Coke Provides a Marketing Lesson

Proponents of vouchers and choice systems never tire of touting the benefits of the free market. For them, the free market is like a colosseum in which gladiator products battle to become better, until the crown goes to those who are Most Excellent of All. It's a touchingly childlike belief; the free market will deliver excellence to customers just like Santa will deliver presents to good boys and girls.

But in our American free-ish market capitalism-lite system, the path to victory often has nothing to do with the pursuit of excellence.

Sometimes the market place just doesn't want excellence enough to pay for it; analysts have suggested that's why the airline travel experience is lousy and getting lousier. Or consider cable television, which promised a cornucopia of varied and quality channels and instead delivered 500 versions of the same bland culture-mulch.

Yesterday, Coca-Cola delivered another lesson in how the free market really works. Coke has been having troubles financially, and it's worth noting that many of these troubles have absolutely nothing to do with the product at all, but with the financial machinations of international exchange rates. Apparently when those aren't tilted in the proper direction, you can magically turn your money into less money. Additionally, Coke has suffered some loss of market share because it has occurred to many people that they could put more healthful substances into their bodies.

So how did Coke handle this? Did they find a way to make their product better? Did they pursue excellence so that they could be rewarded by the free market? Of course not. As reported by the AP, they did this:

To make up for weak volume gains at home, the company has been using a variety of tactics including a focus on "mini-cans" and smaller bottles that are positioned as premium offerings and help push up revenue.

That's right. They looked for a better way to trick the customers into giving them more money. Specifically, they put their flavored fizzy water in smaller cans, essentially raising their price-per-unit and then marketing the increased cost as a Good Thing. They put less of the same old product in new cans. That's it.

This is the free market at its worst. The customer is your adversary-- they have your money and somehow, some way, you have to get it away from them. It's not that you need a product that actually has better quality-- you need a product that can more easily be sold.

I've written this many times. If I'm ever important enough to have a law named after me, this might be my best shot:

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

The notion that unleashing these sorts of market forces in education would somehow lead to better schools would be funny if it weren't so destructive in practice. It is particularly problematic because under school choice, the school can't raise the price because that voucher payment is set by the state (I know we rarely call these vouchers any more, but that's only because the term has become a political liability-- school choice programs are still essentially voucher programs). So the only option for schools in a free market system is to cut services, to put less education in a smaller, shinier can.

When a school's guiding principle, its business plan, is to ask, "How much less can we give these students and still keep market share," that school is broken. A system that rewards better marketing of a poorer product is not a system that creates excellence, and we do not need to put education in smaller cans.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Sheep, Simplicity and Losing the Point

David Greene (no relation) has a long but exceptionally worthwhile post up on his blog, "On Excellent Sheep: Our New Ruling Class." You should absolutely read the whole thing-- I am going to spin off one particular point here, but his whole piece is worth your time.

His "excellent sheep" are the people who are good at playing the school game.

They took as many AP courses as they could accumulate without any love of the subjects. They did all the same extracurriculars. They were tutored to get the highest SAT scores possible. They either had coaches or had “ghost”writers help them write their college essays They had all figured out how to play the academic game of success without taking risks but many couldn’t do simple tasks like get on a commuter train to NYC. These students were the epitome of a saying one of my “regular kids” put on a  t-shirt we made up one year: “Be Different. Just Like Everyone Else.” They followed the script to get the highest grades, the highest SAT scores, and to get them into the most elite universities in the country. And get in they did.

I do not teach in a high-powered super-school, but I have taught an honors class to juniors for twenty-some years now, and I know the students he's speaking about. Mine are generally less wealthy and may have fewer resources that his excellent sheep, but as I read Greene's piece I recognized the habits of mind.

You might think that smarter students, intellectually gifted students would be more engaged in their educations, but as I tell my students, "Some of you do not use your powers for good." Their stronger mental and school skills often mean that they are less engaged than my less academically gifted students.

