Well, this is pretty awesome. PARCC has a video explainer (which I guess is more high tech than a mansplainer) intended to help us all understand how the PARCC is super-awesome. It's only a few minutes long and will make what else I have to show you funnier.
Ordinarily I would watch this and deconstruct it for you shot by shot, pointing out the various moments of transparent stupid. But Dan Masi is already on it. He has fixed the audio quality so that we can hear the real message (note-- the scrolling website recommendations at the end are his, not PARCC's). As I type this, Masi's work has only been viewed six times, which is just a waste. Watch and enjoy:
Saturday, May 16, 2015
How Big Is The Honesty Gap
Sooo many folks are Deeply Concerned about the Honesty Gap. Just check out twitter
Oops! That last tweet was apparently about some other Honesty Gap.
The Gappers are repeatedly expressing concern that parents need to know the truth about how their children are doing, specifically whether or not students are ready for college. Apparently everyone in the world is lying to them. Schools and teachers are lying when they assign grades. Even college letters of acceptance are Big Fat Lies. Everyone is lying-- the only possible way to know how your child is doing is to have that child take a Big Standardized Test, and not just any BS Test, but one from our friends at PARCC or SBA. Only those profoundly honest tests will do.
I got into a twitter discussion about this because I asked why, if NAEP is the gold standard by which state tests can be measured, why do we need the state test? Because the NAEP only samples, and we need to test every single child so that parents can get feedback. Okay, I asked-- doesn't that mean that the tests are for two different purposes and therefor can't really be compared? No, they can be compared if NAEP disaggregates well. So then why can't we-- well, I don't blame the person on the other end. Trying to have a serious conversation via twitter is like having sex by semaphore.
I gather that proof of state honesty would be more students failing, because once again we have an argument that starts with, "We know states suck at education and that students are doing terribly, so we just need to design an instrument that will catch them sucking." It's so much easier to design the right scientific measure if you already know what the answer is supposed to be.
So where is the actual honesty gap?
Is it where Common Core promoters claim that the standards are internationally benchmarked? Is it when CCSS fans suggest that having educational standards lead to national success? Is it when they decry low US test scores without noting that the US has been at the bottom of international test results as long as such things have existed?
Is the honesty gap in view when these folks say that parents need transparent and clear assessments of their children's standing, but what they mean is the kind of vague, opaque reports proposed? You know-- the report that basically gives the child a grade of A, B, C or D on a test whose questions nobody is allowed to see or discuss? Is the honesty gap cracking open even wider every time somebody suggests that a single math-and-reading test can tell us everything we need to know about a child's readiness for college and career?
Are we looking into the abyss of the gap when advocacy groups fail to mention that they are paid to support testing and the Core, or that they stand to make a ton of money from both? Does the honesty gap yawn widely when these folks fail to state plainly, "We think the world would be a better place if we just did away with public education, and we work hard to help make that happen." Is Arne Duncan's voice echoing hollowly from the depths of Honesty Gap Gulch when he suggests that telling an eight-year-old that she's on the college track either can or should be a thing?
It is ballsy as hell for the reformsters, who have been telling lie after lie to sell the CCSS-testing combo for years (oh, remember those golden days of "teachers totally wrote the Common Core"?), to bring up concerns about honesty. I admire their guts; just not their honesty.
They have a hashtag (because, you know, that's how all the kids get their marketing done these days) and I encourage to use it to add your own observations about where the #HonestyGap actually lies.
Parents and educators deserve accurate data about how their students are performing in the classroom: http://t.co/FeIjLPlwZ4 #HonestyGap
— StudentsFirst (@StudentsFirst) May 14, 2015
.@EvanE4E: Gap between state expectations & NAEP confirms need for rigorous, consistent, clear standards http://t.co/P3WiuEt9a6 #HonestyGap
— Educators4Excellence (@Ed4Excellence) May 14, 2015
States are saying students are “proficient” when they're not actually well prepared. We need to fix the #HonestyGap: http://t.co/JbinzeO3aF
— CAP Education (@EdProgress) May 14, 2015
Awesome Products + Dubious Rewards = Bad Experience http://t.co/MdnibIcIZ7 #SurveySweepstakes #HonestyGap
— Customerville (@customerville) June 12, 2014
Oops! That last tweet was apparently about some other Honesty Gap.
The Gappers are repeatedly expressing concern that parents need to know the truth about how their children are doing, specifically whether or not students are ready for college. Apparently everyone in the world is lying to them. Schools and teachers are lying when they assign grades. Even college letters of acceptance are Big Fat Lies. Everyone is lying-- the only possible way to know how your child is doing is to have that child take a Big Standardized Test, and not just any BS Test, but one from our friends at PARCC or SBA. Only those profoundly honest tests will do.
I got into a twitter discussion about this because I asked why, if NAEP is the gold standard by which state tests can be measured, why do we need the state test? Because the NAEP only samples, and we need to test every single child so that parents can get feedback. Okay, I asked-- doesn't that mean that the tests are for two different purposes and therefor can't really be compared? No, they can be compared if NAEP disaggregates well. So then why can't we-- well, I don't blame the person on the other end. Trying to have a serious conversation via twitter is like having sex by semaphore.
