At Yahoo News (yes, that's a thing) Matt Bai, who usually blogs about politics, has a piece arguing for more transparent metrics for teachers, a "Yelp for teachers. Let's take a look.
He spins off from a suit by a Virginia parent to force the state to release "the ratings that public school teachers get based on the test scores of their students."
Bai considers the arguments, and does so in a fairly even-handed manner. In fact. he uses what I'd call a pretty good baseball analogy for why the test-based VAM scores are not exactly the best possible way to measure teachers.
Did Derek Jeter give up more runs,
statistically speaking, than the average shortstop? Yes. Did you want
Jeter as your shortstop anyway? Absolutely. A public school teacher who
ignites the imagination (and most of us had someone like that) might
just be worth more than the one whose students have demonstrated mastery
of the Pythagorean theorem.
But Bai is not so much interested in techy test-based teacher tallies and how to best share them with the world. He's more interested in the matter of customer-based ratings. If amazon.com and Yelp can use customers ratings in a transparent manner, why not do the same for teachers.
Ask the parents at any bus stop which teachers have lost their energy
for the job or can’t control their tempers, and you’ll find out pretty
quickly that they know better than anyone else. But there’s no mechanism
for parents to pool that knowledge or to make the school system respond
to it.
There are a few issues with this. Some Bai recognizes; some, not so much.
First, the platform that he wants to see has been created, and more than once. For instance, check out ratemyteacher.com, which has been around for over a decade. My school is there, with thirteen teachers rated (including one who doesn't actually teach here); I have six ratings myself, placed in the system between 2004 and 2007.
And there's your next problem-- how do you get enough people to use the platform to get meaningful results? Those six ratings (assuming of course that they were written by students that I actually taught) represent approximately .5% of my customer base. Is that enough data for my employer to make decisions about my job performance, or for me to make tweaks in my teaching style?
How would we get all the parents of my district to log in and evaluate teachers, and would we get data that was useful? Voluntary participation would insure that the few who left comments would really mean what they said, but only teachers who evoked particularly strong feelings would elicit comments-- twenty-five sets of parents from my class might say nothing because they think I do a fine regular old vanilla job, but the twenty-sixth parent, who's angry about how Little Chris flunked for never doing work, might blow me up. On the other hand, if I somehow encourage parents to just fill it out, go ahead, say anything, just do it-- they may well take to heart the "say anything" implied in that sort of set-up.
I'm actually a fan of feedback. I have course and teacher evaluation forms of my own that my students fill out anonymously at the end of the year, and on more than one occasion it has changed how I do things. But there's something missing in the techy on-line customer comments model of teacher feedback, and while I'm not sure what it is, the very fact that it doesn't exist is our biggest evidence that nobody yet knows what it should look like. After all, we've made it possible for farmers to find their soulmates. Heck-- if this kind of web-based eval was really desired by parents, it would already exist as a bunch of facebook pages.
There are other problems with the customer feedback model for education. For instance, the quality of the "product" is often not evidenced for years. Every high school teacher has stories of the kid who comes back years later to say, "Boy, at the time, I hated you and I hated your class. But I want to thank you because it turned out you were right to push me." Also, parents are not the only customers-- all taxpayers and business owners
and community members are also customers of public ed.
Maybe this kind of transparent open-source feedback would be useful. After all, how often are comments and rating features of websites commandeered by trolls and cranks? Well, Bia's comment section is up to 1,500 entries, and I can tell you they're not all winners. Would they be a good evaluation tool for Bia's skill as a writer?
His last line is the final stake in this idea's chest:
Shouldn’t we teach to the parents at least as much as we teach to the test?
I understand his point (isn't parent feedback at least as useful as BS Test results soaked in VAM sauce), but the correct answer is "We should not teach to either. We should teach students."
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Trapped in Failing Facilities
This week I'm turning this space over to Phineas DeSiecle, of the Reformers for Reformy Reform, a group devoted to finding more widespread applications for the principles of modern education reform.
I'm writing to you today from outside Uncle Sugar's Big Golden Cafeteria, a failing lunch facility that probably exists in a city near you.
The cafeteria lacks the resources to provide an excellent high-achieving lunch for the students who eat here. The cafeteria does not have enough money to buy high-quality food. The kitchen is understaffed, and there are not enough trays to serve all the students here. Operators of the cafeteria lack the resources to keep the building heated comfortably in the winter. Also, the student group served by the cafeteria include many students with dietary restrictions, food allergies, and eating disorders that they bring with them to every meal. Many of these special needs are difficult and expensive to accommodate. In some cases the needs are daunting; the students with Celiac Disease continue to lose weight and suffer profound health issues no matter how many healthful meals of high quality bread and high achieving pasta they are fed.
Two hundred students are trapped in this failing facility. Trapped, I say. Trapped!!
Some might quibble with my use of the word "trapped." After all, the vast majority of our students and their families actually like the cafeteria well enough to recommend it to others. These people have been hoodwinked by the spectacle of caring trained professionals providing a fundamental human service. They don't understand that the operators of the cafeteria are liars and cheats, because as the customers of the service, they are fundamentally unfit to judge how well their children are being fed.
But here at RRR, we have a solution, a way to rescue those poor, trapped student diners.
