Imagine a hospital where the very toughest cases, the most inoperable cancers, the most stubborn infections, the most complicated reconstructive surgeries, and the most challenging diagnoses-- those are all handed over to someone who works in the personnel office and who has no medical training at all.
Now imagine that you're the state of Tennessee. You've come up with a system for identifying your most challenging and troubled schools, the schools that require the ablest educational leadership, the deepest understanding of how to make student learning happen under the most challenging of circumstances. The last person you put in charge set audacious goals for himself-- and he failed. Then he quit. On his way out the door, he said, "Hey, this turns out to be a lot harder than we thought."
And so the state of Tennessee called upon-- Malika Anderson.
Anderson has Tennessee roots, and a family background in civil rights work, from grandfather Kelly Smith (a Tennessee civil rights heavyweight with a bridge named after him in Nashville) and an aunt who was one of the first black students to integrate Nashville public schools. So when she writes, "Creating great neighborhood schools here is personal for me," we should take her seriously.
But does Malika Anderson have the qualifications to lead Tennessee's Achievement School District?
Her LinkedIn account seems to have been abandoned six years ago. But after graduating from Spelman College in 1997, she spent two years as a senior business analyst at A T Kearney, four years as a manager of corporate planning and projects at Crystal Stairs, one year as VP of Business Strategy and Development at the National Health Foundation, two years as an owner-partner of mobileSPA, a management consulting firm in Atlanta. After that, she started 2007 as VP at WrightWay consulting.
Anderson lists as her specialties, "Strategic planning, data analysis and reporting, organizational assessment, board development, program and project management, and the development of human resources management systems." Her profile also includes a warm recommendation of her human resource services.
So after a decade, no work with or expressed interest in, education.
But in 2009 she landed the job of director of “school turnaround” for the District of Columbia Public Schools as part of the team under Chancellor She Who Will Not Be Named. And by 2012, she was in Tennessee, working as the chief portfolio officer of the ASD to farm out "failing" schools to charter operators.
So how did someone with no background in anything but management consulting and human resources end up on track to become an administrator of a major school system?
What else but the Broad Academy. Anderson is part of the 2009-2011 "residency class."
The Broad Academy is a testament to just what one can accomplish with giant brass cojones. Los Angeles Gazillionaire Eli Board decided that schools did not have an education problem, but a management problem, and so he would set up his own superintendent school, certified by nobody but Eli Broad to provide up-and-coming corporate managers with superintendent certification, also accredited by nobody but Eli Broad. It is like Teach for America, but worse. It is literally as if I set up a "school" in the shed in my backyard and declared that I was training "superintendents" and started issuing certificates. The only difference is that I am not rich and powerful and well-connected.
The Broad Academy has many distinguished alumni, like John Deasy, Chris Cerf and-- well, look!-- Chris Barbic, the former boss who plugged Anderson to be his replacement at ASD.
Broad most infamously wrote the book on how to break and dismantle a public school. And they are pretty resolute in their beliefs that A) schools should be run like businesses and B) trained education professionals don't have a clue about how to run schools properly.
Of course, it's arguable that the Achievement School District doesn't need to be run by educators because it is nothing more than a broker, a government office charged with busting up public schools and handing them over to charter operators. "Take over" and "turn around" seem to mean "farm out in general privatization move." The ASD has experienced some mission shift. For instance, their page with their mission statement used to say this:
The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the to 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students' life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.
Now that pages says this:
Error 404 not Found
I did find a mission statement on a power point slide. It now says this:
Through mutually enriching relationships with the communities we serve, we will build joyful, college-preparatory neighborhood schools that empower students to know their full possibility, to understand the path to pursue it, and to have the academic and social skills to realize it.
Anderson's letter to the public reflects the new, vaguely-focused ASD.
Going forward, we will continue to hold ourselves and our school
operators accountable to the highest levels of student achievement and
growth. We will continue to go where need is concentrated, ensuring
every Priority School in Tennessee is improving because we believe that
families and students in these schools deserve nothing but the best. And
we will continue to ensure that the power in our district is placed in
the hands of local parents, educators and leaders in the neighborhoods
and communities we serve because they are the ones who best know how to
serve our students. We will do so with even greater transparency and
deeper levels of partnership than during the ASD’s initial years.
Anderson faces a variety of problems, not the least of which is that finding buyers for the Tennessee Failed School Yard Sale is getting harder (fun fact-- now that Race to the Top money is gone, charters have to pay the ASD central office an administrative fee).
Meanwhile, ASD's definition of "failing school" as "any school in the bottom 5% of Big Standardized Tests scores soaked in VAM sauce" guarantees that there will always be failing schools in Tennessee, and while it may have seemed to reformsters as if they were planting a money tree, I wonder if they aren't starting to see that they sorcerer's apprenticed themselves into a corner. They're like the kid who enjoyed some popularity because he threatened to kick that big guy's ass after school, but now it's after school and the big guy has shown up with ten of his friends.
Tennessee has suffered for a while from the effects of a school system run by amateurs, starting back with state ed honcho Kevin "All I Know Is What I Learned in TFA" Huffman. These folks may very well have been and continue to be well-intentioned amateurs, but they don't understand how schools work, they don't understand why VAM doesn't work, they don't understand the uses and abuses of standardized testing, and they don't understand how to make troubled schools better. They get as far as "every child of every race and background deserves a good education" and then everything that comes after that, they get wrong.
The continued existence of the failed Achievement School District and the appointment of Malika Anderson to its unnecessary head position is just one more sign that Tennessee's leaders have not wised up yet. The guy from human resources who comes in to operate on my mother's heart may have the best intentions in the world-- but I want somebody with real training, real experience, real expertise, and real knowledge of what needs to be done, and not someone who will do massive destruction because they don't know what the hell they're doing.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Social Impact Bonds for Dummies
We've been hearing about Social Impact Bonds, or "Pay for Success" programs for a few years now, but only recently have they entered the world of public education. Chicago, for example, launched one $17 million program last year for Pre-K, and last month Utah's United Way was happy to announce that Goldman-Sachs' Pay for Success program in Utah had yielded dividends.
The spread of Social Impact Bonds to the education sector raises all sorts of questions like "How are the fiduciary interests of a private investment firm balanced against social demands of education" or "What overseeing groups can best evaluate programs with a balanced view toward all involved interests."
Or, "What the hell is a social impact bond?"
On the ground, it looks kind of ridiculous, like a program that pays a Wall Street firm a bonus every time a kid is taken off of special ed rolls.
But how does that even work? How does the Wall Street firm get paid? With what money? How do you make money on an investment in something that creates no profit?
An Oversimplified Example
Here's the basic structure of a Social Impact Bond. Note: I am not an economist, banker, or investment counselor, nor do I play one on TV, so I may cut a few corners here.
My house is drafty. My windows leak and my heating bill is $10,000 a year.
