Remember how advocates of the new generation of Big Standardized Tests keep insisting that these tests are special because they are totally immune to test prep?
For instance, Laura Slover, CEO of PARCC, told us that
there is no “test prep” for these tests;
these are the kinds of test items that require understanding of concepts
and application that only come through a year of effective teaching,
not through “drill and kill.”
This has convinced pretty much nobody who has actually encountered the new generation of tests. Or anyone who ever encountered any sort of standardized test at all. Well, if you want to add to the list of people who believe that the new tests are totally test preppable, you can add Investment Analysts.
Research and Markets: The World's Largest Market Research Store is now offering the report "Test Preparation Markets in the US: 2015-2019," and it looks-- well, not juicy, exactly, because mostly it looks like a painfully dry market research report. And yet, enticing. Alluring. Redolent with the scent of impending ROI.
The market, we're told at first, has always centered around the test prep involved in getting students ready for SAT, ACT, MCAT, and similar admissions tests. But now--
The market offers promising growth options because its true growth
potential is yet to be unlocked. The emergence of many positive trends
is expected to help the market grow and circumvent the challenges. Focus
on the K-12 market has increased in the US.
The market, though "lucrative," is segmented, so vendors have to produce more individualized products. The report also indicates that an influx of many players into the market has "resulted in increased resistance among customers." Yeah, that's probably it. That's why the "customers" are resisting test prep-- not because it's a time-sucking bunch of soul-crushing educational malpractice. Still, the investment prospects look good:
The test preparation market in the US to grow at a CAGR of 2.20% over the period 2014-2019.
The market report summary lists the major players in this sector, including ArborBridge, Kaplan, Knewton, Pearson, Princeton Review and Club Z! among others. So, Pearson is manufacturing these un-preppable tests, but it's also working to make money from selling test prep.
Sure, of all the lies told in the marketing of Common Core and the Big Standardized Tests, "It can't be test prepped" is one of the less bothersome ones-- it's small, stupid, and so patently obviously a lie that it's on the order of a breakfast cereal telling me that it will transform me into an olympic athlete. It's puffery. But as long as these folks don't get tired of telling the lies, we can't get tired of pointing them out.
The BS Tests are just as preppable as any standardized tests ever. Not only that, but a whole bunch of folks-- including the test manufacturers themselves-- are lined up to make money from selling that very test prep. Not only can we make money selling the emperor his new clothes, but make money selling him full body sunscreen as an accessory.
(Tip of the hat to @teachersolidarity for the lead)
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Supply, Demand, Charters & AEI
Back in April, the American Enterprise Institute released a paper by Michael McShane. Balancing the Equation: Supply and Demand in Tomorrow's School Choice Marketplaces offers a more nuanced view of a charter-choice landscape than the free market acolytes at AEI have presented in the past, but it still reads like an exercise in unicorn farming.
McShane understands some of the problems pretty well. After opening with a picture of how a charter-choice world would be so lovely, McShane moves on to what he sees as the big issues.
But school choice is not guaranteed to succeed. The extent to which it will depends on how well it is able to create a functioning marketplace where the demands of parents are matched to the supply of schools. If barriers exist for schools to enter the marketplace, or if financial or regulatory hurdles make participation not worth their while, fewer options will be available for students to choose from. If parents cannot access information on schools to help them differentiate schools' offerings and performance, the central drivers of quality and diversity will be hamstrung.
So McShane moves on to consider what needs to be done on each side of the supply-demand pipeline.
Demand
McShane believes that the big issue here is information. Charters need to do a better job of getting more information, better information, the right information out into the market. He brings up Maslow's hierarchy, suggesting that parents will follow the standard pyramid when considering a school-- safety first, academics next, other stuff later. Consequently, he sees only limited use for school report cards, and suggests some other avenues. In particular, he sees parent-to-parent communication as effective in establishing a world in which parents choose a school based on rich, deep information about which school would best meet their child's needs.
But McShane is either being disingenuous or he has just lived too long in a thinky tank.
Markets do not run on information. Markets run on marketing. The free market does not foster superior quality; it fosters superior marketing.
McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, Bank of America-- none of these corporations have dominated their marketplace by spreading information about their products and services. There is no market sector in which customers are moved primarily by information. Succeeding in the marketplace often involves carefully controlling and withholding the information that customers receive. In fact (and this should trouble the boys at AEI), often the real information that is available is available only because government regulation and intervention require it (think nutritional info at fast food places).
No charter school will ever say, "Let's get a complete, thorough informational package out there so that families can make the best decision from with the umpteen schools in this market." What the charter will always say, like any good business, is, "How can we best present ourselves to convince the greatest number of families to choose us?"
There is no incentive for any entity operating in a free market to make sure that customers have access to complete, deep, thorough information. It won't help them get customers, and, much to the chagrin of economists through the ages, that sort of data-driven analytical rational analyses is not how customers make decisions anyway.
McShane does make some other more familiar recommendations, such as suggesting that "parents need help advocating programs that help their children... Organizations that want to help parents select schools should also think about how they can help connect parents with the political process." Presumably he is thinking more of Eva Moscowitz bussing her parents and students to Albany to lobby for her charters, and thinking less of the families and students of Newark taking to the streets in a vain attempt to get anybody in power to pay attention to them.