I gather that proof of state honesty would be more students failing, because once again we have an argument that starts with, "We know states suck at education and that students are doing terribly, so we just need to design an instrument that will catch them sucking." It's so much easier to design the right scientific measure if you already know what the answer is supposed to be.
So where is the actual honesty gap?
Is it where Common Core promoters claim that the standards are internationally benchmarked? Is it when CCSS fans suggest that having educational standards lead to national success? Is it when they decry low US test scores without noting that the US has been at the bottom of international test results as long as such things have existed?
Is the honesty gap in view when these folks say that parents need transparent and clear assessments of their children's standing, but what they mean is the kind of vague, opaque reports proposed? You know-- the report that basically gives the child a grade of A, B, C or D on a test whose questions nobody is allowed to see or discuss? Is the honesty gap cracking open even wider every time somebody suggests that a single math-and-reading test can tell us everything we need to know about a child's readiness for college and career?
Are we looking into the abyss of the gap when advocacy groups fail to mention that they are paid to support testing and the Core, or that they stand to make a ton of money from both? Does the honesty gap yawn widely when these folks fail to state plainly, "We think the world would be a better place if we just did away with public education, and we work hard to help make that happen." Is Arne Duncan's voice echoing hollowly from the depths of Honesty Gap Gulch when he suggests that telling an eight-year-old that she's on the college track either can or should be a thing?
It is ballsy as hell for the reformsters, who have been telling lie after lie to sell the CCSS-testing combo for years (oh, remember those golden days of "teachers totally wrote the Common Core"?), to bring up concerns about honesty. I admire their guts; just not their honesty.
They have a hashtag (because, you know, that's how all the kids get their marketing done these days) and I encourage to use it to add your own observations about where the #HonestyGap actually lies.
Friday, May 15, 2015
Is That It
This has been a week.
These are all things that have happened this week.
Monday night was the end-of-the-year choir concert. The director recognized several students who had choreographed some numbers, including one who had choreographed and taught the dances to middle school students. Each senior had a solo part somewhere in the program (even those who didn't particularly want one.)
Early in the week, one of our students was pulled out of school by her father. He had to come get her to tell her at her mother had died in a car accident. Her mother was a graduate of this high school. She was thirty-three. Within the same twenty-four hours, the twenty-nine year old father of students in my wife's classroom was also killed.
This was a big week for my yearbook staff. Wednesday was our annual end-of-year picnic. At that picnic I recognize seniors, one at a time, give them a keepsake to commemorate their years on staff, and explain why that keepsake especially fits them. It's emotional for me; they come to me as raw, graceless sophomores and I get to watch them grow into responsible, reliable leaders who can spot a problem and deal with it as part of a larger team. Then the seniors announce their successors in leadership roles and pass on some token of office (some of these have been passed along for years). Then today we passed out the new books to the student body, and a year's worth of photography, layout, design, a thousand thousand careful decisions finally unveiled to their audience, to sit on shelves and eventually be read and pored over by people who aren't even born yet.
The yearbook distribution was at a school event (Homecoming-- a reverse Homecoming) at which each class fields a team for intra-class competition. Throughout the week we have voted on a Homecoming King, selected by money placed in jars, that money going (by student council's choice) to benefit a student here who is about to start treatment for his third battle with cancer.
Every night this week I've been at school for rehearsals and performances of a local dance studio (I'm the Stage Crew Guy at my school). The dance studio owner is also a former student and now long-time friend who plays piano for theater productions and the traditional jazz band I play in. This is a small town. Again, I find myself watching students act as accomplished performers, dancers and choreographers who know how to command a stage. In the meantime, my stage crew guys (freshmen and eighth graders) are mastering choosing lighting that complements the dance while matching it to music and mood, fitting color and timing to the performance on stage. I'm proud of everybody here.
If you do the dance circuit, you know the drill. Little cute girls. Older accomplished girls. Girls in the too-big-to-be-cute, too-young-to-be-very-graceful stage. All wrapped together in a show that lasts for hours.
But there is one number. A girl is discovered open stage, alone. Others run by, some together, some in groups, then suddenly all stop together, sink as of pushed down by the some crushing force, spring up, and dance together. In one moment they are united in movement, the next they fly apart. They spring up, they run, they run hard. And then a long line, turning into crack the whip-- a dancer flips off the line by herself and sinks back to the floor.
Maybe I'm a little raw this week, but it has gotten me every night.
All of this, these many moments and others like them, have contrasted with two full days of Big Standardized Testing, one covering confusing math and another featuring 54 bad reading questions and as I sit and waste my day reading bad instructions and watching students bubble away, I keep thinking-- is that it?
Is that it?
Test manufacturers want to sell these things as a measure of what our students can handle, what they're ready for, what they're capable and prepared for, who they are and what they are made of, and I look at these dry, dusty, lifeless paper stacks of bad cracked questions and-- really? Is that it?
Life is just too short for this. I mean, life is really, too often, too short for this time-wasting baloney, this clattering, clanking collection of caliginous heartless junk. Life is rich and deep and constantly unfolding in vast and varied patterns filled with crackling chaos and anchoring order.