First, testing. The eating gap can only be closed by more testing. We propose to take from ten to twenty percent of the food prepared by the cafeteria and instead of feeding it to the students, send it out for testing. We propose to take it to a local outdoor public facility where the food could be fed to animals, weighed, and examined for color and viscosity. This Park test would clearly tell us how well-fed the cafeteria customers are.
Once we have proven that the cafeteria is failing (because, face it, we have already decided it's failing;we just need to generate some numbers for proof) we can move on to further rescue.
Those cries of those poor, trapped two hundred students cannot be ignored. Doomed to eat their meals in an inadequately resources cafeteria simply because it's the one they've been assigned to, those two hundred trapped students must be heeded. They must have a choice.
So we propose to rescue them. Well, not all of them. Actually, we'd like to rescue about ten of them. And we'll decide which ten, thank you. We don't want to be rescuing any old random ten students—we just want our choice of the ones which we find worthy of being rescued.
The remaining one hundred ninety? Well, since we can all agree that the cafeteria is struggling because has too little food, too few trained staffers, and too little financial resource, the solution is obvious:
They should have less.
Once we take 5% of their customer base, the cafeteria will clearly be able to run the ovens 5% less, use 5% fewer light bulbs, and heat 5% less of the building. It's true that we will leave them with all of the high-cost customers, but hey-- how are we supposed to make money at this otherwise?
There are a few other solutions we can also offer. We have had some success with folks from Cook for America, a group of young adults who don't really know anything about preparing food, but like playing with kitchen tools. We did have some complaints about how bad their meals were, but they really mean well, and I think we can all agree that the only thing that matters in food preparation is good intentions.
We'd also like to experiment with a deal in which Uncle Sugar gives the cafeteria to us for our ten customers and the other 190 are encouraged to go seek sustenance elsewhere. After all, what could be more liberating, more choiceful, then being tossed out on the street?
Clearly, the one thing we can't do for the two hundred students trapped in this failing facility is to invest the resources, money and support needed to make the facility a success. Remember the RRR motto: throwing money at public service programs is wasteful, but throwing it at us is awesome!
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
I'm writing to you today from outside Uncle Sugar's Big Golden Cafeteria, a failing lunch facility that probably exists in a city near you.The cafeteria lacks the resources to provide an excellent high-achieving lunch for the students who eat here. The cafeteria does not have enough money to buy high-quality food. The kitchen is understaffed, and there are not enough trays to serve all the students here. Operators of the cafeteria lack the resources to keep the building heated comfortably in the winter. Also, the student group served by the cafeteria include many students with dietary restrictions, food allergies, and eating disorders that they bring with them to every meal. Many of these special needs are difficult and expensive to accommodate. In some cases the needs are daunting; the students with Celiac Disease continue to lose weight and suffer profound health issues no matter how many healthful meals of high quality bread and high achieving pasta they are fed.
Two hundred students are trapped in this failing facility. Trapped, I say. Trapped!!
Some might quibble with my use of the word "trapped." After all, the vast majority of our students and their families actually like the cafeteria well enough to recommend it to others. These people have been hoodwinked by the spectacle of caring trained professionals providing a fundamental human service. They don't understand that the operators of the cafeteria are liars and cheats, because as the customers of the service, they are fundamentally unfit to judge how well their children are being fed.
But here at RRR, we have a solution, a way to rescue those poor, trapped student diners.
First, testing. The eating gap can only be closed by more testing. We propose to take from ten to twenty percent of the food prepared by the cafeteria and instead of feeding it to the students, send it out for testing. We propose to take it to a local outdoor public facility where the food could be fed to animals, weighed, and examined for color and viscosity. This Park test would clearly tell us how well-fed the cafeteria customers are.
Once we have proven that the cafeteria is failing (because, face it, we have already decided it's failing;we just need to generate some numbers for proof) we can move on to further rescue.
Those cries of those poor, trapped two hundred students cannot be ignored. Doomed to eat their meals in an inadequately resources cafeteria simply because it's the one they've been assigned to, those two hundred trapped students must be heeded. They must have a choice.
So we propose to rescue them. Well, not all of them. Actually, we'd like to rescue about ten of them. And we'll decide which ten, thank you. We don't want to be rescuing any old random ten students—we just want our choice of the ones which we find worthy of being rescued.
The remaining one hundred ninety? Well, since we can all agree that the cafeteria is struggling because has too little food, too few trained staffers, and too little financial resource, the solution is obvious:
They should have less.
Once we take 5% of their customer base, the cafeteria will clearly be able to run the ovens 5% less, use 5% fewer light bulbs, and heat 5% less of the building. It's true that we will leave them with all of the high-cost customers, but hey-- how are we supposed to make money at this otherwise?
There are a few other solutions we can also offer. We have had some success with folks from Cook for America, a group of young adults who don't really know anything about preparing food, but like playing with kitchen tools. We did have some complaints about how bad their meals were, but they really mean well, and I think we can all agree that the only thing that matters in food preparation is good intentions.
We'd also like to experiment with a deal in which Uncle Sugar gives the cafeteria to us for our ten customers and the other 190 are encouraged to go seek sustenance elsewhere. After all, what could be more liberating, more choiceful, then being tossed out on the street?
