Whose Voice Is Heard?

The "ed reform" crowd has been working hard at dressing its corporate wolves up in the clothing of civil rights sheep. Charter schools, high stakes testing, and the destruction of teacher job protections have all been billed as some version of the New Civil Rights battle.

This is a wise and powerful PR shift for the reformsters. Unlike the sky-is-falling crises of other reformy sales pitches ("OMGZ! Our failing schools will soon make the USA economically subservient to Estonia!!"), civil rights issue are real. The problems of systemic racism and social injustice are real. The needs of poor and minority students and their communities-- those issues are real.

But as post-Katrina New Orleans has thoroughly demonstrated, you can use a real problem to promote a fake solution.

So how do we sort the policies and proposals, the reformsters and the shysters. How do we know if people work as true reformers and not, as Jitu Brown put it in Chicago at this year's NPE convention, simply colonizers.

The key question is simple: whose voice is being heard?

I don't mean whose voice is used to provide cover and camouflage. I don't mean the pretend plaintiffs for groups like Students Matter or the Partnership for Educational Justice; I mean the voices who are truly speaking, who are making the decisions, whose concerns are guiding the ship and calling the shots.

We can see the same old pattern playing out again and again. In Arkansas, Little Rock has become one more school system stripped of a democratically-elected school board by the state. In Massachusetts, the state ignored the voices of citizens in order to strip democracy from the Holyoke school system. I could get into the details, but at this point we have seen this story over and over and over again, from New Jersey to Chicago. In city after city, "reformers" have arrived to "help" by silencing the voice of democracy and community.

We use the Big Standardized Test to "prove" that a school system is "failing." Here are all the things we don't do next.

We do not offer this failure as proof that the state has failed to properly support and supply the school. We do not release additional funds and resources from the state to the local district so that duly elected school board members and local community members can best decide how to use the new support.

We do not bring together a group of stakeholders to ask them what they need to turn their school around.

We do not launch a drive to make sure that local stakeholders have the tools necessary to steer their schools to the solutions the community desires.

We do not hear politicians or policymakers or reformy astroturf groups say things like "We have no way of knowing what solutions are needed here, and we look to the community to take the lead and set priorities" or "It's most important that we develop a strategy that honors the democratic process and involves community members" or even "We want to be very careful to share resources with the community without trying to sell them something. These are human beings, families, and children-- not potential market fodder."

Instead, people from outside the community bring in other people from outside the community, and the voices inside the community are dismissed, ignored, silenced. Occasionally local folks are allowed to speak-- as long as they're the Right Kind of People and they stay on message.

"We are here to get you your civil rights, but you're going to have to shut up and do as we say." There is no context in which that is not some kind of absurdist baloney, and yet that is repeatedly the message of reformy "civil rights" activists. "The tests are a civil rights issue. The charters are a civil rights issue. We are here to help, but to get our help, you will have to stay silent, because we know better than you. We ARE better than you."

Any real reform will involve the vigorous pursuit of democratic processes and the active involvement of local voices. Any real reform will be driven by decisions made by the people there in the community. Any real reform will be focused on engaging, involving, and amplifying the members of the community-- not finding ways to commandeer or cancel elected school boards and other home-grown local leaders.

Giving people permission to speak is not an act of reform; recognizing their right to speak is. Treating them as honored guests is not an act of reform; recognizing that you are a guest in their home is. Here's a hint-- if the students of your community have to stage a sit-in to get a meeting with you, you are not a reformer.

"Shut up while I fix this for you. I will tell you what you need," is not the motto of the civil rights activist. It's the language of the colonizer, and it has no place in true education reform.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats.

We Have To Do Something

You are walking down the street with a loved one when suddenly, a stranger in a white lab coat runs up hollering. "Oh my God!! You've got it!!" and shaking your loved one by the shoulders.

"What? What!??" you reply, slightly panic stricken.