The test manufacturers and the data-loving disciples who unendingly tout their soul-sucking standardization are people who have decided they can understand the ocean by capturing a few spoonfulls of saltwater in a paper cup. Worse, instead of recognizing that the paper cup is too small and inadequate for the job, they insist on declaring every drop of ocean that falls outside the cup is some roguish, illegitimate mistake, something to be ignored and eliminated because it is too hard for them to measure with their little cup. They would like to measure out all lives with coffee spoons, and they will not rest until every life is small enough to fit (well, all lives except those of their own loved ones).
Well, that's not it. That is just not it. It is unfortunate if life is too big and messy for them to grasp and measure, but folks-- that is a feature not a bug, to embraced and not ignored. Your tests are stupid. They do not help, and they do not add a whit (or a wit) to my students' lives.
That is not it. That is not it at all.
Oh yeah. And BB King died this week. I wonder how he would have done on his BS Test.
These are all things that have happened this week.
Monday night was the end-of-the-year choir concert. The director recognized several students who had choreographed some numbers, including one who had choreographed and taught the dances to middle school students. Each senior had a solo part somewhere in the program (even those who didn't particularly want one.)
Early in the week, one of our students was pulled out of school by her father. He had to come get her to tell her at her mother had died in a car accident. Her mother was a graduate of this high school. She was thirty-three. Within the same twenty-four hours, the twenty-nine year old father of students in my wife's classroom was also killed.
This was a big week for my yearbook staff. Wednesday was our annual end-of-year picnic. At that picnic I recognize seniors, one at a time, give them a keepsake to commemorate their years on staff, and explain why that keepsake especially fits them. It's emotional for me; they come to me as raw, graceless sophomores and I get to watch them grow into responsible, reliable leaders who can spot a problem and deal with it as part of a larger team. Then the seniors announce their successors in leadership roles and pass on some token of office (some of these have been passed along for years). Then today we passed out the new books to the student body, and a year's worth of photography, layout, design, a thousand thousand careful decisions finally unveiled to their audience, to sit on shelves and eventually be read and pored over by people who aren't even born yet.
The yearbook distribution was at a school event (Homecoming-- a reverse Homecoming) at which each class fields a team for intra-class competition. Throughout the week we have voted on a Homecoming King, selected by money placed in jars, that money going (by student council's choice) to benefit a student here who is about to start treatment for his third battle with cancer.
Every night this week I've been at school for rehearsals and performances of a local dance studio (I'm the Stage Crew Guy at my school). The dance studio owner is also a former student and now long-time friend who plays piano for theater productions and the traditional jazz band I play in. This is a small town. Again, I find myself watching students act as accomplished performers, dancers and choreographers who know how to command a stage. In the meantime, my stage crew guys (freshmen and eighth graders) are mastering choosing lighting that complements the dance while matching it to music and mood, fitting color and timing to the performance on stage. I'm proud of everybody here.
If you do the dance circuit, you know the drill. Little cute girls. Older accomplished girls. Girls in the too-big-to-be-cute, too-young-to-be-very-graceful stage. All wrapped together in a show that lasts for hours.
But there is one number. A girl is discovered open stage, alone. Others run by, some together, some in groups, then suddenly all stop together, sink as of pushed down by the some crushing force, spring up, and dance together. In one moment they are united in movement, the next they fly apart. They spring up, they run, they run hard. And then a long line, turning into crack the whip-- a dancer flips off the line by herself and sinks back to the floor.
Maybe I'm a little raw this week, but it has gotten me every night.
All of this, these many moments and others like them, have contrasted with two full days of Big Standardized Testing, one covering confusing math and another featuring 54 bad reading questions and as I sit and waste my day reading bad instructions and watching students bubble away, I keep thinking-- is that it?
Is that it?
Test manufacturers want to sell these things as a measure of what our students can handle, what they're ready for, what they're capable and prepared for, who they are and what they are made of, and I look at these dry, dusty, lifeless paper stacks of bad cracked questions and-- really? Is that it?
Life is just too short for this. I mean, life is really, too often, too short for this time-wasting baloney, this clattering, clanking collection of caliginous heartless junk. Life is rich and deep and constantly unfolding in vast and varied patterns filled with crackling chaos and anchoring order.
The test manufacturers and the data-loving disciples who unendingly tout their soul-sucking standardization are people who have decided they can understand the ocean by capturing a few spoonfulls of saltwater in a paper cup. Worse, instead of recognizing that the paper cup is too small and inadequate for the job, they insist on declaring every drop of ocean that falls outside the cup is some roguish, illegitimate mistake, something to be ignored and eliminated because it is too hard for them to measure with their little cup. They would like to measure out all lives with coffee spoons, and they will not rest until every life is small enough to fit (well, all lives except those of their own loved ones).
Well, that's not it. That is just not it. It is unfortunate if life is too big and messy for them to grasp and measure, but folks-- that is a feature not a bug, to embraced and not ignored. Your tests are stupid. They do not help, and they do not add a whit (or a wit) to my students' lives.
That is not it. That is not it at all.
Oh yeah. And BB King died this week. I wonder how he would have done on his BS Test.
Honesty: The Hot New Gap (With Anti-CCSS Bonus)
A new report from Achieve.org doesn't provide a lot of information, but it has opened up a great talking point Gap-- ladies and gentlemen, may we introduce the Honesty Gap!
The report, "Proficient vs. Prepared: Disparities between State Tests and the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)" -- well, actually, that title pretty well covers it. Achieve compared Big Standardized Test results to NAEP results.
