Testing: NY Relaxes Nothing

It would be surprising to find that one of the nation's leading newspapers does not understand some basic vocabulary, but apparently the New York Times does not know what "relax" means.

Yesterday the Times ran a story claiming that the state had "relaxed" the teacher gag order on test items, and then preceded to prove this false in the very same story.

See, now the state will allow teachers to discuss items on the test after they have been publicly released, whereas previously, teachers could only discuss test items after they had been publicly released.

Under the new law, teachers and administrators will be free to discuss certain test questions, but only those that have been publicly released by the state.

For years, the state publicly released every question on elementary and middle school standardized tests, but then stopped after discovering that the practice had led to inflated scores.

According to the article, what has actually changed is that the state has decided to release some test items again-- but only some. After all, there are important interests to protect here:

It takes years of trials, not to mention money, to come up with questions appropriate for mass testing.

As always, test proctors are forbidden to look at the tests they are proctoring. And nobody can discuss items that the test manufacturer hasn't released. I'm sure they'll go ahead and release the more controversial items so that folks can have an open and transparent discussion of what's going on in the testing universe.

No, I don't think so either. Teachers can still talk about test items that have been released, and test manufacturers are still free to keep any parts of the test under wraps that they so choose. So as far as the gag order goes, nothing has changed.


Or, as Carol Burris put it this morning

@NYSchoolSupts @nytimes Please explain the change. what nonsense. We could always talk about released items.

— Carol Burris (@carolburris) June 29, 2015

One More Teacher for Bernie

Boy, I really don't want to start wading into the 2016 Presidential election season yet, but it seems increasingly unavoidable. And besides, I'm kind of excited about Bernie Sanders.

Is he some kind of crazy radical? Fellow Democrats, of all people, accuse him of that of being too far Out There, while no less an authority than George Will says that calling Sanders a Socialist is a charade, the Sanders is no more Socialist than the last seventy years of American politics. But the Washington Post has gone from ignoring him to delivering daily coverage as if he were-- shocker-- a legitimate Presidential candidate-- including a piece two weeks ago confirming that many Americans agree with many of Sanders's positions.

The Sanders campaign trajectory reminds me of the candidacy of Ron Paul-- a guy who initially looks like a fringe candidate slowly gathering steam by speaking to wide streak of voter discontent both in the content of his message and in the unpolished directness of his campaigning. It is part of what draws some people to-- dare I say it-- Donald Trump; he may be a horse's ass, but at least he talks like a regular human being and not a carefully packaged focus-group tested human-shaped product. (Also, they are all not exactly conventionally attractive.)

As a teacher, I know that nobody in the current GOP field is going to support public education. I know that Hillary is never going to say anything she doesn't think voters want to hear, and she is never going to do anything that her 1% backers don't want her to do. They are all standard-issue modern candidates, candidates who don't need to show up in person because every word out of their mouths will be pre-scripted, pre-vetted, pre-tested, and pre-rehearsed. They are all running for one primary reason-- they want to be President. Now we'll just watched to see what they're willing to do to get there. As the old joke ends, we have already established what they are-- now we're just haggling over price.

But Sanders, like the senior Paul before him, has the air of someone who isn't really heart-set on the Oval Office. It's just that there are some things that need to be said, and if not him, then who?

I'm not naive. I know that Sanders is a seasoned politician, that he didn't get where he is by being an amateur bumpkin. I know he's not Superman or a knight on a white steed. But I also know Vermont, and I know slickness will only get you so far there.

And Sanders says stuff like this:



It would have been easy to suck up to the first questioner and deliver some halfway answer. But "no public dollars to private schools" is nice and clear and not what some folks want to hear. I've watched several similar clips and I'm struck that Sanders speaks plainly and directly, but without hyperbole or over-promising.

And with roughly 147 candidates out there, Sanders is the only one willing to directly address the massively corrupting influence of money on our political system; the other 146 want that money too badly to so much as nibble on the hand that feeds them.

Sanders is drawing crowds now, but I don't imagine that means he'll easily withstand a full onslaught of the well-financed political machine that Clinton can unleash. Nor do I imagine that, should he somehow land in the White House that he will single-handedly turn back the tide of corporate reformsterism. But I'm still supporting him.

