First, just in case you missed it in the PR flurry-- no, the Dyett hunger strikers did not "win," and yes, the hunger strike is still going on.
The twelve parents and community members who began going without solid foods over three weeks ago are still standing up for the same issues they were standing up for when this began. The Chicago school system, run by the mayor and not by any sort of elected school board, would like to close the school and replace it with one more privatized education. Or maybe they would really just like to replace it with a nice parking lot for the Coming Someday Obama Presidential Library.
What they don't want to do is listen to the community. So last week they announced that Dyett would stay open as a "compromise" school in a process that would continue to lock out community voices (which was aptly symbolized at the big press conference when the strikers were literally locked outside). This is a loose definition of "compromise," like a mugger who says, "Well, if you don't want to give me all your money, let's compromise and you can just give me most of your money."
The hope was that the public would listen as far as "Dyett will remain open..." and then just stop paying attention, which is the kind of cynical bullshit that gives Chicago politics a bad name. But it was at least marginally successful for five or ten minutes. Supporters were posting links to the news and tagging them "Victory." Eric Zorn, who unleashed a Trib column's worth of asshattery on the strikers, followed up with a non-retraction retraction that declared the strikers victorious and advising them to enjoy their big win and go home, which pretty well exemplified the reaction that Chicago Big Cheeses were angling for.
In retrospect, it seems likely that school chief's hint earlier that Dyett wasn't even necessary was a bargaining tactic, a set-up so that taking the school away from the community instead of flat-out closing it would seem like a generous concession by CPS, and not simply what they had intended to do (and what the organizers had been striking about) in the first place.
So why should those of us around the rest of the country be paying attention? Because this is a bald-faced, shameless display of everything wrong with the reformster privatization movement. It's not simply that non-educators will hand over a public school to other non-educators to commit amateur-hour educational malpractice. The handling of Dyett also displays plainly how the privatization movement is not just an attack on education, but an attack on the democratic rights of people who are not white, not wealthy, and not well-connected.
This is about shutting the community out of the process, about making sure that the people of Bronzeville have no say in any of this, about a political process so devoted to locking community members outside that it considers giving them half-assed lip service as a major concession.
Peter Cunningham, former Arne Duncan mouthpiece and an old Chicago hand, took to his $12 million website to tut-tut at the strikers, suggesting that they "honor the public process," a variation on the old "why don't these protesters just work within the system." But that's what's particularly notable about the Dyett community members-- they have done absolutely everything that the system asked of them. They have played by the rules for years and years, from developing a solid plan backed by community members, respectable institutions, and capable professionals. They submitted a formal proposal (and they did it on time) and they waited patiently while Chicago Public Schools hemmed and hawed and stalled (in a process that wasn't very public at all). Even when the Dyett strikers finally took action, it was not disruptive or destructive to anything but their own bodies.
If anybody can offer advice about what the Dyett folks could have done better, differently, I'd be thrilled to hear it. But the only other option that folks seem to want them to exercise is "Shut up, go home, and let your Betters decide the fate of your neighborhood school without all your yammering in the background."
Dyett cuts straight to the central question of turnovers, takeovers, achievement school districts, charterization, and privatization-- why, exactly, should rich and powerful people with no real ties to the community have more say in how the community's schools are run than the people who actually live there?
Jitu Brown put it pretty plainly--
You are not better than us. You are not smarter than us. And you do not love these children more than we do.
And so we have to ask reformsters: Do you want to argue one of those three point? Because that should be an interesting conversation. And if you don't contest any of those assertions, then on what basis are you taking over the community's school? Even if we let the assertion that the school is failing slide, the question remains-- why are you stripping the community of a voice in its own school? Because you're better, you're smarter, or you love the students more? And if it's not one of those three, then what is it?
What gives you the right to suspend democracy for a community?
Dyett still matters because the issue is not resolved and the strikers have not yet won. Dyett still matters because the fate of Dyett will have a huge impact on that community. And Dyett still matters because the issues being battled there are the same issues faced by every community in this country where the rich and powerful have decided to suspend democracy for certain communities.
Follow #FightForDyett on twitter. Check in with websites like this one. You can donate to the organization here. You can get a national perspective from articles like this one. And if you're in the area, there's a Labor Day rally at 5:00 PM. Spread the word. Speak out. Dyett matters, and the folks who are standing up for that school are standing up for all of us.
Monday, September 7, 2015
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Nobody Really Wants Choice
Families need a choice. Parents want a choice. Poor students deserve a choice. We hear the rhetoric over and over again, but I remain convinced that it's baloney.
People do not want choice.
When I sit down in a restaurant and order my favorite meal, the one I've been craving all day, I don't sit there eating it thinking, "Oh, if only there were more choices. If only, in addition to the meal I'm eating, there was a wider variety of other meals for me to not eat."
When I look across the room at my wife, as my heart fills up with love, I don't think, "If only there were an assortment of women that I could have married, but didn't. That would make my marriage way better."
If I'm watching a movie in a multiplex, my enjoyment is not enhanced by knowledge that there are many swell movies playing on the other screens that I am not watching.
And if my child is in a great school, I don't think, "Oh, if only there were other excellent schools that she wasn't attending."
Furthermore, the corporate guys who tout choice as a value don't believe it, either.
