Can you read one more story about how a charter school was used to scam taxpayers and make one more amateur education expert rich?
This one comes from Florida, courtesy of Andrew Marra at the Palm Beach Post. I'll give you the highlights; you should follow the link for the full deal.The story is one more example of how a charter school can be used as a giant money funnel, even if it wears the noble "non-profit" badge.
Gregory James Blount was a 40-ish-year-old former model and events producer who was working his way out of bankruptcy by teaching modeling and acting classes when he decided that getting into the charter school biz seemed like a fine career move. He recruited Liz Knowles, a teacher and private school chief, to run the school and write his "Artademics" curriculum. But Knowles walked away from Blount soon after (final straw-- discovering he had created a Artademics company to cash in). Knowles recalled Blount's argument for her to stay. "Don't worry, :Liz. You'll be rich."
The Eagle Arts Academy opened up, and Blount was cashing in. What's repeatedly impressive about these scam schools is that even people with no education experience or even successful business experience can still figure out how to make big money at this game. Blount was no exception.
The technique is familiar. The non-profit school hires other companies, and that's where you make your money. Blount set up a business that he called a "foundation," though it was not registered as one. The foundation sold uniforms to students at hefty prices, and that money went to Blount. Blount's company also ran a profitable after-school tutoring program on school grounds, rent free. And when Knowles walked away from writing the school's curriculum, Blount set up a company to do that; the school paid him for that as well-- even though the curriculum was both late. A third company charged the school for consulting services as well.
The Eagles Arts charter did include a clause saying that no board members of the school could profit directly or indirectly. Blount apparently got around that by simply resigning from the board during the periods that he was making money through his companies.
So, does this story end with Blount disgraced and in handcuffs?
Nope. It ends with Blount talking about plans for opening the school for its second year in August. Hey, he admits to making mistakes, but a guy's gotta make a living. And while this may all sound shady as hell, we're only reading about it because a newspaper decided to pursue it. Blount doesn't appear to have done anything illegal under Florida law. Here's the quote from the article:
“Do we like it? No,” said Jim Pegg, who oversees the county’s charter
schools for the Palm Beach County School District. “Is it legal? Yes.”
So, hats off to you, Florida, for continuing your tradition of fostering some of America's finest scams. Nice to know that even with no more swampland left to sell, Florida still offers the chance to make plenty of money in the swamps of charter schools.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Friday, July 10, 2015
Competing Globally
On the list of empty rhetoric that's thrown into the ring for the reformster dog and pony show, we should include "compete globally."
It is frequently used as the bottom line for the reformster argument. We need standards so we can raise test scores so we can prove that students are career and college ready? Why? So that they can compete globally.
What does that even mean? Compete with which parts of the globe? Compete at what?
I mean, there are many areas in which we are not winning global competitions. While Americans go hungry and tons of tons of edible food end up in landfills, France has made it illegal for stores to throw food away. While Americans (and their government) try to get rich off of men and women trying to get a college education, many countries recognize the benefits of making it easy to home-grow educated adults with no-cost colleges. And while we commit so many acts of policy and profit "for the children," we remain one of the absolute worst countries in the world for child-care leave. Anything for the children-- except letting them have their mothers handy during the first months of life.
And Estonia? That country we're worried about catching up to? I learned this week that they are the leaders in free wifi for everybody (instead of preserving it as private source of corporate profit).
Nevertheless, aren't we still a major world power? Is China not still trying to imitate us economically? Are we not among the world's leaders, economically and politically? Also, our women just won the world cup, so in your face, global competition.
So what do our students need to be doing about competing globally?
No, when reformsters talk about competing globally, they're generally talking about jobs and economics. Like this sentence that leads off a White House essay about competing globally:
To create true middle class security, we must out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world, positioning American companies to thrive in a 21st century economy.
There are two problems here.
The first is the use of the term "American companies." I'm not sure that anybody even knows what that means anymore. GE is a quintessential American company; we can all remember various GE products being advertised no matter how old or young we are. But of GE's roughly 300,000 employees, fewer than half (about 134,000) are in the US. "American" automaker Chrysler barely employs more Americans than "Japanese" Toyota.
Five years ago, when McKinsey was beating the drum at the front of the reformy parade, they weren't even bothering to talk about "American companies" so much as "multinational companies headquartered in the US."
Multinationals owe no allegiance to a particular country, nor even to a particular way of life. Robert Reich included this quote in a 2012 look at the issue:
An Apple executive says “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
Nor, for that matter, is Apple obliged to solve China's problems either, and so Apple, like many companies, benefits from a culture where sacrificing one's life for a meager paycheck. China's working conditions suck, but that's not the multinational's problem. It is, in fact, to their benefit.
And that brings us to the second problem with the White House statement.
Reformsters repeatedly talk about this global competition as if it's just a matter of education instead of a matter of controlling costs. This "paper" by the Center for American Progress gives exactly one sentence to the issue
We are quite familiar with what economists call “global labor arbitrage,” the substitution of high-wage workers in advanced economy countries with low-wage workers in developing economies.
Having noted their familiarity, the writers spend the rest of the paper speaking as if competitiveness is strictly a matter of education and training, and not a willingness to provide labor at the lowest possible costs.
The examples are endless. GE is sitting on a mountain of money, and yet they even as they have moved jobs to cheaper overseas locations, they have slashed benefits and created two-tier pay systems for their American workers. Does the recent kerfluffle about Microsoft laying off workers with one hand while pressing Congress for more guest worker visas with the other-- does that all seem familiar? That's because we went through exactly the same kerfluffle a year ago. Google "do we need more STEM workers" and watch the arguments line up.
We aren't losing jobs because we can't "out-innovate, out-educate or out-build" the rest of the world, but because we don't have enough people willing to work for far less money in far crappier conditions. (Even if we were, you don't raise people who can out-innovate anyone by forcing students through a one-size-fits-all, test-driven straightjacket of an education program-- even China understands that.)
Competing how?
It is true that American students are poorly equipped to compete in a marketplace when what they've been told is, "I've got ten Chinese workers willing to live in a dorm away from home and work 80-hour weeks for peanuts. Can you beat that?" But it's not entirely clear how college and career ready standards, backed up by high stakes testing fueling a big stick threat-heavy approach to public schools will help.
I can find plenty of writing about the issues in big broad terms, but try as I might, I can't find somebody who lays out the direct connection. I'm eighteen and I've proven I can pass a test about literature taught the David Coleman way-- exactly what will that allow to say in a job interview that will make a potential employer say, "Yes, I definitely want to hire you, and not that guy in China."
Exactly what is the connection between passing PARCC and scoring a good middle class job?
Reformsters keep trying to frame the issue as an issue or worker worthiness. Surely our American workers would be better paid at better jobs if they deserved to be. The fact that they aren't is proof that they don't deserve to be. I have no doubt that when Jeb Bush says American workers should work more hours, he's displaying the reformster disconnect, not even noticing that 1) vast number of employers won't hire people for more than part-time jobs and 2) employers just fought hard for their right to screw workers out of overtime pay.
