Paying Students for Scores

The Houston Independent School District is trying another way to boost AP test scores-- offer students and teachers a bounty. For every score in the 3-5 range, students-- and their teachers-- get $100.

While this is new in Houston, HISD is actually joining several other districts around the country in this use of bribes incentives for high schoolers.

While there may be similar-ish programs in districts across the country, the big dog in the AP bribery biz is the National Math and Science Initiative. NMSI is an organization that was launched "to address one of this nation’s greatest economic and intellectual threats – the declining number of students who are prepared to take rigorous college courses in math and science and are equipped for careers in those fields." You may recognize that as a classic reformster talking point-- low test scores are a threat to our national security-- and in fact, the big launching funders of NMSI include Exxon, the Michael and Susan Dell foundation, and the Gates Foundation. Partners also include the US Department of Education and the College Board, because why not fund an advocacy group that is telling everyone that your product is really important. This isn't philanthropy-- it's marketing.

And market they do. The college-ready initiative that supports the AP score pay-off plan features writing like this:

The AP curriculum is the best indicator available of whether students are prepared for college-level work.  Students who master AP courses are three times more likely to graduate from college. For minority students, that multiplier is even greater: African American and Hispanic students who succeed in AP courses are four times more likely to graduate from college.

Or students who are more likely to finish college are more likely to do college-preppy things like take AP courses. Man, sorting out correlation and causation must be really hard, because so few people want to actually do it.

The operation is pretty simple-- NMSI unloads a giant pile of money with a college-prep program and the rewards begin as NSMI works to transform the culture of the school. This "grant" program has been operating since 2008, starting out in Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Press has been generally positive when the program popped up in big mainstream outlets like the NYT and US Today. 

Are there issues with this? Well, yes-- any time we inject monetary bribery into education, we are essentially admitting that we can't think of any better reason for learning. That kind of debasement of education is typical of the reformster movement which holds as a foundational belief that the only reason to do things is to get a financial reward.

On the other hand, bribery was already cemented into the foundation of the AP product anyway-- the whole selling point has always been, "Take this course, score well on this test, and it will save you some bucks on your college education. Ka-ching." The AP appeal is to take a challenging course and get college credit. NMSI's program doesn't do much more than move payday forward. The one new feature added by the program is the increased incentive for AP teachers to drop everything and lay into test prep with a vengeance. If you think AP tests are not open to test prep, I have a bridge to sell you. In some courses, the test prep looks enough like real education to be tolerable, though under David Coleman's leadership, that is changing. What is true across the board is that hooking into the AP universe can be just a way to pay the College Board to write your curriculum for you.

NMSI may have to crank their program up soon. It pays bounty on scores from 3 to 5, but at least in my neck of the woods, colleges are increasingly rejecting 3s. Because they have high standards about how often they're willing to give up their own revenue in order to bolster the College Board's business plan.

It would be nice to talk about things like getting ready for college by acquiring actual knowledge and skills. As I often tell my juniors, "I understand that you have to worry about getting into the college of your choice, but you do realize that once you get there, they'll want you to show that you know stuff, too." An actual education is worth more than a hundred bucks.

Politicians Make My Job Harder

Sure, the fact that politicians have commandeered education and inflicted a whole boat-load of anti-education, anti-teacher, anti-students-who-aren't-from-the-right-families rules and regulations. But there are days when I think that all the bad policies, all the funding issues, all the bad leadership on the state and national level, all the esoteric and philosophical and policy issues that take us space on this blog-- none of that compares to trying to swim upstream in a culture that actively rejects some of the values that we're trying to teach.

We invest millions of dollars and endless hours of our attention, for instance, on anti-bullying programs within the walls of our schools. Then we send our students out into a world where bullying is how you Get Things Done. Our policymakers and politicians bully each other to score political victories. Donald Trump is walking away with the GOP nomination for President of the United Freaking States of America because he is the most effective bully in the field.

Or let's try to promote the basic principles of democracy, but at the same time, the Democratic Party will continue to operate its anti-democratic Superdelegate system, by which the party establishment has a buffer against their nomination process being derailed by the actual voters. And no, I don't feel better is you tell me that Superdelegates always follow the will of the voters, because if that's what they always do, they are completely unnecessary.

It is equally challenging to try pushing critical thinking in a world that is actively opposed to it. Take this current very tricky logic problem that our leaders currently face.

