Bellwether Education Partners is a reformy thinky tank that often stands in the shadows of the Fordham Institute. If I were to characterize the differences (beyond size-- Bellwether is a more modestly sized operation) it would be that in the great thinky tank balancing act between thinking and trying to sell something, Bellwether tilts more toward thinking and Fordham tilts toward selling. Bellwether is back in the office reading Carfax reports and meditating on the nature of transportation while Fordham is out on the lot working the hard sell.
But this morning Bellwther hit the ground running with a new report, "Pacts Americana: Balancing National Interest, State Autonomy and Educational Accountability." The paper, by Chad Aldeman, Kelly Robson and Andy Smarick, raises some points worth talking about even though (spoiler alert) I think they get several things very wrong.
It's a thirty page document, but I've read it so that you don't have to. As always, you can thank me later.
Introduction
The paper starts with a recap of accountability over the past thirteen years. NCLB gave us a national reporting-accounting system, but congressional disagreement-lock opened the door to waivers, a "de-facto ESEA reauthorization," which opened the door to multiple accountability measures. The writers' takeaway from all of this is to view all of these various structures as deals between the state and federal government, and that's going to be the lens through which we consider accountability in this paper. I can go along with that for the moment.
Evolution of Federal Accountability
ESEA started out as a way to fund inputs, with little or no accountability measures attached. Under Nixon, the National Institute of Education was launched to see if the feds were getting any bang for their bucks; this gave us the birth of the NAEP tests. By the seventies, more folks wanted to know if the giant mountain of money was doing anything useful, egged on by the 1977 SAT investigation into why SAT scores were falling. The correct answer was "because more students of lower ability are taking it," but folks decided to push accountability anyway, getting us our first "minimums." By the early eighties, the feds were handing out block grants, and we got the premier chicken littling of A Nation at Risk.
NAR kicked off a new accountability era, with the search on for a good test-driven model. From there it's a hop-skip-jump to Clinton-era Goals 2000 and the Improving America's Schools Act, which was kind of like NCLB but without actual teeth-- states were to implement test-based accountability and measure AYP, and if they came up short the feds gave them a Stern Look.
In this context, NCLB looks like the feds simply saying, "Yeah, we say keep doing that stuff, but now we're serious." But it turned out that NCLB's tendency to be inflexible, brutish and stupid did not endear it to anybody. Cue backlash, including a desire to get the feds to back off, and our current mess.
That's the Bellwether History O'Accountability, and it's not a bad one. Let's move on and look at the lessons of the NCLB era.
Lesson 1: Test-based accountability has produced positive academic outcomes.
Man, I thought I'd get further into this before I had to flat-out disagree, but here we are already. There's a lot of research cited here; I'm not going to address it directly or in detail, because I think by looking at this stuff in detail obscures the simple truth of it, and it's in looking at the simple truth that we see why this is just dead wrong.
Here's what the research shows:
By focusing on getting higher standardized test scores, we are able to get higher standardized test scores.
The "positive academic outcomes" mentioned in the heading are really only one single outcome-- higher standardized test scores. That's it. That's all. There are no measures here of future life success of students, ability to better function in the real world, better college achievement level, better professional success, improved quality of life, deeper critical understanding of the material- nor are there any academic outcomes that aren't math and reading related.
So if you think the purpose of school is to get students to produce higher standardized test scores, then yes, this lesson is a True Thing. But if you think that's a narrow, cramped, tiny, inadequate, probably inaccurate measure of student achievement, then lesson one is no lesson at all.
Lesson 2: States vary in their implementation and success.
Again, we're talking about test scores. And since nobody knows how to convert a raw test score into a reliable proxy for educational achievement (we check our work against... what?), every state comes up with its own method-- and since the results were linked to high stakes and big money, states predictably infected the methods with means of blunting the impact of low numbers. These infections ranged from Mildly Creative to Baldfaced Baloney.
Oddly, the writers omit the biggest source of such state-level shenanigans--- under NCLB, every single school in the country was destined to fail. By 2014, given the 100% above average requirement of the law, every single school in America was either going to be failing or cheating. And so as those dates loomed closer and Congress displayed its inability to do anything about it, states and districts did whatever they could do to postpone their inevitable failure. It's the rule demonstrated with fatal consequences in Mao's China-- impossible goals plus strong punishment for failure equals lying.
The authors also do not spend any time talking about variation within the states. If standards and reporting systems really do bring everyone into line and foster achievement, shouldn't we see that within the states, at least, the NCLB era decreased the spread of achievement within states? Did that happen? I think not.