In other words, we have somehow taken a broad economic problems-- the human costs of corporations that want to pay absolute bottom dollar for labor-- and turned it into the workers' fault. Don't whine to me, Mr. Smith-- if you had gotten a better education, working part time at the widget store would pay better.
The global competition is to scour the globe to find the cheapest good-enough labor to be found so that corporate coffers can be crammed full. Multinationals are on their way to reducing national governments to the role of human resources department-- get us a good applicant pool for jobs, take care of health care costs and any other maintenance costs for keeping the human capital in working order. And so nations are in a global competition to see which can bring the most good-enough human capital under budget. Who's going to compete for the job of looking out for the interests of the human capital. Turns out that there is no global competition to be best at that job.
It is frequently used as the bottom line for the reformster argument. We need standards so we can raise test scores so we can prove that students are career and college ready? Why? So that they can compete globally.
What does that even mean? Compete with which parts of the globe? Compete at what?
I mean, there are many areas in which we are not winning global competitions. While Americans go hungry and tons of tons of edible food end up in landfills, France has made it illegal for stores to throw food away. While Americans (and their government) try to get rich off of men and women trying to get a college education, many countries recognize the benefits of making it easy to home-grow educated adults with no-cost colleges. And while we commit so many acts of policy and profit "for the children," we remain one of the absolute worst countries in the world for child-care leave. Anything for the children-- except letting them have their mothers handy during the first months of life.
And Estonia? That country we're worried about catching up to? I learned this week that they are the leaders in free wifi for everybody (instead of preserving it as private source of corporate profit).
Nevertheless, aren't we still a major world power? Is China not still trying to imitate us economically? Are we not among the world's leaders, economically and politically? Also, our women just won the world cup, so in your face, global competition.
So what do our students need to be doing about competing globally?
No, when reformsters talk about competing globally, they're generally talking about jobs and economics. Like this sentence that leads off a White House essay about competing globally:
To create true middle class security, we must out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world, positioning American companies to thrive in a 21st century economy.
There are two problems here.
The first is the use of the term "American companies." I'm not sure that anybody even knows what that means anymore. GE is a quintessential American company; we can all remember various GE products being advertised no matter how old or young we are. But of GE's roughly 300,000 employees, fewer than half (about 134,000) are in the US. "American" automaker Chrysler barely employs more Americans than "Japanese" Toyota.
Five years ago, when McKinsey was beating the drum at the front of the reformy parade, they weren't even bothering to talk about "American companies" so much as "multinational companies headquartered in the US."
Multinationals owe no allegiance to a particular country, nor even to a particular way of life. Robert Reich included this quote in a 2012 look at the issue:
An Apple executive says “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
Nor, for that matter, is Apple obliged to solve China's problems either, and so Apple, like many companies, benefits from a culture where sacrificing one's life for a meager paycheck. China's working conditions suck, but that's not the multinational's problem. It is, in fact, to their benefit.
And that brings us to the second problem with the White House statement.
Reformsters repeatedly talk about this global competition as if it's just a matter of education instead of a matter of controlling costs. This "paper" by the Center for American Progress gives exactly one sentence to the issue
We are quite familiar with what economists call “global labor arbitrage,” the substitution of high-wage workers in advanced economy countries with low-wage workers in developing economies.
Having noted their familiarity, the writers spend the rest of the paper speaking as if competitiveness is strictly a matter of education and training, and not a willingness to provide labor at the lowest possible costs.
The examples are endless. GE is sitting on a mountain of money, and yet they even as they have moved jobs to cheaper overseas locations, they have slashed benefits and created two-tier pay systems for their American workers. Does the recent kerfluffle about Microsoft laying off workers with one hand while pressing Congress for more guest worker visas with the other-- does that all seem familiar? That's because we went through exactly the same kerfluffle a year ago. Google "do we need more STEM workers" and watch the arguments line up.
We aren't losing jobs because we can't "out-innovate, out-educate or out-build" the rest of the world, but because we don't have enough people willing to work for far less money in far crappier conditions. (Even if we were, you don't raise people who can out-innovate anyone by forcing students through a one-size-fits-all, test-driven straightjacket of an education program-- even China understands that.)
Competing how?
It is true that American students are poorly equipped to compete in a marketplace when what they've been told is, "I've got ten Chinese workers willing to live in a dorm away from home and work 80-hour weeks for peanuts. Can you beat that?" But it's not entirely clear how college and career ready standards, backed up by high stakes testing fueling a big stick threat-heavy approach to public schools will help.
I can find plenty of writing about the issues in big broad terms, but try as I might, I can't find somebody who lays out the direct connection. I'm eighteen and I've proven I can pass a test about literature taught the David Coleman way-- exactly what will that allow to say in a job interview that will make a potential employer say, "Yes, I definitely want to hire you, and not that guy in China."
Exactly what is the connection between passing PARCC and scoring a good middle class job?
Reformsters keep trying to frame the issue as an issue or worker worthiness. Surely our American workers would be better paid at better jobs if they deserved to be. The fact that they aren't is proof that they don't deserve to be. I have no doubt that when Jeb Bush says American workers should work more hours, he's displaying the reformster disconnect, not even noticing that 1) vast number of employers won't hire people for more than part-time jobs and 2) employers just fought hard for their right to screw workers out of overtime pay.
In other words, we have somehow taken a broad economic problems-- the human costs of corporations that want to pay absolute bottom dollar for labor-- and turned it into the workers' fault. Don't whine to me, Mr. Smith-- if you had gotten a better education, working part time at the widget store would pay better.
The global competition is to scour the globe to find the cheapest good-enough labor to be found so that corporate coffers can be crammed full. Multinationals are on their way to reducing national governments to the role of human resources department-- get us a good applicant pool for jobs, take care of health care costs and any other maintenance costs for keeping the human capital in working order. And so nations are in a global competition to see which can bring the most good-enough human capital under budget. Who's going to compete for the job of looking out for the interests of the human capital. Turns out that there is no global competition to be best at that job.
Thursday, July 9, 2015
TWB
Teaching While Black has been problematic for decades.
If we roll the clock back to the Brown vs. Board of Education, we discover a response that some folks have just forgotten all about.
If we roll the clock back to the Brown vs. Board of Education, we discover a response that some folks have just forgotten all about.
In the spring of 1953, with the Brown vs. Board
of Education desegregation case pending in the U.S. Supreme Court,
Wendell Godwin, superintendent of schools in Topeka, sent letters to
black elementary school teachers. Painfully polite, the letters couldn't
mask the message: If segregation dies, you will lose your jobs.
"Our Board will proceed on the assumption that
the majority of people in Topeka will not want to employ negro teachers
next year for White children," he wrote.
The USA Today piece from 2004 lists a variety of chilling statistics. In 1954, there were 82,000 Black educators; in the eleven years after Brown, 38,000 of them lost their jobs in the Southern block of states. Number of Black teachers hired in Arkansas desegregated districts between 1958 and 1968-- zero. Black principals were driven out of the profession even more aggressively. Between 1967 and 1971, the number of Black principals in North Carolina dropped from 620 to 40.
