Turning Around Is Hard

The National Center for Educational Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Educational Sciences, has just released a report entitled "State Capacity to Support School Turnaround." There is plenty to wade through, but I'm going to put on my Gross Oversimplification Hat and whack at the highlights.
 
The main question of the report is this: In 2009, the feds threw $3 billion dollars of stimulus money into School Improvement Grants in order to goose intervention models and generally get a bunch of failing schools to turn around. How did that turn out?

Answer: Not all that well.

Presumably the IES spent a bunch of time, money, and effort trying to explain why. Let me add my two cents to the mix.

Turnaround schools have been one of the Great White Whales of education reform for almost a decade. NCLB used AYP to sort out schools and to declare which ones needed to be turned around "or else." This gave turning around a bad name because NCLB, with its 100% of students above average goal, guaranteed that every school in America would be either failing or cheating. NCLB established that turning around a school was as much about satisfying bureaucratic fiat and paperwork and raising meaningless scores on bogus tests as it was about actually teaching students.
By the time Race To The Trough unleashed its Big Pile of Money, people who actually worked in schools had developed little love for the science of turnarounds. But still-- with all that money being thrown at low-performing schools, shouldn't the feds have gotten something for their trouble? Here are the likely reasons that they did not.

States Cheated

Well, maybe not all states. But mine certainly did. Stimulus money was not supposed to be used to replace regular operating budgets, but under Ed Rendell, that's exactly what Pennsylvania did. The tactic had the added feature of being a bomb that went off under the Corbett administration. Here's a handy chart-- ARRA (stimulus money) is in the gold.


So about the time the SIG money (and other stimulus funds) was drying up, we note a steady drop in per pupil spending across the country. 

Strings, Strings, Strings, So Many Strings

As the NCEE report notes, the SIG money was given so that low-performing schools would "implement one of four ED-specified school intervention models." Those include turnaround, restart, closure and transformation model, and each comes with its own set of rules. So you can have the money, but you must select one of our four-sizes-fit-all programs.

So your house is in trouble, and the feds come to help.

Feds: You can use this big tarpaulin or we can bulldoze your house.
You: But I have a hole in my dining room floor. I need some lumber to patch that up.
Feds: This tarpaulin is excellent for covering leaks in the roof, which is one of the most common problems we have found.
You: I don't have a leaky roof. I have a hole in my floor.
Feds: Well, we can always bulldoze the place.

Basing the entire business on bogus data

If you think the test-generated data will tell you everything you need to know about how successful a school is, you are doomed. You might as well try to care for and train an elephant by just studying its toenail clippings once a year. If the data is bad, it doesn't really tell you where you are, it doesn't tell you how to go somewhere else, and it doesn't tell you if you're making progress.

The worst part of depending on Big Standardized Test scores to measure school performance is not that it will keep us from making progress-- it's tat the scores might make us believe we've made progress when we haven't actually accomplished anything useful at all.

Turning Around Is Hard

The report spends a great deal of timing talking about expertise and the states' lack thereof. I'm not very interested in that line of questioning, because it comes from a deeply flawed premise. The premise runs something like this:

Low-performing schools get bad test scores because either the people there don't know what the hell they're doing or they're just not trying, or both. Once we bring in Wise People who know what the hell they're doing or create proper incentives, or both, the school will magically transform.

I won't discount the possibility that a particular school might suffer from systemic dysfunction or that some folks in the field are less committed or capable than we might wish. But I think it's far more likely that a low-performing school is filled with people who are doing the best they can, working as hard as they can, and trying to move in more or less the right direction. The very term "turnaround" suggests a school that is steadfastly moving in the completely wrong direction.

There's a cottage industry in turnaround experts (just google away), yet somehow nobody has emerged in the last decade as a proven genius who consistently turns schools into gardens of genius. Could it be that there are factors involved that cannot be easily addressed by some drive-by do-gooder for hire? Could it be that empowering the community to lead rather than enjoing it to listen might be more useful (but less profitable). Is it possible that a decline that took decades cannot be reverse in a year? Might it even require a concerted long-term commitment rather than a short term side show? And could it even be possible that a diagnosis of "low-performing" based on a single test is not particularly reliable, accurate, or helpful?

