NC: Spellings Sinks To a New Low

Margaret Spellings, the queen of NCLB, the career politician that followed Bush II from Texas to DC, the Secretary of Ed who pushed policies that she had watched fail in her home state, has added one more loathsome act to her resume.

You may recall that Spellings was installed at the once-admirable University of North Carolina in a piece of purely partisan politics. As part of the ongoing work to stamp out every progressive, liberal or humane molecule in NC, Governor Pat McCrory and the GOP legislature have been stomping on public education in an unrelenting series of attacks. 

But they really needed to bring UNC to heel, so to that end, they canned the previous well-respected president and installed, by means that failed any test for transparency, Margaret Spellings.

The list of reasons to be unexcited about her crowning was long. There was the whole NCLB thing-- a massive policy failure that she has continued to defend past the point of any sense or reason. She has had ties to the predatory for-profit college industry. She has hung out with the Boston Consulting Group, and she has generally supported the notion that education is a like any widget or consumer good, except that the education system needs to have its inefficiencies wrung out so that people will do more with less. As I've written before, Spellings either doesn't know baloney when she sees it, or she is determined to make a living selling it.

Oh, and there was that time, as Secretary of Education, that she called up PBS and told them to get that lesbian couple off the air.

So Spellings' response to North Carolina's new law legalizing LGBT discrimination is no surprise.

As president of a major university, she could have done any number of things. She could have taken a bold and brave stand and said something along the lines of, "You can pass a stupid law like this, but you can't make me enforce it on my campus." She could have taken a somewhat less brave, more bottom-line practical stance and said something like, "We are a national university and I won't have the legislature's backwards law reduce our stature and interfere with our ability to recruit the best and the brightest of students from all across the country, regardless of their gender orientation."

She could even have taken a not too brave stance by saying, "Well, let's wait until the court challenges are done" or just pretending not to notice the law and just going about her business.

Spellings did none of those things. Instead, she sent this directive to the university chancellors, laying out how she expected them to comply with the ridiculously titled Pubic Facilities Privacy & Security Act.

University institutions "should take" the following actions:

a. Designate and label multiple-occupancy bathrooms and changing facilities for single-sex use with signage

b. Provide notice of the Act to campus constituencies as appropriate.

c. Consider assembling and making information available about the locations of designated single-occupancy bathrooms and changing facilities on campus.

The memo notes that there is a lawsuit currently pending against the governor, the attorney-general, and the university. Plaintiffs include a student, a faculty member, and a staff member from a UNC institution. The university expects to work with the AG office to get counsel and fight the lawsuit. In the meantime, they will uphold the law.

The memo also provides direction if anyone in the system is contacted "by a federal regulatory agency concerning the Act and its implementation," (something that could occur because, I don't know, the Act is pretty damn illegal). At any rate "if your institution is contacted by a federal agency with a question about the Act, please notify the Division of Legal Affairs at UNC General Administration." So if the feds come sniffing around, don't you dare talk to them-- refer them to the UNC Office of Official Stonewalling.

Is it a surprise or disappointment that Spelling shows little moral fiber or leaderly backbone? I suppose not. But it certainly is one more instance in which she is firmly on the wrong side of history, decency and basic American values. She has found one more way to bring shame to a once-proud UNC.

College Debt, Regret, and Readiness

One third of millennials say they would not have gone to college at all if they had known the debt burden they were going to be left with.

That's one of the big takeaways hit by Bloomberg today, reporting on a survey conducted by TNS "on behalf of" Citizens Bank (I love that "on behalf of," like TNS just felt like doing the bank a big ole favor).

The rest of the picture isn't any better. The average student debt for the group of 18 to 35 year olds is $41,286.40 (a spectacularly specific number). This matches up with numbers from other reports which also say that A) about two-thirds of millennials are carrying that kind of debt and B) it is messing up their lives.

TNS reports that millennials don't all have a firm grasp of exactly what's happening with their debt. 15% of those polled weren't sure exactly what their balance was, and over a third didn't know their interest rate. Almost half don't understand the intricacies of private vs. federal loans.

I can report that all of this is right in line with my personal store of anecdotal data. I gave my millennial children the gift of paying for their college educations, and by the time my first child was halfway through, I had eaten through all my savings and commenced with the loan out-taking. My second child has a degree that is entire a product of Parent Plus loans. I've been at this game for a while (and it will be a while before I'm done).