Lesson 3: State flexibility is essential
One final, critical lesson from NCLB is that state flexibility is essential. States differ widely due to their unique histories, demographics, traditions, politics, and more. The federal government should not—cannot—implement a one-size-fits-all model across such widely varying contexts.
That sounds about right. The authors cite the tradition of local control and the differences between states. They also note that top-down programs imposed from on high do not engender enthusiastic and fruitful implementation by the people on the ground. And finally, the idea of a one-size-fits-all model is just unicorn farming. There is no such thing, and any attempt to create and implement such a thing will result in failure.
In fact, these guys say that the Obama waivers were the right move-- and may not have gone far enough in terms of returning control to the states.
Funny piece of trivia
I just noticed-- and did a document search to confirm-- that the phrase 'common core" does not appear anywhere within this paper.
The New Idea: Compacts
There follows a few pages of chartage, laying out the differences between NCLB, Waivers, and Compacts. Most of what the chart says is covered in the following, but if you're intrigued by any of this, I suggest giving the charts a look.
Principle 1: States must have flexibility to tailor their education policies to their unique local contexts.
Even as I agree with this principle, I know what the problem with it can be. The "unique local context" of some states, for instance, is "we don't want to spend more than $1.98 on education" or "we prefer not to fund schools for poor/black/brown students." And Bellwether's idea of a range of approaches has a familiar reformy ring to it:
Some have embraced non-district chartering; others are adopting private school choice programs and others still have created statewide “extraordinary authority” entities like Louisiana’s Recovery School District.
Compacts would come with some structure and requirements. States should show they have college and career readiness standards in place (sigh). And they would need means of identifying and "addressing" pockets of incorrigible suckage. They will need a plan of attack, but the plan must be all theirs.
The writers recognize that such flexibility takes us back to Lesson 2. They suggest three ways to head this off by requiring approval from either 1) the secretary of ed, 2) a peer review group or 3) a panel of experts. These all have their own sets of drawbacks, all underlining the futility of such a system.
Here, in short form, is your problem. If your system rests on the idea that somewhere, somehow, some place the system rest on an absolute immutable objectively verifiable vision of exactly what a school system must be and do, you are doomed because your journey, no matter how complex and far-ranging, still ends at a unicorn farm. Yes, I do have some ideas about what you do instead, but rather than add another thousand words to this piece, I'll just say that step one is accepting that you can't have perfectly objective and absolute standards of accountability any more than you can come up with such standards for kisses or marriage, because ultimately education is a web of relationships, and all relationships are primarily shaped by the people involved. I have more, but let's not wander too far off track.
Principle 2: State accountability should focus on outcomes, not inputs.
Again, I get this. A teacher whose classroom approach is, "Hey, I cover the material, and they either get it or they don't. Not my problem. I put it out there." is not a good teacher.
But there remains a huge huge huge HUGE problem with the focus on outputs school-- we still don't have any decent way to measure the outputs that matter.
But there would need to be guidance for the creation of goals. For example, goals should include clear measures of educational achievement, in particular for low-income and historically underserved populations of students. States might be required to create goals related to graduation rates but states could also develop other goals. For example, states could decide to measure the development of noncognitive skills, the percentage of fourth graders reporting a challenging and supportive school environment or the percent of high school students taking AP or IB classes.
"Educational achievement" still just means "test scores on limited one-time standardized tests," and if you ask a hundred parents what they want out of their child's school, "Get him to score well on standardized tests" is not going to be high on the list. I will admit that it is creeping up the list, primarily because reformsters have successfully hammered away at the idea that such tests are a measure of educational quality. I'm unimpressed. A well-repeated lie is still a lie.
We don't know how to provide a simple, clear objective measure of how good a school is. Like pornography or the woman who steals our heart, we know it when we see it, but we can't lay out a set of clear, objective measures of it. That's bad enough, but when we try to fake it, we end up screwing up the system and providing more examples of Campbell's Law in action.
I decide I want to measure meal quality in restaurants. I can't really measure easily a meal's goodness, so I notice that being visually appealing with a nice mix of colors and textures usually goes with it, so I measure those. If I offer rewards just to people who score high and punishment to those who don't, pretty soon I've got a world of chefs who are choosing food-ish materials based on how they look and not how they taste, and my meals taste lousy.
Bad, inexact, incorrect, incomplete measurements warp the processes that they measure. That's where we are right now. We aren't measuring the outcomes that matter.
Principle 3: Federal accountability should focus on continuous improvement.
