As recently noted by several fine bloggy outlets, Eva Moskowitz set a new standard in arrogant reckless disregard when defending herself against a John Merrow piece on PBS that outlines some of the less-than-awesome practices of Success Academy.
Specifically, she defended herself by breaching the confidentiality of a young student's records at the school. I'm not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but it sure looks like a FERPA violation to me when you release everything down to excerpts from the teacher narrative about disciplinary incidents for a student who is readily and easily identified.
Well, apparently the child's mother thinks so, too. Yesterday, Moskowitz was slapped with a cease and desist letter. The letter is reproduced here at NYC Public School Parents.
I demand that you
immediately remove the letter you wrote to PBS and sent to the press on October
19, that contained details of my son’s disciplinary record and is posted at [link removed] , as well as the second follow up letter you posted
and sent on October 21 at [link removed.]
The mother notes that actual text of Moskowitz's letter includes the information that the parent did not consent to having her child's private records released. But Moskowitz was willing to smear a ten-year-old child with his six-year-old behavior to defend her pretty PR picture.
As I noted in an earlier post, the picture that emerges of Success Academy in Moskowitz's letter is of a place that deals with a problematic child by emotionally beating him into submission (or out the door, or both). In the past, we've seen her deal with elected offcials who won't give her her way by having her buddies at Families for Excellent Schools mount ugly PR campaigns and by having her friends in Albany beat the Mayor of New York into submission. Now we get to see if either of those techniques are effective against an angry parent with a lawyer.
Stay tuned.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Did RttT Jump-start Edu-Change?
At Education Next, William Howells offers a rater scholarly look at the impact of Race to the Top in "Results of President Obama’s Race to the Top." (The URL says "Race to the Top Reform"-- I wonder what editorial impulse squashed the R word from the final title.)
In particular, Howells is interested in RttT's effect on the larger world of state education policy. "In its public rhetoric, the Obama administration emphasized its intention to use Race to the Top to stimulate new education-policy activity. How would we know if it succeeded?" Howell's is really interested in just that wonky policy question-- he doesn't address the quality or basis for the policy changes, and though he mentions standards, he does once mention Common Core by name. But he does come to the conclusion that the answer is, yes, Race to the Top jump-started policy revolution in the US.
The surge of post-2009 policy activity constitutes a major accomplishment for the Obama administration. With a relatively small amount of money, little formal constitutional authority in education, and without the power to unilaterally impose his will upon state governments, President Obama managed to jump-start policy processes that had languished for years in state governments around the country.
The always-thoughtful Andy Smarick (Bellwether) thinks that Howells may be suffering from a little irrational exuberance here, and he offers nine points that Howells may have missed. I'm going to go ahead and piggyback on his list.
1) Many reformy things pre-date RttT. Smarick is right on the mark here. Common Core, charters, school takeovers, and test-linked teacher policies were already growing in a NCLB-fertlized garden Howells only mentions NCLB twice, and neither instance gives it credit for influencing ed policy. That's a serious oversight, given that RttT simply doubled down on the fundamentals of NCLB. Talking about RttT without looking at its connections to NCLB is like discussing Return of the Jedi as a stand-alone movie, or considering Paul McCartney's career to start with Wings.
2) Howells doesn't explain why RttT winners had big policy changes 2004-2008. See point 1.
3) All the money was spent by 2011. How could RttT be credited with reformy occurrences post 2011? Smarick offers possible explanations such as new state superintendents (nah), GOP political leaders (meh) and ESEA waivers (bingo).
4) Howells treats never-applying states as "controls" but also says that RttT influenced everyone. It's poor design to suggest that your control group isn't really a control group. Plus, if winners, losers and non-appliers were all influenced by something, the omnipresent influence would suggest that "something" was not Race to the Top. If even the kids who didn't eat the lasagna are throwing up, the lasagna isn't the problem. My theory? RttT was not nearly as large an influence as Race To Avoid Punitive Effects of No Child Left Behind.
5) If RttT affected all states, but affected them differently, there must be a non-RttT explanation for the difference.
6) Howells argues that the financial incentives led some states to apply, and then other states raced to keep up at their own expense, because reasons. Again, RTAPEONCLB pretty well explains this effect.
7) Howells wants to give RttT credit for every reform under the sun, even if it wasn't actually part of RttT. This is just silly.
8) Only a third of state leaders actually said, "Yeah, RttT had huge impact." And they were mostly people who won the race and scored some sweet federal funding. Smarick again points toward an alternate narrative of RttT-- that it did not really spur new reforms, but actually rewarded states that had done the most reformy stuff to comply with NCLB.
9) Howells concedes that RttT didn't have an affect on charters, even though it wanted to, which kind of shoots a hole in the claim of its wide effectiveness.
Smarick is pretty gentle and respectful about it, but bottom line is that Howells' idea just doesn't hold up. And both of them skirt the obvious (well, it's obvious to me) explanation, which is that RttT was an extension of NCLB, both in its choice of education reform priorities, its rewarding of states that were already pursuing those priorities under NCLB, and in the way that the looming shadow of NCLB punishments motivated states to grab whatever hope DC dangled before them. Credit also the recession, which made states extra hungry for cash.
Smarick frames all of this with his quest to understand how RttT was important and what there is to learn about federal grant competitions. He and I disagree about that value-- I think any system of federal funding for education based on a competition to decide which states will be denied that funding is a huge mistake. But I think the lessons and importance of RttT are inextricably bound up in its shadow-sibling, NCLB.
