Oh, that hero teacher.
Larger than life. Leaping tall filing cabinets with a single bound. Taking a few moments out of every day to personally reach out to every single student and making that child feel special, while at the same time inspiring greater levels of smartitude just by sheer force of teacherly awesomeness. The Hero Teacher shoots expectation rays at students, making them all instant geniuses.
The Hero Teacher is featured in movies and television, from Sidney Portier's Sir to William Daniels' Mr. Feeney. The Hero Teacher usually has only one class (Feeney is the ultimate example, staying with his students through their entire academic career), and limitless time and resources to Change Their Lives. The Hero Teacher is committed, miraculous, transformative.
The Hero Teacher is also a giant blight on education.
The Hero Teacher haunts the dreams of real live teachers, taunting us with a level of perfection we will never achieve. We will skip over the 100 students we reached to obsess about the twenty we didn't connect to at all because if we were real Hero Teachers, we would have connected with every last student.
Worse, the specter of the Hero Teacher tortures and twists education policy as well.
See, if Hero Teachers are real, then our education policy should be built around finding and retaining them. Hero Teachers are imbued with some teacherly gift (maybe they're born with it, maybe they were infected by another Hero Teacher) and so we don't have to develop and support such people-- we just have to find them. It's possible that some of them aren't even teachers, so we need to make it easy to bring them into the schools from whatever line of work they're currently in. They certainly don't need any special training, because a Hero Teacher just has It.
If Hero Teachers are real, we don't have to address the system. We don't need to build a school that is a community with systems and processes for providing support and development. We don't need to try to develop a good system; we just have to root out the Bad Teachers and hire more Hero Teachers.
This is what reformsters are talking about when they proclaim that we must find the most excellent teachers and pay them really well (though a Hero Teacher would never actually ask for a big salary, because noble)-- find the Hero Teachers and get them to teach everyone. Maybe they could have teaching assistants, or maybe they can just teach 200 students at once (because, after all, they are awesome Hero Teachers). Maybe this is appealing in part because ten well-paid Hero Teachers are still cheaper than fifty moderately-paid regular old teachers. And the as-yet-unrealized requirement that states have a plan for moving highly effective teachers to problem schools is also based on the Hero Teacher story-- we find a Hero Teacher and we send that Hero off to trouble spots, where Hero Teacher will heroically Fix It All.
It's not poverty. It's not systemic failures. It's not crumbling infrastructure. It's not a lack of resources (because a Hero Teacher can MacGyver instruction out of two rocks and a shoelace). It's not the absence of a system to build community, stability, and the room and help to grow as a professional.
No, it's just that we haven't found enough Hero Teachers yet (or maybe, as some reformsters posit, we actually need to find Hero Principals or Hero Superintendents or Hero Charter School Operator).
The Hero Teacher narrative is appealing, but it's lazy, and it lets everybody else in the school and community escape responsibility-- the responsibility to do the best they can for the pieces that they work with, the responsibility to be an active part of a community, the responsibility to help build and grow and lift up the people around them. Effective schools do not run on Hero Teachers, but on strong, stable, supportive communities, and that is no myth.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Jebster on Education
Hats off to the folks at Fordham who have added a new feature to their site-- it's Eduwatch 2016, and it is a handy compendium of education quotes from each Presidential candidate. We'll be turning to that more than a few times, I'm quite certain.
They attracted my attention with what is actually the ninth installment in the series, featuring ten quotes from Jeb Bush. They don't entitle it "Ten Things That Jeb Gets Wrong About Education" or even "One More Attempt To Mitigate Jeb's Common Core Conservative Problem," but they might as well have. I'm going to call it "Ten Reasons People Who Care About Public Education Should Not Vote For Jeb Bush."
1) Common Core as a floor, not a ceiling. Here's a Jebby quote about how states should "aim even higher, be bolder" and just keep raising standards forever. It sounds pretty except for two problems. First, it's reinforces a childishly simple two-dimensional model of school, where education is like a flagpole and you can choose higher or lower and that's it. Education is more like a four-dimensional galaxy, expanding and growing in all directions through space and time. Second, it ignores the question of whether the Core even makes a decent floor (spoiler alert: it doesn't).