My loans have been pretty straightforward, relatively speaking, but these reports often forget that for many millennials, the rules on much of this changed along the way. While my son was in school, for instance, the rules shifted and we went from dealing with a well-trained by anonymous functionary of a financial institution to dealing with a shell-shocked employee of the school's financial aid office. At numerous points my loans were passed off to a new institution, which resulted in changes in amounts and loan numbers (at one point, I confess, I discovered that I had been double paying on one loan and was months behind on another).

But mostly, I look at the amounts I had to borrow, and I cannot begin to imagine how my children-- and other people like them-- could possibly have had a live at this point if they were paying these loans on their own. They struggled through most of their twenties in minimum wage jobs; one happened to be in love with and finally married to a young man with a well-paying gig, but the other periodically had to borrow from the Bank of Dad just to make ends meet. I remain painfully, acutely aware and angry at the many ways that corporations like banks and utilities and the various phone companies find ways to gouge money out of people are doing their best but can barely manage. What kind of conscience-deprived business plan involves the grown-up equivalent of knocking down the little kids and taking their lunch money?

Some folks offer their idea of a practical solution-- only go to college for degrees that will immediately result in lucrative jobs. This is bad for the humans getting the degrees, and bad for a society that depends on a full range of talents, skills, and jobs to make civilization possible, but pays very poorly for many of those jobs. And if you don't buy my larger philosophical objections, consider the practical one-- if every student at Bodacious University drops their old major and switches to the two that lead to well-paying insta-jobs, that job market will be flooded, and those jobs will no longer pay well.

I don't think I know any millennials who regret going to college, but what does it say for our grand and glorious dreams of national college attainment that so many debt-ridden college grads (and drop outs) are out there saying, "Don't go, kid. It's not worth it."

And why can we move heaven and earth and try to rewrite the entire K-12 education system in pursuit of academic college readiness for all, but we can't lift a finger to promote the goal of financial college readiness for all. Why have we focused so much fierce attention on making sure that Chris can pass college algebra, but so little attention on whether or not Chris can afford to pay for it.

I have no doubt that this is neither an easy problem to diagnose or to solve, but this survey drives home once again that we have an entire generation of Americans for whom college costs are the biggest problem in their lives. They can't afford to put money into the economy. They postpone buying homes and having children. They struggle with the stress and strain of living under the shadow of huge debt. How can the fact that some are required to take remedial college courses be a huge issue that must be screamed regularly from the rooftops, but the house of debt that has been dropped on them (amidst promises that college would be their passport to te middle class) merit barely a mention?

How can we pretend to talk about making students college and career ready and not talk about the crushing cost of college?

Do Charters Make Graduates Richer?

Courtesy of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (and not any kind of education related journal) comes a new piece of headline-generating baloney research built to make charter schools look good.

"Charter High Schools' Effects on Long-Term Attainment and Earnings" comes to us from researchers at Georgia State University, Vanderbilt University, and Mathematica Policy Research (always a reliable source of Gates-funded/friendly research), with funding from the Joyce Foundation, and appears to be a revisit of some earlier Mathematica research-shaped product. Their conclusion, coming soon to a headline near you, is that charters lead to more college attainment and more money.

How, you may wonder, can anybody actually research such a thing. After all, the big problem of any research on human stuff is finding a control. We can say that Chris went to a charter school, then went to college, then got a great job as VP of Widgetary Development at World Wide Widgets. But none of that tells us what would have happened to Chris if Chris had attended a public school instead. And unless we can find an exact doppleganger of Chris to follow along an alternate path, or a means of slipping into an alternate universe, we have no way of knowing. Which means we have no way of knowing.

The researchers acknowledge this by opening their methodology section with the phrase "Determining the impact of charter high schools is not easy..." which is true. It is also the last thing they will say in plain English throughout the entire methodological description. Seriously-- I just spent my lunch hour with Les Perelman's BABEL nonsense generator, and this seems ike it might have come from that same source.

Okay, maybe it's not that bad. They do write this:

The fact that the charter students and their parents actively seek an alternative to traditional public schools suggests the students may be more motivated or their parents may be more involved in their child's education than are the families of traditional public school attendees. 

