PA: Monster Equity Plan Study Report Thingy (Part I)

This summer, all states were supposed to get their education equity affairs in order. I'm sitting in Pennsylvania, so their plan was of the most interest to me, which is my bad fortune because Pennsylvania's plan (Pennsylvania's State Plan for Ensuring Equitable Access to Excellent Educators) is over 200 pages long. Also, the title suggests that maybe we are all being trolled. It is possible that I'm not going to get through the whole thing, but I'd still like to mine some highlights. Which will still be a bunch verbage. I will not think less of you for deciding this is a post you can just go ahead and skip this whole wonkfest.

I'm going to break this into two posts. In Part One, we'll look at what PA thinks its equity problems are. In Part Two, we'll take a look at what it thinks the solutions are.

Theory of Action 

Pennsylvania's Theory of Action to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators for All Children. Pennsylvania's theory of action is built around strategically improving the management of Pennsylvania's human capital in our schools-- especially in the poorest and highest minority schools-- to enable them to recruit, hire, retain, and support a pool of highly effective, qualified, fully certified teachers, principals, and other school staff. Pennsylvania's activities are organized around four strategies: human capital management; ongoing professional learning; teacher and principal preparation; and fiscal equity...


Oh, yeah. This is going to be some choice bureaucratic word salad. There's a chart next which shows the four strategies as little bubbles circling the main idea, connected by two-headed arrows. Very evocative.

The Gaps

PA lists eight gaps. Or they say they're listing eight, but they want to include a ninth. And then there's a chart that shows six. My trolling theory is gathering strength.

The listed gaps are: students in poor schools are not growing scores on state tests, lack of quality professional development stuff, new teachers and principals aren't prepared for poor/minority schools, fiscal equity, and missing data. There's another list which adds these items to the first list: Philly schools are loaded with unqualified teachers, as are many poor/minority schools, there's high turnover, and all sorts of people in all sorts of jobs in poor/minority schools don't have proper certifications.

Background and context

PA's kind of a mess, data wise. Our VAM system (we call it PVAAS) requires three years of data to work, which we don't have yet. Also, any kind of plan would require financial stuff, but it's only June and our state leaders are locked in their annual competition with all past legislatures to see which group of bold PA leaders can bring in the latest budget. It's only July. That's not going to get fixed any time soon.

Stakeholders and Meetings

A list of groups that, apparently, were part of this adventure. It includes several school districts, poor and not, rural and urban (in PA, while we are famous for Philly-style poverty, the state has some hugely rural areas that are also pretty poor). One poor charter school and one rich one. Some teacher prep programs, including Grove City College which is interesting to me because GCC regularly sends us student teachers; GCC turns out students who know their content, but in many cases have never set foot in a public school ever. There are some professional organizations (including PSEA and PFT) and a state charter group as well. One more sign that the government is committed to continuing the failed charter experiment as if there's no reason to reconsider. Add on the Human Rights Commission, the YMCA, and the PTA, among others, and you have your stakeholders group.

These guys started meeting in-- April!!?? They cranked this report out in less than two months??!! Well, that's almost.... unbelievable.

Some Data and Interesting Point #1

The group started breaking down schools, dividing them by poverty level and by minority population (separately for public and charter achools). In search of staffing issues, they went in search of Emergency 01 certs, certifications that the state gives you when you swear up and down you can't hire a real chemistry teacher, so can we please just stick this nice lady certified to teach Home Ec in there? I am surprised to see that the number of such certificates issued has been dropping steadily for fifteen years. Oh, wait-- no I'm not. The Highly Qualified Teacher requirement of NCLB really strangled the emergency cert.

But here's our first interesting data point. The groups leading in using the most emergency certs? The highest number of emergency certs were found in the poorest public schools and the wealthiest charter schools.

Spanish, high school English, high school math, and special ed were the most common areas for emergency certs. Suggesting that the subjects getting hardest hit by high-stakes testing are also the first to feel the coming teacher shortage. Well, not Spanish. It's just hard to find people who want to teach Spanish. The champ? School nurses.

There's a more detailed charter, and PK-4 is also up there, though in all cases we're talking about numbers lower than 50 for the entire state. 21 principals had emergency certs.

When we break down teachers using the old high quality teacher standard, we find that rich schools have more HQT's than poor schools.