The whole turnaround model seems to be, at heart, the story of a wise man who descends on a sad school, stands on a podium and points, "That way, you fools!" The assembled locals smack themselves on the forehead and say, "Silly us. Thanks for straightening us out," and then march cheerfully into a bright new day.

My alternate model

Education is hard work, and schools are no place for wimps. If you want to help my school do better, then come here, stay here, work here, and partner with us. Listen more than you talk, because we already have a pretty good idea of what would help even though we don't waste time waiting for it to show up-- we work with what we've got and do the best we can. Don't tell us what we need; we already know way better than you do what that is. Don't come swooping in like you can do this in a week or a month or even a year and then just scoot out like a bad prom date with a short attention span. Most of us who are here made a lifetime commitment to doing this work; do not expect us to take you seriously when you haven't even committed past next June.

You may well have much to offer us in terms of how some approaches played out in other areas, or new things to try. But you are not the only expert in the room. We teachers, our students, their parents, the community members-- we already possess considerable expertise when it comes to this school. If you can't remember that, we're not going to get anything turned around.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Live Specifically

I ran this in my local newspaper column on this date a few years ago. It's my little birthday meditation.

            There were many things to note and ponder when bin Laden was killed. After I’d processed some of the larger implications, I noticed something that had never struck me before—Osama bin Laden and I were born the same year.

            True, in different parts of the world, in different cultural and economic circumstances, but still—we were born the same year. 

            After that common origin, our paths diverged pretty quickly. In 1970, his father died; my dad just lost a little more hair. In 1974, when I was getting over being dumped by my first big-time girlfriend, bin Laden was marrying his distant cousin.

            We both went to college, but when I got out, I crashed in a friend’s living room while looking for a teaching job near Cleveland. When he got out, bin Laden went to Afghanistan looking for Russian soldiers to kill. In 1984 I was working out the business of being a newlywed; he was working out the business of funneling truckloads of money to jihadist groups. By 1988 I was raising two small children while he was establishing al Quaida.

            By 1994, while I was tangled up in melting down my marriage, bin Laden was being thrown out of both his family and his home country. After the same number of years on the planet, I am occasionally an insensitive jerk, but he’s a deceased murderer.

            It’s the specifics that matter. Here are more people who were born the same year that bin Laden and I were: Scott Adams, Brad Bird, Laura Branigan, Berke Breathed, LeVar Burton, Steve Buscemi, Dan Castellaneta, Andrew Dice Clay, Katie Couric, Merrill Cowart, Bill Cowher, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Clarke Duncan, Bill Engvall, Stephen Fry, Nick Hornby, Martin Luther King III, Christopher Knight, John Lasseter, Jon Lovitz, Kelly McGillis, Donny Osmond, Kevin Pollack, Ray Romano, Michael W. Smith, Eddie Van Halen, Sid Vicious, Vanna White, and Hans Zimmer. Plus the millions of people who, like me, are not at all famous.

            Each one of us has had the same amount of time on the planet, and yet everyone has done something entirely different with the days allotted.

            We don’t talk nearly enough about specifics. Instead, our discussions and stories of life are often in generalities. Movies and tv shows are set in some sort of generic city. When tales are told for many years, they take place in some timeless zone where there’s no difference between one year and another. For how many decades was Charlie Brown six (-ish) years old? In what city did the Brady Bunch live? These sorts of details so often don’t matter in our fiction, and yet in real life, nothing matters more. Did you grow up in Franklin in the sixties or Oil City in the eighties—it makes a difference, and the difference is in the specifics. But many forces conspire to hide this—if you awoke in the middle of one of our nation’s gazillion cookie-cutter malls or retail spaces, could you even guess where you were?

            We even lose specifics in the rear-view mirror of history. Locally we talk about The Oil Boom as if it were a solid continuous event. But for the people who lived through the wild ups and downs, six months was the difference between fortune and ruin.

            As students in school we behave as if we are all on one track, one road that leads to one future destination. Then graduation comes and the specifics of each individual trajectory create an explosion, a beautifully wild pattern of fireworks. 