1) Supreme court vacancies are filled by the President.
2) The President is Barack Obama
3) There is a Supreme Court vacancy

So-- what happens next?

This is not a hard one to work out, yet we are already awash in people who are trying their damnedest to avoid the clear conclusion that Barack Obama should now nominate someone to fill the vacancy.

But this is politics as currently practiced, dependent on the very opposite of critical thinking. For critical thinking, we need to collect the evidence, analyze the evidence, and follow it wherever it leads. But in politics, we decide what conclusion want to reach, and then start collecting (or ignoring) evidence to support our pre-determined (or pre-paid for) conclusion. Hell, there are already politicians who oppose Obama's theoretical currently-non-existent nominee based on exactly zero evidence.

Sometimes, the adult world looks a lot like the guy who tells kids not to smoke or drink while puffing on a cigarette and throwing back a beer. Oh, wait. That would be our advertising, in which "responsible" alcohol manufacturers deliver the message, "Kids, you totally should not use this really awesome product that will make you feel wonderful. Just say no."

So here's my message to our political and policy leaders. If you want to oppose corruption, don't be corrupt.  If you want to oppose bullying, don't build your career around it. If you think children should tell the truth, stop lying (and doing it badly). And if you want to promote critical thinking, use it.

ICYMI: Edu-reading for the week

It is Sunday morning, and so cold and still outside that you can't hear anything but some birds and the sound of ice crunching up against the bridge. Perfect day to curl up with some hot chocolate and read what's been going on in the education world.

Charter Schools Are Not the Answer in Ohio

The superintendent of the education center in Lorain County, Ohio (the area where I had my first teaching gig) explains why charters just aren't the answer in Ohio.

Looking Anew at How Teachers Teach

"Anew" might be the wrong word here-- Larry Cuban puts the current kerflufflation over teaching in the context of the history of teaching kerfluffles.

Why Do Teachers Need Instructional Coaches

I have mixed feelings about "instructional coaches," but Peter DeWitt makes a good case for them here.

Stop Humiliating Teachers

David Denby at the New Yorker speaks out against the tradition of hammering on teachers everytime the country hits a rough patch.

An Open Letter To John Lewis

I love this letter-- not because it stands up for Bernie Sanders against the civil rights giants' comments earlier this week, and not because it manages to do so without using any of the asshat attacks on Lewis that characterized a lot of the Sanders "support" this week-- but because it includes a great story and reminder of how social movements really make a difference.

Trust Teachers

Russ Walsh makes a solid argument against the age-old practice of putting our trust in programs instead of teachers.

Beauty, the Rip, and Expectations

Back in May of 2015, Shea Glover, a student at the Chicago High School for the Arts in Ukranian Village, created an art project for her class. The project, she said, "evidently turned into a social experiment."

The result became a viral sensation, so you may have seen this before. Even if have (and especially if you haven't), take a look at it now. Go ahead. I'll wait.



At the moment, the video is closing in on ten million views. Numerous videos inspired by this one are out there, as well as an ad campaign from Dove that lifts the idea.

It's simple and striking. Glover tells her subject that they are beautiful, and they become more beautiful. You couldn't ask for a more powerful, clear and simple demonstration of the power of positive expectations.

It stands, of course, in sharp contrast to the gut-wrenching video that surfaced yesterday showing a teacher emotionally abusing a small child at Success Academy, the roughly sixty-gazillionth piece of evidence about SA's emphasis on brow-beating students into either excellence or departure.

There are many folks who don't get it. We see it in "no excuses" and other brutally over-controlling versions of classrooms-- this idea that "high expectations" means rain down shame and an ass-kicking to students who don't meet those expectations. It's ugly and unpleasant and when we see it in its raw naked form as in the SA video, we see just how awful it is. But it's not an anomaly at Success Academies-- or if it is, it's an anomaly so common that many, many people can step forward to say they've seen it, and can, independent of each other, say that it has a name at SA-- "rip and return."

I'm not advocating for a warm, gooey classroom where every student is effusively praised just for holding a pencil and making random marks on paper. Students will make mistakes, often, and we can't pretend they don't, or shouldn't. But mistakes are an opportunity for growth, not a cause for shame. Sometimes that growth is hard, and sometimes the truths that have to be faced are hard and rough; those are the very moments when making things harder, uglier, suckier on purpose is inexcusable. When the paper is wrinkled and the answers on it are wrong, that is the very worst time to rip it and throw it back in a student's face.

