Earlier this month, the Thomas Fordham Institute (America's leading promoters of school privatization) released the capstone to a series entitled Redefining the School District by Nelson Smith. It's worth a look to better understand where these folks are coming from. (Spoiler alert-- Smith is the former head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and currently advises the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, so guess where this train is headed.)
The first two portions of the series are location-specific (Tennessee and Michigan), but the third installment steps back for a wider view of redefining school districts in America, and that's the one I'm going to skim for you today, but this is still a long haul. Fasten your seatbelt and grab a snack.
Opening Shots from Petrilli
Amber Northern and Mike Petrilli pen the introduction to the report, setting up the premise for all that follows.
First, the failure of turnarounds so far. The feds spent $5.7 billion-with-a-B on School Improvement Grants, and it didn't move the needle a bit. Why? Petrilli and Northern cite an unnamed study from may of 2015 that showed that state officials simply lack the expertise to do it.
So schools need to be turned around, but the states don't know how. To whom, I wonder, can we turn to get this job done?
There are other problems, as suggested by these oddly-juxtaposed sentences:
Even when we stumble upon promising strategies, the old familiar barriers make implementation difficult. In 2012, for example, the Center on Education Policy found that a majority of state officials believed that replacing the principal or staff of low-performing schools was a key element in improving student achievement there.
I agree-- the idea that mass firings will create excellence is an old familiar barrier to improving schools. Oh. Never mind. Reading on, I see that they're setting up the point that silly old unions and regulations keep bold innovators from firing their way to excellence.
So we're going to look at Recovery School District-style governance changes, because that's a system that cuts through government regulations to give charter privateers the chance to do whatever the hell they want, which will advance the cause of public education as surely as the advent of fast food franchises have further the cause of public health and nutrition.
So let's begin.
Introduction
Some of the same background. What will our focus be?
All of these involve the reshuffling of governance authority between state and local players. While touching lightly on all, this paper focuses mainly on state reforms that take over schools, rather than districts, and that assume “LEA” functions for those schools—the mundane routines of oversight, administration, and finance that a local education agency (a.k.a. a conventional school district) ordinarily performs.
Nicely done. Although these papers are talking pretty directly and exclusively about the process of handing public schools over to private corporate interests, we're never going to say those words. Notice here that it's "state reforms" that take over the schools. I respect the precise language fig leaf even as I'm unimpressed by what it covers up.
Framing the Choice
Smith informs us that CAP found "compelling evidence" that turnarounds happens when districts get uber-aggressive about it. No, he's not going to tell us where that evidence is, or whether it would be compelling to people who don't already assume the conclusion.
His repeated point here is that local districts just won't scorch enough earth. It's almost as if they considered community concerns and interests and were not willing to do whatever it takes to get test scores up (because, don't forget, in every instance that we're talking about "success" and "achievement," all we're really talking about is scores on a single not-very-good standardized test).
But the turnaround-district concept is not fundamentally about resources; it’s about establishing and then earnestly pushing toward radically higher expectations for schools that have been written off as failures.
Put that notion beside this quote from Andre Perry:
Our goal is not to improve a school in spite of the community. Our goal is to improve a community using schools.
Throughout his work, Smith rarely mentions community except as an agent of resistance. He certainly doesn't admit that community factors like poverty get in the way of school excellence. And on his list of status quo items that get in the way of excellent turnarounding, he includes "local control" as if allowing people to have a say in running their own community schools is just a foolish roadblock on the road to awesomeness. Nor does he have a real outcome on the table-- just better test scores, which are a proxy for... something. The view of schools as community's shared resources is completely absent from his view.
This the choice he sees:
The real comparison is not between one kind of bracing rescue effort and another. It’s between taking the risk of major, disruptive change and settling for the kind of timid, safe steps that leave thousands of kids in failing schools, desperately awaiting help.
So when he mentioned schools "written off as failures" earlier, maybe he meant that he was the one doing the writing. At any rate, our choice is clear-- we must burn the village to save it, and people who want to put out the torches are just obstacles to be pushed aside.
How Are Current Turnaround Districts Doing?
Smith wants to revisit the three existing takeover districts (my word, never his) and show how great they are doing. These are all discussions that have been had many, many times, and I'm not going to revisit them here in any depth.
Smith does not try to blow nothing but smoke here. He's pretty clear and direct, for instance, in acknowledging that NOLA RSD school are still at the bottom of the Louisiana barrel, though he also talks about the super-duper impressive gains that RSD schools have made. He claims success by saying that the RSD has changed the trajectory of these schools and pointed them in the right direction.