First, because I am sick to death of Democrats who consistently and deliberate kick teachers and public education in the face. "Well, the GOP will kick you in the face and also break your fingers," is the only response we get. At least Jeb Bush is going to continue to be forthright about his intention to break public education and sell off the parts to private concerns. Somehow, the fact that Clinton will do the same thing, but will insist on pretending that she won't is worse.

I am tired of casting my vote for the lesser of several evils. The candidate I support will have to earn my support by some argument tougher than "I don't suck as much as that other guy, as far as you know." I'm done with that. I've had it.

"But what if you throw away your vote and the evil Other Guy wins?!" Honestly, I don't care. If I have to suffer under an Evil Other Guy Presidency in order for the Democratic party to wake up and say, "Hey, maybe we should pay attention to someone other than our rich corporate overlords," then so be it.

I am tired of being the Democratic Party's booty call, and if finally putting my foot down means I have to sit at home alone on Prom night, so be it. It's the right choice for me and the right choice for the long run. I deserve better, dammit.

Go here to read up on Sanders and to make a contribution to his campaign. It doesn't appear that there is any other way that the voices of ordinary citizens and teachers are going to be heard in this election cycle, so let's give it a shot.

Threading Cake Testing Needles (Part III)

I've been enjoying a dialogue centering on some postings by Nate Bowling. Bowling is more reformy than I, but his work is interesting because A) he is an actual teacher and B) he does not claim that he didn't know how to do his job until Common Core. There aren't that many actual classroom teachers out there articulating the reformster case well, but Bowling seems to be continuing a sincere and teacherly search for some answers and solutions around the issues of testing, and I have appreciated watching part of his journey.

You can find earlier pieces of this conversation here and here and here and here.

Part III is up and while we're still torturing metaphors, at least we're still eating cake and threading needles and not eating cake with needles in it.

Bowling opens with observations about the effects of polarization, in particular how it becomes an obstacle to useful discussion. I have some ideas about how that polarization became welded onto the education debates (when you attack teachers and the work they've invested themselves in, it's hard for them not to take it personally), but I absolutely agree that any time you assume that people who disagree with you must be either evil or stupid (or both), you're not going to accomplish anything worthwhile. As much as hugely disagree with many folks on the other sides of the Great Education Debate, I have found that almost every last one of them is amenable to civilized conversation. It's like they're actual humans, or something!

Bowling presents that view as the context for trying to further clarify the issues that he laid out in the first part of the series. His thoughts are worth looking at, even if I disagree with some of them.

Problem 1: Standardized testing comes with huge costs of both money and instructional time, and it gives no real useful information in return. I think that's dead-on.

Problem 2: Testing as a civil rights issue. Reading Bowling's explanation of this issue (which leans on writing by Chris Stewart) suggests to me that maybe what we're talking about here is a new audience for student progress reports.

I've often mocked the notion that either parents or teachers need standardized test results (which are hugely limited in scope, in depth and in detail) to know how their students are doing. But the civil rights testing argument seems to include the notion that communities and leaders need hard data about school failure in order to create political and social pressure to right wrongs and close gaps.

There are problems with using tests for that purpose. One is that the tests are still bad measures. Bowling writes

One of the most frequently raised arguments against testing that I come across is that testing is not an accurate measure of "the whole child," or their “real worth.” I agree, but no one (no one worth listening to anyway) is arguing that it is. 

I disagree with his second sentence. Every time someone makes a statement about student achievement or teacher effectiveness or whether a school is swell or not, all they are talking about is test scores. "Student achievement" as currently used literally means nothing but "student test scores," and so test scores have become a proxy for every kind of measure that can be imagined. And that can't help but narrow the view of what schools are supposed to do.

Nor is there much useful data. Bowling notes that "Tammi got a C+" isn't for some folks-- but it has more granularity than the Big Standardized Test reports which just tell us which of four possible grades that student earned.

I could look past that, maybe a little, if low test scores were used to prove that Lowscore City Schools were not getting sufficient support and resources from state and federal government. But that's not how the story plays out. Instead, we see two things happen over and over again.