"The disease!! The disease!!!" White lab coat replies. The hands now grab your loved one roughly and fling your loved on to the street. "We have to treat this right away," screams WLC. "Also, look at the terrible concussion," pointing to the spot where your loved one's head has smacked into the pavement and blood is now visible. Your loved one is now unconscious.

WLC kneels and starts pulling things out of a satchel. "Here! Quick! Shove these in there!" WLC is instructing you to shove bananas in your loved one's ears. "I"ll get started over here," says WLC, who then pulls out a hacksaw and starts to saw on your loved one's elbow.

"Wait at minute," you yell. "How is any of this going to help? Isn't it dangerous and stupid? Are you even a doctor?"

"Look," says WLC earnestly. "No, I'm not a doctor, and this probably isn't the best course of treatment, and I'm sure we can improve upon it later, but we have to do something!"

Or try this...

You and your family sit down to dinner, and the wait-staff brings out large bows filled with dirt.

"This looks like dirt," you say. "And it seems kind of sparkly. Who made this? Can I speak to the cook?"

One of the waitpersons speaks up. "Actually, I made that. I'm not actually a cook, but I've eaten a lot of food before. And the sparkles are the ground glass I put in it."

"What??!!" You exclaim. "But my family is hungry!"

"Look," says the waitperson earnestly. "I am sure that we will be making better food later and will totally improve on this. But for right now, we have to do something. So go ahead and eat your ground glass and later I'm sure we'll have figured out how to make you a juicy steak."

Or...

Adrift in a lifeboat, you notice that water is starting to leak in. You point this out to fellow traveler who immediately starts poking holes in the bottom of the boat. "What the hell are you doing?" you ask.

"Look," your fellow traveler says. "We have to do something!"

Look

The whole "Yeah, the Big Standardized Test still has some problems but I'm sure it will get better and in the meantime it's what we have and we have to do something" argument is a stupid argument.

Even if we accept "We have to do something" as a Real Thing (which it isn't, because the "crisis" is manufactured, but even if), it does not follow that an urgent Need To Do Something means that we must urgently Do Something Stupid.

If the treatment is damaging, don't use it. If the food is harmful, don't eat it. And if the test is a bad test that wastes time and money, makes the students miserable, damages the credibility of the school, and returns no useful data-- then don't give it!!

Arne Talks Pre-K; I Have Questions

Monday Education Secretary Arne Duncan was hanging out in a bilingual pre-school in Maryland and Lydsey Layton of the Washington Post was covering it because, reasons?

Duncan is unhappy with the speed of adoption of Pre-K. He has a whole shelf of the stuff, and people just aren't buying. He "unveiled" a new report (was he carrying it around prior to that all draped in a veil? what color was the veil? sorry, but sometimes I get to looking at words thinking, "What the heck." anyway, I guess that's why he was there and being covered-- so he could use children as a presser backdrop) from the National Institute for Early Education Research, a group attached to Rutgers that is not so much a research institute as an advocacy that uses research to support their position. Does anybody do research without deciding what they want the answer to be ahead of time?

Anyway, the report said only 29% of four year olds and 4% of three year olds are in pre-school.

Somehow, this is a surprise to Duncan. It has been many, many years since my children were three years old, but that's not long enough to make me imagine that I would have considered pre-school a worthwhile choice back then. Of course, as always, I am troubled by the nagging gut feeling that Arne really thinks that Those Poor Folks are the ones who need to get their children out of the home and into a pre-school ASAP.

Layton reminds us that the feds have been trying hard to get pre-K promoted to headline status in the ESEA rewrite. Duncan asked for full-out grants and got competitive grants instead (which, given the administrations previous deep wet-kissing-with-tongue love for competitive grants is some kind of poetic justice). But anyway...

And whether that bill eventually will be passed by the full Senate and the House and become law is unclear. And it is likely to make a small dent in a “tremendous, unmet need,” Duncan said.