They probably should have quit right there and called it a day. But they didn't. They tried to correct for selection bias, and here's some of what they had to say about that. Here they are rejecting one method:

Two recent studies (Furgeson et al., 2012; Tuttle et al., 2013) have demonstrated that longitudinal analyses of test score impacts that control for pretreatment test scores can closely replicate randomized experimental impact estimates for the same students. But this approach cannot be used to measure long-term outcomes such as graduation, college enrollment, college persistence, and employment, because those outcomes do not occur before a student's enrollment in a charter school.

They talk about how to generate a strong comparison group, which involves looking at charter eighth graders, because reasons. This creates some external validity problems, but in their opinion, the sacrifice is worth it for increased internal validity. They seem to think this is good because it catches students before the transition to high school. Does this not make sense yet? Well, this should settle it for you:

To further deal with potential endogeneity, we also use a matching approach popularized by Rubin (1977) and Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983). While matching procedures can take many forms, we use a one-to-one nearest-neighbor Mahalanobis matching approach (also referred to as a covariate match) in which we match on observable characteristics to create a control group. We then examine difference in student outcomes between those in treatment relative to this counterfactual control group. 

Also, there is math.

The actual data used came from Florida, which covers both high school graduation and, for anyone who has unemployment insurance records, data about employment earnings. The research centered on four cohorts in eighth grade between 1998 and 2002. So this research should be very meaningful, because, really, not much has changed in education in Florida in the last 15-18 years, right?

I tried to answer that, but much of Florida's charter info only goes back ten-ish years. Florida's modern charter law was passed in 2002 (Jeb! Bush was governor from 1999-2007) replacing the first version from 1996. In the 1998-1999 school year, there were a total of 67 charter schools in Florida, and only 20 of those had an eighth grade. Total charter students-- 9,135. By 2001-2001, charters had ballooned to 176, with over 40K students. But still-- I'm wondering just how large a sample the researchers were able to pull out of that.

On top of that, charters were relatively small potatoes, which means that charter students would have been a not-at-all-average group. I'm not a statistician or scholarly researcher (nor do I play one on TV), but I can't escape the notion that the same kind of parental support and push and resources that would get a student into a charter school (particularly back then) would be the same kind of parental support and push and support that would get a student through high school and into college.

In other words, I am once again inclined to conclude that a lot of very fancy researchers and scholars do a lousy job of distinguishing between correlation and causation.

I will gladly accept input from anyone who is actually a trained statistical design scholar, but until someone I can trust tells me otherwise, I'm going to conclude that this is high-priced baloney served on a silver platter.

Segregation, Choice and Education

The National Education Policy Center just released a research report from William J. Mathis and Kevin G. Welner on the question, "Do Choice Policies Segregate Schools?"

Spoiler alert-- the short answer is "Yes."

A review of the research and literature led Mathis and Welner to conclude that while some choice schools are integrated, charters largely are very segregated. That segregation can be by race, poverty, dual language learners (ELL), and students with disabilities. While black students are generally either under-represented or over-represented in charter schools, the researchers found that poor, ELL, and students with disabilities are under-enrolled in charter schools. Within a choice system, both segregation and the achievement gap grow.

However, before charter foes leap on those results, there is this to be considered:

Even without school choice, America's schools would be shockingly segregated, in large part because of housing policies and school district boundaries. School choice policies that do not have sufficient protections against unconstrained, segregative choices do exacerbate the problem.

In other words, charter-choice systems may be making things worse, but they certainly didn't create the problem. Or to put it yet another way, when anti-charter folks say that charters are creating massive segregation problems, they are correct. And when charter fans say that housing-based choice is creating segregation problems, they are also correct.

There may be valid arguments in favor of some charters in some situations, but the "we will fix segregation and close the achievement gap" argument is not one of them. Charters clearly do neither of those things.

Public schools aren't getting it done, either. But in order to look for real solutions, we need to stop pretending that fake solutions are actually working.

 

Grading Good-faith Gibberish

Les Perelman is one of my heroes for his unflinching exposure, time and time again, of the completely inadequacy of using computers to assess writing.

Perelman and his grad students create BABEL, (the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator) a program that can generate brilliant gibberish. Diane Ravitch, education historian and activist, took a stab at using BABEL and got, in part, this:

Didactics to subjugation will always be an experience of humankind. Human life will always civilize education; many for diagnoses but a few of the amanuensis. Myrmidon at absurd lies in the search for reality and the realm of reality. From the fact that denationalization excommunicates the denouncements involved of civilizations, humanity should propagate absurd immediately.

This scored a mere 4 out of 6. Apparently Ravitch, as an older Americam, suffers from being the product of our earlier status quo education system. If only she'd been exposed to the Common Core.

