This is the sequel to a post you'll find here, which was a response to a blog post by Cristina Evans Duncan that you'll find here.
So if education majors are currently "too easy" or "not useful," then what can we put in their place? I have some ideas, and most of them are based on how I myself was trained. I've talked about this program here and there around the blog, but today I'm going to focus directly on it in the context of that important question-- how should we train teachers?
I will preface this with a huge caveat-- this is all about training secondary teachers. I'm pretty sure elementary teaching has a different set of requirements.
Undergrad studies
I attended Allegheny College in Meadville, PA, a small liberal arts college with a serious split personality-- dedicated to the liberal arts, and yet primarily adept at churning out pre-law and pre-med majors.
I went to Allegheny so I could become an English teacher. But I was not an education major because there was no such thing. My major (and my degree) were English. I studied exactly the same range of classes that any English major did, but my coursework included a couple of English courses designed for future teachers. Additionally and unofficially, several of my professors, knowing that I was a future teacher (did I mention that it's a small school) hooked me up with projects and independent studies that put me in local high school classrooms.
This was part of Allegheny's basic philosophy-- Step One in being a good classroom teacher is knowing what the hell you're talking about when you teach.
Undergrad Education Courses
We only had a couple. One was a philosophy course which included non-majors, and it was strictly about looking at the very idea of what we were trying to do and why. Another was a proto-methods course that involved trying to design and teach lessons. One of the highlights of that class was the professor, Robert Schall (we called him Dr. Bob, after the character on the Muppet Show's Veterinarian's Hospital) who sat in the back of the room and played Bobby, the World's Worst Student. To this day, I marvel at his ability to pre-channel every difficult student I was ever going to teach.
I don't know how he did it, but Dr. Bob provided a feature missing from too many education departments-- a professor with a realistic grasp of what a real classroom is really like, really.
Prior to student teaching, I took only two (maybe two and a half-- it's been a long time) education courses.
Student Teaching
Here is where our program varied wildly from most traditional education programs.
Allegheny student teachers did their work in urban schools in Cleveland. Initially the school used Cleveland City Schools, but as that district became unstable (closing in October because levies failed), Allegheny moved out into Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland. The theory here-- if you could handle an urban elementary or middle school, you could handle pretty much anything.
Allegheny leased a set of rooms at a hotel in downtown Cleveland (corner of East 9th and Superior) where the student teachers lived. In that same hotel, the college rented a set of conference rooms which were used as classrooms. And now, while we were student teaching, we took our practical heavy-duty methods courses.
That's not even the amazing part-- my student teaching supervisor saw me roughly once a week, usually for a couple of hours. And that same guy was one of my methods teachers in the evening. Imagine a teaching methods class where your professor says, "Okay, here's a thing that happened to you yesterday in your classroom. Let's all talk about how to handle a situation like that." We could spitball approaches for dealing with problem students, test them out, and talk about it within a week.
In short, the support during student teaching was huge, both from faculty (mostly adjuncts in Cleveland, most of whom were working classroom master teachers) and from fellow student teachers. Isolated far from home base (in those days, you didn't go out in our neighborhood after dark), we had nothing to do but focus on becoming teachers. And my eighth graders at Wiley Junior High were relentless and unforgiving-- I had no choice but to get it figured out, but I had lots of help.
When I watch my student teachers get visited two or three times, for thirty or forty minutes a pop, by a supervisor they've never met before, I feel sad for them. The traditional system depends entirely on the luck of the draw for cooperating teachers-- get a good co-op and you can get a great career start, but get a bad one and you're in a world of hurt.
But we're not done yet
We moved immediately from graduation into our Master's program. This was how the college had made a deal to put teachers without the requisite number of education credits in a classroom. We started in summer school after graduation, and the following fall--
Well, the next fall was our first year of teaching, as far as our school district was concerned. But the college considered us interns. Our first job had to be within forty miles of that same Cleveland field office. Every couple of weeks we traveled there for more coursework, and once a month or so, the same guy who had watched me through student teaching came to watch me work in my first classroom (Lorain, OH). So the same network of support that had helped us through our first teaching year.