It's not just that shaming and browbeating are bad and ugly and lousy ways to treat fellow travelers on the surface of our small spinning globe. The biggest problem is that it just doesn't work.

Imagine that Glover had started filming and then said, "You know, if you would just smile a little, you could be a bit more beautiful." Would those faces have blossomed forth as they do in her film? I doubt it.

When you tell people, directly or indirectly, that they are strong and competent and capable and beautiful, they act as if they are strong and competent and capable and beautiful. When you tell people that they are stupid and they suck, they act as if they are stupid and sucky.

Glover's film ends with the line "There is so much beauty in the world; if you blink, you'll miss it." That's not quite right-- Glover didn't just see the beauty, but she actually added to it. She actually made the world a little bit more beautiful. Charlotte Dial, the SA teacher, made the world a little uglier.

Do you want to make a difference? Do you want to change the world? That's how you do it. You have the power to help every person you encounter become a little more beautiful, or a little more beat down. You have that power by virtue of being alive, and if you are a teacher in a classroom, that power is magnified by virtue of the many small humans in front of you. Use your power for good.

If you are interested in seeing what Glover has been up to, the young filmmaker has her own youtube channel.

ME: The Governor Takes Over

What do you do if you're the governor of a state and you can't get your choice for head of the Department of Education approved?

You just appoint yourself.

Yup. The Governor of Maine has appointed himself commissioner of the Department of Education. The legislature wouldn't approve his choice, currently acting commissioner William Beardsley. Beardsley will serve the maximum time allowed for an "acting" commissioner (six months) and then he will become deputy commissioner under the governor.

This would be wacky enough, but Maine's governor is Paul LePage, the one governor in this country who could give batshit crazy lessons to Donald Trump.

These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty—these types of guys—they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.

Yes, that Paul LePage. The one that Esquire's Charles Pierce called "the insane bowling shoe who somehow got elected governor of Maine." Here are some other LePage classics:

Said that a Democratic senator "has no brains and a black heart and claims to be for the people but he’s the first one to give it to the people without Vaseline"

Told robot-building students at a STEM awards ceremony  “Next year I would like you to create a Legislature that doesn’t speak back.”

He's been a big fan of charter schools:  “ If you’ve got a job and you’re going to be intimidated, give it up and we’ll get somebody who can do the job. I am asking them for the good of the kids of the state of Maine, please go away. We don’t need you. We need some people with backbones.” — LePage calling on the members of Maine’s charter school commission to resign, a day after the seven-member panel rejected four out of five applications for new charter schools.

If you want a good education in Maine, and I get criticized by my opponents because I’m hard on education, but if you want a good education, go to an academy. If you want a good education go to private schools. If you can’t afford it, tough luck. You can go to the public school. 

He has compared the IRS to the Gestapo more than once.

And one of his first acts as governor was to refuse to attend a Martin Luther King Day breakfast and, when called on it, to tell the NAACP to kiss his butt. He also undid decades of environmental reguations, and took down a mural of labor history in the capitol, comparing it to North Korean brainswashing. He sabotaged a $120 million wind power plan.

This Politico article helps explain how such a thing happened. LePage is the Tea Party candidate who got lucky and, in a state where the GOP is a minority party, landed in the governor's mansion, where he hasn't stopped embarrassing the state since.

As commissioner, LePage woud be the sixth person to hold that position in three years. LePage is tired of having his nominations questioned and torn apart, but then, this is the guy who hired a corporate lobbyist to help him rewrite environmental laws. LePage calls confirmation hearings "a shit show."

On the one hand, the law says that a commissioner must have first served as deputy commissioner. On the other hand, Maine law says that in the absence of a commissioner, the governor is required to act on behalf of the department. Whatever the case, LePage seems to determined to make the legislature pay. Or, as suggested in the comments, he's just leveraging hard. The actual vote was scheduled next week, but likme a good pol, he's already run the numbers. Maybe he's hoping to hear sweet screams of, "Dear God, no! Anybody but you!"

"So, if they would rather have me in front of the Education Committee talking about education issues, I would be more than happy to," LePage said. "And that's what's going to happen."