His treatment of the individual districts highlights another rhetorical feature of this paper-- public schools have flaws which are proof that they are failing, abandoned, written off, and otherwise the sort of hopeless institutions in which we don't want students to be trapped. But while charter school flaws are acknowledged, these are not proof that either the charters or the entire takeover model is failing or fundamentally flawed-- it's just a few bugs to be worked out.
Every public school failure is proof that they've reached the end of the road, while charter failures are just challenges to be met on the road to awesome.
Smith's examination of Tennessee's ASD provides one my favorite examples of How To Avoid The T Word. Noting that most of the bottom 5% schools are in Memphis, Smith says that ecah year "the ASD selects a few more of them for inclusion in its portfolio." Doesn't inclusion in a portfolio sound so much nicer than being taken over. It has the added advantage of being language that the hedge fundy backers of the charter chains can understand.
The Tennessee section does run through many of the real issues of Tennessee (for instance, the rules change to allow ASD schools to ship in students from outside the area they're supposed to serve). It also mentions in passing one of the big challenges they face-- RttT money is going to run out soon. And Smith wraps up by saying that the ASD parents poll as being mostly satisfied, which is unsurprising given A) why would unsatisfied parents still be in ASD schools and B) parents are universally satisfied with their schools. If Smith's polling data is a good measure of success, then the vast majority of public schools are successes and we can stop all this nonsense. But of course the reformster narrative is that public school parents are satisfied only because their schools lie to them and they don't know any better.
By the time Smith wheels through Michigan and its "precipitous drop" in enrollment after year one, now happily turned around, or its challenging "external environment," it finally hits me that the language of this report suggests a prospectus for possible investors and business partners, not a consideration of how the takeover of public schools is affecting the schools, the students, or the communities. And that makes more sense out of the next section.
Prospects on the Horizon
The phrase "emerging markets" doesn't actually appear in the next section, but it might as well. Here, Smith says, are some other states where this sort of takeover approach is being tried, floated, promoted or otherwise looks likely to launch.
Fakers
Connecticut and Delaware are brought up as "faux districts." The principal issue seems to be that in these states, the local bodies were allowed to retain some control. The schools were not taken over and properly handed off to charter operators or other privatizers. So, close, but not good enough.
Recommendations
So here's what Smith thinks states should be doing as they prepare to hand public education over to private operators.
Concede There's a Problem
Step One in Smith's book is for the state to admit they have a problem they can't solve, and don't listen to those stupid teachers unions.
Governor Cuomo’s proposal to put some of his state’s 178 failing schools into receivership generated plenty of controversy, but no response was more revealing—or damning—than that of the state teachers’ union: “New York doesn’t have failing schools....It does have struggling schools where teachers and parents are working together in different circumstances to cope with deep poverty. Poverty and chronic under-funding by the state are the central issues the governor’s proposal does not address.”
Followed by this--
That’s a prescription for doing nothing.
This is classic Orwellian backwards reformsterism. Here's how it works. When I say, "We have some serious issues here that need to be addressed as part of the business of addressing student achievement," I am being defeatist and claiming that as a victim, nothing can be done. But when you, Mr. Reformy McCharteralot, say, "This public school is unsalvageable and must be scrapped completely," somehow you are not giving up or claiming that there's no solving the problem?
I come into the house and say, "Hey, before we can drive anywhere, I need some help cleaning out the car." You say, "It's not possible. We'd better just sell the car for scrap and buy a new one." Now, which one of us is giving up and saying that the problem can't possibly be solved?
The observation that poverty and chronic under-funding are factors in school success are not "a prescription for doing nothing." That's like saying, "The doctor says I don't have enough iron in my diet and I need this medicine. So yeah, he totally thinks I should do nothing."
Don't Paint by Numbers
Smith acknowledges that one size does not fit all. For instance, rural areas such as those in Georgia, do not lend themselves to a choicey system (people tend to choose the school that's not thirty miles away). As always, this is not a reason to question if the takeover model is a good idea. It's just a call to get creative with solutions. Mind you, it's not that I don't love me some creative solutions-- but why is that not a legitimate alternative to takeover for public schools?
Call Your Lawyer
You might want to check to make sure that handing over your public schools to private companies isn't a violation of your state constitution.
Be Careful With Eligibility Requirements
I may be reading a little too close here, but this section looks kind of like "Don't make your takeover criteria so rigid that you start chewing up perfectly good charter enterprises along with the public schools."