The practice of nudging, pushing, shoving, ramrodding Black teachers out of the profession has been around for decades. They are, in fact, Exhibit A in the argument in favor of tenure. In the same article, we're reminded that Black teachers were also fired for voting and for joining the NAACP.
So are we doing better nowadays, now that we've dubbed education the Civil Rights Issue of our time? Ha!
Education reform has not made the prospect of Teaching While Black any more attractive than ever. Beyond the more isolated incidents, like the bizarre incident in which a Black principal fired Black teachers for teaching too much Black History (at a middle school at historic Black Howard University), or the appalling NYC principal who called some teachers "nappy-haired," "big-lipped" and "gorilla in a sweater" before firing them.
Most notable in the recent past is the massive firing of Black teachers in post-Katrina New Orleans. The teaching force went from 71% Black to less than 50%, not just a blow to equity in the classroom, but a gut shot to New Orleans' middle class.
And then there's this, from the ever-erudite Jersey Jazzman. He and his research partner Bruce Baker have often noted the disproportionate impact of reformster activity in New Jersey, but this newest piece makes it plainer than ever. I strongly suggest you read the whole thing, but I'm going to focus on what I found most stunning.
NJ has targeted five schools in Camden for "transformation." This is nominally because they are the most struggling schools in Camden. As JJ shows, they are not.
In fact, one school, Francis K. McGraw Elementary School, is one of the top schools in terms of the math growth measure and they are right in the middle for the ELA growth measure. McGraw is on par with some of Camden's carefully creamed charters for beating the statistical predictions that go with their demographic make-up. And in fact, none of the five targeted schools have the most struggling statistics for any measure.
You know what McGraw does have the most of? Black teachers.
In fact, take a look at this chart that I am going to borrow from Jazzman's piece:
Because, notice which schools have the lowest percentage of Black teachers? The charter schools.
Look, I'm not even going to argue about whether we need more Black teachers in the classroom. We do. Students don't need to be taught exclusively by folks who look like they do, but no child should spend a day in a school where no adult looks like that child. We know that we are losing non-white teachers faster than we lose white ones. Good lord, even Teach for America gets that they need to aggressively pursue non-white TFA temps-- and what do they get for the effort? Racist blather.
We see it over and over. Failing schools keep turning out to be full of non-white, non-wealthy students, and "rescuing" those students keeps meaning that we silence their parents and neighbors and then shove out their non-white teachers.
After crunching the Camden numbers, Jazzman* reach this conclusion:
Put
simply: black and experienced teachers are more likely to have to
reapply for their jobs under the Camden "transformation" plan than white
and inexperienced teachers, even when taking into account their
schools' student populations and growth scores.
And all of this is before we even talk about what non-white teachers deal with if they aren't pushed out. The problems of TWB are not new, and they're not exclusive to places under the thumb of reformsters. But reformsters sure aren't making things better by continuing to act as if better teachers are somehow whiter ones.
*Update: The earlier version of this noted Baker as a co-author of this particular brief. That was incorrect.
*Update: The earlier version of this noted Baker as a co-author of this particular brief. That was incorrect.
PA: Ugly Cut Scores Coming
Brace yourself, Pennsylvania teachers. The cut scores for last years tests have been set, and they are not pretty.
Yesterday the State Board's Council of Basic Education met to settle their recommendations to the State Board of Education regarding cut scores for the 2014-2015 test results. Because, yes-- cut scores are set after test results are in, not before. You'll see why shortly.
My source at the meeting (don't laugh-- I do actually have sources of information here and there) passed along some of the results, as well as an analysis of the impact of the new scores and the Board's own explanation of how these scores are set. The worst news is further down the stage, but first I have to explain how we get there.
How Are Scores Set?
In PA, we stick with good, old-fashioned Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. The cut scores-- the scores that decide where we draw the line between those designations come from two groups.
First, we have the Bookmark Participants. The bookmark participants are educators who take a look at the actual test questions and consider the Performance Level Descriptors, a set of guidelines that basically say "A proficient kid can do these following things." These "have been in place since 1999" which doesn't really tell us whether they've ever been revised or not. According to the state's presentation:
By using their content expertise in instruction, curriculum, and the standards, educators made recommendations about items that distinguished between performance levels (eg Basic/Proficient) using the Performance Level Descriptors. When educators came to an item with which students had difficulty, they would place a bookmark on that question.
In other words, this group set dividing lines between levels of proficiency in the way that would kind of make sense-- Advanced students can do X, Y, and Z, while Basic students can at least do X. (It's interesting to note that, as with a classroom test, this approach doesn't really get you a cut score until you fiddle with the proportion of items on the test. In other words, if I have a test that's all items about X, every gets an A, but if I have a test that's all Z, only the proficient kids so much as pass. Makes you wonder who decides how much of what to put on the Big Standardized Test and how they decide it.)
Oh, and where do the committee members come from? My friend clarifies:
The cut score panelists were a group that answered an announcement on the Data Recognition website, who were then selected by PDE staff.
Plus one of the outside "experts" was from the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, one more group that thanks the Gates Foundation for support.
But Wait-- That's Not All
But if we set cut scores based on difficulty of various items on the BS Test, why can't we set cut scores before the test is even given? Why do we wait until after the tests have been administered and scored?
That's because the Bookmark Group is not the end of the line. Their recommendations go on to the Review Committee, and according to the state's explanation
The Review Committee discussed consequences and potential implications associated with the recommendations, such as student and teacher goals, accountability, educator effectiveness, policy impact and development, and resource allocation.
In other words, the Bookmark folks ask, "What's the difference between a Proficient students and a Basic student." The Review Committee asks, "What will the political and budget fall out be if we set the cut scores here?"
It is the review committee that has the last word:
Through this lens, the Review Committee recommended the most appropriate set of cut scores-- using the Bookmark Participants recommendation-- for the system of grade 3-8 assessments in English Language Arts and Math.
So if you've had the sense that cut scores on the BS Test are not entirely about actual students achievement, you are correct. Well, in Pennsylvania you're correct. Perhaps we're the only state factoring politics and policy concerns into our test results. Perhaps I need to stand up a minute to let the pigs fly out of my butt.
Now, the power point presentation from the meeting said that the Review Committee did not mess with the ELA recommendations of the bookmark folks at all. They admit to a few "minor" adjustments to the math, most having to do with cut scores on the lower end.
You Said Something About Ugly
So, yes. How do the cut scores actually look? The charts from the power point do not copy well at all, and they don't provide a context. But my friend in Harrisburg created his own chart that shows how the proposed cut scores stack up to last year's results. This chart shows the percentage of students who fall into the Basic and Below Basic categories.
This raises all sorts of questions. Did all of Pennsylvania's teachers suddenly decide to suck last year? Is Pennsylvania in the grip of astonishing innumeracy? And most importantly, what the hell happened to the students?
