Chad Aldeman at Bellwether Ed Partners has a new report out. Mind the Gap: Re-Imagining the Way States Judge High School Quality gets a few critical questions right, but the answers still need work.
First, the big news
Keep in mind that Bellwether is a reliable member of the reformster thinky tank pantheon, often sipping free market ambrosia while sharing a cloud with the Fordham Institute. I want you to keep that in mind when you read the next quote, which would be unremarkable anywhere else:
State and federal policies on high schools typically reward schools that perform well on measures like test scores and graduation rates while forcing changes on those that don’t. When these two measures alone serve as proxies for a quality high school they paint an incomplete picture of success, one that can reflect more on the school’s demographics than its success in educating students and preparing them for the future. And instead of focusing on higher-order skills,challenging coursework, and annual progress toward college and career readiness, schools are encouraged to focus on lower-level skills and push all students through to a diploma, regardless of what they learn.
Yup. Turns out that the Big Standardized Tests doesn't give a very complete picture of student achievement. Not only that, but because the BS Tests come with such high stakes, schools tend to focus on preparing students for the test and not on giving students a great complete education.And also, this:
Accountability systems reflect these choices. Ideally they would reflect what society values, not
what’s easiest to measure.
Look, I don't want to minimize the fact that these guys finally arrived here. But at the same time, if I'm honest, my most visceral reaction is, "No shit, Sherlock" or "Duhhh" or "In other news, the sun rose in the East this morning."
One Remaining Problem
There is still a big hitch in Aldeman's gitalong, and it shows up in the assumption that a high school's job is to get a student ready for college or a career. Unstated is the idea that education might be for life or even something as old-fashioned as citizenship. That will come back to bite us in the butt, later.
Blah Blah Blah
The first segments of the paper involve pointing out that people should breathe air and drink water. No, okay, the first sections are used to re-make the arguments that some of us have been making for years now-- like what gets measured gets managed, so if you're measuring the wrong things (like narrowly targeted items on BS Tests) then those become the focus of your school and the school stops doing the work that society set it up to do in the first place. Also, if you jam your finger into your eye, your eyeball will start to hurt.
Yes, it would be nice to include a paragraph saying, "Many critics of education reform have been pointing this out for years now and I've come around to thinking they may have a point." But hey-- that's just selfishness talking. I'm glad to find Belwether on this page, finally.
Some Data Points
Because what would a "paper" be without them. Aldeman takes a moment to note that our college drop-out rate is way up there. We're going to interpret this to mean (sigh) that these dropouts were lied to by their schools and told they were ready for college when they weren't. I don't want to side track this too much, but I will offer some alternative theories for why Chris left college.
1) Chris's high school said, "You are not ready for college, at least not THAT college," but Chris went anyway.
2) Wassamatta University accepted Chris because WU needs money, not because they thought Chris was a great prospect.
3) Chris dropped out because WU's costs turned out to be unmanageable.
The Alternative
The real goal is for Aldenman to lay out an alternative program for measuring high school successfulness. Aldeman has used the SCORE model from Tennessee as his template. I will spoil the suspense by observing that his solution needs work.
This would be where Aldeman drops the truth-grenade that test scores have a lot to do with poverty rates. Again, the news not so much in someone saying what we've already known for years, but in who is saying it.
While additional alignment and enrigorfication may help, Aldeman believes that some other factors have "predictive power" in telling us who is really ready for college. And this is where he starts to head into the weeds, mostly because he's still stuck in the notion that high school is basically vocational training, or pre-vocational training for people who will get their vocational training in college. And that still-narrow too-limited view of the purpose of education will lead Aldeman to some cramped solutions to the accountability puzzle.
For his accountability model, Aldeman will keep test results plus advanced course passing rate as 40% of the school's score. The course passage rate strikes me as extremely game-able, but mostly this part is the same old same old.
Next, Aldeman tries some sleight-of-hand. Let's look at actual progression and graduation rates as compared to a reasonable prediction of how the students would have done-- hey, wait a minute!! That's VAM! Aldeman wants to use the magic of VAM sauce to measure the whole school. For 20%. Well, that's just a crock. And the fact that he studiously avoids the usual language of VAM suggests that Aldeman knows he's trying to sneak that wolf into the shepherd's party dressed in a sheep suit.
Aldeman throws in 5% for school environment measures, which is a fair idea, though I'm a little surprised to find a modern reformster measuring inputs instead of outputs. I thought inputs were so fifteen years ago.
His final piece is intriguing. Aldeman proposes measuring post-high school outcomes-- college attendance rates (actual compared, sigh, to predicted, which means it will eventually top out and the school's rating will tank), college credit accumulation, employment, employment earnings!!
On the one hand, I think an after-graduation follow-up has merit. My colleagues and I regularly do informal follow-up with our grads-- how did we do preparing you, what helped, what did you need, that sort of thing. On the other hand, Aldeman is suggesting that we stop relying on data that is highly influenced by the students' socio-economic background and start including some other factors that are highly influenced by the students's socio-economic background. We know that social mobility is limited, and that poor students from poor communities mostly don't end up in the top 5% of income sets. In other words, I'm not sure that Aldeman's system doesn't continue the business of punishing poor schools in poor neighborhoods for having poor students.
The Best Sentence
So Aldeman's paper has a great deal of work to do yet. Good job of identifying the problem; not such a great job of designing a solution. But I will give Aldeman a bonus point or two for this sentence:
Public school accountability systems should measure what society values out of its education system.
In this respect, we are in perfect agreement. And if we can agree that society does not most value students getting scores on Big Standardized Tests, we have a basis to move forward. We might even be able to talk about higher aspirations than simply educating to get a job.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2015
Who Is Served by the Unions?