States should have to re-up their compact with the feds, and part of that process should be showing how they're going to do better. Well, yes. Everyone who actually works in education gets that continuous improvement is part of the gig. I've often said that any teacher worth her salt can immediately list for you the areas where she is weak and is working to improve.
That, actually, was one of the immediate signs that the Common Core are crap-- there is absolutely no mechanism in place for revising, improving and upgrading them. Nothing good in education is like that. Nothing that is high quality in education stands still.
This principle does underline the problem with compacts-- they keep the feds in the driver's seat. We can institute everything that the paper talks about and still end up with a federal government that says, "No, if you don't check off the following items the way we want them, no compact for you." Which would put us right back where we are with waivers.
Negotiating the Compact
In fact, one of my big points of curiosity-- how do these things get settled? How would my state of Pennsylvania, which is incapable of settling the budget-connected policy issues even remotely on time negotiate a compact with the federal government, which is now eight years late rewriting ESEA? If they can't agree on the terms of a compact, what happens? If the answer is, as I suspect, the feds just put their own default in place, then what pressure do they feel to negotiate when they will "win" in the end anyway?
Just wondering how all this will work.
Bottom line
Ignoring for a moment that Bellwether's measure of excellence defaults include "does it help support more charters and choice?" the biggest issue remains that this whole system depends on an objective, reliable, accurate measure of how well schools are doing, and that means that the system might as well depend on a conference of yetis meeting on the head of a pin while dancing angels cater lunch with hippogryph meat. That is a huge problem, and the paper doesn't address it at all.
On the other hand, the question of how to balance state freedom, local control, federal oversight, and some kind of accountability-- that's a good question. A much better question than "how many standardized tests should we have" or "how can we scrap tenure" or "what are some good ways to take over public schools and give them to private operators."
This question at least addresses some of the fundamental issues lurking behind many of the surface skirmishes in education. While I disagree with Bellwether hugely on many of the answers and most of the solutions, I give them props for asking a good question. And the title's cute.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Monday, June 29, 2015
FEE & the Honesty/Proficiency Gap
Oh, how quickly the talking points pass by.
Just a month ago, we were treated to the Honesty Gap, a gap that was revealed by comparing the percentage of students who beat the NAEP cut score to the number who hit the cut score for states. This is a not-very-valid comparison for any number of reasons, but to keep things brief (unless you're a link follower), I'll just mention one.
A 2007 NCES study followed students who had taken the NAEP and discovered that of those who had scored "basic"-- that would be "not proficient" and therefor "not ready for college or career" according to the current gappy discussion-- about 50% of those not-ready-for-college students successfully completed college. So right off the bat, saying that only students who made the "proficient or better" cut on the NAEP are proficient enough for college-- that statement would appear to suffer from an accuracy gap.
Tell us more!
Be that as it may, Honesty Gap was going to be the hot new buzz term. And then it wasn't. The initiative, backed by the Fordham and the Chamber and other of the usual crowd, even had its own hashtag. But now #honestygap hasn't been used supportively by anyone since the 23rd, and then five days before that, and...well, about sixty times total in all of June. For comparison, #Ilikepie has forty-two June mentions and #beiberdefensesquad has about thirty in the last twenty-four hours.
But fear not! The Foundation for Excellence in Education has stepped in. You will recall that FEE is the school privatization advocacy group that was run by Jeb Bush and occasionally launches new PR blitzes to varying degrees of effect or occasionally announces another piece of the sky falling (and only privatizing education can help). Bush actually stepped away from official leadership of the group, handing the com over to Condoleezza Rice so that he could try for the Bush Oval Office hat trick. I have actually wasted a chunk of time sitting here scouring the interwebs for something-- anything-- that Rice has done with the office after rising to it, but I cannot find a thing. All of the heavy lifting (and FEE comes up with some really large piles of shtuff to lift) is still being done by Patricia LeVesque, who has her own special brand of Umbridgian baloney unloading style.
So, anyway. FEE has renamed the gap-- it is no longer an Honesty Gap, but a Proficiency Gap!
Like the Honesty Gap before it, Proficiency Gap gets its own website. And it's here that we'll learn everything we could want to know. Well, almost everything. Let's travel through the five informative, slick, definitely not part of the free blogspot layout package, screens.
Let's define our terms.
Being proficient means a student has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and associated analytical skills.
Well, that sounds like a useful thing to know, as well as an impossible thing to measure. But let's just remember this-- that the tool we're using to measure this is a standardized test covering reading and math. When we say the student has "demonstrated mastery of the subject matter," the only subjects that we're talking about are reading and math. That's it.