Clearly, the one thing we can't do for the two hundred students trapped in this failing facility is to invest the resources, money and support needed to make the facility a success. Remember the RRR motto: throwing money at public service programs is wasteful, but throwing it at us is awesome!
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Whither Content? Wither, Content!
Here's a fun quote from the now-inactive website Core4All, from about 2012:
How do we implement the Common Core into our current units of study?
Answer:
We don’t. In order for our educational system to improve, it is vital that we change the traditional model of teaching, moving from a content- driven curriculum to a skills-based curriculum.
We don't talk about this as much as perhaps we should-- but the Common Core, despite the lovely appendices added to address the very problem I'm about to raise, really don't give a rat's rear about content.
Perhaps in math we can make the case that content and skills are closely wedded enough to be inextricably bound-- a sort of co-location of pedagogical threads.
But in English Teacher Land, we love our content. We while away hours, days, or entire careers holding forth on The Canon and what works of literature should be included. We tweak works in and out of the scope and sequence with a fairly remarkable uniformity and consistency (if you are an American who has finished 9th grade, you are probably familiar in some way with Romeo and Juliet).
We love our literature and we each have a pile of works that in our hearts we believe every student who passes through our classroom ought to be familiar with.
Common Core does not care. There are reformsters who swear up and down that CCSS requires "rich content" works of literature, but there simply isn't a word of the standards that actually supports that (they have perhaps close read the standards until their eyes crossed). Common Core does not care what the students read as long as those students can perform the appropriate reading tricks hinted at in the standards and required by the Big Standardized Tests.
This again brings us back to one of the foundational flaws of CCSS-- the notion that all academic tasks are performed in a vacuum and that relationships are unimportant. Readers need not develop a relationship with text or get to know it in any meaningful way-- just look at it quickly, and perform these simple tasks. What the text is, what the text says-- that should not matter. Hamlet, Pat the Bunny, or Gravity's Rainbow-- it's all reading stuff. If the Common Core included standards on kissing, they would insist that a kiss is just the proper application of the lips to another surface, and it doesn't matter if the surface is your wife, your sister, a stranger, or a toaster.
This fits with another foundational aspect of the Core, which is that we will only show interest in things that can be measured (and relationships cannot be measured). But if English teachers sense a little hollowness at the Core's core, it may be in part this total lack of interest in the actual content, meaning and experience of literature.
Many teachers (and even non-teachers like David "Gives No Shits" Coleman) have convinced themselves that a love of content is somehow implied or suggested or at least tolerated by the Core, but that's just one more way the actual standards have been rewritten on the ground. The test manufacturers and their publishing wings know the truth-- that the Core doesn't care what you read and certainly doesn't care what you know about literature and the great breadth of human wisdom and experience embedded therein.
You know it's true. We could all scrap every bit of traditional literature studies done in our classes, replace them with short random selections from newspapers and magazines paired with some core-modeled questions, and our test score would soar while our students said, "Who's this Shakespeare guy? Was he a writer or something?"
The Core would be perfectly happy to see literature crawl off in a field and die somewhere. CCSS has no use for it, and it has no use for those of us who care about the world of words.
How do we implement the Common Core into our current units of study?
Answer:
We don’t. In order for our educational system to improve, it is vital that we change the traditional model of teaching, moving from a content- driven curriculum to a skills-based curriculum.
We don't talk about this as much as perhaps we should-- but the Common Core, despite the lovely appendices added to address the very problem I'm about to raise, really don't give a rat's rear about content.
Perhaps in math we can make the case that content and skills are closely wedded enough to be inextricably bound-- a sort of co-location of pedagogical threads.
But in English Teacher Land, we love our content. We while away hours, days, or entire careers holding forth on The Canon and what works of literature should be included. We tweak works in and out of the scope and sequence with a fairly remarkable uniformity and consistency (if you are an American who has finished 9th grade, you are probably familiar in some way with Romeo and Juliet).
We love our literature and we each have a pile of works that in our hearts we believe every student who passes through our classroom ought to be familiar with.
Common Core does not care. There are reformsters who swear up and down that CCSS requires "rich content" works of literature, but there simply isn't a word of the standards that actually supports that (they have perhaps close read the standards until their eyes crossed). Common Core does not care what the students read as long as those students can perform the appropriate reading tricks hinted at in the standards and required by the Big Standardized Tests.
This again brings us back to one of the foundational flaws of CCSS-- the notion that all academic tasks are performed in a vacuum and that relationships are unimportant. Readers need not develop a relationship with text or get to know it in any meaningful way-- just look at it quickly, and perform these simple tasks. What the text is, what the text says-- that should not matter. Hamlet, Pat the Bunny, or Gravity's Rainbow-- it's all reading stuff. If the Common Core included standards on kissing, they would insist that a kiss is just the proper application of the lips to another surface, and it doesn't matter if the surface is your wife, your sister, a stranger, or a toaster.
This fits with another foundational aspect of the Core, which is that we will only show interest in things that can be measured (and relationships cannot be measured). But if English teachers sense a little hollowness at the Core's core, it may be in part this total lack of interest in the actual content, meaning and experience of literature.