No business says, "It's really important that the consumers have a choice. Let's get one of our competitors into this neighborhood." Ronald McDonald does not give the Burger King a stack of money and say, "Hey, come open a store across the street from me so the consumers can have a choice." No group of suits sits in a boardroom and says, "Boy, if all the consumers became our customers, that would be awful because it would wipe out choice."
When corporate types extol choice, what they always mean is "We want more customers to choose us."
But nobody wants choice.
What do people actually want? They want to have what they want to have.
"I want more choices," never means, "I have chosen what I want, but I want to know that the options I didn't choose are all great."
"I want choice," really means "I do not like the available options. I want to be offered the option of having what I actually want." If my favorite restaurant has my favorite meal, I don't care if the entire rest of the menu is blank. But if I look at a menu and see nothing that interests me, I'd like more choice. Either way, at the end of the day, I am only going to eat one meal. What difference does it make if the meals that I don't eat are appealing or unappealing to me?
Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. Maybe there are some folks who want to know that while their child is in a great school, there are other schools she could be going to instead. But I'm doubtful.
Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. What parents want is for their child to be in a great school, and if their child is in a great school, they aren't going to care if that school is the only school or one school out of a thousand. Some are going to say that choice will drive excellence, but again-- what's the real goal? Would you really be unhappy if your child were in an outstanding school that didn't get that way through competition? I don't think so.
Why do lots of parents in poor, neglected school districts like the idea of choice? It's not because they love the idea of choices. It's because their local menu offers the prospect of a terrible meal. They want more choices because they are hoping that one of those choices, finally, will be an excellent education for their children.
Nobody really wants choice. What people want is to have what they want. What they want from education is for their children to be in good schools.
But focusing on choice instead of school quality leads to focusing on the wrong thing, sometimes to the detriment of the real goal. Providing choice on a thin budget makes excellence that much harder to achieve. And it completely blinds us to the reformy option that charter/choice fans never want to talk about:
What would happen if we took all the time and energy and money poured into pushing charter/choice and focused it on turning the local schools into schools of excellence.
Some reformsters are going to claim we tried that. I don't believe that's true, for a variety of reasons that would stretch this post from Too Long to Way Too Long.
Some folks have decided that our model for school reform should be like a guy who finds his car filled up with fast food wrappers and in need of new tires-- so instead of working on the car, he goes out and buys three new cars. It's a waste of resources-- and he can only drive one car, anyway. School choice and charter systems have turned out to be hella expensive, costing not only money but community ties and stability, and only rarely delivering excellence-- and that only for a small percentage of students.
People want excellence (or at least their idea of excellence). Some people push choice as a way to get there. But what if it isn't? What if there are better ways to get to excellence?
Look, we know why some people love the idea of choice-- because it is a great way for them to get their hands on bundles of that sweet sweet public tax money. But for people who have a sincere interest in school choice, my request is that they step back and ask themselves what their real goal is, and if it's having each child in the nation in an excellent school, let's talk about that. If you think that choice is a path to that goal, well, you and I have some serious disagreements ahead of us. But the discussion will be much more useful and productive if we focus on the real goal and not get distracted by mistaking means for an end.
People do not want choice.
When I sit down in a restaurant and order my favorite meal, the one I've been craving all day, I don't sit there eating it thinking, "Oh, if only there were more choices. If only, in addition to the meal I'm eating, there was a wider variety of other meals for me to not eat."
When I look across the room at my wife, as my heart fills up with love, I don't think, "If only there were an assortment of women that I could have married, but didn't. That would make my marriage way better."
If I'm watching a movie in a multiplex, my enjoyment is not enhanced by knowledge that there are many swell movies playing on the other screens that I am not watching.
And if my child is in a great school, I don't think, "Oh, if only there were other excellent schools that she wasn't attending."
Furthermore, the corporate guys who tout choice as a value don't believe it, either.
No business says, "It's really important that the consumers have a choice. Let's get one of our competitors into this neighborhood." Ronald McDonald does not give the Burger King a stack of money and say, "Hey, come open a store across the street from me so the consumers can have a choice." No group of suits sits in a boardroom and says, "Boy, if all the consumers became our customers, that would be awful because it would wipe out choice."
When corporate types extol choice, what they always mean is "We want more customers to choose us."
But nobody wants choice.
What do people actually want? They want to have what they want to have.
"I want more choices," never means, "I have chosen what I want, but I want to know that the options I didn't choose are all great."
"I want choice," really means "I do not like the available options. I want to be offered the option of having what I actually want." If my favorite restaurant has my favorite meal, I don't care if the entire rest of the menu is blank. But if I look at a menu and see nothing that interests me, I'd like more choice. Either way, at the end of the day, I am only going to eat one meal. What difference does it make if the meals that I don't eat are appealing or unappealing to me?
Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. Maybe there are some folks who want to know that while their child is in a great school, there are other schools she could be going to instead. But I'm doubtful.
Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. What parents want is for their child to be in a great school, and if their child is in a great school, they aren't going to care if that school is the only school or one school out of a thousand. Some are going to say that choice will drive excellence, but again-- what's the real goal? Would you really be unhappy if your child were in an outstanding school that didn't get that way through competition? I don't think so.
