I have been an extracurricular activity adviser for as long as I've been a teacher. I have been the faculty adviser for class councils, student council, radio club, and a few school magazines. I have been the assistant director for the marching band and every kind of director for school plays. I am the adviser for yearbook and stage crew.
I'm pretty committed to extracurriculars in part because they were a big influence in my own high school years. I learned plenty of things in the classroom, but I learned a lot about leadership and responsibility and working with other people and just generally how to get things done in band and on yearbook staff.
School activities can be enormously empowering for students, but they can also be an avenue for just wringing the power right out of them, and it is a real challenge for teachers to stay on the path that allows students to find and exercise their own voice.
Here are the things I try to stay mindful of when working as a faculty adviser.
1) What Are the Actual Stakes?
I have seen adults act as is getting decorations properly assembled for a school dance was going to decide the Fate of Western Civilization As We Know It. But as it turns out, almost nobody has ever died because tissue poms were not fluffy enough. Prom decorations are almost never a life or death issue.
This does not mean you set slack, half-baked standards for your students. But your most important stakes are not the dance or the class elections or the layout on pages 44-45. Your most important stakes are your students and their learning and their experience and growth as human beings.
It's important to remember that the stakes of your actual activity are not life or death because
2) This Is a Terrible Way To Do Things
There are very few projects in the world for which the best approach is to hand the work over to a bunch of teenagers. The best way for me to get a good yearbook done would be to shove the students out of the way and just do it myself, or do it myself with a few well-trained students who would work only under my direction, doing exactly what I would do. That would certainly be more efficient and yield a more uniformly good product. But what would be the point?
The best way to get a dance well-decorated is to have experienced adults do it. For that matter, your school band would probably sound better if you replaced students with trained adult musicians.
An inexperienced fourteen-year-old is not anybody's first choice for getting a job done quickly, efficiently, and well. But of course, getting the job done quickly, efficiently and well isn't the point. The point is to provide an opportunity for that inexperienced fourteen-year-old. But when you get caught up in creating a good product, it's really easy to forget that. That's when you have to remember the most important question
3) What Are the Students Learning?
This is a school activity. In a school. Are your students learning anything?
The yearbook biz has been highly technified. At this point, I could choose a bunch of pre-made page layouts, hire a local photographer to come to school and take all the pictures, and assign my students the task of plugging pictures into spots in the layout. But what would they learn? So we start with a blank page, and they learn about design principles and layout and the editors decide what the graphic elements will be for the book and they design every aspect of the book from the ground up, and when it's done, not only do we have a book that they created themselves, but they've learned some things.
I know there are schools where the teachers and/or parents basically do all the decorating for Prom. That's sweet, but what do the students learn from it?
And here's the absolute hardest part of this-- sometimes the lessons come from failure. They have to-- because if the students don't have the chance to fail, they don't have the chance to succeed. This can be a tough judgment call-- I may allow my yearbook students to make decisions that I think are kind of ugly, but I can't allow them to make decisions that might lead to the book never coming out at all.
The lessons are not always the ones you want, the way you want them. Years ago I had a class in which some guys ran for senior class president and vice-president as a goof, and students voted for them as a goof-- and they won. I know advisers who would have quietly changed those results. I didn't. The students learned a lesson in democracy ("Oh, man. Did we do that?"), the defeated officers learned a lesson in not taking positions for granted, and the elected goofballs learned about having to step up.
As an adviser I have to constantly ask that question-- what are my students learning? Because if all they're learning in my activity is how to take orders from an adult, well, I think they've already got a handle on that lesson and we don't need to reinforce it.
4) Guardrails and Railroad Tracks
So do I do anything as an adviser, or do I just let them run wild?
Anarchy is not an option. The school district has hired me to make it possible for students to pursue certain activities in a safe and responsible manner. I have a responsibility to the district to make sure the students are safe and don't make a terrible mess.
I see myself as a set of guardrails. It's my job to make sure they don't end up too far into the weeds, to set some boundaries, but to give the freedom to wander within those boundaries.
That means setting first principles. The yearbook is supposed to be representative of and supportive of all students in the school, so no, you can't put only your friends in it and no, "Most likely to die alone" can't be a senior superlative.
That means sharing experience and laying out options, particularly when students are stuck. Here are three ways I can think of to write this sketch for the talent show, and here's what happened in the past to groups that tried Option #2. Now you decide.
It does not mean being a set of railroad tracks, determining exactly where they must go. Because nobody actually needs to learn how to follow railroad tracks.
5) Know Your People
Does this all sound like a balancing act? It is, and it depends so much on the actual students involved. What they can do, what they already know, what they need to know, how willing and ready they are to use their own judgment and voices-- these are all huge factors, and you have to be able to gauge them. In every activity there are years in which you're dealing with students who are pro's and just need plenty of space. In other years, they may need plenty of support and encouragement. Sometimes it's just a building year.
6) It's Not About You
Yeah, we can type that out in forty-foot font. It's not your prom. It's not your yearbook. It's not your show. The whole enterprise, whatever it may be, is not there to express your voice, your aesthetic, your view of the world. No, you can't complete ignore those things because they are wrapped up with your experience and your professional understanding and that's what you're there to provide. But you are not the point, the goal, the purpose.
It's the vanishing test. If you disappeared tomorrow, could your students keep things running smoothly for quite a while? If the answer is "no," you are doing it wrong. If you have made yourself indispensable, you are doing it wrong. It may make you feel Really Important, but it's no help to the students.
Yes, these are hard things
Lord knows, I have failed miserably many times. But I keep working at doing better. There are few things as cool as seeing your students realize their own strength, their own voices. For them to look at a project, a performance, a Thing they have created and to realize that the Thing is them, themselves, taken form in the world and taken a form that is completely in-formed by who they are.
But every time you take a choice or decision away from them, you tell them "Well, this is a thing you can't do" or "You couldn't handle it if anything went wrong" and that message just makes them smaller. Don't give them that message. Don't lead them to suspect that their voices aren't legit, can't hold up, shouldn't speak out.
Confidence comes with competence, but students aren't always good judges of their own competence (and in some times and places they don't have much to judge). But we can help them build both by giving them support and freedom. Maybe you are a genius visionary and students will benefit immensely just by following in your wake and sweeping up the crumbs of your attention and direction. But for the rest of us mortals, giving students the safe space to figure out how they will get things done in the world and still be their best selves will just have to do.
Friday, November 20, 2015
Thursday, November 19, 2015
The Free College Problem
Allison Schrager is an economist who writes about retirement and how to hedge risk in more unconventional situations. But in this article, she addresses the question of free college and whether or not it addresses the bigger problem.
Her arguments echo several being brought up as free college emerges as a Democratic platform item.
The first, largest issue is college completion.
Poor students are far less likely to finish college than their rich counterparts. And that includes poor kids who are smart and get high scores on, well, anything. Here's a chart that lays it out:
Poor students apply to less selective schools, and their are fewer poor students who rank as high achievers (which is unsurprising since "high achiever" means "good standardized test score-getter" which we know doesn't correlate closely with poverty).
It's possible that tuition costs are part of what forces poor students out of school, and that free tuition might help. But there's also a strong case to be made that poor students take all of the problems of poverty to college with them. It's not just that it costs money to pay tuition to go to college; it costs money just to be there, to live in a lifestyle that is in many ways upper class. It's like tossing students over the wall into an exclusive swimming pool without ever checking to see if they can swim.