We're going to have this argument again because folks are pissed about the early endorsement of Hillary Clinton by the AFT. But there's another issue quietly simmering on the union back burner that is far more significant in dealing with the question of which interests, exactly, are served by the big teachers unions.
Who am I?
This whole topic is so fraught and land-miney that I feel the need to place myself on the union spectrum before leaping in. If you don't particularly care, you can skip ahead to the next subheading.
I don't have a lot of patience for the dopes at groups like Free To Teach who are sure that the union is holding them back from being rich and wildly successful as teachers. If you think you would get a better deal for yourself without a union, you really don't understand the situation. I have been a local union president during contract negotiations and a strike, and I know how invaluable the assistance and expertise of the state union can be. Regardless of how confused they get at times, the union still provides some powerful protection for teachers who need it and deserve it. I have no patience for bashing unions as a way to bash teachers.
At the same time, I'm never going to go along with the union just because they think I should. Calls for unity that are actually calls to shut up and go along do not move me (except occasionally in the opposite direction). I am acutely aware that sometimes the interests of the union, the interests of local teachers, and the interests of public education do not always perfectly align.
It's that misalignment that brings up the topic of discussion at hand.
The Noisy Political Issue
Political endorsements are the most visible of national leadership activities, and as witnessed by the continuing blowback over Randi Weingarten's endorsement of Hillary Clinton (an early Christmas gift that helps push Clinton up and away from Bernie Sanders without requiring her to actually acknowledge him).
I have complained to my state leaders about their endorsement of politicians who sucked for education. The standard response is some combination of A) we want a seat at the table and B) you should see how much the other guy sucks.
These are not completely invalid arguments. A teachers union can't do anything for its members if nobody with actual power doesn't listen to it, and that means political horse-trading for a seat at the table. I know there are people who believe that we should simply stand out in the yard, far away from the table, throwing a tantrum and refusing to come inside for anything less that 100% purity and compliance by politicians. Insisting on political purity may be satisfying, but it doesn't get a damned thing done in the real world.
But it's also true that in the real world, politicians say all the right things to make supporters happy until those supporters realize they are sitting at the children's table and nobody is paying them a damn bit of attention (see, for example, George W. Bush and the religious right, who supported him and didn't get a bit of help stopping The Gays).
What did or will AFT get out of endorsing Clinton? I'm going to predict the answer is "Nothing At All." Particularly now that she landed the endorsement without even having to make a show of backing public education. This is not realistic politicking. This is giving away milk for free in hopes that someone will then decide to buy your cow.
Teachers do have an interest in having their unions cultivate political power. But the union leaderships interest in political power does not always align with the interests of teachers.
The Quiet Charter Issue
That mis-alignment could get even worse.
Not as sexy as discussions of testing and Common Core are the ongoing discussions of if or how to bring charter school teachers into the union fold. There are several arguments in favor of this.
1) Making charters deal with unionized teachers will make chartering less attractive and make charter operators behave better if they do still enter the business.
2) Charter teachers are teachers, mostly, sort of, so why not include them in the unions?
3) The unions are desperate for members and would enroll my dog if they could.
I get the value behind the first two possibilities. And I understand how it would be good for the union to have more members. More dues, more clout, more reach, and fewer headlines about shrinking unions.
But there's an inevitable side effect. If charter school teachers are members of the union, the union has an obligation to represent them, and that means a conflict between old members and new. Because charter schools, as currently structured in every state in the union, cannot thrive without sucking the life blood from public schools.
How will things work in this alternate universe? A bad charter is about to close, and that will mean the loss of many union teacher jobs-- will the union fight for the survival of that bad charter? Yet the closing of the charter will stop some of the money-sucking damage to the public school-- will the union support that?
As the charter system in this country is currently set up, charter schools and public schools are competing interests. How can a union serve both? This brings us back to the original question:
Who is served by the unions?
Does the union serve the interests of teachers? Any teachers? All teachers? And does that mean that the union has a vested interest in the survival of anyone who employs those teachers?
Does the union serve the interests of public education? Lots of folks who see the union as obstructionist think so, but are they right? And if the union does have a vested interest in public education, how can it ally itself with those who would tear public education apart?
Does the union serve the interests of the union? And if so, does that mean that all schools and all teachers need to watch their backs in dealing with a union that may screw them any time such screwage serves its own interests?
As the traditional public school system is attacked, broken, busted down for parts, and sold off, will the unions stand with teachers to fight for it, or will they set their sails for whatever way the wind is blowing? And if that's the plan, how can they possibly hope to hold onto and recruit members to survive?
These are not easy questions to answer, but the answers are going to determine the future of the unions and the fate of teachers who depend on them. On the national level, the news has not been good for a while, with support for Common Core and AFT's endorsement of the Very Reformy Clinton signs that sails are set and teachers need to either grab on tight or be thrown overboard. But for those of us who care about the unions, we need to stop reacting to the issue du jour and start paying attention to the bigger picture, the answers our leaders are coming up with for the question-- just who is served by the unions?
Who am I?
This whole topic is so fraught and land-miney that I feel the need to place myself on the union spectrum before leaping in. If you don't particularly care, you can skip ahead to the next subheading.
I don't have a lot of patience for the dopes at groups like Free To Teach who are sure that the union is holding them back from being rich and wildly successful as teachers. If you think you would get a better deal for yourself without a union, you really don't understand the situation. I have been a local union president during contract negotiations and a strike, and I know how invaluable the assistance and expertise of the state union can be. Regardless of how confused they get at times, the union still provides some powerful protection for teachers who need it and deserve it. I have no patience for bashing unions as a way to bash teachers.