Why do lots of parents in poor, neglected school districts like the idea of choice? It's not because they love the idea of choices. It's because their local menu offers the prospect of a terrible meal. They want more choices because they are hoping that one of those choices, finally, will be an excellent education for their children.
Nobody really wants choice. What people want is to have what they want. What they want from education is for their children to be in good schools.
But focusing on choice instead of school quality leads to focusing on the wrong thing, sometimes to the detriment of the real goal. Providing choice on a thin budget makes excellence that much harder to achieve. And it completely blinds us to the reformy option that charter/choice fans never want to talk about:
What would happen if we took all the time and energy and money poured into pushing charter/choice and focused it on turning the local schools into schools of excellence.
Some reformsters are going to claim we tried that. I don't believe that's true, for a variety of reasons that would stretch this post from Too Long to Way Too Long.
Some folks have decided that our model for school reform should be like a guy who finds his car filled up with fast food wrappers and in need of new tires-- so instead of working on the car, he goes out and buys three new cars. It's a waste of resources-- and he can only drive one car, anyway. School choice and charter systems have turned out to be hella expensive, costing not only money but community ties and stability, and only rarely delivering excellence-- and that only for a small percentage of students.
People want excellence (or at least their idea of excellence). Some people push choice as a way to get there. But what if it isn't? What if there are better ways to get to excellence?
Look, we know why some people love the idea of choice-- because it is a great way for them to get their hands on bundles of that sweet sweet public tax money. But for people who have a sincere interest in school choice, my request is that they step back and ask themselves what their real goal is, and if it's having each child in the nation in an excellent school, let's talk about that. If you think that choice is a path to that goal, well, you and I have some serious disagreements ahead of us. But the discussion will be much more useful and productive if we focus on the real goal and not get distracted by mistaking means for an end.
ICYMI: Good reads from the eduverse
School closings seemed to be the topic of the week. With that in mind, if you're not following the news from the Dyett Hunger Strike, you should be. Here are some other reads for your Sunday edification.
Out of Control
I highlighted this report from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools earlier in the week, but it deserves a long, thoughtful look. The report examines the systematic disenfranchisement of African American and Latino communities through the mechanism of school takeovers.
What's Really at Stake When a School Closes?
This New Yorker piece from Jelani Cobb examines the fate of Jamaica High School in Queens, and the long, difficult history that led from a school producing three Pullitzer prize winners to being pushed out of its own auditorium for graduation. Here is what the starving, gutting and closing of a school looks like up close.
How Far We Have Fallen
A simple but artful graphic presentation highlights just how badly public education has been attacked and damaged in North Carolina.
School Closures- A National Look at a Failed Strategy
It was a mighty fine day when the Network for Public Education hired Carol Burris. Here on NPE's site she has put together a look at how school closing has failed as a strategy all across the nation (well, at least as a strategy for improving education).
We're going the wrong way in trying to get teacher evaluations right
Columnist Lloyd E. Schaeffer does a pretty good job of explaining one reason that the teacher evaluation system in Pennsylvania (and many other states) is wrong, and dumb.
Out of Control
I highlighted this report from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools earlier in the week, but it deserves a long, thoughtful look. The report examines the systematic disenfranchisement of African American and Latino communities through the mechanism of school takeovers.
What's Really at Stake When a School Closes?
This New Yorker piece from Jelani Cobb examines the fate of Jamaica High School in Queens, and the long, difficult history that led from a school producing three Pullitzer prize winners to being pushed out of its own auditorium for graduation. Here is what the starving, gutting and closing of a school looks like up close.
How Far We Have Fallen
A simple but artful graphic presentation highlights just how badly public education has been attacked and damaged in North Carolina.
School Closures- A National Look at a Failed Strategy
It was a mighty fine day when the Network for Public Education hired Carol Burris. Here on NPE's site she has put together a look at how school closing has failed as a strategy all across the nation (well, at least as a strategy for improving education).
We're going the wrong way in trying to get teacher evaluations right
Columnist Lloyd E. Schaeffer does a pretty good job of explaining one reason that the teacher evaluation system in Pennsylvania (and many other states) is wrong, and dumb.
Saturday, September 5, 2015
WA: I Have the Charter Solution
The Washington State supreme court has spoken, and charter supporters are freaking out.
There's a #saveWAcharterschools tag on twitter (a little lonely, but it's there), along with several feisty charteristas who are finding ways to express their outrage.
And on Huffington Post, the heads both the national and state charter associations (each, of course, is not called "president" or "chairman," but "CEO") wrote an expression of something between panic, outrage and feistiness about the closing of charter schools. Thomas Franta and Nina Rees are concerned for the 1,200 Washington students who are suddenly school-less for next week, and I have to agree that the court's decision to sit on this ruling until the last days of summer vacation was just plain mean. At the same time, I hope that Rees, as CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, displays some of this same outrage the next time some charter school decides to cut its losses and close up shop in the middle of a school year.
Charteristas are calling for some way to Save Charter Schools. Washington state legislator Drew Stokesbary on twitter proposes three possible solutions:
So, find ways to rewrite the law so that charter money can stay in its own little lock box in its own big silo. This seems a bit overthought and overwrought. The court's decision, as I understand it, is based on the idea that charter schools cannot receive "common school" public funds because they are not overseen by an elected school board. And if that's the case, charters can fix this very easily. Are you paying attention, charter operators? I have your solution right here.