Interesting Point #2

When it comes to years of experience, wealthy schools have a greater percentage of newby (one year) teachers than poor schools. You can find the chart on page 30. Good luck.

I'm not sure what to make of some of these numbers. Our breakdown on schools by wealth left 697 in the top quartile and 701 buildings in the bottom. But this teacher chart says that the wealthy quartile has 33,544 teachers and the poorest quartile has 26,391. Which seems like its own kind of equity gap. Going to keep an eye peeled to see if this beast addresses that.

Salaries 

Hmm, said the committee, or staff, or someone. I wonder if there's a big pay differential between rich and poor districts. The short answer appears to be, no, not much difference if you look at wealthiness of the district, but when it comes to minority schools, we are making a modest attempt to entice teachers to work there. Starting salaries are pretty easy to suss out here, but the other data is fuddling because we're using averages of all more-than-one-year teachers' salaries which would be heavily effected by how old and experienced the staff is. This next charter may be a bit more helpful.

You can see that wealthy districts are recruiting hard with starting money. We should note that nothing here tells us how quickly teachers arrive at the top of the scale, which has a huge effect on career earnings. This data also doesn't include benefits and health insurance, which can have huge financial impact as well.  But now look what happens if we break it down by minority population.

So there's that.

Turnover

How is PA doing with turnover. Again, let's go to the handy chart:

So poor, minority charters are churning like crazy.

Strategic Management of Human Capital

So here's the thing. They didn't have any hard data for things like school climate, and schools don't have to give human capital management data to the Department of Ed. So PDE rounded up a bunch of volunteer human resource people and administrators, and they just made a bunch of crap up. With charts and graphs. Color coded. In less than two months-- specifically the last two months of the school year. I'm going to skip this part. If you'd like more data, you can read the report, or you can read some tarot cards. I'm sure that would be equally helpful.

Educator Effectiveness

Does poverty affect value-added measures for teachers. Again, I'm going to assume that the time frame of this report means that they are just pulling things out of their butts here. Fortunately, somebody else has done this research, and we know the answer, which is that the state could skip the expense of the test and just generate test scores based on socio-economic factors and do as well.

This is worth paying attention to, because it's why the whole federal Let's Put a Great Teacher in Every Classroom program is high grade baloney-- as long as you determine a teacher's effectiveness by student test scores, every teacher you put in poor classroom in a poor school with poor students will turn out to be ineffective.

Expenditures per Pupil and Interesting Point #3

Pennsylvania has one of the highest spending gaps in the country because we have on of the worst school funding laws in the country. If you slice things up on a per pupil basis, we still look bad. Well, bad and racist-- the lowest funding in the state on a per pupil basis occurs in schools with more than 50% black student population. The writers of the report try to massage the data so that our spending gap doesn't look so bad, but they can't hide the worst data point-- while all other categories come in above national average per pupil average when adjusted for poverty blah blah blah, per pupil spending in mostly black schools is almost $800 below the national average. Might want to work on that.

Root Causes

The report will now devote a giant cartload of space to explaining why the various gaps exist in PA. I'm going to summarize, and this will still be lengthy. Are you still here? God bless you.

Philly has lousy unqualified teachers because...

Schools don't cultivate a talent pool. Schools don't have time to really think and focus and search for exactly what they want. Insufficient positive marketing and PR. Lack of effective screening, or training for management. Folks might think the schools are dangerous. And then there's this awesome gem:


Individual bias may preclude teachers from applying for vacancies in Pennsylvania's poorest and highest minority schools, especially since the school's workforce may look different than the local community.

I'm not sure, but I think they just said that middle class white kids don't want to be working in those poor black schools.

Poor minority schools have lousy unqualified teachers because...

Same as above, actually. Man, this report could have been a page shorter.

We don't have enough teachers in certain certificate areas or principals or school nurses because...

Several repeaters from above, actually. But also teacher schools just aren't producing the teachers. Nothing here about continued assault on teaching profession in ways that would make it unappealing to future might-have-been-teachers.

There is too much turnover because...

Because some administrators are lousy managers. Also, teachers don't get enough awesome professional development. And some of those same other things.

Teacher grad programs not producing enough super duper teachers in right fields because...

Human resource departments can't adequately predict future needs. Yeah, sure, that's it. Also, there aren't enough subs??!! Seriously? Once again, we will completely side step the ways in which state and federal education policy has made teaching increasingly less attractive, as well as the way that constant badgering of teachers by politicians and policymakers has reduced respect for the porofession.