Many teachers (and even non-teachers like David "Gives No Shits" Coleman) have convinced themselves that a love of content is somehow implied or suggested or at least tolerated by the Core, but that's just one more way the actual standards have been rewritten on the ground. The test manufacturers and their publishing wings know the truth-- that the Core doesn't care what you read and certainly doesn't care what you know about literature and the great breadth of human wisdom and experience embedded therein.
You know it's true. We could all scrap every bit of traditional literature studies done in our classes, replace them with short random selections from newspapers and magazines paired with some core-modeled questions, and our test score would soar while our students said, "Who's this Shakespeare guy? Was he a writer or something?"
The Core would be perfectly happy to see literature crawl off in a field and die somewhere. CCSS has no use for it, and it has no use for those of us who care about the world of words.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
More Social Media Stalking: Meet Tracx
My blog-colleague Daniel Katz reported a curious follow-up to his recent post about the Pearson-Tracx-Social media monitoring flap-- a piece of spambot advertising for Tracx that popped up in his comments. "Hilarious," I thought. "A company spams a blog that is actually holding it up as an example of bad behavior."
But lo and behold, this afternoon I find that I have two of the identical message on one of my own posts about Pearson's Big Brotherly behavior.
Tracx offers a unified, enterprise-scale, social media management platform. We help brands and organizations from around the world listen and learn about issues related to their products and services so that they can provide a better customer experience and reach new audiences. To learn more about Tracx visit http://www.tracx.com #customerexperience #betterservice #bettersupport #betterproducts #engagingnewaudiences
The comment was "signed" by Benjamin Foley. Now put on your water-wings, boys and girls, as we head down the Tracx rabbit hole.
Turns out that Ben Foley is a person. In fact, he's the person who writes for the blog Making Tracx, all about the awesomeness of Tracx as a means of stalking customers on the interwebs. Come on! Let's learn more!
Meet Ben Foley
Foley's LinkedIn account announces that he is "a creative, results-oriented, energetic and highly motivated marketing leader. " Now, Ben is a young fella-- he's only been at his current post at Tracx since July of 2014, where he does cool things like leading "content creation activities (blog posts, social posts, thought leadership pieces/whitepapers)." Before that he spent nine months as a Tracx sales associate. Before that he was an intern at the Concord, MA, district courthouse (4 months). Before that four months at Vector Marketing, before that four months at the Nauset surf shop (summer of 2010), and before that, a little over two years as a grocery manager at Chatham Village Market in Chatham, MA.
Ben is a 2013 graduate of St. Lawrence University where-- well, I'll just let him tell you in his special prose style:
His relentless analytical interest in the forces that drive people’s emotions and behaviors, both at the individual and group level, resulted in his obtainment of a B.S. in Psychology from St. Lawrence University. Since then Ben has applied his passion for people, their motivations, and their interests to the social media analytics industry by influencing strategic vision and executing multifaceted marketing campaigns.
I don't want to indulge in too much mockation of Young Ben; I remember the days after my obtainment of my degreeification, and the deep pleasure I took in spouting college level gibberish. But this is a man who has clearly found a home in an industry that rewards garblizationizing. I mean, here's another one of his achievements as marketing coordinator:
Drives multichannel lead generation activities which have yielded significant YOY increase in growth, coupled with a YOY increase in marketing generated pipeline.
This is the guy that Tracx has pushing Tracx out into the world and representing their consummate social mediazation skills. I'm feeling a little YOY myself.
What does he say about Tracx?
I happened to land on this blog post--Out of The Dark Ages: The Rise of Social Media Sentiment Analysis, Part 2-- The Renaissance.
Major irony alert: This is all about how media monitoring software can successfully read the sentiment of a post. In other words, the bots can tell whether your post is filled with love or deeply infusified with hatred and anger-- admittedly useful for companies to know. The post is from 2014, and so one would think that this wonderful software would be able to tell the difference between a blog post that says, "Shame on you, you terrible stalking big brothery corporate stooges" and one that says, "I love being stalked on line. Please tell me more about how I can be stalked more effectively." But apparently that feature is not yet available.
The latest post on the blog reports breathlessly that Edison Partners has featured Tracx CEO Eran Gilad because he's awesome. Eran first met the Tracx team when a friend asked him to validate their business plan, which I guess is how you "meet cute" in the tech world.
Eran has some business background beyond grocery management.
He also spent five years in the military and worked with "the Nordics." His recommended reading for every executive is Siddhartha. And -- make of this what you will-- if given the chance to have a super-power, he would choose the power to cancel everyone else's super power.
The blog also trumpets that Tracx ("the global leader in social listening and engagement platforms for Fortune 1000 companies") has integrated image and text analytics, the better to figure out what we're all up to. For this post, Young Ben throws in another description of the Tracx brand:
But lo and behold, this afternoon I find that I have two of the identical message on one of my own posts about Pearson's Big Brotherly behavior.
Tracx offers a unified, enterprise-scale, social media management platform. We help brands and organizations from around the world listen and learn about issues related to their products and services so that they can provide a better customer experience and reach new audiences. To learn more about Tracx visit http://www.tracx.com #customerexperience #betterservice #bettersupport #betterproducts #engagingnewaudiences
The comment was "signed" by Benjamin Foley. Now put on your water-wings, boys and girls, as we head down the Tracx rabbit hole.