In fact, some of McShane's work here is really marketing advice-- which buttons to push in your school report card, which way to approach parents to influence their choosing behavior.
He also talks about "matching students and schools" which is an interesting way of putting it, a shade to the side of actual school choice. In fact, he cites the OneApp system of New Orleans, a system that effective screens out families that lack the resources or background to navigate the system, allowing schools to be selective without looking selective. So, talk of information aside, it would seem that McShane is talking about driving demand by more effective targeted marketing.
Supply
McShane frames this as the problem of turning a monopoly into a free market, so he's wrong right out of the gate-- public education is not now, nor has it ever been, a monopoly. And even if we agree that public schools are a taxpayer-operated monopoly, no monopoly break-up has ever involved making the old monopoly operator provide all the financing of the new "competition." When Microsoft was being threatened with a spanking for being a monopoly, nobody ever suggested that a fitting punishment would be for Microsoft to pay the bills for Apple, Corel, and every other software maker in the marketplace. But somehow the "breakup" of the taxpayer-funded "monopoly" of public schools involves having the taxpayers pay the bills for every school that wants to "compete" with public education.
Remember when charters used to make the argument that they could do more with less? Those days are gone. Most of McShane's argument for the supply side is that charters should get more money.
They should get more money to build things and train people in better ways. For McShane the training is important because private schools keep organizing themselves in the same old way. He does not deduce that there's something about that old way that people who are actually teaching in schools continue to find effective; no, instead he concludes that we need more people to be trained Some Other Way so that charters can be Really Different.
McShane also takes on regulation, arguing that one-size-fits-all regulation combined with mission creep leads to regulations that suppress all manner of individuality and variety. I wish I had more space to talk about this part of his argument because it is an awesome argument against Common Core and the Big Standardized Testing boom.
He is concerned that the tendency is to over-regulate charters. I'd argue that such over-regulation is absolutely inevitable and guaranteed. The progression has been, and will always be, just like this:
1) Charters open in a free market environment
2) Charters marketing plan = whatever we can get away with to hook customers in a crowded, competitive marketplace
3) Some charters will go way too far (aka lying, cheating, fraud, theft)
4) Regulations will be created to rein them in
Education is an important service delivered to society's most vulnerable citizens. If you put something like that on a money-stuffed open market, you will either get high levels of regulation or high levels of misbehavior.
You will probably also, after a time, have emerging big players who will make sure their friends in government regulate a market that is harder to enter to protect their stake. The free market, from oil to railroads to telephones to cable to software, creates an intense pressure to destroy itself.
Buy the farm
I get the rosy picture of free market fans like the AEI crew-- a world where there is a robust field of varied, high-quality independent schools, and parents sort through them by consulting clear, rational, fact-filled materials to make sensible decisions and select the school that will best serve their children. I myself like to imagine a picture in which I live in a beautiful mansion surrounded by a huge lawn that never has to be mowed, am regularly invited to travel the world to play tailgate trombone, and have a full head of hair. Also, I would like to own a unicorn farm. I think my dream is more closely connected to reality.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
McShane understands some of the problems pretty well. After opening with a picture of how a charter-choice world would be so lovely, McShane moves on to what he sees as the big issues.
But school choice is not guaranteed to succeed. The extent to which it will depends on how well it is able to create a functioning marketplace where the demands of parents are matched to the supply of schools. If barriers exist for schools to enter the marketplace, or if financial or regulatory hurdles make participation not worth their while, fewer options will be available for students to choose from. If parents cannot access information on schools to help them differentiate schools' offerings and performance, the central drivers of quality and diversity will be hamstrung.
So McShane moves on to consider what needs to be done on each side of the supply-demand pipeline.
Demand
McShane believes that the big issue here is information. Charters need to do a better job of getting more information, better information, the right information out into the market. He brings up Maslow's hierarchy, suggesting that parents will follow the standard pyramid when considering a school-- safety first, academics next, other stuff later. Consequently, he sees only limited use for school report cards, and suggests some other avenues. In particular, he sees parent-to-parent communication as effective in establishing a world in which parents choose a school based on rich, deep information about which school would best meet their child's needs.
But McShane is either being disingenuous or he has just lived too long in a thinky tank.
Markets do not run on information. Markets run on marketing. The free market does not foster superior quality; it fosters superior marketing.
McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, Bank of America-- none of these corporations have dominated their marketplace by spreading information about their products and services. There is no market sector in which customers are moved primarily by information. Succeeding in the marketplace often involves carefully controlling and withholding the information that customers receive. In fact (and this should trouble the boys at AEI), often the real information that is available is available only because government regulation and intervention require it (think nutritional info at fast food places).
No charter school will ever say, "Let's get a complete, thorough informational package out there so that families can make the best decision from with the umpteen schools in this market." What the charter will always say, like any good business, is, "How can we best present ourselves to convince the greatest number of families to choose us?"
There is no incentive for any entity operating in a free market to make sure that customers have access to complete, deep, thorough information. It won't help them get customers, and, much to the chagrin of economists through the ages, that sort of data-driven analytical rational analyses is not how customers make decisions anyway.
