Standardization (7/13)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

One of the keystones of the ed reform movement is standardizing things. I'd rather not.

Same

If I had to put my finger on the one most troubling aspect of the wave of reformy stuff that is currently battering us, it would be this. The standardization. The premise that education is a big machine with interchangeable cogs. The one size fits all. The sameness.

In Praise of Non-Standardization

Standardization is safe. It's predictable. We can walk into any McDonald's in the country and it will be just like any other and we will know exactly what we will get. I am not excited about that prospect. Let me plop you into the center of any mall in the country and defy you to guess where you are. That's not a good thing.

Good versus Uniform

“It doesn’t matter to us whether our customers are hundreds of thousands of individual students and their parents in China, or thousands of school districts in America,” says Fallon. “What we’re trying to do is the same thing—to help improve learning outcomes.”

There's your problem. If you're trying to do "the same thing," for a student in the US and a student in China, and if "it doesn't matter" to you which is which, then something is wrong.

What We Don't Know about Normal

Some very cool research shows that what we think of as normal for all humans isn't at all.

Bon Voyage (7/12)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Some very old favorites from 2013

Why American Public Education Is Worth the Fight

The US is a big gloriously polyglot mess of a country, stitched together out of pieces-parts from every other people on the planet. As such, we can only claim a handful of native art forms. Jazz, comics, maybe baseball. And true public education.

Arne Duncan vs. Moms

That time that the Secretary of Education stuck his foot square in his mouth by blaming white moms for Common Core's problems.

Raise the Bar (or Not)

About that frequently used image for higher standards

The World's Worst Boyfriend

In the age of reform, is the teaching profession in the worst relationship ever?

Some Blog News

Tomorrow morning m wife and I are going to hope in the car and start the drive from here in western PA over to Seattle, WA (where my daughter, her husband, and my grandson live). Driving across the country is one of those bucket list things, and I'm pretty excited about the whole business. We are fortunate to have teh resources and the opportunity to pull this off. The dog is staying at the kennel where he was born, the in-laws are watching the house, and the car is ready to go. And we get to celebrate our wedding anniversary in Glacier National Park.

That means I'll be Away From Keyboard for a bit. I'm not sure how that's going to work for me-- it's been a while since I went a whole 24 hours without writing anything at all. But I know it's a pain to have your routine interrupted, so I've set up automatic posts with a daily dose of dipping into the archives here (there are now over 1900 posts on this blog, and a couple of them are actually pretty good, so feel free to poke around). So there will be something newish here every day for those of you who are creatures of habit.

I also cannot recommend enough that you make use of the blogroll in the righthand column. There are so many people doing really good work out there, and they deserve your time and attention. So stay alert, keep informed, and catch your breath long enough to remember why any of it matters. Meanwhile, I'm going to go look at a bunch of the country. See you soon.

IL: State Finds Worse Tool Than PARCC

Well, it's a good day for the SAT marketing team, which has now conned the state of Illinois into replacing PARCC with the College Board's flagship Big Standardized Test (or you can follow this link to the state board of education's own website, because the folks at the State Journal-Register have just gone ahead and run the ISBE press release verbatim. Because reporting is hard).

“District and school administrators overwhelmingly agree with ISBE that every high school junior should have access to a college entrance exam, a policy that promotes equity and access and that provides each and every student with greater opportunities in higher education,” State Superintendent of Education Tony Smith said in a statement. “The SAT is aligned with the Illinois Learning Standards and will continue to empower educators to measure college and career readiness.”

Yes, the Illinois State Board of Education is just doing this because everyone asked for it. Also, if you're an anti-CCSS Illinois resident, please note that the SAT can only be aligned with the Illinois Learning Standards if those standards are exactly the same as the Common Core.

Folks indicated that students didn't take the PARCC seriously (which is understandable), though it's not clear why they would take the SAT seriously.On the other hand, it's crystal clear why the College Board would take seriously the opportunity to supplant (not supplement) the PARCC-- big, fat honking market share. Why do all the hard work of selling tests to one customer at a time when you can con a state into buying a round for everyone in the house?

There are, however, several huge problems with this idea.

Some are left-over problems. The SAT can't remotely measure the college-and-career readiness of student whose heart is set on a career in welding or running hotels or the ministry. But neither could the PARCC. But there are other new, special problems that come with substituting the SAT.