At the same time, I'm never going to go along with the union just because they think I should. Calls for unity that are actually calls to shut up and go along do not move me (except occasionally in the opposite direction). I am acutely aware that sometimes the interests of the union, the interests of local teachers, and the interests of public education do not always perfectly align.
It's that misalignment that brings up the topic of discussion at hand.
The Noisy Political Issue
Political endorsements are the most visible of national leadership activities, and as witnessed by the continuing blowback over Randi Weingarten's endorsement of Hillary Clinton (an early Christmas gift that helps push Clinton up and away from Bernie Sanders without requiring her to actually acknowledge him).
I have complained to my state leaders about their endorsement of politicians who sucked for education. The standard response is some combination of A) we want a seat at the table and B) you should see how much the other guy sucks.
These are not completely invalid arguments. A teachers union can't do anything for its members if nobody with actual power doesn't listen to it, and that means political horse-trading for a seat at the table. I know there are people who believe that we should simply stand out in the yard, far away from the table, throwing a tantrum and refusing to come inside for anything less that 100% purity and compliance by politicians. Insisting on political purity may be satisfying, but it doesn't get a damned thing done in the real world.
But it's also true that in the real world, politicians say all the right things to make supporters happy until those supporters realize they are sitting at the children's table and nobody is paying them a damn bit of attention (see, for example, George W. Bush and the religious right, who supported him and didn't get a bit of help stopping The Gays).
What did or will AFT get out of endorsing Clinton? I'm going to predict the answer is "Nothing At All." Particularly now that she landed the endorsement without even having to make a show of backing public education. This is not realistic politicking. This is giving away milk for free in hopes that someone will then decide to buy your cow.
Teachers do have an interest in having their unions cultivate political power. But the union leaderships interest in political power does not always align with the interests of teachers.
The Quiet Charter Issue
That mis-alignment could get even worse.
Not as sexy as discussions of testing and Common Core are the ongoing discussions of if or how to bring charter school teachers into the union fold. There are several arguments in favor of this.
1) Making charters deal with unionized teachers will make chartering less attractive and make charter operators behave better if they do still enter the business.
2) Charter teachers are teachers, mostly, sort of, so why not include them in the unions?
3) The unions are desperate for members and would enroll my dog if they could.
I get the value behind the first two possibilities. And I understand how it would be good for the union to have more members. More dues, more clout, more reach, and fewer headlines about shrinking unions.
But there's an inevitable side effect. If charter school teachers are members of the union, the union has an obligation to represent them, and that means a conflict between old members and new. Because charter schools, as currently structured in every state in the union, cannot thrive without sucking the life blood from public schools.
How will things work in this alternate universe? A bad charter is about to close, and that will mean the loss of many union teacher jobs-- will the union fight for the survival of that bad charter? Yet the closing of the charter will stop some of the money-sucking damage to the public school-- will the union support that?
As the charter system in this country is currently set up, charter schools and public schools are competing interests. How can a union serve both? This brings us back to the original question:
Who is served by the unions?
Does the union serve the interests of teachers? Any teachers? All teachers? And does that mean that the union has a vested interest in the survival of anyone who employs those teachers?
Does the union serve the interests of public education? Lots of folks who see the union as obstructionist think so, but are they right? And if the union does have a vested interest in public education, how can it ally itself with those who would tear public education apart?
Does the union serve the interests of the union? And if so, does that mean that all schools and all teachers need to watch their backs in dealing with a union that may screw them any time such screwage serves its own interests?
As the traditional public school system is attacked, broken, busted down for parts, and sold off, will the unions stand with teachers to fight for it, or will they set their sails for whatever way the wind is blowing? And if that's the plan, how can they possibly hope to hold onto and recruit members to survive?
These are not easy questions to answer, but the answers are going to determine the future of the unions and the fate of teachers who depend on them. On the national level, the news has not been good for a while, with support for Common Core and AFT's endorsement of the Very Reformy Clinton signs that sails are set and teachers need to either grab on tight or be thrown overboard. But for those of us who care about the unions, we need to stop reacting to the issue du jour and start paying attention to the bigger picture, the answers our leaders are coming up with for the question-- just who is served by the unions?
Campbell Brown's PR Site Launches
Well, the 74 is here, and it's not exactly loaded with surprises.
Campbell Brown has launched her new site devoted to bringing the Power of Journalism to bear on pushing her particular view of What Is Needed in Education. Here's what we can find there this morning.
Brown herself has an opinion piece entitled "Advocacy, Journalism, and Why Not Every Story Has Two Sides."
Through our reporting we will advocate for a public school system that truly serves the 74 million children in this country and prioritizes their needs. Without question, The Seventy Four has an agenda – children first. We will fiercely challenge those forces within the education establishment who impede innovation in our schools and who protect and defend inequality and institutional failure.
Yes, this site is For The Children. Also, they will fight for Equity and Quality, and against the Establishment. Brown continues to position herself rhetorically as a fighter for children against teachers and other educators. She is here to speak up for the voiceless.
Naïve as it sounds, I was taken with the idea that a journalist could be a voice for those who don’t have one
Interesting notion. Because one would think that a person running a website with a four million dollar budget could provide a platform to allow those people's voices to be heard. But no-- once again (and to be fair, reformsters don't have a monopoly on this) the plan is to speak for people-- not to let them speak for themselves.