2) States are in charge. This quote oddly acknowledges that the Common Core brand has become a fuzzy meaningless mess, so that no two people using it may mean the same thing. But from there Jebby somehow gets to "The federal government should play no role in this, either in the creation of standards, content, or curriculum." Which-- well, first, that ship has sailed, and second, if that's the case, why is a Presidential candidate talking about it? Will some journalist please ask Jebby, "Knowing what we know now, would you have signed off on No Child Left Behind?"
3) School choice. “Consumer choice created the most innovative and powerful economy in the world....Choice rewards success and weeds out stagnation, inefficiency, and failure." Wrong, and wrong. The fact that people have been repeating this mantra for decades does not make it so. Coke and Pepsi. Microsoft. Standard Oil. Cable television.
4) Class size. He cites the Harvard study on class size. He should probably take a look at what we could loosely call "all the other research" on this subject. Class size matters. Do note, however, that he also says "We have spent billions of dollars on more buildings and for more teachers with no evidence this policy produced better results." I can only hope he plans to apply the Dollars Spent To No Results metric to charter schools, Common Core and Big Standardized Testing.
5) Teacher pay. There was a time I might have let this one go ("Pay our best, great teachers more") but I have come around to the way of thinking favored by Michael Fullan and many others-- the myth of the Hero Teacher is bad news. Believing that a great school is one with room after room captained by a Hero Teacher just leads us to the idea that we don't have to look at the system or the supports or the processes we've put in place to help each teacher grow and improve-- we just have to fire Bad Teachers and hire Hero Teachers. It's lazy, it's unrealistic, and guys like the Jebster like it because what they really imagine is a couple of well-paid Hero Teachers teaching 200 kids each, for a net payroll savings of big, big bucks.
6) Preschool. Here's my rule about pushing preschool-- preschool can be a great thing, but if you can't get anything else about education right, you're going to muck up preschool, too. Jeb thinks the magic formula is choice (marketing), early literacy focus (developmentally ignorant), measure and report (test test test), focus on outcomes not inputs (test test test test). This absolutely guarantees that Jeb is the worst person in the world to set up a preschool.
7) The achievement gap. Poor minority students should get better test scores. It is up to the school to fix all the problems of society; there is no obligation for society to address problems so that kids can more easily get a better education. Well, not an education-- just better test scores.
8) Course access. This is cutting edge reformster stuff. Choice on steroids-- you don't just choose a school, but you put your education program together course by course, from a wide variety of vendors who are peeing themselves with delight because they don't have to provide a full program, just whatever niche market material they're pushing. An almost-interesting idea until you spend even five seconds trying to think about how it would actually work. It really is choice on steroids-- misshapen, unhealthy, and prone to sudden fits of rage and/or heart failure.
9) Education and technology. "The main challenge facing the country is how to redesign education around what technology allows us to do." Man, that is so perfectly and utterly backwards. We do not need to redesign education to fit the tech; we need to design the tech to fit education.
10) Raising expectations in education. “Some in the education community complain that every time they achieve the results expected of them, we raise expectations, and school grades drop as a result. That was our goal. We have learned that students and teachers rise to the new challenge, and the school grades go back up because everyone rises to the challenge. This formula is how you drive success in any endeavor.” That's really inspiring, but it always raises the same question for me-- if expectations are so powerful, why aren't we unleashing their power everywhere? Instead of saying "Colleges have to give too many remedial courses," why don't we say, "Colleges, just expect more from your freshmen." Instead of saying "We need young people to be better prepared for the workplace," why don't we say, "Employers, if you just raise your expectations, you can hire anybody."
It tells us something about the political-educational landscape that Arne Duncan would be perfectly suited to serve as Jeb's Secretary of Education-- they don't disagree on anything (and they both have that lanky, slightly-confused look). There are many things about a Jeb Presidency that would be uncertain, but one thing is clear-- we would get four more years just like the last sixteen years of anti-public education policy.
They attracted my attention with what is actually the ninth installment in the series, featuring ten quotes from Jeb Bush. They don't entitle it "Ten Things That Jeb Gets Wrong About Education" or even "One More Attempt To Mitigate Jeb's Common Core Conservative Problem," but they might as well have. I'm going to call it "Ten Reasons People Who Care About Public Education Should Not Vote For Jeb Bush."