Look at it this way-- if there had been no NCLB before it, and Race to the Top had been proposed in, say, 1999, when state coffers were full and federal coercion of education was so much less. Would anyone have paid attention? Would the money attached to the Race been enough for states to consider handing control of their school systems over to the feds? I doubt it. Anybody who tries to explain the RttT era without a big chapter on NCLB is going to present an incomplete and inaccurate narrative.
In particular, Howells is interested in RttT's effect on the larger world of state education policy. "In its public rhetoric, the Obama administration emphasized its intention to use Race to the Top to stimulate new education-policy activity. How would we know if it succeeded?" Howell's is really interested in just that wonky policy question-- he doesn't address the quality or basis for the policy changes, and though he mentions standards, he does once mention Common Core by name. But he does come to the conclusion that the answer is, yes, Race to the Top jump-started policy revolution in the US.
The surge of post-2009 policy activity constitutes a major accomplishment for the Obama administration. With a relatively small amount of money, little formal constitutional authority in education, and without the power to unilaterally impose his will upon state governments, President Obama managed to jump-start policy processes that had languished for years in state governments around the country.
The always-thoughtful Andy Smarick (Bellwether) thinks that Howells may be suffering from a little irrational exuberance here, and he offers nine points that Howells may have missed. I'm going to go ahead and piggyback on his list.
1) Many reformy things pre-date RttT. Smarick is right on the mark here. Common Core, charters, school takeovers, and test-linked teacher policies were already growing in a NCLB-fertlized garden Howells only mentions NCLB twice, and neither instance gives it credit for influencing ed policy. That's a serious oversight, given that RttT simply doubled down on the fundamentals of NCLB. Talking about RttT without looking at its connections to NCLB is like discussing Return of the Jedi as a stand-alone movie, or considering Paul McCartney's career to start with Wings.
2) Howells doesn't explain why RttT winners had big policy changes 2004-2008. See point 1.
3) All the money was spent by 2011. How could RttT be credited with reformy occurrences post 2011? Smarick offers possible explanations such as new state superintendents (nah), GOP political leaders (meh) and ESEA waivers (bingo).
4) Howells treats never-applying states as "controls" but also says that RttT influenced everyone. It's poor design to suggest that your control group isn't really a control group. Plus, if winners, losers and non-appliers were all influenced by something, the omnipresent influence would suggest that "something" was not Race to the Top. If even the kids who didn't eat the lasagna are throwing up, the lasagna isn't the problem. My theory? RttT was not nearly as large an influence as Race To Avoid Punitive Effects of No Child Left Behind.
5) If RttT affected all states, but affected them differently, there must be a non-RttT explanation for the difference.
6) Howells argues that the financial incentives led some states to apply, and then other states raced to keep up at their own expense, because reasons. Again, RTAPEONCLB pretty well explains this effect.
7) Howells wants to give RttT credit for every reform under the sun, even if it wasn't actually part of RttT. This is just silly.
8) Only a third of state leaders actually said, "Yeah, RttT had huge impact." And they were mostly people who won the race and scored some sweet federal funding. Smarick again points toward an alternate narrative of RttT-- that it did not really spur new reforms, but actually rewarded states that had done the most reformy stuff to comply with NCLB.
9) Howells concedes that RttT didn't have an affect on charters, even though it wanted to, which kind of shoots a hole in the claim of its wide effectiveness.
Smarick is pretty gentle and respectful about it, but bottom line is that Howells' idea just doesn't hold up. And both of them skirt the obvious (well, it's obvious to me) explanation, which is that RttT was an extension of NCLB, both in its choice of education reform priorities, its rewarding of states that were already pursuing those priorities under NCLB, and in the way that the looming shadow of NCLB punishments motivated states to grab whatever hope DC dangled before them. Credit also the recession, which made states extra hungry for cash.
Smarick frames all of this with his quest to understand how RttT was important and what there is to learn about federal grant competitions. He and I disagree about that value-- I think any system of federal funding for education based on a competition to decide which states will be denied that funding is a huge mistake. But I think the lessons and importance of RttT are inextricably bound up in its shadow-sibling, NCLB.
Look at it this way-- if there had been no NCLB before it, and Race to the Top had been proposed in, say, 1999, when state coffers were full and federal coercion of education was so much less. Would anyone have paid attention? Would the money attached to the Race been enough for states to consider handing control of their school systems over to the feds? I doubt it. Anybody who tries to explain the RttT era without a big chapter on NCLB is going to present an incomplete and inaccurate narrative.
Gates Support
It is possible that the Gates folks just don't know the meaning of the word "support."
At Impatient Optimists, the Gates Foundation blog, well-traveled reformster Vicki Phillips starts out with a new twist on a classic teacher narrative trope.
Of all the teachers I had growing up, I think about Miss Marjorie the most. She was the hardcore head teacher of McQuady Elementary, the poor grade school near where I grew up in Falls of Rough, Kentucky. Miss Marjorie taught me hard work, how to treat my peers, how to respect my elders and how to hold myself accountable.
But it turns out that Miss Marjorie sucked. When Phillips got to college, she "wasn't ready." Which is why Phillips flunked out of college and failed to ever get a job. Ha! Not really. Vicki Phillips has two college degrees, spent time in a classroom, was a superintendent, and rose through various edu-supervisory positions to now act as the edu-mouthpiece for one of the richest men in the world. Damn that Miss Marjorie and the life of abject failure she condemned Vicki Phillips to.
What Miss Marjorie needed was "support." She "didn't have the tools." She wasn't "supported with high standards or insightful teacher evaluations or professional development to improve her practice."
By using our context clues and doing some close reading, we can quickly conclude that as used by Phillips, "supported" means "fixed."
This is one of the premises of the Gates Approach To Education-- teachers do not know what they're doing, and they'll never figure it out until someone 'splains it to them. And let's combine this with another Gates premise-- the definition of a Good Teacher is "one whose students get better scores on the Big Standardized Test."
