Can We Filter Out Bad Teachers?

Last February, Chad Aldeman and Ashley LiBetti Mitchel, working at Bellwether Partners (a right-tilted reformy-favoring thinky tank) released a report that asked the question "Is it possible to ensure teachers are ready on day one?" and answered that question in the title: "No Guarantees."

Now Aldeman is back with a look at some specific tools for filtering out the chaff, raising the bar, and pre-selecting the best and the brightest. The results fit snugly into the folder of Things Teachers Already Knew and Have Been Trying To Get Someone To Hear For Years, but that's okay-- let's take a look, and the next time you need to discuss this kind of baloney, you'll have some legit-ish research right at your fingertips.

Aldeman lays out the problem in a sassy tone that I have to respect:

First, there’s a lot of interest in “raising the bar” for the teaching profession. It’s not clear what this means exactly, but at root it implies that if we could somehow just recruit better people to become teachers, then “poof!” we’d have better teachers.

So Aldeman first looks at the beloved Praxis exams (and their various descendants). Full disclosure-- I can mock the Praxis exams because I am so old. How old am I? I'm so old that I never had to take the Praxis. But I've watched plenty of student teachers sweat it.

You will be shocked to discover that research shows no super-strong correlation between Praxis results and teacher effectiveness (and as always, I'll note that we aren't really talking about teacher effectiveness at all, but the test results of students assigned to that teacher-- but at the moment I'm playing in the reformster sandbox, so we're stuck with their rules). Looking at a couple of state comparisons (because states can set different "passing" scores for the Praxis), researchers found that on average, teachers who did well on the Praxis generally had higher effectiveness than those who scored poorly on Praxis, but the differences are tiny and the "on average" hides wide ranges of results.

Nor does it make a difference whether we're talking Praxis I or Praxis II.

There are plenty of possible explanations of why the lack of predictive Praxis power, but I think we can go with the obvious. The Praxis measures a math teacher's ability to take a standardized multiple-choice math test, not their ability to teach math. If you want to get your carburetor fixed, you don't give mechanics a multiple-choice test to take-- you find someone who does a good job working on carburetors. If you need a doctor to fix your spleen, you find someone who is known to be good at operating on spleens, not somebody who's good at taking multiple choice tests about spleens.

It's true that at the very bottom, a test may be helpful. Someone who can't get any questions right on the math Praxis probably doesn't know enough math to teach math. But once we get out of the basement, we are trying to find the best apples by seeing which ones make the best orange juice.

Aldeman asks the question-- if a bubble test isn't the right model, then how about something more open-ended. How about, for example, edTPA?

Well, here's a research paper looking at edTPA and math teachers and-- whoopsies-- other than a general overall average trend as we saw with Praxis, edTPA doesn't really tell you anything about the value-added prospects for that proto-teacher (and VAM doesn't tell you anything about anything, but that's the tool the researcher chose). The scatterplot looks like someone sneezed on graph paper.

Aldeman is looking for a policy tool, something that policymakers can impose on the system to filter out more bad teachers. I'd submit that Huge Problem #1 is that we have exactly zero zip zada tools that can assess the effectiveness of teachers in the field. If I can't tell a good apple from a bad apple when they're in front of me, how will I ever tell them apart when they're just buds on the tree?

But even when we use the tools for detecting effectiveness currently preferred by reformsters, Aldeman concludes that there is still no useful policy tool available. States that use Praxis or edTPA to keep some people out of the teaching profession are barring people who would be effective teachers, and admitting other people who aren't so hot. Which makes these tests bad policy tools.

Should we give up? Aldeman says no, but we have to shift "the locus of control should shift from states to districts." Because as Aldeman also notes, "what’s useful for a district may not be actionable in policy, because picking the best option between two possible teachers is a different question than whether those teachers deserve to enter the profession at all." He's absolutely correct. I would add that the best option between two teachers is also a question that has a different answer for each different district.

I also agree with his conclusion--

...states should stop trying to do the impossible in finding the “right” bar to keep people out of the teaching profession.

You cannot standardize teaching, and you cannot standardize the requirements for becoming a teacher. Each local district has to make the best choices its local leaders can make, based on interviews, demonstrations, portfolios, recommendations, all filtered through the professional judgment of the local decision-makers. It is not perfect, but as the saying goes, the only thing worse is every other method. 