And here's another depressing factoid. We can talk about how hard it is for poor students to finish college, but data suggests that middle class students have a lousy completion rate as well.
The second issue is just how much value a college education provides.
Folks keep discussing college degrees as if there's a direct correlation between degree and lifetime earnings. The emphasis onCommon Core college and career readiness is predicated on the notion that if everyone had a college degree, everyone would be making much more money. Some of this notion is based on the work of guys like Raj Chetty, whose research is hugely doubtworthy. And it fails the common sense test-- if everyone had a college degree, what would happen to minimum wage jobs? Would McDonald's start paying big bucks to burger flippers with BA's? Would those jobs just vanish somehow?
What research suggests repeatedly is that your eventual earning power is best predicted by that of your parents. I've seen various charts for these data, but here's one that Schrager uses
In other words, a man who comes from the lowest SES level who gets a Bachelors degree will still make about a third of the lifetime earnings of a rich-kid high school grad.
I've seen various numbers associated with this argument, but the basic point remains unchanged-- college does not remotely come close to magically erasing the effects of your SES of origin.
So does all this mean that free tuition is a bust of an idea? I don't think so-- a college degree is still worth having (though good welding certification is also an excellent career move). But to suggest that free college will cure societies ills, reverse social injustice, and revitalize America's stalling social mobility-- well, it's not going to do those things. It's foolish to expect it to, and even more foolish to institute free tuition and then declare, "Mission accomplished," and stop looking for better solutions for the underlying issues.
Her arguments echo several being brought up as free college emerges as a Democratic platform item.
The first, largest issue is college completion.
Poor students are far less likely to finish college than their rich counterparts. And that includes poor kids who are smart and get high scores on, well, anything. Here's a chart that lays it out:
Poor students apply to less selective schools, and their are fewer poor students who rank as high achievers (which is unsurprising since "high achiever" means "good standardized test score-getter" which we know doesn't correlate closely with poverty).
It's possible that tuition costs are part of what forces poor students out of school, and that free tuition might help. But there's also a strong case to be made that poor students take all of the problems of poverty to college with them. It's not just that it costs money to pay tuition to go to college; it costs money just to be there, to live in a lifestyle that is in many ways upper class. It's like tossing students over the wall into an exclusive swimming pool without ever checking to see if they can swim.
And here's another depressing factoid. We can talk about how hard it is for poor students to finish college, but data suggests that middle class students have a lousy completion rate as well.
The second issue is just how much value a college education provides.
Folks keep discussing college degrees as if there's a direct correlation between degree and lifetime earnings. The emphasis on
What research suggests repeatedly is that your eventual earning power is best predicted by that of your parents. I've seen various charts for these data, but here's one that Schrager uses
In other words, a man who comes from the lowest SES level who gets a Bachelors degree will still make about a third of the lifetime earnings of a rich-kid high school grad.
I've seen various numbers associated with this argument, but the basic point remains unchanged-- college does not remotely come close to magically erasing the effects of your SES of origin.
So does all this mean that free tuition is a bust of an idea? I don't think so-- a college degree is still worth having (though good welding certification is also an excellent career move). But to suggest that free college will cure societies ills, reverse social injustice, and revitalize America's stalling social mobility-- well, it's not going to do those things. It's foolish to expect it to, and even more foolish to institute free tuition and then declare, "Mission accomplished," and stop looking for better solutions for the underlying issues.
More Evidence That Tests Measure SES
Want more proof, again, some more, of the connection between socio-economic status and standardized test results? Twitter follower Joseph Robertshaw pointed me at a pair of studies by Randy Hoover, PhD, at the Department of Teacher Education, Beeghly College of Education, Youngstown State University.
Hoover is now a professor emeritus, but the validity of standardized testing and the search for a valid and reliable accountability system. He now runs a website called the Teacher Advocate and it's worth a look.
Hoover released two studies-- one in 2000, and one in 2007-- that looked at the validity of the Ohio Achievement Tests and the Ohio Graduate Test, and while there are no surprises here, you can add these to your file of scientific debunking of standardized testing. We're just going to look at the 2007 study, which was in part intended to check on the results of the 2000 study.
The bottom line of the earlier study appears right up front in the first paragraph of the 2007 paper:
The primary finding of this previous study was that student performance on the tests was most significantly (r = 0.80) affected by the non-school variables within the student social-economic living conditions. Indeed, the statistical significance of the predictive power of SES led to the inescapable conclusion that the tests had no academic accountability or validity whatsoever.
The 2007 study wanted to re-examine the findings, check the fairness and validity of the tests, and draw conclusions about what those findings meant to the Ohio School Report Card.
So what did Hoover find? Well, mostly that he was right the first time. He does take the time to offer a short lesson in statistical correlation analysis, which will be helpful if, like me, you are not a research scholar. Basically, the thing to remember is that a perfect correlation is 1.0 (or -1,0). So, getting punched in the nose correlates about 1.0 to feeling pain.
Hoover is out to find the correlation between what he calls the students' "lived experience" to district level performance is 0.78. Which is high.
If you like scatterplot charts (calling Jersey Jazzman), then Hoover has some of those for you, all driving home the same point. For instance, here's one looking at the percent of economically disadvantaged students as a predictor of district performance.
That's an r value of -0.75, which means you can do a pretty good job of predicting how a district will do based on how few or many economically disadvantaged students there are.
Hoover crunched together three factors to create what he calls a Lived Experience Index that shows, in fact, a 0.78 r value. Like Chris Tienken, Hoover has shown that we can pretty well assign a school or district a rating based on their demographics and just skip the whole testing business entirely.
Hoover takes things a step further, and reverse-maths the results to a plot of results with his live experience index factored out-- a sort of crude VAM sauce. He has a chart for those results, showing that there are poor schools performing well and rich schools performing poorly. Frankly, I think he's probably on shakier ground here, but it does support his conclusion about the Ohio school accountability system of the time to be "grossly misleading at best and grossly unfair at worst," a system that "perpetuates the political fiction that poor children can't learn and teachers in schools with poor children can't teach."
That was back in 2007, so some of the landscape such as the Ohio school accountability system (well, public school accountability-- Ohio charters are apparently not accountable to anybody) has changed, along with many reformster advances of the past eight years.
But this research does stand as one more data point regarding standardized tests and their ability to measure SES far better than they measure anything else.
Hoover is now a professor emeritus, but the validity of standardized testing and the search for a valid and reliable accountability system. He now runs a website called the Teacher Advocate and it's worth a look.
Hoover released two studies-- one in 2000, and one in 2007-- that looked at the validity of the Ohio Achievement Tests and the Ohio Graduate Test, and while there are no surprises here, you can add these to your file of scientific debunking of standardized testing. We're just going to look at the 2007 study, which was in part intended to check on the results of the 2000 study.
The bottom line of the earlier study appears right up front in the first paragraph of the 2007 paper:
The primary finding of this previous study was that student performance on the tests was most significantly (r = 0.80) affected by the non-school variables within the student social-economic living conditions. Indeed, the statistical significance of the predictive power of SES led to the inescapable conclusion that the tests had no academic accountability or validity whatsoever.
The 2007 study wanted to re-examine the findings, check the fairness and validity of the tests, and draw conclusions about what those findings meant to the Ohio School Report Card.