McShane does make some other more familiar recommendations, such as suggesting that "parents need help advocating programs that help their children... Organizations that want to help parents select schools should also think about how they can help connect parents with the political process." Presumably he is thinking more of Eva Moscowitz bussing her parents and students to Albany to lobby for her charters, and thinking less of the families and students of Newark taking to the streets in a vain attempt to get anybody in power to pay attention to them.
In fact, some of McShane's work here is really marketing advice-- which buttons to push in your school report card, which way to approach parents to influence their choosing behavior.
He also talks about "matching students and schools" which is an interesting way of putting it, a shade to the side of actual school choice. In fact, he cites the OneApp system of New Orleans, a system that effective screens out families that lack the resources or background to navigate the system, allowing schools to be selective without looking selective. So, talk of information aside, it would seem that McShane is talking about driving demand by more effective targeted marketing.
Supply
McShane frames this as the problem of turning a monopoly into a free market, so he's wrong right out of the gate-- public education is not now, nor has it ever been, a monopoly. And even if we agree that public schools are a taxpayer-operated monopoly, no monopoly break-up has ever involved making the old monopoly operator provide all the financing of the new "competition." When Microsoft was being threatened with a spanking for being a monopoly, nobody ever suggested that a fitting punishment would be for Microsoft to pay the bills for Apple, Corel, and every other software maker in the marketplace. But somehow the "breakup" of the taxpayer-funded "monopoly" of public schools involves having the taxpayers pay the bills for every school that wants to "compete" with public education.
Remember when charters used to make the argument that they could do more with less? Those days are gone. Most of McShane's argument for the supply side is that charters should get more money.
They should get more money to build things and train people in better ways. For McShane the training is important because private schools keep organizing themselves in the same old way. He does not deduce that there's something about that old way that people who are actually teaching in schools continue to find effective; no, instead he concludes that we need more people to be trained Some Other Way so that charters can be Really Different.
McShane also takes on regulation, arguing that one-size-fits-all regulation combined with mission creep leads to regulations that suppress all manner of individuality and variety. I wish I had more space to talk about this part of his argument because it is an awesome argument against Common Core and the Big Standardized Testing boom.
He is concerned that the tendency is to over-regulate charters. I'd argue that such over-regulation is absolutely inevitable and guaranteed. The progression has been, and will always be, just like this:
1) Charters open in a free market environment
2) Charters marketing plan = whatever we can get away with to hook customers in a crowded, competitive marketplace
3) Some charters will go way too far (aka lying, cheating, fraud, theft)
4) Regulations will be created to rein them in
Education is an important service delivered to society's most vulnerable citizens. If you put something like that on a money-stuffed open market, you will either get high levels of regulation or high levels of misbehavior.
You will probably also, after a time, have emerging big players who will make sure their friends in government regulate a market that is harder to enter to protect their stake. The free market, from oil to railroads to telephones to cable to software, creates an intense pressure to destroy itself.
Buy the farm
I get the rosy picture of free market fans like the AEI crew-- a world where there is a robust field of varied, high-quality independent schools, and parents sort through them by consulting clear, rational, fact-filled materials to make sensible decisions and select the school that will best serve their children. I myself like to imagine a picture in which I live in a beautiful mansion surrounded by a huge lawn that never has to be mowed, am regularly invited to travel the world to play tailgate trombone, and have a full head of hair. Also, I would like to own a unicorn farm. I think my dream is more closely connected to reality.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
McGrading the McTest
In Monday's New York Times, journalist Motoko Rich gives a master class in how to let the subjects of a story make themselves look ridiculous.
The piece takes us to San Antonio to give us a look at how the Big Standard Tests are actually graded, and in doing so, shows how the BS Tests are not one whit more advanced than the old school bubble tests they claim to replace.
Rich begins by noting that the scoring is not necessarily (or even probably) done by actual teachers. But Pearson's vp of content and scoring management is here to reassure us with this astonishing quote:
“From the standpoint of comparing us to a Starbucks or McDonald’s, where you go into those places you know exactly what you’re going to get,” said Bob Sanders, vice president of content and scoring management at Pearson North America, when asked whether such an analogy was apt.
“McDonald’s has a process in place to make sure they put two patties on that Big Mac,” he continued. “We do that exact same thing. We have processes to oversee our processes, and to make sure they are being followed.”
This is not news, really. For years we've been reading exposes by former graders and Pearson's advertisements in craigslist. It can be no surprise that the same country that has worked hard to teacher-proof classrooms would also find a test-scoring method suitable for folks with no educational expertise.
How low does the bar go? Consider this quote from one scorer, a former wedding planner who immigrated from France just five years ago:
She acknowledged that scoring was challenging. “Only after all these weeks being here,” Ms. Gomm said, “I am finally getting it.”
Sigh. I cut and pasted that. It is not one of my innumerable typos.
Look, here's the real problem revealed by this article (and others like it).
The test manufacturers have repeatedly argued that these new generation tests are better because they don't use bubble tests. They incorporate open-ended essay(ish) questions, so they can test deeper levels of understanding-- that's the argument. A multiple choice question (whether bubbling, clicking, or drag-and-dropping) only has one correct answer, and that narrow questioning strategy can only measure a narrow set of skills or understanding.
So essays ought to be better. Unless you score them like this, according to a narrow set of criteria to be used by people with no expertise in the area being tested. If someone who doesn't know the field is sitting there with a rubric that narrowly defines success, all you've got is a slightly more complicated bubble test. Instead of having four choices, the student has an infinite number of choices, but there's still just one way to be right.