Turns out that Ben Foley is a person. In fact, he's the person who writes for the blog Making Tracx, all about the awesomeness of Tracx as a means of stalking customers on the interwebs. Come on! Let's learn more!
Meet Ben Foley
Foley's LinkedIn account announces that he is "a creative, results-oriented, energetic and highly motivated marketing leader. " Now, Ben is a young fella-- he's only been at his current post at Tracx since July of 2014, where he does cool things like leading "content creation activities (blog posts, social posts, thought leadership pieces/whitepapers)." Before that he spent nine months as a Tracx sales associate. Before that he was an intern at the Concord, MA, district courthouse (4 months). Before that four months at Vector Marketing, before that four months at the Nauset surf shop (summer of 2010), and before that, a little over two years as a grocery manager at Chatham Village Market in Chatham, MA.
Ben is a 2013 graduate of St. Lawrence University where-- well, I'll just let him tell you in his special prose style:
His relentless analytical interest in the forces that drive people’s emotions and behaviors, both at the individual and group level, resulted in his obtainment of a B.S. in Psychology from St. Lawrence University. Since then Ben has applied his passion for people, their motivations, and their interests to the social media analytics industry by influencing strategic vision and executing multifaceted marketing campaigns.
I don't want to indulge in too much mockation of Young Ben; I remember the days after my obtainment of my degreeification, and the deep pleasure I took in spouting college level gibberish. But this is a man who has clearly found a home in an industry that rewards garblizationizing. I mean, here's another one of his achievements as marketing coordinator:
Drives multichannel lead generation activities which have yielded significant YOY increase in growth, coupled with a YOY increase in marketing generated pipeline.
This is the guy that Tracx has pushing Tracx out into the world and representing their consummate social mediazation skills. I'm feeling a little YOY myself.
What does he say about Tracx?
I happened to land on this blog post--Out of The Dark Ages: The Rise of Social Media Sentiment Analysis, Part 2-- The Renaissance.
Major irony alert: This is all about how media monitoring software can successfully read the sentiment of a post. In other words, the bots can tell whether your post is filled with love or deeply infusified with hatred and anger-- admittedly useful for companies to know. The post is from 2014, and so one would think that this wonderful software would be able to tell the difference between a blog post that says, "Shame on you, you terrible stalking big brothery corporate stooges" and one that says, "I love being stalked on line. Please tell me more about how I can be stalked more effectively." But apparently that feature is not yet available.
The latest post on the blog reports breathlessly that Edison Partners has featured Tracx CEO Eran Gilad because he's awesome. Eran first met the Tracx team when a friend asked him to validate their business plan, which I guess is how you "meet cute" in the tech world.
Eran has some business background beyond grocery management.
He also spent five years in the military and worked with "the Nordics." His recommended reading for every executive is Siddhartha. And -- make of this what you will-- if given the chance to have a super-power, he would choose the power to cancel everyone else's super power.
The blog also trumpets that Tracx ("the global leader in social listening and engagement platforms for Fortune 1000 companies") has integrated image and text analytics, the better to figure out what we're all up to. For this post, Young Ben throws in another description of the Tracx brand:
Monday, March 16, 2015
Spellings Remains Steadfastly Wrong
US News ran another of its nifty Debate Club features on Monday, this time tackling the question, "Does No Child Left Behind's Testing Regime Work?"
Arguing "no" were the presidents of America's two large teachers' unions. Sticking up for NCLB's test-and-punish regime were Cheryl Oldham from the US Chamber of Commerce, and Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush's secretary of education.
Spellings uses her time at the debate podium to demonstrate that she remains steadfastly devoted to the same bad policy ideas that she promoted back in the day, still without support. But her piece lets her tick off all the standard bad arguments for keeping NCLB on its same doomed path of educational destruction.
The success of every student in reading and doing math on grade level is vital to the future success of our nation.
That's the very first sentence, and while it's a piece of the NCLB canon, after all these years, there still isn't a lick of proof that it's true. It certainly wasn't true in the past, where large chunks of the US population could not do either of those things and yet the country still did pretty well. She may well want to argue that times have changed, and I wouldn't disagree-- but there's still no proof that there's any linkage between eight-year-olds who read on grade level and national success (and what do we mean by "success" anyway).
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card, show that No Child Left Behind has added to the focus on poor and minority students and resulted in increases in their achievement.
Lots of smart people have looked at the same data and failed to see the improvement that Spellings likes to tout.
Prior to the federal requirement for annual assessments that was instituted in 2002, few states had assessments in place. That means that few students had the necessary information to truly meet the needs of each and every child.
Because....? Teachers were incapable of evaluating student progress? No educational measure known to man could possibly be as awesome as a big fat federal test?
Annual, comparable, valid, reliable statewide assessments give educators and policymakers the ability to focus resources on problem areas, find strategies that work and reward results.
After an over a decade, educators and policymakers have not managed to do any of those things (unless, by "focus resources" you mean "unleash privatizers upon"). I have a standing offer for any reformster to name a single pedagogical strategy that has been discovered by the testing program and then scaled up into schools across the nation. The closest thing we have is fairly widespread adoption of test prep techniques, but all those do is teach students how to do better on tests. Is test-taking our nation's educational aspiration?