So what did Hoover find? Well, mostly that he was right the first time. He does take the time to offer a short lesson in statistical correlation analysis, which will be helpful if, like me, you are not a research scholar. Basically, the thing to remember is that a perfect correlation is 1.0 (or -1,0). So, getting punched in the nose correlates about 1.0 to feeling pain.
Hoover is out to find the correlation between what he calls the students' "lived experience" to district level performance is 0.78. Which is high.
If you like scatterplot charts (calling Jersey Jazzman), then Hoover has some of those for you, all driving home the same point. For instance, here's one looking at the percent of economically disadvantaged students as a predictor of district performance.
That's an r value of -0.75, which means you can do a pretty good job of predicting how a district will do based on how few or many economically disadvantaged students there are.
Hoover crunched together three factors to create what he calls a Lived Experience Index that shows, in fact, a 0.78 r value. Like Chris Tienken, Hoover has shown that we can pretty well assign a school or district a rating based on their demographics and just skip the whole testing business entirely.
Hoover takes things a step further, and reverse-maths the results to a plot of results with his live experience index factored out-- a sort of crude VAM sauce. He has a chart for those results, showing that there are poor schools performing well and rich schools performing poorly. Frankly, I think he's probably on shakier ground here, but it does support his conclusion about the Ohio school accountability system of the time to be "grossly misleading at best and grossly unfair at worst," a system that "perpetuates the political fiction that poor children can't learn and teachers in schools with poor children can't teach."
That was back in 2007, so some of the landscape such as the Ohio school accountability system (well, public school accountability-- Ohio charters are apparently not accountable to anybody) has changed, along with many reformster advances of the past eight years.
But this research does stand as one more data point regarding standardized tests and their ability to measure SES far better than they measure anything else.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Gates Takes Aim at Teacher Education
As noted today at Education Week, the Gates Foundation has fastened its aim on teacher preparation programs. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is ready to drop $34 million cool ones on "cooperative initiatives designed to improve teacher-preparation programs' overall effectiveness."
So what does that mean? Good news? Bad news?
The three year grants are based on four principles:
* developing strong partnerships with school districts
* giving teacher-candidates opportunities to refine a specific set of teaching skills
* using data for improvement and accountability
* ensuring that faculty mentors are effective at guiding novices into the profession
The first sounds great. The second sounds... well, I don't know. Exactly what specific set are we talking about, and what does that even mean? Becoming an interrogatory specialist? Learning to be excellent at teaching fractions? I'm worried that the Gates tendency to believe that all complex activities can be broken down into disconnected, context-free skills is at play here, in which case I'm doubting this will be useful.
Third? Well, if I thought "data" meant what I mean by "data, I'd think this was fine. I use data every minute of every day. But since this is Gates, I'm afraid that "data" means "results from a computer-based bunch of competency-based-baloney" or even "more of the useless data from those dreadful Big Standardized Tests."
Fourth point. Yes, excellent idea, if in fact you have any idea of how to tell that mentors are effective at guiding etc etc. Which I'm betting you don't, or worse, you have some sort of "based on student test scores VAM sauce baloney," which won't do anyone any good.
But hey, maybe the recipients of the Gates money will give us a clue about where this is headed.
Grantee #1 is TeacherSquared (you know-- a place that makes teacher teachers) which is mostly "nontraditional" preparation programs. In fact, it's mostly RelayGSE, a fake teacher school set up by charters so that non-teachers with a little experience could teach non-teachers with no experience how to be teachers. So that is not a good sign.
#2 Texas Tech University, "which will head the University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation National Center" which is six Southern universities welded together. Lord only knows what that will look like.
#3 Massachusetts Department of Education, which will head up an EPIC (Elevate Preparation, Impact Children) center to work with all the teacher ed programs in the state. This is just going to be confusing, because the EPIC acronym has been used before-- including by charter schools in Massachusetts (Effective Practice Incentive Community). But the Massachusetts DoE has a mixed track record on reformy issues, so we'll see.
#4 National Center for Teacher Residencies, which is promoting a full-year residency model which has been popping up around the country and which I think could actually be a great idea.
TeachingWorks at University of Michigan will be a coordinating hub for all the cool things these other grantees will come up with.
According to EdWeek's Stephen Sawchuk, Gates wants each of these "centers" to crank out 2,500 teachers per year which is-- well, that is huge. I'm pretty sure that's more than most entire states produce. It is a grand total of 10,000 teachers. Per year. At a time when enrollment in teacher education programs is plummeting. The USPREPNC would have to get upwards of 600 teacher-grads per year out of its six member universities. I mean, we can turn this number around many ways, and from every angle, it's a huge number. Of the four grantees, only the state of Massachusetts seems likely to handle that kind of capacity.
Want more bad signs? Here's a quote from Vicki Phillips:
“The timing is great because of having great consistent, high standards in the country and more meaningful, actionable teacher-feedback systems and some clear definitions about what excellence in teaching looks like,” said Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation’s director of college-ready programs.
In other words, this is way to drive Common Core up into teacher education programs, where it can do more damage.
Anissa Listak of the NCTR points out that making sure clinical faculty (i.e. co-operating teachers) are top notch will be a game changer, and I don't disagree. But it sidesteps the question of how the top notch faculty will be identified, and it really side steps the issue of how the program will find 10,000 master teachers who want to share their classes with a student teacher for a whole year-- especially in locations where test scores will reflect on their own teacher ratings (including, perhaps, the ratings that marked them as "qualified" to host a teacher-resident in the first place).
The Gates has identified a need here-- evaluating teacher preparation programs. Nobody is doing it (well, nobody except the scam artists at NCTQ who do it by reading commencement programs and syllabi), and if we had a legitimate method of measuring program quality, it could be helpful to aspiring teachers. But we don't, and it's not clear that any of these grantees have a clue, either.
It all rests on knowing exactly how to measure and quantify teacher excellence. With data. And boy, there's no way that can end badly.
Will the Gates money be well-spent? I'm not optimistic-- particularly not with an outfit like Relay GSE on the list of recipients. And the Gates has a bad history of using grants to push a narrow and unbending agenda that it has already formed rather than truly exploring an issue or trying to get ideas from people who might know something. In other words, if this is all just a way for Gates to impose his own ideas of what teacher training should look like, then it's likely to be as wasteful and destructive as his championing of Common Core.
So what does that mean? Good news? Bad news?
The three year grants are based on four principles:
* developing strong partnerships with school districts
* giving teacher-candidates opportunities to refine a specific set of teaching skills
* using data for improvement and accountability
* ensuring that faculty mentors are effective at guiding novices into the profession
The first sounds great. The second sounds... well, I don't know. Exactly what specific set are we talking about, and what does that even mean? Becoming an interrogatory specialist? Learning to be excellent at teaching fractions? I'm worried that the Gates tendency to believe that all complex activities can be broken down into disconnected, context-free skills is at play here, in which case I'm doubting this will be useful.
Third? Well, if I thought "data" meant what I mean by "data, I'd think this was fine. I use data every minute of every day. But since this is Gates, I'm afraid that "data" means "results from a computer-based bunch of competency-based-baloney" or even "more of the useless data from those dreadful Big Standardized Tests."