Achieve, you may recall, was one of the groups instrumental in creating Common Core and foisting it on American schools. So we can't be surprised when their stance is somewhat less than objective.
Today’s economy demands that all young people develop high-level literacy, quantitative reasoning, problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills, all grounded in a rigorous and content-rich K-12 curriculum. Acquiring these skills ensures that high school graduates are academically prepared to pursue the future of their choosing.
Two sentences. The first one sounds lovely, if rather limited, and is an opinion that I'm sure many folks share (at least in part). The second is another iteration of the unproven belief that such a list of qualities will lead to academic preparation. But then, in the next sentence, in bold typeface-- we make a huge, huge leap.
Many state tests, however, continue to mislead the public about whether students are proficient. Parents, students, and teachers deserve transparency and accuracy in public reporting.
This statement assumes and implies that "proficient" is a measure of students development of the list above. It is not. It is a score from one badly designed, non-validated Big Standardized Test that does not have a hope of measuring any of those high function skills (not to mention "collaboration," which is of course expressly forbidden).
I do like the call for transparency. Does this mean that Achieve is going to call for an end to the Giant Cone of Secrecy around the test, and that states should no longer be required to serve as enforcement arms for protecting the proprietary rights of test manufacturers over the educational interests of students? No, I didn't think so.
BS Tests are measuring tools that have never been checked. It's like somebody holds up a length of string and says, "Yeah, that is what I imagine a yard should be, more or less" without ever grabbing a yardstick. Now, Achieve is shocked-- shocked!!-- to discover that the various states' pieces of string aren't exactly a yard long.
But their framing of it is, well, exquisite. States that have BS Test scores that come (somehow) in line with their NAEP scores are called the Top Truth-Tellers. The big gap states are not called Top Dirty Rotten Liars, but hey, if the shoe fits. This raises a few questions, such as how one compares the state-level BS Tests with the NAEP (maybe, it seems, just by counting the number who pass or fail).
More importantly, it raises this question: if the NAEP is the gold standard for measuring all that cool stuff about student achievement, why don't we just use it and scrap all the state-level BS Tests?
Reformsters are skipping right past that to The Honesty Gap. It's a more formal version of the old assertion that schools and teachers are just lying to their students and ed reform has to include telling parents and students that they and their schools and their teachers all suck.
Not surprisingly, the Honesty Gap has shown up in pieces by Mike Petrilli at Fordham and at the Reformster Website To Which I Will Not Link. And those pieces are not a surprise because the Honesty Gap has recently launched its very own website!! Woo hoo!! That website was launched by The Collaborative for Student Success, an advocacy group with most excellently reformy partners,
including the Fordham Foundation, the US Chamber, and even-- oh, look! Also Achievethecore.org. All of which explains why Honesty Gap uses much of the same rhetoric to highlight the data from the Achieve.org report.
[Update: Oh, wow. The full-scale product rollout includes a new hashtag #HonestyGap on twitter, where you can find all your favorite reformy hucksters tweeting about how parents deserve the truth!]
Man-- it's like the group is so loaded with money that every time they wan t to launch a new talking point, they give it its own glitzy website. Meanwhile, I am typing about it while eating my convenience store fiesta chicken wrap at lunch. It's an amazing world.
So what's the end game of this particular self-supporting PR blitz? Maybe the secret is here in the third of the Achieve report's "findings"--
A number of states have been working to address proficiency gaps; this year, even more will do so by administering the college- and career-ready-aligned Smarter Balanced and PARCC assessments.
The dream of a national assessment, a BS Test that waves its flag from shore to shore-- that dream still lives! See, states? You insisted on launching your own test and dropping out of PARCC/SBA and that's just cause you're lying liars who lie the giant big lies. Come back home to the warm bosom of a giant, national scale test!
Here's one funny thing about the Achieve report. There's a term that does turn up on the Honesty Gap website, but in twelve pages of the original Achieve report about being prepared and proficient etc etc, these words do not appear once-- Common Core.
It's funny. Even a year ago, I hated the Core pretty passionately. But I start to feel sorry for it-- given the need to choose between Core and charters, Core and political advantage, or Core and testing, people keep picking the Core last. Poor orphaned useless piece of junk.
The report, "Proficient vs. Prepared: Disparities between State Tests and the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)" -- well, actually, that title pretty well covers it. Achieve compared Big Standardized Test results to NAEP results.
Achieve, you may recall, was one of the groups instrumental in creating Common Core and foisting it on American schools. So we can't be surprised when their stance is somewhat less than objective.
Today’s economy demands that all young people develop high-level literacy, quantitative reasoning, problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills, all grounded in a rigorous and content-rich K-12 curriculum. Acquiring these skills ensures that high school graduates are academically prepared to pursue the future of their choosing.
Two sentences. The first one sounds lovely, if rather limited, and is an opinion that I'm sure many folks share (at least in part). The second is another iteration of the unproven belief that such a list of qualities will lead to academic preparation. But then, in the next sentence, in bold typeface-- we make a huge, huge leap.
Many state tests, however, continue to mislead the public about whether students are proficient. Parents, students, and teachers deserve transparency and accuracy in public reporting.
This statement assumes and implies that "proficient" is a measure of students development of the list above. It is not. It is a score from one badly designed, non-validated Big Standardized Test that does not have a hope of measuring any of those high function skills (not to mention "collaboration," which is of course expressly forbidden).