We have school financial inequity because...

And here's the winner of the Opaque Criticism of Somebody Award. "Poor funding decisions have severe consequences, especially when fiscal resources are limited." You mean, like when the state reneges on its teacher pension payments and then announces a crisis a decade later? Or when the state insists on a crazy-pants blood-sucking funding system for charters?  Also, some districts are poor, and can't make up the difference when the state short changes them.

We have data gaps because...

Because the state's data systems are slow and stupid and unusable. Did they really say that? It might just have been me.


But now we've diagnosed the problems. Well, we've sort of diagnosed them. If you are still with me, you can head on over to Part Two and we'll look at the super-awesome solutions that PDE proposed to the feds and the surprise ending that comes with them.

Bottom 5%

Five percent.

It's a figure that turns up again and again in reformster rhetoric, usually teamed up with the word "bottom."

It has a fine long history. All the way back in June 2009, we can find Arnie Duncan talking about the five percent in his address to the conference of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools. The address, "Turning Around the Bottom Five Percent," and it features the rhetorical sleight-of-hand that usually accompanies discussion of the five percent. Duncan leads with a description of chronically under-performing schools, noting the social and physical conditions of these schools are "horrific." "They're often unsafe, underfunded, poorly run, crumbling, and challenged in so many ways that the situation can feel hopeless."

That was six years ago. Since then, the five percent have been cropping up regularly. Michigan is just one example of a state that targeted the bottom five percent of schools for turnaround and takeover. The speading-like-a-slow-ugly-weed program of Achievement School Districts (ASD, or "sad" spelled sideways) love the five percent figure. In Tennessee, Chris Barbic promised that he would take the bottom five percent of schools and lift them into the top twenty-five percent (spoiler alert: Barbic didn't even come close, and is instead getting out of Dodge). Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, legislators are talking about adopting the ASD model, complete with "bottom five percent" qualification for takeover.

The "bottom five percent" meme is firmly ensconced in the language of reform. Just today, we find Hunt Lambert, the Dean of Continuing Education and Extension, opening a piece on his life-long learning blog with this sentence:

Improving the bottom five percent of K-12 schools is one of the most vexing problems in America. 

Setting aside his use of "vexing" (is vexation the next step of agitation past pearl clutching?), here's one more presumably educated person talking about the bottom five percent as if it's an actual thing.

There isn't a shred of evidence to suggest that the bottom five percent of schools have some particular characteristic that makes their turnaround, takeover, or general state nose-poking are required or effective. It could have been the bottom six percent, or four percent, or eleven-point-oh-two-six percent. Five is a just a nice, round, simple number. The fact the everyone from California to Oklahoma to New York is hunting down the same five percent figure could be a sign that five percent is a very attractive number, an appealing number, the Younger Brad Pitt or numbers. Or it could be (though I haven't found direct evidence of this, yet) that all these states are working from the same template, perhaps one created by ALEC?

So is the number bad just because it's arbitrary?  It's a fair question, and the fair answer is, no, no it's not. After all, we love arbitrary-ish performance measures in education. Should the cut-off for an A be 90% or 93%? If you've worked in a building that had the grading scale argument, you know just how fact-and-data free that discussion can be.

But no-- there are other, larger reasons that the "bottom five percent" cut-off line is wrong, and bad, and should be avoided like the plague.

First, that "bottom" is troubling. You remember when Arne painted a picture of chronically under-performing schools with "horrific" conditions. But "bottom five percent" means just that. If we go to a wealthy county where the schools have great resources and support and the graduation and college completion rates are sky-high, somewhere in that district there are still schools that fall in the bottom five percent. If we look at the prestigious pre-ivy private prep school network, somewhere amidst Trinity and Philips Exeter, we'll find the bottom five percent. If the students in my class all master a skill and ace the test so that the grades range between 95% and 100%, someone in that class is still in the bottom five percent.

If we set a bottom standard and said, "All schools must come in higher than this cut line," there could conceivably come a day on which we said, "Mission accomplished! Every school has made the cut. We win! Let's declare victory and come home." But there will be a bottom five percent forever, and so the reformster's work will never be done. There will always be schools targeted for closure and takeover. Always.