First, it's not remotely what the SAT was ever designed to do. The SAT was designed to allow colleges to gauge about how ready an individual student was. If the test had any virtue at all, it was that there was never a "pass" or "fail." Harvard could look at your SAT scores and say, "No, you're not ready for us," and Wottsamatta U could look at the same scores and say, "We'd like to offer you a scholarship, a nice room, and free ice cream every Sunday." As I have told thirty years' worth of fretful juniors, whether your score is good or not depends on the school and the major that you have in mind. So how will Illinois translate this into an accountability score? Will it demand all students-- even those who have no intention of going to a four year college-- show Harvard-level "readiness"?

Second, the SAT didn't even do what it was intended to do particularly well. High school GPA remains a more reliable predictor of college performance than the SAT. So not only has Illinois hired a plumber to fix an electrical wiring problem, but they've hired a plumber who wasn't even very good at plumbing.

Third, the current version of the SAT is a horrendous mess. David Coleman, who proudly touted his lack of expertise when whipping up the Common Core, has now provided that same lack of expertise to the SAT redesign, attempting to make it more Common Core compliant, even as we have collectively figured out that the standards are hooey. So we've got a test that may or may not measure standards that may or may not prepare students for college and career.

The new PSAT rollout last fall was a mess, with exceptionally late returns on results, and the spring rollout of the new SAT was also plagued with problems. And it turns out, according to a College Board whistleblower, the test was so hastily thrown together that it was riddled with errors and untested items.

Fourth, I have yet to see an explanation from anyone in the College Board camp about how the scoring process would accommodate the influx of non-college bound students. The SAT scores have to be massaged each year based on the total results form the students-- but those students are self-selecting the students who intend to go to college. It is no slam on the current test non-takers to suggest that they will likely come in on the low end of the scale, and not simply match the curve of the usual college-bound SAT customers. What will that do to the proprietary curve magic that the SAT uses to turn raw scores into SAT scores? How will it affect the all-important percentile mapping? I have no idea whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing, but it does appear to be a thing that nobody has offered an explanation for yet, and from a company that apparently couldn't even vet all its test items before unleashing them on unsuspecting customers, that seems problematic.

Officials can try to sell this move by saying repeatedly, "We got rid of that awful PARCC you hated! Isn't that great!!" But telling someone, "We're not going to steal your wallet after all," is not good news if you follow it with, "Instead, we're going to burn down your house."

And the suggestion that this will cut down on all that test prep time is nuts. Illinois students were already trying to adjust to the substitution of the SAT for the ACT. The College Board may be on its way to a sweet, sweet revenue hike here, but they will be followed closely by SAT tutoring services.

Illinois is not the first state to make this boneheaded move, and they may not be the first to figure out it was a bonehead move. Let's see how long it takes the opt-out organizations to get right back into action.

Which Reformy Thing Most Needs To Die 2 ?

A little over two years ago, I took a look around the reformy landscape to judge which pieces of the Giant Ed Reform Monster were actually the largest threats to public education in this country. Now that time has passed and arguments have shifted, I thought it might be a good time to take another look. Ratings were given in hydra heads, rating to what degree each policy was an Evil Bloodsucking Monster That Must Be Killed scale.


VAM

Previous rating: 10 EBMTMBK

VAM remains one of the great threats to public education. And I want to be clear-- when you threaten the professional existence of public school teachers, you threaten public education. If you try to drive all the doctors out of practicing medicine, you are degrading and attacking health care in this country, and when you try to de-professionalize, de-stabilize and de-stroy teachers in this country, you are degrading and attacking public education. At this point, from its rejection by assessment and education professionals, to its defeat in court, VAM has shed any possible pretense of being a legitimate means of evaluating teachers and stands revealed for what it always was-- a way to destabilize the profession and get rid of public school teachers. It remains one of the big threats to public education.

EBMTMBK= 10


CHARTERS

Previous rating: 5 EBMTMBK
Well, I missed this call. I predicted that the modern charter movement would fall victim to its own failures. I seriously underestimated the degree to which charters would use lobbying, marketing, connections and money to keep themselves in business. So now we sit with the cyber-charter industry proving to be an abject failure and under attack even by the rest of the charter industry, and still no law-makers are seriously proposing to just get rid of the hugely expensive failed cyber-school experiment. Charter schools have proven to be cockroaches-- cockroaches that breathe free market fire and chew through all the electrical cables in the basement. In many places, the charter movement poses a threat to our very definition of public education, threatening to turn public schools into a dumping ground for Those People. And in other places, the charter movement poses a threat to the very existence of public education at all. The biggest irony is that it doesn't have to be this way-- charter schools could be a force for good in the educational landscape. But not as long as they are engines for using faux free market forces to chew up schools and turn them into money-making operations run by education amateurs. In terms of preserving the entire institution of public education, charters may be the biggest threat we face.