Fourth point. Yes, excellent idea, if in fact you have any idea of how to tell that mentors are effective at guiding etc etc. Which I'm betting you don't, or worse, you have some sort of "based on student test scores VAM sauce baloney," which won't do anyone any good.
But hey, maybe the recipients of the Gates money will give us a clue about where this is headed.
Grantee #1 is TeacherSquared (you know-- a place that makes teacher teachers) which is mostly "nontraditional" preparation programs. In fact, it's mostly RelayGSE, a fake teacher school set up by charters so that non-teachers with a little experience could teach non-teachers with no experience how to be teachers. So that is not a good sign.
#2 Texas Tech University, "which will head the University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation National Center" which is six Southern universities welded together. Lord only knows what that will look like.
#3 Massachusetts Department of Education, which will head up an EPIC (Elevate Preparation, Impact Children) center to work with all the teacher ed programs in the state. This is just going to be confusing, because the EPIC acronym has been used before-- including by charter schools in Massachusetts (Effective Practice Incentive Community). But the Massachusetts DoE has a mixed track record on reformy issues, so we'll see.
#4 National Center for Teacher Residencies, which is promoting a full-year residency model which has been popping up around the country and which I think could actually be a great idea.
TeachingWorks at University of Michigan will be a coordinating hub for all the cool things these other grantees will come up with.
According to EdWeek's Stephen Sawchuk, Gates wants each of these "centers" to crank out 2,500 teachers per year which is-- well, that is huge. I'm pretty sure that's more than most entire states produce. It is a grand total of 10,000 teachers. Per year. At a time when enrollment in teacher education programs is plummeting. The USPREPNC would have to get upwards of 600 teacher-grads per year out of its six member universities. I mean, we can turn this number around many ways, and from every angle, it's a huge number. Of the four grantees, only the state of Massachusetts seems likely to handle that kind of capacity.
Want more bad signs? Here's a quote from Vicki Phillips:
“The timing is great because of having great consistent, high standards in the country and more meaningful, actionable teacher-feedback systems and some clear definitions about what excellence in teaching looks like,” said Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation’s director of college-ready programs.
In other words, this is way to drive Common Core up into teacher education programs, where it can do more damage.
Anissa Listak of the NCTR points out that making sure clinical faculty (i.e. co-operating teachers) are top notch will be a game changer, and I don't disagree. But it sidesteps the question of how the top notch faculty will be identified, and it really side steps the issue of how the program will find 10,000 master teachers who want to share their classes with a student teacher for a whole year-- especially in locations where test scores will reflect on their own teacher ratings (including, perhaps, the ratings that marked them as "qualified" to host a teacher-resident in the first place).
The Gates has identified a need here-- evaluating teacher preparation programs. Nobody is doing it (well, nobody except the scam artists at NCTQ who do it by reading commencement programs and syllabi), and if we had a legitimate method of measuring program quality, it could be helpful to aspiring teachers. But we don't, and it's not clear that any of these grantees have a clue, either.
It all rests on knowing exactly how to measure and quantify teacher excellence. With data. And boy, there's no way that can end badly.
Will the Gates money be well-spent? I'm not optimistic-- particularly not with an outfit like Relay GSE on the list of recipients. And the Gates has a bad history of using grants to push a narrow and unbending agenda that it has already formed rather than truly exploring an issue or trying to get ideas from people who might know something. In other words, if this is all just a way for Gates to impose his own ideas of what teacher training should look like, then it's likely to be as wasteful and destructive as his championing of Common Core.
Evil L.A. Teacher Unions
The Center for Education Reform is a charter promotion group, perhaps one of the most cynical and self-serving of the reformster groups. Search their website for information or ideas about education-- the actual pedagogy and instruction in a classroom-- and you will find nothing, because the Center has no actual interest in education.
Check out their board of directors-- you will find a combination of money managers and charter school operators. That is where the Center's interest lies-- in getting more money into more charters.
And what stands in the way of these corporate interests making a better, bigger buck? Well, those damn unions, of course. The Center may not have any section devoted to actually educating children, but they have a whole tab devoted to those damn unions, and here's What They Believe:
We believe that the special interests that draw funds from the tax dollars funding public education, and that have become an intransient [sic-- pretty sure they mean "intransigent," though "intransient" as in "won't move away to some other place" might suit them as well] force in political and policy circles, have outlived the usefulness of the associations they once had and have become obstacles to programs and activities that can best and most judiciously serve children. Such groups—from teachers unions, to the associations of administrators, principals, school boards and hybrids of all (e.g., “The Blob”)—should be free to organize but without access to the dollars that are spent to fund schools and should be free to recruit but not mandate members, but they should not have a public stream of money that permits the dues of members to subsidize their defense of the status quo.
The Center is currently excited with itself because it placed a quote in a Wall Street Journal article. The piece (behind a paywall) discusses the desire of some charter teachers to unionize. Or, as the Center headlined it in their regular email, "Teachers at Successful Los Angeles Charter School Organization Being Manipulated by Union Leaders."
The charter in question is the Alliance charter, a chain run by rich folks like a former mayor of LA and the owner of the Atlanta Hawks. Alliance is a big gun in the LA charter scene, and seventy of its 500-person teacher workforce started pushing for a union last spring.
"We believe that when teachers have a respected voice in policymaking it leads to school sustainability and teacher retention," said Elana Goldbaum, who teaches history at Gertz-Ressler High School, a member of the Alliance group. "We have a lot of talent and we want to see that stay. We want to see our teachers be a part of the decision-making and we want to advocate for our students and ourselves."
The union movement has sparked controversy, with the LA union claiming interference on the part of charter management and Alliance saying the teachers feel harassed by the union. The struggle escalated at the end of October when the California Public Employment Relations Board sued Alliance for engaging in anti-union activity.
All of this, somehow, is the evil union pulling the wool over the eyes of the poor, hapless teachers.
Look, the big unions are no angels, and the big-city unions are probably the least angelic of all. But you know that teachers need some kind of union when the charters are letting loose with baloney like this, the quote from the WSJ of which the Center is so proud:
“It’s not surprising that teachers that work at charter schools would not want to join a union,” said Alison Zgainer, executive vice president of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter organization in Washington, D.C. “They want more autonomy in the classroom, and being part of a union you lose that autonomy.”
I guess Zgainer is referring to "autonomy" as defined by charter operators-- the autonomy to be told you must work long hours over a long week. The autonomy to have instruction strictly dictated. The autonomy to be paid as little as the charter wants to pay you. The autonomy to be fired any time the charter feels like it. The autonomy to be trained in "no excuse" techniques that are just as prescriptive of teacher behavior as they are of student behavior. That autonomy.
The autonomy that business-driven charters care about is the autonomy of management. Their dream is the same dream as that of the 19th century robber barons who fought unions tooth and nail. It's a dream where a CEO sits in his office and runs his company with complete freedom to hire and fire, raise and lower salaries, and change the work hours (or any other terms of employment) at will. It's a dream of a business where the CEO is a visionary free to seek his vision (and profit from it) without having anyone ever say "no" to him.
That's the autonomy that folks like the Center for Education Reform are interested in.