Just submit to being overseen by an elected school board.
Act like the public schools you claim to be. Make your finances and operation completely transparent to the public.
And allow yourselves to be overseen by an elected school board instead of a collection of individuals who are not answerable to the voters or the taxpayers.
I mean-- what's more important to you? Providing a strong educational alternative for those 1,200 students, or holding on your ability to do whatever you want without having to answer to the public? Is it so important to you that you not be accountable to the public that you would rather engage in timeconsuming rewrites of state law, or even just close your doors, rather than let yourself submit to transparent and open oversight by a group of citizens elected by the very taxpayers whose money you use to run your school?
Many eyes are on Washington right now. One of the things we'll be watching to see is what charter operators do next, because their next move will be one more sign of what they really care about.
There's a #saveWAcharterschools tag on twitter (a little lonely, but it's there), along with several feisty charteristas who are finding ways to express their outrage.
And on Huffington Post, the heads both the national and state charter associations (each, of course, is not called "president" or "chairman," but "CEO") wrote an expression of something between panic, outrage and feistiness about the closing of charter schools. Thomas Franta and Nina Rees are concerned for the 1,200 Washington students who are suddenly school-less for next week, and I have to agree that the court's decision to sit on this ruling until the last days of summer vacation was just plain mean. At the same time, I hope that Rees, as CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, displays some of this same outrage the next time some charter school decides to cut its losses and close up shop in the middle of a school year.
Charteristas are calling for some way to Save Charter Schools. Washington state legislator Drew Stokesbary on twitter proposes three possible solutions:
So, find ways to rewrite the law so that charter money can stay in its own little lock box in its own big silo. This seems a bit overthought and overwrought. The court's decision, as I understand it, is based on the idea that charter schools cannot receive "common school" public funds because they are not overseen by an elected school board. And if that's the case, charters can fix this very easily. Are you paying attention, charter operators? I have your solution right here.
Just submit to being overseen by an elected school board.
Act like the public schools you claim to be. Make your finances and operation completely transparent to the public.
And allow yourselves to be overseen by an elected school board instead of a collection of individuals who are not answerable to the voters or the taxpayers.
I mean-- what's more important to you? Providing a strong educational alternative for those 1,200 students, or holding on your ability to do whatever you want without having to answer to the public? Is it so important to you that you not be accountable to the public that you would rather engage in timeconsuming rewrites of state law, or even just close your doors, rather than let yourself submit to transparent and open oversight by a group of citizens elected by the very taxpayers whose money you use to run your school?
Many eyes are on Washington right now. One of the things we'll be watching to see is what charter operators do next, because their next move will be one more sign of what they really care about.
FL: Testing Swamp
Since the 1920's boom in swampland sales, Florida has a been a land of Things Too Good To Be True. There is no state in the union that has pulled off the Big Standardized Testing piece of the Common Core-related Reformsterama, but Florida has brought a special "panache" and "je ne sais quoi le hell I'm doing" to the deployment of Le Gran Test.
Florida was on the testing bus early, rolling out the FCAT in 1998. They were members of the PARCC club, until it became clear that all things Common Core were going to be liabilities for politicians. So Florida jumped ship and eventually awarded its testing contract to American Institutes for Research, a test manufacturer that has been a perennial runner up in the testing contract beauty pageants.
According to various published reports, this may have led to the odd sidetrack of Florida buying into an alternative test that Utah had commissioned and then thrown out. But you won't find many Florida officials talking about the reported $5 million they paid for that test, perhaps because they've been too busy dealing with all the testing fallout.
Le rolloutte was not tres bien. Reports came rolling in that the technological infrastructure could not manage the job, leading an editorial writer at the Tampa Bay Times to give the state an F for testing, noting Buzzfeed had managed to let 41 million people vote on what color that damn dress was, with peak traffic of 670K viewers. Why, with months to prepare, could the testing computers not handle a smaller load, well known ahead of time?
Well, apparently the Tampa Bay writer choice a particularly apt analogy, because we have now arrived at a moment that is just as unclear as the color of the fabled dress.
See, the Florida legislature decided that thebest way to quiet the din of criticism next logical step was a $600K study of the BS Test. They hired Alpine Testing Solutions, a company that specializes in "psychometric and test development services." The company was well at it this summer, working to complete their study by the end of August. Because you definitely want to make sure your test is valid before you give it a second time.
But now the report has emerged and-- well, is it blue or gold or brown or what? That seems to be a bit of a contratemps regarding this point.
The State of Florida thinks that the reports says that the test is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. They point out things like how this year more tests were given than last year, and the test is totally safe from cyberattack. The big headline, though, is that despite a long, long list of issues, the test is still "valid in judging students' skills"
This is not exactly a home run. It's more, "We've talked to Mrs. Lincoln and we're pretty sure that she thought the play was swell."
You can read the report here. Well, you can try to read the report; it's written in fluent test manufacturer jargon, and would probably be easier to follow even in my pidgin French. You can go for the executive summary, but it's only shorter-- not clearer.
But digging out some specifics does not help the test's cause.