The poor, dumb loser, Miss Marjorie-- she probably thought that she was teaching Little Vicki the life skills she needed to succeed in life and to become a life-long learner so that she could keep learning what she needed to know. What a dope. She should have been teaching Little Vicki how to better filter out the distractors in a multiple-choice question.
Gates has latched onto one idea-- "teacher evaluation and teacher development are the same thing." It's an arguable notion, but focusing on it causes the Gates to miss a crucial factor. The Gates Foundation has no idea what good teaching looks like, has no idea how to do meaningful evaluation, and has no clue how to promote teacher development. This is primarily because the Gates Foundation steadfastly refuses to consult, listen to, talk with, or otherwise involve itself with actual teachers.
See, "support" generally means you don't get to drive the bus. Support means that you help people achieve goals that they set for themselves and pursue on their own. If I tell my spouse exactly how she's going to make a meal and exactly how she's going to eat it and where and when and correct her repeatedly when she's doing it in a way I consider "wrong," that's not support. That's badgering and bossing. A support crew at a racetrack does not drive the car; they just help keep the car working.
You might get excited to hear that your corner of the world is going to get "support" from the Gates, because that often looks like a giant pile of money, but even there they are confused. Say what you like about Rockefeller and Carnegie (and you can rightly say many bad things), but when they decided to support a cause like universal libraries or black universities, they handed money to people who knew what they were doing, and they left them largely alone. When you get a Gates Foundation pile of money, you often get a Gates Foundation contact person, who basically stays with the money and makes sure that it is used the way Gates wants it to be used. This is not support-- this is just hiring someone to do a job and then micromanaging them.
Standing over my mechanic and giving him instructions while he fixes my carburetor? I'm just supporting him. Telling my spouse exactly what to wear and then dressing them so that they get it just right? That's just support. Hiring a surgeon to rotate my spleen and insisting that I be awake to guide him through the surgery? That's just support.
I wonder if Gates doesn't conflate two ideas. On the one hand, giving folks money is a form of support. But on the other hand, guys who run a giant corporation might get the idea that anything they spend money on is a thing they have controlling interest in.
But the disconnect between the Gates and the World O' Teachers remains the same-- Gates is just one more amateur who doesn't really understand how schools and classrooms and teaching work, but who thinks he's an expert because he was in school when he was a kid. The only difference between Gates and your know-it-all brother-in-law or the guy you run into at the Piggly Wiggly is that Gates has a giant mountain of money, and when he stands on top of it, he looks taller and bigger and more wise than he really is.
If you want to support someone, including teachers, the very first step is to ask, "What is it that you want to do?" The very first step is NOT to say, "Let me tell you what you're supposed to be doing."
If Phillips and the folks at the Gates want to say, "Teaching is messed up and teachers are broken and we have a theory about how to fix them," then say it and make your case. But the intellectual PR-massaging dishonesty of calling your desire to criticize and control, to make the teaching profession bend to your idea of what it should be-- calling that "support" is rank, transparent dishonesty. It signals, among other things, that you aren't really talking to teachers, who are in a position to know that they are being showered with something other than rain, but to bystanders, parents, taxpayers to convince them that you are Doing a Swell Thing. This is not just the language of someone who beats a child and says, "I'm doing this for your own good," but the language of a mugger telling a passerby, "I'm just helping the guy out."
At Impatient Optimists, the Gates Foundation blog, well-traveled reformster Vicki Phillips starts out with a new twist on a classic teacher narrative trope.
Of all the teachers I had growing up, I think about Miss Marjorie the most. She was the hardcore head teacher of McQuady Elementary, the poor grade school near where I grew up in Falls of Rough, Kentucky. Miss Marjorie taught me hard work, how to treat my peers, how to respect my elders and how to hold myself accountable.
But it turns out that Miss Marjorie sucked. When Phillips got to college, she "wasn't ready." Which is why Phillips flunked out of college and failed to ever get a job. Ha! Not really. Vicki Phillips has two college degrees, spent time in a classroom, was a superintendent, and rose through various edu-supervisory positions to now act as the edu-mouthpiece for one of the richest men in the world. Damn that Miss Marjorie and the life of abject failure she condemned Vicki Phillips to.
What Miss Marjorie needed was "support." She "didn't have the tools." She wasn't "supported with high standards or insightful teacher evaluations or professional development to improve her practice."
By using our context clues and doing some close reading, we can quickly conclude that as used by Phillips, "supported" means "fixed."
This is one of the premises of the Gates Approach To Education-- teachers do not know what they're doing, and they'll never figure it out until someone 'splains it to them. And let's combine this with another Gates premise-- the definition of a Good Teacher is "one whose students get better scores on the Big Standardized Test."
The poor, dumb loser, Miss Marjorie-- she probably thought that she was teaching Little Vicki the life skills she needed to succeed in life and to become a life-long learner so that she could keep learning what she needed to know. What a dope. She should have been teaching Little Vicki how to better filter out the distractors in a multiple-choice question.
Gates has latched onto one idea-- "teacher evaluation and teacher development are the same thing." It's an arguable notion, but focusing on it causes the Gates to miss a crucial factor. The Gates Foundation has no idea what good teaching looks like, has no idea how to do meaningful evaluation, and has no clue how to promote teacher development. This is primarily because the Gates Foundation steadfastly refuses to consult, listen to, talk with, or otherwise involve itself with actual teachers.