1) Common Core as a floor, not a ceiling. Here's a Jebby quote about how states should "aim even higher, be bolder" and just keep raising standards forever. It sounds pretty except for two problems. First, it's reinforces a childishly simple two-dimensional model of school, where education is like a flagpole and you can choose higher or lower and that's it. Education is more like a four-dimensional galaxy, expanding and growing in all directions through space and time. Second, it ignores the question of whether the Core even makes a decent floor (spoiler alert: it doesn't).
2) States are in charge. This quote oddly acknowledges that the Common Core brand has become a fuzzy meaningless mess, so that no two people using it may mean the same thing. But from there Jebby somehow gets to "The federal government should play no role in this, either in the creation of standards, content, or curriculum." Which-- well, first, that ship has sailed, and second, if that's the case, why is a Presidential candidate talking about it? Will some journalist please ask Jebby, "Knowing what we know now, would you have signed off on No Child Left Behind?"
3) School choice. “Consumer choice created the most innovative and powerful economy in the world....Choice rewards success and weeds out stagnation, inefficiency, and failure." Wrong, and wrong. The fact that people have been repeating this mantra for decades does not make it so. Coke and Pepsi. Microsoft. Standard Oil. Cable television.
4) Class size. He cites the Harvard study on class size. He should probably take a look at what we could loosely call "all the other research" on this subject. Class size matters. Do note, however, that he also says "We have spent billions of dollars on more buildings and for more teachers with no evidence this policy produced better results." I can only hope he plans to apply the Dollars Spent To No Results metric to charter schools, Common Core and Big Standardized Testing.
5) Teacher pay. There was a time I might have let this one go ("Pay our best, great teachers more") but I have come around to the way of thinking favored by Michael Fullan and many others-- the myth of the Hero Teacher is bad news. Believing that a great school is one with room after room captained by a Hero Teacher just leads us to the idea that we don't have to look at the system or the supports or the processes we've put in place to help each teacher grow and improve-- we just have to fire Bad Teachers and hire Hero Teachers. It's lazy, it's unrealistic, and guys like the Jebster like it because what they really imagine is a couple of well-paid Hero Teachers teaching 200 kids each, for a net payroll savings of big, big bucks.
6) Preschool. Here's my rule about pushing preschool-- preschool can be a great thing, but if you can't get anything else about education right, you're going to muck up preschool, too. Jeb thinks the magic formula is choice (marketing), early literacy focus (developmentally ignorant), measure and report (test test test), focus on outcomes not inputs (test test test test). This absolutely guarantees that Jeb is the worst person in the world to set up a preschool.
7) The achievement gap. Poor minority students should get better test scores. It is up to the school to fix all the problems of society; there is no obligation for society to address problems so that kids can more easily get a better education. Well, not an education-- just better test scores.
8) Course access. This is cutting edge reformster stuff. Choice on steroids-- you don't just choose a school, but you put your education program together course by course, from a wide variety of vendors who are peeing themselves with delight because they don't have to provide a full program, just whatever niche market material they're pushing. An almost-interesting idea until you spend even five seconds trying to think about how it would actually work. It really is choice on steroids-- misshapen, unhealthy, and prone to sudden fits of rage and/or heart failure.
9) Education and technology. "The main challenge facing the country is how to redesign education around what technology allows us to do." Man, that is so perfectly and utterly backwards. We do not need to redesign education to fit the tech; we need to design the tech to fit education.
10) Raising expectations in education. “Some in the education community complain that every time they achieve the results expected of them, we raise expectations, and school grades drop as a result. That was our goal. We have learned that students and teachers rise to the new challenge, and the school grades go back up because everyone rises to the challenge. This formula is how you drive success in any endeavor.” That's really inspiring, but it always raises the same question for me-- if expectations are so powerful, why aren't we unleashing their power everywhere? Instead of saying "Colleges have to give too many remedial courses," why don't we say, "Colleges, just expect more from your freshmen." Instead of saying "We need young people to be better prepared for the workplace," why don't we say, "Employers, if you just raise your expectations, you can hire anybody."
It tells us something about the political-educational landscape that Arne Duncan would be perfectly suited to serve as Jeb's Secretary of Education-- they don't disagree on anything (and they both have that lanky, slightly-confused look). There are many things about a Jeb Presidency that would be uncertain, but one thing is clear-- we would get four more years just like the last sixteen years of anti-public education policy.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Is NAEP Really a Benchmark?