Spellings also likes the tale of how, pre-NCLB, nobody knew anything about how schools that served poor and minority students were under-served, under-resourced, and under-funded. Once test results came out, minority children could no longer fall through the cracks. Perhaps you remember that year that state and federal government unleashed a wave of financial support, delivering on the promise that our poorest schools would be funded just as well as our richest ones. Oh, wait. That never actually happened.
Did (and do) some of our nation's schools do a terrible job of serving poor and minority students? Absolutely. But NCLB 1) did not find troubled schools that nobody ever knew were troubled nor 2) lead to a redirection of resources to those schools.
According to the Nation’s Report Card, Hispanic and African-American nine-year-olds grew by two grade levels in reading between 1999 and 2008.
Did they? What was the rate of improvement prior to 1999? And why are we counting from 1999 when NCLB didn't take effect until 2003? How much of the wonderful gainage she cites came before NCLB even had a chance to affect student results?
Our main concern must be students. Timely and transparent reporting of data is the only way to keep the focus where it belongs, on increasing student achievement. How else will we know whether they are prepared for college or a good job after high school? How else will we ensure that they aren’t being pushed through the system by those who were elected to ensure they received the best possible education and opportunity for the future?
"Increased student achievement" simply means "higher standardized test scores." And all those "How else" questions? Standardized test scores don't provide answers to any of them. This is like declaring "We must keep polishing our bicycles. How else will we know if our vest still has no sleeves?"
The Texas Senate Education Committee recently unanimously approved legislation that would let high school kids receive their diploma without having demonstrated that they have the basic skills and knowledge to be successful in attending college, work or in life.
Did anybody know how to measure those things with a test? Any proof that such a test exists? Because I'd bet that if any such test exists, it is stapled to a Yeti riding on the back of a centaur.
The argument for it is that nearly 30,000 seniors will be unable to pass the exams and therefore will be limited in their future opportunities. But when we eliminate the requirement that assesses their college and job readiness, how successful can we expect their future opportunities to be? It is a cruel trick to suggest they are ready for life when the data show otherwise.
It is also a cruel trick to insist that you know whether they will be successful or not when there is in fact no proof, evidence, research or tea leaf reading to support the idea that the single narrow test of some math and reading skills is an accurate predictor of a child's future.
Also, what was the plan for those 30K seniors. They were going to flunk high school and then.... what? Not take the GED (nobody is passing the new Pearsonized GED these days). Take an entire senior year over again just to take a single test?
The question we should be asking is why the same student who cannot pass a ninth or tenth grade level test is receiving passing grades in the classroom.
Orrrr.... we could ask why a test claims a passing student is actually failing. If a large number of students fail a test in my class, particularly if all other indicators show they're doing well with the material, then I don't look at the students-- I look at the test.
We must use this opportunity to move education forward and not dilute the progress that has been made.
The "we can't turn back and waste our accomplishments so far" argument is special because it is an argument used to oppose NCLB back in the day and Common Core more recently. But somehow back then the reformsters thought that new and awesome things were worth a little chaos and disorder. Now suddenly they are huge fans of inertia. It should not be news to anybody that when you are doing something that doesn't work, you should think about not doing it any more.
Look, some of these would be great things to say if they represented reality. But the standardized test does not become an accurate measure of a student's entire life prospects just because you say so, and while it would be nice if the test results were used to improve education for underserved students, we've been at this for over a decade and it hasn't happened yet.
Spelling's paean to NCLB testing is a news broadcast from an alternate universe. Read the pieces by Garcia and Weingarten instead.
Arguing "no" were the presidents of America's two large teachers' unions. Sticking up for NCLB's test-and-punish regime were Cheryl Oldham from the US Chamber of Commerce, and Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush's secretary of education.
Spellings uses her time at the debate podium to demonstrate that she remains steadfastly devoted to the same bad policy ideas that she promoted back in the day, still without support. But her piece lets her tick off all the standard bad arguments for keeping NCLB on its same doomed path of educational destruction.
The success of every student in reading and doing math on grade level is vital to the future success of our nation.
That's the very first sentence, and while it's a piece of the NCLB canon, after all these years, there still isn't a lick of proof that it's true. It certainly wasn't true in the past, where large chunks of the US population could not do either of those things and yet the country still did pretty well. She may well want to argue that times have changed, and I wouldn't disagree-- but there's still no proof that there's any linkage between eight-year-olds who read on grade level and national success (and what do we mean by "success" anyway).
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card, show that No Child Left Behind has added to the focus on poor and minority students and resulted in increases in their achievement.
Lots of smart people have looked at the same data and failed to see the improvement that Spellings likes to tout.
Prior to the federal requirement for annual assessments that was instituted in 2002, few states had assessments in place. That means that few students had the necessary information to truly meet the needs of each and every child.
Because....? Teachers were incapable of evaluating student progress? No educational measure known to man could possibly be as awesome as a big fat federal test?
Annual, comparable, valid, reliable statewide assessments give educators and policymakers the ability to focus resources on problem areas, find strategies that work and reward results.
After an over a decade, educators and policymakers have not managed to do any of those things (unless, by "focus resources" you mean "unleash privatizers upon"). I have a standing offer for any reformster to name a single pedagogical strategy that has been discovered by the testing program and then scaled up into schools across the nation. The closest thing we have is fairly widespread adoption of test prep techniques, but all those do is teach students how to do better on tests. Is test-taking our nation's educational aspiration?