Define Turned Around & Define the End Game
This is actually a good point. The outcome of your school takeover is supposed to be... what? This continues to be a weak spot in the privatizer battle map, a piece of rhetoric that distinguished them from Common Core pushers. Core fans have a lofty end goal-- we'll be smarterer than the whole wide world. But privatizers' end goal is a privatized education system that will be better because it will be privatized, and that's just inherently better, because reasons.
Hey, I have a thought. Let me repeat Andre Perry's quote from above:
Our goal is not to improve a school in spite of the community. Our goal is to improve a community using schools.
Doesn't that seem like a better goal than High Test Scores and Good ROI?
Don't Include Sucky Charters
Smith says don't take charters over; just put them out of business. For just a second, we kind of agree. But then I'm thinking, one charter closed is another charter's business opportunity-- unless the state gets in the way.
Pay for it from Public Funds
Don't make the program dependent on grant money or philanthropy or one-time state largesse. This of course creates a whole other question-- what if there aren't enough public funds to go around?
Learn from This
Let your state-commandeered takeover district be a shining beacon of How To Do Schools. Remember--we started this in the first place because nobody working in education or operating state bureaucracies-- nobody knows how to make schools better. Once those privateers get in there and show you how it's done, take notes!
Of course, we've had modern era privateer charters and even takeover school districts for a while now, so maybe we could list off all the things they've taught us about How To Run Successful Schools............ . . . . .
Well, we have learned a couple of things. Like running a successful school means spending all the money it really takes. And being careful that you don't accept or keep the Wrong Kinds of Students. Anything else? No?
Next Up: Recommendations for Management
Here are the things you need to do when setting up the management of your new takeover district.
1. Think long term. There will a lot of pressure to get things fixed immediately. Probably because that's how you sold this whole business in the first place (We can't give public schools one more day to work on this. We must fix it RIGHT NOW!) Don't let those expectations push you around. Be patient. Wait. These things take time (except for public schools).
2) Expect course corrections. You'll make mistake. Just keep trying stuff till you get better. Remember, you're not a public school, so you deserve more chances.
3) Create a portfolio. Let lots of different privatizers ride this gravy train.
4) Get the right skills. Hire people who are really good at doing turnaround work, although that may be difficult because right now the number of companies with a proven track record is pretty much none.
5) Understand that race and class matter. No, he's not suddenly acknowledging those terrible "excuses "that public schools use might be worth thinking about. He is acknowledging that when you bring rich white guys to come run schools in poor black communities, the locals might get a little cranky.
From the outset—in framing the legislation, in designing the district, in hiring administrators, in reviewing applications for charter operators—those who will be affected by this change should be part of the process.
Close, but no cigar. Those who will be affected by this change should be in charge of the process.
6) Use the district to leverage broader improvement. In other words, use school takeovers as a threat.
7) Stress talent. Yeah, forget everything from point five. Smith quotes privateer par excellence Neerav Kingsland: “The RSD has helped facilitate the nation’s first decentralized, non-governmental human capital system—where groups like Teach For America, TNTP, Leading Educators, and Relay Graduate School of Education are the talent engines.”
There are people out there who are just better than everybody else (particularly most of the everbody's who are teachers) and you should recruit them. Smith mentions that the influx of young TFA type talent into New Orleans was great; he does not mention the hundreds of black teachers who were fired to make the space.
8) Give the locals a chance. You know, they might not all suck. Maybe.
9) Focus on neighborhoods. I have no way of knowing if he giggled aloud while typing this.
10) Communicate clearly with the community. Again, is there some place in the reformy world where this has actually happened?
Five General Implications
Smith has five more ideas that run through the paper that he makes explicit at the end. I'm pretty sure I don't see any of these quite the way he does, and since this is my blog, I'll be giving you my perspective.
1) The local district has lost the exclusive franchise. Well, yes-- local taxpayers and voters have in fact been disenfranchised in these takeover school districts, their voices silenced and their ability to vote for representation in school governance stripped from them. Though they do still get to pay all the bills that all these various schools run up, so there's that, I guess.
Smith notes that while states have always been able to take over schools in "extraordinary" circumstances, the definition of such circumstances has widened "to include a school’s chronic failure to educate its pupils." Which, again, simply means lots of low test scores. But the playbook remains the same-- starve the school of financial resources, or simply push at the low test scores that inevitably come in any high poverty community school, and you can declare a crisis and throw out local control. Ka-ching.
2) Power shift at the state level. This is an interesting point and deserving of its own study. Basically, the implication is that under a state takeover plan, he who controls the state's "school district" controls access to a ton of money and fat juicy contracts, which means that suddenly being an educational bureaucrat is getting to be a lot more fun. Plus the state "school district" needs its own administrative and contract-granting super-structure, so states are growing new offices. Smith and I may not see the same implications here, but I think we agree that all sorts of power lines are shifting in state capitals.