Because, remember, we can read this chart a couple of ways, and one way is to follow the students-- so last year only 22.8% of the fifth graders "failed." But this year those exact same students, just one year older, have a 60.2% failure rate??!! 37% of those students turned into mathematical boneheads in just one year??!! 47% of eighth graders forgot everything they learned as seventh graders??!! 70% failure??!! Really????!!!! My astonishment can barely press down enough punctuation keys.
Said my Harrisburg friend, "There was some pushback from Board members, but all voting members eventually fell in line. It was clear they were ramming this through."
"Farce" doesn't seem too strong a word.
At a minimum, this will require an explanation of how the math abilities of Pennsylvania students or Pennsylvania teachers could fall off such a stunningly abrupt cliff.
And that's before we even get to the question of the validity of the raw data itself. Of course, none of us are supposed to be able to discuss the BS Test ever, as we've signed an Oath of Secrecy, but we've all peeked and I can tell you that I remember chunks of the 11th grade test in the same way that I remember stumbling across a rotting carcass in the woods or vivid details from my divorce-- unpleasant painful awful things tend to burn themselves into your brain. Point being, this whole exercise starts with tests that aren't very good to begin with.
If I'm teaching a class and suddenly my failure rate doubles or almost triples, I am going to be looking for things that are messed up-- and it won't be the students.
The theme of yesterday's meeting should have been "Holy smokes!! Something is really goobered up with our process because these results couldn't possibly be right" and the theme of the meeting today when these cut scores are recommended to the whole State Board of Education should be the same.
My source thinks it's a done deal and some folks are scrambling to let people like, say, Governor Tom Wolf know that if this happens, there will be a great deal of Spirited Displeasure out in the schools and communities. If you happen to have the phone number of someone in Harrisburg who could be useful, this morning would be a good time to call.
The Chair of the State Board Larry Wittig; the Deputy Secretary of Education Matthew Stem; and the Chair of the Council of Basic Ed, Former State Board Chair and former Erie City Superintendent James Barker apparently are the conductors on this railroad. So when it turns out that your teacher evaluation just dove straight into the toilet because of these shenanigan, be sure to call them.
And here's the list of Board members, though you will literally need to contact them within the next few hours.
I will do my best to keep an eye on things and let you know, but in the mean time, if you're a PA 3-8 teacher, you'd better fasten your seatbelt, because this ride is about to get bumpy.
Update: These numbers did indeed pass. Sorry, colleagues.
Yesterday the State Board's Council of Basic Education met to settle their recommendations to the State Board of Education regarding cut scores for the 2014-2015 test results. Because, yes-- cut scores are set after test results are in, not before. You'll see why shortly.
My source at the meeting (don't laugh-- I do actually have sources of information here and there) passed along some of the results, as well as an analysis of the impact of the new scores and the Board's own explanation of how these scores are set. The worst news is further down the stage, but first I have to explain how we get there.
How Are Scores Set?
In PA, we stick with good, old-fashioned Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. The cut scores-- the scores that decide where we draw the line between those designations come from two groups.
First, we have the Bookmark Participants. The bookmark participants are educators who take a look at the actual test questions and consider the Performance Level Descriptors, a set of guidelines that basically say "A proficient kid can do these following things." These "have been in place since 1999" which doesn't really tell us whether they've ever been revised or not. According to the state's presentation:
By using their content expertise in instruction, curriculum, and the standards, educators made recommendations about items that distinguished between performance levels (eg Basic/Proficient) using the Performance Level Descriptors. When educators came to an item with which students had difficulty, they would place a bookmark on that question.
In other words, this group set dividing lines between levels of proficiency in the way that would kind of make sense-- Advanced students can do X, Y, and Z, while Basic students can at least do X. (It's interesting to note that, as with a classroom test, this approach doesn't really get you a cut score until you fiddle with the proportion of items on the test. In other words, if I have a test that's all items about X, every gets an A, but if I have a test that's all Z, only the proficient kids so much as pass. Makes you wonder who decides how much of what to put on the Big Standardized Test and how they decide it.)
Oh, and where do the committee members come from? My friend clarifies:
The cut score panelists were a group that answered an announcement on the Data Recognition website, who were then selected by PDE staff.
Plus one of the outside "experts" was from the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, one more group that thanks the Gates Foundation for support.
But Wait-- That's Not All
But if we set cut scores based on difficulty of various items on the BS Test, why can't we set cut scores before the test is even given? Why do we wait until after the tests have been administered and scored?
That's because the Bookmark Group is not the end of the line. Their recommendations go on to the Review Committee, and according to the state's explanation
The Review Committee discussed consequences and potential implications associated with the recommendations, such as student and teacher goals, accountability, educator effectiveness, policy impact and development, and resource allocation.
In other words, the Bookmark folks ask, "What's the difference between a Proficient students and a Basic student." The Review Committee asks, "What will the political and budget fall out be if we set the cut scores here?"
It is the review committee that has the last word:
Through this lens, the Review Committee recommended the most appropriate set of cut scores-- using the Bookmark Participants recommendation-- for the system of grade 3-8 assessments in English Language Arts and Math.
So if you've had the sense that cut scores on the BS Test are not entirely about actual students achievement, you are correct. Well, in Pennsylvania you're correct. Perhaps we're the only state factoring politics and policy concerns into our test results. Perhaps I need to stand up a minute to let the pigs fly out of my butt.
Now, the power point presentation from the meeting said that the Review Committee did not mess with the ELA recommendations of the bookmark folks at all. They admit to a few "minor" adjustments to the math, most having to do with cut scores on the lower end.
You Said Something About Ugly
So, yes. How do the cut scores actually look? The charts from the power point do not copy well at all, and they don't provide a context. But my friend in Harrisburg created his own chart that shows how the proposed cut scores stack up to last year's results. This chart shows the percentage of students who fall into the Basic and Below Basic categories.
Grade
|
Reading
2013-2014
|
ELA
2014-2015
|
Difference
|
Math
2013-2014
|
Math
2014-2015
|
Difference
|
3rd
|
29.7
|
37.9
|
- 8.2
|
24.9
|
51.5
|
- 26.6
|
4th
|
31.1
|
41.4
|
- 10.1
|
23.7
|
55.5
|
- 31.8
|
5th
|
39.4
|
38
|
1.4
|
22.8
|
57.2
|
- 34.4
|
6th
|
35.5
|
40.2
|
- 4.7
|
28
|
60.2
|
- 32.2
|
7th
|
27.9
|
41.4
|
- 13.5
|
23.3
|
66.9
|
- 43.6
|
8th
|
20.4
|
41.7
|
- 21.3
|
26.4
|
70.1
|
- 43.7
|
Avg
|
- 9.4
|
Avg
|
- 35.4
|
This raises all sorts of questions. Did all of Pennsylvania's teachers suddenly decide to suck last year? Is Pennsylvania in the grip of astonishing innumeracy? And most importantly, what the hell happened to the students?