Do you want to determine if young Chris is ready to major in music, study biology, or become a welder? Too bad-- none of those things are covered by the instruments that we are going to pretend measure proficiency. And that's just the issues we have before we even get to discussing what "mastery" means or what kind of 'real world situations" we're talking about or what's implied by "associated analytical skills."
But let's not forget-- what "proficiency" actually means is "high-enough test score on a single standardized test covering math and reading."
Why do we measure it?
To have an honest, objective benchmark of what a child is learning to ensure that every student is prepared for success in college, a career or the military.
FEE isn't going to let the "honest" thing go entirely, because reformsters are attached to the notion that the public school system is founded on lies and deception. I am impressed, however, that a benchmark exists that would allow us to know with certainty that a student is ready for those things. That would be awesome. Every college, prospective employer, and branch of the military could use it and be guaranteed that they would never, ever, accept/hire/enlist someone who couldn't cut it ever again. That is awesome news.
Boy, oh boy-- I just hope the next slide tells us HOW we are able to pull off such a difficult, complex benchmarking thingy.
What does proficiency cut score mean?
Oh, disappointment.
A proficiency cut score is an actual number (score) on an assessment that draws the line determining where a student is proficient.
FEE would like you to know that some states draw the line too low, giving students a false sense of confidence when they actually suck and their teachers are big lying liars. There's a cool graphic showing a Greek column on which state score and NEP score lines have been drawn at different heights. Boo, state line drawers!
There is also an option to draw up the (beautifully rendered) stats for your state, so you can see how badly you're being lied to.
What is the issue with proficiency measurement?
If you guessed "that we have no idea how to measure proficiency," the BRRZZT sorry, but you failed. The issue is (somewhat redundantly) that states and NAEP define proficiency differently.
Therefore, state-reported proficiency is not equivalent to proficiency on NAEP. This is referred to as the “proficiency gap”.
Now, I might have called that a "testing gap" or a "test design gap" or just plain "test score" gap or even "proof that the state tests are crap gap" or even possibly "proof that cut scores are arbitrary and don't really reflect a damn thing" which is not technically a gap, so I'll deduct three style points from myself.
Why does proficiency matter?
Here come some factoids. Too many students do poorly on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test. There are too many manufacturing jobs begging for qualified applicants. Too many ACT test-takers came up as Not College Ready. And too many students have to spend a ton of money on remedial college courses.
Remember-- proficiency is "a high-enough test score on a single standardized test covering math and reading."
And yet-- if our students just had higher PARCC or SBA or Various Mongrel Test scores, that would make them ready for the army, ready to be welders, and never needing a remedial course whether they attended Harvard University or the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. Just two scores-- one math and one reading-- can tell us all that. My God-- but we live in a magical age!!
What question did we not ask?
We never did ask or answer how we determine proficiency. I don't mean how we set cut scores (though we didn't really answer that, either) but how do we determine whether a student is proficient or not? How do we measure it? Apparently the NAEP folks know exactly how to do it, so what's their secret? How do we determine that a student is ready to study at any college in the country or do any job in the country or serve in any branch of the military? I've plumbed the mysteries of proficiency before:
What could it even mean to call someone a proficient reader? Does it mean she can finish an entire novel? Does she have to understand it? Does she have to finish it in less than a month? A week? A year? Can it be any novel? Does it have to be a modern one, or can it be a classic? If I can get through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but not Moby Dick, am I still a proficient reader? If I read Huck Finn, but I just think it's a boy's adventure novel, and I proficient, or do I have to grasp the levels of satire to be proficient? Must I also be able to see symbolism tied to the search for identity in order to be proficient? What about poetry? Does someone have to be able to read poetry to be proficient? Any poetry? From any period? Is a proficient reader moved by what she reads, or does reading proficiency have to do only with the mechanics and thinky parts? And should proficient reader be able to read and follow instructions, say, for assembling a new media center? Would a proficient reader be able to follow the instructions even if the writer of the instructions was not a proficient English language writer? Can a proficient reader deal with any non-fiction reading? How about, say, Julian Jaynes Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? Can a proficient reader read a whole Glenn Beck book and spot which parts are crap? Because that was some pretty heavy stuff! How about legal documents? Does a proficient reader read legal documents well enough to understand them sort of, or completely, or well enough to mount a capable counter-argument to the legal document? Would I count as proficient if I only ever read chunks of reading that were all 1000 words or less (like, say, blog posts), or does proficiency mean dealing with longer, more involved stuff? If college readiness is part of proficiency, does that mean a proficient reader is ready to do the assigned reading for a class on Italian Literature at Harvard or a class on Engineering at MIT or How To Talk Good at West Bogswallup Junior College? Will a proficient reader get A's? C's? And speaking of levels of ability, would a proficient reader read all of a Dan Brown or Stephanie Myers novel and know that it was terribly written? Would a proficient reader have made it all the way through this unnecessarily lengthy paragraph, or would a proficient reader have figured out that I was using bulk to make a rhetorical point and just skipped to the end?