A few more years of summer coursework, and we were fresh new MA in Ed grads. This, I think, is one of the great undiscussed necessities, but I'm going to argue that there is not enough room in a standard four-year program to learn everything you need to learn (and not enough experience in the undergrad years to know what you wish knew).
Where can I sign up?
Not at Allegheny. They canned the program years ago.
You may have deduced, reading through the description, that this program did not handle huge numbers. I student taught with eight other undergrads, and graduated with a total class of thirteen or so. The kind of support required for the small number of students was not cheap.
And so we arrive at the same old problem that badgers education around every turn-- we know how to do it right, but that would be expensive, and we don't want to spend a bunch of money on education.
So what do we need
If I were going to start a teacher training program, here's what I would require:
* Professors who have found some means of staying connected to actual classrooms
* Intense and thorough content area training
* Heavy duty support through student teaching
* Support that continues through the first year of teaching
* Involvement of working master teachers
* Graduate work
* Enough funding to do all these things well
I do not know if such a program would be easier or harder (it can be pretty hard to do senseless activities), but it would be better preparation than what most schools do now.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Are Education Majors Too Easy?
Last week at EdWeek, Cristiina Duncan Evans said yes, yes they are. But while she raises some interesting points, she also misses the boat on others. (Apologies to those of you hoping for a discussion of the promiscuity of education majors.)
What's the problem?
Evans opens by noting that, had she gone into an actual teacher program, she probably would have quit before finishing.
This may seem a like a weird statement if you consider that I love learning and I self-identify as a nerd. I like it when learning something is difficult; and when I see a puzzle I feel compelled to try to solve it. I'm very literal, and I'm only satisfied with an abstract conversation when it's anchored in observable phenomena. I crave specifics, and as both a learner and as a teacher I sometimes don't see the forest because I'm busy inspecting the trees.
Evans did not like the lack of rigor and problem solving, and that combined with her love of learning (not teaching?) and self-identified nerd line make me wonder how good a risk she was for teaching at that point in her career. I've had more than one student teacher who came from a strong classroom background, but who didn't really want to be a teacher-- he just wanted to be the smartest kid in a classroom.
But Evans was young at that point, and I have thought more than a few times (especially reflecting on my own shortcomings as a beginning teacher) that it might be a good idea not to start training teachers until they've logged a few years in the world.
We don't really know how "easy" programs are. NCTQ did some faux research in which they looked through college commencement programs, and there have been attempts to correlate teacher candidate SAT scores, but really, who are we kidding? This is not research that means anything at all. And yet, put a group of teachers together and start them talking about their own training, or the training of student teachers they've mentored, and you'll hear plenty of anecdotal data to suggest that college teacher programs are mostly not setting the world on fire.
See, I can quibble about how Evans arrives at her answer, but I agree that college teacher training programs are, at best, a mixed bag, and at the bottom of that bag are some truly useless programs. Talking about "hard" or "easy" is really beside the point; we'd be better off talking about useful or useless, and some teacher prep programs really are useless. Some programs involved a lot of hoop jumping and elaborate lesson planning techniques that will never, ever be used in the field; this kind of thing is arguably rigorous and challenging, but it's of no earthly use to actual teachers.
It may be that the professors are simply too far removed from actual classrooms, that they dispense untested or impractical theories, or it could be that they adhere too slavishly to the fad/mandate of the day. In PA, teacher programs routinely instruct teachers to get ideas and support from the state-run website that has absolutely nothing useful at all on it. And some of the more subtle damage done by Common Core has been done in college classrooms, teaching future teachers that they must use CCSS as a template for lessons. And I think pretty much everyone who ever sat in an education course has had this experience described by Evans:
Too often I've come to the end of an education class and had practical questions about how the theory I learned was supposed to guide day-to-day interactions with my students.