In the CEO-centered vision of school, unions are bad. Unions are evil obstacles that dare to make rules by which the CEO must abide (they are often aided by Big Government, which also dares to interfere with the CEO). I think these folks believe in the myth of the Hero Teacher because it echoes the myth of the Hero CEO-- a bold genius who makes the world a better place by pushing aside all obstacles, including the people who don't recognize his genius, until he arrives at the mountain top, loved and praised by all the Little People who are grateful that he saved them. Compromise and collaboration are for the weak, and unions are just weaklings who want to drag down the Hero CEO because they are jealous of his awesomeness and afraid that their undeserved power will be stripped from them by his deserving might.
In this topsy-turvy world, unions must be crushed not just because they set up rules to thwart the Hero CEO, but because they are holding captive all the teachers who really want to give themselves body and soul to the Hero CEO's genius vision, but the union won't let them. Damn you, evil unions.
This does not explain all charter supporters (it does not, for instance, reflect the motivations of the social justice warrior school of charter support). But it sure does explain some, even as it is oddly reminiscent of "We'll be greeted as liberators" and the tantrums of any three-year-old. But I hope that the Center for Education Reform has to live impotently with the threat of evil unions for years to come.
Check out their board of directors-- you will find a combination of money managers and charter school operators. That is where the Center's interest lies-- in getting more money into more charters.
And what stands in the way of these corporate interests making a better, bigger buck? Well, those damn unions, of course. The Center may not have any section devoted to actually educating children, but they have a whole tab devoted to those damn unions, and here's What They Believe:
We believe that the special interests that draw funds from the tax dollars funding public education, and that have become an intransient [sic-- pretty sure they mean "intransigent," though "intransient" as in "won't move away to some other place" might suit them as well] force in political and policy circles, have outlived the usefulness of the associations they once had and have become obstacles to programs and activities that can best and most judiciously serve children. Such groups—from teachers unions, to the associations of administrators, principals, school boards and hybrids of all (e.g., “The Blob”)—should be free to organize but without access to the dollars that are spent to fund schools and should be free to recruit but not mandate members, but they should not have a public stream of money that permits the dues of members to subsidize their defense of the status quo.
The Center is currently excited with itself because it placed a quote in a Wall Street Journal article. The piece (behind a paywall) discusses the desire of some charter teachers to unionize. Or, as the Center headlined it in their regular email, "Teachers at Successful Los Angeles Charter School Organization Being Manipulated by Union Leaders."
The charter in question is the Alliance charter, a chain run by rich folks like a former mayor of LA and the owner of the Atlanta Hawks. Alliance is a big gun in the LA charter scene, and seventy of its 500-person teacher workforce started pushing for a union last spring.
"We believe that when teachers have a respected voice in policymaking it leads to school sustainability and teacher retention," said Elana Goldbaum, who teaches history at Gertz-Ressler High School, a member of the Alliance group. "We have a lot of talent and we want to see that stay. We want to see our teachers be a part of the decision-making and we want to advocate for our students and ourselves."
The union movement has sparked controversy, with the LA union claiming interference on the part of charter management and Alliance saying the teachers feel harassed by the union. The struggle escalated at the end of October when the California Public Employment Relations Board sued Alliance for engaging in anti-union activity.
All of this, somehow, is the evil union pulling the wool over the eyes of the poor, hapless teachers.
Look, the big unions are no angels, and the big-city unions are probably the least angelic of all. But you know that teachers need some kind of union when the charters are letting loose with baloney like this, the quote from the WSJ of which the Center is so proud:
“It’s not surprising that teachers that work at charter schools would not want to join a union,” said Alison Zgainer, executive vice president of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter organization in Washington, D.C. “They want more autonomy in the classroom, and being part of a union you lose that autonomy.”
I guess Zgainer is referring to "autonomy" as defined by charter operators-- the autonomy to be told you must work long hours over a long week. The autonomy to have instruction strictly dictated. The autonomy to be paid as little as the charter wants to pay you. The autonomy to be fired any time the charter feels like it. The autonomy to be trained in "no excuse" techniques that are just as prescriptive of teacher behavior as they are of student behavior. That autonomy.
The autonomy that business-driven charters care about is the autonomy of management. Their dream is the same dream as that of the 19th century robber barons who fought unions tooth and nail. It's a dream where a CEO sits in his office and runs his company with complete freedom to hire and fire, raise and lower salaries, and change the work hours (or any other terms of employment) at will. It's a dream of a business where the CEO is a visionary free to seek his vision (and profit from it) without having anyone ever say "no" to him.
That's the autonomy that folks like the Center for Education Reform are interested in.
In the CEO-centered vision of school, unions are bad. Unions are evil obstacles that dare to make rules by which the CEO must abide (they are often aided by Big Government, which also dares to interfere with the CEO). I think these folks believe in the myth of the Hero Teacher because it echoes the myth of the Hero CEO-- a bold genius who makes the world a better place by pushing aside all obstacles, including the people who don't recognize his genius, until he arrives at the mountain top, loved and praised by all the Little People who are grateful that he saved them. Compromise and collaboration are for the weak, and unions are just weaklings who want to drag down the Hero CEO because they are jealous of his awesomeness and afraid that their undeserved power will be stripped from them by his deserving might.
In this topsy-turvy world, unions must be crushed not just because they set up rules to thwart the Hero CEO, but because they are holding captive all the teachers who really want to give themselves body and soul to the Hero CEO's genius vision, but the union won't let them. Damn you, evil unions.
This does not explain all charter supporters (it does not, for instance, reflect the motivations of the social justice warrior school of charter support). But it sure does explain some, even as it is oddly reminiscent of "We'll be greeted as liberators" and the tantrums of any three-year-old. But I hope that the Center for Education Reform has to live impotently with the threat of evil unions for years to come.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Accelerated Reader's Ridiculous Research
If you are not familiar with Renaissance Learning and their flagship product, Accelerated Reader, count yourself lucky.
Accelerated Reading bills itself as a reading program, but it would be more accurate to call it a huge library of reading quizzes, with a reading level assessment component thrown in. That's it. It doesn't teach children how to read; it just puts them in a computerized Skinner box that feeds them points instead of pellets for performing some simple tasks repeatedly.
Pick a book (but only one on the approved AR list). Read it. As soon as you've read it, you can take the computer quiz and earn points. AR is a great demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences as well as Campbell's Law, because it ends up teaching students all sorts of unproductive attitudes about reading while twisting the very reading process itself. Only read books on the approved list. Don't read long books-- it will take you too long to get to your next quiz to earn points. If you're lagging in points, pick short books that are easy for you. Because the AR quizzes are largely recalling questions, learn what superficial features of the book to read for and skip everything else. And while AR doesn't explicitly encourage it, this is a program that lends itself easily to other layers of abuse, like classroom prizes for hitting certain point goals. Remember kids-- there is no intrinsic reward or joy in reading. You read only so that somebody will give you a prize.
While AR has been adopted in a huge number of classrooms, it's not hard to find folks who do not love it. Look at some articles like "3 Reasons I Loathe Accelerated Reader" or "Accelerated Reader: Undermining Literacy While Undermining Library Budgets" or "Accelerated Reader Is Not a Reading Program" or "The 18 Reasons Not To Use Accelerated Reader." Or read Alfie Kohn's "A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs." So, a wide consensus that the Accelerated Reading program gets some very basic things wrong about reading.
But while AR sells itself to parents and schools as a reading program, it also does a huge amount of work as a data mining operation. Annually the Renaissance people scrape together the data that they have mined through AR and they issue a report. You can get at this year's report by way of this website.