"When they need somebody from education, guess who is going to be appearing?" LePage asked as he tugged on his suit jacket lapels. 

LePage is all about charters and choice and an unfortunate attachment to competency-based education, and his tenure as his own education commissioner should keep that rolling right along. It's probably just as well; the only person who could possibly run the department in the full-on crazy manner preferred by LePage is LePage. One can only hope that he will extend this level of wacknuttery to his entire government, eventually declaring himself King of Maine.

How Scary Can Big Data Get

There are plenty of people talking repeatedly and forcefully about resisting the infection of public education by the many tentacle-like limbs of Big Data. We know that reformsters have been talking for decades about the prospect of a cradle-to-career pipeline in which all manner of data can be collected and crunched and used to determine how best society can use the human beings that the data represents.

But if you want to see a real-world, already-happening demonstration of what this kind of data looks like, check out this article from the Washington Post that ran last month. "The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat score."

Think Minority Report. Except instead of a predictive criminal system based on three psychics floating in a small pool, it's a giant pool of all the data from everywhere.

The article centers on Fresno's Real Time Crime Center, a high tech hub that allows police to access a gazillion data points available on the on-line world-- including feeds from 800 school and traffic cameras. There's also a library of license plate scans. The city is also networked with microphones that can figure out the location of gunshots. And of course there's a program to monitor social media.

But the scariest of all is a program called Beware. By using special proprietary (and therefore secret) algorithms, Beware can create a color-coded threat level for any person and for any address.

It's not like this is a senseless program with no point. Police repeatedly walk into situations without a clue whether they're facing a relatively harmless citizen or a dangerous menace. To be able to access someone's record in real time, knowing what their most likely response will be-- that was the advantage that small town cops had because they already knew everybody. And this is not just an advantage to police-- if police walk into a non-volatile situation with their own tension dialed back, perhaps a few fewer innocent citizens might not get shot.

But at the same time, the level of access is creepy. And when we attach that kind of data access to Everything a Student Ever Did in School, including databases that attempt to assess students social and emotional characteristics-- well, it's not hard to imagine police approaching someone with guns drawn and ready to fire at a danger-tagged suspect because that suspect had some behavior problems in second grade and some computer software thinks his teenage video gaming habits showed violent tendencies.

Pop culture has numbed us to much of this abuse. The noble heroes of shows like NCIS and Bones and the like regularly violate data privacy, but hey-- they're good guys who are just trying to stop bad guys. But what if the data is not being accessed by Jethro Gibbs, but by J. Edgar Hoover.

Big Data would like to get these data collections up and running for every citizen, and they'd like to get started on children, even infants, before anyone has a chance to object. These are complex and difficult issues, and they deserve a long and careful conversation in our country, but the conversation has barely begun to begin, and the construction of the Surveillance State is already well under way.

Fordham Provides More Core Testing PR

The Fordham Institute is back with another "study" of circular reasoning and unexamined assumptions that concludes that reformster policy is awesome. 

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a right-tilted thinky tank that has been one of the most faithful and diligent promoters of the reformster agenda, from charters (they run some in Ohio) to the Common Core to the business of Big Standardized Testing.

In 2009, Fordham got an almost-a-million dollar grant from the Gates Foundation to "study" Common Core Standards, the same standards that Gates was working hard to promote. They concluded that the Core was swell. Since those days, Fordham's support team has traveled across the country, swooping into various state legislators to explain the wisdom of reformster ideas.

This newest report fits right into that tradition.

Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments is a big, 122-page monster of a report. But I'm not sure we need to dig down into the details, because once we understand that it's built on a cardboard foundation, we can realize that the details don't really matter.

The report is authored by Nancy Doorey and Morgan Polikoff. Doorey is the founder of her own consulting firm, and her reformy pedigree is excellent. She works as a study lead for Fordham, and she has worked with the head of Education Testing Services to develop new testing goodies. She also wrote a nice report for SBA about how good the SBA tests were. Polikoff is a testing expert and professor at USC at Rossier. He earned his PhD from UPenn in 2010 (BA at Urbana in 2006), and immediately raised his profile by working as a lead consultant on the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching project. He is in high demand as an expert on how test and implement Common Core, and he has written a ton about it.

So they have some history with the materials being studied.

So what did the study set out to study? They picked the PARCC, SBA, ACT Aspire and Massachussetts MCAS to study. Polikoff sums it up in his Brookings piece about the report.