Teaching is like setting up an obstacle course for students, with the intent that running the course will cause them to develop certain skills and acquire certain knowledge. But the excellent sheep are good at seeing ways to just walk around the obstacle course and still end up at the other side. They like to reduce assignments to a simple series of hoops. Thinking about what they're doing, becoming engaged, really wrestling mentally with the material-- all of that just slows them down. They will ask questions about assignments, but these are not questions borne of curiosity-- they're just carefully reworded versions of "Just tell me exactly what you have to see in order for me to get my A." Thwarting these sheep and putting them in pens that they must think their way out of is one of the great ongoing goals of my teaching career.

Like Greene, I see this ability to skip the process and fake the outcome in the people driving reform. In fact, Andrew Rotherman of reformster-friendly Bellwether said much the same thing at US News when he points out that the people driving the ed reform bus are the people who were "good at school" and so want to install exactly the same sort of systems that they were so good at gaming.

At first glance it might seem that what we're looking at is the ability to simplify-- and isn't that a good thing? Henry David Thoreau's Walden is a hymn to simplicity, to cutting away all the extra fat so that we can see the bare bones of What Really Matters.

But there's the problem. Because if we're not careful, what we're cutting away isn't fat at all.

This is particularly true when you simplify a complex internal human operation down to simple superficial measures. You could, for instance, that you are going to decide to measure how much somebody loves you by the superficial measure of how many times they call you, or how much they spent on your birthday present, or how many times they kiss you in a week. But these clear simple measures of a complex and intricate phenomenon are clear and simple precisely because they miss the point.

The excellent sheep, whether they are in the classroom or being educational thought leaders, have made the same mistake.

I say, "Read the Sun Also Rises, and tell me how you think ideas like alienation and powerlessness are reflected in both the novel and the modernist movement. When we've had some discussion, I'll ask you to expand those ideas in a paper about the subject."

The excellent sheep hear "Blah blah blah write a paper" and start asking questions like "Exactly how long does it have to be?" and "How many quotes from the novel should we use?" They say to each other (and remember when they grow up to be thought leaders) "I wish we were just doing a multiple choice test on this. I kick ass on multiple choice tests." They may complain about the assignment-- "Why doesn't he tell us exactly what he wants us to write? If he would tell me exactly what I'm supposed to write, I could just go ahead and write that."

Reducing complex behaviors to simple measures always means losing the idea, missing the point, cutting away that which is most essential in the behavior. My students want to do it, and the excellent sheep who have commandeered education have enshrined this sort of point-missing into regulation.

With my students, there is hope. They're young, and we go very meta on this phenomenon in my class, talking about what they're doing and how they're doing it and why it is not in their best interest to do it. I was an excellent sheep once; I know most of the shortcuts and I'm almost always there waiting for them when they try to take one.

Unfortunately, I don't get to have this discussion with the excellent sheep who are running the reformy show, nor do I think I could make an impression. They are rich and successful and they have drawn the very sheeplike conclusion that their success is a direct result of their sheepishness. Those of us who are reformed sheep almost always got there because life handed us a huge attitude adjustment, and that's a benefit that I'm in no position to deliver.

So the most I can do is write and read and talk. Those of us who aren't sheep need to do that at a minimum, because the excellent sheep are so determined and confident that the rest of us can start to doubt our own senses, and we need to remind each other that there are huge, important aspects of life that the sheep are missing entirely.

Keep the faith. Don't believe the excellent sheep.

Fiction, Charter Fiction, and Damned Lies

Back in August of 2014, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools published "Separating Fact & Fiction: What You Need To Know About Charter Schools." This is kind of like reading a tobacco industry publication about the health benefits of smoking. Admittedly, the NAPCS only suggests they're going to separate fact and fiction, not tell us which are which. But the National Education Policy Center, one of the most indispensable research centers for education, did their own review of the charter report, and that review was just released.

NEPC's review is scholarly, thorough, and responsible. So I figured I would take a quick scan through the NAPCS piece with a somewhat less grown-up eye (since I missed it when it first came out) and see what kind of baloney the charter folks are selling.