Also problematic-- while education majors are taking multiple ed courses of debatable usefulness, they are not taking courses in the field which they will teach. I can't tell you how many student teachers have shown up in my classroom with nothing but the same content knowledge they had when they left high school.
In general, I think Evans is talking about a problem that is a Real Thing. But when she gets into diagnosis and prescription, I think she loses her way.
So how did we end up with this issue?
Evans offers an explanation that I'm not sure I've ever seen before, but her education was at an ivy league (Dartmouth?) and only a decade ago, so we definitely come from different places. At any rate, one of her theories is that education courses have low status at highly competitive schools. So students don't take ed courses because it's just not cool for a future Master of the Universe.
Okay, fair enough. Teaching has been hammered as teachers are publicly berated for every imaginable offense and blamed for every societal ill. Pay has not kept pace with similar professions, but perhaps more significantly, teaching has also lost much of its autonomy. Today's college students are the ones who have seen teachers serve as nothing but glorified clerks and content delivery specialists. And as the talent pool dries up, it's only natural that colleges will try harder and open their doors wider in an attempt to keep these departments afloat.
When Evans complains about courses that treat her like a child, I sympathize. I also think that getting used to such treatment is probably well-aligned with what professionals can expect. Teachers are treated like children, by PD presenters, by administrators, by legislators and policymakers. I'm not saying I like it or approve of it. But it didn't appear in education courses randomly, and it's not unconnected to what teaching professionals can expect.
What do we do?
Evans does not offer much by way of ideas for making things better, and that's fine-- a blog can only run so long.
It's time for university departments of education to practice what they preach, and consider whether their programs meet the needs of different types of learners. Teachers deserve coursework that challenges and engages them, and the education system as a whole would benefit from higher standards for pedagogical instruction.
Again, we're solving the wrong problem. We don't need to insure that education coursework is more challenging and rewarding for the students who enroll in it; we need to insure that education coursework provides solid preparation for the future teachers who enroll in it. She ends with this line:
Take it from a nerd: when people who love learning don't find it remotely appealing to study education, something's wrong.
I'm not sure that's true. I'm more concerned that future teachers don't find it helpful to study education, including help in making the transition from thinking of yourself as a learner to thinking of yourself as a teacher.
Now, as it turns out, I have some pretty clear ideas about how to train teachers and fix teacher programs. But I'm going to put that in a sequel to this post. If you want my answer to "How do we fix education departments," just follow the link.
What's the problem?
Evans opens by noting that, had she gone into an actual teacher program, she probably would have quit before finishing.
This may seem a like a weird statement if you consider that I love learning and I self-identify as a nerd. I like it when learning something is difficult; and when I see a puzzle I feel compelled to try to solve it. I'm very literal, and I'm only satisfied with an abstract conversation when it's anchored in observable phenomena. I crave specifics, and as both a learner and as a teacher I sometimes don't see the forest because I'm busy inspecting the trees.
Evans did not like the lack of rigor and problem solving, and that combined with her love of learning (not teaching?) and self-identified nerd line make me wonder how good a risk she was for teaching at that point in her career. I've had more than one student teacher who came from a strong classroom background, but who didn't really want to be a teacher-- he just wanted to be the smartest kid in a classroom.
But Evans was young at that point, and I have thought more than a few times (especially reflecting on my own shortcomings as a beginning teacher) that it might be a good idea not to start training teachers until they've logged a few years in the world.
We don't really know how "easy" programs are. NCTQ did some faux research in which they looked through college commencement programs, and there have been attempts to correlate teacher candidate SAT scores, but really, who are we kidding? This is not research that means anything at all. And yet, put a group of teachers together and start them talking about their own training, or the training of student teachers they've mentored, and you'll hear plenty of anecdotal data to suggest that college teacher programs are mostly not setting the world on fire.
See, I can quibble about how Evans arrives at her answer, but I agree that college teacher training programs are, at best, a mixed bag, and at the bottom of that bag are some truly useless programs. Talking about "hard" or "easy" is really beside the point; we'd be better off talking about useful or useless, and some teacher prep programs really are useless. Some programs involved a lot of hoop jumping and elaborate lesson planning techniques that will never, ever be used in the field; this kind of thing is arguably rigorous and challenging, but it's of no earthly use to actual teachers.