EBMTMBK= 15


TFA

Previous rating: EBMTMBK 7
It turns out that all anyone had to do to defuse Teach for America is just pay attention, watch, and listen. Recruitment is down, and broad-based criticism of their ever-shifting mission(s) is up. Many of their friends in high places have moved on to new scams ventures, and the young people with a sincere desire to Do Some Good who were once TFA's bread and butter-- those young people are more often asking the right questions and concluding there are better ways to Do Some Good. What I wrote two years ago is even truer today: they're a blot on the profession, a destabilizing influence in the schools they descend upon, and a work force that unnecessarily prolongs the life of deserve-to-die charter schools. But they are shrinking both in size and influence.

EBMTMBK= 5


DATA MINING

Previous rating: EBMTMBK 9
Two years ago what I said was "Its specific threat to education is that it has shaped too much of what we do. Policy and curriculum decisions are made not on educational merit, not even on 'hey this is easy to do, anyway,' but because we want to structure things for best data generation and collection." That turns out to be an understatement. Some folks would now like to re-organize education so that it is all data collection, all day. We're selling it as personalization and project-based education and competency achievement, but mostly we're shuffling things about so that we can collect more data. So while this intrusive monitoring and collecting has always been a threat to our society and our citizens, it is likely become even more of a threat to the education system itself.

EBMTMBK= 11


COMMON CORE STATE [sic] STANDARDS
Previous rating: EBMTMBK 8
Common Core, as originally conceived, are dead. No national standards keeping all states on the same page. No national test that reflects and measures the standards. Hell, no test at all that truly reflects and measures the standards. And now that they've been out there in the field for a few years, the standards have been rewritten, retooled, tweaked, or just plain ignored by administrators, PD deliverers, publishers, and classroom teachers all across the country. The "common core" brand has been shamed and abandoned, and because of the tweaking and adapting, it doesn't really mean anything, anyway. Even people who still claim to support it have unofficially rewritten it on their own. Make no mistake-- a huge amount of serious damage is being done in the name of Common Core and/or its masked secret identity, "college and career ready standards." But the standards are no longer the point of the spear, but more like the butt. The shift to CACR standards has only compounded the problem for supporters, because nobody knows what it takes to be college and career ready or how to measure it, and any attempt to talk specifically just makes them sound dumb. Common Core is still dangerous, but instead of a well-organized marauding army, it's now more like a lost battalion of ragged soldiers who don't know the war is over yet.

EBMTMBK= 4


BIG HIGH STAKES TESTS

Previous rating: EBMTMBK 11
The Big Standardized Test has seen better days. It's under attack from many quarters, and it doesn't have quite the support it once did. Mind you, some people who have started attacking it are doing so only so they can replace it with something worse. The BS Test still has the whole-hearted (and only-partially-brained) support of the US Department of Education, but the law now recognizes, sort of, the parental right to opt out of the test. The new law also offers the chance to chip away at the BS Test's role as the only arbiter of teacher quality-- whether states take that opportunity or not remains to be seen. But the test has always been the keystone in the arch of Terrible Reformy Ideas, from judging teachers to "proving" that schools are failing to big-time data mining. It is losing those roles. It would be a mistake to stop fighting the BS Test, which still in most states and districts is the unofficial (narrow and crappy) curriculum plan. With continued pressure, we can strip the BS Test of its power to drag schools into the dark pit of test prep, but until that day comes, it still poses a huge threat to education.

EBMTMBK= 9


COMPETENCY BASED EDUCATION

Previously unranked
Two years ago, CBE was barely on my radar, and honestly, having lived through the early-nineties disastrous fiasco that was Outcome Based Education, I'm still kind of amazed that we're back here. But we are. What has changed since 1991? Computers, the internet, the cloud, the sheer raw data collecting and crunching power that a company like Pearson now has at its command. In a CBE world, neither teachers nor schools are necessary-- just students at their computer terminal being put through their software-controlled paces, each keystroke and answer filed away (and put to all manner of uses) in their new lifelong data record. Public education and citizen privacy would all be washed away. CBE fans are ju-jitsuing themselves some support for the approach (Quick! Run away from the evil test and take refuge in this CBE sanctuary over here!) and ESSA has opened the door wide for new "personalized" and non-BSTest-based measures of student achievement. I still think there are some serious hurdles in CBE's path, but if it clears those obstacles, we'll be looking at a huge threat to public education in this country (and the absolute end of teaching as a career).