3) A boost for the portfolio concept. As noted, a diverse portfolio makes for a better investment and school privatization plan.
4) The federal question mark. This is a long-running reformster problem. They loved federal involvement when it helped break open the piggy bank (e.g. federal support and push for Common Core) but not so much when the feds start making a lot of rules about how the game can be played. Only the feds had a hammer big enough to crack open the public education sector, but privatizers really don't want the feds to stick around after the smashing is done. So there are many "questions" about the federal role, in the sense that you and the traffic cop that just pulled you over may have "questions" about whether you violated any law or not.
5) We need to know more. There are many aspects of takeover schools and the results thereof for which we don't have answers. Or, we have answers, but privatizers don't like the answers very much. But remember-- when these kinds of questions come up in a public school, that's proof of failure, but when they come up in privatized schools, it's just a challenge that we must patiently learn and grow from.
My implications
My cranky demeanor might suggest that I am simply trying to blow holes in this report without even considering what it has to say, but I am paying attention, and there are specific reasons that I think the takeover school model is a bad idea.
1) The bizarre double standard. Privatized schools that are
struggling need resources, time, patience, and the chance to try new
approaches. Public schools that are struggling need to be taken over,
closed, privatized, wiped out. This is not what you do when you're trying to find the best way and understand what is going on-- this is what you do when you've already decided that you want to support privatization and crush public schools.
2) The dishonesty. The repeated use of language meant to soften or hide what we're really talking about is a bad sign. It indicates a program that's unwilling to honestly stand up and live or die on its own merits. It indicates people who know they're proposing a bad idea, but are trying to somehow slip it by.
3) The narrowing of education. Without even discussing the choice, this report summarily reduces the meaning of a quality education to good test scores on a bad standardized test. That is inexcusable and unsupportable.
4) The bludgeoning of democracy. Takeover school districts involve
the end of any democratic process for local taxpayers and voters. For
that very reason, takeover school districts target schools that serve
mainly poor, brown, or black citizens. These communities have the
predictable low test scores and poor financial support that makes it
easy for bureaucrats to holler, "Failing school!" and they lack the kind
of political connections that have kept reformsters from trying to
"reform" any rich, white districts.
Just as schools
can and should be tools for strengthening and improving communities
(want me to bust out that Andre Perry quote again?), schools are being
used as tools to bust communities apart. Take away the local voice.
Spread the students around the city, away from the community. This is
backwards, and this is wrong.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
The ACT Is Tattling
Like all corporations in the test manufacturing industry, the ACT is working hard to retain and grow market share. With that in mind, the folks at ACT have been announcing upcoming changes in the test. Some of the changes are merely dumb, while at least one is actually creepy.
Writing? Really? Sigh.
I would call the search for a workable standardized writing test the holy grail of testing, but by comparison the search for the holy grail (whether we're talking Chretien de Troyes or Monty Python) is relatively sensible, realistic, and possibly successful compared to the search for a means of mass-assessing high level writing. I've discussed this foolishness here and here and here and here and here and you get the idea. Here's what the ACT folk say they have in mind:
In addition, ACT plans to enhance the scoring and approach of the optional ACT Writing Test, offering more insights to help students become college and career ready. Students’ essays will be evaluated on four domains of writing competency: ideas and analysis, development and support, organization, and language use. The test will measure students’ ability to evaluate multiple perspectives on a complex issue and generate their own analysis based on reasoning, knowledge and experience. This will allow students to more fully demonstrate their analytical writing ability.
No, the ACT writing test will not measure any of these things. It will measure the students' ability to crank out a formulaic piece of writing-ish work on short notice.
We're Here To Help
Much of the verbage of the ACT announcement follows the pattern of the first sentence above-- the part where they write "to help students become college and career ready." The ACT copy keeps talking like the ACT is an integral part of the education process, as if students and teachers and administrators are carefully examining ACT results in order to fine tune educational choices going forward.
"Wow, according to my ACT results, I am a little soft on my paragraph-building skills, particularly when it comes to transitions and coordinating of complex ideas. I had better ask my English teacher to focus on these skills so I'm better prepared for college," said no high school student ever.
Maybe the ACT folks just read their own marketing too often. Maybe I just haven't had enough contact with the Finer School Districts where faculty and students have long sessions plumbing the depths of ACT results over tiny sandwiches and grey poupon. But in the world I'm familiar with, students recognize SAT and ACT testing as a pointless activity required for college admissions, take the test, check the resulting score and move on with life.