It may be that the professors are simply too far removed from actual classrooms, that they dispense untested or impractical theories, or it could be that they adhere too slavishly to the fad/mandate of the day. In PA, teacher programs routinely instruct teachers to get ideas and support from the state-run website that has absolutely nothing useful at all on it. And some of the more subtle damage done by Common Core has been done in college classrooms, teaching future teachers that they must use CCSS as a template for lessons. And I think pretty much everyone who ever sat in an education course has had this experience described by Evans:
Too often I've come to the end of an education class and had practical questions about how the theory I learned was supposed to guide day-to-day interactions with my students.
Also problematic-- while education majors are taking multiple ed courses of debatable usefulness, they are not taking courses in the field which they will teach. I can't tell you how many student teachers have shown up in my classroom with nothing but the same content knowledge they had when they left high school.
In general, I think Evans is talking about a problem that is a Real Thing. But when she gets into diagnosis and prescription, I think she loses her way.
So how did we end up with this issue?
Evans offers an explanation that I'm not sure I've ever seen before, but her education was at an ivy league (Dartmouth?) and only a decade ago, so we definitely come from different places. At any rate, one of her theories is that education courses have low status at highly competitive schools. So students don't take ed courses because it's just not cool for a future Master of the Universe.
Okay, fair enough. Teaching has been hammered as teachers are publicly berated for every imaginable offense and blamed for every societal ill. Pay has not kept pace with similar professions, but perhaps more significantly, teaching has also lost much of its autonomy. Today's college students are the ones who have seen teachers serve as nothing but glorified clerks and content delivery specialists. And as the talent pool dries up, it's only natural that colleges will try harder and open their doors wider in an attempt to keep these departments afloat.
When Evans complains about courses that treat her like a child, I sympathize. I also think that getting used to such treatment is probably well-aligned with what professionals can expect. Teachers are treated like children, by PD presenters, by administrators, by legislators and policymakers. I'm not saying I like it or approve of it. But it didn't appear in education courses randomly, and it's not unconnected to what teaching professionals can expect.
What do we do?
Evans does not offer much by way of ideas for making things better, and that's fine-- a blog can only run so long.
It's time for university departments of education to practice what they preach, and consider whether their programs meet the needs of different types of learners. Teachers deserve coursework that challenges and engages them, and the education system as a whole would benefit from higher standards for pedagogical instruction.
Again, we're solving the wrong problem. We don't need to insure that education coursework is more challenging and rewarding for the students who enroll in it; we need to insure that education coursework provides solid preparation for the future teachers who enroll in it. She ends with this line:
Take it from a nerd: when people who love learning don't find it remotely appealing to study education, something's wrong.
I'm not sure that's true. I'm more concerned that future teachers don't find it helpful to study education, including help in making the transition from thinking of yourself as a learner to thinking of yourself as a teacher.
Now, as it turns out, I have some pretty clear ideas about how to train teachers and fix teacher programs. But I'm going to put that in a sequel to this post. If you want my answer to "How do we fix education departments," just follow the link.
Who the Hell Is Scott Wagner?
If you're a Pennsylvania teacher whose blood pressure is a little low this morning, here's a little something to kick it into a higher gear:
That's Pennsylvania State Senator Scott Wagner of the 28th district, which basically covers York County (the home base of Governor Tom Wolf).
Wagner's political career is impressive. Wagner is straight out of the private sector; he owns and operates a waste management business and a trucking company. He has long been a supporter of the GOP, but in 2014, when the Senate seat opened up, the GOP attempted to thwart his attempt to run. This dance has been repeated in many GOP areas across the state, including my own, with a Tea Party-ish candidate being told to go sit down and behave by the GOP establishment.