The recent Achieve study (the one with the Honesty Gap) is just the most recent example of someone using the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) as a benchmark test, as the gold standard of Sorting Students Out.
But not everybody agrees that the NAEP (aka "the nation's report card) is a good measure of, well, anything. Google "NAEP fundamentally flawed" (people seem to love that Fundamentally Flawed verbage when discussing NAEP) and you'll find lots to chew on.
Most debate centers around the leveling of the test. Folks don't care for how they're set. Many critics find them to be irrationally high. In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences released Grading the Nation's Report Card. I can't direct you to a free copy of that to read, but I can summarize second-hand the basic arguments brought against the NAEP.
1) The results don't match the results of AP testing, finding fewer top students than the AP test does.
2) The NAEP gives more weight to open-ended questions.
3) The cut score lines are drawn in vague and hard-to-justify ways. NAS specifies this down to "You can't tell whether a kid just over the line will or won't answer a particular question correctly.
These arguments are not perfectly convincing. The Center for Public Education found, for instance, that NAEP's people had a pretty clear idea of how they were setting achievement levels.
A more damning report came from NCES way back in 2007, in turn looking back at students and test results in the nineties. That time span allowed researchers to do what folks looking at PARCC or SBAC still have not done-- follow up on later successes from the students. Here's a look at what the class of 1992 had done by the time eight years had passed.
Note that 50% of students judged Basic went to college and earned a degree. It's almost as if they were, in fact, college and career ready. And in fact that is a frequent complaint about NAEP level setting-- that their "Basic" is everybody else's idea of "Proficient." Which would certainly explain the finding that state tests find far more proficient students than the NAEP does.
By 2009, deep into the reformy swamp, the government asked for another audit of NAEP, and got this report from the Buros Institute at the University of Nebraska. The report had some issues with NAEP as well:
1) No real validity framework, meaning no real framework for determining what the test actually measures nor what the data from the test can actually be used for.
2) The fact that no other tests, including various state tests, found the same results. This suggests that either NAEP has a singular unmatched vision, or it's out of whack.
3) There's no demonstration of alignment between NAEP and state standards and tests, which means using the test for matters such as, say, Achieve's Honesty Gap study, has no basis.
4) All this means that many "stakeholders" don't really know what they're looking at or talking about when it comes to NAEP scores.
My conclusion? The NAEP, like all other standardized tests, best functions as a measure of how well students do at the task of taking this particular standardized test. As soon as you start trying to figure out anything else based on the test results, you're in trouble. That includes writing fancy reports in which you suggest that states have an honesty gap.
But not everybody agrees that the NAEP (aka "the nation's report card) is a good measure of, well, anything. Google "NAEP fundamentally flawed" (people seem to love that Fundamentally Flawed verbage when discussing NAEP) and you'll find lots to chew on.
Most debate centers around the leveling of the test. Folks don't care for how they're set. Many critics find them to be irrationally high. In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences released Grading the Nation's Report Card. I can't direct you to a free copy of that to read, but I can summarize second-hand the basic arguments brought against the NAEP.
1) The results don't match the results of AP testing, finding fewer top students than the AP test does.
2) The NAEP gives more weight to open-ended questions.
3) The cut score lines are drawn in vague and hard-to-justify ways. NAS specifies this down to "You can't tell whether a kid just over the line will or won't answer a particular question correctly.
These arguments are not perfectly convincing. The Center for Public Education found, for instance, that NAEP's people had a pretty clear idea of how they were setting achievement levels.
A more damning report came from NCES way back in 2007, in turn looking back at students and test results in the nineties. That time span allowed researchers to do what folks looking at PARCC or SBAC still have not done-- follow up on later successes from the students. Here's a look at what the class of 1992 had done by the time eight years had passed.
NAEP Score
|
No Degree
|
Certificate
|
Assoc. Degree
|
Bachelor’s degree or higher
|
Below Basic
|
61.6
|
9.9
|
10.5
|
18.0
|
Basic
|
37.7
|
3.8
|
9.0
|
49.5
|
Proficient
|
18.1
|
0.4
|
2.5
|
79.0
|
Advanced
|
7.5
|
0.2
|
1.3
|
91.1
|
Note that 50% of students judged Basic went to college and earned a degree. It's almost as if they were, in fact, college and career ready. And in fact that is a frequent complaint about NAEP level setting-- that their "Basic" is everybody else's idea of "Proficient." Which would certainly explain the finding that state tests find far more proficient students than the NAEP does.