I'll preface this, as always, by saying that I believe there is a place for charters, particularly the classic charters that pre-date the current explosion of charters that are more interested in investment return and money-funneling than actual education. It's unfortunate that the current crop of charters are making the whole concept of charter schooling look bad. So, no, I'm not a knee-jerk automatic charter hater.

Now let's check out some myths.

MYTH: Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools

Their claim is that they meet the legal definition of a public school. Of course, there are states (looking at you, OK) where helpful legislators are actually trying to get charters excused from those pesky testing and transparency requirements. Otherwise, the rule remains the same-- charters are public when they want access to public money, and private when they want to avoid being transparent-- even to other parts of the charter network!

MYTH: Charter schools get more money than other public schools.

I see what you did there with the word "other"-- asserting some more that charters are public schools. Their claim is that charters get less money. Of course charters also get more free buildings for co-locations or just plain take overs. And charters have started agitating hard for a bigger piece of the pie, so I guess all that talk about how charters would do more with less was just a sales pitch.

MYTH: Charter schools receive a disproportionate amount of private funds.

Well, "disproportionate" is a fancy word for "fair," and fairness is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly some charters have some fancy high profile fundraisers while schools like mine are holding car washes. But I have no idea how we figure this, since every dollar a parent spends on a Hello Kitty backpack would conceivably count as a private fund.

MYTH: There is a lack of transparency around charter schools' use of funds.

Well, yes. There was also a lack of civility during assault on the US Embassy in Benghazi. Charters don't so much lack transparency as they fight it like cats being forced to bathe. One of the authors of the NEPC review sent out 400 Freedom of Information Act requests to charters. 20% answered, 10% asserted their right to ignore FOIA requests, and 70% simply ignored the request.

Now, what NAPSC actually says is that charter schools "have greater accountability and scrutiny over their finances than traditional public schools." They have no real support for that other than claiming that they must meet all state laws as well as keep their authorizers happy. Maybe what they really mean is that they have to answer to their investors.

MYTH: Charter school teachers are less qualified than teachers in traditional public schools.

"Like all public school leaders, charter leaders aim to hire talented, passionate, and qualified teachers who will boost student achievement and contribute to a thriving school culture." Well, baloney. Nobody asked what you aim at. You can aim at anything. But since charters aim to spend less money on teaching staffs and charters aim to fill spaces with easily-replaced TFA temps and charters aim to install systems where they can hide lousy pay structures with shiny "merit" systems, we can easily predict that what their aim is confused. They may be aiming for the target, but their big cheap gun is pointed straight at the floor. I have no doubt that there are many excellent teachers working in the charter world, but since they prize the "flexibility...to draw from a wider candidate pool," they will, in fact, have a teaching pool of less-qualified people filling teaching slots.

MYTH: Charter schools are anti-union.

The National Alliance believes that teachers in any school should be treated fairly and should be given the due process rights they are accorded under the law. And we believe in giving school leaders the flexibility they need to staff their schools with teachers who support the mission and will meet school standards. 

We are happy to have unions, as long as they are ineffective and powerless and never intrude on the management's freedom to run the school however they wish.

MYTH: Charter schools aren't accountable to the public since their boards aren't elected.

Yeah, we're just going to fudge our way through this one. See charters have to answer to authorizers, who are just like the public. "Charter schools are uniquely accountable to the public because they sign contracts with a government-endorsed authorizer..." So, no, they aren't accountable to the public. In fact, they rather like it that way.

MYTH: Charter schools cream or cherry-pick the best students from traditional public schools.

NAPCS says that charters are "generally required" to accept all students. But one of their most vocal supporters says, no, they don't, and that's a good thing. The modern charter is excellent at making sure it only serves the kind of students it wishes to serve, and this selectivity has been demonstrated by researchers again and again, to the point that the New Jersey Charter Schools group tried to use the court system to stop one set of researchers from proving that yet again, the charters do not serve the same population as the public system.

Part of the answer here is also marketing. If you market a restaurant as a prime steak house, you won't pull big vegan clientelle. If you market a charter as a no excuses, all science all day, we make slackers miserable school, your potential market will do some of the cherry picking for you.