The eyebrow raising headline from this year's report is that a mere 4.7 minutes of reading per day separate the reading stars from the reading goats. Or, as US News headlined it, "Just a Few More Minutes Daily May Help Struggling Readers Catch Up." Why, that's incredible. So incredible that one might conclude that such a finding is actually bunk.
Now, we can first put some blame on the media's regular issues with reporting sciency stories. US News simply ran a story from the Hechinger Report, and when Hechinger originally ran it, they accompanied it with much more restrained heading "Mining online data on struggling readers who catch up: A tiny difference in daily reading habits is associated with giant improvements." But what does the report actually say?
I think it's possible that the main finding of this study is that Renaissance is a very silly business. I'm no research scientist, but here are several reasons that I'm pretty sure that this "research" doesn't have anything useful to tell us.
1) Renaissance thinks reading is word encounter.
The first chunk of the report is devoted to "an analysis of reading practice." I have made fun of the Common Core approach of treating reading as a set of contextless skills, free-floating abilities that are unrelated to the content. But Renaissance doesn't see any skills involved in reading at all. Here's their breakdown of reading practice:
* the more time you practice reading, the more vocabulary words you encounter
* students who spend more time on our test-preppy program do better on SAB and PARCC tests
* students get out of the bottom quartile by encountering more words
* setting goals to read more leads to reading more
They repeatedly interpret stats in terms of "number of words," as if simply battering a student with a dictionary would automatically improve reading.
2) Renaissance thinks PARCC and SBA are benchmarks of college and career readiness
There is no evidence to support this. Also, while this assumption pops up in the report, there's a vagueness surrounding the idea of "success." Are they also using success at their own program as proof of growing student reading swellness? Because that would be lazy and unsupportable, and argument that the more students do AR activities, the better they get at AR activities.
No, if you want to prove that AR stuff makes students better at reading, you'll need a separate independent measure. And there's no reason to think that the SBA or PARCC constitute valid, reliable measures of reading abilities.
Bottom line: when Renaissance says that students "experienced higher reading achievement," there's no reason to believe that the phrase means anything.
3) About the time spent.
Much ado is made in the report about the amount of time a student spends on independent reading, but I cannot find anything to indicate how they are arriving at these numbers. How exactly do they know that Chris read fifteen minutes every day but Pat read thirty. There are only a few possible answers, and they all raise huge questions.
In Jill Barshaw's Hechinger piece, the phrase "an average of 19 minutes a day on the software"crops up. But surely the independent reading time isn't based on time on the computer-- not when so much independent reading occurs elsewhere.
The student's minutes reading could be self-reported, or parent-reported. But how can we possibly trust those numbers? How many parents or children would accurately report, "Chris hasn't read a single minute all week."
Or those numbers could be based on independent reading time as scheduled by the teacher in the classroom, in which case we're really talking about how a student reads (or doesn't) in a very specific environment that is neither chosen nor controlled by the student. Can we really assume that Chris reading in his comfy chair at home is the same as Chris reading in an uncomfortable school chair next to the window?
Nor is there any way that any of these techniques would consider the quality of reading-- intensely engaged with the text versus staring in the general direction of the page versus skimming quickly for basic facts likely to be on a multiple choice quiz about the text.
The only other possibility I can think of is some sort of implanted electrodes that monitor Chris's brain-level reading activity, and I'm pretty sure we're not there yet. Which means that anybody who wants to tell me that Chris spent nineteen minutes reading (not twenty, and not eighteen) is being ridiculous.
(Update: The AR twitter account directed me to a clarification on this point of sorts. The truth is actually worse than any of my guesses.)
4) Correlation and causation
Barshay quotes University of Michigan professor Nell Duke, who points out what should not need to be pointed out-- correlation is not causation and "we cannot tell from this study whether the extra five minutes a day is causing kids to make dramatic improvements." So it may be
that stronger readers spend more time reading. So we don’t know if extra reading practice causes growth, or if students naturally want to read a few minutes more a day after they become better readers. “It is possible that some other factor, such as increased parental involvement, caused both,” the reading growth, and the desire to read more, she wrote.
But "discovering" that students who like to read tend to read more often and are better at it-- well, that's not exactly big headline material.
5) Non-random subjects
In her coverage of last year's report, Barshay noted a caveat. The AR program is not distributed uniformly across the country, and in fact seems to skew rural. So while some demographic characteristics do at least superficially match the national student demographics, it is not a perfect match, and so not a random, representative sampling.
So what can we conclude
Some students, who may or may not be representative of all students, read for some amount of time that we can't really substantiate tend to read at some level of achievement that we can't really verify.
A few things we can learn
The data mining that goes into this report does generate some interesting lists of reading materials. John Green is the king of high school readers, and all the YA dystopic novels are still huge, mixed in with the classics like Frankensein, MacBeth, the Crucible, and Huck Finn. Scanning the lists also gives you an idea of how well Renaissance's proprietary reading level software ATOS works. For instance, the Crucible scores a lowly 4.9-- lower than the Fault in our Stars (5.5) or Frankenstein (12.4) but still higher than Of Mice and Men (4.5). Most of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books come in in the mid-5.somethings. So if the wimpy kid books are too tough for your students, hit them with Lord of the Flies which is a mere 5.0 even.
Also, while Renaissance shares the David Coleman-infused Common Core love of non-fiction ("The majority of texts students encounter as they progress through college or move into the workforce are nonfiction"), the AR non-fiction collection is strictly articles. So I guess there are no book length non-fiction texts to be read in the Accelerated Reader 360 world.
Is the reading tough enough?
Renaissance is concerned about its discovery that high school students are reading work that doesn't rank highly enough on the ATOS scale. By which they mean "not up to the level of college and career texts." It is possible this is true. It is also possible that the ATOS scale, the scale that thinks The Catcher in the Rye is a 4.7, is messed up. Just saying.
The final big question
Does the Accelerated Reader program do any good?
Findings from prior research have detected a tipping point around a comprehension level of about 85% (i.e., students averaging 85% or higher on Accelerated Reader 360 quizzes taken after reading a book or article). Students who maintain this level of success over a quarter, semester, or school year are likely to experience above-average achievement growth.
Remember that "student achievement" means "standardized test score." So what we have is proof that students who do well on the AR battery of multiple choice questions also do well on the battery of PARCC and SBA standardized test questions. So at least we have another correlation, and at most we have proof that AR is effective test prep.
Oddly enough, there is nothing in the report about how AR influences joy, independence, excitement, or lifelong enthusiasm for reading. Nor does it address the use of reading to learn things. Granted, that would all be hard to prove conclusively with research, but then, this report is 64 pages of unsupported, hard-to-prove assertions, so why not throw in one more? The fact that the folks at Renaissance Learning found some results important enough to fake but other results not even worth mentioning-- that tells us as much about their priorities and their program as all their pages of bogus research.
Accelerated Reading bills itself as a reading program, but it would be more accurate to call it a huge library of reading quizzes, with a reading level assessment component thrown in. That's it. It doesn't teach children how to read; it just puts them in a computerized Skinner box that feeds them points instead of pellets for performing some simple tasks repeatedly.