Some are simply practical, like the idea that the Utah items should be more Floridified. Because apparently around a third of the test questions are not even connected to Florida's standards. Without digging more deeply than I'm going to on a Saturday afternoon, it's hard to know just how bad that really is-- Utah and Florida are both states that faux-dropped the Common Core so that they could adopt some faux-local standards that are not too terribly different from CCSS. But there are other issues of deeper concern raised by the report.
With respect to student level decisions, the evidence for the paper and pencil delivered exams support the use of the FSA at the student level. For the CBT FSA, the FSA scores for some students will be suspect. Although the percentage of students in the aggregate may appear small, it still represents a significant number of students for whom critical decisions need to be made. Therefore, test scores should not be used as a sole determinant in decisions such as the prevention of advancement to the next grade, graduation eligibility, or placement into a remedial course.
So, the individual scores for students who took the computer version of the test shouldn't be used to make any decisions about the student, because it's entirely possible that they're wrong.
The interim passing scores were not established through a formal standard setting process and therefore do not represent a criterion-based measure of student knowledge and skills. The limitations regarding the meaning of these interim passing scores should be communicated to stakeholders.
We really need to talk about this more often. The BS Tests are not measuring students against any standard; they're just being used to stack rank students. Your child could only miss one question on the test, but if most of the other students miss zero questions, your child is still a failure. Well, assuming she actually missed the question.
The spring 2015 FSA administration was problematic. Problems were encountered on just about every aspect of the administration, from the initial training and preparation to the delivery of the tests themselves.
Test administration was a giant cluster-farfegnugen. Everything that could go wrong did.
If we take a step back and look at the larger picture, things don't look any better for this report.
First of all, while the state did hire "independent third party" to examine its test, they were only independent in the sense that they aren't directly involved in sales and marketing for this particular computer-based BS Test. But since they are in the industry, they are not going to ask some of the other necessary questions, like "Is it ever a good idea to try to give eight-year-olds a test on a computer." The report is filled with language about how aspects of FSA fell "within industry standards." There was never going to be any question about whether or not industry standards are a big pile of baloney.
Nor could these independent third party fail to notice that the people paying them $600,000 were hoping for a particular answer. Nobody in the state capital wanted to hear about having wasted a gazzillion dollars on a big pile of useless crap. There was always going to be a limit to just how much bad news Alpine could slip into the report.
Despite the unveiling of this $600K PR package, the hub-bub doesn't seem to be subsiding. A few counties are still making noise about getting away from the test, nor has there been a great upswell of parents declaring, "Tres jolie! All of my concerns have been addressed, and I know welcome the FSA as a beloved and trusted friend." In fact, if we go back and look at the concerns that were being voiced last spring, we can't help but notice that they are largely unaddressed by the Alpine report. And the Tampa Bay Times still gives the test an F. It's safe to assume that a great many Floridians would still like to bid the test, "Bon voyage!" Even if education commissioner Pam Stewart declares the report "welcome news," it seems to be fairly unconvincing. Too bad, taxpayers who forked over $600 K for nothing. C'est la vie.
Florida was on the testing bus early, rolling out the FCAT in 1998. They were members of the PARCC club, until it became clear that all things Common Core were going to be liabilities for politicians. So Florida jumped ship and eventually awarded its testing contract to American Institutes for Research, a test manufacturer that has been a perennial runner up in the testing contract beauty pageants.
According to various published reports, this may have led to the odd sidetrack of Florida buying into an alternative test that Utah had commissioned and then thrown out. But you won't find many Florida officials talking about the reported $5 million they paid for that test, perhaps because they've been too busy dealing with all the testing fallout.
Le rolloutte was not tres bien. Reports came rolling in that the technological infrastructure could not manage the job, leading an editorial writer at the Tampa Bay Times to give the state an F for testing, noting Buzzfeed had managed to let 41 million people vote on what color that damn dress was, with peak traffic of 670K viewers. Why, with months to prepare, could the testing computers not handle a smaller load, well known ahead of time?
Well, apparently the Tampa Bay writer choice a particularly apt analogy, because we have now arrived at a moment that is just as unclear as the color of the fabled dress.
See, the Florida legislature decided that the
But now the report has emerged and-- well, is it blue or gold or brown or what? That seems to be a bit of a contratemps regarding this point.
The State of Florida thinks that the reports says that the test is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. They point out things like how this year more tests were given than last year, and the test is totally safe from cyberattack. The big headline, though, is that despite a long, long list of issues, the test is still "valid in judging students' skills"
This is not exactly a home run. It's more, "We've talked to Mrs. Lincoln and we're pretty sure that she thought the play was swell."
You can read the report here. Well, you can try to read the report; it's written in fluent test manufacturer jargon, and would probably be easier to follow even in my pidgin French. You can go for the executive summary, but it's only shorter-- not clearer.
But digging out some specifics does not help the test's cause.
Some are simply practical, like the idea that the Utah items should be more Floridified. Because apparently around a third of the test questions are not even connected to Florida's standards. Without digging more deeply than I'm going to on a Saturday afternoon, it's hard to know just how bad that really is-- Utah and Florida are both states that faux-dropped the Common Core so that they could adopt some faux-local standards that are not too terribly different from CCSS. But there are other issues of deeper concern raised by the report.