The website has a Top Four feature that headlines the top four features of the day, and today the number one feature is a story about Scott Walker. It's actually a reading list, with links to nine articles about his childhood, the moral imperative of vouchers, his complicated relationship with Common Core, his war on tenure, Politifacts debunking of WI growth scores, his courting of home schoolers, his protection of vouchers against budget cuts, how he dropped out of college, and his op-ed last month.
I expect we'll see more of these sorts of pieces. Brown wants to position her website as a player in the Presidential election, and has already set up education "summits" in NH and Iowa (one for each party). Prize-winning commentator Cynthia Tucker Haynes argues that the next President will have to fix education, arguing that NCLB was a good step and Race to the Top was swell because of the teacher accountability idea, allowing us to hunt down bad teachers to get rid of them, proving I guess that you can win a Pullitzer and still not understand every topic you write about.
It does suggest that Brown's project wants to advocate for a level of federalism that is out of step with much of reformsterism. It'll be interesting to see how free-market right guys like AEI and Fordham take to her.
What else have we got?
There's a breathless expose of the secret conspiracy behind the Montclair, NJ opt out movement (hint: the dastardly teacher's union was wrapped up in it). There's an inspirational story of how Miami-Dade's superintendent saved the district by using charters and choice. There's another inspirational story about how a "heroic pilot" became a great educator thanks to Teach for America. And in state-level news, there's a story about how Nevada's only hope is to make the bold move of shifting to an all-choice system.
If that's not enough charter love, there is also a flashcard feature (in this and in many design features, the site seems to owe a bit to vox.xom) which offers us thirteen things to know about charter schools.
Point 2 is "are charter schools more successful than public schools," so kudos for acknowledging that they aren't the same thing! No kudos for answering, "Yeah, a little." Most of the thirteen points are straightforward (where do charters get their money?) but a few stretchers appear. For instance, in response to "do charters have to accept all students," we learn charters have huge waiting lists, but they settle these with lotteries and there's no proof that they counsel out problem students-- none of which actually answers the question.
So, bottom line, how does the site look?
First, Brown's site benefits from the hiring of real journalists and real professionals from the world of online news. It looks slick, and the writing is generally well-done and competent. Honestly, I'm not sure I really noticed how amateur hour Peter Cunningham's $12 million Education Post site looks and reads until I checked out The 74.
Second, it uses the modern news-ish outlet technique of letting opinion and news live right side by side so that only people paying attention will notice the difference. For the rest, the professional tone of the news reporting will give a feeling of substance to the opinion pieces that they don't really deserve (and I say this as a person whose opinion pieces run at Huffington Post). The news items up at the moment are not hugely obviously fox-news-style slanted, but give a pretty good semblance of objectivity, if not the actual thing. Which leads us straight to
Third, this is an advocacy site, and "advocacy" is our nice name for PR. It has a point of view that it wants to push, and whether that's because Brown is a clueless rich dilettante who doesn't know what she's talking about or an evil mastermind who's fronting for her husband and his disaster capitalist friends, either way, this is a site that has a point of view to push. This is no more nor less than we expected. That's evident just in the choice of topics. One good way to be subtle in slanting news is to provide fairly level coverage-- but only of the things you want to talk about.
You could, for instance, provide fairly level coverage of problems in education, but never ever send a reporter to cover the problems that turn up in charter schools. Your individual stories might be close to objective, but your overall coverage would still be slanted.
We'll see how things play out. If Brown can convince candidates to cue up for her educational summits, she may start looking like a real player in the ed debates, or at least a good mouthpiece for candidates who want to say educationy things without being challenged on their baloney.
But if you had the slightest thought that there would be any surprises at The 74, banish such foolish notions. It's a slicker package and better buns, but it's the same old pro-charter, anti-union, pro-privatization, anti-public ed meal inside. I can't wait till they start covering Brown's heroic fight to destroy tenure in New York, but I definitely won't hold my breath waiting for a hard-hitting expose of a charter school scandal.
There is no such thing as advocacy journalism. You cannot, as Brown promises we will, have both. Either you have a journalist's interest in pursuing the truth, wherever the path leads you, or you have an advocate's interest in finding support for the position that you have already committed yourself to. It's one or the other, and for all the journalistic trappings, Brown has chosen the path of the advocate.
Campbell Brown has launched her new site devoted to bringing the Power of Journalism to bear on pushing her particular view of What Is Needed in Education. Here's what we can find there this morning.
Brown herself has an opinion piece entitled "Advocacy, Journalism, and Why Not Every Story Has Two Sides."
Through our reporting we will advocate for a public school system that truly serves the 74 million children in this country and prioritizes their needs. Without question, The Seventy Four has an agenda – children first. We will fiercely challenge those forces within the education establishment who impede innovation in our schools and who protect and defend inequality and institutional failure.
Yes, this site is For The Children. Also, they will fight for Equity and Quality, and against the Establishment. Brown continues to position herself rhetorically as a fighter for children against teachers and other educators. She is here to speak up for the voiceless.
Naïve as it sounds, I was taken with the idea that a journalist could be a voice for those who don’t have one
Interesting notion. Because one would think that a person running a website with a four million dollar budget could provide a platform to allow those people's voices to be heard. But no-- once again (and to be fair, reformsters don't have a monopoly on this) the plan is to speak for people-- not to let them speak for themselves.
The website has a Top Four feature that headlines the top four features of the day, and today the number one feature is a story about Scott Walker. It's actually a reading list, with links to nine articles about his childhood, the moral imperative of vouchers, his complicated relationship with Common Core, his war on tenure, Politifacts debunking of WI growth scores, his courting of home schoolers, his protection of vouchers against budget cuts, how he dropped out of college, and his op-ed last month.