My landlord goes to the bank. She says, "Banker, I would like a bond of $4,000 for new storm windows. I think they would reduce my annual heating bill by $3,000."
And the investor issues a bond for the program costs, in return for which he gets a healthy cut of the $3K saved by installing the new windows. My landlord's savings from the successful Stop Freezing My Butt Off Social Program become the bond holder's profit-- but only if our goals are met.
Typically a third party will come in to judge the result, making sure that I didn't just turn the thermostat down or it wasn't just a warm winter or my landlord didn't actually save $6K and hide it from the bondholder. Also, it's worth noting that bonds generally come with negotiated maturity dates, at which point the original loan amount is to be paid back. And remember kids-- bond holders are different from investors. An investor owns part of the company, but a bondholder is just a fancy debtor, and as such has legal priority for being paid back.
In this example, the government is, more or less, my landlord. For a more thorough explanation, we can look here. Here's the shortened version of their explanation:
In the classic... social impact bond, a government agency sets a specific, measurable social outcome they want to see achieved within a well-defined population over a period of time. ...The government then contracts with an external organization—sometimes called an intermediary—that is in charge of achieving that outcome. ... The intermediary hires and manages service providers who perform the interventions intended to achieve the desired outcome. Because the government does not pay until and unless the outcome is achieved, the intermediary raises money from outside investors. These investors will be repaid and receive a return on their investment for taking on the performance risk of the interventions if and only if the outcome is achieved.
Okay, Watch Carefully Now
From New York Times coverage of a SIB program that failed. “Social Impact Bonds offer a strikingly different way to pay for social programs. Governments, rather than tapping taxpayers, can turn to outside investors and philanthropists for funds, and reward them only for programs that work." If the program fails, the taxpayers are off the hook. If it succeeds, the bond holders are paid off with what would have been taxpayer savings of taxpayer dollars.
But the finances get muddier because in the couple of years we've been trying this, we've learned a useful insight:
“The tool of ‘pay for success’ is much better suited to expanding an existing program,” Andrea Phillips, vice president of Goldman’s urban investment group, said in an interview on Wednesday. “That is something we’ve already learned through this.”
But issuing bonds for existing programs means we'll have public and private money swimming in the same pool.
So Is This a Good Thing for Education, or Not?
There's huge cheating potential here, on both sides. The school system could pocket the SIB money and declare, "Damn, but the goal wasn't met. Guess we'll just keep your pile of cash and you get nothing." On the other hand, when a metric is as simple as moving students off the special education rolls, it's really easy to fake the results if you are so inclined. If that happens, all the money that used to be your special ed budget is now funneled straight to Goldman Sachs or whoever is holding the bond, and this whole set-up becomes one more way to turn public tax dollars into private corporate profit.
It all comes down to the third-party evaluator. That's the entity that is supposed to keep the whole game honest and determine whether the goals of the SIB-funded program have been met-- they will determine who gets a payday.
So all that's needed to keep this system honest, fair, and above-board is an entity that has the expertise to judge the program achievement but which has no interests in either side of the transaction. An independent overseer. You know, kind of like the SEC or the firms that were responsible for making sure that big Wall Street firms weren't peddling junk investments ten years ago.
It is, of course, up to government to make sure that such above-board groups are in place. So as Chicago runs forward with its SIB program, I'm sure that Rahm Emanuel will select third-party evaluators who have no ties to or interests in the investors who laid out the money in hopes of big fat tax-funded returns on their money.
You Begin To See the Problem
This is a hugely easy system to game, in part because the whole business is byzantine and twisty that by the time you get to discussion of the proper disinterested expertise of the overseers of the metrics for judging the success of the blah blah blah and now the general public thinks you sound like the grownups in a Peanuts cartoon.
That's not my only problem with this approach.
This is the kind of system that favors easily-measured results, so investments are liable to steered toward the program that is easier to attach to some easily moved metric, and not the program that is most necessary.
What difference does that make, you may ask. The money saved over here can be used to pump up the program over there. Except it can't be, because the money saved over here becomes financial returns for the bond-holders over there.
In the unlikely event that a Social Impact Bond program doesn't just become an exercise in cooking the books, the development of a more efficient or more effective school system, the local taxpayers reap no benefit from that because the cost of the district remains the same-- it's just that now taxpayers are paying off Goldman Sachs with their tax dollars instead of paying for an educational system.
Finally,when if this turns into an exercise in cooking the books, students pay the price. If our metric is getting 110 students off the special education rolls, we had better be damned sure that we don't end up with 100 students who are being denied the services they need so that Goldman Sachs can enjoy a healthy return on their bond. (Update: In fact, I've since found an account of how the above-mentioned Utah program did, indeed, lead to book cookery.)
I can understand the appeal of Social Impact Bonds in some situations. But every time we let the bulls and bears of Wall Street loose in the china shop of education, bad things happen. Maybe there's something magical about all this that I just don't get, in which case at a minimum, these guys are doing a lousy job of explaining themselves. But maybe I should just trust the guys on Wall Street at place like Goldman Sachs. After all, it's not like they've ever tried to screw us all over before, right?
The spread of Social Impact Bonds to the education sector raises all sorts of questions like "How are the fiduciary interests of a private investment firm balanced against social demands of education" or "What overseeing groups can best evaluate programs with a balanced view toward all involved interests."
Or, "What the hell is a social impact bond?"
On the ground, it looks kind of ridiculous, like a program that pays a Wall Street firm a bonus every time a kid is taken off of special ed rolls.
But how does that even work? How does the Wall Street firm get paid? With what money? How do you make money on an investment in something that creates no profit?
An Oversimplified Example
Here's the basic structure of a Social Impact Bond. Note: I am not an economist, banker, or investment counselor, nor do I play one on TV, so I may cut a few corners here.
My house is drafty. My windows leak and my heating bill is $10,000 a year.
My landlord goes to the bank. She says, "Banker, I would like a bond of $4,000 for new storm windows. I think they would reduce my annual heating bill by $3,000."
And the investor issues a bond for the program costs, in return for which he gets a healthy cut of the $3K saved by installing the new windows. My landlord's savings from the successful Stop Freezing My Butt Off Social Program become the bond holder's profit-- but only if our goals are met.
Typically a third party will come in to judge the result, making sure that I didn't just turn the thermostat down or it wasn't just a warm winter or my landlord didn't actually save $6K and hide it from the bondholder. Also, it's worth noting that bonds generally come with negotiated maturity dates, at which point the original loan amount is to be paid back. And remember kids-- bond holders are different from investors. An investor owns part of the company, but a bondholder is just a fancy debtor, and as such has legal priority for being paid back.
In this example, the government is, more or less, my landlord. For a more thorough explanation, we can look here. Here's the shortened version of their explanation:
In the classic... social impact bond, a government agency sets a specific, measurable social outcome they want to see achieved within a well-defined population over a period of time. ...The government then contracts with an external organization—sometimes called an intermediary—that is in charge of achieving that outcome. ... The intermediary hires and manages service providers who perform the interventions intended to achieve the desired outcome. Because the government does not pay until and unless the outcome is achieved, the intermediary raises money from outside investors. These investors will be repaid and receive a return on their investment for taking on the performance risk of the interventions if and only if the outcome is achieved.