Also, you know what kind of student charters never have to accept? The kind of student who comes into school in the middle of the year. For the most part, charters do not have to back fill their empty seats. None of their students have come in in the middle of the year-- those kids can hie them to a public school.

MYTH: Charter schools don't enroll children from underserved families.

The research is stacking up that charters accelerate segregation by both race and class (NEPC has a list of six). Charters do enroll such students, but not at the same rate as public schools.

MYTH: Charter schools serve fewer English language learners than traditional public schools.

NAPCS says there is "no significant difference" in the percentage of ELL students served by charter and public schools. NEPC says this claim is "unsubstantiated and demonstrably false" which is the polite researcher way of calling pants on fire. Maybe NAPCS thinks "no significant difference" means "no difference large enough to bother us."

MYTH: Charter schools serve fewer students with disabilities.

NAPCS says they're at 10% enrollment versus 12% for public schools. They neglect to mention how the disabilities sort out as far as severity, so they are counting a child with a mild processing disability the same as a child with severe learning challenges. They also give themselves a big pat on the back for keeping a huge percentage of their students in a least restrictive environment of a regular classroom, which is a great way to spin providing no special supports for students with special needs.

MYTH: Charter schools depend on counseling out for academic results blah blah this is a wordy one for some reason.

Well, not for some reason. The myth is worded to embed the notion that charters get better academic results, which they don't. The NAPCS defense is awesome: "There is no evidence of charter school policies that explicitly push out students." So, "You'll never catch us doing it."

MYTH: Charter schools have higher suspension and expulsion rates.

Pretty sure that's just wrong. For instance, Chicago just noticed a problem. And DC is really out of whack. NAPCS is using a single Education Week article covering 2009-2010 data. It's a weak stretch.

MYTH: Charter school students do no better than traditional public schools.

NAPCS uses their own studies to assert their superiority. Well, actually, just a couple of their own studies. Funny they didn't use any of the independent studies out there, most of which show that charters generally are neither better nor worse than public schools. But I'm going to give them a pass on this because most of those studies reach their conclusions by looking at standardized tests scores, and those things don't really tell us how any students in any schools are really doing.

MYTH: Underperforming charter schools are allowed to remain open.

Tricky one to defend, since the most striking defense is that the really bad charter schools often just close up shop during the school year with no warning at all. Closing whenever they feel like it is one of the defining characteristics of the modern charter school, and one of the reasons I oppose them.

MYTH: Charters are an urban-only phenomenon.

Well, I believe that probably is a myth. I'm sure that charter operators will go anywhere they think the market is ripe for the plucking. Pennsylvania's cyber charters have displayed a rapacious love of money that knows no boundaries whatsoever. Of course, if we can agree that charters also appear in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, then perhaps we can move onto the next logical question, which is "So what?"

MYTH: Competition from charter schools is causing neighborhood schools to close and harming the students attending them.

MYTH: Charter schools take funding away from traditional public schools.

Again, the statement of the first myth itself is a big fat lie. The implication here is that charters are just out-competing those lame-o public schools. But no-- it's not the competition that's doing the damage-- it's the sweet, sweet political deals that turn charter systems into bloodsucking leeches firmly latched onto the veins of public education.

NAPSC's defense is stupid. "No research has shown that the presence of public charter schools cause neighborhood schools to close."  Come visit me at my home, and I will walk you across the street to the former neighborhood elementary school that was closed a few years ago. In that year, our goal was to save about $800K in operating expenses. In that same year, we handed over about $760K to cyber-charters. Charters suck the money out of public schools. In places like New York City where politically-connected profiteers like Eva Moskowitz can strong-arm the city into handing them free real estate, charters are literally taking the school buildings away from the neighborhood.

One of the biggest, boldest, fattest, most destructive lies of the charter movement is that we can operate multiple school systems for the cost of one. But charters have made sure that their political backers will insure that it's the public system that loses out and that the public schools will be the ones stripped of resources and left with less than they need to function.