See, "support" generally means you don't get to drive the bus. Support means that you help people achieve goals that they set for themselves and pursue on their own. If I tell my spouse exactly how she's going to make a meal and exactly how she's going to eat it and where and when and correct her repeatedly when she's doing it in a way I consider "wrong," that's not support. That's badgering and bossing. A support crew at a racetrack does not drive the car; they just help keep the car working.
You might get excited to hear that your corner of the world is going to get "support" from the Gates, because that often looks like a giant pile of money, but even there they are confused. Say what you like about Rockefeller and Carnegie (and you can rightly say many bad things), but when they decided to support a cause like universal libraries or black universities, they handed money to people who knew what they were doing, and they left them largely alone. When you get a Gates Foundation pile of money, you often get a Gates Foundation contact person, who basically stays with the money and makes sure that it is used the way Gates wants it to be used. This is not support-- this is just hiring someone to do a job and then micromanaging them.
Standing over my mechanic and giving him instructions while he fixes my carburetor? I'm just supporting him. Telling my spouse exactly what to wear and then dressing them so that they get it just right? That's just support. Hiring a surgeon to rotate my spleen and insisting that I be awake to guide him through the surgery? That's just support.
I wonder if Gates doesn't conflate two ideas. On the one hand, giving folks money is a form of support. But on the other hand, guys who run a giant corporation might get the idea that anything they spend money on is a thing they have controlling interest in.
But the disconnect between the Gates and the World O' Teachers remains the same-- Gates is just one more amateur who doesn't really understand how schools and classrooms and teaching work, but who thinks he's an expert because he was in school when he was a kid. The only difference between Gates and your know-it-all brother-in-law or the guy you run into at the Piggly Wiggly is that Gates has a giant mountain of money, and when he stands on top of it, he looks taller and bigger and more wise than he really is.
If you want to support someone, including teachers, the very first step is to ask, "What is it that you want to do?" The very first step is NOT to say, "Let me tell you what you're supposed to be doing."
If Phillips and the folks at the Gates want to say, "Teaching is messed up and teachers are broken and we have a theory about how to fix them," then say it and make your case. But the intellectual PR-massaging dishonesty of calling your desire to criticize and control, to make the teaching profession bend to your idea of what it should be-- calling that "support" is rank, transparent dishonesty. It signals, among other things, that you aren't really talking to teachers, who are in a position to know that they are being showered with something other than rain, but to bystanders, parents, taxpayers to convince them that you are Doing a Swell Thing. This is not just the language of someone who beats a child and says, "I'm doing this for your own good," but the language of a mugger telling a passerby, "I'm just helping the guy out."
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Can edTPA Be Gamed?
Over at EdWeek, Steven Sawchuk is asking the musical question, "Are New Teacher Tests Vulnerable to Cheating?" I look forward to other tough-to-answer EdWeek articles like "Will the sun rise in the east tomorrow?" and "Does the Pope avoid bears in the woods?"
The answer is, "Of course." edTPA (the "new teacher test" in question) is one more demonstration of the Law of Bad Assessment-- the more inauthentic the assessment and the more removed from what is actually being assessed, the easier it is to cheat.
edTPA does not assess an aspiring teacher's teaching skills. It assesses their skills in filling out the paperwork involved in edTPA. It assesses their ability to cough up a bunch of money to pay for the edTPA process. It assesses their ability to jump through the edTPA hoops in the exact manner preferred by the edTPA assessors.
All of these tasks are far removed from actually teaching a class. They are inauthentic measures of teaching skill, aptitude and knowledge, and they are all enormously gameable, and it was utterly and completely predictable, given the high stakes involved (will you get to be a teacher, or have you just wasted four years of your life and a buttload of money), that some business would emerge to help with that gaming.
Meet edTPA Tutoring.
We can help you in any way you need to complete and pass your edTPA. We are a small company with dedicated tutors ready to work with you individually and confidentially to help you pass the edTPA. We have been in business for three years and we have a 100% success rate.
The confidentiality part is particularly tasty. There's also a part about how "the Client will handle all video cutting as requested by the Consultant." In other words, these guys will help you edit your video for best effect.
The cost? $49.00 an hour, which is pretty manageable given how much is riding on your edTPA hoop-jumping festival.
Blogger and retired teacher Fred Klonsky has had many conversations and taken much flak for his comments about edTPA as it has sunk its fangs into Illinois, but he's been right all along.
edTPA is a crock and a swindle. I haven't studied it extensively; I don't need to because what I know is enough to indict it.
edTPA is the privatization of the profession. New teachers should be evaluated and certified by other teachers. Period. The system we have, where the gateway to the profession is guarded by state-level bureaucrats, is also a crock. But edTPA is worse, because on top of bureaucratic baloney, we have Pearson using the process to generate revenue, which means making sure they evaluate new teachers fairly and accurately is not their primary concern. The entry to the teaching profession should not be in the hands of a private corporation. I'm a reasonable man, but I can't imagine anything you can say that would convince me otherwise.
edTPA is ass-backwards. The correct way to evaluate teacher performance is to go watch the teacher work. As the supervisory body, it's your job to go find out how well the proto-teacher does the job. It is backwards to say that it's the proto-teacher's job to find a way to prove herself to you. It's an extension of what I say about assessing students. And that's because
edTPA is inauthentic assessment. Again-- there is only one way to find out if somebody can cut it as a teacher, and that is to go sit in their classroom and watch them work. Period. Seriously. I don't know why we even have to argue about this. If you want to hire a cakemaker for your wedding, you go taste their work. You don't have them fill out some complex forms and take pictures of the tools in their kitchen and mail the whole thing to somebody far away who isn't even going to be at the wedding.
edTPA is highly cheatable. The hallmark of inauthentic assessment is that it's easy to cheat, because you don't have to be good at what you're allegedly being judged for-- you just have to be good at the assessment task which, because it's inauthentic, consists of faking proxies for the real deal anyway. What it really measures is the proxy-faking skills.