But as sometimes happens, the GOP establishment seriously underestimated just how pissed off voters were, and Wagner became the first Pennsylvanian to win an election as a write-in candidate. Wagner did not just beat the GOP and Democrat candidates, but absolutely shellacked them, winning 48% of the vote (neither of the other candidates cracked the 30% mark).
That got people's attention. The PA legislature runs on seniority, but Wagner is now chair of the Urban Affairs and Housing Committee. And Tom Wolf's office has targeted him, saying that he's "calling the shots in the Republican Caucus."
So is the clip above a momentary aberration in Wagner's career. Nope.
On his website (I can't get them embedded here) you can find clips in which Wagner stumps for paycheck protection, a popular initiative that uses specious claims to push legislation making it illegal for unions to let their members pay dues through payroll deductions. Wagner also takes five minutes to explain why teacher salaries are out of control, and the math he uses is--well, special. He takes one district, looks at the total costs for salary, compares that to the total salaries from a year five years later, and somehow concludes from those two numbers that teachers are getting a 6% raise every year. It's a bizarrely inaccurate way to figure out teacher wage increases, particularly when tehre's a pay scale that is public information that would give you the exact answer. Gosh, it's almost as if he was looking for a way to compute the figures that would give him a larger answer for effect, as if he weren't interested in the truth of the matter at all.
You can read his thoughts about school funding at greater length here, but the basics are in this quote: "Pennsylvania does not have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem." (Oh, and unions are kind of like Hitler and Stalin and Putin, too).
Or if you want to get another head of steam up, check out this video in which Wagner explains why no raise in minimum wage is needed.
Yep. Poor folks are just lazy, drug-addled, unwilling-to-get-up slackers.
I will give Wagner credit for this-- he inspired this fun video from the organization Kids Against Education. "Thanks, Scott Wagner!"
But I think we can safely say that although Wagner is a newbie in Harrisburg, he has quickly established himself as a staunch foe of public education and the teachers who work there. I expect his name will come up again.
That's Pennsylvania State Senator Scott Wagner of the 28th district, which basically covers York County (the home base of Governor Tom Wolf).
Wagner's political career is impressive. Wagner is straight out of the private sector; he owns and operates a waste management business and a trucking company. He has long been a supporter of the GOP, but in 2014, when the Senate seat opened up, the GOP attempted to thwart his attempt to run. This dance has been repeated in many GOP areas across the state, including my own, with a Tea Party-ish candidate being told to go sit down and behave by the GOP establishment.
But as sometimes happens, the GOP establishment seriously underestimated just how pissed off voters were, and Wagner became the first Pennsylvanian to win an election as a write-in candidate. Wagner did not just beat the GOP and Democrat candidates, but absolutely shellacked them, winning 48% of the vote (neither of the other candidates cracked the 30% mark).
That got people's attention. The PA legislature runs on seniority, but Wagner is now chair of the Urban Affairs and Housing Committee. And Tom Wolf's office has targeted him, saying that he's "calling the shots in the Republican Caucus."
So is the clip above a momentary aberration in Wagner's career. Nope.
On his website (I can't get them embedded here) you can find clips in which Wagner stumps for paycheck protection, a popular initiative that uses specious claims to push legislation making it illegal for unions to let their members pay dues through payroll deductions. Wagner also takes five minutes to explain why teacher salaries are out of control, and the math he uses is--well, special. He takes one district, looks at the total costs for salary, compares that to the total salaries from a year five years later, and somehow concludes from those two numbers that teachers are getting a 6% raise every year. It's a bizarrely inaccurate way to figure out teacher wage increases, particularly when tehre's a pay scale that is public information that would give you the exact answer. Gosh, it's almost as if he was looking for a way to compute the figures that would give him a larger answer for effect, as if he weren't interested in the truth of the matter at all.
You can read his thoughts about school funding at greater length here, but the basics are in this quote: "Pennsylvania does not have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem." (Oh, and unions are kind of like Hitler and Stalin and Putin, too).
Or if you want to get another head of steam up, check out this video in which Wagner explains why no raise in minimum wage is needed.
Yep. Poor folks are just lazy, drug-addled, unwilling-to-get-up slackers.