By 2009, deep into the reformy swamp, the government asked for another audit of NAEP, and got this report from the Buros Institute at the University of Nebraska. The report had some issues with NAEP as well:
1) No real validity framework, meaning no real framework for determining what the test actually measures nor what the data from the test can actually be used for.
2) The fact that no other tests, including various state tests, found the same results. This suggests that either NAEP has a singular unmatched vision, or it's out of whack.
3) There's no demonstration of alignment between NAEP and state standards and tests, which means using the test for matters such as, say, Achieve's Honesty Gap study, has no basis.
4) All this means that many "stakeholders" don't really know what they're looking at or talking about when it comes to NAEP scores.
My conclusion? The NAEP, like all other standardized tests, best functions as a measure of how well students do at the task of taking this particular standardized test. As soon as you start trying to figure out anything else based on the test results, you're in trouble. That includes writing fancy reports in which you suggest that states have an honesty gap.
PA: Another Charter Boosting Plan
Pennsylvania is joining the list of states contemplating an Achievement School District. This is a great mechanism for replacing public schools with charters, disenfranchising taxpayers, and wasting a ton of money, but the push is coming from Sen. Lloyd Smucker, the Lancaster Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee even though he is no friend of public education in PA.
Smucker is proposing the bottom performing 5% of PA schools be given a choice-- either "transform" themselves by turning charter or "contracting with outside providers" and fix things in three years, or the state will take them over and then turn them into a charter or hire an outside provider to run them. So, hey-- actually, no choice at all! Schools that fall under this category will also get to scrap union seniority rules. And Smucker would like to include a parent trigger rule as well. So a veritable smorgasborg ofcorporate profit opportunities educational transformation.
Of course, the beauty of the 5% rule is that there are always schools in the bottom 5%. Theoretically, you could eventually end up converting a considerably larger percentage of your total schools.
The proposal frames this as a state takeover, and that's a bit odd since it presumes that the folks in Harrisburg apparently know the secret of educational success and they've just been holding out on us all these years. But it's not really a state takeover-- it's a state handoff, in which the state takes control of the schools away from local voters and taxpayers and hands that control over to charter operators. That's the beauty of the ASD.
If you are unfamiliar with the term, here's a quick primer:
Reformsters love how things worked out in New Orleans. A major disaster hit the city, crushed its public school system along with everything else, and cleared the ground for the installation of an all-charter system, the Recovery School District. That system allows the state to install a management board that serves as the maitre d' at a big, ole school buffet, giving various charter operators the opportunity to step up for their big fat slice of the tax dollar pie. Arne Duncan famously called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the schools in New Orleans" and reformsters sat at home quietly dreaming of natural disasters obliterating all public schools across America.
But there's just never a natural disaster when you need one, so in most areas refomsters have had to settle for the slow-motion man-made disasters of funding cuts and "failing" scores of Big Standardized Tests. Combined with reformsters in charge like Tennessee's Kevin Huffman (the first TFA grad to be put in charge of an entire state's education system) man-made school disasters opened the door for Achievement School Districts.
The principle of an ASD is the same-- in theory, the state takes over some schools and lumps them together in a state-run school district. In practice, the state hires charters to come in and run the schools. An ASD is simply another mechanism for privatizing public schools.
How's it working? Well, New Orleans is now a charter paradise, with no public schools left at all. This means no neighborhood schools; every morning students travel back and forth across the city in a crazy quilt of bus routes to get to their schools. Local taxpayers have been completely disenfranchised, democratic local control of schools is gone, and families are pretty much at the mercy of schools that get to pick and choose their students ("school choice" it turns out to mean "school's choice").
As far as academic results go, there are mixed opinions. It's the opinion of everyone who's making money from the charter system that it's doing great. It's the opinion of everybody else that it's not. The failures of the RSD have been extensively documented by bloggers Mercedes Schneider and Crazy Crawfish, among others.
The ASD of Tennessee has produced similar results, converting a chunk of Memphis schools to charters with no improvement to show for it, despite claims that it would "catapult" the bottom 5% of schools into the top 25%.