I realize that ACT is mostly just marketing here, but there's also a kind of poignant sadness to it-- it's like the guy who gives you your driving test thinking that he's now an integral part of your family.
But the new ACT will shake and bake and chop and dice and even julienne data in all sort of new indexes and scores to provide you with data deep-fried and half-baked so that you can better integrate the information into your educational plan. Also, Common Core Standards blah blah blah.
The Creepy Part- Big Brother Is Tattling on You
Here's the reporting form that students will get. Pretty basic same old same old.
Now check out the reporting form that a college will get. Check out the upper right hand corner. Now check it out again to make sure you see what you really see.
That's right-- the ACT is going to tell the college of your choice the chances that you will get a B or better and the chances that you will get a C or better, both by major and by specific course.
For instance, Ann Taylor, according to the ACT, has a 72% chance of doing better that a C in Freshman English, but only a 48% chance of doing better than a B. If she becomes an education major, she has 65% chance of doing better than a B, but in business administration, she'd only have a 61% chance. Because the ACT is prepared to be just that granular.
How can they possibly pretend to know any of this. According to college admissions examiner Nancy Griesemer, the ACT folks say they will consider data provided by participating colleges, the test results and data about the student such as high school GPA. But in a fairly awesome twist, all of the data about the student will be self-reported. So the ACT will factor in whatever GPA the student claims to have in high school. It occurs to me that this may just be some elaborate problem-solving exercise that tests the student's critical and ethical thinking skills.
Of course, the ACT's ethical thinking skills may be a little fuzzy, because I'll now remind you that we found this creative piece of reportage on the college report-- and nowhere else.
So sign up now, kids. Sign yourself up for the ACT and pay for the privilege of having someone use voodoo science to screw with your admission's chances at the colleges of your choice and to do it behind your back. Heck, even the credit report companies are required to show you what they're saying about you-- and you're not giving them your money to do it!
This is a bold move on ACT's part-- after all, it won't take long at all for colleges to notice if the predictions are crap (and it won't take students long to figure out the strategic advantages of giving their own record the Stretch Armstrong treatment). The only up side to all of this is that with David Coleman steering the College Board (SAT, AP, ETC) into the weeds and now encouraging the ACT to head there as well, this may open up further discussion of simply dumping these fear-inducing, anxiety-creating, money-wasting tests from the entire college admissions process.
Writing? Really? Sigh.
I would call the search for a workable standardized writing test the holy grail of testing, but by comparison the search for the holy grail (whether we're talking Chretien de Troyes or Monty Python) is relatively sensible, realistic, and possibly successful compared to the search for a means of mass-assessing high level writing. I've discussed this foolishness here and here and here and here and here and you get the idea. Here's what the ACT folk say they have in mind:
In addition, ACT plans to enhance the scoring and approach of the optional ACT Writing Test, offering more insights to help students become college and career ready. Students’ essays will be evaluated on four domains of writing competency: ideas and analysis, development and support, organization, and language use. The test will measure students’ ability to evaluate multiple perspectives on a complex issue and generate their own analysis based on reasoning, knowledge and experience. This will allow students to more fully demonstrate their analytical writing ability.
No, the ACT writing test will not measure any of these things. It will measure the students' ability to crank out a formulaic piece of writing-ish work on short notice.
We're Here To Help
Much of the verbage of the ACT announcement follows the pattern of the first sentence above-- the part where they write "to help students become college and career ready." The ACT copy keeps talking like the ACT is an integral part of the education process, as if students and teachers and administrators are carefully examining ACT results in order to fine tune educational choices going forward.
"Wow, according to my ACT results, I am a little soft on my paragraph-building skills, particularly when it comes to transitions and coordinating of complex ideas. I had better ask my English teacher to focus on these skills so I'm better prepared for college," said no high school student ever.
Maybe the ACT folks just read their own marketing too often. Maybe I just haven't had enough contact with the Finer School Districts where faculty and students have long sessions plumbing the depths of ACT results over tiny sandwiches and grey poupon. But in the world I'm familiar with, students recognize SAT and ACT testing as a pointless activity required for college admissions, take the test, check the resulting score and move on with life.
I realize that ACT is mostly just marketing here, but there's also a kind of poignant sadness to it-- it's like the guy who gives you your driving test thinking that he's now an integral part of your family.
But the new ACT will shake and bake and chop and dice and even julienne data in all sort of new indexes and scores to provide you with data deep-fried and half-baked so that you can better integrate the information into your educational plan. Also, Common Core Standards blah blah blah.