Because, remember, we can read this chart a couple of ways, and one way is to follow the students-- so last year only 22.8% of the fifth graders "failed." But this year those exact same students, just one year older, have a 60.2% failure rate??!! 37% of those students turned into mathematical boneheads in just one year??!! 47% of eighth graders forgot everything they learned as seventh graders??!! 70% failure??!! Really????!!!! My astonishment can barely press down enough punctuation keys.
Said my Harrisburg friend, "There was some pushback from Board members, but all voting members eventually fell in line. It was clear they were ramming this through."
"Farce" doesn't seem too strong a word.
At a minimum, this will require an explanation of how the math abilities of Pennsylvania students or Pennsylvania teachers could fall off such a stunningly abrupt cliff.
And that's before we even get to the question of the validity of the raw data itself. Of course, none of us are supposed to be able to discuss the BS Test ever, as we've signed an Oath of Secrecy, but we've all peeked and I can tell you that I remember chunks of the 11th grade test in the same way that I remember stumbling across a rotting carcass in the woods or vivid details from my divorce-- unpleasant painful awful things tend to burn themselves into your brain. Point being, this whole exercise starts with tests that aren't very good to begin with.
If I'm teaching a class and suddenly my failure rate doubles or almost triples, I am going to be looking for things that are messed up-- and it won't be the students.
The theme of yesterday's meeting should have been "Holy smokes!! Something is really goobered up with our process because these results couldn't possibly be right" and the theme of the meeting today when these cut scores are recommended to the whole State Board of Education should be the same.
My source thinks it's a done deal and some folks are scrambling to let people like, say, Governor Tom Wolf know that if this happens, there will be a great deal of Spirited Displeasure out in the schools and communities. If you happen to have the phone number of someone in Harrisburg who could be useful, this morning would be a good time to call.
The Chair of the State Board Larry Wittig; the Deputy Secretary of Education Matthew Stem; and the Chair of the Council of Basic Ed, Former State Board Chair and former Erie City Superintendent James Barker apparently are the conductors on this railroad. So when it turns out that your teacher evaluation just dove straight into the toilet because of these shenanigan, be sure to call them.
And here's the list of Board members, though you will literally need to contact them within the next few hours.
I will do my best to keep an eye on things and let you know, but in the mean time, if you're a PA 3-8 teacher, you'd better fasten your seatbelt, because this ride is about to get bumpy.
Update: These numbers did indeed pass. Sorry, colleagues.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
The Charleston Syllabus
Sometimes, the internet astounds me with its power. Every day there's another answer to the question, "Can the internet come up with something more useful than collections of pancake art?" In the wake of a truly terrible act of racism, the internet has birthed a powerful community and an invaluable resource.
Chad Williams is the chair of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University. He's a published expert on African American military history (particularly in World War I). And on the morning of June 18, he was one more American facing one more eruption of racist-fueled violence and shocking murder.
He was looking for intelligent discussion; he was not finding it.
The Charleston massacre, albeit in the worst imaginable way, opened a blood stained door to this country's racial history. Would people have the courage to walk through it? Vapid calls for renewing the "conversation on race," a soothing focus on black forgiveness and ill-informed discussions about the Confederate flag did nothing for my confidence. Over the course of two days, it became painfully evident that the vast majority of people lacked the necessary historical awareness to engage in serious dialogue about Charleston, much less subject themselves to critical introspection.
Williams remembered the #FergussonSyllabus launched by Marcia Chatelain of Georgetown, and watched for a similar initiative to emerge for Charleston. It didn't, so he recruited other African American Intellectual History Society members to begin the conversation on twitter.
You can read more about the development of #CharlestonSyllabus here. It's an amazing example of how social media can facilitate a powerful and important dialogue. As Williams tells it
What quickly emerged in just two days was a diverse community of people from a variety of professions, with divergent levels of historical expertise, all sharing a desire to educate, learn and challenge the prevailing discourse about race stemming from the Charleston tragedy.
What also emerged was a resource list, an impressively crowd-sourced collection of materials to help inform discussion of the racist terrorism of June 17 in Charleston, but perhaps more importantly, of race, racism, and racial violence in America as a whole. In discussions of these issues (heck, in discussion of pretty much all issues), Americans often leap forward with limited or absent understanding of history and context. This list can help fill that gap.
Some of us, through circumstances of birth, geography, or just not paying attention, have not engaged in these dialogues about race in America very much over the past few decades. Well, history has caught up with us, and we can no longer pretend to have the luxury of sitting out the discussion. But it is not necessary for us to freak out.
Imagine that you've been assigned to teach classes that involve material you haven't really studied in years-- say, you've been teaching American Lit, but next fall you'll be doing the Shakespeare course.
What do you do? Well, you don't go over to the Shakespeare teacher and say, "Could you just lay this all out for me and tell me what to do, since you're the expert?" It's not her job to educate you. No, you do what your academic training taught you to do-- you go find the source materials and you do your homework.
So the Charleston Syllabus reading list has arrived in a timely manner. Yes, by fall, most of my students will have completely forgotten about the horrific murders in Charleston. But those events are just one more in a sad series of reminders that America's racial issues are not a sleeping dog that we can try to let lie. The dialogue is going to happen-- it has to happen-- and it will be most useful if participants have some knowledge of the history and context of the issues. That goes double for those of us who teach, and perhaps triple for those of us who teach in mostly-white schools. This is the world in which our students are growing up; we have to be able to talk to them about it, to help them better make sense of it.
The Charleston Syllabus has secured its own web address, with a fully developed website to follow. Let's hope that this becomes a valued resource for the nation, proof that the internet can help build community in ways that elevate us as a culture.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Chad Williams is the chair of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University. He's a published expert on African American military history (particularly in World War I). And on the morning of June 18, he was one more American facing one more eruption of racist-fueled violence and shocking murder.
He was looking for intelligent discussion; he was not finding it.
The Charleston massacre, albeit in the worst imaginable way, opened a blood stained door to this country's racial history. Would people have the courage to walk through it? Vapid calls for renewing the "conversation on race," a soothing focus on black forgiveness and ill-informed discussions about the Confederate flag did nothing for my confidence. Over the course of two days, it became painfully evident that the vast majority of people lacked the necessary historical awareness to engage in serious dialogue about Charleston, much less subject themselves to critical introspection.
Williams remembered the #FergussonSyllabus launched by Marcia Chatelain of Georgetown, and watched for a similar initiative to emerge for Charleston. It didn't, so he recruited other African American Intellectual History Society members to begin the conversation on twitter.
You can read more about the development of #CharlestonSyllabus here. It's an amazing example of how social media can facilitate a powerful and important dialogue. As Williams tells it
What quickly emerged in just two days was a diverse community of people from a variety of professions, with divergent levels of historical expertise, all sharing a desire to educate, learn and challenge the prevailing discourse about race stemming from the Charleston tragedy.