            A belief in a general-purpose life can be stifling. We think that, faced with life choices, there’s something that Most People Usually Do, and we shy away from any choice that seems too strikingly unique or specific.

            That’s a mistake. There is no such thing as what Most People Usually Do, or How It Always Goes, or What Usually Happens. We may discuss life generally, but we live it specifically. We make a choice, and it makes a difference. I can talk about Changing My Life, but it’s a meaningless phrase—my past can’t be changed because it is set, and my future can’t be changed because it doesn’t exist yet and you can’t change what doesn’t exist. We create our futures daily, and we should build them out of specifics, made to order, custom built for each one of us alone. 

            That’s how people move the same distance through time and travel to entirely different places.

NJ: No Applause for Banning Testing for the Littlest Students

The news from New Jersey is that the legislature is very close to banning using the Big Standardized Test on students in Kindergarten through Second Grade, which is good news, I guess.

Only there is no similar move being contemplated for the many New Jersey students currently required to take the Big Boys and Girls Version of the PARCC, despite the New Jersey landfill-sized mountain of evidence that such a move would be both beneficial and welcome. There is a mess of various proposals calling for everything from greater transparency to giving the commissioner power to open a can of state-level whoop-ass on any who dare to opt out (while simultaneous declaring that, hey, hardly anybody did that opty outy thing so it's just no buggy).

And anyway-- what does it say about the current state of reform foolishness that any such law is even a thing? Will the legislature also be considering a law again lacing school lunches with ground glass? Will the legislature legislate that school administrators may not administer swirlies to students? Do we need a law to tell schools that they may not have students spend recess playing in traffic? Is there a law saying that schools may not heat the building winter by burning the students' clothes?

The fact that giving BS Tests to kindergarten students is on anybody's mind in the first place is just a bad thing! If your brand new spouse looks over at you and says, "You know, you're so sweet, I think I won't sell your liver on the black market after all," that is not cause for either celebration or relaxation.

So while I guess this proposal is better than one which mandated ten mile runs for five year olds, I'm not prepared to applaud the NJ legislature for putting into law what anybody with even an iota of sense would know better than to vent think about. The fact that such a law seems like a good idea is just a sign of how many people without an iota of sense but with a great deal of power are roaming loose these days.

You might be a charter school fan...

If every time your car gets too full of fast food wrappers and empty drink cans, you go buy a new car (and kept the old one so you can make payments on both), you might be a charter school fan.

If ice cream cones cost a dollar and you only have 75 cents, so you decide the solution is to buy three, you might be a charter school fan.

If you think it's a shame that some schools have gotten worse since they let Those People in, you might be a charter school  fan.

If you think a great way to build grit in children is to entrust their care to an institution that might close at any time with no warning, you might b a charter school fan.

If you think anybody can be a great teacher as long as they teach out of the right book, you might be a charter school fan.

If you think there trouble with democracy is that it allows too many of the wrong people to vote, you might be a charter school  fan.

If you think the best way to fix a crumbling bridge is to let private companies all build bridges up and down the river, you might be a charter school fan. If you think they should all do it with the same total money budgeted for the original bridge, you definitely might be a charter school fan.

If you think taxpayers should not get to elect the people who decide what to do with taxpayer dollars, you might be a charter school fan.

If you think lifeboats and fire fighters should only rescue the worthy from peril, you might be a charter school fan.

If you think the operation of education is best left to hedge fund managers, you might be a charter school fan.

If you think competition has made McDonald's, Microsoft, Netscape, America On Line, and Myspace great, you might be a charter school fan.

If you think rules are for suckers and little people, you might be a charter school fan.

Of course, if you've thought for years that fully funded charters could be a way to foster rich variety and creativity while working as partners with public schools, you might also be a charter school fan. Just a very lonely one at the moment.

Reformster Poker Benefit

So, got a quarter million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and looking for a way to support the school privatization movement? Then I have the event for you!

It's the Sixth Annual Take 'Em To School Poker Tournament to benefit the fine folks at Education Reform Now. The evening of conspicuous consumption will be on Wednesday, July 22 at Gotham Hall in NYC, and it will be somewhat astonishing. The event will be hosted by Phil Hellmuth and include poker pros Phil Ivey, Erik Seidel, Andy Frankenberger, and Layne Flack.