The Creepy Part- Big Brother Is Tattling on You
Here's the reporting form that students will get. Pretty basic same old same old.
Now check out the reporting form that a college will get. Check out the upper right hand corner. Now check it out again to make sure you see what you really see.
That's right-- the ACT is going to tell the college of your choice the chances that you will get a B or better and the chances that you will get a C or better, both by major and by specific course.
For instance, Ann Taylor, according to the ACT, has a 72% chance of doing better that a C in Freshman English, but only a 48% chance of doing better than a B. If she becomes an education major, she has 65% chance of doing better than a B, but in business administration, she'd only have a 61% chance. Because the ACT is prepared to be just that granular.
How can they possibly pretend to know any of this. According to college admissions examiner Nancy Griesemer, the ACT folks say they will consider data provided by participating colleges, the test results and data about the student such as high school GPA. But in a fairly awesome twist, all of the data about the student will be self-reported. So the ACT will factor in whatever GPA the student claims to have in high school. It occurs to me that this may just be some elaborate problem-solving exercise that tests the student's critical and ethical thinking skills.
Of course, the ACT's ethical thinking skills may be a little fuzzy, because I'll now remind you that we found this creative piece of reportage on the college report-- and nowhere else.
So sign up now, kids. Sign yourself up for the ACT and pay for the privilege of having someone use voodoo science to screw with your admission's chances at the colleges of your choice and to do it behind your back. Heck, even the credit report companies are required to show you what they're saying about you-- and you're not giving them your money to do it!
This is a bold move on ACT's part-- after all, it won't take long at all for colleges to notice if the predictions are crap (and it won't take students long to figure out the strategic advantages of giving their own record the Stretch Armstrong treatment). The only up side to all of this is that with David Coleman steering the College Board (SAT, AP, ETC) into the weeds and now encouraging the ACT to head there as well, this may open up further discussion of simply dumping these fear-inducing, anxiety-creating, money-wasting tests from the entire college admissions process.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
PA: Shredding Seniority
The PA House of Representatives has passed HB 805, a bill intended to blow a hole in seniority protections in Pennsylvania. Currently, we are one of the remaining states where furloughs must be done in Last In First Out style. If this bill passes the PA Senate, we will no longer be one of those states.
What Does the Bill Say?
If you want to look at the full text, you can find it here. It's a tough go, and I can't promise you that I didn't miss something in my perusal. But there are two portions that are getting the most attention.
First, we want to increase the amount of pre-tenure service time. Currently PA makes you wait three years for job protections to kick in; the bill would up that to four, with an optional fifth if your administration is feeling kind of iffy about you.
Second, we want to fold our teacher evaluations into furlough decisions. A teacher with a low rating would be the first to go, regardless of years of service.
Those are the headlines.
Full Disclosure
This issue is not purely abstract for me. My wife has just been furloughed by her school district because they are trying to slice of chunks of their budgetary costs with a big, ugly chain saw. Teachers were let go, and since she is at the beginning of her career. Which sucks, because she is damn good.
So when we're talking about these great young teachers whose careers get unjustly whacked with the furlough ax, that is not a hypothetical thing to me. That's my wife.
Whose Bright Idea Is This?
This bill has been kicking around for a while. Here you can see a letter written by the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bloom, back in February. It contains several fine slices of baloney, including this statistic thrown out without any references:
Research demonstrates that under a seniority-based layoff system, the more effective teacher is dismissed roughly four out of five times.
What research? How is it demonstrated? And why haven't we heard about this before like, say, during the Vergara trial's work of destroying tenure and seniority in California? Those guys were clearly willing to bring up anything they could think of to make their point-- but I don't believe they mentioned this. So I kind of suspect this is not an entirely fact-based statement.
Fun Trivia
Pennsylvania has the largest full-time legislature in the country (New Hampshire's is larger, but those folks are essentially part-time volunteers). There are 253 members (203 representatives, 50 senators) who start with a base pay of $85,356 (that pay is a tetchy subject in PA-- the legislators once voted themselves a pay raise at 2 AM with no discussion).
How do they keep things organized with so many legislators jostling for position? Why, just like most legislatures-- members earn privileges with seniority. Go figure.
Why This Isn't Going To Do Much of Anything
Will this legislation trigger a teacherly thunderdome? Well, not right away.