Okay, Watch Carefully Now
From New York Times coverage of a SIB program that failed. “Social Impact Bonds offer a strikingly different way to pay for social programs. Governments, rather than tapping taxpayers, can turn to outside investors and philanthropists for funds, and reward them only for programs that work." If the program fails, the taxpayers are off the hook. If it succeeds, the bond holders are paid off with what would have been taxpayer savings of taxpayer dollars.
But the finances get muddier because in the couple of years we've been trying this, we've learned a useful insight:
“The tool of ‘pay for success’ is much better suited to expanding an existing program,” Andrea Phillips, vice president of Goldman’s urban investment group, said in an interview on Wednesday. “That is something we’ve already learned through this.”
But issuing bonds for existing programs means we'll have public and private money swimming in the same pool.
So Is This a Good Thing for Education, or Not?
There's huge cheating potential here, on both sides. The school system could pocket the SIB money and declare, "Damn, but the goal wasn't met. Guess we'll just keep your pile of cash and you get nothing." On the other hand, when a metric is as simple as moving students off the special education rolls, it's really easy to fake the results if you are so inclined. If that happens, all the money that used to be your special ed budget is now funneled straight to Goldman Sachs or whoever is holding the bond, and this whole set-up becomes one more way to turn public tax dollars into private corporate profit.
It all comes down to the third-party evaluator. That's the entity that is supposed to keep the whole game honest and determine whether the goals of the SIB-funded program have been met-- they will determine who gets a payday.
So all that's needed to keep this system honest, fair, and above-board is an entity that has the expertise to judge the program achievement but which has no interests in either side of the transaction. An independent overseer. You know, kind of like the SEC or the firms that were responsible for making sure that big Wall Street firms weren't peddling junk investments ten years ago.
It is, of course, up to government to make sure that such above-board groups are in place. So as Chicago runs forward with its SIB program, I'm sure that Rahm Emanuel will select third-party evaluators who have no ties to or interests in the investors who laid out the money in hopes of big fat tax-funded returns on their money.
You Begin To See the Problem
This is a hugely easy system to game, in part because the whole business is byzantine and twisty that by the time you get to discussion of the proper disinterested expertise of the overseers of the metrics for judging the success of the blah blah blah and now the general public thinks you sound like the grownups in a Peanuts cartoon.
That's not my only problem with this approach.
This is the kind of system that favors easily-measured results, so investments are liable to steered toward the program that is easier to attach to some easily moved metric, and not the program that is most necessary.
What difference does that make, you may ask. The money saved over here can be used to pump up the program over there. Except it can't be, because the money saved over here becomes financial returns for the bond-holders over there.
In the unlikely event that a Social Impact Bond program doesn't just become an exercise in cooking the books, the development of a more efficient or more effective school system, the local taxpayers reap no benefit from that because the cost of the district remains the same-- it's just that now taxpayers are paying off Goldman Sachs with their tax dollars instead of paying for an educational system.
Finally,
I can understand the appeal of Social Impact Bonds in some situations. But every time we let the bulls and bears of Wall Street loose in the china shop of education, bad things happen. Maybe there's something magical about all this that I just don't get, in which case at a minimum, these guys are doing a lousy job of explaining themselves. But maybe I should just trust the guys on Wall Street at place like Goldman Sachs. After all, it's not like they've ever tried to screw us all over before, right?
NEA's Lily Eskelsen García on What Teachers Do
Lord knows I can be as critical of some of Lily Eskelsen Garcia's choices as NEA president as anyone around, but the woman can speak. Here's a quick three minutes on what teachers need and what teachers do. It's worth a view.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
How Assessment Ruins Standards
Long time readers know that I do not subscribe to the whole "The standards are swell; it's just those evil tests that screw everything up" school of thought. I think there are plenty of reasons to oppose national standards no matter what standards they are, and plenty of reasons to believe that no set of national standards will ever accomplish any of the goals set for them.
But let's set all of that aside for a moment and talk about how the very attempt to assess standards-based outcomes ruins those standards.
For my example, I'm going to pick the oft-noted CCSS standards about evidence.
I pick it because it's a part of the Common Core that doesn't particularly bother me. Like most English teachers, I've been encouraging (in many cases, quite vigorously) my students to provide support for whatever idea they are trying to assert. ("No, Chris-- saying Huck Finn is a dynamic character because he does dynamic stuff in a dynamic way does not really make your case"). When I assign a paper, two of the main questions I consider when assigning a grade are 1) did you actually have a point and 2) did you support it with actual evidence.
So in this area, the Core and I can co-exist peacefully.
But this kind of evidence use is a tool, a technique, and so it can't be assessed in a vacuum, just as you cannot judge somebody's hammering skills by just watching them hold a hammer or judge their free-throw shooting skills without handing them a ball. And that's where we get into trouble.
Assessing this skill is easiest when tying it to an act of critical thinking. But critical thinking has to be an open-ended activity. (Here's a quick tip-- if your question only has a single possible correct answer, it is not assessing critical thinking skills.) In my classroom, the most obvious avenue is a response to literature, though it will also work to deal with social issues, human behavior puzzles, historical research, or evaluating somebody else's essay work. Just to name a few.
To make this assessment work, I have to really know my stuff. I have to know Huck Finn frontwards and backwards, and perhaps augment my own expertise with lots of reading of scholarly critiques of the work. I have to know the work well enough that I can give the student freedom to go where his ideas lead him without me having to say, "Sorry, but I don't know anything about that, so I can't grade it, so you can't do it."
Every area of study is like a big patch of real estate, and I need to be a well-informed native guide who knows the territory so well that no matter where the student wanders off to, I'll know the terrain. When I don't know the territory, I end up fencing students in. "Just stay on the path-- don't stray." At the very worst, I will lay rails and make everyone ride through the territory on a train that only goes where it is meant to. The train tour is by far the least interesting, the least useful, the least rewarding, the least educational, and the least authentic way to explore the territory. It rules out all discovery and invention, and it is certainly hard on any prospect for joy or excitement.
But again-- we can only scrap the train and the pathway if we have a knowledgeable native guide. That's how my juniors can do a unit built on research of local history-- because I've made myself a little bit of an expert on the subject. That's how my colleague can do a massive end-of-year project with her AP seniors about Paradise Lost-- because she knows and loves that work. If we had to trade projects, we would both be lost.
But within our areas, we are qualified to tell the difference between evidence that is really evidence, and evidence that is just a piece of camouflaged baloney.
So here's why a standardized test can't test this standard.
First, a standardized tests starts with the assumption that any person (or computer program) should be able to evaluate the student's work without possessing any actual expertise at all.