A key hope of these new tests is that they will overcome the weaknesses of the previous generation of state tests. Among these weaknesses were poor alignment with the standards they were designed to represent and low overall levels of cognitive demand (i.e., most items requiring simple recall or procedures, rather than deeper skills such as demonstrating understanding). There was widespread belief that these features of NCLB-era state tests sent teachers conflicting messages about what to teach, undermining the standards and leading to undesired instructional responses.

Or consider this blurb from the Fordham website: 

Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments examines previously unreleased items from three multi-state tests (ACT Aspire, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced) and one best-in-class state assessment, Massachusetts’ state exam (MCAS), to answer policymakers’ most pressing questions: Do these tests reflect strong content? Are they rigorous? What are their strengths and areas for improvement? No one has ever gotten under the hood of these tests and published an objective third-party review of their content, quality, and rigor. Until now.

So, two main questions-- are the new tests well-aligned to the Core, and do they serve as a clear "unambiguous" driver of curriculum and instruction?

We start from the very beginning with a host of unexamined assumptions. The notion that Polikoff and Doorey or the Fordham Institute are in any way an objective third parties seems absurd, but it's not possible to objectively consider the questions because that would require us to unobjectively accept the premise that national or higher standards have anything to do with educational achievement, that the Core standards are in any way connected to college and career success, that a standardized test can measure any of the important parts of an education, and that having a Big Standardized Test drive instruction and curriculum is a good idea for any reason at all. These assumptions are at best highly debatable topics and at worst unsupportable baloney, but they are all accepted as givens before this study even begins.

And on top of them, another layer of assumption-- that having instruction and curriculum driven by a standardized test is somehow a good thing. That teaching to the test is really the way to go.

But what does the report actually say? You can look at the executive summary or the full report. I am only going to hit the highlights here.

The study was built around three questions:

Do the assessments place strong emphasis on the most important content for college and career readiness(CCR), as called for by the Common Core State Standards and other CCR standards? (Content)

Do they require all students to demonstrate the range of thinking skills, including higher-order skills, called for by those standards? (Depth)

What are the overall strengths and weaknesses of each assessment relative to the examined criteria forELA/Literacy and mathematics? (Overall Strengths and Weaknesses)

The first question assumes that Common Core (and its generic replacements) actually includes anything that truly prepares students for college and career. The second question assumes that such standards include calls for higher-order thinking skills. And the third assumes that the examined criteria are a legitimate measures of how weak or strong literacy and math instruction might be.

So we're on shaky ground already. Do things get better?

Well, the methodology involves using the CCSSO “Criteria for Procuring and Evaluating High-Quality Assessments.” So, here's what we're doing. We've got a new ruler from the emperor, and we want to make sure that it really measures twelve inches, a foot. We need something to check it against, some reference. So the emperor says, "Here, check it against this." And he hands us a ruler.

So who was selected for this objective study of the tests, and how were they selected.

We began by soliciting reviewer recommendations from each participating testing program and other sources, including content and assessment experts, individuals with experience in prior alignment studies, and several national and state organizations. 

That's right. They asked for reviewer recommendations from the test manufacturers. They picked up the phone and said, "Hey, do you anybody who would be good to use on a study of whether or not your product is any good?"

So what were the findings?

Well, that's not really the question. The question is, what were they looking for? Once they broke down the definitions from CCSSO's measure of a high-quality test, what exactly were they looking for? Because here's the problem I have with a "study" like this. You can tell me that you are hunting for bear, but if you then tell me, "Yup, and we'll know we're seeing a bear when we spot its flowing white mane and its shiny horn growing in the middle of its forehead, galloping majestically on its noble hooves while pooping rainbows."

I'm not going to report on every single criteria here-- a few will give you the idea of whether the report shows us a big old bear or a majestic, non-existent unicorn.

Do the tests place strong emphasis on the most important content etc?

When we break this down it means--

Do the tests require students to read closely and use evidence from texts to obtain and defend responses? 

The correct answer is no, because nothing resembling true close reading can be done on a short excerpt that is measured by close-ended responses that assume that all proper close readings of the text can only reach one "correct" conclusion. That is neither close reading (nor critical thinking). And before we have that conversation, we need to have the one where we discuss whether or not close reading is, in fact, a "most important" skill for college and career success.