Why Are Teachers Burning Out?

It has been half a year since Campbell Brown took over the LA School Report, but the site still occasionally publishes something that's not bunk. Reader Bill Spangler brought this next piece to my attention, and it's worth a look.

"Why Teachers Are Burning Out" is the second in a five-part series about teacher turnover. The first piece in the series looked at how high the LA turnover is and what the costs are, and managed to do so without suggesting that this is actually a good thing or it would be helped by removing tenure. The series is being written by Jane Mayer, a former teacher with both public and charter schools in LA, and Jesse Soza, a former teacher who did a dissertation on origins of teacher dissatisfaction and turnover.

The second entry is actually pretty short and clear and I'm not inclined to argue with it. After surveying some data and experts (including teacher workforce guru Richard Ingersoll), the writers move to a pretty simple statement of the issue:

Could it really be so simple that all teachers need to stay in the classroom is to feel heard, respected and empowered?

Yes.

When there is a workforce that is intelligent, well-educated, compassionate and committed to service, the best way we can honor them is to trust them to do their jobs. Trust them to teach what needs to be taught, trust their experiences in the classroom are valuable sources of information, trust that they are experts at teaching.

While I'm a little puzzled about how Brown ever let this run in her publication, that doesn't change that I would like to offer the authors a small round of applause. Because there in about 80 words is the whole secret of teacher turnover, retention and burnout. Everything else-- decent pay, empowerment, seats at the fabled table, job protections, the end of high stakes testing and government interference-- everything else is just working out the details.

Mayer and Soza note that the current state of education is not based on that respect for and trust in educators, and that top-down reform has made a mess. "As I have heard again and again from teachers around our city and state, our current education system actually keeps them from the being best versions of themselves as educators."

But they also offer an important insight-- top-down reform cannot be cured by more top-down reform. "As much as we want to, we cannot change the system through new legislation, new standards or new protocols." I think they're half-right here-- the system cannot be fixed by top-down reforms, but the top-down crap that is currently choking education can be best removed by the people who created it. We can't remove, for instance, high stakes testing at the grass roots-- we can only create the pressure for the people who installed that system to dismantle it.

But Mayer and Soza argue that individuals, working form the bottom up, can address three major factors in teacher burnout, the "three conditions that undergird the reasons that teachers are leaving our classrooms at a staggering rate." See if any of these sound familiar.

1. Feeling powerless—and that your work is meaningless.

This is particularly brutal for teachers, most of whom entered the field specifically to make a meaningful difference. Feeling powerless, stripped of the ability to make a meaningful difference in student lives because you're too busy implementing programs and reading scripts and giving tests and doing nothing except what you're told to do-- that is miles away from what most teachers signed up for. The message for school leaders is simple-- if you want to keep teachers, give them power.

That's a tricky one, because some administrators aren't feeling very powerful themselves. And administrators often have trouble actually handing over power, preferring to just lend it, or demanding that the power be used only in the ways they choose (which is, of course, not giving up power at all). In his Cage Busting Teacher book, Rick Hess argues, sort of, that teachers can take power, kind of, as long as they're polite and proper about it. Personally, I've long argued that teaching has become a kind of guerrilla warfare, but that kind of rebelliousness is hard to come by for teachers, who are often inclined to be proper rules followers.

The attacks on education (from people like, ironically, Campbell Brown) are not just corrosive because they attack the profession as human beings and professionals, but because they attack it specifically by justifying the disempowerment of educators. The refrain throughout modern reform has been "teachers are terrible" but the unspoken second half of that sentence is "and that's why they should have no say in what happens next." 

2. Feeling like the norms on the campus are overwhelming and ineffective.

Many teachers feel suffocated by the teaching profession because of the intrusiveness of curriculum, district and federal mandates, behavior management systems, state testing and a constant re-vamping of all of the above. Very few of these “norms” are ever generated by the adults on school campuses, and that disconnect creates a sense of disempowerment. 

In other words, this is really just another flavor of the powerlessness issue. The rules, both official and unofficial, are not very helpful for the business of educating children. In some cases, they actually work against educating children (looking at you, Big Standardized Test). But teachers don't get to sit at the table where these decisions are made. They just have to live with them.