Second, the answers have to be evaluatable in a very short time span.
And that means we will travel through the territory strapped into a seat on a tightly run train.
Look through the PARCC samples. These are slightly spiffed up multiple-choice single answer questions. The new SAT essay is just a wordier version of the same thing-- look at a piece of writing, determine what point the test manufacturers think you should see, and support it with the evidence that the test manufacturers believe are the correct pieces of evidence. These folks keep coming up with more complicated ways to ask closed-ended questions. This is partly, I suspect, because it's simply faster and more efficient to have a test of closed-ended questions that can be scored by any non-expert (or non-human). But also partly because some of these folks just have a narrow, cramped, stilted view of life and the world. "I handed you a brush, a small flat surface, and a jar of blue paint. What else would any normal person do except paint the flat surface solid blue?"
But that's not critical thinking, and it's not supporting your ideas with evidence.
Now, what is often shortened to "support with evidence" in discussion of the CCSS is actually mangled pretty badly in the actual wording of the standards, but even if it weren't, the Big Standardized Tests would mangle this idea to death anyway.
What this should properly mean is, "Come up with an idea that makes sense to you, and support it with evidence that you believe backs up your idea." But the only person who can evaluate that is a classroom teacher who possesses 1) enough expertise to evaluate the student's process 2) fewer than 1,000 students so that said evaluation can occur within the next week or so.
So what the standard means in a standardized test situations is, "Figure out what idea the test manufacturer wants you to find, and then locate the details that the test manufacturer wants you to pick out."
When we talk about test prep in the ELA world, we're talking about getting students into that second mindset, about training them to figure out the One Correct Answer associated with each piece of reading and the Only Correct Evidence located as well. And then repeat it, year after year after year.
And what really sucks is that we are getting good at it, and our students are paying the price. This whole blog piece is the result of a conversation I had with a colleague, both of us concerned because, despite our best efforts, we find our students over the past few years have become progressively worse at really engaging with reading and writing. They have learned that it's not about thinking or reacting or engaging and gripping the material with your own brain. What do you think? Why do you think that? Can you convince me to agree with you? I feel like my students have only recently encountered these kinds of questions, and they aren't sure what to do with them, because they've learned that there's only one right way to do each reading and writing task, and that one right way is known by someone else, and it's up to them to figure that out.
Of course, this issue didn't start with Common Core and Big Standardized Testing, but those conjoined twins have made things so much worse. When you try to make a complicated idea something you can assess "at scale," you do enormous damage. When you write a standard specifically so that you CAN test it "at scale," you break it entirely.
But let's set all of that aside for a moment and talk about how the very attempt to assess standards-based outcomes ruins those standards.
For my example, I'm going to pick the oft-noted CCSS standards about evidence.
I pick it because it's a part of the Common Core that doesn't particularly bother me. Like most English teachers, I've been encouraging (in many cases, quite vigorously) my students to provide support for whatever idea they are trying to assert. ("No, Chris-- saying Huck Finn is a dynamic character because he does dynamic stuff in a dynamic way does not really make your case"). When I assign a paper, two of the main questions I consider when assigning a grade are 1) did you actually have a point and 2) did you support it with actual evidence.
So in this area, the Core and I can co-exist peacefully.
But this kind of evidence use is a tool, a technique, and so it can't be assessed in a vacuum, just as you cannot judge somebody's hammering skills by just watching them hold a hammer or judge their free-throw shooting skills without handing them a ball. And that's where we get into trouble.
Assessing this skill is easiest when tying it to an act of critical thinking. But critical thinking has to be an open-ended activity. (Here's a quick tip-- if your question only has a single possible correct answer, it is not assessing critical thinking skills.) In my classroom, the most obvious avenue is a response to literature, though it will also work to deal with social issues, human behavior puzzles, historical research, or evaluating somebody else's essay work. Just to name a few.
To make this assessment work, I have to really know my stuff. I have to know Huck Finn frontwards and backwards, and perhaps augment my own expertise with lots of reading of scholarly critiques of the work. I have to know the work well enough that I can give the student freedom to go where his ideas lead him without me having to say, "Sorry, but I don't know anything about that, so I can't grade it, so you can't do it."
Every area of study is like a big patch of real estate, and I need to be a well-informed native guide who knows the territory so well that no matter where the student wanders off to, I'll know the terrain. When I don't know the territory, I end up fencing students in. "Just stay on the path-- don't stray." At the very worst, I will lay rails and make everyone ride through the territory on a train that only goes where it is meant to. The train tour is by far the least interesting, the least useful, the least rewarding, the least educational, and the least authentic way to explore the territory. It rules out all discovery and invention, and it is certainly hard on any prospect for joy or excitement.
But again-- we can only scrap the train and the pathway if we have a knowledgeable native guide. That's how my juniors can do a unit built on research of local history-- because I've made myself a little bit of an expert on the subject. That's how my colleague can do a massive end-of-year project with her AP seniors about Paradise Lost-- because she knows and loves that work. If we had to trade projects, we would both be lost.
But within our areas, we are qualified to tell the difference between evidence that is really evidence, and evidence that is just a piece of camouflaged baloney.
So here's why a standardized test can't test this standard.
First, a standardized tests starts with the assumption that any person (or computer program) should be able to evaluate the student's work without possessing any actual expertise at all.
Second, the answers have to be evaluatable in a very short time span.
And that means we will travel through the territory strapped into a seat on a tightly run train.
Look through the PARCC samples. These are slightly spiffed up multiple-choice single answer questions. The new SAT essay is just a wordier version of the same thing-- look at a piece of writing, determine what point the test manufacturers think you should see, and support it with the evidence that the test manufacturers believe are the correct pieces of evidence. These folks keep coming up with more complicated ways to ask closed-ended questions. This is partly, I suspect, because it's simply faster and more efficient to have a test of closed-ended questions that can be scored by any non-expert (or non-human). But also partly because some of these folks just have a narrow, cramped, stilted view of life and the world. "I handed you a brush, a small flat surface, and a jar of blue paint. What else would any normal person do except paint the flat surface solid blue?"
But that's not critical thinking, and it's not supporting your ideas with evidence.
Now, what is often shortened to "support with evidence" in discussion of the CCSS is actually mangled pretty badly in the actual wording of the standards, but even if it weren't, the Big Standardized Tests would mangle this idea to death anyway.
What this should properly mean is, "Come up with an idea that makes sense to you, and support it with evidence that you believe backs up your idea." But the only person who can evaluate that is a classroom teacher who possesses 1) enough expertise to evaluate the student's process 2) fewer than 1,000 students so that said evaluation can occur within the next week or so.
So what the standard means in a standardized test situations is, "Figure out what idea the test manufacturer wants you to find, and then locate the details that the test manufacturer wants you to pick out."
When we talk about test prep in the ELA world, we're talking about getting students into that second mindset, about training them to figure out the One Correct Answer associated with each piece of reading and the Only Correct Evidence located as well. And then repeat it, year after year after year.