Pennsylvania's teacher evaluation system only offers four ratings. Crappy, Getting Better, Pretty Okay, and Super Duper. That's it. The new law says that Crappy teachers must be thrown overboard first, and Super Duper teachers can never be thrown overboard. But if, for instance, everybody in the department getting axed is rated Pretty Okay, then furloughs will be decided by seniority.
Other News in Teacher Evaluations
PA just used its shiny new evaluation system for the first time. How'd that turn out?
98.2% of PA teachers were rated Pretty Good or Super Duper-- the highest percentage ever.
The total number of teachers rated unsatisfactory in all the public schools in Pennsylvania-- 289. In charter schools-- 803.
So once again, the reformster myth that our schools are choking on vast supplies of terrible teachers takes a hit.
So Who Will Be Affected?
So those 289 teachers could be in trouble under the new system. And we could get some struggles between the Pretty Okay and Super Duper teachers.
But huge differences within schools will not necessarily emerge.
See, in PA, we have a School Performance Profile which is mostly a result of test scores (through both VAMmy and straight-up methods). But it's applied to everybody in the school who does not teach a tested subject.
So elementary teachers will be at the mercy of crappy VAMified test scores. Middle and high school teachers mostly don't teach tested classes, so most of those staffs will have the exact same SPP score as each other, so that any significant differences will come from SOP's (our version of the do-it-yourself performance goals)-- and nobody knows how those work yet.
But mostly, as we've seen with the latest results, most folks are going to have the same Pretty Good rating, and we'll be right back to seniority as the deciding factor again. At least until some legislator gets the bright idea of using a scale with more than four stops.
Alternatives
Essentially, this bill wouldn't really do anything-- except slap PA teachers in the collective face, and set the stage for future abuses.
So if the legislature wanted to do something really useful, they could try funding schools.
PA schools are dropping like flies, and it seems likely that this year's bloodbath may bring PA close to the 30,000 teaching jobs lost mark for the past several years (there's a great deal of disagreement about that number).
Public school budget cuts in PA are directly due to two simple factors-
1) A pension system that the state has avoided funding properly, instead kicking that can down the road. We are now at a dead end, and the legislature has required local schools to pay for their screw-up.
2) A cyber charter reimbursement plan that bleeds local schools dry.
Both of these factors trace their origins straight back to Harrisburg. If the legislature is so concerned about great teachers losing their jobs (and if they even wanted to care, a little, about community schools being closed), then they might make a serious attempt to fund public schools properly. Right now only the new governor is making much noise about that, and our GOP legislature is busy finding ways to tell him no.
The Great Reformster Onslaught
PA reformsters have had huge success in getting people not to ask why the state is doing such a crappy job of funding public education. Instead, we have legislators pushing ways to further shut down public education, hand schools over to charters, and generally stick it to public ed.
This bill is part of that. We already have the numbers to tell us how many terrible teachers there are in PA public schools, and the answer is Very Few-- even using a system that is rigged to "find" as many terrible teachers as possible, despite the fact that VAASS (PA's version of VAM) has been widely debunked. Plus you can throw in all the stories of great teachers who got crappy ratings as well.
This is a bad bill, and it should die a lonely death. But part of its badness is that it is completely beside the point and will allow reformsters to jump up and down and hold a pep rally while not effectively doing much of anything. True, it will set the stage for far uglier things down the road, and that's one more reason it should die.
But it is also a sign of how clueless and intellectually dishonest this whole reformy exercise is in the first place. And its worst result is that it encourages the legislature to talk about everything except what they need to be doing to actually strengthen public education in Pennsylvania.
What Does the Bill Say?
If you want to look at the full text, you can find it here. It's a tough go, and I can't promise you that I didn't miss something in my perusal. But there are two portions that are getting the most attention.
First, we want to increase the amount of pre-tenure service time. Currently PA makes you wait three years for job protections to kick in; the bill would up that to four, with an optional fifth if your administration is feeling kind of iffy about you.
Second, we want to fold our teacher evaluations into furlough decisions. A teacher with a low rating would be the first to go, regardless of years of service.
Those are the headlines.
Full Disclosure
This issue is not purely abstract for me. My wife has just been furloughed by her school district because they are trying to slice of chunks of their budgetary costs with a big, ugly chain saw. Teachers were let go, and since she is at the beginning of her career. Which sucks, because she is damn good.
So when we're talking about these great young teachers whose careers get unjustly whacked with the furlough ax, that is not a hypothetical thing to me. That's my wife.
Whose Bright Idea Is This?
This bill has been kicking around for a while. Here you can see a letter written by the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bloom, back in February. It contains several fine slices of baloney, including this statistic thrown out without any references:
Research demonstrates that under a seniority-based layoff system, the more effective teacher is dismissed roughly four out of five times.