EBMTMBK= 12

The Dem Platform, Randi, and Charters

The Democratic platform committee has been working away all weekend, reportedly till well past midnight. We've been fortunate to have some public education advocates there as part of the education committee, including Chuck Pascal and Troy LaRiviere.

Twitter had a little bit of a eruption today over what was finally submitted to the main platform committee regarding charter schools. The whole business is pretty brief and can be found on this gigantic slice of C-Span at about the 31:00 mark. But I've watched it, and if you don't want to, you don't have to.

Chuck Pascal (from Pittsburgh, just up the road from me, so woo-hoo) went to committee armed with many amendments, and this was one of them. He's listed as the sponsor.

First-- here's the original draft language, with additions in blue:

Democrats are also committed to providing parents with high-quality public school options and expanding these options for low-income youth. We support democratically-governed great neighborhood public schools and high-quality public charter schools, and we will help them disseminate best practices to other school leaders and educators. Democrats oppose for-profit charter schools focused on making a profit off of public resources. We believe that high-quality public charter schools should provide options for parents, but should not replace or destabilize traditional public schools. Charter schools must reflect their communities, and thus must accept and retain proportionate numbers of students of color, students with disabilities and English Language Learners in relation to their neighborhood public schools. We instead support increased transparency and accountability for all charter schools.

(Let's just set aside for a moment the issue of the omitted Oxford comma in the amendment.)

Next, Randi Weingarten steps up to speak in support of the amendment. She's delighted that the education section started with a unity amendment and will now end with one. And then she yells a bunch, because that's Randi. Democrats should be for high quality schools regardless of zip codes (and fierce finger pointing-- she must have some serious guns) and regardless of economic status. She says that there's a place for public charter schools (which puzzles me, because ALL charter schools claim to be public but virtually NONE of them actually are), but not for things like Detroit where Big Bads like the Devos family and the Kochs are using charter schools to kill off public schools. She winds down with blah blah blah level playing field blah blah good schools for parents to send  children, teachers to work students to learn blah and so here's the amendment.

So how'd she do? There's still a lot of charter love in Randi's speech, and with the exception of her use of  "democratically-elected" there's not much she said about the amendment that she couldn't have said about the original rotten language. But she and this amendment do make a new kind of distinction-- that when charters disrupt and displace traditional public schools, that's a Bad Thing. Which is a remarkably direct challenge to the modern charter model, which says that disruption and displacement of the public school system is the goal. It's the closest I think I've heard a national union leader get to saying, "The goals of charter proponents are bad, destructive, wrong goals." So I'm happy for that.

Now if she wants to take her pointed attack on Detroit a step further and also challenge what's being done in New York and Connecticut and say things like "What happened in New Orleans after Katrina should never have been allowed to happen," then we'd really have something.

But to original platform definition of Bad Charter was just "a for-profit charter" which seriously overlooked the point that non-profit charters are just as bad (and profitable) as the for-profits. This new language defines a Bad Charter as one that does not have democratically-elected governance, does not serve the exact same population as the the local public school, and that destabilizes or damages the health of that local public school."

In other words, the new language offers a much broader understanding of when a charter school is Not Okay than the draft did.

Sure, there are some of us who would like to see Bad Charter defined as Any Charter At All-- but that blanket condemnation just brings us back to supporters saying, "Well, why? What's wrong with charters." I would much rather, you will excuse the expression, hold them to some specific high standards, and this language, while not perfect, does that.

Now, I don't know how well Weingarten grabbed that. I don't know how well she embraces the change in the definition of Bad Charters she just presented-- it's not what she focuses on in her presentation. I don't know if she understands that the language now condemns most charter schools that exist.

But there are two more speakers. One is a very nice lady who wants to point out that she's proud of her party and that charters don't take care of children properly and I think she means well but doesn't necessarily understand the choreography of these sorts of gatherings.

Then Chuck Pascal himself steps up and puts emphasis back on the ways in which this new language makes demands of charter operators.

And then the language is passed and we're moving on.

Is it perfect? No. Is it better? Yes. Does it call out the full frontal assault of charter schools on traditional public education and demand that the assault stop? No, it doesn't-- and neither will Hillary Clinton, ever. Will this document make the slightest bit of difference a year from now? No, no, it won't. It's amendment by addition, which means everybody can still point to the parts they like and ignore the parts they don't.