Or does "proficient" just mean "able to manage the dribs and drabs of reading-related tasks that we can easily work into a standardized test"?
I'm still wondering. It's not that I don't think there are levels of how well-educated a student is, or not. But when reformsters start throwing around words in ways that don't actually mean anything, I suspect they're busy trying to cloud an issue rather than illuminate it. I suspect they're trying to lay down a smokescreen to cover whatever piece of thievery they're up to now.
And "proficient" is a big, thick smokescreen, billowy and opaque and yet possessing no substance whatsoever.
Is there a proficiency gap?
Between what and what? If the assertion is that we have a gap between the results of one lousy standardized test and another different lousy standardized test, then, yeah, I guess so, but so what? If the gap is between what we tell students they can accomplish and what they actually are able to accomplish-- well, where's the evidence? Oh, I know what reformsters believe-- that all the poverty in the country is the result of students who couldn't score high enough on a standardized test. This strikes me as highly unlikely, though I get that there are many possible explanations for and solutions to widespread poverty. But if we've had the most terrible education system in the world, and we should fear that because it will lead to failure and collapse, I just feel as if the country isn't doing as badly as all these chicken littling privatizers want to say, and where I do see failure, I see problems of racism and systemic barriers to class mobility. Oddly enough, race and poverty do not appear as issues on the proficiency gap site.
So if FEE is declaring that states need to do more about closing the resource gap and the opportunity gap and the stupid racist barriers gap, that would be swell. But I've read enough FEE materials to suspect that they're chicken littling in one more act of "There's a terrible emergency, so you must do as we say!!" The Honesty Gap folks wanted us all to buy more PARCC and SBA tests, and Common Core harder, as well as handing over more public schools to private interests. Oh, and stop opting out. This seems like more of the same old stuff aimed primarily at helping privatizers close their revenue gaps.
Just a month ago, we were treated to the Honesty Gap, a gap that was revealed by comparing the percentage of students who beat the NAEP cut score to the number who hit the cut score for states. This is a not-very-valid comparison for any number of reasons, but to keep things brief (unless you're a link follower), I'll just mention one.
A 2007 NCES study followed students who had taken the NAEP and discovered that of those who had scored "basic"-- that would be "not proficient" and therefor "not ready for college or career" according to the current gappy discussion-- about 50% of those not-ready-for-college students successfully completed college. So right off the bat, saying that only students who made the "proficient or better" cut on the NAEP are proficient enough for college-- that statement would appear to suffer from an accuracy gap.
Tell us more!
Be that as it may, Honesty Gap was going to be the hot new buzz term. And then it wasn't. The initiative, backed by the Fordham and the Chamber and other of the usual crowd, even had its own hashtag. But now #honestygap hasn't been used supportively by anyone since the 23rd, and then five days before that, and...well, about sixty times total in all of June. For comparison, #Ilikepie has forty-two June mentions and #beiberdefensesquad has about thirty in the last twenty-four hours.
But fear not! The Foundation for Excellence in Education has stepped in. You will recall that FEE is the school privatization advocacy group that was run by Jeb Bush and occasionally launches new PR blitzes to varying degrees of effect or occasionally announces another piece of the sky falling (and only privatizing education can help). Bush actually stepped away from official leadership of the group, handing the com over to Condoleezza Rice so that he could try for the Bush Oval Office hat trick. I have actually wasted a chunk of time sitting here scouring the interwebs for something-- anything-- that Rice has done with the office after rising to it, but I cannot find a thing. All of the heavy lifting (and FEE comes up with some really large piles of shtuff to lift) is still being done by Patricia LeVesque, who has her own special brand of Umbridgian baloney unloading style.
So, anyway. FEE has renamed the gap-- it is no longer an Honesty Gap, but a Proficiency Gap!
Like the Honesty Gap before it, Proficiency Gap gets its own website. And it's here that we'll learn everything we could want to know. Well, almost everything. Let's travel through the five informative, slick, definitely not part of the free blogspot layout package, screens.