See, here's one of my questions-- what unmet need? What exactly is the need that school for three year olds must meet? Because I'm deathly afraid that the "unmet" need is the need for three-year-olds to open their books and start studying calculus so they can take a Pearson-manufactured standardized test to measure their sentence-writing skills. In which case, there is no unmet need.

Duncan notes that it would take 75 years at this rate to kid all the children into pre-school. Arne's explanation for why things are moving slowly is, well, not a good one. “We need more resources. We need Congress to invest, to partner with states to expand access," he says. Yes, and the Edsel wasn't sold in enough car lots. And New Coke didn't have enough marketing support.

When people aren't buying what you're selling (or in this case, trying to essentially give away), doesn't that mean you need to look at your product and the market and ask yourself if you're not trying to sell something that nobody wants?

I'll admit to mixed feelings about pre-school. I am sure that there are many ways that it could be handled that would really enrich life for children and their families, but at this point, I feel in my bones that the USED would like to do pre-school in the wrongest ways possible, for all the wrong reasons, and do it badly.

But in the meantime, what Arne is complaining about is simply all those delightful and beloved market forces doing their thing.

The piece was not a total waste, however. Layton totally got a picture of Arne roaring like a lion. I'm pretty sure that was worth the trip to Maryland all by itself.

Nashville Schools Under Attack While Journalists Sleep

Over at Dad Gone Wild, blogger norinrad10 has been chronicling the various messes in the Nashville, Tennessee school scene. The latest news is not good-- one more example of a city in which entrenched media are part of the business community that is cheerfully working to dismantle public education.

Tennessee's Grand Experiments

Tennessee has long been out in front of the reformster wave, marking such dubious achievements as being the first state put a former TFA temp guy in charge of the state education system. Kevin Huffman did also mark some time as an education lawyer, but that and the two years of TFA temping were enough to rank him as one of Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change. Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn't like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters) and his commitment was strong-- when Nashville failed to approve a Huffman-approved charter expansion, Huffman took $3.4 million away from the school system. 

Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of business investment opportunities private charter schools?

Hurricane ASD landed initially on Memphis, with a business plan that is a little bit genius--"The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state." There will always be a bottom 5%. In fact, given even a tiny modicum of success, ASD will eventually get its hands on almost 100% of the schools as they all cycle through that bottom slot. More recently, ASD has worked on expanding into Nashville, and that is raising its own new set of issues.

Huffman, however, has moved on, gracefully jumping ship before he could be pushed off the plank. Late in 2014, his general incompetence and gracelessness had finally turned him into a large enough political liability to end his happy time as Tennessee Educhieftain.

Can't We Just Start Over?

Lots of folks in power had loved Huffman and thought he had the right ideas. But the whole Common Core discussion had exploded in a welter of hard-right anti-gummint much dislike, and Huffman's attempt to make every Tennessee teacher just a little poorer had not exactly won a lot of backing from that community, either.

So here comes the Nashville Public Education Foundation, a coalition of civic-minded folks that would really like to make a mark on public education as long as they don't have to A) actually talk to or deal with people who work in public education or B) work through any of those democratically-elected institutions. We've seen this kind of foundation before (I ran across it most recently in York, PA, when local businessmen decided that they really wanted to dismantle public schools without actually having to run for office or convince the general public to go along.)

Watch their scrolling bank of happy quotes and you'll see supportive words from Teach for America, the Chamber of Commerce, the mayor, a former governor, a parent, a CEO, the school director, the country music association foundation, and -- wait? what! really??-- Ben Folds.

The Foundation has had its fingers all over Nashville education, and that foundation has decided that what the city needs is to RESET.  What the heck is that?

The mission of Project RESET (Reimagining Education Starts with Everyone at the Table) is to elevate the conversation on education as we approach a vital time in Nashville’s history. Led by the Nashville Public Education Foundation, with the support of Nashville’s Agenda and media assistance from The Tennessean, Project RESET will set the table for a larger, communitywide conversation about improving Nashville’s public schools.

The event, lauded by charter operators around Nashville, is coming up at the end of the month. How much fun will that be?