One is that the state sweeps in and cancels democracy for the community. Instead of coming in, sitting down with community leaders, and finding out what resources they need to support their local vision for their own community, from Newark to Philly to Chicago to Detroit, over and over, the state comes in and says, "Clearly you brown/black/poor folks can't be trusted to run things, so we're going to suspend democracy, silence your voices, and tell you what you should have."

The other is the building of tiny lifeboats. In the name of rescuing students from failing schools, charter systems are created that allow a small percentage of students to escape the failing schools. Meanwhile, all the other students are still in the troubled schools-- which are now getting fewer resources rather than assistance.

When the citizens and students of Newark are in the streets repeatedly-- and fruitlessly-- demanding to have a voice in their own community's schools, that doesn't look like a civil rights win to me.

Now, should we have some means of keeping relentless and forceful pressure on politicians to make sure that all communities are well-served and absolutely unignorable? We should. I don't believe for a milisecond that politicians do not know which the communities need assistance, but if we need to be able to generate charts and graphs to hold their feet to the fire, then let's play that game. But the current wave of test-based accountability-- which we've been trying for over a decade-- is failing to do the job. We have never really had; a system for generating data for the audience of politicians and policymakers, and we need to go back to the drawing board to come up with the right instrument for that task.

Bowling goes on to offer solutions, with the caveat that these are Washington State-based ideas, and your mileage may vary.

No test scores in teaching evals. Well, yes. I'm not sure what will finally kill this, since there is not a small continent's worth of VAM debunkery out there. I suspect that this won't crumble until we have enough local stories of how Beloved Mrs. Teachswell, known by one and all to be wonderful in the classroom, has been judged Terrible by the state evaluation system. Right now the system is so crazypants that folks literally refuse to believe me when I explain that the shop teachers evaluation is partly based on the test scores of students he's never even met; it's so bizarre that they are sure "that can't be right."

Eliminate redundant exams and shorten existing ones. And, though this implied by the rest of his paragraph, be damn sure you can explain why failing Exam X should, all by itself, keep a child from graduating or moving on to the next grade.

I mean come on, the test to determine whether you are proficient at any single grade level should not be longer than a Bar Exam. We can create assessments, linked to the CCSS, NGSS, (insert your own SS) that indicate where a student is on a continuum from way below grade level.These assessments don’t have to be insanely expensive, overly complicated and should be able to be completed in one or two class periods, rather than the five days (2xs) it took to administer each SBAC (math and ELA), at many schools this year.

I'd go further. Why does it need to be a test?

Shift power from testing companies to educators.

"If tomorrow I was given the power, I’d commission a group of teacher leaders to create the exams for my state. I would shift the duty of designing state exams from unknown figures at various testing companies to noted and notable educators." Yeah, I'll back that. The problem is money. All of reform is a shift of power from educators to people who would like to make money from education. How we push Pearson back out of the BS Test manufacturing market when on any given day we are in our classrooms and they are lobbying in capitals is a mystery to me.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try. But the whole premise of BS Testing is that the grade given by a classroom teacher can't be trusted, and I don't know how we can possibly turn that political tide. Lord knows we're trying to get the message across-- but very few people with actual power are listening.

One other advantage of teacher-created testing? Students would be more likely to take the testing seriously. And teachers might get something we could actually use. It really would be a vast improvement in many ways, but I don't know how we sell it.

I appreciate Bowling's resolve to see this conversation through and to examine the positions honestly. One other problem with polarization is that it can give you blinders-- you only allow certain conclusions to be reachable, and that, of course, colors how you view everything. It takes some nerve and patience to track the ideas without trying to force your way to a particular conclusion, and I appreciate that Bowling appears to be doing so. Thanks for the cake, Nate.

The Charter Life

 from the May 2017 issue of Charter & Choice Journal

by Macon S. Uppton

Charles T. McSwagg arrived late to the interview, pulling up thirty minutes after our appointment in a shiny new Mercedes.

"Sorry I'm late," he said, getting out of the car. "The Bentley was almost out of gas."

This kind of bold problem solving is a good example of McSwagg's bold approach to the Charter-choice lifetsyle. He explained further over twelve cups of coffee. "I want access to an excellent automobile with a full tank of gas. The Mercedes was almost out of gas, so the only solution was to look at some choices of other excellent cars that had full tanks of gas." And then he went back to testing the twelve cups of coffee.