I expect we'll see more of these sorts of pieces. Brown wants to position her website as a player in the Presidential election, and has already set up education "summits" in NH and Iowa (one for each party). Prize-winning commentator Cynthia Tucker Haynes argues that the next President will have to fix education, arguing that NCLB was a good step and Race to the Top was swell because of the teacher accountability idea, allowing us to hunt down bad teachers to get rid of them, proving I guess that you can win a Pullitzer and still not understand every topic you write about.
It does suggest that Brown's project wants to advocate for a level of federalism that is out of step with much of reformsterism. It'll be interesting to see how free-market right guys like AEI and Fordham take to her.
What else have we got?
There's a breathless expose of the secret conspiracy behind the Montclair, NJ opt out movement (hint: the dastardly teacher's union was wrapped up in it). There's an inspirational story of how Miami-Dade's superintendent saved the district by using charters and choice. There's another inspirational story about how a "heroic pilot" became a great educator thanks to Teach for America. And in state-level news, there's a story about how Nevada's only hope is to make the bold move of shifting to an all-choice system.
If that's not enough charter love, there is also a flashcard feature (in this and in many design features, the site seems to owe a bit to vox.xom) which offers us thirteen things to know about charter schools.
Point 2 is "are charter schools more successful than public schools," so kudos for acknowledging that they aren't the same thing! No kudos for answering, "Yeah, a little." Most of the thirteen points are straightforward (where do charters get their money?) but a few stretchers appear. For instance, in response to "do charters have to accept all students," we learn charters have huge waiting lists, but they settle these with lotteries and there's no proof that they counsel out problem students-- none of which actually answers the question.
So, bottom line, how does the site look?
First, Brown's site benefits from the hiring of real journalists and real professionals from the world of online news. It looks slick, and the writing is generally well-done and competent. Honestly, I'm not sure I really noticed how amateur hour Peter Cunningham's $12 million Education Post site looks and reads until I checked out The 74.
Second, it uses the modern news-ish outlet technique of letting opinion and news live right side by side so that only people paying attention will notice the difference. For the rest, the professional tone of the news reporting will give a feeling of substance to the opinion pieces that they don't really deserve (and I say this as a person whose opinion pieces run at Huffington Post). The news items up at the moment are not hugely obviously fox-news-style slanted, but give a pretty good semblance of objectivity, if not the actual thing. Which leads us straight to
Third, this is an advocacy site, and "advocacy" is our nice name for PR. It has a point of view that it wants to push, and whether that's because Brown is a clueless rich dilettante who doesn't know what she's talking about or an evil mastermind who's fronting for her husband and his disaster capitalist friends, either way, this is a site that has a point of view to push. This is no more nor less than we expected. That's evident just in the choice of topics. One good way to be subtle in slanting news is to provide fairly level coverage-- but only of the things you want to talk about.
You could, for instance, provide fairly level coverage of problems in education, but never ever send a reporter to cover the problems that turn up in charter schools. Your individual stories might be close to objective, but your overall coverage would still be slanted.
We'll see how things play out. If Brown can convince candidates to cue up for her educational summits, she may start looking like a real player in the ed debates, or at least a good mouthpiece for candidates who want to say educationy things without being challenged on their baloney.
But if you had the slightest thought that there would be any surprises at The 74, banish such foolish notions. It's a slicker package and better buns, but it's the same old pro-charter, anti-union, pro-privatization, anti-public ed meal inside. I can't wait till they start covering Brown's heroic fight to destroy tenure in New York, but I definitely won't hold my breath waiting for a hard-hitting expose of a charter school scandal.
There is no such thing as advocacy journalism. You cannot, as Brown promises we will, have both. Either you have a journalist's interest in pursuing the truth, wherever the path leads you, or you have an advocate's interest in finding support for the position that you have already committed yourself to. It's one or the other, and for all the journalistic trappings, Brown has chosen the path of the advocate.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Test Scoring Monkeys
It's been less than a month since Motoko Rich traveled to San Antonio to hear a Pearson test scoring supervisor explain that scoring the tests is like making a Big Mac. Now Claudio Sanchez has made the same journey for NPR, and the results are no more flattering for Pearson than those from Rich's jaunt.
The center uses scorers from many walks of life, though a four-year degree is required. What is not required is any sort of opinion about the quality of the questions.
David Connerty-Marin, a spokesman for PARCC, says it's not up to a scorer or Pearson or PARCC to say, "Gee, we think this is too hard for a fourth-grader."
What is or is not developmentally appropriate, he says, is not an issue because the states have already made that decision based on the Common Core Standards.
One of these rainy summer days, I'll spend some time running up and down the internet and see if I can find, somewhere in the great chain of standards and testing, the person who says, "Me, I'm the one. I'm the guy who decides that this test item is appropriate for an eight year old." But until the day comes, we're stuck with test manufacturers who say, "Well, we just follow what the state tells us" and states that say, "Well, we lean on the professionals to design these things" and a whole bunch of people who point and shrug and say, "Well, you know, the standards" as if the standards were dropped down from heaven on the back of a golden cloud that deposited them on top of a burning bush.
The article's description of the scoring process reveals for the gazillionth time that the constructed open-ended responses are not any kind of open-ended response at all, but a bizarre exercise in blind matching.
Sanchez talked to one retired teacher who has worked eight years for Pearson.
She looks for evidence that students understood what they read, that their writing is coherent and that they used proper grammar. But it's actually not up to Vickers to decide what score a student deserves.
Instead, she relies on a three-ring binder filled with "anchor papers." These are samples of students' writing that show what a low-score or a high-score response looks like.
"I compare the composition to the anchors and see which score does the composition match more closely," Vickers says.