Pick a book (but only one on the approved AR list). Read it. As soon as you've read it, you can take the computer quiz and earn points. AR is a great demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences as well as Campbell's Law, because it ends up teaching students all sorts of unproductive attitudes about reading while twisting the very reading process itself. Only read books on the approved list. Don't read long books-- it will take you too long to get to your next quiz to earn points. If you're lagging in points, pick short books that are easy for you. Because the AR quizzes are largely recalling questions, learn what superficial features of the book to read for and skip everything else. And while AR doesn't explicitly encourage it, this is a program that lends itself easily to other layers of abuse, like classroom prizes for hitting certain point goals. Remember kids-- there is no intrinsic reward or joy in reading. You read only so that somebody will give you a prize.
While AR has been adopted in a huge number of classrooms, it's not hard to find folks who do not love it. Look at some articles like "3 Reasons I Loathe Accelerated Reader" or "Accelerated Reader: Undermining Literacy While Undermining Library Budgets" or "Accelerated Reader Is Not a Reading Program" or "The 18 Reasons Not To Use Accelerated Reader." Or read Alfie Kohn's "A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs." So, a wide consensus that the Accelerated Reading program gets some very basic things wrong about reading.
But while AR sells itself to parents and schools as a reading program, it also does a huge amount of work as a data mining operation. Annually the Renaissance people scrape together the data that they have mined through AR and they issue a report. You can get at this year's report by way of this website.
The eyebrow raising headline from this year's report is that a mere 4.7 minutes of reading per day separate the reading stars from the reading goats. Or, as US News headlined it, "Just a Few More Minutes Daily May Help Struggling Readers Catch Up." Why, that's incredible. So incredible that one might conclude that such a finding is actually bunk.
Now, we can first put some blame on the media's regular issues with reporting sciency stories. US News simply ran a story from the Hechinger Report, and when Hechinger originally ran it, they accompanied it with much more restrained heading "Mining online data on struggling readers who catch up: A tiny difference in daily reading habits is associated with giant improvements." But what does the report actually say?
I think it's possible that the main finding of this study is that Renaissance is a very silly business. I'm no research scientist, but here are several reasons that I'm pretty sure that this "research" doesn't have anything useful to tell us.
1) Renaissance thinks reading is word encounter.
The first chunk of the report is devoted to "an analysis of reading practice." I have made fun of the Common Core approach of treating reading as a set of contextless skills, free-floating abilities that are unrelated to the content. But Renaissance doesn't see any skills involved in reading at all. Here's their breakdown of reading practice:
* the more time you practice reading, the more vocabulary words you encounter
* students who spend more time on our test-preppy program do better on SAB and PARCC tests
* students get out of the bottom quartile by encountering more words
* setting goals to read more leads to reading more
They repeatedly interpret stats in terms of "number of words," as if simply battering a student with a dictionary would automatically improve reading.
2) Renaissance thinks PARCC and SBA are benchmarks of college and career readiness
There is no evidence to support this. Also, while this assumption pops up in the report, there's a vagueness surrounding the idea of "success." Are they also using success at their own program as proof of growing student reading swellness? Because that would be lazy and unsupportable, and argument that the more students do AR activities, the better they get at AR activities.
No, if you want to prove that AR stuff makes students better at reading, you'll need a separate independent measure. And there's no reason to think that the SBA or PARCC constitute valid, reliable measures of reading abilities.
Bottom line: when Renaissance says that students "experienced higher reading achievement," there's no reason to believe that the phrase means anything.
3) About the time spent.
Much ado is made in the report about the amount of time a student spends on independent reading, but I cannot find anything to indicate how they are arriving at these numbers. How exactly do they know that Chris read fifteen minutes every day but Pat read thirty. There are only a few possible answers, and they all raise huge questions.
In Jill Barshaw's Hechinger piece, the phrase "an average of 19 minutes a day on the software"crops up. But surely the independent reading time isn't based on time on the computer-- not when so much independent reading occurs elsewhere.
The student's minutes reading could be self-reported, or parent-reported. But how can we possibly trust those numbers? How many parents or children would accurately report, "Chris hasn't read a single minute all week."
Or those numbers could be based on independent reading time as scheduled by the teacher in the classroom, in which case we're really talking about how a student reads (or doesn't) in a very specific environment that is neither chosen nor controlled by the student. Can we really assume that Chris reading in his comfy chair at home is the same as Chris reading in an uncomfortable school chair next to the window?
Nor is there any way that any of these techniques would consider the quality of reading-- intensely engaged with the text versus staring in the general direction of the page versus skimming quickly for basic facts likely to be on a multiple choice quiz about the text.
The only other possibility I can think of is some sort of implanted electrodes that monitor Chris's brain-level reading activity, and I'm pretty sure we're not there yet. Which means that anybody who wants to tell me that Chris spent nineteen minutes reading (not twenty, and not eighteen) is being ridiculous.
(Update: The AR twitter account directed me to a clarification on this point of sorts. The truth is actually worse than any of my guesses.)
4) Correlation and causation
Barshay quotes University of Michigan professor Nell Duke, who points out what should not need to be pointed out-- correlation is not causation and "we cannot tell from this study whether the extra five minutes a day is causing kids to make dramatic improvements." So it may be
that stronger readers spend more time reading. So we don’t know if extra reading practice causes growth, or if students naturally want to read a few minutes more a day after they become better readers. “It is possible that some other factor, such as increased parental involvement, caused both,” the reading growth, and the desire to read more, she wrote.
But "discovering" that students who like to read tend to read more often and are better at it-- well, that's not exactly big headline material.
5) Non-random subjects
In her coverage of last year's report, Barshay noted a caveat. The AR program is not distributed uniformly across the country, and in fact seems to skew rural. So while some demographic characteristics do at least superficially match the national student demographics, it is not a perfect match, and so not a random, representative sampling.
So what can we conclude
Some students, who may or may not be representative of all students, read for some amount of time that we can't really substantiate tend to read at some level of achievement that we can't really verify.
A few things we can learn
The data mining that goes into this report does generate some interesting lists of reading materials. John Green is the king of high school readers, and all the YA dystopic novels are still huge, mixed in with the classics like Frankensein, MacBeth, the Crucible, and Huck Finn. Scanning the lists also gives you an idea of how well Renaissance's proprietary reading level software ATOS works. For instance, the Crucible scores a lowly 4.9-- lower than the Fault in our Stars (5.5) or Frankenstein (12.4) but still higher than Of Mice and Men (4.5). Most of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books come in in the mid-5.somethings. So if the wimpy kid books are too tough for your students, hit them with Lord of the Flies which is a mere 5.0 even.
Also, while Renaissance shares the David Coleman-infused Common Core love of non-fiction ("The majority of texts students encounter as they progress through college or move into the workforce are nonfiction"), the AR non-fiction collection is strictly articles. So I guess there are no book length non-fiction texts to be read in the Accelerated Reader 360 world.
Is the reading tough enough?
Renaissance is concerned about its discovery that high school students are reading work that doesn't rank highly enough on the ATOS scale. By which they mean "not up to the level of college and career texts." It is possible this is true. It is also possible that the ATOS scale, the scale that thinks The Catcher in the Rye is a 4.7, is messed up. Just saying.
The final big question
Does the Accelerated Reader program do any good?
Findings from prior research have detected a tipping point around a comprehension level of about 85% (i.e., students averaging 85% or higher on Accelerated Reader 360 quizzes taken after reading a book or article). Students who maintain this level of success over a quarter, semester, or school year are likely to experience above-average achievement growth.