I do like the call for transparency. Does this mean that Achieve is going to call for an end to the Giant Cone of Secrecy around the test, and that states should no longer be required to serve as enforcement arms for protecting the proprietary rights of test manufacturers over the educational interests of students? No, I didn't think so.
BS Tests are measuring tools that have never been checked. It's like somebody holds up a length of string and says, "Yeah, that is what I imagine a yard should be, more or less" without ever grabbing a yardstick. Now, Achieve is shocked-- shocked!!-- to discover that the various states' pieces of string aren't exactly a yard long.
But their framing of it is, well, exquisite. States that have BS Test scores that come (somehow) in line with their NAEP scores are called the Top Truth-Tellers. The big gap states are not called Top Dirty Rotten Liars, but hey, if the shoe fits. This raises a few questions, such as how one compares the state-level BS Tests with the NAEP (maybe, it seems, just by counting the number who pass or fail).
More importantly, it raises this question: if the NAEP is the gold standard for measuring all that cool stuff about student achievement, why don't we just use it and scrap all the state-level BS Tests?
Reformsters are skipping right past that to The Honesty Gap. It's a more formal version of the old assertion that schools and teachers are just lying to their students and ed reform has to include telling parents and students that they and their schools and their teachers all suck.
Not surprisingly, the Honesty Gap has shown up in pieces by Mike Petrilli at Fordham and at the Reformster Website To Which I Will Not Link. And those pieces are not a surprise because the Honesty Gap has recently launched its very own website!! Woo hoo!! That website was launched by The Collaborative for Student Success, an advocacy group with most excellently reformy partners,
including the Fordham Foundation, the US Chamber, and even-- oh, look! Also Achievethecore.org. All of which explains why Honesty Gap uses much of the same rhetoric to highlight the data from the Achieve.org report.
[Update: Oh, wow. The full-scale product rollout includes a new hashtag #HonestyGap on twitter, where you can find all your favorite reformy hucksters tweeting about how parents deserve the truth!]
Man-- it's like the group is so loaded with money that every time they wan t to launch a new talking point, they give it its own glitzy website. Meanwhile, I am typing about it while eating my convenience store fiesta chicken wrap at lunch. It's an amazing world.
So what's the end game of this particular self-supporting PR blitz? Maybe the secret is here in the third of the Achieve report's "findings"--
A number of states have been working to address proficiency gaps; this year, even more will do so by administering the college- and career-ready-aligned Smarter Balanced and PARCC assessments.
The dream of a national assessment, a BS Test that waves its flag from shore to shore-- that dream still lives! See, states? You insisted on launching your own test and dropping out of PARCC/SBA and that's just cause you're lying liars who lie the giant big lies. Come back home to the warm bosom of a giant, national scale test!
Here's one funny thing about the Achieve report. There's a term that does turn up on the Honesty Gap website, but in twelve pages of the original Achieve report about being prepared and proficient etc etc, these words do not appear once-- Common Core.
It's funny. Even a year ago, I hated the Core pretty passionately. But I start to feel sorry for it-- given the need to choose between Core and charters, Core and political advantage, or Core and testing, people keep picking the Core last. Poor orphaned useless piece of junk.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Welcome Aboard Big Test Airlines
This week is Big Standardized Test week in Pennsylvania high schools. I have the great good fortune to be a proctor, which means of course that I earned my Super-Secret High Security Test Guardian Certificate. And that means I can't tell you anything about the test itself.
Technically speaking, I'm not even supposed to look at it, though the state seems to recognize that my proctoring duties would be more challenging were I blindfolded. But I am not supposed to retain, remember, in part or in whole, any test items-- not even the general idea of a test item. You might think that the results of unseen test questions to inform instruction might be challenging or impossible or just plain stupid, but that is why you are sitting there reading some silly teacher blog and not making either policy decisions in a capitol or big piles of money in a test manufacturing company.
Yes, we now live in a world where I may well be risking legal penalties for saying that the test includes old-fashioned vocab questions where the student must match a semi-unfamiliar word with its synonym among four other semi-unfamiliar odds. Or that there are interpretation questions with at least three equally correct answers, only one of which will be accepted by the state.
By saying that, I may have said too much. I'm certain that if I tell you more, I have to kill both you and myself.
But I can, as near as I can tell, talk about giving instructions.
BS Test instructions are a unique piece of tone-setting, the classroom equivalent of pre-flight safety instructions on any airline that is not Southwest. These instructions accomplish many goals, none of which are desirable in a classroom.
Right off the bat, the scripting sets a tone. The usual tone (or should I say mood?) of a classroom recognizes that we are all human beings, and that I am an adult human being here to help you manage our next challenge. But the script establishes that I am not here to help you-- in fact, I am not even supposed to interact with you in the same manner as we would any other place in the universe.
Immediately, we are both stripped of agency. You are not to do the simplest action-- not even turn a page-- until I read the instructions to do so. And because I must announce even my simplest action ("I will now pass out pieces of scratch paper"), it is clear I have no agency, either. We are both just subject to a Greater Power-- the Power of the Test.