Nobody has yet come up with a computerized system of grading writing that doesn't suck and which can't be publicly embarrassed. But if you're going to hire humans to act like a computer ("Just follow these instructions carefully and precisely"), your suckage levels will stay the same.
If it doesn't take a person with subject knowledge to score the essay, it doesn't take a person with subject knowledge to write it.
So the take-away from Rich's piece is not just that these tests are being graded by people who don't necessarily know what the hell they're doing, but that test manufacturers have created tests for which graders who don't know what the hell they're doing seems like a viable option. And that is just one more sign that the Big Standardized Tests are pointless slices of expensive baloney. You can't make a test like McDonalds and still pretend that you're cooking classic cuisine.
The piece takes us to San Antonio to give us a look at how the Big Standard Tests are actually graded, and in doing so, shows how the BS Tests are not one whit more advanced than the old school bubble tests they claim to replace.
Rich begins by noting that the scoring is not necessarily (or even probably) done by actual teachers. But Pearson's vp of content and scoring management is here to reassure us with this astonishing quote:
“From the standpoint of comparing us to a Starbucks or McDonald’s, where you go into those places you know exactly what you’re going to get,” said Bob Sanders, vice president of content and scoring management at Pearson North America, when asked whether such an analogy was apt.
“McDonald’s has a process in place to make sure they put two patties on that Big Mac,” he continued. “We do that exact same thing. We have processes to oversee our processes, and to make sure they are being followed.”
This is not news, really. For years we've been reading exposes by former graders and Pearson's advertisements in craigslist. It can be no surprise that the same country that has worked hard to teacher-proof classrooms would also find a test-scoring method suitable for folks with no educational expertise.
How low does the bar go? Consider this quote from one scorer, a former wedding planner who immigrated from France just five years ago:
She acknowledged that scoring was challenging. “Only after all these weeks being here,” Ms. Gomm said, “I am finally getting it.”
Sigh. I cut and pasted that. It is not one of my innumerable typos.
Look, here's the real problem revealed by this article (and others like it).
The test manufacturers have repeatedly argued that these new generation tests are better because they don't use bubble tests. They incorporate open-ended essay(ish) questions, so they can test deeper levels of understanding-- that's the argument. A multiple choice question (whether bubbling, clicking, or drag-and-dropping) only has one correct answer, and that narrow questioning strategy can only measure a narrow set of skills or understanding.
So essays ought to be better. Unless you score them like this, according to a narrow set of criteria to be used by people with no expertise in the area being tested. If someone who doesn't know the field is sitting there with a rubric that narrowly defines success, all you've got is a slightly more complicated bubble test. Instead of having four choices, the student has an infinite number of choices, but there's still just one way to be right.
Nobody has yet come up with a computerized system of grading writing that doesn't suck and which can't be publicly embarrassed. But if you're going to hire humans to act like a computer ("Just follow these instructions carefully and precisely"), your suckage levels will stay the same.
If it doesn't take a person with subject knowledge to score the essay, it doesn't take a person with subject knowledge to write it.
So the take-away from Rich's piece is not just that these tests are being graded by people who don't necessarily know what the hell they're doing, but that test manufacturers have created tests for which graders who don't know what the hell they're doing seems like a viable option. And that is just one more sign that the Big Standardized Tests are pointless slices of expensive baloney. You can't make a test like McDonalds and still pretend that you're cooking classic cuisine.
Campbell Brown's New Assault
Today the Wall Street Journal is announcing that Campbell Brown is launching a new education site that "won't shy away from advocacy." Which is kind of like announcing that Wal-Mart is opening a new store and will not shy away from marketing or that Burger King is opening up at a new location that might sell hamburgers.
Sadly, there are no surprises in this story. The site, called The Seventy Four in reference to the seventy-four million students in the US (and not say, the seventy-four gazillion dollars Campbell and her friends hope to make from privatizing education). Here's the blurb currently resting on the site:
The Seventy Four is a non-profit, non-partisan news site covering education in America. Our public education system is in crisis. In the United States, less than half of our students can read or do math at grade-level, yet the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin. Our mission is to lead an honest, fact-based conversation about how to give America’s 74 million children under the age of 18 the education they deserve.
From this I can only assume that when they say that the "education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin," the rest of the sentence was supposed to be "and we hope to get our misinformation and political spin to the front of the pack."
We haven't heard much lately about Brown's PR campaign to break the teachers union (loosely attached to her Vergara-style lawsuit). But where the Parent's Transparency Projected was marked by a distinctly non-transparent resolve to protect the tender identities of Brown's backers, this new project has clear funders.
The new site will launch with thirteen employees and a $4 million dollar budget, courtesy of backers that include Bloomberg Philanthropies (as in former anti-public ed NY mayor Michael Bloomberg), Walton Family Foundation, Johnathan Sackler, and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation-- in other words, the usual group of charter school backers.
And while the WSJ is extraordinarily generous in calling Brown an education-reform advocate (just as Ronald McDonald is haute cuisine advocate and the heads of the tobacco industry are health advocates), they do also note:
Ms. Brown’s husband, Dan Senor, sits on the board of StudentsFirstNY, which advocates for charter schools among other issues. Joel Klein, head of the Amplify digital education unit at The Wall Street Journal’s parent company News Corp, is also on the board.