3. Feeling isolated.

When you have no power in the system, no say in what happens, you disengage. And when you disengage, you become isolated. Personally, I'm an introvert with a capital INT, so isolation is not hard to lean into-- but if you lose the connection and community in a school building, it gets even harder to get things done and to have any sort of power at all. Your local union may or may not be the answer, but teachers need some kind of authentic community, and they have to make the effort to create and maintain it.

The series promises to investigate each of these three factors in its upcoming segments. I'm looking forward to seeing exactly what they have to say, because fighting teacher burnout and dropout is becoming one of the big issues of education, and we're not always inclined to talk about it because it feels selfish. But if the hemorrhaging of teachers from the profession is going to end, we have to talk about this stuff.

Let The Vergara Whining Begin

Vergara is dead (probably, mostly).

The California lawsuit brought by gabillionaire anti-union, pro-charter reformsters has finally had a well-deserved stake driven through its non-existent heart.

When the appeals court shot it down, the determined that while one might imagine that in some imaginary alternative universe without tenure laws, students might get better teachers,  

the statutes do not address the assignment of teachers; instead, administrators—not the statutes—ultimately determine where teachers within a district are assigned to teach. Critically, plaintiffs failed to show that the statutes themselves make any certain group of students more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than any other group of students.

The petition to have the appeal heard at a higher level court has been denied.

There are interesting points to be found in the decision and the dissents. For instance, one dissenting judge argues that while some classes of students are getting a churning mess of less-than-awesome teachers, that doesn't appear to have anything to do with tenure, but is instead "because they were enrolled in a distressed school district."

A conservative observed way back when Vergara was first decided that this case could turn out to be a tactical error (I don't remember which one-- sorry, writer for whom I'm not giving full credit for prescience) because Vergara underlines the state's obligation to provide decent schools under "equal protection." And reading this decision, I am struck that the case-- even in the dissents-- could end up saying, "No, you can't sue the state for having a tenure law, but you could probably sue it for underfunding poorer school districts." In which case the whole business could boomerang back in the faces of the folks who were hoping to use Vergara to weaken public education.

But mostly the folks who were banking on an eventual upholding of Vergara are sad.

Take, for instance, Jeanne Allen. Allen is the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform, an organization that has been yipping regularly for the crushing of teacher unions and the sweeping aside of public education in favor of charter schools. I'm on CER's emailing list, and their response to Vergara's death was swift and senseless. Here's the whole thing, minus the press releasy opening graph:

"At a time when innovation and opportunity are so desperately needed in education, it’s astounding to think that hiring and firing decisions are based on artificial parameters such as how many years an educator has been in the classroom. It’s a huge disservice to kids. Our schools need the freedom to staff their institutions appropriately to meet students’ ever-changing needs.

"The California Supreme Court has inserted legal rights that otherwise do not exist. In doing so, they relegate too many children badly in need of a great education to ineffective schools and ignore the science that a great teacher can make a difference in the life of a child.

"Tenure discourages great teachers by protecting those who might not be able to keep their job if they had to prove their success. This decision is bad for aspiring teachers and bad for kids."

Yes, being able to hire and fire teachers at will would totally drive innovation because... reasons? It's the Dread Pirate Roberts School of Management ("I'll probably kill you today.") But then, Allen also assumes that hiring and firing are only based on years of experience-- wait-- hiring is based on years in the classroom??!! In fact, firing is pretty much always on turning out to be bad at teaching. Now, maybe she means layoffs based on years of experience, but as we see in places like Chicago, that's not even true everywhere. At any rate, we know that the traditional system promotes stability and protects the district's investment in teaching staff. 

Second paragraph? Well, that of course is what Vergara failed to do-- that tenure (I know, I know-- we should be saying "due process protections" but "tenure" is what most civilians think this is about) has anything to do with maintaining quality education. And while nobody would argue that good teaching is good for children, the "science" presented at the trial was bunk.

Allen would also like to reassert the notion that aspiring teachers would be more interested in teaching if they knew that they would never have job security and could be fired at any time for any reason. Because that's what really gets people interested in devoting their lives to a line of work.

Oh, and I almost forgot-- the heading for this whole thing "Sad Day for Teachers' Rights in California." Because, you know, at the end of the day, Vergara was about protecting a teacher's right to be fired at any time for any reason.