Dogs and Rocks

You know the old Will Rogers quote: "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while you look for a rock." Remember this any time somebody is acting diplomatically toward you. Don't listen to what they say; watch to see if they're looking for a rock.

The rock in this case is the Parthenon Consulting Group.

Look at their website. Look at this 2009 power point presentation about educational investment. Look at this paper about investing in KSA and UAE. Check out how this publisher lists them with other examples of Strategic Consulting Firms like Bain, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group.

Look at what Parthenon had to suggest in Knoxville. Their suggestions there included cutting 300 people, which would create a big pile of money if teachers were paid as well as Parthenon consultants in Memphis (4 consultants per month = $350K).

What is blindingly clear is that when it comes to education, Parthenon is only interested in one topic-- how to make money at it.

If your landlord says he's called an outfit to come work on the problems in your building, and what you see pull up in front is a Demolition Specialists truck, you are the doggie. If you are a public school system and the Parthenon Group shows up to "help" you, you are the doggie. The Parthenon Group does not specialize in helping schools systems do a better job of educating students. The Parthenon Groups helps school systems turn into pieces that can be more easily replaced with profitable charter schools. (The Momma Bears have a great post about what Broad-style slash-and-burn looks like.)

Is anybody paying attention?

Well, no.

Scroll back up to the RESET quote, the one where The Tennessean is credited with providing "media assistance." You can peruse that site for glowing PR puff pieces in support of NPEF, with a big fat RESET logo on each one. Just yesterday they ran a super-duper article about how great it is that Nashville has Pre-K's doing academic instruction with four-year-olds. A ten-second google would have turned up ample evidence that such instruction is a terrible idea, but as we've recently seen  in New Jersey, sometimes it's just more fun to promote what you're supposed to promote instead of doing actual journalism.

And that brings us back around to the post that originally sparked my interest.

I personally called Tennessean reporter Jason Gonzales to discuss his article and asked him point blank if The Tennessean had a sponsorship role in Project RESET. He emphatically answered no, they are just producing a series of articles on the Nashville education system. Articles that all bear the Project RESET logo and have been a mixture of negative and calls to put aside petty politics. You know, politics that call for an equitable system for all kids.... When I asked Jason if he thought that information surrounding the group conducting the study was relevant he answered with an equally emphatically no. The data from the study is important, he said, but not the conductors.

I don't know a thing about Jason Gonzales, but I feel perfectly comfortable calling him dead wrong. When the city zoo hires a consultant who specializes in selling rare animal pelts, that information is relevant. When a local business hires a consultant who specializes in closing businesses and selling off parts, that information is relevant.


And when the unelected body that has put itself in charge of revamping local education hires a consultant who specializes in closing public schools and turning them into profit-making private enterprises, that information is relevant.

Why all this now? Nashville gets a new mayor and a new school chief very shortly; think of it as big welcome pep rally for them. Nashville schools are definitely the doggie. Let's hope somebody steps up to protect it before the rock falls.

Charter Fraud: Tip of the Iceberg

In April, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy released their looks-like-it's-becoming-annual report on charter school fraud. The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse has several points to make and some numbers to throw around, but the major point is, "Wow! Many charters abuse the system something fierce."

The report sorts the various reports of fraud that they've cataloged into six varieties.

Operators using fraud for personal gain.

This is good, old-fashioned "I'm going to dip into the company cash register fraud. Examples include Masai Skiefs of the Harambee Institute of Science, who helped himself to $88K for, among other things, a house down payment. He was a slacker compared to the Pierces, of Minnesota's Right Step Academy, who paid for a Caribbean vacation, $11,125 worth of Timberwolves season tickets, and almost $18K of credit card debt.

School revenues used to support other operator businesses.

This would include the Philadelphia charter operator who used a half a million in tax dollars for his school to help keep his restaurant and health food store in business. Or the Florida charter director who used $750K from his school to finance his apartment complex.