With respect to student level decisions, the evidence for the paper and pencil delivered exams support the use of the FSA at the student level. For the CBT FSA, the FSA scores for some students will be suspect. Although the percentage of students in the aggregate may appear small, it still represents a significant number of students for whom critical decisions need to be made. Therefore, test scores should not be used as a sole determinant in decisions such as the prevention of advancement to the next grade, graduation eligibility, or placement into a remedial course.
So, the individual scores for students who took the computer version of the test shouldn't be used to make any decisions about the student, because it's entirely possible that they're wrong.
The interim passing scores were not established through a formal standard setting process and therefore do not represent a criterion-based measure of student knowledge and skills. The limitations regarding the meaning of these interim passing scores should be communicated to stakeholders.
We really need to talk about this more often. The BS Tests are not measuring students against any standard; they're just being used to stack rank students. Your child could only miss one question on the test, but if most of the other students miss zero questions, your child is still a failure. Well, assuming she actually missed the question.
The spring 2015 FSA administration was problematic. Problems were encountered on just about every aspect of the administration, from the initial training and preparation to the delivery of the tests themselves.
Test administration was a giant cluster-farfegnugen. Everything that could go wrong did.
If we take a step back and look at the larger picture, things don't look any better for this report.
First of all, while the state did hire "independent third party" to examine its test, they were only independent in the sense that they aren't directly involved in sales and marketing for this particular computer-based BS Test. But since they are in the industry, they are not going to ask some of the other necessary questions, like "Is it ever a good idea to try to give eight-year-olds a test on a computer." The report is filled with language about how aspects of FSA fell "within industry standards." There was never going to be any question about whether or not industry standards are a big pile of baloney.
Nor could these independent third party fail to notice that the people paying them $600,000 were hoping for a particular answer. Nobody in the state capital wanted to hear about having wasted a gazzillion dollars on a big pile of useless crap. There was always going to be a limit to just how much bad news Alpine could slip into the report.
Despite the unveiling of this $600K PR package, the hub-bub doesn't seem to be subsiding. A few counties are still making noise about getting away from the test, nor has there been a great upswell of parents declaring, "Tres jolie! All of my concerns have been addressed, and I know welcome the FSA as a beloved and trusted friend." In fact, if we go back and look at the concerns that were being voiced last spring, we can't help but notice that they are largely unaddressed by the Alpine report. And the Tampa Bay Times still gives the test an F. It's safe to assume that a great many Floridians would still like to bid the test, "Bon voyage!" Even if education commissioner Pam Stewart declares the report "welcome news," it seems to be fairly unconvincing. Too bad, taxpayers who forked over $600 K for nothing. C'est la vie.
OH: State Cheats for Charters
Ohio continues to work hard to stay on the cutting edge of charter school abuse and corruption. But as much as charteristas like to see business handled by the private sector, sometimes, when you really want to make a dark and dirty mess, you have to get some government assistance.
The Columbus Dispatch and some other Ohio papers have been behaving like an actual pack of journalists, pursuing a story that first broke a while ago. You may recall that in the middle of the summer, the Ohio Department of Educations school choice czar David Hansen was forced to resign because he had cooked the books for charter schools, using techniques that might be called "grade-fixing" or "lying" or "cheating" or "misbehavior that gets you sent to jail if you're a teacher in Atlanta." Hansen left out data that would have lowered the scores of select charter schools, making those charters look better than they actually were.
Hansen (who is the husband of John Kasich's former chief of staff and current campaign manager) has never really owned up to his misbehavior, offering observations such as "the law is really bonkers and hella unclear, so how as I to know? As near as I could see, cherry picking the data in a way that made some schools look better seemed perfectly okee dokee." (I'm paraphrasing).
Thanks to the ever-Ohio-vigilant blog Plunderbund, we know that Hansen has played this game before. In his previous work at the Buckeye Institute, Hansen cooked some charter school books for an influential donor as well.
Well, it turns out that there's more ugliness underneath all that.
In response to a public records information request, the department has released over 100,000 pages of stuff, and reporters have been poring through that mess ever since. What they have found suggests that neither state superintendent Richard Ross nor governor and Presidential aspirant John Kasich knew anything about the cheating, a whole big bunch of other people surely did. Turns out it takes more than just one guy to really corrupt a system.
The Dispatch has found emails and notes that fall into several categories. Some are at least a little encouraging, consisting of staffers asking, "Is there really a good reason or rule for what I'm seeing happening?"
But others make it clear that staff members knew they were up to no good. Here's one of the Dispatch's juicier quotes of a text message from Hansen's assistant to a staff member:
The ratios are on your laptop. Someone needs to calculate the overall authorizer scores and walk them up to Melissa today. They have to be walked up, not emailed, not printed. Just handwritten on paper. Thanks!
This indicates not only an awareness of misbehavior, but-- well, come on. Why would you leave a message trail of your instructions not to leave a message trail? What's worse than being nefarious and sneaky? Being bad at it.
Journalists' findings don't help Hansen's protests of innocence much. Here's another exchange from when Hansen was getting cranky about numbers for three preferred charters not coming out quite right.
“Then we will put them all down as getting 92 and being exemplary in agency commitment and go from there,” Hansen wrote in an email.