Let's define our terms.
Being proficient means a student has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and associated analytical skills.
Well, that sounds like a useful thing to know, as well as an impossible thing to measure. But let's just remember this-- that the tool we're using to measure this is a standardized test covering reading and math. When we say the student has "demonstrated mastery of the subject matter," the only subjects that we're talking about are reading and math. That's it.
Do you want to determine if young Chris is ready to major in music, study biology, or become a welder? Too bad-- none of those things are covered by the instruments that we are going to pretend measure proficiency. And that's just the issues we have before we even get to discussing what "mastery" means or what kind of 'real world situations" we're talking about or what's implied by "associated analytical skills."
But let's not forget-- what "proficiency" actually means is "high-enough test score on a single standardized test covering math and reading."
Why do we measure it?
To have an honest, objective benchmark of what a child is learning to ensure that every student is prepared for success in college, a career or the military.
FEE isn't going to let the "honest" thing go entirely, because reformsters are attached to the notion that the public school system is founded on lies and deception. I am impressed, however, that a benchmark exists that would allow us to know with certainty that a student is ready for those things. That would be awesome. Every college, prospective employer, and branch of the military could use it and be guaranteed that they would never, ever, accept/hire/enlist someone who couldn't cut it ever again. That is awesome news.
Boy, oh boy-- I just hope the next slide tells us HOW we are able to pull off such a difficult, complex benchmarking thingy.
What does proficiency cut score mean?
Oh, disappointment.
A proficiency cut score is an actual number (score) on an assessment that draws the line determining where a student is proficient.
FEE would like you to know that some states draw the line too low, giving students a false sense of confidence when they actually suck and their teachers are big lying liars. There's a cool graphic showing a Greek column on which state score and NEP score lines have been drawn at different heights. Boo, state line drawers!
There is also an option to draw up the (beautifully rendered) stats for your state, so you can see how badly you're being lied to.
What is the issue with proficiency measurement?
If you guessed "that we have no idea how to measure proficiency," the BRRZZT sorry, but you failed. The issue is (somewhat redundantly) that states and NAEP define proficiency differently.
Therefore, state-reported proficiency is not equivalent to proficiency on NAEP. This is referred to as the “proficiency gap”.
Now, I might have called that a "testing gap" or a "test design gap" or just plain "test score" gap or even "proof that the state tests are crap gap" or even possibly "proof that cut scores are arbitrary and don't really reflect a damn thing" which is not technically a gap, so I'll deduct three style points from myself.
Why does proficiency matter?
Here come some factoids. Too many students do poorly on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test. There are too many manufacturing jobs begging for qualified applicants. Too many ACT test-takers came up as Not College Ready. And too many students have to spend a ton of money on remedial college courses.
Remember-- proficiency is "a high-enough test score on a single standardized test covering math and reading."
And yet-- if our students just had higher PARCC or SBA or Various Mongrel Test scores, that would make them ready for the army, ready to be welders, and never needing a remedial course whether they attended Harvard University or the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. Just two scores-- one math and one reading-- can tell us all that. My God-- but we live in a magical age!!
What question did we not ask?
We never did ask or answer how we determine proficiency. I don't mean how we set cut scores (though we didn't really answer that, either) but how do we determine whether a student is proficient or not? How do we measure it? Apparently the NAEP folks know exactly how to do it, so what's their secret? How do we determine that a student is ready to study at any college in the country or do any job in the country or serve in any branch of the military? I've plumbed the mysteries of proficiency before:
What could it even mean to call someone a proficient reader? Does it mean she can finish an entire novel? Does she have to understand it? Does she have to finish it in less than a month? A week? A year? Can it be any novel? Does it have to be a modern one, or can it be a classic? If I can get through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but not Moby Dick, am I still a proficient reader? If I read Huck Finn, but I just think it's a boy's adventure novel, and I proficient, or do I have to grasp the levels of satire to be proficient? Must I also be able to see symbolism tied to the search for identity in order to be proficient? What about poetry? Does someone have to be able to read poetry to be proficient? Any poetry? From any period? Is a proficient reader moved by what she reads, or does reading proficiency have to do only with the mechanics and thinky parts? And should proficient reader be able to read and follow instructions, say, for assembling a new media center? Would a proficient reader be able to follow the instructions even if the writer of the instructions was not a proficient English language writer? Can a proficient reader deal with any non-fiction reading? How about, say, Julian Jaynes Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? Can a proficient reader read a whole Glenn Beck book and spot which parts are crap? Because that was some pretty heavy stuff! How about legal documents? Does a proficient reader read legal documents well enough to understand them sort of, or completely, or well enough to mount a capable counter-argument to the legal document? Would I count as proficient if I only ever read chunks of reading that were all 1000 words or less (like, say, blog posts), or does proficiency mean dealing with longer, more involved stuff? If college readiness is part of proficiency, does that mean a proficient reader is ready to do the assigned reading for a class on Italian Literature at Harvard or a class on Engineering at MIT or How To Talk Good at West Bogswallup Junior College? Will a proficient reader get A's? C's? And speaking of levels of ability, would a proficient reader read all of a Dan Brown or Stephanie Myers novel and know that it was terribly written? Would a proficient reader have made it all the way through this unnecessarily lengthy paragraph, or would a proficient reader have figured out that I was using bulk to make a rhetorical point and just skipped to the end?