That's not an open-ended response. It's a newer, more gigantic form of multiple choice, where students choose from all the possible combinations of words in the English language in hopes of selecting the one combination that is acceptable to test manufacturers. Those folks in Texas have the same basic task as the guy checking the work of the million monkeys to see which one has typed a Shakespeare play. This is a test where students are given a box full of LEGOs and told to build something, but will only get credit if they build the right thing.
And, of course, reporters can't know any specifics about any of the actual test questions or responses.
Pearson does not allow reporters to describe or provide examples of what students wrote because otherwise, company officials say, everybody would know what's on the test.
I don't even know how to explain how insane that is. In my own classroom, my students know exactly what is going to be on a test. Any test that depends on super-duper secrecy is a terrible test. It is also possibly a test manufactured by cheap money-grubbing slackers who don't want to do the work of updating it annually.
Pearson delivers a backhanded acknowledgement that secrecy has not been their friend. One supervisor notes that since the public doesn't know what Pearson's doing, "misconceptions" abound. But Sanchez gets the last word on that subject:
Most Americans have been in the dark, says Thompson. So the risk for Pearson, PARCC and the states is that by trying to be more transparent this late in the game, people may very well end up with more questions than answers.
The center uses scorers from many walks of life, though a four-year degree is required. What is not required is any sort of opinion about the quality of the questions.
David Connerty-Marin, a spokesman for PARCC, says it's not up to a scorer or Pearson or PARCC to say, "Gee, we think this is too hard for a fourth-grader."
What is or is not developmentally appropriate, he says, is not an issue because the states have already made that decision based on the Common Core Standards.
One of these rainy summer days, I'll spend some time running up and down the internet and see if I can find, somewhere in the great chain of standards and testing, the person who says, "Me, I'm the one. I'm the guy who decides that this test item is appropriate for an eight year old." But until the day comes, we're stuck with test manufacturers who say, "Well, we just follow what the state tells us" and states that say, "Well, we lean on the professionals to design these things" and a whole bunch of people who point and shrug and say, "Well, you know, the standards" as if the standards were dropped down from heaven on the back of a golden cloud that deposited them on top of a burning bush.
The article's description of the scoring process reveals for the gazillionth time that the constructed open-ended responses are not any kind of open-ended response at all, but a bizarre exercise in blind matching.
Sanchez talked to one retired teacher who has worked eight years for Pearson.
She looks for evidence that students understood what they read, that their writing is coherent and that they used proper grammar. But it's actually not up to Vickers to decide what score a student deserves.
Instead, she relies on a three-ring binder filled with "anchor papers." These are samples of students' writing that show what a low-score or a high-score response looks like.
"I compare the composition to the anchors and see which score does the composition match more closely," Vickers says.
That's not an open-ended response. It's a newer, more gigantic form of multiple choice, where students choose from all the possible combinations of words in the English language in hopes of selecting the one combination that is acceptable to test manufacturers. Those folks in Texas have the same basic task as the guy checking the work of the million monkeys to see which one has typed a Shakespeare play. This is a test where students are given a box full of LEGOs and told to build something, but will only get credit if they build the right thing.
And, of course, reporters can't know any specifics about any of the actual test questions or responses.
Pearson does not allow reporters to describe or provide examples of what students wrote because otherwise, company officials say, everybody would know what's on the test.
I don't even know how to explain how insane that is. In my own classroom, my students know exactly what is going to be on a test. Any test that depends on super-duper secrecy is a terrible test. It is also possibly a test manufactured by cheap money-grubbing slackers who don't want to do the work of updating it annually.
Pearson delivers a backhanded acknowledgement that secrecy has not been their friend. One supervisor notes that since the public doesn't know what Pearson's doing, "misconceptions" abound. But Sanchez gets the last word on that subject:
Most Americans have been in the dark, says Thompson. So the risk for Pearson, PARCC and the states is that by trying to be more transparent this late in the game, people may very well end up with more questions than answers.
ICYMI: Top Eduposts of the Week (7/12)
Once again, here's some choice bits from around the edublogosphere that you should catch this week. I"m not perfect and this isn't every single thing you should read, but these are definitely pieces you should not miss.
Charter Schools Are Mired in Fraud and Failure
Paul Buchheit at Alternet takes a look at what's not to love about charter schools. This is a well-sourced compendium of many of the things we know are wrong. You might not find anything here you didn't already know, but it's a good source for finding it all in one place.
The Disturbing Forces Behind a School "Reform" Fight in Colorado
Jeff Bryant takes a closer look at the ongoing mess in Colorado, where Jefferson and Douglas County have both attracted the attention and money of reformsters from outside the area. This is the same fight featured in the film Education, Inc, and well worth studying up on. This is the blueprint for how outsiders take over a local district, and Bryant is, as always, thorough.
Testimony Regarding PARCC/MAS
Tracy Novick's testimony about choosing between the PARCC and Massachusetts' home-grown test (Novick picks None of the Above). A quick concise argument about what's wrong with the high stakes standardized testing regime.
False Sense of Security
This story leads off with the story of a student who found himself dealing with police twice-- just because he forgot his school id badge. A look at more effective approaches to school security.
Washington Post writes the most embarrassing, awful profile of Arne Duncan ever, completely misses the point
Lyndsey Layton took some flak this week for her profile of Arne Duncan, but nobody laid down the flak more precisely and thoroughly than Jeff Bryant at Salon with this too-long-for-twitter title.
Kansas Is Becoming a Hard Place To Teach, So Teachers Are Crossing the State Line
A Wichita public radio station notices that Kansas's anti-public ed policies are starting to drive teachers away. Complete with pics of the recruiting billboards Missouri is putting up in Kansas to poach teachers.