There's a nifty video, slickly shot and produced, that ticks off the usual topics in "I want to know..." statements. These folks want to know about positive news about what works, which makes me wonder why Gates isn't in on this, as he is a fan of positive outcomes journalism. They want to know about "the best teachers, the best schools." So, looking for super-heroes. And a whole progression of students remind us that they are the seventy four-- this site will apparently be big on For The Children. Brown also expresses her desire to use the site to push education issues to the forefront of the Presidential campaign.
Brown has used some of that $4 million to hire actual journalists, including Pullitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker, Conor Williams from Talking Points Memo (but his day job is senior researcher in the Early Education Initiative at New America-- he also once wrote a spirited defense of Brown), and Steve Snyder from Time Magazine (where he was in charge of digital editorial coverage).
As usual, I am struck by just how much money reformsters are willing to pump into the cause. I'm here with my staff of one (me) and a budget of-- well, I guess you could claim that my budget today is about 75 cents because while I was sitting here working on this, I had a bagel and a cup of orange juice.
At any rate, brace yourselves boys and girls-- here comes the next wave of faux progressive teacher bashing and charter pushing by privatizers who will not rest until they've cracked that golden egg full of tax dollars. Because that's the other reason they're willing to sink $4 million into something like this-- because while that may seem like a lot of money to you or me, to them it's peanuts, an investment that they hope will pay off eventually in billions of tax dollars directed away from public education and to the private corporations that are drooling at the prospect of cashing in on education.
Sadly, there are no surprises in this story. The site, called The Seventy Four in reference to the seventy-four million students in the US (and not say, the seventy-four gazillion dollars Campbell and her friends hope to make from privatizing education). Here's the blurb currently resting on the site:
The Seventy Four is a non-profit, non-partisan news site covering education in America. Our public education system is in crisis. In the United States, less than half of our students can read or do math at grade-level, yet the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin. Our mission is to lead an honest, fact-based conversation about how to give America’s 74 million children under the age of 18 the education they deserve.
From this I can only assume that when they say that the "education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin," the rest of the sentence was supposed to be "and we hope to get our misinformation and political spin to the front of the pack."
We haven't heard much lately about Brown's PR campaign to break the teachers union (loosely attached to her Vergara-style lawsuit). But where the Parent's Transparency Projected was marked by a distinctly non-transparent resolve to protect the tender identities of Brown's backers, this new project has clear funders.
The new site will launch with thirteen employees and a $4 million dollar budget, courtesy of backers that include Bloomberg Philanthropies (as in former anti-public ed NY mayor Michael Bloomberg), Walton Family Foundation, Johnathan Sackler, and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation-- in other words, the usual group of charter school backers.
And while the WSJ is extraordinarily generous in calling Brown an education-reform advocate (just as Ronald McDonald is haute cuisine advocate and the heads of the tobacco industry are health advocates), they do also note:
Ms. Brown’s husband, Dan Senor, sits on the board of StudentsFirstNY, which advocates for charter schools among other issues. Joel Klein, head of the Amplify digital education unit at The Wall Street Journal’s parent company News Corp, is also on the board.
There's a nifty video, slickly shot and produced, that ticks off the usual topics in "I want to know..." statements. These folks want to know about positive news about what works, which makes me wonder why Gates isn't in on this, as he is a fan of positive outcomes journalism. They want to know about "the best teachers, the best schools." So, looking for super-heroes. And a whole progression of students remind us that they are the seventy four-- this site will apparently be big on For The Children. Brown also expresses her desire to use the site to push education issues to the forefront of the Presidential campaign.
Brown has used some of that $4 million to hire actual journalists, including Pullitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker, Conor Williams from Talking Points Memo (but his day job is senior researcher in the Early Education Initiative at New America-- he also once wrote a spirited defense of Brown), and Steve Snyder from Time Magazine (where he was in charge of digital editorial coverage).
As usual, I am struck by just how much money reformsters are willing to pump into the cause. I'm here with my staff of one (me) and a budget of-- well, I guess you could claim that my budget today is about 75 cents because while I was sitting here working on this, I had a bagel and a cup of orange juice.
At any rate, brace yourselves boys and girls-- here comes the next wave of faux progressive teacher bashing and charter pushing by privatizers who will not rest until they've cracked that golden egg full of tax dollars. Because that's the other reason they're willing to sink $4 million into something like this-- because while that may seem like a lot of money to you or me, to them it's peanuts, an investment that they hope will pay off eventually in billions of tax dollars directed away from public education and to the private corporations that are drooling at the prospect of cashing in on education.
Monday, June 22, 2015
So Long, Cami. No Celebration To Follow.
After four years of consistently disastrous misleadership, Cami Anderson will be stepping down as head of Newark Schools.
The announcement came today, attached to the name of Commissioner David Hespe. Who finally shoved Anderson out the door? It doesn't really matter. In the manner of other reformsters, I expect that she will fail upwards.