These are really fine examples of the charter philosophy that says, "That money doesn't belong to the taxpayer-- it belongs to the child. And once the child enrolls in the school, the money belongs to me." This is the bold entrepreneurial spirit run amuck.

Mismanagement that puts children in actual danger.

In all fairness, this is more like "not following state regulations to insure safety of children." Less common, but still concerning. Take the two Ohio charters that were shut down by the state because, among other things, they were not feeding the students. Or the Paterson NJ charter in which 75% of the staff never passed a background check.

Charters requesting public funds for services not provided.

Ah, good old-fashioned fraud. Just charge the government for things you never did. California's Cato School of Reason Charter School managed to soak the state for millions of dollars for students who were actually attending private school elsewhere. In Minnesota, the Community School of Excellence Charter School had its students attest to lunches that they did not eat so that the school could be reimbursed for them. Not providing mandated special ed services is also a popular twist on this trick.

Boosting Enrollment

Sort of a special subcategory of the previous scam, this is billing the government for students you just don't have. Success Academy in Minnesota was found to have overbilled the taxpayers over $600K. The report cites schools in Florida, Pennsylvania, and California that listed enrollment over and above the number of students actually in evidence.

Mismanagement

Keeping books for a school is hard, but many states don't require charter operators even to prove they can balance their own check book (Hey, remember that time New York authorized a twenty-two year old who hadn't even finished college to run a charter school?)

The report has appendices full of more specifics-- and this is just the stuff that made it into official paperwork of charges, convictions, or state direct orders to pay money back.

The grand total of charter waste and fraud is now over $200 million dollars. The more sexy number that made it into the papers is $1.4 billion in the next year, but that's a bit of grandstanding-- the report uses a methodology from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, and the methodology is to look at the grand total and assume that 5% of it will end up drained by fraud. So that's not exactly a rock-solid number.

But the $200 million? That's a real number, and simply it only includes what has been proven by or admitted to authorities, I feel comfortable believing that there's a heck of a lot more money than that involved. And that's before we get to all the perfectly legal methods that charters can use to bilk the taxpayer (lease a building to yourself, anyone?).

That is over $200 million dollars drained away from public schools. That is over $200 million that public schools didn't have to buy supplies, hire staff, maintain buildings, and keep from raising taxes. That is $200 million dollars taken from taxpayers.

The longer the modern charter movement continues, the more instances of misbehavior come to light and the more obvious it becomes (even and especially to the non-fraudster charter operators) that the charter sector needs-- at the very least-- to be more tightly regulated and controlled.

The charter industry will push back against that, as they have pushed back against every attempt to inhibit their ability to just roll in piles of money freely, answering to nobody. In fact, word on the street is that a brand-new Education News Service is about to be launched. It will employ actual professional reporters, but they will be employed only after signing a pledge that they will cast a critical eye only on public schools and never on charter schools. So there's that to look forward to.

But in the meantime, check out this report, and read up on the many, many ways that charter scam artists make themselves rich and their industry look bad all at the same time.

Is the Right Splintering on Testing?

Last week both Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) and Robert Pondiscio (Fordham) turned up in the pages of US News, each to post his own response to the opt out movement. Since both of these guys come from the Fordham-AEI-Stanford axis of market-based reformsterism, it's interesting to note that they seem to disagree. Of course, the right is no more monolithic than any other segment of opinion, but it's still interesting to look for points of debate within reformsterdom.

Pondiscio presented Four Lessons To Learn from the Opt Out Debate, which was really a list of four things that opt-outers need to wise up about.

4) Unions are driving discontent. Pondiscio and Mike Petrilli have both tried to sell this idea, but it is a pig that will not fly. Has the union in NY successfully stirred up agitation among parents over everything? That's a clear "no." The union could not roil up opposition to the Big Standardized Test if the parents of New York thought the test was just peachy. One could argue that the teachers simply removed one last obstacle to opting out (fear that opting out would hurt beloved Miss Othmar) and let nature take its course.