What also emerged was a resource list, an impressively crowd-sourced collection of materials to help inform discussion of the racist terrorism of June 17 in Charleston, but perhaps more importantly, of race, racism, and racial violence in America as a whole. In discussions of these issues (heck, in discussion of pretty much all issues), Americans often leap forward with limited or absent understanding of history and context. This list can help fill that gap.
Some of us, through circumstances of birth, geography, or just not paying attention, have not engaged in these dialogues about race in America very much over the past few decades. Well, history has caught up with us, and we can no longer pretend to have the luxury of sitting out the discussion. But it is not necessary for us to freak out.
Imagine that you've been assigned to teach classes that involve material you haven't really studied in years-- say, you've been teaching American Lit, but next fall you'll be doing the Shakespeare course.
What do you do? Well, you don't go over to the Shakespeare teacher and say, "Could you just lay this all out for me and tell me what to do, since you're the expert?" It's not her job to educate you. No, you do what your academic training taught you to do-- you go find the source materials and you do your homework.
So the Charleston Syllabus reading list has arrived in a timely manner. Yes, by fall, most of my students will have completely forgotten about the horrific murders in Charleston. But those events are just one more in a sad series of reminders that America's racial issues are not a sleeping dog that we can try to let lie. The dialogue is going to happen-- it has to happen-- and it will be most useful if participants have some knowledge of the history and context of the issues. That goes double for those of us who teach, and perhaps triple for those of us who teach in mostly-white schools. This is the world in which our students are growing up; we have to be able to talk to them about it, to help them better make sense of it.
The Charleston Syllabus has secured its own web address, with a fully developed website to follow. Let's hope that this becomes a valued resource for the nation, proof that the internet can help build community in ways that elevate us as a culture.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
ECAA AOK PDQ RIP NCLB BYOB MOUSE
The interwebs are blowing up-- and, frankly, kind of freaking out-- over the newest Congressional round of Hey Maybe We Might Do Something regarding the rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently stomping around under brain-eating zombie nom de nom nom nom of No Child Left Behind).
All the usual debate topics have erupted again, with the usual challenge in figuring out who exactly sides with whom. The two basic sides seem to boil down to "If we don't get everything we want, then we must take everybody's balls and go home" and "You know, a leak in the roof is still better than an ax murderer in the house."
In the second group we find folks like Mike Petrilli, who points out that conservatives got much of what they want and lefties-- well, he runs the old talking point about the civil rights awesomeness of giving test manufacturers lots of money. Meanwhile, Leonie Haimson points out that ECAA effectively defangs the feds and takes most of the high stakes away from the testing monster. Or as I put it when I first wrote about the rewrite:
The new ESEA doesn't dismantle the machine that has been chewing up public ed so much as it forces the USED to hand the keys to the Leveller over to the states.
Yes, in its current form the rewrite loves testing and charters way too much. But this is also an excellent time to think about being practical. Because as much as I don't care for aspects of the proposed ESEA, I keep remembering that this is not a choice between a bad law from this Congress and some other perfect law from some other imaginary Congress. The choice is between a new crappy law written by this Congress and NCLB.
Let me say that again. On the one hand we have a law written and passed by a Congress filled with anti-public ed representatives, free market fans, and people who generally don't know much about education except what they've heard from the corporate lobbyists hanging around their lobby-- a law that must then be signed by a President who has made it pretty clear that he likes reformster policies just fine. That's the choice on one side.
On the other side, we have No Child Left Behind.
On the one side, a lousy rewrite job.
On the other side, a law that made us realize that there are laws that simply can't be any worse, used to leverage RttT/waiver pseudo laws that made us say, "Oh, wait! I was wrong! You can make it worse!"
For me, the specifics of certain aspects of the law are not as important as shifting the locus of power, and the new bill does that. Yes, some states will use their newly-restored education control to implement terrible, awful, stupid, no good, very bad ideas. But when a state implements a terrible idea, that is a fail rate of 1/50 for the nation. When the US Education Department implements a terrible idea, that's a 50/50 fail rate.
There is much to debate in the bill, including what's in the bill. Christel Swasey is pretty sure it stomps on the opt-out movement, while Leonie Haimson is pretty sure it does the exact opposite. And there's still amending to do, all before the President, perhaps, sends it all back to the drawing board.
But at the end of the day, I don't think the rewrite would be a major crisis because it would still be better than what we've got, and what we've got is what we'll have until ESEA is finally rewritten.
Yes, high stakes standardized testing should go away, completely, forever. But defanging it even a little is an improvement. Yes, the continued implied love of Common Core (under its new handle "college and career standards") sucks. Yes, the various regulations designed to keep that sweet, sweet tax money flowing to various corporate pockets is offensive and stupid and corrupt. But it's still all better than what we've got, and what we've got is what we'll have until a rewrite is passed.
Meanwhile, the interwebs continue to blow up and Congress continues to get an earful, which is great-- that's how things should work. Write, phone, call, tweet-- I surely am, and you should, too. But if this bill is killed, all we get is the old law which has long been dead, but will not lie down and leave us alone.
All the usual debate topics have erupted again, with the usual challenge in figuring out who exactly sides with whom. The two basic sides seem to boil down to "If we don't get everything we want, then we must take everybody's balls and go home" and "You know, a leak in the roof is still better than an ax murderer in the house."
In the second group we find folks like Mike Petrilli, who points out that conservatives got much of what they want and lefties-- well, he runs the old talking point about the civil rights awesomeness of giving test manufacturers lots of money. Meanwhile, Leonie Haimson points out that ECAA effectively defangs the feds and takes most of the high stakes away from the testing monster. Or as I put it when I first wrote about the rewrite:
The new ESEA doesn't dismantle the machine that has been chewing up public ed so much as it forces the USED to hand the keys to the Leveller over to the states.
Yes, in its current form the rewrite loves testing and charters way too much. But this is also an excellent time to think about being practical. Because as much as I don't care for aspects of the proposed ESEA, I keep remembering that this is not a choice between a bad law from this Congress and some other perfect law from some other imaginary Congress. The choice is between a new crappy law written by this Congress and NCLB.
Let me say that again. On the one hand we have a law written and passed by a Congress filled with anti-public ed representatives, free market fans, and people who generally don't know much about education except what they've heard from the corporate lobbyists hanging around their lobby-- a law that must then be signed by a President who has made it pretty clear that he likes reformster policies just fine. That's the choice on one side.
On the other side, we have No Child Left Behind.
On the one side, a lousy rewrite job.
On the other side, a law that made us realize that there are laws that simply can't be any worse, used to leverage RttT/waiver pseudo laws that made us say, "Oh, wait! I was wrong! You can make it worse!"
For me, the specifics of certain aspects of the law are not as important as shifting the locus of power, and the new bill does that. Yes, some states will use their newly-restored education control to implement terrible, awful, stupid, no good, very bad ideas. But when a state implements a terrible idea, that is a fail rate of 1/50 for the nation. When the US Education Department implements a terrible idea, that's a 50/50 fail rate.