Or does "proficient" just mean "able to manage the dribs and drabs of reading-related tasks that we can easily work into a standardized test"?
I'm still wondering. It's not that I don't think there are levels of how well-educated a student is, or not. But when reformsters start throwing around words in ways that don't actually mean anything, I suspect they're busy trying to cloud an issue rather than illuminate it. I suspect they're trying to lay down a smokescreen to cover whatever piece of thievery they're up to now.
And "proficient" is a big, thick smokescreen, billowy and opaque and yet possessing no substance whatsoever.
Is there a proficiency gap?
Between what and what? If the assertion is that we have a gap between the results of one lousy standardized test and another different lousy standardized test, then, yeah, I guess so, but so what? If the gap is between what we tell students they can accomplish and what they actually are able to accomplish-- well, where's the evidence? Oh, I know what reformsters believe-- that all the poverty in the country is the result of students who couldn't score high enough on a standardized test. This strikes me as highly unlikely, though I get that there are many possible explanations for and solutions to widespread poverty. But if we've had the most terrible education system in the world, and we should fear that because it will lead to failure and collapse, I just feel as if the country isn't doing as badly as all these chicken littling privatizers want to say, and where I do see failure, I see problems of racism and systemic barriers to class mobility. Oddly enough, race and poverty do not appear as issues on the proficiency gap site.
So if FEE is declaring that states need to do more about closing the resource gap and the opportunity gap and the stupid racist barriers gap, that would be swell. But I've read enough FEE materials to suspect that they're chicken littling in one more act of "There's a terrible emergency, so you must do as we say!!" The Honesty Gap folks wanted us all to buy more PARCC and SBA tests, and Common Core harder, as well as handing over more public schools to private interests. Oh, and stop opting out. This seems like more of the same old stuff aimed primarily at helping privatizers close their revenue gaps.
Cyberschool, Truancy, and Abuse
Pennsylvania is a playground for cyber-charters, and many cybers have been happy to play there (at considerable cost to local districts). And child advocates have noticed an issue that affects a small number of students in critical ways.
I want to be clear before we get into this-- we're talking about a systemic problem, but also an issue that appears exceptionally rarely.
According to an early-June report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh School's solicitor Ira Weiss and pediatrician Mary Carrasco talked about the issue of reporting truancy after the beating death of Donovan McKee, an eleven-year-old who attended a cyber-charter. Since that case, two more children have died in similar cases.
Carrasco notes that one of things that cyber schools do not have are mandatory reporters. If a child shows up in my classroom with questionable bruises, I am required by law to pass that on to my boss and/or file a report with the state. Cyber teachers, of course, cannot. This leaves a small but scary loophole. As Carrasco tells the PPG:
“I’m not suggesting that every child in cyber charter school is at risk, but there are kids who are taken out of regular school precisely because the parents don’t want someone to see them and that’s a problem,” said Dr. Carrasco, also a member of the child death review team in Allegheny County.
That is not an easy loophole to plug-- but part of it can be addressed, and Carrasco,Weiss and State Representative Dom Costa have been trying to address the truancy piece with some legislation requiring cyber charters to deal more aggressively with truancy. In a PA school, three unexcused absences will get you an official call and a report sent up the chain of school administrator command; in more aggressive districts, even one absence will get you a phone call home. Even small schools districts such as mine employ a truancy officer.
We think of truancy in terms of getting those darn kids to school, but it's also an issue of making sure that the child does not disappear through the cracks. If Donovan McKee had been in a public school, either his repeated abuse would have been noted and reported, or his continued absence would have been followed up on.