So why are we considering this, exactly...?
Top reformster ronin Mike Petrilli (of the privatization-loving Fordham Institute) stopped to offer his well-paid opinion, and it offers the argument for an ASD.
It starts with the premise that "failing schools are, by and large, a creation of dysfunctional school districts." Here's Petrilli's explanation of how ASD's make everything All Better:
The genius of the Recovery School District and the Tennessee Achievement School District is that they pluck failing schools out of their dysfunctional districts and give them a new lease on life. They pump new blood into these schools with new staffing arrangements. They get rid of the sclerosis of the arteries by cutting through the red tape of overbearing central offices. But they also bring accountability—and a willingness to pull the plug if, despite heroic efforts, the patient still isn’t getting better.
It's a picturesque way to put the argument. It sounds so much better than "We take away local control, fire all the teachers and replace them with low-cost temps, and install a new bureaucracy that isn't accountable to anybody but owners and investors. But charters will totally retain the right to close up the school (even in the middle of the year) if they decide the business just isn't working for them."
Petrilli also trots out a Fordham study that purports to show that having your school closed and getting yourself booted to some other school is awesome. This study is not very convincing. It is even less convincing coming from the guy who has said that charters exist to save worthy wheat while leaving the chaff behind.
ASD vs Philly (and about those civil rights)
Currently, a big chunk of those bottom 5% schools are in Philadelphia, which makes this extra Kafka-esque, because that means the proposal is that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania should take control of the schools away from-- the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
But launching the ASD in Philly would keep one aspect of these turnaround plans consistent-- from New Orleans to Holyoke to Nashville, the rescue efforts consistently involve taking local control away from non-rich, non-white citizens. Because school reform involves overdoses of irony, the "civil rights" issue of our day involves taking away community schools and a democratic voice in running them from poor, Black Americans.
Comments?
Mike Wang is executive director of Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners, a group that advocates for charter expansion through the usual use of highly selective/inaccurate data, thinks this sounds awesome and claims it has worked in other states, which is true if by "worked" you mean "made some charter folks a ton of money." He says, "It seems to be really grounded in empowering local school districts to address their lowest-performing schools." Which is true is by "empowering" you mean "stripping of all control over their own schools."
Donna Cooper of Public Citizens for Children and Youth calls the proposal "a diversion and a smokescreen," which I think is a little unfair, since it's actually pretty clear what the proposal is about, if you just look.
But thank God for the ranking Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, Senator Andrew Dinniman, who according to Philly.com "said that although he had not seen the proposal's details, he believes there cannot be a conversation about how to adequately deal with consistently low-performing schools without a serious discussion about the impact of poverty on education."
So if you're in Pennsylvania, you might want to take a moment to let Dinniman (and Smucker, too, if you have a taste for brick wall head banging) know that this is, indeed, a terrible idea designed to dismantle public education and sell off the scraps.
Smucker is proposing the bottom performing 5% of PA schools be given a choice-- either "transform" themselves by turning charter or "contracting with outside providers" and fix things in three years, or the state will take them over and then turn them into a charter or hire an outside provider to run them. So, hey-- actually, no choice at all! Schools that fall under this category will also get to scrap union seniority rules. And Smucker would like to include a parent trigger rule as well. So a veritable smorgasborg of
Of course, the beauty of the 5% rule is that there are always schools in the bottom 5%. Theoretically, you could eventually end up converting a considerably larger percentage of your total schools.
The proposal frames this as a state takeover, and that's a bit odd since it presumes that the folks in Harrisburg apparently know the secret of educational success and they've just been holding out on us all these years. But it's not really a state takeover-- it's a state handoff, in which the state takes control of the schools away from local voters and taxpayers and hands that control over to charter operators. That's the beauty of the ASD.
If you are unfamiliar with the term, here's a quick primer:
Reformsters love how things worked out in New Orleans. A major disaster hit the city, crushed its public school system along with everything else, and cleared the ground for the installation of an all-charter system, the Recovery School District. That system allows the state to install a management board that serves as the maitre d' at a big, ole school buffet, giving various charter operators the opportunity to step up for their big fat slice of the tax dollar pie. Arne Duncan famously called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the schools in New Orleans" and reformsters sat at home quietly dreaming of natural disasters obliterating all public schools across America.