Second, this is stack ranking. Stack ranking enjoyed a vogue in business and industry, but the curtain fell loudly upon the practice ranking employees in comparison to each other and firing the bottom of the stack. Most famously, Microsoft dropped the practice in 2013, not because it was philosophically repulsive or made people sad, but because it just didn't work. The New York Times Business section just last week attacked the practice once again reporting on yet another study showing that stack ranking doesn't work and in fact does more harm than good.

And those problems, both serious indictments of the "bottom five percent" approach to reform-- those problems are before we even get to the question of how schools are ranked in the first place. The answer, generally, is "by test scores." So those same old Big Standardized Test scores involving badly designed questions aiming to measure a very narrow sliver of student ability will somehow tell us which schools are better or best.

Or the other big question mark in this whole system-- the state will take those bottom five percent schools and do.... what? Turn them around and fix them? Is there any indication that the states or the privateers that they invariably hire to do the work-- do any of them know the secret sauce for turning schools around? If they don't, then what is the point of this exercise? If they do, why did we decide that only the bottom five percent would get the benefit of this miraculous brew of fairy dust and unicorn pee?

Any time you see "bottom five percent" crop up, beware. It's one more time that reformsters are just making stuff up but trusting you'll believe them because, look, numbers!

UPDATE: Somehow I neglected to include the "research" from Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff that canning the bottom 5% of teachers (identified using magical and debunked VAM sauce) would make schools more awesome. Such a magical number, that 5%.

The GOP vs. DEM Question

Discussion surrounding ESEA re-authorization has helped clarify the question that distinguished between the Democratic and Republican parties when it comes to education--

Is it better to have stupid education policy implemented by the state or federal government?

Democrats believe (and asserted it with vigor in their ill-conceived Murphy Amendment) that high-stakes testing and prescriptive punishments attached to test results should be managed by the federal government. The GOP, however, argues that the feds should be left out of the equation and that power brokers on the state level should have the privilege of crushing public education and selling off the parts to privateers.

Neither party has displayed any interest in discussing what educational policies might actual help public education in the US. Neither party has shown an ability to hear the chorus of educational experts and qualified researchers pointing out that stack ranking, magic VAM sauce, and disenfranchising local members of the community are not working and will most likely never work.

Neither party has displayed an inclination to say, "Hey, we've been doing some of these things for fifteen years now. Are there any signs that any of it actually works?"

Nope. The parties disagree one one point only-- should the feds be in charge, or should each individual state run its own show.

That's our choice, apparently.

Given that choice, I lean toward the state-driven answer.

Not that I have unbridled faith in the states. Guys like Scott Walker and Andrew Cuomo have shown themselves completely capable of destroying their state's public education systems without any help from the federal government.

But I side with states for two reasons.

First. the state can only hurt the state. Cuomo can make a mess out of New York, but his idiotic ideas have not done any damage here in Pennsylvania. Sam Brownback may be able to shamblize education in Kansas, but Arne Duncan has been able to screw up education in all fifty states.

Second, on the state level, progress can be made. In Pennsylvania, we managed to can a governor who was destroying public education and replace him with a governor who is at least trying to help. Local activists can focus resources on local issues, while the national-scale corporations and activists who are pushing the reformster agenda have to fight on fifty fronts.

It isn't optimal. Optimal is elected officials and policymakers who listen to educators and use their powers of critical thinking to figure out the obvious-- that the policies which reformsters love are bad for education, corrosive for democracy, and don't actually accomplish any of their stated goals. That's the conversation we need to have. But in the grand debate between DEM and GOP, only one question is on the table--

What's the best way to implement bad policy? Is it better to have stupid education policy implemented by the state or federal government.

Test & Punish & Civil Rights

The Murphy Amendment (Premise: the worst parts of NCLB are actually the best parts; let's give them steroids) was one more manifestation of the Civil Rights Argument for Test and Punish. Amendment proposer Chris Murphy (D-Conn) invoked that justification for his test and punish bill, saying that ESEA "has to be a civil rights law."

Kati Haycock is president and founder of the Education Trust, a Gates-funded test-pushing advocacy group that supported NCLB and helped craft the Common Core. She took to her website to call Lily Eskelsen Garcia a liar for claiming that test and punish policies are not a civil rights win. Haycock is just one of the many civil rights advocates who speak out in favor of test and punish. But there is now a large coalition of civil rights advocates who speak out against test and punish, as well.