I could point Allen to research like Eunice Han's paper showing that a strong collective bargaining actually increases the likelihood that "bad teachers" will be fired, but Allen doesn't really care about public schools, teachers, or the students who attend public schools-- she's just to rip down public ed and push profitable charters. If she did care about anything except charter growth, she would be questioning things like the chronic underfunding of some schools, or asking how better to hold onto great teachers and get their best work out of them (spoiler alert: you don't do it by threatening to fire anyone at any time for any reason).

I don't want to spend a lot of time doing a happy dance about Vergara's ultimate fate, but the whole business is a reminder that in the public ed debates, there are reformsters who are thoughtful critics who reach some terribly wrong conclusions with reasonably good intentions. Then there are people like the bankrollers of Vergara and Allen, who are just vandals who want to tear down teaching and public education  so they can gain some power, make a buck, and never have to listen to anyone disagree with them ever again. Vergara was a bullshit lawsuit with no real purpose except to shut up and shut down teachers, further weakening public schools in California. Its defenders were increasingly driven to rhetorical ploys that defied all logic and sense and actual facts.

There's no doubt that they'll find new outlets for their nonsense (Allen has been peddling her baloney-laden wares on Twitter to support Massachusetts' Let's Make More Charter Operators Rich bill), but at least, once the last few tantrums are over, we won't have to listen to any more Vergara-based foolishness. All the parties who were oh so interested in Vergara could stick around to have a real discussion about how to actually strengthen public education in California. Go ahead and place your bets now on how many will actually do so-- or whether we're just going to be treated to more shenanigans to try to get to the federal level. 

John Oliver on Charter Schools

I hope you've seen this by now. But if you haven't, or you just lost the link, or you were going to get around to it someday, then watch it now. Oliver does not address the philosophy behind charters, the types of charter malpractice like No Excuses, or the ways that charters leech money from public schools. But boy does he nail the corruption, the lack of oversight, and the distinction-without-a-difference of for-profits and non-profits. This is one of those things you want to pass on to all your civilian friends so they can begin to Get It.

How Do Unions Really Affect Schools?

Back in February, Eunice Han at Wellesley College put out a paper entitled "The Myth of Unions' Overprotection of Teachers: Evidence from the District-Teacher Matched Panel Data on Teacher Turnover." Han reaches some really interesting and, perhaps for some folks, counter-intuitive findings, and they're worth a look.

But full disclosure right up front-- I can't really make sense out of her methodology. Han takes sixteen pages just to explain how she did what she did, and it includes all sorts of economist equationing and data mumbo-jumbo that is just plain beyond me. Things like this:

Han has a Ph.D. from Harvard and she has, no kidding, an impressive bucket list. And I can follow the reasoning behind her data crunching, but not the crunching itself. And if her findings seem vaguely familiar, it's because they have been covered elsewhere (check out this interview with Han from Edushyster). But there are some pieces of research that are worth re-blogging about. You say "redundant;" I say "amplifying the message."

So here are the conclusions Han reached with her data crunching.

Union Strength Affects Teacher Pay-- But So Do Other Factors

Much to nobody's surprise, districts with stronger collective bargaining units end up with higher-paid teachers. Generally that "wage premium" is paid for teachers with the most experience.

However, there are other factors that figure in. Districts with a high percentage of minority students pay their teachers more. But teachers who work in districts with a large student population, and teachers who work in districts with a large free/reduced lunch enrollment are paid "significantly less." And of course, where collective bargaining is illegal, teachers get paid less (so those legislators who have stamped out collective bargaining have achieved one of their goals-- congratulations, you cheapskates). As has been pointed out innumerable times, the "right to work" does not go along with the "right to be paid a great wage."

Union Strength Affects the Dismissal of "Bad" Teachers

But not the way you would expect it to. To listen to the rhetoric of the past years, one would think that unions are out there building fortresses around the worst teachers, allowing those terrible teachers to commit professional malpractice, suck the brains out of students, and kill puppies with impunity. Changing the system so that Bad Teachers can be gotten rid of has been consistently raised as one of the great educational concerns of the age, and unions have been painted as the principal obstacle to the bad teacher jettisoning.