We then move into a ridiculous dance. I say turn to page two and read the paragraph (the one threatening you with vague, ominous punishment if you dare to violate test security), and you of course do not. Certainly not the fourth time you've been told to read it in two days. Again, we are establishing a tone, delivering a message.
In six modules of testing, you will be told to sign a Code of Test Taker Ethics Pledge (don't cheat or violate security) three times. You will be told to read the section about test security six times. Test security gets a paragraph, all on its own page. Encouragement ("do your best") gets eighteen words over six modules. How many times will we tell you something encouraging, affirming, reminding you of your value as a student and a human being. None times. The allocation of space in the script makes it clear what is most important here, and it's not the students.
I will read the directions out loud as you read them silently just about as much as air travelers read the card in the seat-back pocket. I will ask you repeatedly if you have any questions, but of course by the time we get to those, it's clear that none of us is supposed to say or do anything that's not in the script.
I am supposed to tell you one bald-faced lie-- when looking at the scoring guides, the script makes reference to "professional scorers." That is a lie. There are no such people.
Sometimes I will use vocal inflection or facial expression to indicate that I am, in fact, a live human being and not a Borg-trained flight attendant. I don't know if that makes things better or worse-- is it sadder just to see the bars of a cage, or to see the face of the person shut in behind them?
It is hard to imagine an atmosphere more artificial and offputting. I imagine that for the youngest students it is the saddest, most alienating experience they have ever had. For some very young students I'll bet it is the first time in their lives they've found themselves in a difficult place with no friendly face to be found. When I was little I had nightmares about being lost in a store, unable to find my parents and surrounding by cold, distant strangers. If I were that young today, would I have nightmares about BS Tests instead?
It is all just one more reason that I doubt the validity of the test. Is this really the situation under which we think students will demonstrate their very best? Did test manufacturers stop just short of saying, "What if we left a Slim Whitman album playing full blast the whole time, and every fifteen minutes the proctor had to punch each kid in the face?"
I am not saying that the poor, fragile children need to be coddled through every test. But if I were setting out to discover exactly what my students knew and could do, this is not the first, or even the one thousandth, way I would think of going about it. The direction script is just one more indicator that there are many priorities in play here, and finding out what our students really know is far from the top of the list.
Technically speaking, I'm not even supposed to look at it, though the state seems to recognize that my proctoring duties would be more challenging were I blindfolded. But I am not supposed to retain, remember, in part or in whole, any test items-- not even the general idea of a test item. You might think that the results of unseen test questions to inform instruction might be challenging or impossible or just plain stupid, but that is why you are sitting there reading some silly teacher blog and not making either policy decisions in a capitol or big piles of money in a test manufacturing company.
Yes, we now live in a world where I may well be risking legal penalties for saying that the test includes old-fashioned vocab questions where the student must match a semi-unfamiliar word with its synonym among four other semi-unfamiliar odds. Or that there are interpretation questions with at least three equally correct answers, only one of which will be accepted by the state.
By saying that, I may have said too much. I'm certain that if I tell you more, I have to kill both you and myself.
But I can, as near as I can tell, talk about giving instructions.
BS Test instructions are a unique piece of tone-setting, the classroom equivalent of pre-flight safety instructions on any airline that is not Southwest. These instructions accomplish many goals, none of which are desirable in a classroom.
Right off the bat, the scripting sets a tone. The usual tone (or should I say mood?) of a classroom recognizes that we are all human beings, and that I am an adult human being here to help you manage our next challenge. But the script establishes that I am not here to help you-- in fact, I am not even supposed to interact with you in the same manner as we would any other place in the universe.
Immediately, we are both stripped of agency. You are not to do the simplest action-- not even turn a page-- until I read the instructions to do so. And because I must announce even my simplest action ("I will now pass out pieces of scratch paper"), it is clear I have no agency, either. We are both just subject to a Greater Power-- the Power of the Test.
We then move into a ridiculous dance. I say turn to page two and read the paragraph (the one threatening you with vague, ominous punishment if you dare to violate test security), and you of course do not. Certainly not the fourth time you've been told to read it in two days. Again, we are establishing a tone, delivering a message.
In six modules of testing, you will be told to sign a Code of Test Taker Ethics Pledge (don't cheat or violate security) three times. You will be told to read the section about test security six times. Test security gets a paragraph, all on its own page. Encouragement ("do your best") gets eighteen words over six modules. How many times will we tell you something encouraging, affirming, reminding you of your value as a student and a human being. None times. The allocation of space in the script makes it clear what is most important here, and it's not the students.
I will read the directions out loud as you read them silently just about as much as air travelers read the card in the seat-back pocket. I will ask you repeatedly if you have any questions, but of course by the time we get to those, it's clear that none of us is supposed to say or do anything that's not in the script.
I am supposed to tell you one bald-faced lie-- when looking at the scoring guides, the script makes reference to "professional scorers." That is a lie. There are no such people.
Sometimes I will use vocal inflection or facial expression to indicate that I am, in fact, a live human being and not a Borg-trained flight attendant. I don't know if that makes things better or worse-- is it sadder just to see the bars of a cage, or to see the face of the person shut in behind them?
It is hard to imagine an atmosphere more artificial and offputting. I imagine that for the youngest students it is the saddest, most alienating experience they have ever had. For some very young students I'll bet it is the first time in their lives they've found themselves in a difficult place with no friendly face to be found. When I was little I had nightmares about being lost in a store, unable to find my parents and surrounding by cold, distant strangers. If I were that young today, would I have nightmares about BS Tests instead?