There is much to debate in the bill, including what's in the bill. Christel Swasey is pretty sure it stomps on the opt-out movement, while Leonie Haimson is pretty sure it does the exact opposite. And there's still amending to do, all before the President, perhaps, sends it all back to the drawing board.
But at the end of the day, I don't think the rewrite would be a major crisis because it would still be better than what we've got, and what we've got is what we'll have until ESEA is finally rewritten.
Yes, high stakes standardized testing should go away, completely, forever. But defanging it even a little is an improvement. Yes, the continued implied love of Common Core (under its new handle "college and career standards") sucks. Yes, the various regulations designed to keep that sweet, sweet tax money flowing to various corporate pockets is offensive and stupid and corrupt. But it's still all better than what we've got, and what we've got is what we'll have until a rewrite is passed.
Meanwhile, the interwebs continue to blow up and Congress continues to get an earful, which is great-- that's how things should work. Write, phone, call, tweet-- I surely am, and you should, too. But if this bill is killed, all we get is the old law which has long been dead, but will not lie down and leave us alone.
MA: Reinventing the Wheel
The Huffington Posts is not picky. Their education page carries a wide variety of viewpoints, including regular posts courtesy of TeachPlus, an organization devoted to putting teacher-ish human capital in the reformster pipeline, in true Orwellian reformster fashion, diminishing the profession while praising it.
The most recent is a post by Brittany Vetter, a young woman who is the very picture of the fresh-faced, well-scrubbed enthusiastic young educator. She's here to tell us that High Stakes Testing and the Common Core are awesome and magical, and that charters have discovered the secret to educational success. In short, it's yet another attempt to squeeze every piece of reformster marketing boilerplate into one short piece.
Vetter starts by talking about the awesome conversation she'll have this fall with her sixth graders about the economic gaps between different sections Massachusetts, and how the school they're attending erases those differences. See, poverty doesn't matter.
I then stress to my sixth graders that they will have to work extra-hard to achieve beyond what others might expect of them. I emphasize that our only option is to defy the odds and gain access to opportunities that will help change the system from within.
Vetter teaches at Excel Academy, part of a charter chain in Massachusetts, a state where charters have a history of spectacular levels of student suspensions. Vetter's version of Excel is in Chelsea, and at one point racked up a suspension rate of 17.9%, the 19th highest in the state. Excel was also among those charters that made sure not to many students who didn't actually speak English.
You might also find it telling that Excel's Board of Trustees-- well, actually, it's a little telling that they even have such a board, but that board is almost entirely composed of investment managers. They've also had an advisory board since 2014, composed of politicians and businessmen (one PR expert), so I'm not sure what kind of advice they're giving. A foundation board made of banksters. And a director's council, composed of MBA's and investment bankers. And a network management team that is also devoid of actual teachers or educators. Well, what about the actual school leaders? Nope-- TFA alums, one TNTP alum, and one person with an actual MA in teaching on top of a BA in public policy. If I showed you the list of people managing this enterprise and asked you to guess what the enterprise did, you would not guess "educates children."
Vetter's school enrolls students in grades 5 through 8-- they have a total of 224 students. All of them are local to Chelsea, 83% are Latino (I don't know what that stat is even useful for) and 83% fall below federal poverty lines. No word on how many of those are ELL. The school employs five administrators and twenty-five other faculty. A few faculty have actual teaching degrees, but many are TFA alum-- some aren't even that. The staffer who designed a comprehensive English curriculum for ELL students has a BA in government and international studies.
So, yes. Excel Academy is a massive revenue-generating amateur hour. Has this gifted collection of Betters somehow discovered the secret of educating students? Well, I mean a secret beyond accepting only students who will do well and driving out any that might bring your numbers down.
Holding our schools and teachers accountable for such trajectory-changing results says that we not only believe in their possibility but in fact demand it for all of our students regardless of the neighborhood in which they live.
What else? Well, Vetter wants to tell us the story of how they used the PARCC to make magic. When Excel decided to use the PARCC, Vetter found the multiple choice questions were "highly nuanced," which is the best way I've seen to describe PARCC's tendency to ask bubble test questions with multiple correct answers, only one of which is accepted. How did they deal with it?
We revised our unit assessments to include questions that mirrored PARCC's emphasis on supporting multiple choice answers with evidence, and we engaged in discussions about how to build our students' ability to write in a variety of genres. Initially, test averages were lower overall. But as students collaboratively corrected their missed questions and became familiar with the new level of expectations, they rose to the occasion, and their test scores began to improve.
So, lots of test prep. Vetter continues on her mission to include every reformster cliche in the book.
What's more, PARCC's alignment with Common Core has upped the rigor of my course. In the process, I discovered that Jose had a real gift for writing engaging dialogue, while Estefania could effectively integrate information from multiple sources. All of my students can now analyze how an author's choices led to a specific purpose in her writing and compare the choices of two different authors. The PARCC's emphasis on textual evidence led to much richer student discussions in my classroom, pushing me to recognize the level of thinking of which my sixth graders are truly capable. At end of the school year, my students surpassed my expectations.
This is a new twist-- Vetter apparently didn't know how to teach before, but not just the Common Core, but the combination of Common Core and the PARCC showed her how to do her job.
In all fairness to Vetter, it's entirely possible that she actually didn't know how to do her job before. Since graduating from Goucher College in 2007 with a BA in sociology, Vetter put in two years with TFA, three years at a STRIVE academy, and now three years at Excel. So it is possible, for instance, that she had no clue what level of thinking is developmentally possible for a sixth grader.
No set of reformster testy cliches would be complete without a disclaimer (the PARCC is not perfect), and followed by a wrap-up that undercuts the disclaimer.
Every teacher would agree that standardized tests are imperfect measures of the complex output that is students' growth as learners and people. However, without the data that is provided by these assessments, we would have no method for seeing how our students stack up and where to revise our approach.
Again, given that Vetter is an amateur working in a setting run and occupied by other amateurs, she may really believe that she would have no method of seeing how students stack up, or even understand that trying to stack rank students is destructive and useless (in less, of course, your school's business model is built on getting rid of the students on the bottom of the stack). It may well be that this big batch of amateurs has no idea how to collect their own data to evaluate and revise their own teaching program. And it could well be that this big bunch of amateurs doesn't understand that using a single bad standardized test to drive that process is just about the least useful way to approach the problem.
Looking into Vetter, her school, and her writing drives home for me just how lost these folks are. First, they're trying to re-invent the wheel. But they're working with roughly chiseled slabs of stone while actual trained teachers are trying to work out better bearing and support assemblies for the wheels on fully developed vehicles. And because the charter amateurs set their testing spots at the top of a steep hill, they think they've really discovered something when their giant rock slabs actually roll down the hill a ways, while real teachers in real public schools are trying to figure out how to get their educational trucks to traverse rocky, uphill terrain. The reformsters have set themselves a game that a chimp could win (Roll Things Down Easy Hill) and think they've discovered something useful in the process.
Vetter looks happy, cheery, and she's stuck with the reformster ed game for almost a decade now, but I don't know if she has a clue. She may be smart, and she may mean well, but she has nothing to teach us about how to educate students.