There is one respect in which edTPA is an authentic task for our day and age in teaching. It confronts the proto-teacher with a basic ethical conundrum-- is it okay to cheat a bogus task in order to win the chance to do some actual teaching. As it turns out, this is a problem that most teachers in the age of Common Core and Big Standardized Tests face-- do we cheat our way around a bogus, pointless, anti-education obstacle in order to do some actual educating.
If someone is holding your career hostage, is it ethical to get past the hostage taker by any means possible?
Because, unfortunately, the Law of Bad Assessment has a corollary-- just as inauthentic assessment can be cheated by faking the required inauthentic tasks, it cannot be satisfied by the use of authentic skills. Being a really good proto-teacher with promise won't necessarily help you succeed with the edTPA process. Or to look at it another way-- not only is it easier to cheat to succeed, but it may be necessary to cheat. So what is cheating, exactly?
Congratulations, young proto-teacher, and welcome to the modern, ethically murky world of teaching.
The answer is, "Of course." edTPA (the "new teacher test" in question) is one more demonstration of the Law of Bad Assessment-- the more inauthentic the assessment and the more removed from what is actually being assessed, the easier it is to cheat.
edTPA does not assess an aspiring teacher's teaching skills. It assesses their skills in filling out the paperwork involved in edTPA. It assesses their ability to cough up a bunch of money to pay for the edTPA process. It assesses their ability to jump through the edTPA hoops in the exact manner preferred by the edTPA assessors.
All of these tasks are far removed from actually teaching a class. They are inauthentic measures of teaching skill, aptitude and knowledge, and they are all enormously gameable, and it was utterly and completely predictable, given the high stakes involved (will you get to be a teacher, or have you just wasted four years of your life and a buttload of money), that some business would emerge to help with that gaming.
Meet edTPA Tutoring.
We can help you in any way you need to complete and pass your edTPA. We are a small company with dedicated tutors ready to work with you individually and confidentially to help you pass the edTPA. We have been in business for three years and we have a 100% success rate.
The confidentiality part is particularly tasty. There's also a part about how "the Client will handle all video cutting as requested by the Consultant." In other words, these guys will help you edit your video for best effect.
The cost? $49.00 an hour, which is pretty manageable given how much is riding on your edTPA hoop-jumping festival.
Blogger and retired teacher Fred Klonsky has had many conversations and taken much flak for his comments about edTPA as it has sunk its fangs into Illinois, but he's been right all along.
edTPA is a crock and a swindle. I haven't studied it extensively; I don't need to because what I know is enough to indict it.
edTPA is the privatization of the profession. New teachers should be evaluated and certified by other teachers. Period. The system we have, where the gateway to the profession is guarded by state-level bureaucrats, is also a crock. But edTPA is worse, because on top of bureaucratic baloney, we have Pearson using the process to generate revenue, which means making sure they evaluate new teachers fairly and accurately is not their primary concern. The entry to the teaching profession should not be in the hands of a private corporation. I'm a reasonable man, but I can't imagine anything you can say that would convince me otherwise.
edTPA is ass-backwards. The correct way to evaluate teacher performance is to go watch the teacher work. As the supervisory body, it's your job to go find out how well the proto-teacher does the job. It is backwards to say that it's the proto-teacher's job to find a way to prove herself to you. It's an extension of what I say about assessing students. And that's because
edTPA is inauthentic assessment. Again-- there is only one way to find out if somebody can cut it as a teacher, and that is to go sit in their classroom and watch them work. Period. Seriously. I don't know why we even have to argue about this. If you want to hire a cakemaker for your wedding, you go taste their work. You don't have them fill out some complex forms and take pictures of the tools in their kitchen and mail the whole thing to somebody far away who isn't even going to be at the wedding.
edTPA is highly cheatable. The hallmark of inauthentic assessment is that it's easy to cheat, because you don't have to be good at what you're allegedly being judged for-- you just have to be good at the assessment task which, because it's inauthentic, consists of faking proxies for the real deal anyway. What it really measures is the proxy-faking skills.
There is one respect in which edTPA is an authentic task for our day and age in teaching. It confronts the proto-teacher with a basic ethical conundrum-- is it okay to cheat a bogus task in order to win the chance to do some actual teaching. As it turns out, this is a problem that most teachers in the age of Common Core and Big Standardized Tests face-- do we cheat our way around a bogus, pointless, anti-education obstacle in order to do some actual educating.
If someone is holding your career hostage, is it ethical to get past the hostage taker by any means possible?
Because, unfortunately, the Law of Bad Assessment has a corollary-- just as inauthentic assessment can be cheated by faking the required inauthentic tasks, it cannot be satisfied by the use of authentic skills. Being a really good proto-teacher with promise won't necessarily help you succeed with the edTPA process. Or to look at it another way-- not only is it easier to cheat to succeed, but it may be necessary to cheat. So what is cheating, exactly?
Congratulations, young proto-teacher, and welcome to the modern, ethically murky world of teaching.
PA: Opt Out Bill Proposed
PA House Bill 1634 is as short as it is sweet. It adds the following language to the section of PA law that require the Keystone exams (our own version of the Big Standardized Test).
(b) Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, no child may be required to take a Keystone Exam if the parent or guardian of the child notifies in writing the superintendent or chief administrator that the parent or guardian wishes for the child not to take the Keystone Exam.
(c) No student may be penalized by a school district, the State Board of Education or the Commonwealth for failing to take a Keystone Exam if the parent or guardian of the child has provided notice under subsection (b).
(d) No student may be required to take a Keystone Exam as a condition for high school graduation.