That's the good news. The less good news is that, contrary to Bob Braun's report last week, Anderson will not be replaced by Chris Cerf on a temporary basis; instead, Cerf will reportedly be offered a three year contract. While expectations of an Anderson resignation have been kicking around for at least a year, the emptying of her office gave new life to those expectations. Whoever shoved her gets no credit; Anderson's administration has been so clearly dysfunctional and addicted to failure that it's hard to think of anything that she ever did even sort of right. Leaving her in office this long has been its own sort of spectacular failure, like driving from New York to San Francisco in a car that blew out all four tires somewhere around Philadelphia. You don't get any genius points for finally doing something about the problem that has been killing you for years.
Cerf, of course, comes with a strong reformster pedigree. He worked for Joel Klein from 2006 to 2009, helping make a hash out of New York City schools. He became New Jersey's school chief next, leaving that job in 2014 at about the same time that Bridgegate was taking off. Cerf left directly to work for his old boss Klein at Amplify, the company that Rupert Murdoch hoped would help him cash in in the educational tech biz. No sooner had Cerf exited his New Jersey office then Cami Anderson awarded Amplify over $2 million worth of contracts. It is a cozy club that reformster belong to.
Cerf is one of those guys who has no regrets and never admits a mistake. But Amplify has been a train wreck. They were going to revolutionize education with tablets and on-line content. But, as Bloomberg put it, "that hasn't happened." Amplify couldn't come up with hardware that worked, software that worked, content that impressed anybody, and a workable plan to crack the crowded school market. They couldn't crack the market in assessments, they couldn't get their own internal bureaucracy sorted out, and they couldn't stop hemorrhaging money, making their market as the one division of News Corp that couldn't turn a profit. So when News Corp started waving its ax around, Amplify felt the cutting edge.
Cerf's trajectory is unusual-- he returns to New Jersey in a lower position than he left. But there is no reason to think that his arrival in Newark will be good news for anybody. At the same time, he will be facing some of the strongest, smartest and most experienced student and community activists anywhere in the country. It's true that Anderson set the bar low-- she couldn't even bring herself to speak with anybody in the community. But Cerf is walking into a huge mess with a four-year history of denying Newark citizens any semblance of democracy and any imitation of a working plan for running a public school system.
Cerf starts at the beginning of July. It should be an interesting summer.
The announcement came today, attached to the name of Commissioner David Hespe. Who finally shoved Anderson out the door? It doesn't really matter. In the manner of other reformsters, I expect that she will fail upwards.
That's the good news. The less good news is that, contrary to Bob Braun's report last week, Anderson will not be replaced by Chris Cerf on a temporary basis; instead, Cerf will reportedly be offered a three year contract. While expectations of an Anderson resignation have been kicking around for at least a year, the emptying of her office gave new life to those expectations. Whoever shoved her gets no credit; Anderson's administration has been so clearly dysfunctional and addicted to failure that it's hard to think of anything that she ever did even sort of right. Leaving her in office this long has been its own sort of spectacular failure, like driving from New York to San Francisco in a car that blew out all four tires somewhere around Philadelphia. You don't get any genius points for finally doing something about the problem that has been killing you for years.
Cerf, of course, comes with a strong reformster pedigree. He worked for Joel Klein from 2006 to 2009, helping make a hash out of New York City schools. He became New Jersey's school chief next, leaving that job in 2014 at about the same time that Bridgegate was taking off. Cerf left directly to work for his old boss Klein at Amplify, the company that Rupert Murdoch hoped would help him cash in in the educational tech biz. No sooner had Cerf exited his New Jersey office then Cami Anderson awarded Amplify over $2 million worth of contracts. It is a cozy club that reformster belong to.
Cerf is one of those guys who has no regrets and never admits a mistake. But Amplify has been a train wreck. They were going to revolutionize education with tablets and on-line content. But, as Bloomberg put it, "that hasn't happened." Amplify couldn't come up with hardware that worked, software that worked, content that impressed anybody, and a workable plan to crack the crowded school market. They couldn't crack the market in assessments, they couldn't get their own internal bureaucracy sorted out, and they couldn't stop hemorrhaging money, making their market as the one division of News Corp that couldn't turn a profit. So when News Corp started waving its ax around, Amplify felt the cutting edge.
Cerf's trajectory is unusual-- he returns to New Jersey in a lower position than he left. But there is no reason to think that his arrival in Newark will be good news for anybody. At the same time, he will be facing some of the strongest, smartest and most experienced student and community activists anywhere in the country. It's true that Anderson set the bar low-- she couldn't even bring herself to speak with anybody in the community. But Cerf is walking into a huge mess with a four-year history of denying Newark citizens any semblance of democracy and any imitation of a working plan for running a public school system.
Cerf starts at the beginning of July. It should be an interesting summer.
Fox Runs PARCC PR
Fox News Sunday took a little under four minutes to provide some uncritical promotional time for PARCC, using their "Power Player of the Week" spot to let Laura Slover, PARCC CEO, push the usual PARCC baloney. It's short-- but I've watched it so that you don't have to.
Chris Wallace kicks things off by saying that Common Core was "started by governors and state education officials as a way to set standards," so we know we're entering the Feel Free To Spin Zone right off the bat, though the second half of that sentence notes that it has become controversial because of concerns over federal interference (it is) and whether or not it's the best way to teach kids (it isn't). So I guess he's acknowledging the controversy, if not teaching it. But let's go visit a group that's testing how well Common Core works.
Roll title card for PPOTW.
Cut to Slover's talking head saying that high standards are vital because high expectations will make students do better.