On top of that, special guest players will include Hank Azaria, James Blake, Billy Crudup, David Einhorn, Seth Gilliam, Allan Houston, Brian Koppelman, Alex Kovalev, Marc Lasry, John Starks, and Vince Van Patten. So whether you like sporty folks or voice actors from the Simpsons, you've got a chance to rub special elbows.

You can have a table with two of those special guests for the low, low registration fee of $250,000 (the Royal Flush Table). No, I did not stutter or mistype. If five years' worth of teacher salary is too steep, settle for the Straight Flush Table for only $100,000. Only one special guest for you, but hey, if you wanted two guests, you should have been more rich. You can get a table of ten with amenities for $50K or just a plain boring table for $20K. If you don't have friends, you can get a single seat for $2,000, and if you're just there to gawk, eat, drink, and play casino games, $250 is now looking like a highly reasonable cost.

It sure beats a bake sale. Who throws a party like this? Well, co-chair of the event is our old friend Whitney Tilson, which makes sense, since Education Reform Now is just another variation on DFER-- neo-lib high-rolling hedge funding education privatizers who do fun things like try to defeat local anti-reform candidates and have silly philosopher retreats to think deep thoughts about reform.

Frankly, I like the idea of the Network for Public Education or BATs buying a table or two, then sitting there making rude comments about charter schools, common core, and testing all night. But I'm afraid that my exclusive tailor, Jean-Claude Pennee, could not whip up something appropriate in time. And I'm sure it takes a certain level of wealth to set up and participate in an event like this without feeling a twinge of shame or irony. On the website for the event we can find information like this:

Mississippi’s average per pupil expenditure is $7,890 per year while New Jersey’s is $17,620, a disparity reflected across the nation. There is a ceiling, however, on what can be achieved through traditional approaches to resource re-allocation. 

These are exactly the same people who declare that we have to get teacher pay under control and that you cannot improve public education by throwing money at it. Yes, throwing money at the education of children across America is a waste of money, money that could be spent on much more valuable and important things. But when the rich want to spend an evening throwing money at each other-- well, that's just good sense and great fun. 

Proficient?

"Proficient" is having a moment right now, so perhaps this is an opportune moment to stop and reflect, to sit and think about how the term, like "all natural" and  "college and career ready," doesn't actually mean a thing.

Okay, that's not entirely true. "Proficient" does have one very specific meaning-- "having scored above an arbitrarily set cut score on a Big Standardized Test." But like "student achievement" (which actually means "test scores"), it has been carefully chosen because it suggests so much more than it actually means. Like much of education reform rhetoric, it is that smouldering hottie that gives you a look across the room that promises all sort of soft, sweaty delights but who never delivers so much as a friendly peck on the cheek.

What could it even mean to call someone a proficient reader? Does it mean she can finish an entire novel? Does she have to understand it? Does she have to finish it in less than a month? A week? A year? Can it be any novel? Does it have to be a modern one, or can it be a classic? If I can get through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but not Moby Dick, am I still a proficient reader? If I read Huck Finn, but I just think it's a boy's adventure novel, and I proficient, or do I have to grasp the levels of satire to be proficient? Must I also be able to see symbolism tied to the search for identity in order to be proficient? What about poetry? Does someone have to be able to read poetry to be proficient? Any poetry? From any period? Is a proficient reader moved by what she reads, or does reading proficiency have to do only with the mechanics and thinky parts? And should proficient reader be able to read and follow instructions, say, for assembling a new media center? Would a proficient reader be able to follow the instructions even if the writer of the instructions was not a proficient English language writer? Can a proficient reader deal with any non-fiction reading? How about, say, Julian Jaynes Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? Can a proficient reader read a whole Glenn Beck book and spot which parts are crap? Because that was some pretty heavy stuff! How about legal documents? Does a proficient reader read legal documents well enough to understand them sort of, or completely, or well enough to mount a capable counter-argument to the legal document? Would I count as proficient if I only ever read chunks of reading that were all 1000 words or less (like, say, blog posts), or does proficiency mean dealing with longer, more involved stuff? If college readiness is part of proficiency, does that mean a proficient reader is ready to do the assigned reading for a class on Italian Literature at Harvard or a class on Engineering at MIT or How To Talk Good at West Bogswallup Junior College? Will a proficient reader get A's? C's? And speaking of levels of ability, would a proficient reader read all of a Dan Brown or Stephanie Myers novel and know that it was terribly written? Would a proficient reader have made it all the way through this unnecessarily lengthy paragraph, or would a proficient reader have figured out that I was using bulk to make a rhetorical point and just skipped to the end?