And what really sucks is that we are getting good at it, and our students are paying the price. This whole blog piece is the result of a conversation I had with a colleague, both of us concerned because, despite our best efforts, we find our students over the past few years have become progressively worse at really engaging with reading and writing. They have learned that it's not about thinking or reacting or engaging and gripping the material with your own brain. What do you think? Why do you think that? Can you convince me to agree with you? I feel like my students have only recently encountered these kinds of questions, and they aren't sure what to do with them, because they've learned that there's only one right way to do each reading and writing task, and that one right way is known by someone else, and it's up to them to figure that out.
Of course, this issue didn't start with Common Core and Big Standardized Testing, but those conjoined twins have made things so much worse. When you try to make a complicated idea something you can assess "at scale," you do enormous damage. When you write a standard specifically so that you CAN test it "at scale," you break it entirely.
Friday, November 6, 2015
CAP & Common Core Whack-a-mole
I have decided that the Center for American Promise has based its relentless (and senseless) Common Core promotional campaign on a game of whack-a-mole in which they play the part of the mole.
Here comes Carmel Martin, executive vice-president of policy at CAP (previously employed by the US Department of Education-- you can view her revolving door history here), writing a piece for Inside Sources, a website that seems to be a sort of clearing house for news from "policy and industry experts" aka "people who have a news story they want to have placed." But it totally worked, because the piece was picked up by Newsday.
Martin announces her intent with her lede:
The irony of the controversy over the Common Core is that proponents and opponents actually agree on much more than we disagree on.
I'm not sure what the "irony" of the controversy is, really. That Common Core backers never thought anyone would argue with them or resist? That they are being sold as higher standards that will prepare students for college and career when there's no actual evidence they do either? But hey-- let's hold hands, start strumming our ukelele, and see what it is that we all agree on.
First, "we all agree" that America's students must be prepared to thrive in today's competitive global economy. Do we all agree? Because I bet some of us think that some folks think there's something wrong with an economic vision that chews people up and spits them out. So maybe some of us agree that rather than preparing students to resist being poisoned, we might strive for a world less steeped in poisonous atmosphere. Just saying. So are you wondering yet if Martin is a parent?
As a parent and a policy leader, I want every American child held to the same high expectations as students in the highest-performing nations.
That is an interesting goal to cheer for, and it would be more convincing if Martin named just one successful nation that can credit its success to "rigorous" national standards. Heck, go ahead and name a country that has such standards. But Martin doesn't back up her assertion for the same reason that she doesn't include a pull-quote from a Yeti that she interviewed on the back of a unicorn.
Next we get a recap of the history. Let's cruise past all the landmarks. Look-- there's "A Nation at Risk," announcing that America was on the verge of collapse because of our terrible education system. That was 1983-- you all remember how the last thirty years have been marked by America's collapse and fall, right? Just how long does "A Nation at Risk" have to keep being wrong before we stop citing it as an authority.
Also, Martin adds, remediation rates. She says that only one third of students are proficient at math and reading and while she neither indicates which students or where that figure came from, she doesn't really need to because does anybody, looking around at live humans in the world, believe that only a third of Americans can handle math and reading? Also, achievement gaps, supported by more-- oh, no, wait. Still no sources or citations for any of this.
Are we getting to the parts of Common Core on which we all agree, yet? No, now it's time for the paragraph about PISA, chicken littling our international test scores because those test scores have been linked to... well, the scores on the tests.
Anyway, back before the Common Core, each state had its own standards. And that was bad, because reasons. Still nothing that we all agree on.
Now Martin shares some fictionalized history about the origins of Common Core; states recognized the problem and "banded together to create the Common Core." I always wonder what audience CAP imagines when they spin their SF PR yarns; apparently Newsday is read primarily by folks who live under rocks.
The new standards made it possible to compare results from one state to the next and enabled parents, teachers and school system leaders to know whether their students were really on track to graduate ready for college or a career for the first time in history.
No, you don't get a lick of proof for any of the absurd notion that A) such foreknowledge is possible, no matter what path a student chooses or B) that anyone has a clue how to know it. This would be a good place, now that we are so many years into Common Core deployment, for Martin to report how much better core-ified graduates are doing at colleges and in their careers. But she doesn't do that.
We do get a whole paragraph about how math is now wider and deeper and more conceptual. Then it's on to implementation excuses and noting that teachers are still "internalizing" the standards.
But the bottom line is that the Common Core addressed a vital and longstanding need to better prepare all students to graduate from high school ready for college and careers.
Yes, the premise that we all agree about Common Core stuff, the actual lede of this piece-- it didn't survive past the first sentence, and Martin does not even pretend to circle back to it for her finish. Instead she sticks with the classic reformsters formula-- there is a problem, so this is a good solution. Your spleen has exploded, so you should hold this frog over your nose under a full moon. Your house is on fire, so you should let me run a bulldozer through your living room. A bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves.
If you want to sell me a solution to a problem, don't just yammer about the problem. Show me how the solution will fix it. That's what the best salesman needs to do, and Martin, like the rest of the CAP infinite PR flackery department, fails to do that. Maybe the idea is that if they just keep peeking up their plastic heads, we'll eventually get tired of whacking away. Doesn't matter. Whether anybody hits it or not, it's still just a plastic mole head, with no heart, no guts, and no real substance hiding behind its tired plastic surface.
Here comes Carmel Martin, executive vice-president of policy at CAP (previously employed by the US Department of Education-- you can view her revolving door history here), writing a piece for Inside Sources, a website that seems to be a sort of clearing house for news from "policy and industry experts" aka "people who have a news story they want to have placed." But it totally worked, because the piece was picked up by Newsday.
Martin announces her intent with her lede:
The irony of the controversy over the Common Core is that proponents and opponents actually agree on much more than we disagree on.
I'm not sure what the "irony" of the controversy is, really. That Common Core backers never thought anyone would argue with them or resist? That they are being sold as higher standards that will prepare students for college and career when there's no actual evidence they do either? But hey-- let's hold hands, start strumming our ukelele, and see what it is that we all agree on.
First, "we all agree" that America's students must be prepared to thrive in today's competitive global economy. Do we all agree? Because I bet some of us think that some folks think there's something wrong with an economic vision that chews people up and spits them out. So maybe some of us agree that rather than preparing students to resist being poisoned, we might strive for a world less steeped in poisonous atmosphere. Just saying. So are you wondering yet if Martin is a parent?
As a parent and a policy leader, I want every American child held to the same high expectations as students in the highest-performing nations.
That is an interesting goal to cheer for, and it would be more convincing if Martin named just one successful nation that can credit its success to "rigorous" national standards. Heck, go ahead and name a country that has such standards. But Martin doesn't back up her assertion for the same reason that she doesn't include a pull-quote from a Yeti that she interviewed on the back of a unicorn.