I'll include a link here, so that you can check my work to keep me honest, but I recommend you don't add to the Teach Plus click count. Because Excel is not only reinventing the education wheel, but Vetter is reinventing the Reformy Teacher-ish Praise wheel, and that's one wheel that just needs to stop turning.
Update: This morning when I posted this, there were three comments on HuffPo in reply to the article-- one critical, a supportive post from one of Vetter's co-workers, and my link to the piece you're reading. As of this afternoon, there are no comments up at HuffPo in reply to the article. Ironically, that commenst section is called "conversations."
The most recent is a post by Brittany Vetter, a young woman who is the very picture of the fresh-faced, well-scrubbed enthusiastic young educator. She's here to tell us that High Stakes Testing and the Common Core are awesome and magical, and that charters have discovered the secret to educational success. In short, it's yet another attempt to squeeze every piece of reformster marketing boilerplate into one short piece.
Vetter starts by talking about the awesome conversation she'll have this fall with her sixth graders about the economic gaps between different sections Massachusetts, and how the school they're attending erases those differences. See, poverty doesn't matter.
I then stress to my sixth graders that they will have to work extra-hard to achieve beyond what others might expect of them. I emphasize that our only option is to defy the odds and gain access to opportunities that will help change the system from within.
Vetter teaches at Excel Academy, part of a charter chain in Massachusetts, a state where charters have a history of spectacular levels of student suspensions. Vetter's version of Excel is in Chelsea, and at one point racked up a suspension rate of 17.9%, the 19th highest in the state. Excel was also among those charters that made sure not to many students who didn't actually speak English.
You might also find it telling that Excel's Board of Trustees-- well, actually, it's a little telling that they even have such a board, but that board is almost entirely composed of investment managers. They've also had an advisory board since 2014, composed of politicians and businessmen (one PR expert), so I'm not sure what kind of advice they're giving. A foundation board made of banksters. And a director's council, composed of MBA's and investment bankers. And a network management team that is also devoid of actual teachers or educators. Well, what about the actual school leaders? Nope-- TFA alums, one TNTP alum, and one person with an actual MA in teaching on top of a BA in public policy. If I showed you the list of people managing this enterprise and asked you to guess what the enterprise did, you would not guess "educates children."
Vetter's school enrolls students in grades 5 through 8-- they have a total of 224 students. All of them are local to Chelsea, 83% are Latino (I don't know what that stat is even useful for) and 83% fall below federal poverty lines. No word on how many of those are ELL. The school employs five administrators and twenty-five other faculty. A few faculty have actual teaching degrees, but many are TFA alum-- some aren't even that. The staffer who designed a comprehensive English curriculum for ELL students has a BA in government and international studies.
So, yes. Excel Academy is a massive revenue-generating amateur hour. Has this gifted collection of Betters somehow discovered the secret of educating students? Well, I mean a secret beyond accepting only students who will do well and driving out any that might bring your numbers down.
Holding our schools and teachers accountable for such trajectory-changing results says that we not only believe in their possibility but in fact demand it for all of our students regardless of the neighborhood in which they live.
What else? Well, Vetter wants to tell us the story of how they used the PARCC to make magic. When Excel decided to use the PARCC, Vetter found the multiple choice questions were "highly nuanced," which is the best way I've seen to describe PARCC's tendency to ask bubble test questions with multiple correct answers, only one of which is accepted. How did they deal with it?
We revised our unit assessments to include questions that mirrored PARCC's emphasis on supporting multiple choice answers with evidence, and we engaged in discussions about how to build our students' ability to write in a variety of genres. Initially, test averages were lower overall. But as students collaboratively corrected their missed questions and became familiar with the new level of expectations, they rose to the occasion, and their test scores began to improve.
So, lots of test prep. Vetter continues on her mission to include every reformster cliche in the book.
What's more, PARCC's alignment with Common Core has upped the rigor of my course. In the process, I discovered that Jose had a real gift for writing engaging dialogue, while Estefania could effectively integrate information from multiple sources. All of my students can now analyze how an author's choices led to a specific purpose in her writing and compare the choices of two different authors. The PARCC's emphasis on textual evidence led to much richer student discussions in my classroom, pushing me to recognize the level of thinking of which my sixth graders are truly capable. At end of the school year, my students surpassed my expectations.
This is a new twist-- Vetter apparently didn't know how to teach before, but not just the Common Core, but the combination of Common Core and the PARCC showed her how to do her job.
In all fairness to Vetter, it's entirely possible that she actually didn't know how to do her job before. Since graduating from Goucher College in 2007 with a BA in sociology, Vetter put in two years with TFA, three years at a STRIVE academy, and now three years at Excel. So it is possible, for instance, that she had no clue what level of thinking is developmentally possible for a sixth grader.
No set of reformster testy cliches would be complete without a disclaimer (the PARCC is not perfect), and followed by a wrap-up that undercuts the disclaimer.
Every teacher would agree that standardized tests are imperfect measures of the complex output that is students' growth as learners and people. However, without the data that is provided by these assessments, we would have no method for seeing how our students stack up and where to revise our approach.
Again, given that Vetter is an amateur working in a setting run and occupied by other amateurs, she may really believe that she would have no method of seeing how students stack up, or even understand that trying to stack rank students is destructive and useless (in less, of course, your school's business model is built on getting rid of the students on the bottom of the stack). It may well be that this big batch of amateurs has no idea how to collect their own data to evaluate and revise their own teaching program. And it could well be that this big bunch of amateurs doesn't understand that using a single bad standardized test to drive that process is just about the least useful way to approach the problem.
Looking into Vetter, her school, and her writing drives home for me just how lost these folks are. First, they're trying to re-invent the wheel. But they're working with roughly chiseled slabs of stone while actual trained teachers are trying to work out better bearing and support assemblies for the wheels on fully developed vehicles. And because the charter amateurs set their testing spots at the top of a steep hill, they think they've really discovered something when their giant rock slabs actually roll down the hill a ways, while real teachers in real public schools are trying to figure out how to get their educational trucks to traverse rocky, uphill terrain. The reformsters have set themselves a game that a chimp could win (Roll Things Down Easy Hill) and think they've discovered something useful in the process.
Vetter looks happy, cheery, and she's stuck with the reformster ed game for almost a decade now, but I don't know if she has a clue. She may be smart, and she may mean well, but she has nothing to teach us about how to educate students.
I'll include a link here, so that you can check my work to keep me honest, but I recommend you don't add to the Teach Plus click count. Because Excel is not only reinventing the education wheel, but Vetter is reinventing the Reformy Teacher-ish Praise wheel, and that's one wheel that just needs to stop turning.
Update: This morning when I posted this, there were three comments on HuffPo in reply to the article-- one critical, a supportive post from one of Vetter's co-workers, and my link to the piece you're reading. As of this afternoon, there are no comments up at HuffPo in reply to the article. Ironically, that commenst section is called "conversations."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)