It is all just one more reason that I doubt the validity of the test. Is this really the situation under which we think students will demonstrate their very best? Did test manufacturers stop just short of saying, "What if we left a Slim Whitman album playing full blast the whole time, and every fifteen minutes the proctor had to punch each kid in the face?"
I am not saying that the poor, fragile children need to be coddled through every test. But if I were setting out to discover exactly what my students knew and could do, this is not the first, or even the one thousandth, way I would think of going about it. The direction script is just one more indicator that there are many priorities in play here, and finding out what our students really know is far from the top of the list.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
I Should Support Charters
I'm a big fan of the opt-out movement when it comes to testing. I believe, in general, that it's better for people to have a choice, to be free to consider options. It would make a certain amount of sense for me to be a supporter of school choice in general and charter schools as an expression of that choice.
And yet, I am not a supporter of either-- at least not as currently proposed and practiced.
But I think any time one finds inconsistencies rattling around in one's head, intellectual honesty and a desire to live with as much integrity as one can muster demand that one considers what that inconsistency means.
So-- why am I a fan of choice, except when it comes to school.
Dishonesty about the cost
Choice and charter systems are currently constructed as a zero-sum game. In many districts, the charter system forces multiple schools to finance multiple systems with a pot of money that isn't even sufficient to finance a single system. This means that one school must be the loser, and charter policies are written so that the loser is always the public school. This system creates several problems.
There's a problem with rampant inequity-- students who most need extra support are left behind in public schools that have the least per-pupil ability to support them. Challenging application processes, targeted marketing, counseling out, and non-backfilling can all help insure that the public school becomes the holding ground for the students who most need help even as charters strip away the public school's financial ability to deal with them. And that's before we start to consider how a school climate is affected by the absence of the top-tier students.
The system is also unsustainable. Taxpayers funding multiple systems are essentially footing the bill for excess capacity spread over several schools. Schools have to cut programs so that they can have seats for students who may or may not show up on their doorstep. Furthermore, initial stages of a charter system work on a simple dynamic-- all charters drain their money from the public system. But as the market saturates, the charters begin stripping resources from each other. That adds to
System instability and impermanence
Market-driven systems pretty much demand a cycle of growing too much capacity followed by shucking off that capacity. In other words, a choice system is going to have closing schools as a regular feature. This never seems to stop surprising people, particularly when the closing is mid-year and unannounced.
A school should be a permanent feature of a community, not a temporary business venture. A school should not be a store in a strip mall, but a pillar of the community that is, in fact, paying taxes to provide exactly that. A commitment to operate a school should be "until the community decides to close it" and not "until the business owners decide it's not to their advantage to stay open." Schools should be married to their community for a lifetime, not hooking up for a hot weekend in Vegas.
Students
I actually can imagine a system that provided a selection of different school environments and emphases. Arts schools and science schools. Highly structured schools and loosely organized schools. I can imagine some cool systems built on schools that provided different sorts of fits.
But I don't imagine any of those schools having the ability to refuse or reject students. And I don't imagine any of those schools being allowed to short-change programs for students with special needs or English Language Learners.
The American public education system must never, ever, require students to settle for a second-class school, and our current charter system does exactly that. In fact, by giving Student A access to a supposed first-class school, most choice system condemn Students B through K to a second-class school in order to finance Student A's shiny education. One of the most damaging and ungenerous problems of the traditional system has been well-to-do parents who take the position, "I've got mine, Jack." Our new charter systems haven't changed that a bit; they've just created a new mechanism for indulging selfishness. Warren Buffet called this one exactly right-- if wealthier parents hadn't opted out of public schools, we'd have a far better public school system.
All schools must be ready, willing and able to take any student. Period. Our current charters by and large are not. Charter schools should provide unique and different educational experiences. Current charters are set up to do exactly what public schools do-- just with a more carefully-selected student body.
Marketing
Marketing eats everything, to the point that students are there to serve the school by getting scores that will help the school market. Plus, marketing wastes a ton of precious tax dollars.
Marketing will do to a choice and charter system what it did to cable TV-- drive every vendor to the middle in search for a broad and profitable customer base (leaving niche markets and low-wealth markets ignored and underserved). And any attempt to reduce the salient characteristics of a school to an easy ad slogan will yield no true or useful information to consumers anyway. Marketing leads us to things like schools that focus all their energy on test prep so that they can get high scores so that they can advertise high scores. That's not a good school, but it's a nice clear marketing strategy.
No chains
Local governance only. Local taxpayer accountability only. No schools where all policy decisions are made by people in an office in some other city. All taxpayers who have a concern about a school should be able to pick up a phone, dial a local number, and start a sentence with, "If you want my vote in the next election..."
No profits
Including not-for-profit profits. Never. No school should be pitting the educational interests of students against the financial interests of the operators. No school operator should be figuring out how to cut a theater program so that he can buy a second house in Boca.
Could I Support Charters
I have said on many occasions that I could support a charter system. But it would look far different than the system we have. Most fundamentally, it would be fully funded so that schools were not locked in wasteful stupid zero-sum battles over table scraps. But it would also be set up in order to provide the best, richest, deepest, widest education for all students-- not set up to provide maximum Return On Investment for hedge funders.