Explanation that PARCC is one of two state consortia for testing. This is the first of many opportunities Wallace will have to note that PARCC started out with twenty-three members and is now down to twelve, but that little market-based measure of PARCC's failure will not make it into the profile. He'll just mention the twelve state figure in passing and let it go at that.
Slover will now run the talking point about how PARCC is a new kind of test where you don't (always) bubble in the right answer, but now drag and drop the right answer, which is, you know, totally different. She also claims that the tests measure critical thinking, problem solving, and writing, and as we have seen repeatedly, that's mostly a lie. Problem solving, maybe. Writing, not in any meaningful way. Critical thinking, never.
Wallace takes a third grade test and mentions that it was "a little challenging." We see a shot of him being amazed? incredulous? that an answer is dragged and dropped instead of being clicked on (because this is how we test eight year olds' advanced mouse operating skills-- that's in the Core, right?) but no real discussoin of what the questions entailed. Nor do we ever address where the questions come from or why anyone should believe they are a good measure of anything in particular.
Next, several GOP Presidential hopefuls say mean things about Common Core, including Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz, both of whom get sound bites about how the feds are intruding. Wallace tells Slover, "The main complaint is that this is all part of a federal takeover of local schools." And I suppose that might be the main complaint among Fox News viewers, but c'mon-- even over there word has to have come by now that a whole host of working teachers and education experts have a list of concerns about the actual quality of the standards.
Slover counters that this is a state-driven program and states make all the decisions. But Wallace says it's more complicated than that (though not to Slover, who clearly did not need to wear her big girl pants to this interview). Wallace notes that Race to the Top effectively pushed the Core on states, but he skips over the whole business of waivers; that omission seems odd, given that the Obama administration end run around the law would be just the sort of shenanigans that Fox viewers would love to get outraged about.
We'll now give a few seconds to the opt out movement. Actually, we don't acknowledge there's a movement--we just indicate that some parents choose to pull their children from the test. But not Slover-- she wants to have her young daughter take the test because "I want to be sure she's learning." Because this highly educated CEO of a testing corporation won't know whether or not her child can read or do math unless she has test results to look at. There are so many things Wallace could have done at this juncture, but even in non-confrontation mode, he could have shown us the report that PARCC provides, which basically gives a simple verbal version of a letter grade.
But we're sticking to the usual narrative, which means that besides the usual anti-fed opposition to the Core, the other group we'll mention is-- you guessed it-- the teachers unions. As we watch picketing clips, we're reminded that the union doesn't like testing because they "worry" that their members will be judged on test results. Wallace has nothing to say about that concern (not even a simple observation that the Value-Added method for doing test-based judgment has been rejected by every authority on the subject).
Instead we go back to Slover to ask her how she feels about being slammed by both the right and the left. She takes the softball and says, "We must be doing something right," with a hearty smile.
Wallace begins the wrapup by observing that PARCC is fine-tuning by doing things like making the test 90 minutes shorter next year. But, he says, Slover says the basic principle is sound. Was there a basic principle we talked about anywhere in this piece? No matter- Slover is going to now opine on the testing talking point that we haven't yet squeezed into this piece of PR fluffery yet:
For too long in this country, success has been really a function of what income level parents have and where kids grow up. We think it's critical that kids all have opportunities, whether they live in Mississippi or Massachusetts or Colorado or Ohio, they should all have access to an excellent education, and this is a step in the right direction.
I'll note one more instance of the "access" construction favored by reformsters (would you rather have access to food, or food?). But mostly I'm impressed that Slover is able to deliver all of that speech with a straight face, given that we know that the PARCC and tests like it correlate most directly to socio-economic class. It would have been nice if Wallace had asked something like, "So how, exactly, does taking a standardized test give kids access to an excellent education?" But he just pops up to note that whether or not this is a step in the right direction is debatable, which, yes, yes, it is, and as a debatable issue, it deserves some actual fact-based reporting about the sides of that debate, but Wallace just finishes the sentence by promising us that it will be a big issue for GOP candidates.
I know that the "Power Player of the Week" segments are not meant to be hard news, but this is just a three-minute advertisement for PARCC masquerading as news. A long time ago, television personalities used to pitch products in advertisements during their own programs, but they stopped doing it because it was undignified and hurt credibility. Would that modern news channels (not just Fox) would have another such epiphany.
Chris Wallace kicks things off by saying that Common Core was "started by governors and state education officials as a way to set standards," so we know we're entering the Feel Free To Spin Zone right off the bat, though the second half of that sentence notes that it has become controversial because of concerns over federal interference (it is) and whether or not it's the best way to teach kids (it isn't). So I guess he's acknowledging the controversy, if not teaching it. But let's go visit a group that's testing how well Common Core works.
Roll title card for PPOTW.
Cut to Slover's talking head saying that high standards are vital because high expectations will make students do better.
Explanation that PARCC is one of two state consortia for testing. This is the first of many opportunities Wallace will have to note that PARCC started out with twenty-three members and is now down to twelve, but that little market-based measure of PARCC's failure will not make it into the profile. He'll just mention the twelve state figure in passing and let it go at that.