I might have raised my eyebrows.

"I like just the right balance of sweetener and cream in my coffee," he said. "So I have them bring me several different combinations so that I have access to the excellent cup of coffee that I'm looking for."

I asked if that wasn't rather expensive. He shrugged. "We make compromises," he said, and I looked closer to see that each of the cups only held a small amount of coffee. McSwagg selected the cup he wanted, swept the rest off the side of the table and onto the floor, and as the waitress swept up after him, we began the interview.

CCJ: What led you to first adopt the charter-choice lifestyle?

M: I made a bundle investing in the charter school movement, and I found the approach of options over improvements to be a powerful one. Why should we have to fix things, or pour more money into the things we already have? Shouldn't we instead just have access to a variety of better options? Wouldn't that be a great way to approach life?

CCJ: So, how many homes do you currently own?

M: I think I'm up to ten. Of course, I've moved out of several of them. My first home had carpet that wore out and, after a bad windstorm, there was serious roof damage. So of course my only option at that point was to move into another home.

CCJ: Isn't that a waste of the home?

M: My first wife lives there now. I think she's comfortable as long as she stays in the front parlor and on the first floor.

CCJ: Your first wife...

M: Yes, my first wife and I had some conflicts and disagreements about how to manage the house; thank goodness I had access to many excellent alternative wives and was able to move on.

CCJ: Did you consider repairs for the home, or counseling for your marriage? If there were problems that could be solved with time and work--

M: Well, that would just be making excuses. There's no reason the house couldn't be excellent and my first wife couldn't be excellent. But they weren't. I just wanted access to other excellent options.

CCJ: So how many wives--

M: Well, my second wife was injured in a car accident, and my third just started to really show her age. I'm grateful that I had access to those other excellent options.

CCJ: But couldn't you just--

M: There's just no point in trying to fix things when you can have other, better things, instead. Leave the things that need fixing for other people. Poorer people.

CCJ: Don't some of your wives, or, um, optional possible wives, find this system sort of... of-putting?

M: Well, now you sound like several of my children. But as I've explained to them, if a relationship isn't serving my needs right now, today, then I see no reason to invest more time and effort in it. And time is limited. If I spent five minutes a day with each of my children, I'd never get anything else done. But I do want access to the option to have excellent children, so I have several on stand-by.

CCJ: Children?

M: Why ground them when you can just replace them?

CCJ: Why try to fix it when you can just replace it?

M: Exactly. Now we can-- oh, bother.

CCJ: Did you just spill some of that coffee on your pants?

M: I did. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to cut this short. I need to go buy a new outfit.

Teachers vs. Publishers' Reps

If there is one area where educators consistently fail to flex their muscles and stand up for themselves and their students, it is in dealing with publisher's reps.

Making the deal

I don't know if this is part of the general tendency of teachers to be good team players who don't want to be mean or unpleasant to anybody, but many publisher's reps must feel as if they've slipped through a portal into salesman's heaven. It's a dimension where used car salesmen say, "Well, the price on the sticker is probably as good as it gets, and you'd better snap this up right now," and the customer just says, "Oh, all right, then."

I have a teaching colleague who, for a decade before she returned to the classroom, ran the sales department of a newspaper in the New York Times Giant Chain O'Papers. When she gets done with a textbook salesperson, he doesn't know what hit him. "You'll need to grab these up right now," goes the pitch. "I can only make this price available for the next few weeks, so you have to go for it. Sign here."

"Here's how it's going to go," she replies. "We'll be deciding in a few months, after we look at all the available books out there. If we decide to go with you in a few months, it will be at a lower price than the one you just quoted me, and here's a list of how many teacher manuals and supplemental materials you're going to throw in for free. We'll be in touch."

It's a thing of beauty, and it is based on what so many administrators and teachers seem to forget-- in the sales relationship with textbook publishers, it is school districts that hold the power.