Geis responded, “Can we assume you are joking about putting them down as a 92? (Looks of shock from others in the room).”
Ohio officials cling to the belief that Hansen acted alone in altering grade outcomes for charters and it's possible that we're hair-splitting here. It certainly appears that staffers gave him the tools that he asked for, and that they had to know that something hinky was going on with the rigging of data. At a bare minimum, the department had a culture of not challenging the boss when clearly unethical activities were under way. "We were just following orders," provides no comfort here. And as this has unspooled, some Ohio politicians have suggested that Superintendent Ross either A) knew what was happening or B) is a terrible, incompetent, out-of-touch administrator of the department.
Bottom line: Ohio continues to set the standard for lousy, ineffective, and corrupt oversight of charter schools.
The Columbus Dispatch and some other Ohio papers have been behaving like an actual pack of journalists, pursuing a story that first broke a while ago. You may recall that in the middle of the summer, the Ohio Department of Educations school choice czar David Hansen was forced to resign because he had cooked the books for charter schools, using techniques that might be called "grade-fixing" or "lying" or "cheating" or "misbehavior that gets you sent to jail if you're a teacher in Atlanta." Hansen left out data that would have lowered the scores of select charter schools, making those charters look better than they actually were.
Hansen (who is the husband of John Kasich's former chief of staff and current campaign manager) has never really owned up to his misbehavior, offering observations such as "the law is really bonkers and hella unclear, so how as I to know? As near as I could see, cherry picking the data in a way that made some schools look better seemed perfectly okee dokee." (I'm paraphrasing).
Thanks to the ever-Ohio-vigilant blog Plunderbund, we know that Hansen has played this game before. In his previous work at the Buckeye Institute, Hansen cooked some charter school books for an influential donor as well.
Well, it turns out that there's more ugliness underneath all that.
In response to a public records information request, the department has released over 100,000 pages of stuff, and reporters have been poring through that mess ever since. What they have found suggests that neither state superintendent Richard Ross nor governor and Presidential aspirant John Kasich knew anything about the cheating, a whole big bunch of other people surely did. Turns out it takes more than just one guy to really corrupt a system.
The Dispatch has found emails and notes that fall into several categories. Some are at least a little encouraging, consisting of staffers asking, "Is there really a good reason or rule for what I'm seeing happening?"
But others make it clear that staff members knew they were up to no good. Here's one of the Dispatch's juicier quotes of a text message from Hansen's assistant to a staff member:
The ratios are on your laptop. Someone needs to calculate the overall authorizer scores and walk them up to Melissa today. They have to be walked up, not emailed, not printed. Just handwritten on paper. Thanks!
This indicates not only an awareness of misbehavior, but-- well, come on. Why would you leave a message trail of your instructions not to leave a message trail? What's worse than being nefarious and sneaky? Being bad at it.
Journalists' findings don't help Hansen's protests of innocence much. Here's another exchange from when Hansen was getting cranky about numbers for three preferred charters not coming out quite right.
“Then we will put them all down as getting 92 and being exemplary in agency commitment and go from there,” Hansen wrote in an email.
Geis responded, “Can we assume you are joking about putting them down as a 92? (Looks of shock from others in the room).”
Ohio officials cling to the belief that Hansen acted alone in altering grade outcomes for charters and it's possible that we're hair-splitting here. It certainly appears that staffers gave him the tools that he asked for, and that they had to know that something hinky was going on with the rigging of data. At a bare minimum, the department had a culture of not challenging the boss when clearly unethical activities were under way. "We were just following orders," provides no comfort here. And as this has unspooled, some Ohio politicians have suggested that Superintendent Ross either A) knew what was happening or B) is a terrible, incompetent, out-of-touch administrator of the department.
Bottom line: Ohio continues to set the standard for lousy, ineffective, and corrupt oversight of charter schools.
Choice vs. Common Core Baloney
The reformster movement has always involved coalitions between groups that are not necessarily natural allies. This is most apparent when we consider Common Core advocates and fans of free market charters and choice.
Because here's the thing-- if every school in the country has been built around the same one-size-fits-all standards leading to the same one-size-measures-all test, how do schools compete and differentiate between themselves. If government regulations tightly control what features an automobile must have and how its performance must be measured, what difference does it make if you buy a Ford or a Chevy?
On any given day, somewhere on the interwebs, you will find stalwarts of free market and choice such as Neal McClusky of Cato or Rick Hess of AEI voicing disagreement with Common Core promoters like Mike Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio. This week it was Michael Q. McShane of AEI and/or, in this case, the Show-Me Institute, popping up in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to rebut Petrilli and Pondiscio's recent piece in the same newspaper.
Petrilli and Pondiscio had written that the public should not "shoot the test messenger." The piece is a pastiche of CCSS talking points. There's a reminder that state-level standards have historically sucked, and that states have been big fat lying liars who lie about how well students are doing. There's an unsubstantiated assertion that truckloads of students are arriving at college unprepared, a factoid for which there's no actual evidence (nor do we know what we're trying to fix). And what pro-Core article would be complete without a howler like this:
The Common Core should help to boost college readiness — and college completion — by significantly raising expectations, starting in kindergarten.