I look forward to hearing from Pascal and LaRiviere what it took to get even this small shift in the party platform's direction-- Pascal says his other amendments were adopted without change, but this one took some negotiating. I can't imagine it was easy. I would count it as a small win, a baby step forward, a shift in a better direction. We've got language on the table that gives a broad definition of Bad Chartering, a definition that encompasses most of the charters out there, which is a hell of a lot better than the bogus "for profit" distinction. Advocates for public education showed up, made some noise, and got the establishment to budge, even if the establishment may not get how they budged, even if establishment intends to keep trundling along as if they never budged at all.

Come November, public education is still screwed-- but at least for one moment, we got the Democratic Party to sort of pay attention to real, substantive criticism of charter schools. "It could have been worse" is not a phrase I live by, but still, this could have been worse, and in this election cycle, I think that's as good as it's ever going to get. But sucking less and not sucking at all are still two different things.

CA: K12 Caught Lying and Cheating, Again

K12, one of the giants of the cyber-charter biz, has reached a settlement in California after being slapped for lying about student enrollment and student achievement. K12 and California Virtual Academies collected about $310 million in money from the state over the last twelve years (and those are largely Californis tax dollars diverted to the Virginia HQ of K12); the settlement will cost K12 $168.5 million-- sort of.

K12, a for profit company, provides the curriculum and programming for CAVA, a non-profit cyber charter in California. As part of the settlement, K12 must cancel $160 million in "credits" that CAVA "owed" it and which represented part of the crushing debt that K12 saddled CAVA with. In addition, it must pay $8.5 million to the state.

In April, the Bay Area News Group published some serious investigative reporting that examined just how badly K12 was soaking the taxpayers of California. Soon thereafter, K12 was under investigation by the California Attorney General's office, which found that the company and its affiliated schools submitted inflated student enrollment figures (or, as we say in the regular world, lied) in order to collect more money from the state. The investigation also found that the parent company leaned on the schools and pushed them to get themselves in deep debt. And then there was the matter of advertising:


"K12 and its schools misled parents and the State of California by claiming taxpayer dollars for questionable student attendance, misstating student success and parent satisfaction and loading nonprofit charities with debt," [Attorney General Kamala] Harris said in a statement. "This settlement ensures K12 and its schools are held accountable and make much-needed improvements."

For its part, K12 continues its history of stonewalling and denying all misbehavior. K12 CEO Stuart Udell said that K12 didn't misbehave, was totally already going to take some of the corrective actions required by the state, and furthermore, the AG was "overstating" the cost of the settlement. Udell is a longtime player in the charter biz-- he holds business degrees from Bucknell and Columbia and has run Kaplan K12, Renaissance Learning, and Catapult Learning before taking the head spot at K12. In other words, no experience in education, but lots of experience in making money from education.

Those sixty corrective actions include doing away with giving recruiters incentive pay for each student enrolled and making sure that its advertisements aren't filled with lies.

And in keeping with recent trends in the charter industry, the California Charter School Association spoke up-- on the side of the state. CCSA spokeswoman Emily Bertelli called the settlement "a good start."  

None of these sorts of shenanigans are new for K12. Back in 2012, Florida (a state not exactly known for its aggressive regulation of charters) was investigating K12 for using uncertified teachers and for grossly inflating its student numbers (in one case, a K12 manager told a teacher to sign off on a list of 100 students-- the teacher only recognized seven names on the list). 

In Pennsylvania, Agora cyber charters were, like CAVA, cyber-schools that hired K12 to provide programs and management, and K12 almost lost them their charter all the way back in 2009 by mismanaging tax dollars. By 2014 the parent company had become so toxic in PA that Agora took the unusual step of threatening to cut ties to K12. It tells you something about the nature of the charter biz that the news of Agora's proposed defection was widely covered in the investment world. Never mind the educational implications-- what will this do to the stock price?

When North Carolina was looking at allowing K12 into the state, a dozen CAVA teachers wrote to list the various misbehaviors, including failure to provide services for students with special needs.

In recent years, K12 has lost its management contract with Colorado Virtual Academy and was shut down for low performance in Tennessee. And remember back in 2014 when the NCAA said it would no longer accept coursework from the K12 cyber charters?

K12 has been around so long that it's easy to slip into thinking that any such long-lived operation must be basically legit, but year after year, the evidence rolls in that K12 is a scam, a business devoted not to educating anybody, but to using an education-flavored product as a means of hoovering up as many public education tax dollars as they can get their grubby hands on-- without much regard for what means they use to get it. The California legislature is reportedly considering some law changes to tighten the reins, but at this stage of the game, why is anybody allowing cyber charters at all? They have repeatedly failed to produce real educational results, and while there are a handful of students out there who can benefit from cybers, allowing for-profit chains into the field has simply made it ripe for lying, cheating, and general scamming of taxpayers.