Next we get a recap of the history. Let's cruise past all the landmarks. Look-- there's "A Nation at Risk," announcing that America was on the verge of collapse because of our terrible education system. That was 1983-- you all remember how the last thirty years have been marked by America's collapse and fall, right? Just how long does "A Nation at Risk" have to keep being wrong before we stop citing it as an authority.
Also, Martin adds, remediation rates. She says that only one third of students are proficient at math and reading and while she neither indicates which students or where that figure came from, she doesn't really need to because does anybody, looking around at live humans in the world, believe that only a third of Americans can handle math and reading? Also, achievement gaps, supported by more-- oh, no, wait. Still no sources or citations for any of this.
Are we getting to the parts of Common Core on which we all agree, yet? No, now it's time for the paragraph about PISA, chicken littling our international test scores because those test scores have been linked to... well, the scores on the tests.
Anyway, back before the Common Core, each state had its own standards. And that was bad, because reasons. Still nothing that we all agree on.
Now Martin shares some fictionalized history about the origins of Common Core; states recognized the problem and "banded together to create the Common Core." I always wonder what audience CAP imagines when they spin their SF PR yarns; apparently Newsday is read primarily by folks who live under rocks.
The new standards made it possible to compare results from one state to the next and enabled parents, teachers and school system leaders to know whether their students were really on track to graduate ready for college or a career for the first time in history.
No, you don't get a lick of proof for any of the absurd notion that A) such foreknowledge is possible, no matter what path a student chooses or B) that anyone has a clue how to know it. This would be a good place, now that we are so many years into Common Core deployment, for Martin to report how much better core-ified graduates are doing at colleges and in their careers. But she doesn't do that.
We do get a whole paragraph about how math is now wider and deeper and more conceptual. Then it's on to implementation excuses and noting that teachers are still "internalizing" the standards.
But the bottom line is that the Common Core addressed a vital and longstanding need to better prepare all students to graduate from high school ready for college and careers.
Yes, the premise that we all agree about Common Core stuff, the actual lede of this piece-- it didn't survive past the first sentence, and Martin does not even pretend to circle back to it for her finish. Instead she sticks with the classic reformsters formula-- there is a problem, so this is a good solution. Your spleen has exploded, so you should hold this frog over your nose under a full moon. Your house is on fire, so you should let me run a bulldozer through your living room. A bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves.
If you want to sell me a solution to a problem, don't just yammer about the problem. Show me how the solution will fix it. That's what the best salesman needs to do, and Martin, like the rest of the CAP infinite PR flackery department, fails to do that. Maybe the idea is that if they just keep peeking up their plastic heads, we'll eventually get tired of whacking away. Doesn't matter. Whether anybody hits it or not, it's still just a plastic mole head, with no heart, no guts, and no real substance hiding behind its tired plastic surface.
Cheating the NAEP
We've had our giant round of reaction to the NAEP test results, and their woeful failure to show American school children being propelled forward into a wonderland of learning by over a decade of reformster policies. I'm not sure there's any reason to get excited about NAEP results at all, but test-loving folks do, and there's really no denying that this round of NAEP results were Just Not Good.
Oh, but what if it turned out that they were actually even worse?
RaShawn Biddle may not be familiar to you; Biddle runs a one-man media empire parked firmly in reformsterland. But his blog Dropout Nation ran some interesting analysis of some NAEP numbers.
To understand what he's about, you need to know that NAEP allows states to opt out up to 15% of their student special population-- typically students with special needs and English Language Learners. But Biddle is a good reformster, and so he believes in the simple two-step proposition:
1) Public schools are failing. We just need to prove it so we can get support for dismantling them.
2) Making students take Big Standardized Tests who can't possible pass them-- that will help with #1.
Biddle likes to talk about "special ed ghettos" and he's a huge supporter of having all the students there fail BS Tests so we can prove that their school districts suck. But he's not wrong when he points out that some states and cities are gaming their NAEP stats by controlling who actually takes the test. Biddle has assembled two Dishonor Rolls.
On the state level, the big loser is Georgia.
The Peach State was the worst in the nation in excluding fourth- and eighth-grade kids in special ed, keeping 25 percent of each group of students from taking NAEP this year. Although the levels of exclusion declined by, respectively, six and seven percentage points from levels two years ago, Georgia has done far less than either Maryland or Department of Defense to reduce its test-cheating.
Different states use different exclusion approaches to special needs and ELL. Here are the exclusion leaders when it comes to 4th grade special ed
When we look at ELL; Kentucky leaps into the lead:
Meanwhile, the NAEP is working on trial assessments of big urban districts, so Biddle needs a whole other Dishonor Roll for those Big Cheaters on the City Scale (by his count, fourteen of the twenty-three cities cheated).
Washington DC's heralded NAEP improvement? They excluded almost half of their ELL students from the test. Dallas opted out 44% of their fourth grade students with special needs, and 29% of the eighth grade. Philly and Miami-Dade managed to exclude students all across the board-- both groups, both grades. Baltimore, Houston, and Detroit also excluded huge numbers of students, making their NAEP results somewhere between "suspicious" and "invalid."
It's interesting to see so many states and cities doing their best to support the Opt Out movement. Michigan is not really a fan of Opt Out, but I guess Detroit wants to run its own Opt Out program.
And it's also worth noting that we've got one more example here of how putting stakes on BS Tests leads to people looking for ways to game the system-- even people who are the supposed official guardians of correctness and fair play.
But there's another issue here-- what exactly qualifies as "fair" or "not cheating" in this situation? Following the rules is only fair if the rules are fair to begin with, and I can't find anything to suggest that the 15% opt-out allowance is anything but an arbitrary number arrived at as a political compromise between hard-nosed test love (we must test everyone) and inconvenient reality (given students a test far above their abilities is a pointless, punishing exercise).
I'm also going to invoke my made-up 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. And its corollary-- when an assessment is so inauthentic that its demands can't be met by authentic skills, cheating is not only probable, but necessary.
That law is only amplified when the inauthentic assessment is used for no legitimate purpose. Did we need to have all the ELL and SWSN tested so that we could identify the ones who would fail? The states and cities already identified them in order to exempt them, and Biddle's critique of the states and cities assumes they are correct (he's not saying, "Boy, they would have had better results if only they'd let everyone be tested."). We all already know which students can't make this particular grade. Biddle claims to want the benefits of testing for all students. That's silly. There are no benefits to making a student take a test that she, her teachers and her parents all know is beyond her current level of ability and knowledge.
Did we need to be able to identify failing states or cities, or at least stack rank them? Why? What policy goal is aided by that information? We know where the challenged students are, we know where their schools are, and we know what they need (time, resources, and teachers). What else do you think we need to know, and how will making more students fail the NAEP help gather that information?