And finally, two pieces from Jersey Jazzman that you should not miss.
Chris Cerf's Victory Lap is a reminder that a 100% charter district is probably not the end game for privatizers. Firing Black, Experienced Teachers in Camden lays out once again, with data, how reformster programs often have a disproportionate effect on non-white teachers.
Charter Schools Are Mired in Fraud and Failure
Paul Buchheit at Alternet takes a look at what's not to love about charter schools. This is a well-sourced compendium of many of the things we know are wrong. You might not find anything here you didn't already know, but it's a good source for finding it all in one place.
The Disturbing Forces Behind a School "Reform" Fight in Colorado
Jeff Bryant takes a closer look at the ongoing mess in Colorado, where Jefferson and Douglas County have both attracted the attention and money of reformsters from outside the area. This is the same fight featured in the film Education, Inc, and well worth studying up on. This is the blueprint for how outsiders take over a local district, and Bryant is, as always, thorough.
Testimony Regarding PARCC/MAS
Tracy Novick's testimony about choosing between the PARCC and Massachusetts' home-grown test (Novick picks None of the Above). A quick concise argument about what's wrong with the high stakes standardized testing regime.
False Sense of Security
This story leads off with the story of a student who found himself dealing with police twice-- just because he forgot his school id badge. A look at more effective approaches to school security.
Washington Post writes the most embarrassing, awful profile of Arne Duncan ever, completely misses the point
Lyndsey Layton took some flak this week for her profile of Arne Duncan, but nobody laid down the flak more precisely and thoroughly than Jeff Bryant at Salon with this too-long-for-twitter title.
Kansas Is Becoming a Hard Place To Teach, So Teachers Are Crossing the State Line
A Wichita public radio station notices that Kansas's anti-public ed policies are starting to drive teachers away. Complete with pics of the recruiting billboards Missouri is putting up in Kansas to poach teachers.
And finally, two pieces from Jersey Jazzman that you should not miss.
Chris Cerf's Victory Lap is a reminder that a 100% charter district is probably not the end game for privatizers. Firing Black, Experienced Teachers in Camden lays out once again, with data, how reformster programs often have a disproportionate effect on non-white teachers.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Jeb: Beware Big Words
Well, here's another possible explanation for why Jeb Bush favors reformster policies for breaking down public education and selling off the parts.
Jeb sat down for an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, and as written up, it presents a fairly boilerplate Bush campaign talk. The Union Leader reported one section of the interview like this:
"We don't have to be the world's policeman, but we have to be the world's leader," Bush said. "If we're not leading, that creates chaos and a more dangerous world."
You don’t have to be the world’s policemen, but you have to be the world’s leader and there’s a huge difference. This guy — this president and Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry – when someone disagrees with their nuanced approach where it’s all kind of so sophisticated it makes no sense. You know what I’m saying? Big syllable words and lots of fancy conferences and meetings and – We’re not leading. That creates chaos. It creates a more dangerous world. So restoring the alliances that have kept the world safer and our country safer – getting back to a position in the Middle East where there’s no light between Israel and the United States.
I get the Jeb is trying to paint himself as a plain-speaking, straight-shooting, git-er-done kinda guy. But his picture of the opposite-- some fancy-pants guy with his fancy conferences and big syllable words who just isn't a leader-- how does Jeb want to square that with his notion that kids need to get an education so they can compete globally and make America better?
Is his beloved Common Core supposed to provide just a basic meat-and-potatoes education without getting too fancy? Should it have a cap on number of syllables in words, or a limit on how many clauses can be put in one sentence? Will we have a federal ban on semi-colons because they're just too fancy for a simple American piece of punctuation? A limit on the number of abstract nouns used in any composition?Should we also require Microsoft to strip Word of fancy swirly script fonts? I mean, shouldn't Times New Roman be enough for any plainspoken American (okay, maybe Comic Sans for when you're feeling kind of wacky)? And the most meta of concerns-- does the word "syllable" have too many syllables?
Does any red-blooded American need a vocabulary of more than a few hundred words? Could we perhaps focus the Common Core by simply listing the, say, 500 words that every American needs to know and just drop the rest of them? Syllables, nuance, complexity-- that way lies madness and chaos.
In fact, I think we need to find out right away which five hundred words should be on Jeb Bush's List of Real American Vocabulary so that we can get our lesson plans aligned for the fall. Let's see if we can get him to send us that list soon.
Jeb sat down for an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, and as written up, it presents a fairly boilerplate Bush campaign talk. The Union Leader reported one section of the interview like this:
"We don't have to be the world's policeman, but we have to be the world's leader," Bush said. "If we're not leading, that creates chaos and a more dangerous world."
ave to be the world's policeman, but we have to be the world’s
leader," Bush said. "If we're not leading, that creates chaos and a more
dangerous world."
- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150709/NEWS0605/150709206/0/FRONTPAGE#sthash.8Yj14IrD.dpuf
- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150709/NEWS0605/150709206/0/FRONTPAGE#sthash.8Yj14IrD.dpuf
"We
don’t have to be the world's policeman, but we have to be the world’s
leader," Bush said. "If we're not leading, that creates chaos and a more
dangerous world."
- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150709/NEWS0605/150709206/0/FRONTPAGE#sthash.8Yj14IrD.dpuf
But when C-Span took a look at the raw footage, they discovered that the Union Leader might have cleaned that quote up for Jeb a bit. The full quote sounds a little more like this:- See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150709/NEWS0605/150709206/0/FRONTPAGE#sthash.8Yj14IrD.dpuf
You don’t have to be the world’s policemen, but you have to be the world’s leader and there’s a huge difference. This guy — this president and Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry – when someone disagrees with their nuanced approach where it’s all kind of so sophisticated it makes no sense. You know what I’m saying? Big syllable words and lots of fancy conferences and meetings and – We’re not leading. That creates chaos. It creates a more dangerous world. So restoring the alliances that have kept the world safer and our country safer – getting back to a position in the Middle East where there’s no light between Israel and the United States.
I get the Jeb is trying to paint himself as a plain-speaking, straight-shooting, git-er-done kinda guy. But his picture of the opposite-- some fancy-pants guy with his fancy conferences and big syllable words who just isn't a leader-- how does Jeb want to square that with his notion that kids need to get an education so they can compete globally and make America better?
Is his beloved Common Core supposed to provide just a basic meat-and-potatoes education without getting too fancy? Should it have a cap on number of syllables in words, or a limit on how many clauses can be put in one sentence? Will we have a federal ban on semi-colons because they're just too fancy for a simple American piece of punctuation? A limit on the number of abstract nouns used in any composition?Should we also require Microsoft to strip Word of fancy swirly script fonts? I mean, shouldn't Times New Roman be enough for any plainspoken American (okay, maybe Comic Sans for when you're feeling kind of wacky)? And the most meta of concerns-- does the word "syllable" have too many syllables?
Does any red-blooded American need a vocabulary of more than a few hundred words? Could we perhaps focus the Common Core by simply listing the, say, 500 words that every American needs to know and just drop the rest of them? Syllables, nuance, complexity-- that way lies madness and chaos.
In fact, I think we need to find out right away which five hundred words should be on Jeb Bush's List of Real American Vocabulary so that we can get our lesson plans aligned for the fall. Let's see if we can get him to send us that list soon.
WI: Cheering Public Ed Destruction
The Wisconsin Legislature passed a budget this week that dumps more funding into the already-robust voucherific choicetastic system in Wisconsin. All the budget needs is a signature from Governor Scott Walker, and the only way Walker wouldn't approve such move would be if he were disappointed that it didn't explicitly end public education and replace public school teachers with minimum-wage temps.
Also cheering for this are the boys at the Heartland Institute, a thinky tank devoted to free market causes and a better world where rich people are free to do as they wish and poor people live the crappy lives they deserve.
But these quotes certainly show what free market folks want. No surprises here, but it's nice to see them in their own words.
"This budget shows Wisconsin legislators are taking improving education seriously. They are doing so by recognizing that throwing more money at a broken public education system in need of systemic change is not the answer," says Heather Kays. She does not go on to say, "But they do recognize that throwing money at charter operators is totally awesome and magically effective."
"The primary focus of education should be children, which the Wisconsin Legislature finally recognizes by adopting a fund-the-child approach over the funding-a-system approach," says Lennie Jarratt, who does not go on to say, "That's why we're proposing that we actually just give the kids the money and let them spend it on whatever they want."
But here's our winner:
“Wisconsin’s new budget, which expands school choice programs, is a big win for Wisconsin parents and taxpayers. The strategy of across-the-board expansion of choice accelerates the process of dismantling the inefficient ‘district-based’ system and the educational apartheid that system creates.” Says Bruno Behrend, who just goes right on ahead and uses the word "dismantling."
Yup-- that's the Randian view of education. Cut every kid a check, and those that are well-connected and have the resources can use that check as down-payment on a good education. Those Other People-- well, we gave them a voucher. How much more are we supposed to spend on Those People anyway? They have "access to" swell charter schools (in the same way that every citizen of Wisconsin has "access to" a Mercedes Benz and if they aren't able to convert that access to actual possession, well, they should have thought about that when they chose to be poor). Let's go ahead and scrap public education entirely.
Let's just all pay attention when Presidential Candidate Scott Walker signs this great piece of dismantling legislature.
Also cheering for this are the boys at the Heartland Institute, a thinky tank devoted to free market causes and a better world where rich people are free to do as they wish and poor people live the crappy lives they deserve.
But these quotes certainly show what free market folks want. No surprises here, but it's nice to see them in their own words.
"This budget shows Wisconsin legislators are taking improving education seriously. They are doing so by recognizing that throwing more money at a broken public education system in need of systemic change is not the answer," says Heather Kays. She does not go on to say, "But they do recognize that throwing money at charter operators is totally awesome and magically effective."
"The primary focus of education should be children, which the Wisconsin Legislature finally recognizes by adopting a fund-the-child approach over the funding-a-system approach," says Lennie Jarratt, who does not go on to say, "That's why we're proposing that we actually just give the kids the money and let them spend it on whatever they want."
But here's our winner:
“Wisconsin’s new budget, which expands school choice programs, is a big win for Wisconsin parents and taxpayers. The strategy of across-the-board expansion of choice accelerates the process of dismantling the inefficient ‘district-based’ system and the educational apartheid that system creates.” Says Bruno Behrend, who just goes right on ahead and uses the word "dismantling."
Yup-- that's the Randian view of education. Cut every kid a check, and those that are well-connected and have the resources can use that check as down-payment on a good education. Those Other People-- well, we gave them a voucher. How much more are we supposed to spend on Those People anyway? They have "access to" swell charter schools (in the same way that every citizen of Wisconsin has "access to" a Mercedes Benz and if they aren't able to convert that access to actual possession, well, they should have thought about that when they chose to be poor). Let's go ahead and scrap public education entirely.
Let's just all pay attention when Presidential Candidate Scott Walker signs this great piece of dismantling legislature.
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