Spellings also likes the tale of how, pre-NCLB, nobody knew anything about how schools that served poor and minority students were under-served, under-resourced, and under-funded. Once test results came out, minority children could no longer fall through the cracks. Perhaps you remember that year that state and federal government unleashed a wave of financial support, delivering on the promise that our poorest schools would be funded just as well as our richest ones. Oh, wait. That never actually happened.
Did (and do) some of our nation's schools do a terrible job of serving poor and minority students? Absolutely. But NCLB 1) did not find troubled schools that nobody ever knew were troubled nor 2) lead to a redirection of resources to those schools.
According to the Nation’s Report Card, Hispanic and African-American nine-year-olds grew by two grade levels in reading between 1999 and 2008.
Did they? What was the rate of improvement prior to 1999? And why are we counting from 1999 when NCLB didn't take effect until 2003? How much of the wonderful gainage she cites came before NCLB even had a chance to affect student results?
Our main concern must be students. Timely and transparent reporting of data is the only way to keep the focus where it belongs, on increasing student achievement. How else will we know whether they are prepared for college or a good job after high school? How else will we ensure that they aren’t being pushed through the system by those who were elected to ensure they received the best possible education and opportunity for the future?
"Increased student achievement" simply means "higher standardized test scores." And all those "How else" questions? Standardized test scores don't provide answers to any of them. This is like declaring "We must keep polishing our bicycles. How else will we know if our vest still has no sleeves?"
The Texas Senate Education Committee recently unanimously approved legislation that would let high school kids receive their diploma without having demonstrated that they have the basic skills and knowledge to be successful in attending college, work or in life.
Did anybody know how to measure those things with a test? Any proof that such a test exists? Because I'd bet that if any such test exists, it is stapled to a Yeti riding on the back of a centaur.
The argument for it is that nearly 30,000 seniors will be unable to pass the exams and therefore will be limited in their future opportunities. But when we eliminate the requirement that assesses their college and job readiness, how successful can we expect their future opportunities to be? It is a cruel trick to suggest they are ready for life when the data show otherwise.
It is also a cruel trick to insist that you know whether they will be successful or not when there is in fact no proof, evidence, research or tea leaf reading to support the idea that the single narrow test of some math and reading skills is an accurate predictor of a child's future.
Also, what was the plan for those 30K seniors. They were going to flunk high school and then.... what? Not take the GED (nobody is passing the new Pearsonized GED these days). Take an entire senior year over again just to take a single test?
The question we should be asking is why the same student who cannot pass a ninth or tenth grade level test is receiving passing grades in the classroom.
Orrrr.... we could ask why a test claims a passing student is actually failing. If a large number of students fail a test in my class, particularly if all other indicators show they're doing well with the material, then I don't look at the students-- I look at the test.
We must use this opportunity to move education forward and not dilute the progress that has been made.
The "we can't turn back and waste our accomplishments so far" argument is special because it is an argument used to oppose NCLB back in the day and Common Core more recently. But somehow back then the reformsters thought that new and awesome things were worth a little chaos and disorder. Now suddenly they are huge fans of inertia. It should not be news to anybody that when you are doing something that doesn't work, you should think about not doing it any more.
Look, some of these would be great things to say if they represented reality. But the standardized test does not become an accurate measure of a student's entire life prospects just because you say so, and while it would be nice if the test results were used to improve education for underserved students, we've been at this for over a decade and it hasn't happened yet.
Spelling's paean to NCLB testing is a news broadcast from an alternate universe. Read the pieces by Garcia and Weingarten instead.
Arne's Dumb Expectations
Andrea Mitchell, always a reliable amplifier of administration PR, gave Arne Duncan yet another opportunity to try to peddle his wares recently.
Arne wanted to stand up for Common Core in the face of the GOP pre-pre-primary beat-em-up on the standards. As reported by Ben Kamisar at The Hill, Duncan is framing his pitch with one of his favorite spins-- it's all about the expectations.
“When you dumb down expectations to make politicians look good, that's one of the most insidious things that happens.”
Of course, another insidious thing that happens is when politicians raise expectations to make themselves look good, but don't actually deliver any of the support needed to meet those expectations.
It's also insidious when politicians raise expectations and back them up by holding other people responsible for meeting them. Imagine how different education would reform would play out if we just changed half of the following sentence. Instead of
Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold teachers and school districts responsible for their failure to properly teach those students
we could instead say
Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold politicians responsible for their failure to properly support those schools with needed resources.
Duncan's belief in the magic of expectations is well-documented. It just isn't well-founded in reality. High expectations are great-- when realistic. High expectations are great-- when they are applied to the people and government agencies that are supposed to provide the resources needed to meet those expectations.
But among the many things that Duncan fails to grasp is the result not of high expectation, but the placement of blame and punishment when those expectations are not met.
When a child fails to meet expectations that were set unreasonably high by politicians, who should be held responsible?
When a child struggles to meet expectations because her school and community are starved for the resources needed to help her achieve, who should be held responsible?