But there's just never a natural disaster when you need one, so in most areas refomsters have had to settle for the slow-motion man-made disasters of funding cuts and "failing" scores of Big Standardized Tests. Combined with reformsters in charge like Tennessee's Kevin Huffman (the first TFA grad to be put in charge of an entire state's education system) man-made school disasters opened the door for Achievement School Districts.
The principle of an ASD is the same-- in theory, the state takes over some schools and lumps them together in a state-run school district. In practice, the state hires charters to come in and run the schools. An ASD is simply another mechanism for privatizing public schools.
How's it working? Well, New Orleans is now a charter paradise, with no public schools left at all. This means no neighborhood schools; every morning students travel back and forth across the city in a crazy quilt of bus routes to get to their schools. Local taxpayers have been completely disenfranchised, democratic local control of schools is gone, and families are pretty much at the mercy of schools that get to pick and choose their students ("school choice" it turns out to mean "school's choice").
As far as academic results go, there are mixed opinions. It's the opinion of everyone who's making money from the charter system that it's doing great. It's the opinion of everybody else that it's not. The failures of the RSD have been extensively documented by bloggers Mercedes Schneider and Crazy Crawfish, among others.
The ASD of Tennessee has produced similar results, converting a chunk of Memphis schools to charters with no improvement to show for it, despite claims that it would "catapult" the bottom 5% of schools into the top 25%.
So why are we considering this, exactly...?
Top reformster ronin Mike Petrilli (of the privatization-loving Fordham Institute) stopped to offer his well-paid opinion, and it offers the argument for an ASD.
It starts with the premise that "failing schools are, by and large, a creation of dysfunctional school districts." Here's Petrilli's explanation of how ASD's make everything All Better:
The genius of the Recovery School District and the Tennessee Achievement School District is that they pluck failing schools out of their dysfunctional districts and give them a new lease on life. They pump new blood into these schools with new staffing arrangements. They get rid of the sclerosis of the arteries by cutting through the red tape of overbearing central offices. But they also bring accountability—and a willingness to pull the plug if, despite heroic efforts, the patient still isn’t getting better.
It's a picturesque way to put the argument. It sounds so much better than "We take away local control, fire all the teachers and replace them with low-cost temps, and install a new bureaucracy that isn't accountable to anybody but owners and investors. But charters will totally retain the right to close up the school (even in the middle of the year) if they decide the business just isn't working for them."
Petrilli also trots out a Fordham study that purports to show that having your school closed and getting yourself booted to some other school is awesome. This study is not very convincing. It is even less convincing coming from the guy who has said that charters exist to save worthy wheat while leaving the chaff behind.
ASD vs Philly (and about those civil rights)
Currently, a big chunk of those bottom 5% schools are in Philadelphia, which makes this extra Kafka-esque, because that means the proposal is that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania should take control of the schools away from-- the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
But launching the ASD in Philly would keep one aspect of these turnaround plans consistent-- from New Orleans to Holyoke to Nashville, the rescue efforts consistently involve taking local control away from non-rich, non-white citizens. Because school reform involves overdoses of irony, the "civil rights" issue of our day involves taking away community schools and a democratic voice in running them from poor, Black Americans.
Comments?
Mike Wang is executive director of Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners, a group that advocates for charter expansion through the usual use of highly selective/inaccurate data, thinks this sounds awesome and claims it has worked in other states, which is true if by "worked" you mean "made some charter folks a ton of money." He says, "It seems to be really grounded in empowering local school districts to address their lowest-performing schools." Which is true is by "empowering" you mean "stripping of all control over their own schools."
Donna Cooper of Public Citizens for Children and Youth calls the proposal "a diversion and a smokescreen," which I think is a little unfair, since it's actually pretty clear what the proposal is about, if you just look.
But thank God for the ranking Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, Senator Andrew Dinniman, who according to Philly.com "said that although he had not seen the proposal's details, he believes there cannot be a conversation about how to adequately deal with consistently low-performing schools without a serious discussion about the impact of poverty on education."
So if you're in Pennsylvania, you might want to take a moment to let Dinniman (and Smucker, too, if you have a taste for brick wall head banging) know that this is, indeed, a terrible idea designed to dismantle public education and sell off the scraps.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
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
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.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)