I've written about this again and again and again and again. But as the reformsters have found a strong tactical advantage in using the civil rights argument to promote test and punish, let me see if I can distill the important points of the argument here.

There Is a Real Concern

The systemic ignoring, underserving, and general neglect of non-white, non-wealthy populations is a real problem. "Do nothing" and "Go back to doing what we used to do" are not viable solutions.


Testing doesn't tell us anything we don't already know

Actually, test scores don't tell us much of anything, because the Big Standardized Tests are narrowly focused, poorly designed, and extremely limited in their scope. Furthermore, we can predict test score results pretty well just using demographic information. So to claim that we would be fumbling in the dark without these tests, with no idea of how to find schools that were in trouble, is simply ridiculous.


Nobody is sending help

Advocates argue that test scores provide political leverage that forces The System to respond. But from New Jersey to Philly to Detroit to Chicago, the response has been the same-- instead of help, politicians silence and disenfranchise the members of the community and privatizers come in to strip-mine the community for profit.

If policymakers responded to low test scores by sitting down with community members to say, "How can we help you," and channeling resources to the schools, I'd feel differently about all this. But that's not even sort of what's happening. Instead, charters may "save" a handful of students while simultaneously making the public schools even worse for everyone else.

P.S. Watch for cynical bullshit 

The Murphy Amendment included the famous "bottom 5%" clause, which is always a tip-off that vampires are at work. This is a guarantee that there will always be fresh meat, because even if all the schools in your city score between 95% and 100%, there will still be schools that are in the bottom 5% of that.


Test and Punish is a False Narrative

The claim is that there is a plane crash out there, and we can only find the victims by releasing the hounds. But the hounds are not rescue animals, but blind and deaf hunting dogs, and the smoke from the crash is clearly visible in the sky, and instead of sending doctors and rescue personnel, the powers that be are sending vultures while beating the doctors for not trying hard enough.


It's doubly anger-making because there are people who really do need our help, but instead of trying to actually help them, we've got people gaming the system in order to profit from the problem. This is not okay. And that's as simple as I can make it.

Public Ed Needs Allies

With the now-thankfully-defeated Murphy Amendment, Senate Democrats gave a giant middle finger to public education and a bathtub full of cold water in the face to those who keep thinking that maybe the Democrats in general and Progressives in particular are going to be our allies in our struggle to preserve the promise of public education.

They aren't.

Steven Singer lays out the shock and dismay pretty clearly.

Up until now I’ve always been with the Democrats because they had better – though still bad – education policies than the Republicans. I’m not sure I can say that anymore. In fact, it may be just the opposite.

So what's the fuss? The Murphy Amendment was an attempt to put the test-and-punish back into ESEA, including solidifying that magic "bottom 5%" rule into federal law. It was a way for Democrats to say that they actually loved them the last fifteen years of test-and-punish based ed reform and they would like still more of it. And it took the GOP to stop these dopes.

This is not entirely a shock. The Democrats have given plenty of notice that they are not friends of public education, not the least of which would be two entire Democratic administrations under Obama-Duncan. I know die-hard Dems like to imagine that Obama is some sort of outlier or that Duncan is a rogue Education Secretary, but the sad truth is that a Democrat has had the chance to set education policy, and that's what we've been living with for seven years. The Murphy Amendment doesn't represent a new shift or alliance or change in direction. It's right where they've been headed all along.

The only bright spot in any of this was that the NEA was vocal and on the right side of this and not making nice with the Democrats (because, hey, they're our political allies).

I do not know the answer to the political calculus of public education in this country, but I do know that we have got to stop blindly supporting parties and start focusing on policy. And we have got to stop pretending that the Democrats are our friends no matter what. For that matter, we need to start distinguishing between good relationships and good policies. The fact that we may have a "good relationship" with Democrats does not mean they won't screw us, and the fact that we have a "bad relationship" with some Republicans does not mean that they won't support policies that help public education work better.

Public education is a political orphan, with few politicians watching out for us. The Murphy Amendment is just one more reminder that just because you think someone's swell, that doesn't mean they stand for what you wish they stood for.

It is a dark part of Democrat dna to think that only filing reports with the feds makes the world go around, just as it is in the dark part of GOP dna to think that those who can't pay the price of admission to society's lifeboat should just be left to swim home on their own.