Yessirreebob. If we just get tough with those five-year-olds, they'll be college ready toot de suite. And then there's this:
This is a big shift, and a painful one, from the Lake Wobegon days, when, like in Garrison Keillor’s fictional town, all the children were above average.
Well, yes. Since the Big Standardized Test is graded on the curve, we will now have a world in which some students are always below average, and below average is always equated with failing. P & P point out that the standards and the tests are not perfect, but they are still an improvement because they are "a standard that promises to end the lies and games with statistics." Except that the BS Tests are all about lies with statistics, because even if every student in a state scores at least a 95% on the test, some students (and their teachers and their schools) will still be labeled "failing" because they are "below average."
To claim that this process will make students college ready is baloney. Because-- remember-- we're not saying, before the test is taken, "Everybody who can clear the bar set at six feet is ready for college." We're saying that we'll let everybody jump the bar first, we'll rank their best jumps, and we'll say that the lowest jumpers aren't ready for college-- no matter what height they cleared.
McShane is pretty brutal in his response. Despite P & P's insistence that Missouri's old standards, stunk, McShane points out that they were highly regarded. MO standards and tests had Harvard researcher Paul Peterson's stamp of approval. His criticism of the Core promoters comes down to this:
Opponents of the standards have argued that supporters are out of touch with the reality on the ground and are trying to force a one-size-fits-all solution onto the diverse landscape of the American education system. So when two prominent supporters of the standards take to the pages of the Post-Dispatch, what do they do? They demonstrate that they are out of touch with the reality on the ground and then try to push a one-size-fits-all solution.
I disagree with the Free Marketeers hugely when it comes to education; I think their belief that free market forces can create better public education are baloney. But we agree on one thing-- holding everybody to one-size-fits-all national standards will do nothing about educational excellence except get in the way of it. One-size-fits-all standards are bad news.
But McShane missed one detail of this story. On the same day this op-ed ran in the St.Louis Post-Dispatch, it also ran in the New Haven Register-- just with "Connecticut" in place of "Missouri." One size fits all, indeed.
[Update: This same piece ran yet again in USA Today!]
Because here's the thing-- if every school in the country has been built around the same one-size-fits-all standards leading to the same one-size-measures-all test, how do schools compete and differentiate between themselves. If government regulations tightly control what features an automobile must have and how its performance must be measured, what difference does it make if you buy a Ford or a Chevy?
On any given day, somewhere on the interwebs, you will find stalwarts of free market and choice such as Neal McClusky of Cato or Rick Hess of AEI voicing disagreement with Common Core promoters like Mike Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio. This week it was Michael Q. McShane of AEI and/or, in this case, the Show-Me Institute, popping up in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to rebut Petrilli and Pondiscio's recent piece in the same newspaper.
Petrilli and Pondiscio had written that the public should not "shoot the test messenger." The piece is a pastiche of CCSS talking points. There's a reminder that state-level standards have historically sucked, and that states have been big fat lying liars who lie about how well students are doing. There's an unsubstantiated assertion that truckloads of students are arriving at college unprepared, a factoid for which there's no actual evidence (nor do we know what we're trying to fix). And what pro-Core article would be complete without a howler like this:
The Common Core should help to boost college readiness — and college completion — by significantly raising expectations, starting in kindergarten.
Yessirreebob. If we just get tough with those five-year-olds, they'll be college ready toot de suite. And then there's this:
This is a big shift, and a painful one, from the Lake Wobegon days, when, like in Garrison Keillor’s fictional town, all the children were above average.
Well, yes. Since the Big Standardized Test is graded on the curve, we will now have a world in which some students are always below average, and below average is always equated with failing. P & P point out that the standards and the tests are not perfect, but they are still an improvement because they are "a standard that promises to end the lies and games with statistics." Except that the BS Tests are all about lies with statistics, because even if every student in a state scores at least a 95% on the test, some students (and their teachers and their schools) will still be labeled "failing" because they are "below average."
To claim that this process will make students college ready is baloney. Because-- remember-- we're not saying, before the test is taken, "Everybody who can clear the bar set at six feet is ready for college." We're saying that we'll let everybody jump the bar first, we'll rank their best jumps, and we'll say that the lowest jumpers aren't ready for college-- no matter what height they cleared.
McShane is pretty brutal in his response. Despite P & P's insistence that Missouri's old standards, stunk, McShane points out that they were highly regarded. MO standards and tests had Harvard researcher Paul Peterson's stamp of approval. His criticism of the Core promoters comes down to this:
Opponents of the standards have argued that supporters are out of touch with the reality on the ground and are trying to force a one-size-fits-all solution onto the diverse landscape of the American education system. So when two prominent supporters of the standards take to the pages of the Post-Dispatch, what do they do? They demonstrate that they are out of touch with the reality on the ground and then try to push a one-size-fits-all solution.
I disagree with the Free Marketeers hugely when it comes to education; I think their belief that free market forces can create better public education are baloney. But we agree on one thing-- holding everybody to one-size-fits-all national standards will do nothing about educational excellence except get in the way of it. One-size-fits-all standards are bad news.
But McShane missed one detail of this story. On the same day this op-ed ran in the St.Louis Post-Dispatch, it also ran in the New Haven Register-- just with "Connecticut" in place of "Missouri." One size fits all, indeed.
[Update: This same piece ran yet again in USA Today!]
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