In 2014, the charter industry could still claim with a straight face that only a portion of the per-pupil cost left the public schools with the student. But they have been working on that. Indiana's Governor Pence actually wants the charters to get MORE per pupil tan a public school.

NAPSC ends with a non-denial denial, leaning on the competitive aspect. In essence, their position is, "Well, yes, we take resources away from pubic schools. But we are better, so we deserve to."

MYTH: Charter schools resegregate pubic education.

Asked and answered. All the reputable research suggests that they do, in fact, do this. In fact, the NAPCS defense is, "Yeah, we're working on that."

MYTH: Some charter schools are religious schools.

NAPCS response is that it would be wrong to operate as a religious school, which I guess means that charters are careful enough not to get caught. NEPC wryly observes that researchers are studying faith-based charters, which suggests that such schools exist.

MYTH: Charter schools aren't the incubators of innovation that they claim to be.

NAPCS wants you to remember that charters themselves are an innovation (though I don't know if you get to call yourself a new idea if you are older than the internet). And they've blending learning  and using online instruction. So, you know, innovation! You might expect a longer list to back this point up, but I guess this is all they've got. In all fairness to charters, I think I more often here the incubator of innovation claim from their supporters (e.g. POTUS). I don't recall often reading about a charter saying, "Hey, everyone, come look at this innovative success we're having here," probably for the same reason that you don't hear me holler, "Hey, everyone, come watch me flap my arms and fly off the top of the Chrysler Building."

That's the myth portion.

Post-mythbusting, the paper moves into the endnote section, which leans heavily on the work of NAPCS and other charter school boosters. Not so much on actual real research.

I give them credit for not crafting all of the myths as straw men, but here's the thing about myths-- they often spring into being because many, many people encounter something and reach a similar conclusion. The idea, for instance, that gay folks are actually human beings pretty much like other human beings seems to have spread mostly because, as gay folks stopped hiding the gay, straight folks looked around and went, "Oh. I know some gay folks. They appear to be regular human beings." It did not require a massive PR campaign.

Charter folks may be confused here because they shoved their way into recent prominence by spending a lot of money for PR and political influence. So perhaps they feel that these myths are the result of some sort of massive PR counter-offensive, and not the result of people using teir eyes and ears and brains. People know that charters are bleeding public schools dry because they have eyes and ears. People know that charters cream and cherry-pick and push out because people have eyes and ears.

But if you want to counter these counter-myths with facts and research and scholarship, I recommend the NEPC report, which handles the Big Bunch O' Charter Talking Points nicely. Let's hope it helps beat back the modern wave of charters and helps keep alive that charter schools can go back to being the positive force for education that they once were.

Adaptive Students and Adaptive Tests

One the great unexamined assumptions of the test-driven accountability fans is that students will actually give a rat's rear about the tests.

I'm not sure why the test fans make this assumption. Maybe they were the kinds of students who took every single test with the utmost seriousness, whether it mattered or not. Maybe they have convinced themselves that the tests are super-duper important and they can't imagine how anyone would think otherwise. Maybe it's been a really long time since they met someone who was fifteen years old.

If you like your "news" in anecdote form, there's this piece that's been bouncing around the internet that gathers a few choice tweets about the PARCC. Not exactly conclusive, but I'm betting few high school teachers read it and shake their heads, thinking, "My land, but I never heard of students saying such a thing." No, in high school land, we already know that one of the challenges of the Big Standardized Test is convincing students it isn't a complete waste of their time.

But this unexamined assumption really hits the fan when we get to adaptive testing.

The idea of an adaptive test is, of course, that it adjusts to the student level-- the smarter the student appears to be, the more the test ramps up the question.

But that only works if the student is motivated to do his best no matter what, if his reward is knowing he's done the best he could possibly do. However, if a student thinks the reward associated with the test is to be done with the test, adaptive testing looks completely different.

If my reward is to be done with a minimum of fuss, then I can adapt to my adaptive test easily, because here's the deal-- the more questions I answer incorrectly, the easier the questions get, and the quicker I can finish. And as I was writing this this morning, stories are starting to wander into facebook of exactly this happening-- students who have been burned out on endless pointless testing are starting to figure out how to game the new super-duper tests.