Both the GOP and Dems are infected with money. Neither can be trusted as a group. Certainly neither can be trusted all the time to watch out for American public education, because neither party believes in the promise of public education any more. I'm not sure what the answer is. Take personal responsibility for getting the word out (don't just say "Well, I pay union dues so they'll take care of it). Contact your representatives early and often. Convince others to do the same. Raise a fuss and make some noise. Pay attention ALL THE TIME. And remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Public education needs allies. I suggest that rather than farm the job out, we start with ourselves, and make ourselves into the allies that public education needs, because the folks in DC sure as hell aren't going to do it.

Can Third Graders "Fail"

A twitter conversation this morning turned into a discussion of the semantics of talking about test results, but any conversation that turns to phrases like "semantics of talking about test results" (39 characters) is kind of doomed on twitter. Jennifer Borgioli (@JennBinis) referred me to her article from last summer addressing the issue, "The Semantics of Test Scores."

There's a fairly detailed illustration of her argument, but her general point is that people play pretty fast and loose with the term "fail," particularly with the 3-8 grade range of tests.

Generally speaking, when we talk about a test where the resulting score is described as passing or failing, it’s in relation to the consequences for the test taker. Fail your driver’s test? You can’t drive. Pass your boards? Welcome to the profession, Doctor. 

While that holds true for many high school Big Standardized Tests that are used as graduation requirements, Bergioli argues that no such "bright line" exists for BS Tests for grades 3 through 8. 

There are no short-term negative consequences for students in grades 3-8 based on their performance on the state assessments. 

Bergioli's example is rooted in New York; this "bright line" assertion is, of course, flat out false if we throw in states like Mississippi that like the idea of holding back third graders who score too low on the reading assessment. That, I think, qualifies pretty clearly as failing.

I do get her point. Language choice with children (particularly younger ones) is important, and it is particularly important to choose carefully when discussing success or the lack thereof. When my kids were little, their mother and I were careful to use phrases like "haven't succeeded yet" in place of "failed." When we designed graduation projects for my high school, the only outcomes we made a place for in the evaluation stage were "successfully completed" and "not successfully completed yet." 

I get that some test-loving reformsters imagine a perfect world where tests are given, tests come back, and nine year olds say, "Well, that was not what I had hoped for. But I can see that I need to enrich my study and practice of identifying main ideas in paragraphs, so I guess I'll just hunker down and do that." 

But in this, as in so many areas, folks who design and promote this stuff are kidding themselves.

So, while there is once again the possibility of larger, longer-term consequences to the school, the district, and the community based on how a group of students do on these tests, in the absence of a clear and bright line of a relationship between student performance on the test and consequences to the student, it’s misleading to say the student “failed” the test.

No, I don't think it's misleading at all.

First of all, the larger, long-term consequences are based on drawing a clear and bright line. The state says, "This number of your students fell on the wrong side of this clear, bright line, so you are not an effective teacher." Depending on your state and its laws, that ineffectiveness may be reflected in your evaluation, your pay, and your future employment. It will also be reflected in the rating of your school, and of course in many states that rating will be a nice, neat letter grade. Why do some policymakers like giving schools letter grades? Because it makes it easy to tell if the school is passing or failing.

Second, children are not dopes. Decades of sorting students into bluebirds and chickenhawks have fooled almost nobody-- students know whether they're winning or losing in the Big Game O' Learning Stuff. And because the stakes on test results are so high for schools, students who score Not So High on BS Tests will find themselves rewarded with extra work, extra practice, extra time in the albatross reading group. It can take a tough little kid to look at the evidence and not reach unflattering conclusions about herself, and most teachers I know do their best to keep children from reaching those conclusions. But students know when they've failed, whatever we try to call it.

We can say that these students have not technically failed, and in an academic technical sense, we are correct. But eight year olds are not known for their ability to look at things in an academic technical sense. That's one of the truly toxic effects of badly written tests-- young students lack the capacity to say, "Well, this was a poorly designed assessment." They just think, "I must be stupid."

Nor do we get a lot of nuance from the policymakers and politicians who keep talking about failing schools and failing teachers, all of which underlines clearly that there's a bright clear line, and anybody falling below it has failed. 

Test manufacturing experts sometimes remind me of sad scientists in old SF movies. They design these instruments to try to tease out nuanced granular pictures of student strengths and weaknesses and then policymakers just grab the tests and say, "Never mind all that. I just wanna know how many of these kids failed."
 