Instead, too many administrators and teachers "negotiate" like Oliver Twist or an unattractive teen in an Abercrombie & Fitch, acting as if we're just hoping that maybe the publisher will consent to sell us something. No. Wrong. Backwards. We do not have to bow and scrape for the privilege of being allowed to buy their product. Negotiate from power and for the love of God, remember that no matter how much they try to suggest otherwise, you are not making friends with the salesperson-- you are buying something from them on behalf of the taxpayers who ponied up the money in the first place. Get the best deal possible and please don't worry about making the salesperson sad-- he'll perk right up when he finally makes a sale.

Amateur Hour Professional Development

Once the product is purchased, then we get the next round of fun and games-- professional development during which a textbook salesperson tells teachers how to do their jobs.

Textbook publishers have developed a greater interest in following up their sales, figuring that if they can make sure that teachers are successful with, say, Pearson products, then Pearson loyalty and repeat business may ensue.

This leads to the awkward spectacle of trained professional educators sitting in a room and listening politely as some publisher's rep (who may have taught for a year, once, a while ago) explain how to "properly" teach addition or pronouns or whatever else the textbook contains. These sessions range from insulting to infuriating, and they can be one more example of too-polite teachers refusing to stand up and push back.

I'm not advocating rudeness. The publisher's rep is just the messenger, but always remember-- the line of communication runs both ways, and your reaction in the "training" session will be carried back to the mother ship. Your behavior in the PD will be the difference between Publisher McRepface telling the boss, "People out there love this stuff" and "Boss, we have got to get this tweaked."

So don't be an asshat, but don't just sit there smiling and nodding if you are thinking, "Well, that can't possibly work." Use your words. Use them politely, but firmly. But use them. Is your principal in the room? All the more reason to be vocal. Stand up for your students. Stand up for your profession. Never forget-- you are the person who actually teaches and nurtures students for a living, and that guy in the nice suit is the person who sells textbooks for a living.

The Education Monopoly?

I fell into a twitter conversation a while back with Neal McClusky, the education guy for the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinky tank originally founded as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1976, though in keeping with libertarian principles, the institute has had some spirited arguments with the Kochs over the independence of the organization.

Libertarians have never been a fan of Common Core, and they generally frown on anything that comes out of DC. But they do love them some choice. McClusky made this distinction today:

Libertarians don't dislike pub "education." Dislike pub "schooling" - gov monopoly - b/c freedom is essential 

I questioned the "monopoly" label-- public education would have to be the lousiest national monopoly ever, with thousands of locally-run branch offices that cannot coordinate to save their lives. McClusky clarified that schools are local monopolies, and that citizens are forced to pay taxes for schools assigned by location.

I am generally not unsympathetic to the libertarian view. I am doubtful that top-down decisions coming out of DC will be helpful (though I also know that historically, some state make terrible choices if not federally co-erced). Unlike many of my progressive friends, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be sad to see the Department of Education go away. But while I found libertarian ideas appealing when I was younger, I've come to recognize that in practice, libertarian ideas look a lot like survival of the richest and best-connected. Libertarians comfort themselves with the idea that such extra power is earned and deserved based on merit. I remain unconvinced.

So if we end the local school monopoly and open the field up to the power of individual choice, what happens? I raised the question of Newark, an "all-choice" system that has spectacularly ignored the voices of individuals. McClusky says that Newark is state control, not freedom.

Libertarians aren't anarchists; they believe some regulation is required. But if we have erased local geographic boundaries to end the tyranny of the zip code, doesn't that actually shift the locus of control toward DC instead of away? (And if we hate the tyranny of zip codes, does that mean we should also stop hounding undocumented workers for just being born on the wrong side of another imaginary border?)

So who would regulate the new open market? Would we just let anybody open up any school and accept students from any place? Or would we have some quality control, in which case who would provide it, enforce it, and oversee it? Who would make sure that every single student in the country had access to a quality education and not just be consigned to Hot Potato High School (established and maintained at minimal cost for all the students that no charter wants)? Who would insure that no school could just suddenly close up? I mean, it's great fun when the invisible hand of the marketplace sorts out the winners and losers, but individual students do not have that kind of time to waste ("Yes, I have no real high school education because the market was stabilizing itself during my teen years.")