Bottom line-- the union could not create discontent out of thin air.

3) Black test scores matter. Here Pondiscio tries to sell the "opt out is a middle class white thing" narrative, which ignores a great number of details (and makes the odd assumption that white = middle class and black = poor which-- really?) It also tries to sell the pretense that non-wealthy non-whites have really been benefiting by having their neighborhood school bulldozed and their democratic voices silenced.

2) Don't follow the money. Pondiscio's argument here is that everything in a school costs money.

"The test prep industry is lucrative," writes anti-testing NPR reporter Anya Kamenetz, who also points to a report that calculated $669 million spent on tests in 45 states, or $27 per student. That's it? The desk on which your kid takes his tests costs four times that amount.

Pondiscio is arguing that "money-making" does not automatically equal "evil and untrustworthy." But the difference between the test and the desk is that the desk has a proven and recognized purpose in the classroom. The test is there because of an artificially created "need," and since the test manufacturers were themselves instrumental in creating that artificial "need," they are suspect.

1) Respect parental choice. I saved this one till last because it is the crux of the issue. The opt-out movement has put many people (at least those who care about some level of intellectual consistency and honesty) in a bind. If you think parents should get to choose their own schools, it seems awfully inconsistent to say they should not get a choice when it comes to testing. (There's also a problem if you're anti-school choice but pro opt-out-- I have an answer for that, but that's for a whole other piece. I just didn't want you to think I'd missed that).

Those of us who value testing need to do a better job of explaining to unhappy parents what's in it for them. But we also must respect parental prerogative, whether we like it or not. 

Rick Hess went first, but he still calls Pondiscio on that last point.

Oddly enough, suburban parents seem oddly ungrateful for these efforts to help them see that their children’s schools actually stink. When reformers wonder why these parents don’t get it, the usual culprit is “messaging.” And the usual solution is better PR. 

Hess's piece "Opt out parents have a point" is pure Hess. Whatever you think of his goals and track record, Hess is smart, and he doesn't hesitate to call his fellow-reformsters on weak arguments, like a white hat hacker strolling in to say, "You can't argue that. It's weak and stupid and they will punch a hole in you right here--" and then he punches the hole himself to prove the point, even as he subtly plays the angle to strengthen other pieces of the argument. Of all the people I read, few are as good as Hess at playing the chess game of arguments and angles and looking dozens of moves ahead.

So Hess points out that parents are not idiots and the opt-out revolt is not some crazy tin hat fluke, even as he doubles down on the idea that opt out is white suburban thing. In Hess's narrative, "Middle-class parents are right to question whether today's education reforms will help their kids." That line is the sub-heading of his article.

Reformsters, Hess suggests, have gotten tied up in trying to convince middle-class parents that their schools actually suck, and see parents as irrational for resisting such enlightenment (insert Duncan mom quote here).

But there’s another possibility. It’s that these parents are being reasonable when they worry that the reform agenda, whatever its merits when it comes to schools steeped in dysfunction, does more harm than good for their kids. Reformers have tended to dismiss this possibility, while seeking to convince middle-class parents that their schools are much worse than they may realize. 

Hess is offering a smoother formulation of Merryl Tisch's clumsy compromise offer that "better schools" could be exempt from test-bombing. This will be a tricky argument to pull off-- how to tell higher-income schools, "No, we won't use the same ugly blunt tools on you that we'll use on the poor schools," when the argument for poor schools has always been, "We'll use the same instruments on you that we use on the rich kids."

Hess offers three concrete proposals. Make testing more transparent, top to bottom. Broaden the "vision of excellence" beyond simple math and English. Drop the redistribution of teachers planning for creating excellence everywhere.

Meh. Transparency is great, but unlikely. Hess does always seem to have disliked the narrowing of curriculum that testing has driven. Nobody anywhere has anything remotely like a real plan for redistributing "good" teachers, so objecting to that is a freebie.