Currently, Pennsylvania families can opt out of testing only for religious reasons. The state cannot ask you what your religious reasons are, and so the effect is that PA parents can opt out any time they want to. But this makes the opt-out less equivocal, and it reduces parents' need to stand up for their principles by lying about their principles (The test makes me want to holler "God damn it" so, it's kind of a religious objection).
Most important is d), a can that the state has nudged down the road a bit, but which is still definitely in our future. That, combined with our growing insistence that students with special needs take an unmodified Keystone, promises a diploma-denying catastrophe down the road. And of course the use of BS Tests as a grad requirement insures that the lowest functioning students will be denied any education except an endless volley of test prep. Making BS Tests a grad requirement guarantees that for the most vulnerable students, school will no longer be about preparing them for life as fully-function full-grown. For them, school will be the place you go to get prepared to take a single test.
Now that you're excited, let me point out that A) this is a bill in the PA House of Representatives, which like most Houses of Representatives, floats DOA legislative ideas every day, and twice on Sunday and B) it has currently been sent to the Education Committee, a black hole from which it may never return.
Still, it has been written, and it is out there, and if enough people made a fuss to their representatives, maybe it will make a difference.
Opt Out PA has kindly provided the contact information for all the members of the education committee, and here is a handy email address block that you can copy and paste into an email to these folks:
So step on up and get your two cents in. Encourage the PA legislature to do their part to lessen the impact of these tests on public education and to give parents a vital tool in making their voices heard. As always, one of the most damaging parts of the reform movement is the silencing of parent and community voices. A bill that lets parents speak up about testing abuse and frees students and schools from an unhealthy focus on a single big (not very good) test for graduation-- that's a good bill.
Make some noise.
(b) Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, no child may be required to take a Keystone Exam if the parent or guardian of the child notifies in writing the superintendent or chief administrator that the parent or guardian wishes for the child not to take the Keystone Exam.
(c) No student may be penalized by a school district, the State Board of Education or the Commonwealth for failing to take a Keystone Exam if the parent or guardian of the child has provided notice under subsection (b).
(d) No student may be required to take a Keystone Exam as a condition for high school graduation.
Currently, Pennsylvania families can opt out of testing only for religious reasons. The state cannot ask you what your religious reasons are, and so the effect is that PA parents can opt out any time they want to. But this makes the opt-out less equivocal, and it reduces parents' need to stand up for their principles by lying about their principles (The test makes me want to holler "God damn it" so, it's kind of a religious objection).
Most important is d), a can that the state has nudged down the road a bit, but which is still definitely in our future. That, combined with our growing insistence that students with special needs take an unmodified Keystone, promises a diploma-denying catastrophe down the road. And of course the use of BS Tests as a grad requirement insures that the lowest functioning students will be denied any education except an endless volley of test prep. Making BS Tests a grad requirement guarantees that for the most vulnerable students, school will no longer be about preparing them for life as fully-function full-grown. For them, school will be the place you go to get prepared to take a single test.
Now that you're excited, let me point out that A) this is a bill in the PA House of Representatives, which like most Houses of Representatives, floats DOA legislative ideas every day, and twice on Sunday and B) it has currently been sent to the Education Committee, a black hole from which it may never return.
Still, it has been written, and it is out there, and if enough people made a fuss to their representatives, maybe it will make a difference.
Opt Out PA has kindly provided the contact information for all the members of the education committee, and here is a handy email address block that you can copy and paste into an email to these folks:
ssaylor@pahousegop.com, jroebuck@pahouse.net, rbrown@pahousegop.com, jchristi@pahousegop.com, henglish@pahousegop.com, mgillen@pahousegop.com, sgrove@pahousegop.com, khill@pahousegop.com, HLewis@pahousegop.com, boneill@pahousegop.com, tquigley@pahousegop.com, klrapp@pahousegop.com, Mreese@pahousegop.com, CStaats@pahousegop.com, wtallman@pahousegop.com, mtobash@pahousegop.com, dtruitt@pahousegop.com, mcarroll@pahouse.net, sconklin@pahouse.net, pharkins@pahouse.net, RepKim@pahouse.net, mlongiet@pahouse.net, dmiller@pahouse.net, gmullery@pahouse.net, mobrien@pahouse.net, ssantars@pahouse.net, schreiber@pahouse.net
So step on up and get your two cents in. Encourage the PA legislature to do their part to lessen the impact of these tests on public education and to give parents a vital tool in making their voices heard. As always, one of the most damaging parts of the reform movement is the silencing of parent and community voices. A bill that lets parents speak up about testing abuse and frees students and schools from an unhealthy focus on a single big (not very good) test for graduation-- that's a good bill.
Make some noise.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Eva Moskowitz Has Big Brass Balls
Eva Moskowitz, head of New York's Success Academy chain of charter schools, might just have the biggest, brassest balls in the business. Let's look at the record.
She has fought for and won the idea of co-location, that charming arrangement where charter operators get to take over a public school a few floors at a time. What better way to force the public system to foot all the bills for your private enterprise?
She claims that her charter chain is a public school-- except when the state wants to audit her, in which case she's willing to go to court to assert that her academies are not public schools at all.
When the mayor of New York City wasn't going to give Moskowitz her way on opening more charters, she simply went over his head to the state legislature and governor (who has reaped at least $400,000 in contributions from Moskowitz's backers).
She has routinely closed her schools in order to use staff, students, and their families as prop for pro-charter rallies in the state capital, giving her staff specific instructions on how to "handle" parents.
She pays herself a salary of $475,000, more than double the actual head of the entire New York City public system-- or the mayor himself.
And now, Eva Moskowitz would like an apology.