So what's the beef? The beef is that by cheating, the states and cities avoid being publicly caught failing and suffering the beatdown that reformsters want them to get. The beef is also that by cheating, the states and cities hid the full extent to which reformsters have failed to achieve the gains they promised us we'd see after years of their policies. And the fact that we are all unhappy is a sign of just how large a clusterfarfigneugen the whole business is.
Can we really talking about gaming the system when the system is just a big game?
Oh, but what if it turned out that they were actually even worse?
RaShawn Biddle may not be familiar to you; Biddle runs a one-man media empire parked firmly in reformsterland. But his blog Dropout Nation ran some interesting analysis of some NAEP numbers.
To understand what he's about, you need to know that NAEP allows states to opt out up to 15% of their student special population-- typically students with special needs and English Language Learners. But Biddle is a good reformster, and so he believes in the simple two-step proposition:
1) Public schools are failing. We just need to prove it so we can get support for dismantling them.
2) Making students take Big Standardized Tests who can't possible pass them-- that will help with #1.
Biddle likes to talk about "special ed ghettos" and he's a huge supporter of having all the students there fail BS Tests so we can prove that their school districts suck. But he's not wrong when he points out that some states and cities are gaming their NAEP stats by controlling who actually takes the test. Biddle has assembled two Dishonor Rolls.
On the state level, the big loser is Georgia.
The Peach State was the worst in the nation in excluding fourth- and eighth-grade kids in special ed, keeping 25 percent of each group of students from taking NAEP this year. Although the levels of exclusion declined by, respectively, six and seven percentage points from levels two years ago, Georgia has done far less than either Maryland or Department of Defense to reduce its test-cheating.
Different states use different exclusion approaches to special needs and ELL. Here are the exclusion leaders when it comes to 4th grade special ed
When we look at ELL; Kentucky leaps into the lead:
Meanwhile, the NAEP is working on trial assessments of big urban districts, so Biddle needs a whole other Dishonor Roll for those Big Cheaters on the City Scale (by his count, fourteen of the twenty-three cities cheated).
Washington DC's heralded NAEP improvement? They excluded almost half of their ELL students from the test. Dallas opted out 44% of their fourth grade students with special needs, and 29% of the eighth grade. Philly and Miami-Dade managed to exclude students all across the board-- both groups, both grades. Baltimore, Houston, and Detroit also excluded huge numbers of students, making their NAEP results somewhere between "suspicious" and "invalid."
It's interesting to see so many states and cities doing their best to support the Opt Out movement. Michigan is not really a fan of Opt Out, but I guess Detroit wants to run its own Opt Out program.
And it's also worth noting that we've got one more example here of how putting stakes on BS Tests leads to people looking for ways to game the system-- even people who are the supposed official guardians of correctness and fair play.
But there's another issue here-- what exactly qualifies as "fair" or "not cheating" in this situation? Following the rules is only fair if the rules are fair to begin with, and I can't find anything to suggest that the 15% opt-out allowance is anything but an arbitrary number arrived at as a political compromise between hard-nosed test love (we must test everyone) and inconvenient reality (given students a test far above their abilities is a pointless, punishing exercise).
I'm also going to invoke my made-up 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. And its corollary-- when an assessment is so inauthentic that its demands can't be met by authentic skills, cheating is not only probable, but necessary.
That law is only amplified when the inauthentic assessment is used for no legitimate purpose. Did we need to have all the ELL and SWSN tested so that we could identify the ones who would fail? The states and cities already identified them in order to exempt them, and Biddle's critique of the states and cities assumes they are correct (he's not saying, "Boy, they would have had better results if only they'd let everyone be tested."). We all already know which students can't make this particular grade. Biddle claims to want the benefits of testing for all students. That's silly. There are no benefits to making a student take a test that she, her teachers and her parents all know is beyond her current level of ability and knowledge.
Did we need to be able to identify failing states or cities, or at least stack rank them? Why? What policy goal is aided by that information? We know where the challenged students are, we know where their schools are, and we know what they need (time, resources, and teachers). What else do you think we need to know, and how will making more students fail the NAEP help gather that information?
So what's the beef? The beef is that by cheating, the states and cities avoid being publicly caught failing and suffering the beatdown that reformsters want them to get. The beef is also that by cheating, the states and cities hid the full extent to which reformsters have failed to achieve the gains they promised us we'd see after years of their policies. And the fact that we are all unhappy is a sign of just how large a clusterfarfigneugen the whole business is.
Can we really talking about gaming the system when the system is just a big game?
Thursday, November 5, 2015
WSJ Runs Cyberschool PR
If you were feeling badly about the poor beleaguered cyber schools that took a drubbing earlier this week (from both a report suggesting they are no more effective than a long nap and the many charter fans who piled on to excoriate them), take heart. Someone did run to their defense. And an alleged journalist paved the road so that the run would be easy.
The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal posted a five minute infomercial for the cybers, featuring Center for Education Reform Senior Fellow and President Emeritus Jeanne Allen. The Center for Education Reform is a full-on advocacy group for the charter school industry, used to float every imaginable argument in support of sweet, chartery goodness. Allen was there to blunt the impact of the study, and the WSJ host was there to help her do it.
"A small study on online charter schools is creating a big controversy," our hostess leads, suggesting that the study was neither large nor important, and suggesting that there is actually some sort of debate over the uselessness of cybers, and not just a whole lot folks from all across the ideological spectrum declaring that cyberschools are a big expensive waste of time.
Then we introduce Allen and lead with a question that is a softball in much the same way that Donald Trump is somewhat self-assured. Referring to the CREDO study, the host asks "Was this study conducted at Stanford or near Stanford--" with a chuckling delivery which suggests that somebody cribbed the study off the back of a cereal box and is just trying to make it sound important by attaching Stanford's name. "What exactly did the researchers study," she asks, in a tone that suggests she's pretty sure they studied newts under a full moon.
And so we are twenty seconds in, Allen hasn't even spoken yet, and we have already clearly conveyed to the audience that the study is some kind of over-inflated joke. That's some pretty awesome journalism, there!
Here comes Allen. She's stern, like she found out that somebody is stealing her kid's lunch money on the bus. She does a five-second history of CREDO and charters "who are helping, oh, about 2.5 million kids today" and that "oh about" is not searching for the answer but using the kind of sarcastic flourish with which readers of this blog are familiar.
But Allen says the report is important because every time somebody does "research" and or a "study" publishes "findings" that are negative (and kudos to Allen who manages to create the oral Airquotes of Mockery as well as anyone I've ever seen) it just scares policymakers and it makes folks confused. But how can we trust CREDO reports on charters to be valid, Allen asks, if they use these "experimental" techniques and data from states that (here Allen makes a pained face, like she hates to tell you, but you husband is kind of dumb and ugly) aren't very reliable.
The host steps in to feed another question about cyber clientele? Rural students? Homeschooled? "Who's taking advantage of" the cybers. I suppose she could mean "taking advantage" as in tricking the cyber schools into going to third base without so much as a promise of a class ring, but it seems clear she means it as in "who is getting the great benefits of these swell schools?" She is smirking and Allen is nodding as if to say, "Yes, just like we did it in practice."