Slover will now run the talking point about how PARCC is a new kind of test where you don't (always) bubble in the right answer, but now drag and drop the right answer, which is, you know, totally different. She also claims that the tests measure critical thinking, problem solving, and writing, and as we have seen repeatedly, that's mostly a lie. Problem solving, maybe. Writing, not in any meaningful way. Critical thinking, never.
Wallace takes a third grade test and mentions that it was "a little challenging." We see a shot of him being amazed? incredulous? that an answer is dragged and dropped instead of being clicked on (because this is how we test eight year olds' advanced mouse operating skills-- that's in the Core, right?) but no real discussoin of what the questions entailed. Nor do we ever address where the questions come from or why anyone should believe they are a good measure of anything in particular.
Next, several GOP Presidential hopefuls say mean things about Common Core, including Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz, both of whom get sound bites about how the feds are intruding. Wallace tells Slover, "The main complaint is that this is all part of a federal takeover of local schools." And I suppose that might be the main complaint among Fox News viewers, but c'mon-- even over there word has to have come by now that a whole host of working teachers and education experts have a list of concerns about the actual quality of the standards.
Slover counters that this is a state-driven program and states make all the decisions. But Wallace says it's more complicated than that (though not to Slover, who clearly did not need to wear her big girl pants to this interview). Wallace notes that Race to the Top effectively pushed the Core on states, but he skips over the whole business of waivers; that omission seems odd, given that the Obama administration end run around the law would be just the sort of shenanigans that Fox viewers would love to get outraged about.
We'll now give a few seconds to the opt out movement. Actually, we don't acknowledge there's a movement--we just indicate that some parents choose to pull their children from the test. But not Slover-- she wants to have her young daughter take the test because "I want to be sure she's learning." Because this highly educated CEO of a testing corporation won't know whether or not her child can read or do math unless she has test results to look at. There are so many things Wallace could have done at this juncture, but even in non-confrontation mode, he could have shown us the report that PARCC provides, which basically gives a simple verbal version of a letter grade.
But we're sticking to the usual narrative, which means that besides the usual anti-fed opposition to the Core, the other group we'll mention is-- you guessed it-- the teachers unions. As we watch picketing clips, we're reminded that the union doesn't like testing because they "worry" that their members will be judged on test results. Wallace has nothing to say about that concern (not even a simple observation that the Value-Added method for doing test-based judgment has been rejected by every authority on the subject).
Instead we go back to Slover to ask her how she feels about being slammed by both the right and the left. She takes the softball and says, "We must be doing something right," with a hearty smile.
Wallace begins the wrapup by observing that PARCC is fine-tuning by doing things like making the test 90 minutes shorter next year. But, he says, Slover says the basic principle is sound. Was there a basic principle we talked about anywhere in this piece? No matter- Slover is going to now opine on the testing talking point that we haven't yet squeezed into this piece of PR fluffery yet:
For too long in this country, success has been really a function of what income level parents have and where kids grow up. We think it's critical that kids all have opportunities, whether they live in Mississippi or Massachusetts or Colorado or Ohio, they should all have access to an excellent education, and this is a step in the right direction.
I'll note one more instance of the "access" construction favored by reformsters (would you rather have access to food, or food?). But mostly I'm impressed that Slover is able to deliver all of that speech with a straight face, given that we know that the PARCC and tests like it correlate most directly to socio-economic class. It would have been nice if Wallace had asked something like, "So how, exactly, does taking a standardized test give kids access to an excellent education?" But he just pops up to note that whether or not this is a step in the right direction is debatable, which, yes, yes, it is, and as a debatable issue, it deserves some actual fact-based reporting about the sides of that debate, but Wallace just finishes the sentence by promising us that it will be a big issue for GOP candidates.
I know that the "Power Player of the Week" segments are not meant to be hard news, but this is just a three-minute advertisement for PARCC masquerading as news. A long time ago, television personalities used to pitch products in advertisements during their own programs, but they stopped doing it because it was undignified and hurt credibility. Would that modern news channels (not just Fox) would have another such epiphany.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Einstein on Learning
I'm a fan of the website Brain Pickings, a site where Maria Popova curates a cool collection of cool, smart things. Today for Father's Day she offers an excerpt from the book Posterity, a cool collection of letters from important Americans to their children.
She picked a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his son when Einstein was 36 and his son Hans Albert was 11. It was 1914 and Einstein had just finished his paper on his general theory of relativity which was about to make him a Very Famous Smart Guy.
In his letter, Einstein included an observation about education. After discussing his son's pursuits, Einstein offered some advice about piano practice-- play the pieces that gave his son joy, whether they were assigned by the teacher or not.
That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.
Well, isn't that the truth. It is admittedly a difficult state to achieve in a classroom full of teenagers (or six year olds), but it certainly makes a better star to navigate toward than "learn to do something with full awareness that failure will be punished."
She picked a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his son when Einstein was 36 and his son Hans Albert was 11. It was 1914 and Einstein had just finished his paper on his general theory of relativity which was about to make him a Very Famous Smart Guy.
In his letter, Einstein included an observation about education. After discussing his son's pursuits, Einstein offered some advice about piano practice-- play the pieces that gave his son joy, whether they were assigned by the teacher or not.
That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.
Well, isn't that the truth. It is admittedly a difficult state to achieve in a classroom full of teenagers (or six year olds), but it certainly makes a better star to navigate toward than "learn to do something with full awareness that failure will be punished."
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