I will give Wagner credit for this-- he inspired this fun video from the organization Kids Against Education. "Thanks, Scott Wagner!"
But I think we can safely say that although Wagner is a newbie in Harrisburg, he has quickly established himself as a staunch foe of public education and the teachers who work there. I expect his name will come up again.
Mirage: 5 Reasons Nevada's All-Choice Law Is Bad News
Charter-choice fans are ecstatic. Nevada's GOP legislature has decided to go all in on a state-wide voucher program.
"I think a healthy public school system has choice," says Sen. Scott Hammond, bill sponsor and future charter school chief. The move was also lauded by Patricia Levesque, who is currently the head of Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education, the organization that helped Nevada write the legislation.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is so delighted that they've devoted a few weeks of bloggy wonkathonning to talking about how awesome this will be.
It will not be awesome. Here are five reasons that Nevada's imagined future of choice-driven most excellent unicorn farming is just a mirage.
1) Let's talk about geography.
Nevada is the seventh-largest state in the US with over 110K square miles. And yet, those square miles are served by a grand total of 35,061 miles of roadway-- and that's counting every tiny local dirt road.
Nevada uses county-based school districts; there are seventeen counties in Nevada, including Esmerelda County (pop. 783). In all, there are nine counties with population of 10K or less. Of Nevada's 2.7 million people, 1.9 million live in Clark County, home of Las Vegas and one of the nation's single largest school districts.
A choice system will have a chance to play out in Clark County. In the rest of the state? Some of those counties don't even have one high school, let alone several to choose from. To choose another county's school creates serious transportation issues. So while this may look like a massive change for education across the state, this is really only aimed at one school district. Charteristas like to talk about how this new money will lead to lots of great new charters opening up, but I don't see any CMO's racing up to Esmerelda County to cash in on that market.
2. The economics are weak.
Under the new rules, poor kids get a $5,700 voucher (not-so-poor kids get $5,100). The average private school tuition in Las Vegas is $8,393 for elementary school and $8,644 for high school.
That may not seem like a large gap to cover, but Nevada has been leading the country in child poverty rates, with Las Vegas earning a long-standing reputation for being one of those cities-- if you worked there, you couldn't afford to live there. Vouchers will be a nice windfall for families that can already afford to outsource their children's educations, but for most of the poor, all a voucher system will do is strip more resources form the public schools in which they must stay.
In other words, if the goal of the voucher program is to help poor students escape "failing" schools, the bad news is that it will not help those students escape-- it will just make their schools fail harder.
3. Choice sorts and segregates
Choice-charter supporters have an almost child-like faith in the free market system, despite all evidence. Here's Andy Smarick showing concern about previous failures:
Our experience with NCLB tutoring is instructive. It too was supposed to empower families and create a vibrant supply of services. But the law didn't work as expected.
But Smarick quickly concludes that it was "the existing system" that "gummed up the works." He admits that "emerging markets are inefficient and sometimes dodgy" but I see no reason to believe that mature markets are dodge-free.
That charter schools might further segregation is both predictable and unsurprising. To work a market that is broad and varied, a business needs to sort potential customers according to how much money can be made from them. Just watch (any non-Southwestern) airline load passengers-- the traveling cattle have been sorted according to how much good they can do for the airline.
Charter promoters insist that a robust charter system will match students with the schools that best fit their needs, but if that actually happened, it would be the first time the free market worked that way, ever. We could talk about automobiles or audio equipment, but since we're talking schools, let's look at the market-based education system we already have-- colleges and universities.
Colleges and universities maintain complete control over their own admissions process, and that process is based on one question-- what can you, potential student, do to help us? The best answer is "Hook the college up with some money," closely followed by "Make the college look good (which will help with the money hooking in the future)" The result is a post-high school system that solidifies and reinforces class divisions in America. A charter-choice system will do the same.
4) The free market does not produce excellence
Here's a conversation nobody has, ever:
Chris: I need to go shopping for a product, and I need to be certain that I am getting the very best quality.