The software that scored her essay is PEG writing, and the site has some lovely FAQ items, one of which Ravitch highlighted.

It is important to note that although PEG software is extremely reliable in terms of producing scores that are comparable to those awarded by human judges, it can be fooled. Computers, like humans, are not perfect.

PEG presumes “good faith” essays authored by “motivated” writers. A “good faith” essay is one that reflects the writer’s best efforts to respond to the assignment and the prompt without trickery or deceit. A “motivated” writer is one who genuinely wants to do well and for whom the assignment has some consequence (a grade, a factor in admissions or hiring, etc.).

Efforts to “spoof” the system by typing in gibberish, repetitive phrases, or off-topic, illogical prose will produce illogical and essentially meaningless results.

In other words, PEG knows it doesn't work. It also assumes a great deal in assuming that students writing pointless essays on boring subjects for baloney-filled standardized tests are "motivated" writers. Can the software accurately score motivated gibberish? Can the program distinguish between frivolous garbage and well-meant garbage?

Probably not. As noted in PEG's response to the question of how the software can evaluate content:

However, analyzing the content for “correctness” is a much more complex challenge illustrated by the “Columbus Problem.” Consider the sentence, “Columbus navigated his tiny ships to the shores of Santa Maria.” The sentence, of course, is well framed, grammatically sound, and entirely on topic. It is also incorrect. Without a substantial knowledge base specifically aligned to the question, artificial intelligence (AI) technology will fail to grasp the “meaning” behind the prose. Likewise, evaluating “how well” a student has analyzed a problem or synthesized information from an article or other stimulus is currently beyond the capabilities of today’s state of the art automated scoring technologies.

PEG bills itself as a "trusted" teaching assistant that can help relieve some of the time pressures that come from having many, many essays to grade. But I can't trust it, and it's unlikely that I ever will.

This is the flip side of Common Core reading, an approach that assumes that reading is a batch of discrete behaviors and tricks that are unrelated to any content. Here we assume that writing is just a series of tricks, and it doesn't really matter what you're writing about, which is a concept so bizarre that I can barely wrap my head around it. Use big words-- even if they have nothing to do with the topic of the essay. Use varied sentence lengths-- but don't worry about what the sentences say. 

PEG, like other similar services, offers as proof of its reliability its closeness to human-rendered scores. But that happens only because the human-rendered scores come from a rubric designed to resemble the algorithm of a computer, not the evaluative processes of a human writing teacher. In other words, you make the computer look good by dumbing down the humans used for comparison.

Pearson's continued fascination with AI-directed education, as well as the news that PARCC will use computer essay grading in four of its six states-- these are Bad News, because computer software is simply not up to the job of evaluating writing in any meaningful way. BABEL is just one more demonstration of how completely inadequate the software tools are.

P.S. My favorite line from my own BABEL efforts:

Charter, frequently to an accusation, might innumerably be grout for the allocution.

How To Promote the Test

As we wade further and further into the testing season, we get to see more and more ham-handed attempts by testocrats to convince parents that the Big Standardized Test is really their friend. For instance, High Achievement New York, an alliance of businessmen and reformsters, produced a flurry of PR spots promoting the test (they might have done their homework-- "Say Yes to the Test" was a slogan previously used to promote tests for chlamydia or HIV).

The campaign was pretty typical in its use of recycled talking points and PR spin (the tests are new! and improved!) as well as some flat out lies (2/3 of high school grads aren't ready for college or career-- and the test will somehow fix that. A double lie). It also appears to have failed miserably.

If testocrats really want to promote the BS Tests, here's the press release they need.

                                                                 ***

A coalition of state and local officials gathered today at the district offices of Upper Baldweasel Schools to celebrate the district's spectacular turnaround.

"It's exciting," said Superintendent Pat Whipsnagle. "And it all started with the test."

Three years ago, when Whipsnagle first saw the results of the federally mandated, state chosen SHNARCC tests, the picture was much more grim.

"We had terrible results. A huge section of our students simply weren't getting it. The scores were terrible, and they put us on notice."

Upper Baldweasel is located in the poorest section Big Urban Metropolis, and the student body is largely minority students. "We knew that there was, you know, poverty out there," said Principal Pat Pzzaltstitz, "But we thought we were doing a great job. We had no idea that so many of our students were actually lagging so far behind. But once we saw the SHNARCC scores, we knew we had a problem."