The mistake is in imagining education as a commodity to be sold, when it is a community service to be provided. It has not grown top-down, but bottom-up. The geographic restraints are a natural result of that-- people banded together to provide the service of education to themselves and their neighbors. Most communities also have "monopolies" on fire departments, sewage systems, police services, and water. None of these services would be improved by allowing for competition across geographical boundaries. What's more, creating such competition would be tremendously wasteful economically. It costs more to operate two or twelve homes than it does to operate one.

It is true that some "local communities" are too large to be truly local. I suspect there is some upper limit past which size becomes more of a problem than a help. I have no idea where that line is crossed, but I'll bet that New York, Chicago and many other metro systems are on the wrong side of it.

I'm aware that some libertarians are actually okay with some extra cost because they see the availability of choice as a virtue in and of itself. But in most communities, when people see that they are paying extra for redundant services, the pressure of the invisible hand is for consolidation. Certainly as individual districts find themselves cash-strapped across the country (often because many of their resources have been diverted to charter-choice schools), their reaction is to close existing schools, not open new ones.

I'm not an economist (but then most economists don't know jack about about education and that doesn't keep them from making pronouncements about it) but I'd love to read a scholarly look at the relationship between free markets and monopolies, because in my reading of history it certainly looks like the former often leads to the latter, and the process always involves government stepping in on the side of The People (hello, Ma Bell breakup) or on the side of the most powerful players (hi there, Affordable Care Act). 

At any rate, what McClusky and friends call a monopoly, I call a delicate balance between democracy, market dynamics, civic responsibility, and federal-vs-local powers in the act of providing a vital community service that we, as a country, long ago decided we would provide to every single citizen.

When a corporation starts winning in a free market, its priority does not become to preserve the free market, but to take it over, dominate it, and come as close to a monopoly as possible. I see three possibilities here:

A) Our current system-- a loosely connected network of locally-operated service providers.

B) A system of private corporations providing the service, eventually dominated by a handful, or even just one, corporation that controls most of the market (though certain unprofitable customer bases would be left to fend for themselves).

C) A heavily-regulated market created when the government steps in to keep B from going Too Far.

The dream of a vast network of private corporations locked in robust competition that pushes all to greater and greater levels of excellence-- it's a lovely dream, but I cannot think of a single industry or sector of the economy in which that has ever happened. Not one.

NC: Driving Teachers Away Still Working

North Carolina's leaders have made a long and strong commitment to ending teaching as a viable career in their state, and teachers continue to get the message.

Just to recap. NC legislators tried to get rid of tenure, but there were these dumb laws and things that got in their way. Then, since they couldn't manage that, the plucky leaders decided to hold teacher pay hostage-- an easy trick because North Carolina teachers have been losing ground in both real dollar wages and, well, any other kind of dollar wages, for almost a decade. The legislature offered a deal-- teachers could have a raise (just one) if they gave up job security. They've also attempted merit pay, offering a big whopping $500 bonus for teachers of students with good test scores.

On top of all that, North Carolina has also instituted destructive classroom policies. NC is one of the states where we'll flunk your third grader if she can't pass the standardized test, despite a boatload of evidence that such policies do more harm than good. Plus, North Carolina has tried to become an Ohio-style charter school paradise with the kind of oversight-free approach that lets even the most obvious grifter strike it rich.

By spring of 2014, reports showed that the program to drive teachers out of NC was working well. It wasn't looking any better the following fall. NC is bad enough that to some teachers, Georgia is looking like a better option-- but when you're 42nd in teacher and plummeting regularly, that's what you get.

Well, here's a new report to let us know that things are still looking bad.

Station WBTV reports that teachers rallied at the state capital last week to speak out about the NC budget, which includes cuts to education money, resulting in various cuts including a possible 8,500 teacher assistants. The state's second-largest school district has seen almost 1,000 teachers resign for this coming fall. The state may be bleeding classroom professionals faster than any transfusion could hope to replace-- and no transfusion is coming soon, because enrollment in NC teacher training programs is down twenty percent over three years.

The report indicates that teachers are learning the fine art of one-to-one lobbying. It remains to be seen if they can make an impression in time to save the teaching profession in their state. It is true that teachers don't go into the profession in order to make money-- but we do like to make a difference, and we do like to make our bill payments. As long as North Carolina makes it more and more difficult for teachers to do either of those things, they will continue to be strong contenders in the race to the bottom.