Do the tests require students to write narrative, expository, and persuasive/argumentation essays (across each grade band, if not in each grade) in which they use evidence from sources to support their claims?

Again, the answer is no. None of the tests do this. No decent standardized test of writing exists, and the more test manufacturers try to develop one, the further into the weeds they wander, like the version of a standardized writing I've seen that involves taking an "evidence" paragraph and answering a prompt according to a method so precise that all "correct" answers will be essentially identical. If there is only one correct answer to your essay question, you are not assessing writing skills. Not to mention what bizarre sort of animal a narrative essay based on evidence must be.

Do the tests require students to demonstrate proficiency in the use of language, including academic vocabulary and language conventions, through tasks that mirror real-world activities?

None, again. Because nothing anywhere on a BS Tests mirrors real-world activities. Not to mention how "demonstrate proficiency" ends up on a test (hint: it invariably looks like a multiple choice Pick the Right Word question).

Do the tests require students to demonstrate research skills, including the ability to analyze, synthesize organize, and use information from sources?

Nope. Nope, nope, nope. We are talking about the skills involved in creating a real piece of research. We could be talking about the project my honors juniors complete in which they research a part of local history and we publish the results. Or you could be talking about a think tank putting together some experts in a field to do research and collecting it into a shiny 122-page report. But you are definitely not talking about something that can be squeezed into a twenty-minute standardized test section with all students trying to address the same "research" problem with nothing but the source material they're handed by the test. There are little-to-none research skills tested there.

How far in the weeds does this study get?

I look at the specific criteria for the "content" portion of our ELA measure, and I see nothing that a BS Test can actually provide, including the PARCC test for which I examined the sample version. But Fordham's study gives the PARCC a big fat E-for-excellent in this category.

The study "measures" other things, too.

Depth and complexity are supposed to be a thing. This turns out to be a call for higher-order thinking, as well as high quality texts on the test. We will, for the one-gazzillionth time, skip over any discussion of whether you can be talking about true high quality, deeply complex texts when none of them are ever longer than a page. How exactly do we argue that tests will cover fully complex texts without ever including an entire short story or an entire novel?

But that's what we get when testing drives the bus-- we're not asking "What would be the best assortment of complex, rich, important texts to assess students on?" We are asking "what excerpts short enough to fit in the time frame of a standardized text will be good enough to get by?"

Higher-order responses. Well, we have to have "at least one" question where the student generates rather than selects an answer. At least one?! And we do not discuss the equally important question of how that open response will be scored and evaluated (because if it's by putting a narrow rubric in the hands of a minimum-wage temp, then the test has failed yet again).

There's also math. 

But I am not a math teacher, nor do I play one on television.

Oddly enough 

When you get down to the specific comparisons of details of the four tests, you may find useful info, like how often the test has "broken" items, or how often questions allow for more than one correct answer. I'm just not sure these incidentals are worth digging past all the rest. They are signs, however, that researchers really did spend time actually looking at things, which shouldn't seem like a big deal, but in world where NCTQ can "study" teacher prep programs by looking at commencement fliers, it's actually kind of commendable that the researchers here really looked at what they were allegedly looking at. 

What else?

There are recommendations and commendations and areas of improvement (everybody sucks-- surprise-- at assessing speaking and listening skills), but it doesn't really matter. The premises of this entire study are flawed, based on assumptions that are either unproven or disproven. Fordham has insisted they are loaded for bear, when they have, in fact, gone unicorn hunting.

The premises and assumptions of the study are false, hollow, wrong, take your pick. Once again, the people who are heavily invested in selling the material of reform have gotten together and concluded once again that they are correct, as proven by them, using their own measuring sticks and their own definitions. An awful lot of time and effortappears to have gone into this report, but I'm not sure what it good it does anybody except the folks who live, eat and breathe Common Core PR and Big Standardized Testing promotion.

These are not stupid people, and this is not the kind of lazy, bogus "research" promulgated by groups like TNTP or NCTQ. But it assumes conclusions not in evidence and leaps to other conclusions that cannot be supported-- and all of these conclusions are suspiciously close to the same ideas that Fordham has been promoting all along. This is yet another study that is probably going to be passed around and will pick up some press-- PARCC and SBA in particularly will likely cling to it like the last life preserver on the Titanic. I just don't think it proves what it wants to prove.