Remember that "student achievement" means "standardized test score." So what we have is proof that students who do well on the AR battery of multiple choice questions also do well on the battery of PARCC and SBA standardized test questions. So at least we have another correlation, and at most we have proof that AR is effective test prep.
Oddly enough, there is nothing in the report about how AR influences joy, independence, excitement, or lifelong enthusiasm for reading. Nor does it address the use of reading to learn things. Granted, that would all be hard to prove conclusively with research, but then, this report is 64 pages of unsupported, hard-to-prove assertions, so why not throw in one more? The fact that the folks at Renaissance Learning found some results important enough to fake but other results not even worth mentioning-- that tells us as much about their priorities and their program as all their pages of bogus research.
Monday, November 16, 2015
USED Goes Open Source, Stabs Pearson in the Back for a Change
The United States Department of Education announced at the end of last month its new #GoOpen campaign, a program in support of using "openly licensed" aka open source materials for schools. Word of this is only slowly leaking into the media, which is odd, because unless I'm missing something here, this is kind of huge. Open sourced material does not have traditional copyright restrictions and so can be shared by anybody and modified by anybody (to really drive that point home, I'll link to Wikipedia).
Is the USED just dropping hints that we are potentially reading too much into? I don't think so. Here's the second paragraph from the USED's own press release:
“In order to ensure that all students – no matter their zip code – have access to high-quality learning resources, we are encouraging districts and states to move away from traditional textbooks and toward freely accessible, openly-licensed materials,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “Districts across the country are transforming learning by using materials that can be constantly updated and adjusted to meet students’ needs.”
Yeah, that message is pretty unambiguous-- stop buying your textbooks from Pearson and grab a nice online open-source free text instead.
And if that still seems ambiguous, here's something that isn't-- a proposed rules change for competitive grants.
In plain English, the proposed rule "would require intellectual property created with Department of Education grant funding to be openly licensed to the public. This includes both software and instructional materials." The policy parallels similar policies in other government departments.
The represents such a change of direction for the department that I still suspect there's something about this I'm either not seeing or not understanding. We've operated so long under the theory that the way government gets things done is to hand a stack of money to a private company, allowing them both to profit and to maintain their corporate independence. You get federal funds to help you develop a cool new idea, then you turn around and market that cool idea to make yourself rich. That was old school. That was "unleashing the power of the free market."
But imagine if this new policy had been the rule for the last fifteen years. If any grant money had touched the development of Common Core, the standards would have been open source, free and editable to anyone in the country. If any grant money touched the development of the SBA and PARCC tests, they would be open and editable for every school in America. And if USED money was tracked as it trickled down through the states- the mind reels. If, for instance, any federal grant money found its way to a charter school, all of that schools instructional ideas and educational materials would have become property of all US citizens.
As a classroom teacher, I find the idea of having the federal government confiscate all my work because federal grant money somehow touched my classroom-- well, that's kind of appalling. But I confess-- the image of Eva Moskowitz having to not only open her books but hand over all her proprietary materials to the feds is a little delicious.
Corporations no doubt know how to build firewalls that allow them to glom up federal money while protecting intellectual property. And those that don't may just stop taking federal money to fuel their innovation-- after all, what else is a Gates or a Walton foundation for?
And realistically speaking, this will not have a super-broad impact because it refers only to competitive grants, which account for about $3 billion of the $67 billion that the department throws around.
So who knows if anything will actually come of this. Still, the prospect of the feds standing in front of a big rack of textbooks and software published by Pearson et al and declaring, "Stop! Don't waste your money on this stuff!" Well, that's just special.
And in case you're wondering if this will survive the transition coming up in a month, the USED also quotes the hilariously-titled John King:
“By requiring an open license, we will ensure that high-quality resources created through our public funds are shared with the public, thereby ensuring equal access for all teachers and students regardless of their location or background,” said John King, senior advisor delegated the duty of the Deputy Secretary of Education. “We are excited to join other federal agencies leading on this work to ensure that we are part of the solution to helping classrooms transition to next generation materials.”
The proposed change will be open for thirty days of comment as soon as it's published at the regulations site. In the meantime, we can ponder what curious conditions lead to fans of the free market declaring their love for just plain free. But hey-- we know they're serious because they wrote a hashtag for it.
Is the USED just dropping hints that we are potentially reading too much into? I don't think so. Here's the second paragraph from the USED's own press release:
“In order to ensure that all students – no matter their zip code – have access to high-quality learning resources, we are encouraging districts and states to move away from traditional textbooks and toward freely accessible, openly-licensed materials,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “Districts across the country are transforming learning by using materials that can be constantly updated and adjusted to meet students’ needs.”
Yeah, that message is pretty unambiguous-- stop buying your textbooks from Pearson and grab a nice online open-source free text instead.
And if that still seems ambiguous, here's something that isn't-- a proposed rules change for competitive grants.
In plain English, the proposed rule "would require intellectual property created with Department of Education grant funding to be openly licensed to the public. This includes both software and instructional materials." The policy parallels similar policies in other government departments.
The represents such a change of direction for the department that I still suspect there's something about this I'm either not seeing or not understanding. We've operated so long under the theory that the way government gets things done is to hand a stack of money to a private company, allowing them both to profit and to maintain their corporate independence. You get federal funds to help you develop a cool new idea, then you turn around and market that cool idea to make yourself rich. That was old school. That was "unleashing the power of the free market."
But imagine if this new policy had been the rule for the last fifteen years. If any grant money had touched the development of Common Core, the standards would have been open source, free and editable to anyone in the country. If any grant money touched the development of the SBA and PARCC tests, they would be open and editable for every school in America. And if USED money was tracked as it trickled down through the states- the mind reels. If, for instance, any federal grant money found its way to a charter school, all of that schools instructional ideas and educational materials would have become property of all US citizens.
As a classroom teacher, I find the idea of having the federal government confiscate all my work because federal grant money somehow touched my classroom-- well, that's kind of appalling. But I confess-- the image of Eva Moskowitz having to not only open her books but hand over all her proprietary materials to the feds is a little delicious.
Corporations no doubt know how to build firewalls that allow them to glom up federal money while protecting intellectual property. And those that don't may just stop taking federal money to fuel their innovation-- after all, what else is a Gates or a Walton foundation for?
And realistically speaking, this will not have a super-broad impact because it refers only to competitive grants, which account for about $3 billion of the $67 billion that the department throws around.
So who knows if anything will actually come of this. Still, the prospect of the feds standing in front of a big rack of textbooks and software published by Pearson et al and declaring, "Stop! Don't waste your money on this stuff!" Well, that's just special.
And in case you're wondering if this will survive the transition coming up in a month, the USED also quotes the hilariously-titled John King:
“By requiring an open license, we will ensure that high-quality resources created through our public funds are shared with the public, thereby ensuring equal access for all teachers and students regardless of their location or background,” said John King, senior advisor delegated the duty of the Deputy Secretary of Education. “We are excited to join other federal agencies leading on this work to ensure that we are part of the solution to helping classrooms transition to next generation materials.”
The proposed change will be open for thirty days of comment as soon as it's published at the regulations site. In the meantime, we can ponder what curious conditions lead to fans of the free market declaring their love for just plain free. But hey-- we know they're serious because they wrote a hashtag for it.
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