Pat: Well, then. Let's go to Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is a huge success story, but that free market domination did not come from pursuing excellent products or excellent service, but by finding the most excellent ways to squeeze money out of retailing to non-wealthy folks.
If Nevada's voucher system survives a court challenge, I guarantee there will be charters launched on a business plan of marketing to medium-poor parents in order to get those vouchers. They will talk about marketing, and they will talk about how they can cut costs to hold onto profits from the vouchers, and they might, eventually, talk about providing a quality education, but that will never, ever be their first concern. The winners will be the charter operators who do the best job of figuring out how to make money in this system, not the ones who provide the best education for students. The losers will be the students who can't provide a good source of profit for charters.
5) Taxation without representation
If you pay taxes in Nevada and have no school age children, you have now been cut out of the loop. You have no say in what sort of education those tax dollars are spent on. Voucher systems mean that Black taxpayers can foot the bill for Aryan Supremecist High School and conservative Christian taxpayers can fund a Sharia Law elementary academy.
Worse, if many of your local parents decide to ride the voucher train out of your local school, you'll be faced with the choice of watching your local school fall into a deeper and deeper financial pit or of raising taxes to make up the difference (though Nevada has a tax cap, so that will only get you so far).
Local school districts will increasingly fail as the vouchers strip resources. If you don't believe that is so, I invite you to buy a second or third home so that you can save money by running three houses instead of one. Or perhaps you can go to work and suggest when times get tight that the company should open more offices to save money. Increasing the total cost of the education system by duplicating services and creating excess capacity is financially wasteful, and it is the public schools that will pay the price.
For those inevitably driven-to-failure public schools, Nevada would like to institute an Achievement School District, a method of managing state takeovers. At that point, local voters and taxpayers lose all semblance of a say in how their schools are run.
The end game in Nevada is pretty simple, pretty clear, and pretty close: the voucher program marks the end of any semblance of commitment to public education and the beginning of a completely privatized system of schools for Nevada. It will not be good for Nevada, it will not be good for students, it will not be good for Nevada's taxpayers, and it will not fulfill any of its promises. It will make a few edupreneurs wealthy. For everyone else, the benefits of the voucher system will remain a mirage.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
"I think a healthy public school system has choice," says Sen. Scott Hammond, bill sponsor and future charter school chief. The move was also lauded by Patricia Levesque, who is currently the head of Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education, the organization that helped Nevada write the legislation.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is so delighted that they've devoted a few weeks of bloggy wonkathonning to talking about how awesome this will be.
It will not be awesome. Here are five reasons that Nevada's imagined future of choice-driven most excellent unicorn farming is just a mirage.
1) Let's talk about geography.
Nevada is the seventh-largest state in the US with over 110K square miles. And yet, those square miles are served by a grand total of 35,061 miles of roadway-- and that's counting every tiny local dirt road.
Nevada uses county-based school districts; there are seventeen counties in Nevada, including Esmerelda County (pop. 783). In all, there are nine counties with population of 10K or less. Of Nevada's 2.7 million people, 1.9 million live in Clark County, home of Las Vegas and one of the nation's single largest school districts.
A choice system will have a chance to play out in Clark County. In the rest of the state? Some of those counties don't even have one high school, let alone several to choose from. To choose another county's school creates serious transportation issues. So while this may look like a massive change for education across the state, this is really only aimed at one school district. Charteristas like to talk about how this new money will lead to lots of great new charters opening up, but I don't see any CMO's racing up to Esmerelda County to cash in on that market.
2. The economics are weak.
Under the new rules, poor kids get a $5,700 voucher (not-so-poor kids get $5,100). The average private school tuition in Las Vegas is $8,393 for elementary school and $8,644 for high school.
That may not seem like a large gap to cover, but Nevada has been leading the country in child poverty rates, with Las Vegas earning a long-standing reputation for being one of those cities-- if you worked there, you couldn't afford to live there. Vouchers will be a nice windfall for families that can already afford to outsource their children's educations, but for most of the poor, all a voucher system will do is strip more resources form the public schools in which they must stay.