I agree that it would be better for everyone if we could deal with these issues in a nuanced thoughtful manner. But then, if the education discussion were being run by policymakers who valued nuance, detail, and the expertise of people in the field, we'd be in a far different place than we are today. We can try to shade the meaning of "fail" so that it has a very specific meaning in very specific circumstances, but that's a hopeless exercise. Everyone knows what "fails," means-- you came in below a particular mark. And that definition fits for every test in the history of ever.

 

How AFT Blew It

I wouldn't devote one more post to deconstructing Randi Weingarten's early-bird Christmas gift to Hillary Clinton except that I'm an NEA member, and I'm living in fear that NEA president Lily Ekelsen Garcia's administration will lead us down the same path.

Arguing about Clinton (or Weingarten for that matter) is a tricky dance. Clinton tends to have a destabilizing effect on the brains of people who don't like her, who proceed to froth at the mouth at start ranting about conspiracies tortured enough make a truther blush. My opposition to Clinton (and support for Bernie Sanders) is not based on any belief that she is a terrible human being, a crazy-awful person, or some evil mastermind bitch on wheels. My reluctance to support her is not even based on my perception that she is extraordinarily inauthentic (though I think that magnifies her other issues). I just don't think she is remotely a supporter of public education or the teachers who work there. I think she would be perfectly comfortable continuing the exact same policies that we've suffered under for the past fifteen years and in fact would prefer to continue with them.

The counter-argument is that she's electable while Sanders is a modern George McGovern, beloved by liberals and doomed in the general election. Maybe Clinton is electable (though if that's the case I'd ask why? Could it be that she's electable because, other than her lack of a penis, she is indistinguishable from a Republican candidate). And there's a case to be made that endorsing early and ahead of the pack earns you a better voice in policy discussions.

But if she is electable, nobody's pretending it won't be a tough sell. And that's how AFT blew it.

Let me take a moment to tell you how I have always handled advising students who are in charge of putting on Prom. First, it takes months-- mooonnnnnnths. Because we make sure every student on class council has had a chance to propose an idea and explain that idea. Then students break into groups and they research and pitch the ideas. And then they discuss the ideas until every single person has been heard just as much as they want to be. And then they decide.

The process is long and involved and inefficient and often results in exactly the same theme-and-decoration decisions that the class president or I could have simply installed by fiat at the beginning of the process. But the long involved process doesn't just result in a decision about which color of vinyl to hand behind the cardboard castle. It also results in an entire group of students who are energized, informed, and invested. They know what we're doing, why we're doing it, and why it's the best solution we could come up with. They will work for that theme, even if it wasn't the one they most wanted.

The process of deciding on a candidate to endorse could-- and should-- also be the process of getting members educated, involved and invested in the decision. But leaders of large, unruly, cat-herding groups like a teachers union are reluctant to relinquish control. The irony here is that such groups are often run with the same top-down management style that has helped make education "reform" such a train wreck.

While AFT's tiny sample was legit for sampling purposes, Daniel Katz correctly notes that the massaging of the data makes it a bit suspect. But what it mostly did was completely fail to engage the members, and now instead of delivering a groundswell of Clinton enthusiasm, Weingarten delivers a free-wheeling cat-herding argument about leadership's choice for the union. Instead, the people who are excited about the endorsement are people like DFER-- the faux Democrats (also, faux democrats) who would like teachers to be Put in Their Place and for the unions to die. That's who's excited about this.

I believe some folks have grossly over-estimated Clinton's electability, under-estimated Sander's electability, and hugely under-estimated how much Clinton really doesn't support public education and the people who work there. I suppose time will tell.

But in the meantime, I'm really, really hoping that NEA will take a more careful approach to an endorsement. I hope we don't send the Dems the message that we will always be there for them, no matter how badly they treat us. I hope we don't cut the membership out of the process and just expect them to fall in line. And I hope we endorse somebody who isn't going to, once again, stab us in the back, front, and side.

The AFT used a long questionnaire  (about twenty-six questions, only eight of which directly addressed education). I'd like to see the NEA's list of questions include these two:

What did the Obama/Duncan administration get wrong about education?

What would your administration do differently going forward?

Because any candidate that wants support from teachers ought to be able to answer both of those, clearly and specifically. I'll be waiting.