Truancy in cyber school is an issue. Attendance is taken simply enough-- students have to log in each day. Of course, to be exact, somebody has to put in the child's login name and password. But even when students are reported absent, all the cybers are required to do is pass an over-three-day absence report to the home district.
The proposed amendment would require cyber teachers to notify their administrator and basically put the requirement to enforce truancy laws on the cyber charter. This is not unheard of-- Minnesota actually implemented a fairly aggressive anti-cyber-truancy program years ago. And Pennsylvania cybers are not unsympathetic to the need.
Bob Fayfich, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, reports that many charter operators get it, and "welcome that kind of accountability and authority." But they are concerned that this give cybers more work to do just as the state is getting ready to cut charter revenue.
“The problem is there’s an increased responsibility while cutting resources,” he said.
He should probably not try that plea for sympathy around any public school employees, who have regularly acquired more responsibilities even as Fayfich's members are busily sucking the blood out of public schools. I think I speak for all public school employees when I say, "Big frickin' waaah."
Forcing Pennsylvania cybers to deal with truancy more immediately, directly and effectively would be better for everyone. It does cybers no good to be known as a haven for truants and slackers, and yet there is a small but significant sliver of cyber-school sign-ups that are about a frustrated parent or student who don't to deal with truancy officers and fines any more.
I cannot say this enough-- I have absolutely no doubt that the vast majority of cyber school parents are NOT child abusers or even just truancy enablers. But clearly there are steps we can take in Pennsylvania to better involve cyber-charters in the critical work of keeping students safe and accountable.
I want to be clear before we get into this-- we're talking about a systemic problem, but also an issue that appears exceptionally rarely.
According to an early-June report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh School's solicitor Ira Weiss and pediatrician Mary Carrasco talked about the issue of reporting truancy after the beating death of Donovan McKee, an eleven-year-old who attended a cyber-charter. Since that case, two more children have died in similar cases.
Carrasco notes that one of things that cyber schools do not have are mandatory reporters. If a child shows up in my classroom with questionable bruises, I am required by law to pass that on to my boss and/or file a report with the state. Cyber teachers, of course, cannot. This leaves a small but scary loophole. As Carrasco tells the PPG:
“I’m not suggesting that every child in cyber charter school is at risk, but there are kids who are taken out of regular school precisely because the parents don’t want someone to see them and that’s a problem,” said Dr. Carrasco, also a member of the child death review team in Allegheny County.
That is not an easy loophole to plug-- but part of it can be addressed, and Carrasco,Weiss and State Representative Dom Costa have been trying to address the truancy piece with some legislation requiring cyber charters to deal more aggressively with truancy. In a PA school, three unexcused absences will get you an official call and a report sent up the chain of school administrator command; in more aggressive districts, even one absence will get you a phone call home. Even small schools districts such as mine employ a truancy officer.
We think of truancy in terms of getting those darn kids to school, but it's also an issue of making sure that the child does not disappear through the cracks. If Donovan McKee had been in a public school, either his repeated abuse would have been noted and reported, or his continued absence would have been followed up on.
Truancy in cyber school is an issue. Attendance is taken simply enough-- students have to log in each day. Of course, to be exact, somebody has to put in the child's login name and password. But even when students are reported absent, all the cybers are required to do is pass an over-three-day absence report to the home district.
The proposed amendment would require cyber teachers to notify their administrator and basically put the requirement to enforce truancy laws on the cyber charter. This is not unheard of-- Minnesota actually implemented a fairly aggressive anti-cyber-truancy program years ago. And Pennsylvania cybers are not unsympathetic to the need.
Bob Fayfich, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, reports that many charter operators get it, and "welcome that kind of accountability and authority." But they are concerned that this give cybers more work to do just as the state is getting ready to cut charter revenue.
“The problem is there’s an increased responsibility while cutting resources,” he said.
He should probably not try that plea for sympathy around any public school employees, who have regularly acquired more responsibilities even as Fayfich's members are busily sucking the blood out of public schools. I think I speak for all public school employees when I say, "Big frickin' waaah."
Forcing Pennsylvania cybers to deal with truancy more immediately, directly and effectively would be better for everyone. It does cybers no good to be known as a haven for truants and slackers, and yet there is a small but significant sliver of cyber-school sign-ups that are about a frustrated parent or student who don't to deal with truancy officers and fines any more.
I cannot say this enough-- I have absolutely no doubt that the vast majority of cyber school parents are NOT child abusers or even just truancy enablers. But clearly there are steps we can take in Pennsylvania to better involve cyber-charters in the critical work of keeping students safe and accountable.
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
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
Sunday, June 28, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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