What research? How is it demonstrated? And why haven't we heard about this before like, say, during the Vergara trial's work of destroying tenure and seniority in California? Those guys were clearly willing to bring up anything they could think of to make their point-- but I don't believe they mentioned this. So I kind of suspect this is not an entirely fact-based statement.
Fun Trivia
Pennsylvania has the largest full-time legislature in the country (New Hampshire's is larger, but those folks are essentially part-time volunteers). There are 253 members (203 representatives, 50 senators) who start with a base pay of $85,356 (that pay is a tetchy subject in PA-- the legislators once voted themselves a pay raise at 2 AM with no discussion).
How do they keep things organized with so many legislators jostling for position? Why, just like most legislatures-- members earn privileges with seniority. Go figure.
Why This Isn't Going To Do Much of Anything
Will this legislation trigger a teacherly thunderdome? Well, not right away.
Pennsylvania's teacher evaluation system only offers four ratings. Crappy, Getting Better, Pretty Okay, and Super Duper. That's it. The new law says that Crappy teachers must be thrown overboard first, and Super Duper teachers can never be thrown overboard. But if, for instance, everybody in the department getting axed is rated Pretty Okay, then furloughs will be decided by seniority.
Other News in Teacher Evaluations
PA just used its shiny new evaluation system for the first time. How'd that turn out?
98.2% of PA teachers were rated Pretty Good or Super Duper-- the highest percentage ever.
The total number of teachers rated unsatisfactory in all the public schools in Pennsylvania-- 289. In charter schools-- 803.
So once again, the reformster myth that our schools are choking on vast supplies of terrible teachers takes a hit.
So Who Will Be Affected?
So those 289 teachers could be in trouble under the new system. And we could get some struggles between the Pretty Okay and Super Duper teachers.
But huge differences within schools will not necessarily emerge.
See, in PA, we have a School Performance Profile which is mostly a result of test scores (through both VAMmy and straight-up methods). But it's applied to everybody in the school who does not teach a tested subject.
So elementary teachers will be at the mercy of crappy VAMified test scores. Middle and high school teachers mostly don't teach tested classes, so most of those staffs will have the exact same SPP score as each other, so that any significant differences will come from SOP's (our version of the do-it-yourself performance goals)-- and nobody knows how those work yet.
But mostly, as we've seen with the latest results, most folks are going to have the same Pretty Good rating, and we'll be right back to seniority as the deciding factor again. At least until some legislator gets the bright idea of using a scale with more than four stops.
Alternatives
Essentially, this bill wouldn't really do anything-- except slap PA teachers in the collective face, and set the stage for future abuses.
So if the legislature wanted to do something really useful, they could try funding schools.
PA schools are dropping like flies, and it seems likely that this year's bloodbath may bring PA close to the 30,000 teaching jobs lost mark for the past several years (there's a great deal of disagreement about that number).
Public school budget cuts in PA are directly due to two simple factors-
1) A pension system that the state has avoided funding properly, instead kicking that can down the road. We are now at a dead end, and the legislature has required local schools to pay for their screw-up.
2) A cyber charter reimbursement plan that bleeds local schools dry.
Both of these factors trace their origins straight back to Harrisburg. If the legislature is so concerned about great teachers losing their jobs (and if they even wanted to care, a little, about community schools being closed), then they might make a serious attempt to fund public schools properly. Right now only the new governor is making much noise about that, and our GOP legislature is busy finding ways to tell him no.
The Great Reformster Onslaught
PA reformsters have had huge success in getting people not to ask why the state is doing such a crappy job of funding public education. Instead, we have legislators pushing ways to further shut down public education, hand schools over to charters, and generally stick it to public ed.
This bill is part of that. We already have the numbers to tell us how many terrible teachers there are in PA public schools, and the answer is Very Few-- even using a system that is rigged to "find" as many terrible teachers as possible, despite the fact that VAASS (PA's version of VAM) has been widely debunked. Plus you can throw in all the stories of great teachers who got crappy ratings as well.
This is a bad bill, and it should die a lonely death. But part of its badness is that it is completely beside the point and will allow reformsters to jump up and down and hold a pep rally while not effectively doing much of anything. True, it will set the stage for far uglier things down the road, and that's one more reason it should die.
But it is also a sign of how clueless and intellectually dishonest this whole reformy exercise is in the first place. And its worst result is that it encourages the legislature to talk about everything except what they need to be doing to actually strengthen public education in Pennsylvania.
Invest in Test Prep
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)
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)
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.
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