communicate clearly. These skills are paramount to success in our ever changing, global and technology driven world.
Chapter One of the Tale of Test-Driven Accountability remains the same. "Once upon a time, we adopted the magical Common Core." You'll note that even though Townsend is willing to be controversial and unpopular, she's not crazy enough to promote the Common Core by name, but she does support it with the usual unproven assertions. How does anyone know that the standards cover objectives needed for career or college success? "The standards look at critical thinking"? I looked at a zoo once; that doesn't make me an elephant. Nor do I see any standards that address communicating clearly. Nor do we have a whit of evidence of exactly what skills are paramount to success.
According to the PARCConline.org website, “The new tests also are being developed in response to the longstanding concerns of educators, parents and employers who want assessments that better measure students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills and their ability to communicate clearly.”
Come on, Ms. Townsend-- you're better than this. According to Budwesier ads, drinking beer will make me attractive to hot blondes. According to Tony the Tiger, Frosted Flakes will make me great. As an administrator, you've had to deal with numerous vendors-- when they're trying to sell you something, do you just take their word for it, or do you check things out and verify? PARCC is just a big test vendor. Do you have any proof of their test's awesomeness beyond their own word?
Next she raises the issue of a diverse student population, specifically considering students with special needs. Again, with no back-up other than a quote from PARCC, she asserts that PARCC totally handles a wide range of students-- without ever altering the content. PARCC just allows for different ways to interact with the test, but it is great for assessing students at the far reaches of the scale-- which is really difficult to do. Much has been written about the inadequacy of PARCC's accommodations (here's one example), so we'll need more than just PARCC's word for it here, too.
Acquiring skills begins with a clear understanding of two things. First we must clearly understand what skill we want. Second we must clearly understand the skills we already have. When we have those two pieces of information, we are able to learn, practice and apply skills between those we have and those we want. It is important in education that we have the clearest understanding of the skills each student has and the skills each student needs.
Chapter Two of the Tale includes the story of how the magical PARCC will let us know exactly what our students do and don't know. Again, we know this because PARCC says so. But the PARCC is not a formative assessment, and its results are neither fine-grained enough nor quickly returned enough nor transparent enough (remember, teachers aren't allowed to so much as look at the test questions) to help any teacher-- certainly not to give the kind of help that a teacher gets from her own assessmenbts and data in the classroom.
Change is hard, says Townsend. And some of the process of change has been problematic. But she still supports the PARCC. And she has a quote from somebody's facebook page to back that up.
The lead line says that Townsend wrote this with the support of Greenville City School's Central Office, so it's unclear exactly how much this represents the district's point of view. But It does represent the fairy tale that continues to be the supporting narrative for PARCC:
Common Core Standards are magical and will make all students ready for college and career. To know if they're really acquiring those skills, we must have a magical test that can measure exactly how skilled each student has become, so that teachers can fine tune their instruction. The PARCC is that test.
That's the story, and every single sentence of it is riddled with unproven, unsupported assertions. Townsend has given us a fairly straightforward retelling of the classic, but it still rests on magical standards, magical testing, and magical thinking.
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