Or does "proficient" just mean "able to manage the dribs and drabs of reading-related tasks that we can easily work into a standardized test"?

Because not only do we have to pretend that we actually know what "proficient" means, but we after we have drawn our lines around all of the complicated questions above, we have to go on to claim that we can glean a clear and accurate picture of that constellation of complex skills with one standardized test. In Pennsylvania, we are going to assess your proficiency with fifty-four questions, half of which are just plain old multiple choice bubble questions.

So the next time you read a piece like this thinky tank piece or this piece of ridiculous editorializing, keep in mind that all these people waxing philosophic about "proficient" might just as well be discussing the hair care preferences of yetis.

The Ballast

I worry about the ballast.

Charter fans brag about their successes. They tell the starfish story. They will occasionally own that their successes are, in fact, about selecting out the strivers, the winners, the students who are, in fact, their own children and allowing them to rise. And it is no small thing that many students have had an opportunity to rise in a charter setting.

But I worry about the ballast.

How do these lucky few rise? The charter doesn't have better teachers. In many cases the charter doesn't have a single pedagogical technique or instructional program that is a bit different from its public school counterparts. What it has is a concentration of students who are supported, committed, and capable.

Those students are able to rise because the school, like the pilot of a hot air balloon, has shed the ballast, the extra weight that is holding them down. It's left behind, abandoned. There's no plan to go back for it, rescue it somehow. Just cut it loose. Let it go. Out of sight, out of mind. We dump those students in a public school, but we take the supplies, the resources, the money, and send it on with the students we've decided are Worth Saving.

This may be why the charter model so often involves starting over in another school-- because the alternative would be to stay in the same school and tell Those Students, the ones without motivation or support or unhindered learning tools, to get out. As those students were sent away so that strivers could succeed, it would just be too obvious that we are achieving success for some students by discarding others.

The ballast model is an echo of a common attitude about poverty. If you are poor, it's because you chose badly, because you didn't try hard enough, because you don't have grit, because you lack character, because you deserve to be poor. Insert story here of some person who was born poor and use grit and determination and hard work to become successful, thereby proving that anyone who is still poor has nobody to blame but himself. Just repeat that narrative, but instead of saying "if you are poor" say "if you are a poor student."

This is a societal model based on discarding people. This is a school model based on discarding students.

Because  after all, if a student is failing, that is because the student is faulty, or possibly the teacher. Even learning disabilities, we've been told, have no effect on the student's achievement if the teacher's expectations are high and the student has grit.

So I guess that makes it okay to discard the ballast, the extra weight that is holding the Better People back.

I repeat-- it is no small thing that some students are carried aloft, lifted high among the clouds in that basket of high achievement.

But I keep thinking of the ballast. Somebody cuts a rope, and the heavy bag goes rocketing downward, plummeting to earth and disappear in a cloud of impact far below. Except they aren't just bags of dirt. They are human beings.

That's the charter model. Cut loose all the dead weight, all the students who aren't good enough, who cost to much time and trouble and money to lift up. This is one more reason that public school folks remain unimpressed by charter "success"-- we always knew that cutting loose the ballast would help everyone else, but our mandate is to lift everyone, not just the chosen few.

Maybe cutting loose the ballast is necessary. Maybe we've decided that's how school should work now. But we should at least be honest and have that discussion, not just cut the ballast loose while nobody is paying attention and then declare, "Well, look, we're headed up now. It's like magic!" If we're going to abandon ten students in order to rescue one, we need to talk about whether or not we're okay with that. We might even have conversation about getting a bigger balloon, one with enough lift to carry everyone and not just the chosen few.

I am glad that a few more students are being lifted up, and that is no small thing. But still, I worry about the ballast.