That was when the state and local alliance sprang into action.

"I got the call from Pat, " said Pennsylsippi State Senator Pat Del Wafflestein, "and I was just rocked back on my heels. I remember turning to a couple of my fellow senators and telling them that we had really failed in our responsibility to support these local districts. And I decided at that moment that we would make sure that UB schools got whatever resources they needed."

Asked if they had considered a new school as an option, Wafflestein continued. "Sure, we could have built a new school and filled it with just the kids who do well on the SCHNARCC. But that would have meant abandoning the rest of them, the ones who showed the most need in those test results. Why start from scratch for just a few students when we can invest in what we already have and serve all students?"

Governor Pat Jones chimed into the conversation. "That was when my office got involved. If the tests are showing pockets of poverty in the state that keep our students stuck behind their wealthier peers, then clearly we need to address the issues of poverty in the state while at the same time addressing the specific resource needs of districts like Upper Baldweasel, as well as long hard conversations about system inequities and, frankly, some of the racist impulses behind those inequities. That meant legislative initiatives, and it also meant turning to our friends in the private sector."

Pat Wallpockets of the Grand Allienace of Totally Economically Secure Businessmen waved off the Governor's praise. "At GATESBiz, we just wanted to help. But we have no expertise in education, so we simply made the resources available to experts like classroom teachers and then got out of the way. These are the trained professionals, the people who devote their whole lives to these kids. If they don't know what's needed, nobody does."

"The test results were so useful to us," said teacher Pat Chalkwhacker. "Those exact and specific results-- I could look right down the row and see the exact questions that each student was missing and what wrong answers they were giving so that I could target test pre-- er, instruction for each student."

State and local leaders, supported by business and philanthropic groups, worked together and within two years had transformed the district into one where the achievement gap was nearly erased and all students achieved higher test scores. District reports indicate that more students are achieving college and career success, including driving nicer cars and marrying more attractive spouses.

"It was all the test," repeats Whipsnagle. "Teachers, administrators, parents, the students themselves- nobody had the slightest clue of how students were really doing until we saw those test results."

"And once we saw them," continued Jones, "we knew what we had to do. We knew that all of us, from government on down to local school boards, had not met our responsibility to provide these public schools with the support we needed, but with test results to hold us accountable, we knew to step up and provide these schools with the support and resources they needed."

                                                                       ***

If reformsters could release that story, they could build some real support for the BS Tests. And they assert and hint constantly that this is the story, even as it is somehow a story they can never tell. After years of test-driven accountability, you would think that they would be able to point to at least one single example of the success of their policies, and yet they never do, for the same reason they never show photographs of magical elves writing the test while riding on the backs of rainbow unicorns.

If someone keeps telling you, "Stand right here and you are going to see the most amazing unicorns jump up and turn water into flowers," and you keep standing there, and you never, ever see a unicorn, you have to wonder if A) they are just slinging baloney at you and B) if they are up to something behind your back while they keep your attention focused Over There.

Until we get the news from Upper Baldweasel, there's no reason to believe that the BS Tests are not a huge waste of our time. We can and should believe that opting out remains the most sensible response to further senseless acts of testing.

PA: Court Upholds Spanking of Philly SRC

Back in February, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that Philadelphia's appointed-not-elected School Reform Commission didn't have most of the powers it thought it had.

It was immediately difficult to determine whether this was good news or bad news-- the SRC had claimed for itself the power to cap charter enrollment, close schools, and unilaterally rewrite/cancel teacher contracts (thereby guaranteeing that the SRC had no friends in Philadelphia's education world).

What the court actually said was that the original act of the legislature that gave the SRC "carte blache" to do whatever the heck they wanted was, in fact, unconstitutional.This was bad news for the SRC, which has discovered, among other tings, that Pennsylvania charter school law lets charters suck a huge amount of blood out of public school systems. They have also discovered that paying teachers costs money (and are busy discovering this year that hiring substitute teachers costs money, too). The SRC can be forgiven for feeling hugely poor-- they are dealing with a very poor urban system in a state that has one of the worst funding systems in the country.

But their dreams of being able to rule over the district like autocratic CEO's are now dashed for good. The PA Supremes considered revisiting their February decision and used exactly one sentence to deny that reconsideration. Philadelphia schools will have to operate under the law, and the SRC no longer gets to make up their own rules and play sheriff in a wild west town.