Now Allen strings together a nonsense sentence about how that's a great question because the heart of whether the study is valid is who is using these schools. And, well, no. That's not what "valid" means here. But Allen plows on. Most cyber charter students "have had issues." They wouldn't be there unless they had a problem (and I can hear cyberschool folks saying, "Yeah, thanks, you can stop helping us now"). Some might have been bullied. "Many of them" (and I'm going to be careful to transcribe this because, well) "might be on the road because perhaps their involvement with a different effort." They might have been unsuccessful at academics, or they might have been too successful and turned to cybers for Big Challenges. Anyway, the heart of this, "personalization for our kids." We must kill the one size fits all world of public schools also zoning kids by zip codes and it's like the talking points are so jammed up in her mouth there's no room for the rest of the parts needed to build a sentence. Some of the cyberstudents might only be there a year while they're "getting over some kind of challenge or hump" and the study (she may have found her way back to the point, finally) did not take into account how long they were there, where they come from, how much progress they made over time, which, wait, no-- the CREDO study, which expressed everything in the admittedly bogus measure of "days of learning" was totally focused on how much growth the students showed over time, so she's kind of exactly, oh, you know, wrong.
But this big mean study damns the cybers and suggests they shouldn't be open, and in this we agree. That's certainly what the study suggests. Is she going to suggest some data that would prove the study wrong? Nope.
The host cuts off Allen's impotent sputtering to ask if there are better studies of online schools. You know, studies that prove what you want them to prove. Allen replies "Homina homina homina no." Allen does suggest that parents considering schools of choice look at the data, including the local data and the data the state supplies (she has already forgotten that state data gave her a bad attack of frowny face just two minutes ago). Also, interview teachers and administrators and other parents. Please, oh please, can I watch the process by which a parent tries to get access to a cybercharter teacher.
Allen gets in that of course states and authorizers have a responsibility to make sure charters don't suck, but "all the data out there is confusing" (she is very conflicted about the data, apparently). Education data is very difficult.
And the host cuts her off again to sum up-- "The answer seems to be don't look at this study, but the other studies may not be much better."
As damage control for the CREDO study, it was pretty weak. As an example of how journalists can avoid doing their jobs by letting PR flacks do their jobs unimpeded, it was aces.
The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal posted a five minute infomercial for the cybers, featuring Center for Education Reform Senior Fellow and President Emeritus Jeanne Allen. The Center for Education Reform is a full-on advocacy group for the charter school industry, used to float every imaginable argument in support of sweet, chartery goodness. Allen was there to blunt the impact of the study, and the WSJ host was there to help her do it.
"A small study on online charter schools is creating a big controversy," our hostess leads, suggesting that the study was neither large nor important, and suggesting that there is actually some sort of debate over the uselessness of cybers, and not just a whole lot folks from all across the ideological spectrum declaring that cyberschools are a big expensive waste of time.
Then we introduce Allen and lead with a question that is a softball in much the same way that Donald Trump is somewhat self-assured. Referring to the CREDO study, the host asks "Was this study conducted at Stanford or near Stanford--" with a chuckling delivery which suggests that somebody cribbed the study off the back of a cereal box and is just trying to make it sound important by attaching Stanford's name. "What exactly did the researchers study," she asks, in a tone that suggests she's pretty sure they studied newts under a full moon.
And so we are twenty seconds in, Allen hasn't even spoken yet, and we have already clearly conveyed to the audience that the study is some kind of over-inflated joke. That's some pretty awesome journalism, there!
Here comes Allen. She's stern, like she found out that somebody is stealing her kid's lunch money on the bus. She does a five-second history of CREDO and charters "who are helping, oh, about 2.5 million kids today" and that "oh about" is not searching for the answer but using the kind of sarcastic flourish with which readers of this blog are familiar.
But Allen says the report is important because every time somebody does "research" and or a "study" publishes "findings" that are negative (and kudos to Allen who manages to create the oral Airquotes of Mockery as well as anyone I've ever seen) it just scares policymakers and it makes folks confused. But how can we trust CREDO reports on charters to be valid, Allen asks, if they use these "experimental" techniques and data from states that (here Allen makes a pained face, like she hates to tell you, but you husband is kind of dumb and ugly) aren't very reliable.
The host steps in to feed another question about cyber clientele? Rural students? Homeschooled? "Who's taking advantage of" the cybers. I suppose she could mean "taking advantage" as in tricking the cyber schools into going to third base without so much as a promise of a class ring, but it seems clear she means it as in "who is getting the great benefits of these swell schools?" She is smirking and Allen is nodding as if to say, "Yes, just like we did it in practice."
Now Allen strings together a nonsense sentence about how that's a great question because the heart of whether the study is valid is who is using these schools. And, well, no. That's not what "valid" means here. But Allen plows on. Most cyber charter students "have had issues." They wouldn't be there unless they had a problem (and I can hear cyberschool folks saying, "Yeah, thanks, you can stop helping us now"). Some might have been bullied. "Many of them" (and I'm going to be careful to transcribe this because, well) "might be on the road because perhaps their involvement with a different effort." They might have been unsuccessful at academics, or they might have been too successful and turned to cybers for Big Challenges. Anyway, the heart of this, "personalization for our kids." We must kill the one size fits all world of public schools also zoning kids by zip codes and it's like the talking points are so jammed up in her mouth there's no room for the rest of the parts needed to build a sentence. Some of the cyberstudents might only be there a year while they're "getting over some kind of challenge or hump" and the study (she may have found her way back to the point, finally) did not take into account how long they were there, where they come from, how much progress they made over time, which, wait, no-- the CREDO study, which expressed everything in the admittedly bogus measure of "days of learning" was totally focused on how much growth the students showed over time, so she's kind of exactly, oh, you know, wrong.
But this big mean study damns the cybers and suggests they shouldn't be open, and in this we agree. That's certainly what the study suggests. Is she going to suggest some data that would prove the study wrong? Nope.
The host cuts off Allen's impotent sputtering to ask if there are better studies of online schools. You know, studies that prove what you want them to prove. Allen replies "Homina homina homina no." Allen does suggest that parents considering schools of choice look at the data, including the local data and the data the state supplies (she has already forgotten that state data gave her a bad attack of frowny face just two minutes ago). Also, interview teachers and administrators and other parents. Please, oh please, can I watch the process by which a parent tries to get access to a cybercharter teacher.
Allen gets in that of course states and authorizers have a responsibility to make sure charters don't suck, but "all the data out there is confusing" (she is very conflicted about the data, apparently). Education data is very difficult.
And the host cuts her off again to sum up-- "The answer seems to be don't look at this study, but the other studies may not be much better."
As damage control for the CREDO study, it was pretty weak. As an example of how journalists can avoid doing their jobs by letting PR flacks do their jobs unimpeded, it was aces.
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