My reward for answering questions well is that the test gets longer and harder.

Adaptive tests can only work for a body of students who are driven to do their very best and show that impersonal, inhuman, pointless, no-stakes, computerized test just what they're made of. It's for students who are incapable of analyzing and adapting to their testing environment, but who are simply stuck in a default full-on setting. For everyone else, this is like some bizarro video game where the more fights you lose, the sooner you get to the final boss and the easier he is to beat. Tell me my students don't have the critical thinking skills to figure that one out, or the adaptive response skills to adjust to it.

Doublespeak Studies: "Student Achievement"

If you frame the argument, you win the argument before it even starts. And the best way to frame the argument is to choose the language that will be used to argue.

That's why, for instance, there's so much wrestling over whether to talk about "pro-choice" or "pro-life"-- because each term tilts the playing field.

Reformsters have framed the argument with precisely this technique, and nowhere have they been as successful as with the term "student achievement." It's a great re-construction, like renaming life-obliterating nuclear weapons as peacekeeper missiles, or remarketing GI Joe's not as dolls for boys, but as action figures.

The essence of doublespeak is to use a word that has two meanings-- one is the meaning that I actually have in mind when I use the term, and the other meaning is the one the audience will supply based on their own assumptions (which are based on what the word ordinarily means). So I tell my prom date we're taking a "limo" because to most people, "limo" means big elegant fancy car; but I actually mean a hotel-owned van. I use the language to conjure up a happy picture in your head, rather than confront you with smelly reality.

If you asked any 100 random people to explain what they thought student achievement meant, you would likely get a rich and varied set of answers. Student achievement sounds like it covers the full range of accomplishments, talents, skills and knowledge that we would find within a student body. It might echo the way in which I sometimes describe classes of students as a Legion of Super-Heroes (my personal preference over the Avengers or Justice League)-- a group of accomplished individuals, each with a different but exciting super power. Student achievement sounds great. It sounds like lots of young folks Getting Things Done and Fulfilling Their Promise.

But of course that's not what student achievement means at all.

"Student achievement" means "student test scores."

That's all. That's it. But reformsters have been excrutiatingly effective in getting people to think we're talking about actual student achievement while we're only talking about student test scores.

A google of "student achievement" returns 37,700,000 results. They are not encouraging.

Lots of folks want to talk about the student achievement gap. This always means the student test score gap.

When Arne Duncan tells audiences that the nation must "focus on improving teacher quality and support in order to boost student achievement," he means "to boost student test scores."

When a study last year asserted that teacher strikes hurt student achievement, fully reading the study shows that they mean the strike hurt student test scores (they didn't prove it, but they meant it).

Whenever a study talks about whether or not TFA boosts student achievement, the study is inevitably talking about whether or not TFA boost student test scores.

Whenever there's an attempt to connect teacher tenure to effects on student achievement, we turn out to actually be talking about correlations between tenure and student test scores.

In short, it has become commonplace to say "student achievement" when we really, honestly mean "student test scores." It serves reformsters well, because few people are really all that concerned about student standardized tests scores. "Chris seemed happy and thriving at school, and was coming home excited about new learning every day. Chris was just blossoming and becoming a great little person. But Chris kept got a low standardized test score last year, so we had no choice but to look for another school," said no parent ever. Ever!

As advocates for public education, here's one of the things we need to keep doing. When reformsters start saying student achievement, we need to speak up and ask, "So are you really just talking about student test scores?" Over and over.

By allowing them to say "achievement" when they mean "test scores" we are allowing them to skip over the entire discussion of whether or not the Big Standardized Test measures anything worth measuring. We allow them to skip over the discussion of whether the BS Test can be a useful proxy for anything (spoiler alert: it can't).

One of the ways to control a conversation is not to say what you mean, but to say something else so that your audience will hear something else, something different from what you are really saying. Let's stop saying "student achievement" when we're really talking about "student test scores."

Students As Vending Machines

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.

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!