In other words, if the goal of the voucher program is to help poor students escape "failing" schools, the bad news is that it will not help those students escape-- it will just make their schools fail harder.
3. Choice sorts and segregates
Choice-charter supporters have an almost child-like faith in the free market system, despite all evidence. Here's Andy Smarick showing concern about previous failures:
Our experience with NCLB tutoring is instructive. It too was supposed to empower families and create a vibrant supply of services. But the law didn't work as expected.
But Smarick quickly concludes that it was "the existing system" that "gummed up the works." He admits that "emerging markets are inefficient and sometimes dodgy" but I see no reason to believe that mature markets are dodge-free.
That charter schools might further segregation is both predictable and unsurprising. To work a market that is broad and varied, a business needs to sort potential customers according to how much money can be made from them. Just watch (any non-Southwestern) airline load passengers-- the traveling cattle have been sorted according to how much good they can do for the airline.
Charter promoters insist that a robust charter system will match students with the schools that best fit their needs, but if that actually happened, it would be the first time the free market worked that way, ever. We could talk about automobiles or audio equipment, but since we're talking schools, let's look at the market-based education system we already have-- colleges and universities.
Colleges and universities maintain complete control over their own admissions process, and that process is based on one question-- what can you, potential student, do to help us? The best answer is "Hook the college up with some money," closely followed by "Make the college look good (which will help with the money hooking in the future)" The result is a post-high school system that solidifies and reinforces class divisions in America. A charter-choice system will do the same.
4) The free market does not produce excellence
Here's a conversation nobody has, ever:
Chris: I need to go shopping for a product, and I need to be certain that I am getting the very best quality.
Pat: Well, then. Let's go to Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is a huge success story, but that free market domination did not come from pursuing excellent products or excellent service, but by finding the most excellent ways to squeeze money out of retailing to non-wealthy folks.
If Nevada's voucher system survives a court challenge, I guarantee there will be charters launched on a business plan of marketing to medium-poor parents in order to get those vouchers. They will talk about marketing, and they will talk about how they can cut costs to hold onto profits from the vouchers, and they might, eventually, talk about providing a quality education, but that will never, ever be their first concern. The winners will be the charter operators who do the best job of figuring out how to make money in this system, not the ones who provide the best education for students. The losers will be the students who can't provide a good source of profit for charters.
5) Taxation without representation
If you pay taxes in Nevada and have no school age children, you have now been cut out of the loop. You have no say in what sort of education those tax dollars are spent on. Voucher systems mean that Black taxpayers can foot the bill for Aryan Supremecist High School and conservative Christian taxpayers can fund a Sharia Law elementary academy.
Worse, if many of your local parents decide to ride the voucher train out of your local school, you'll be faced with the choice of watching your local school fall into a deeper and deeper financial pit or of raising taxes to make up the difference (though Nevada has a tax cap, so that will only get you so far).
Local school districts will increasingly fail as the vouchers strip resources. If you don't believe that is so, I invite you to buy a second or third home so that you can save money by running three houses instead of one. Or perhaps you can go to work and suggest when times get tight that the company should open more offices to save money. Increasing the total cost of the education system by duplicating services and creating excess capacity is financially wasteful, and it is the public schools that will pay the price.
For those inevitably driven-to-failure public schools, Nevada would like to institute an Achievement School District, a method of managing state takeovers. At that point, local voters and taxpayers lose all semblance of a say in how their schools are run.
The end game in Nevada is pretty simple, pretty clear, and pretty close: the voucher program marks the end of any semblance of commitment to public education and the beginning of a completely privatized system of schools for Nevada. It will not be good for Nevada, it will not be good for students, it will not be good for Nevada's taxpayers, and it will not fulfill any of its promises. It will make a few edupreneurs wealthy. For everyone else, the benefits of the voucher system will remain a mirage.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Pacts Americana: Bellwether Looks at Fed-State Relationship
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.
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.
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.
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