Well, demands an apology would be more to the point. She wants Judy Woodruff and PBS to take back the mean things that John Merrow said about them in his piece about Success Academy.
I hesitate to link to the letter because it includes what I would have to assume is confidential student information. The problem is familiar to everyone who works in a school-- the school is accused of one misbehavior or another by an dissatisfied student, and the school cannot defend itself publicly because that student's records are confidential.
But Moskowitz gets around that problem by simply ignoring the confidentiality of the student, and smearing the child's name by listing his many alleged offenses (she calls him John Doe, but all you have to do is look at Merrow's piece to get the name). She even includes what is presented as the teacher's write-up of some of the incidents. Here's a link to an excerpt from the letter; you can follow through to the whole text if you wish.
And here's the thing about the teacher write-up. It doesn't really make the school look any better. The child is upset because he didn't do well on the regular test, and then resisted taking his "mandatory cool down,' but instead climbed under the desk and was crying and shaking. I've been in public education in my sleepy little town for thirty-some years, and I know that even the youngest classes can contain extremely hard-to-manage bad actors-- but that's not a kid crying and shaking under a desk.
What the hell is wrong with a school that it drives a small child to this state?
The rest of Merrow's report repeats what we've heard over and over again-- that Success Academies demand compliance and obedience in the pursuit of test scores, and that those who will not knuckle under must be driven away.
Moskowitz also demands a retraction for the reporting of a high attrition rate, claiming, "Our attrition rate is actually lower than the average for either district or charter schools." This is an exceptionally ballsy claim. You can look at these charts from Democracy Builders, a pro-charter group in NYC, showing that for eighty-eight students starting in third grade, Success ends up with thirty-one in eighth grade. In 2014, the Daily News reported that the first graduating class at Harlem Success was just thirty-two of the original seventy-three-- and despite their awesome test scores, none of them qualified on the entrance exam for the top high schools in the city.
Moskowitz also disputes the claim that Success Academy's policy of practice-- excuse me, "alleged practice"-- of pushing out students helps them game the test scores. Moskowitz's response is to construct a straw man version of Merrow's point and dispatch it. But if you want a good fact-filled analysis of Success Academy's approach to race and discipline, this Leo Casey piece from yesterday will more than fill the bill.
Look, the tales of Success Academy's oppressive treatment of children and omnipresent test prep are omnipresent. Everybody has read a few (You can find Jack Covey's collection of teacher stories here.). At best, critics and fans of Success Academy agree that Success Academies are not for everyone, which is kind of the point-- if you are truly a public school, you are "for everyone."
Moskowitz has created an unsustainable model that burns through teachers quickly, depends on infusions of donated cash and the co-opting of public resources, defines success as "good test scores," and serves only about half of the students who enroll, who are in turn a small percentage of city students.
But sure-- demand "a correction and an apology" because somebody didn't follow the Eva Moskowitz PR script. Because while listing the many ways in which Success Academy is nothing like a public school, be sure to include "no transparency." A real public school takes its lumps because how it operates, how it treats its students, how it achieves its success, or even defines its success-- all of that must remain open to the taxpayers who pay the bills.
I suppose you have to admire big brass ones that are so big, the sheer force of will of a woman who, having lost a position of influence as a councilwoman simply carves out her own kingdom of power and influence by operating a business that serves a very small clientele. And to demand an apology from a reporter for actually reporting. Man-- they are just soooo big.
She has fought for and won the idea of co-location, that charming arrangement where charter operators get to take over a public school a few floors at a time. What better way to force the public system to foot all the bills for your private enterprise?
She claims that her charter chain is a public school-- except when the state wants to audit her, in which case she's willing to go to court to assert that her academies are not public schools at all.
When the mayor of New York City wasn't going to give Moskowitz her way on opening more charters, she simply went over his head to the state legislature and governor (who has reaped at least $400,000 in contributions from Moskowitz's backers).
She has routinely closed her schools in order to use staff, students, and their families as prop for pro-charter rallies in the state capital, giving her staff specific instructions on how to "handle" parents.
She pays herself a salary of $475,000, more than double the actual head of the entire New York City public system-- or the mayor himself.
And now, Eva Moskowitz would like an apology.
Well, demands an apology would be more to the point. She wants Judy Woodruff and PBS to take back the mean things that John Merrow said about them in his piece about Success Academy.
I hesitate to link to the letter because it includes what I would have to assume is confidential student information. The problem is familiar to everyone who works in a school-- the school is accused of one misbehavior or another by an dissatisfied student, and the school cannot defend itself publicly because that student's records are confidential.
But Moskowitz gets around that problem by simply ignoring the confidentiality of the student, and smearing the child's name by listing his many alleged offenses (she calls him John Doe, but all you have to do is look at Merrow's piece to get the name). She even includes what is presented as the teacher's write-up of some of the incidents. Here's a link to an excerpt from the letter; you can follow through to the whole text if you wish.
And here's the thing about the teacher write-up. It doesn't really make the school look any better. The child is upset because he didn't do well on the regular test, and then resisted taking his "mandatory cool down,' but instead climbed under the desk and was crying and shaking. I've been in public education in my sleepy little town for thirty-some years, and I know that even the youngest classes can contain extremely hard-to-manage bad actors-- but that's not a kid crying and shaking under a desk.
What the hell is wrong with a school that it drives a small child to this state?
The rest of Merrow's report repeats what we've heard over and over again-- that Success Academies demand compliance and obedience in the pursuit of test scores, and that those who will not knuckle under must be driven away.