Not so, says Han. It's a little more complicated than that.

from Han, The Myth of Unions' Overprotection (2016)

So, high collective bargaining districts fire the largest number of their new, untenured teachers. And schools where there are no collective bargaining rights at all fire the fewest of their new hires before they can become tenured. No collective bargaining schools also fire the largest percentage of tenured teachers.

There's actually an economics rule for this, which basically says that the more you pay for something, the more inclined you are to demand quality. True for toasters, new cars, and, Han asserts, for hiring teachers as well. Districts that pay big-- well, bigger-- bucks are more inclined to make careful use of their tenure system, says Han.

Union Effect on Retention

When it comes to teacher retention, districts with strong collective bargaining do the best job of holding onto their people. Districts with no collective bargaining are most likely to lose teachers through voluntary departure.

Han also notes that voluntary retirement is a U-shaped curve, with most folks checking out either very early in their career or after many, many years. This fits with an assertion many have long made, which is that what mostly happens to Bad Teachers is that within a year or two they look around and decide they want to get out of dodge. While reformsters search for punishments that will drive bad teachers out, the best discouragement for any person is to return day after day to face a roomful of students one is not equipped to teach. Teaching badly is really hard on a person, and very few people can stand to teach badly for more than a year or two.

Union Effect on Quality and Achievement 

Let me lead with the usual disclaimer-- we aren't really talking about teacher quality or student achievement. We're talking about test scores, which is a useful metric for almost nothing. But it's the metric many folks love, so let's see if-- by their metric-- unions have any kind of effect.

Surprise. Teachers in the high collective bargaining schools were 5% more likely to be high quality teachers than those in the no collective bargaining schools. Student test scores are maybe a bit better; unionism seems to have no real effect on the dropout rate.

Restricting Bargaining Rights and Retaining Teachers

Taking away bargaining rights causes many teachers to start looking for greener pastures. We needed an economist to figure this out?

Other Conclusions? 

Han's observation is that strong collectively bargained pay systems do a better job of attracting and retaining teachers than things like merit pay and performance bonuses. Also, a strong union results in less turnover of staff, which provides more stability for the school and students.

In short-- where you find a stronger union, you will find a stronger school district.

Now, I do see some caveats here. Some of Han's data is five years old, which is a lot of time in the current climate. I am also wary that with all these factors flying around, there may be some confusion between correlation and causation. Strong unions may be a symptom of a strong school community, and not a cause.

But that doesn't change one significant part of the findings-- the notion that busting unions will make schools better has absolutely no data to support it. "If we could just get rid of the union, we'd have better teachers in our schools," is bunk without a leg to stand on. Reformsters should welcome one finding here-- Han's work finds one more way to support the notion that schools in poor communities are not getting the best teachers in their classrooms. What reformsters may not like is the notion that one way to strengthen those schools (beside, you know, getting the government to fully fund them) is by strengthening the local union.

Imagine that. Test results come in showing a struggling school, so policy makers and legislators and school leaders put their heads together and say, "Well, we need to call the NEA and the AFT and see how we can get a stronger union in these buildings." Wouldn't that be an interesting new approach to school reform.

Resolve To Be Present

For the next couple of weeks, as the beginning of my school year approaches. I'm going to write to renew my resolve to keep focus in my practice. This is one of that series of posts.

If teaching is about relationship (and I believe most definitely that it is), then it must follow the First Rule of Relationships, which is that the first thing one must do to be in a relationship is show up.

There are any number of reasons that one has not shown up. Stuck in your own head. Distracted by issues from outside of the time and place you're currently occupying. So used to doing something that you no longer think about it, but just go through the motions.

We know some of the cliche versions of absence. The person who is so stuck on either a great or a terrible moment in the past that they fail to move into the present, repeating like a closed loop the tale of either a former triumph or an unreleased wrong. Or the person who is waiting for life to begin ("Once I get through X, I will be ready to really start living.")

The person who just doesn't want to be here, for whatever reason. And so, in their head, they're not here. And for some of us, it's easy to get lost inside our own heads for no particular reason at all.

We make excuses, sometimes without even knowing it. In my first marriage, I somehow had it in my head that having made a commitment in the past, that business was locked down and taken care of. This, it turns out, is stupidly and self-destructively wrong, like saying, "Well, I ate last week, so there's no need to eat this week."