But Hess's real Big Idea here is to bridge the gap between poor and middle class parents so that they are not fighting each other, and to listen to what they want and try to get it to them.

Damn, but I admire Hess's precision of argument and language. Here's what he says:

Maybe the solution is not to berate these parents, but to ask what they want for their children, find ways to help make that happen and seek opportunities to promote reform that benefits a broad coalition of low-income and middle-class families. 

This is not the blunt, bald-faced call for school choice (and charters) that Pondiscio made; it's an artful and careful laying of the foundation for the same argument.

That would make sense. The market forces wing of the reformsters is most enamored of choice (and charter) in schools. It has already pretty much abandoned Common Core-- they don't need it and in fact it now becomes an argument in favor of charters ("Get your kids away from that stupid Common Core"). Now, if they're willing, they can ju-jitsu the opt-out momentum straight into an argument for a market-driven choice (and charter) system. I don't think there's any real splintering happening at all.

The market wing will always like some sort of instrument for generating data, because they believe that free-market choices have to be based on some sort of data. But the reformster market wing (schools would be better with free-market profit-judged competition) is not the same as the reformster elite betters wing (the Lessers should shut up and let their Betters tell them what they need) and it's a mistake to confuse the two. The opt out movement will continue to confound and annoy the elites because, to them, it's a bunch of the Lessers acting up and misbehaving. But if the marketeers can set that aside, they can use the opt out movement to their advantage. I'm pretty sure Hess can see that; now he's just got to clue in his allies without tipping off the rest of us.

The Two Critical Testing Questions

The full range of debate about the Big Standardized Tests really comes down to answering two critical questions about the testing.

1. Does the test collect good data?

The whole justification for the BS Tests is that they will collect all sorts of rich and useful data about students, schools, and educational programs.

I have been amazed at the widespread, childlike, bland faith that many people have in anything called a "standardized test." If it's a "standardized test," then surely it must measure real stuff with accuracy, reliability and validity. Sure, the reasoning goes, they wouldn't be putting the test out there if it weren't really measuring stuff.

But to date, no evidence has appeared that the BS Tests are reliable, valid, or actually measuring anything that they claim to measure. The test contents are locked under a Giant Cone of Secrecy, as if the test is some sort of educational vampire that will evaporate if sunlight hits it. Nor have the data collected by the BS Test been clearly linked to anything useful. "Well, since she got a great score on the PARCC, we can be assured that she will be a happy, productive, and rich member of society," said nobody, ever.

Nor is the data rich with any level of data at all. Instead, we get reports that are the equivalent of saying the student was either "Pathetic," "Sad," "Okee dokee-ish," and "Mighty Swell."

Do the BS Tests measure anything other than the students' ability to take the BS Tests? Do the test results actually mean anything? If the test fans can't answer those questions, we're wasting everyone's time.

2. What action is taken with the data?

The tests are supposed to provide data on which to act. Does that-- can that-- happen?

On the classroom level, no. Data is too meager, non-transparent, and just plain late to do anybody any good. "Well, last year you score Okee-dokee-ish because you missed some questions that I'm not allowed to see, so I've customized an educational program to address what I imagine your problem areas used to be," is not a useful thing to say to a student.

But what about identifying schools that need help? Is the data used to help those schools? Not unless by "help" you mean "close" or "take over" or "strip of resources so students can go to a charter instead." Our current system does not identify schools for help; it identifies schools for punishment.

Of course, it's hard to come up with a good action plan based on bad data, which is why we need answers to Question #1 before we can do anything with Question #2.

We can't fix what we don't measure.

Well, maybe, but it doesn't matter because right now our process is as follows:

1) Hey, your bicycle looks like it's not working right.

2) I've measured the lead content of the paint on the bicycle by squeezing the bouncy part of the seat. Your bike is definitely defective.

3) I have thrown your bicycle in the dumpster.

We aren't measuring anything, and we aren't fixing anything. Outside of that, test-driven accountability is working out very Okee dokee-ish.