Moskowitz also demands a retraction for the reporting of a high attrition rate, claiming, "Our attrition rate is actually lower than the average for either district or charter schools." This is an exceptionally ballsy claim. You can look at these charts from Democracy Builders, a pro-charter group in NYC, showing that for eighty-eight students starting in third grade, Success ends up with thirty-one in eighth grade. In 2014, the Daily News reported that the first graduating class at Harlem Success was just thirty-two of the original seventy-three-- and despite their awesome test scores, none of them qualified on the entrance exam for the top high schools in the city.
Moskowitz also disputes the claim that Success Academy's policy of practice-- excuse me, "alleged practice"-- of pushing out students helps them game the test scores. Moskowitz's response is to construct a straw man version of Merrow's point and dispatch it. But if you want a good fact-filled analysis of Success Academy's approach to race and discipline, this Leo Casey piece from yesterday will more than fill the bill.
Look, the tales of Success Academy's oppressive treatment of children and omnipresent test prep are omnipresent. Everybody has read a few (You can find Jack Covey's collection of teacher stories here.). At best, critics and fans of Success Academy agree that Success Academies are not for everyone, which is kind of the point-- if you are truly a public school, you are "for everyone."
Moskowitz has created an unsustainable model that burns through teachers quickly, depends on infusions of donated cash and the co-opting of public resources, defines success as "good test scores," and serves only about half of the students who enroll, who are in turn a small percentage of city students.
But sure-- demand "a correction and an apology" because somebody didn't follow the Eva Moskowitz PR script. Because while listing the many ways in which Success Academy is nothing like a public school, be sure to include "no transparency." A real public school takes its lumps because how it operates, how it treats its students, how it achieves its success, or even defines its success-- all of that must remain open to the taxpayers who pay the bills.
I suppose you have to admire big brass ones that are so big, the sheer force of will of a woman who, having lost a position of influence as a councilwoman simply carves out her own kingdom of power and influence by operating a business that serves a very small clientele. And to demand an apology from a reporter for actually reporting. Man-- they are just soooo big.
Monday, October 19, 2015
Top States for Special Ed Lawsuits
At Education Week, Christina Samuels reports on recent research showing which states find themselves most often in court over special education issues.
The paper, "Frequency Trends of Court Decisions Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act," was recently published in the Journal of Special Education Leadership. And it shows that ten states are responsible for almost two thirds of the lawsuits filed.
Let's go to the chart:
Note that some of the states have high total numbers, but don't crack the top ten in suits-per-capita. In other words, California has a huge number of lawsuits because it has a huge number of people. DC, on the other hand, is apparently is apparently doing its best to make sure that every special education student has her own personal lawsuit.
It's particularly in light of my piece yesterday that Pennsylvania ranks high both ways. Pennsylvania's parents have found ample reason to sue the state on behalf of their students with special needs, and Pennsylvania is now responding with a program that will insure that SWSN get even fewer resources. I suspect that the new initiative will not help Pennsylvania with its lawsuit problem; I don't think those several hundred lawsuits represent parents who wanted the state to offer their students less help and support.
The authors of the original paper suggest that this information shows that special education lawsuits are a local problem, not a national one, and that the frequency of such suits can best be addressed by looking at the state issues, not the federal ones. I would go a step further and suggest that these numbers indicate that something is spectacularly wrong in a handful of states.
Meanwhile, in Utah there were only 8 "decisions" over that 34 year period, with a per capita rate of 1.6. I suppose that the secret in low-lawsuit states is a set of terrible laws that give SWSN no legal protection and therefor not basis for going to court. It may also be that high-lawsuit states are extraordinarily deficient in avenues of recourse for parents other than dragging schools to court. In other words, Utah schools might just listen better than PA and NY systems.
Whatever the case, the data certainly suggest that something is going on in those top ten states, and it's probably not a good thing-- not good for the states, and not good for the families that end up feeling that court is their only recourse, and especially not good for the students whose needs are not being met while everybody is busy arguing in court instead of taking care of some of the state's most vulnerable students.
The paper, "Frequency Trends of Court Decisions Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act," was recently published in the Journal of Special Education Leadership. And it shows that ten states are responsible for almost two thirds of the lawsuits filed.
Let's go to the chart:
Note that some of the states have high total numbers, but don't crack the top ten in suits-per-capita. In other words, California has a huge number of lawsuits because it has a huge number of people. DC, on the other hand, is apparently is apparently doing its best to make sure that every special education student has her own personal lawsuit.
It's particularly in light of my piece yesterday that Pennsylvania ranks high both ways. Pennsylvania's parents have found ample reason to sue the state on behalf of their students with special needs, and Pennsylvania is now responding with a program that will insure that SWSN get even fewer resources. I suspect that the new initiative will not help Pennsylvania with its lawsuit problem; I don't think those several hundred lawsuits represent parents who wanted the state to offer their students less help and support.
The authors of the original paper suggest that this information shows that special education lawsuits are a local problem, not a national one, and that the frequency of such suits can best be addressed by looking at the state issues, not the federal ones. I would go a step further and suggest that these numbers indicate that something is spectacularly wrong in a handful of states.
Meanwhile, in Utah there were only 8 "decisions" over that 34 year period, with a per capita rate of 1.6. I suppose that the secret in low-lawsuit states is a set of terrible laws that give SWSN no legal protection and therefor not basis for going to court. It may also be that high-lawsuit states are extraordinarily deficient in avenues of recourse for parents other than dragging schools to court. In other words, Utah schools might just listen better than PA and NY systems.
Whatever the case, the data certainly suggest that something is going on in those top ten states, and it's probably not a good thing-- not good for the states, and not good for the families that end up feeling that court is their only recourse, and especially not good for the students whose needs are not being met while everybody is busy arguing in court instead of taking care of some of the state's most vulnerable students.
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