We got the system we have by answering the wrong question. This system does not answer the question, "How could we provide a better, richer, more effective education for all students in the community." It answers the question "How can we get our kids away from Those People?" and "How can we get our hands on a slice of that massive education tax dollar pie."
I have no doubt that a great charter system is theoretically possible. But that's not the system we got because it's not the system we tried to build. And that's why, right now, I am not a charter fan.
And yet, I am not a supporter of either-- at least not as currently proposed and practiced.
But I think any time one finds inconsistencies rattling around in one's head, intellectual honesty and a desire to live with as much integrity as one can muster demand that one considers what that inconsistency means.
So-- why am I a fan of choice, except when it comes to school.
Dishonesty about the cost
Choice and charter systems are currently constructed as a zero-sum game. In many districts, the charter system forces multiple schools to finance multiple systems with a pot of money that isn't even sufficient to finance a single system. This means that one school must be the loser, and charter policies are written so that the loser is always the public school. This system creates several problems.
There's a problem with rampant inequity-- students who most need extra support are left behind in public schools that have the least per-pupil ability to support them. Challenging application processes, targeted marketing, counseling out, and non-backfilling can all help insure that the public school becomes the holding ground for the students who most need help even as charters strip away the public school's financial ability to deal with them. And that's before we start to consider how a school climate is affected by the absence of the top-tier students.
The system is also unsustainable. Taxpayers funding multiple systems are essentially footing the bill for excess capacity spread over several schools. Schools have to cut programs so that they can have seats for students who may or may not show up on their doorstep. Furthermore, initial stages of a charter system work on a simple dynamic-- all charters drain their money from the public system. But as the market saturates, the charters begin stripping resources from each other. That adds to
System instability and impermanence
Market-driven systems pretty much demand a cycle of growing too much capacity followed by shucking off that capacity. In other words, a choice system is going to have closing schools as a regular feature. This never seems to stop surprising people, particularly when the closing is mid-year and unannounced.
A school should be a permanent feature of a community, not a temporary business venture. A school should not be a store in a strip mall, but a pillar of the community that is, in fact, paying taxes to provide exactly that. A commitment to operate a school should be "until the community decides to close it" and not "until the business owners decide it's not to their advantage to stay open." Schools should be married to their community for a lifetime, not hooking up for a hot weekend in Vegas.
Students
I actually can imagine a system that provided a selection of different school environments and emphases. Arts schools and science schools. Highly structured schools and loosely organized schools. I can imagine some cool systems built on schools that provided different sorts of fits.
But I don't imagine any of those schools having the ability to refuse or reject students. And I don't imagine any of those schools being allowed to short-change programs for students with special needs or English Language Learners.
The American public education system must never, ever, require students to settle for a second-class school, and our current charter system does exactly that. In fact, by giving Student A access to a supposed first-class school, most choice system condemn Students B through K to a second-class school in order to finance Student A's shiny education. One of the most damaging and ungenerous problems of the traditional system has been well-to-do parents who take the position, "I've got mine, Jack." Our new charter systems haven't changed that a bit; they've just created a new mechanism for indulging selfishness. Warren Buffet called this one exactly right-- if wealthier parents hadn't opted out of public schools, we'd have a far better public school system.
All schools must be ready, willing and able to take any student. Period. Our current charters by and large are not. Charter schools should provide unique and different educational experiences. Current charters are set up to do exactly what public schools do-- just with a more carefully-selected student body.
Marketing
Marketing eats everything, to the point that students are there to serve the school by getting scores that will help the school market. Plus, marketing wastes a ton of precious tax dollars.
Marketing will do to a choice and charter system what it did to cable TV-- drive every vendor to the middle in search for a broad and profitable customer base (leaving niche markets and low-wealth markets ignored and underserved). And any attempt to reduce the salient characteristics of a school to an easy ad slogan will yield no true or useful information to consumers anyway. Marketing leads us to things like schools that focus all their energy on test prep so that they can get high scores so that they can advertise high scores. That's not a good school, but it's a nice clear marketing strategy.
No chains
Local governance only. Local taxpayer accountability only. No schools where all policy decisions are made by people in an office in some other city. All taxpayers who have a concern about a school should be able to pick up a phone, dial a local number, and start a sentence with, "If you want my vote in the next election..."
No profits
Including not-for-profit profits. Never. No school should be pitting the educational interests of students against the financial interests of the operators. No school operator should be figuring out how to cut a theater program so that he can buy a second house in Boca.
Could I Support Charters
I have said on many occasions that I could support a charter system. But it would look far different than the system we have. Most fundamentally, it would be fully funded so that schools were not locked in wasteful stupid zero-sum battles over table scraps. But it would also be set up in order to provide the best, richest, deepest, widest education for all students-- not set up to provide maximum Return On Investment for hedge funders.
We got the system we have by answering the wrong question. This system does not answer the question, "How could we provide a better, richer, more effective education for all students in the community." It answers the question "How can we get our kids away from Those People?" and "How can we get our hands on a slice of that massive education tax dollar pie."
I have no doubt that a great charter system is theoretically possible. But that's not the system we got because it's not the system we tried to build. And that's why, right now, I am not a charter fan.
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.
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.
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