Duncan continues to fail to understand the system that he has perpetuated. Politicians did not lower expectations "to look good" under NCLB-- they did it to avoid losing badly-needed money for poor, struggling schools. Duncan continues to ask as if public education has twisted itself into a test-obsessed mis-directed pretzel on some sort of random whim, and not as a predictable and not-irrational response to the policy of test-and-punish pursued with gusto by this administration.
Arne wanted to stand up for Common Core in the face of the GOP pre-pre-primary beat-em-up on the standards. As reported by Ben Kamisar at The Hill, Duncan is framing his pitch with one of his favorite spins-- it's all about the expectations.
“When you dumb down expectations to make politicians look good, that's one of the most insidious things that happens.”
Of course, another insidious thing that happens is when politicians raise expectations to make themselves look good, but don't actually deliver any of the support needed to meet those expectations.
It's also insidious when politicians raise expectations and back them up by holding other people responsible for meeting them. Imagine how different education would reform would play out if we just changed half of the following sentence. Instead of
Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold teachers and school districts responsible for their failure to properly teach those students
we could instead say
Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold politicians responsible for their failure to properly support those schools with needed resources.
Duncan's belief in the magic of expectations is well-documented. It just isn't well-founded in reality. High expectations are great-- when realistic. High expectations are great-- when they are applied to the people and government agencies that are supposed to provide the resources needed to meet those expectations.
But among the many things that Duncan fails to grasp is the result not of high expectation, but the placement of blame and punishment when those expectations are not met.
When a child fails to meet expectations that were set unreasonably high by politicians, who should be held responsible?
When a child struggles to meet expectations because her school and community are starved for the resources needed to help her achieve, who should be held responsible?
Duncan continues to fail to understand the system that he has perpetuated. Politicians did not lower expectations "to look good" under NCLB-- they did it to avoid losing badly-needed money for poor, struggling schools. Duncan continues to ask as if public education has twisted itself into a test-obsessed mis-directed pretzel on some sort of random whim, and not as a predictable and not-irrational response to the policy of test-and-punish pursued with gusto by this administration.
NM: Defending the Test
Reader Terry Ward drew my attention to a part of the New Mexico Administrative Code. It's just one more example of how far the government protections of the Big Standardized Test goes.
Section 6.10.7.11 of the NMAC deals with staff responsibilities regarding testing, and it includes a list of "prohibitive practices"-- things that staff are forbidden to do. At the end of the list, that it shall be prohibitive practice for the staff member
disparage or diminish the significance, importance or use of the standardized tests.
Other no-no's include photocopying the test, teaching from a copy of the test, copying copyrighted test prep materials, giving students reviews of the test questions, leaving test materials alone in an unlocked room, coaching students during the test, and taking standardized test materials off campus. All fairly standard stuff. Only the "don't say mean things about the test" rule surprised me.
The implications seem, well, chilling. Can teachers who look at blog pieces that disparage the significance, importance or use of standardized tests (I think I may have written one or twelve of those) be disciplined? Am I now an outlaw in New Mexico?
Penalties relating to these particular misbehaviors are unclear, but further along in section 6.10.7 we have section 6.10.7.12 which includes very stern language about flauting the non-disclosure of test materials rules (because "given the proprietary nature of any assessment which is part of the NMSAP, under no circumstance shall a standardized test which is part of the NMSAP be released").
Section 6.10.7.14 gets to the penalties for "testing irregularities" which can include anything from directing the "named individual" to cease and desist as well as barring them from ever administering a test again (boy, that hurts) all the way up to suspending or revoking their professional license (okay, that actually hurts). Whether Saying Mean Things about testing may or may not rise to the level of a testing irregularity.
So remember, New Mexico educators-- never speak ill of the beloved standardized test in all its resplendent swellness. I look forward to the New Mexico blog embargo that will somehow silence the rest of us.
Section 6.10.7.11 of the NMAC deals with staff responsibilities regarding testing, and it includes a list of "prohibitive practices"-- things that staff are forbidden to do. At the end of the list, that it shall be prohibitive practice for the staff member
disparage or diminish the significance, importance or use of the standardized tests.
Other no-no's include photocopying the test, teaching from a copy of the test, copying copyrighted test prep materials, giving students reviews of the test questions, leaving test materials alone in an unlocked room, coaching students during the test, and taking standardized test materials off campus. All fairly standard stuff. Only the "don't say mean things about the test" rule surprised me.
The implications seem, well, chilling. Can teachers who look at blog pieces that disparage the significance, importance or use of standardized tests (I think I may have written one or twelve of those) be disciplined? Am I now an outlaw in New Mexico?
Penalties relating to these particular misbehaviors are unclear, but further along in section 6.10.7 we have section 6.10.7.12 which includes very stern language about flauting the non-disclosure of test materials rules (because "given the proprietary nature of any assessment which is part of the NMSAP, under no circumstance shall a standardized test which is part of the NMSAP be released").
Section 6.10.7.14 gets to the penalties for "testing irregularities" which can include anything from directing the "named individual" to cease and desist as well as barring them from ever administering a test again (boy, that hurts) all the way up to suspending or revoking their professional license (okay, that actually hurts). Whether Saying Mean Things about testing may or may not rise to the level of a testing irregularity.
So remember, New Mexico educators-- never speak ill of the beloved standardized test in all its resplendent swellness. I look forward to the New Mexico blog embargo that will somehow silence the rest of us.
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