But no-- you have to show up and be present every day. Really listen, look, see, pay attention, and not just as a disconnected observer sitting somewhere in a bunker in the back of your head. You have to bring all of yourself into the room.

This is a tricky balance for teachers. Your classroom is not all about you; you are the least important person in it. Nor do your students benefit from being the porters for whatever emotional baggage you're carrying today. Being present for a teacher means somehow pushing through and beyond ego without simply numbing all sense of self.

When I was starting out, I would do this thing where, if something came up, some question, some issue, whatever, I would basically leave the room to go figure out how to respond. My physical form was still there, but I was not there, and I didn't come back until I'd figured out the right thing to say next. Add that to the fact that I am not by nature a wild and dynamic person, and it was easy for my students to conclude that I was one of those just-going-through-motions teachers. What I have taught myself to do is stay in the room and verbalize. Instead of working it out in another remote headspace, I do it in front of them. "Dang. I don't know. What would be the way to approach that? I remember one example-- anybody ever heard of--?"

That's me. Presence takes different adjustments for different people. Some folks cover their absence with silence, and others cover their absence with noise. But what presence requires is attention and honesty.

I draw the line this way-- at the end of the year, I think my students should have little idea of the specifics of my life, but they should have a good idea of what sort of person I am.

Presence is one more way in which teaching reminds me of performance. I imagine it's similar for athletes. There's a whole world of stuff that we carry around with us, stuff that distracts, that stings, that numbs, but when the lights come up and the show starts, every bit of us is right there, present and focused in that moment. In that moment, what we're doing gets everything we are.

It sounds like a lot of work, I suppose, but there are benefits. One of the biggest is that in those moments in which we are really present, life is more vivid and full and rich and interesting. I teach teenagers, who struggle with the problem of being bored bored bored bored, and I've talked about some version of all of this at some point every year, because I'm convinced that presence is the antidote to boredom. That being where you really are and being all there and all in is infinitely more interesting than wishing that you were somewhere else, or waiting for something to drag you out of yourself into the moment.

All those things we say we want to do-- engage, excite, inspire, inform students-- can be most easily done when we show up, when we are present in the classroom. Not waiting for Saturday or planning for tonight or tuning out Pat's incessant droning or just wandering off in our own heads, but present in this moment and place, focused and purposeful and present.

Always a challenge for me. This is my reminder to me to be there, fully and honestly.

Feds Testing Plan, Part II (Still Clueless)

You may recall that almost a year ago, President Obama and his administration announced that they'd noticed that testing was out of control in schools, and maybe somebody should do something about that. (Actually, if your memory's good, you may recall they had the same epiphany two years ago.)

This led to the announcement of a Testing Action Plan that did not so much rearrange deck chairs as it combed the fringes on the pillows on the deck chairs. The administration position on out-of-control testing has remained--

1) The bad testing is all that other stuff that's going on, not our stuff
2) Big Standardized Tests are still an absolutely crucial part of education
3) Teachers, students, schools, and maybe college teacher prep programs should be judged by BS Tests
4) We have no idea why schools and teachers started acting as if their entire careers depended on test results. We cannot imagine how such an idea got around.

But the Testing Action Plan had seven big guiding principals that were going to get the testing monkey off America's back.

1) Tests must be worth taking.
2) Tests must be high quality.
3) Tests can only take up 2% of the student year.
4) Tests must be fair (aka all students must take the same one)
5) Tests must be fully transparent for parents and students
6) Tests should be used with other multiple measures
7) Tests must be used to improve student learning

In the last year, we've accomplished on #4, which is the item on the list that absolutely shouldn't be accomplished. The rest of these? Bupkus. Zip. Zero. In fact, the only thing that has happened on the list of Things To Improve the Testing Situation is this one

8) Congress will pass a new ESEA that takes away some of the Department of Education's power to be an intrusive, oppressive, test-demanding agency.

And we still don't know how that's going to shake out. Most notably, the new law says that 95% BS Test participation is absolutely required, even though it also says that parents totally have the right to opt their children out of the test. I suppose both could be true. The feds could be saying that parents have a right to opt out and states have a responsibility to punish them for doing so. Keep your eyes on New York, where a concerted state effort resulted in opt out numbers going up last year. Will the feds punish New York? Will New York punish the districts, or the parents and students of those districts? Let's all pay attention. Remember-- a law that nobody has the guts to enforce is kind of like no law at all. And that is how bad laws die.

But I digress. The Department of Education is back, ready to "build on" last October's plan with a new Testing Action Plan sequel. 

As has often been the case, the plan rests on a grant competition (because if something is worth doing, it's really only worth doing a select few-- everyone else can just sit in the winners' dust moping). This year USED will be "focusing on working with states to improve the quality of testing items, ensure effective public reporting of scores and results, and reduce unnecessary testing."

"The President's Testing Action Plan encourages thoughtful approaches to assessments that will help to restore the balance on testing in America's classrooms by reducing unnecessary assessments while promoting equity and innovation," said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. "This grant competition is the next step as part of that plan, and will help states and districts improve tests to allow for better depiction of student and school progress so that parents, teachers, and communities have the vital information they need on academic achievement."

And that is an impressive mountain of baloney. This is a failed weather person who says, "You know, we've put way too much emphasis on using reading the bumps on toads for our predictions, so we're going to fix that by getting better toads, coming up with new ways to examine the lumps, and typing the predictions in a new font."

A "thoughtful approach to assessment" would start by asking which assessments might best yield useful information; a "thoughtful approach to assessment" would not start with the assumption that such assessment has to take the form of a large-scale standardized test. The Feds are thoughtfully examining everything except their fatally flawed premise-- that a Big Standardized Test is the best way to get a good depiction of students and schools progress.

Pro tip, guys. It's not.

When done well and thoughtfully, annual assessments can provide meaningful information and provide clear, objective and actionable data that can be used to improve academic outcomes and promote equity for educators, families, the public, and students. 

Yeah, I'm not sure that's true, at all. In terms of "actionable data" for "improving academic outcomes," there's probably nothing much worse than a single annual assessment. It is possible it could be used to help "promote equity," but only if it were followed by a useful response ("Clearly this school needs additional resources and support from government-- let's get them the help they need") and not a useless one ("Hey, this school is failing, so let's cut it off at the knees and get some charters in here so that a tenth of the kids can get into a nice private school that helps some hedge fund guys make a buck"). And if you start with the question, "How could we best improve equity in this country," nobody;s first answer would be, "With a standardized test!"

So what exactly will the USED be looking for in this next race to the trough?

The Department will select winners that demonstrate a focus on (1) collaborating with institutions of higher education, other research institutions, or other organizations to improve the quality, validity and reliability of state academic assessments; (2) gauging student academic achievement using a variety of measures; (3) charting student progress over time; and (4) evaluating student academic achievement through the development of comprehensive academic assessment instruments, such as performance and technology-based tools.[numbers inserted by moi]

1) Note "or other organizations," as that opens the field up to test manufacturers like Pearson. Give this credit for being an achievable goal, as making BS Tests more reliable or valid is as tough as making a desert more wet.

2) Well, that's sufficiently vague to mean anything at all. But it probably doesn't. Heck, it could even admit the cool new business of assessing whether or not the student is a good person.

3) More data storage, and like 2, an invitation to competency based education platforms to join the fun.

4) Did I say "invitation"? This is more of a promise to pick CBE up at its apartment and drive it wherever it wants to go.

Applications for the grant are due by late September.

Here's a list of things the administration doesn't know.

1) It doesn't know that an assessment instrument has to be created to collect particular data for a particular purpose, and that if you use the assessment for some other purpose, it's as counterproductive as trying to drive screws with a jigsaw.
2) Creating a large-scale assessment that can just be used for a whole bunch of stuff is like thinking that the only tool you need is a hammer.
3) Saying "we're going to use computerized technology" first and then figuring out "for what" second is backwards, and likely to yield technology that nobody uses.
4) Standardized tests are not useful for measuring anything except a student's ability to take a standardized test (though they can also show socio-economic background).

The grant competition is for a whopping $8.86 million, and maybe I've been reading about too many elections lately, but that seems like chump change once you've divided it up between states. Also, the Department expects to announce the winners in January, 2017, and, I don't know, isn't DC going to busy with a few other issues right around then? I can hardly wait to see where this "test enhancement" falls on the new administration's to-do list.