Grade Inflation?

Mike Petrilli (Fordham) is concerned about grade inflation.

His concern, as expressed in a recent piece at Education Next, is hung on the hook of a recent-ish survey by Learning Heroes, a new group sponsored by the same old folks (Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Helmsley) that has partnered with some other outfits funded by the same people, like Great Schools (funded by Gates, Bloomberg, Helmsley, Walton) to help sell the notion that Big Standardized Testing is Really Important and we should care about it.

The Learning Heroes survey found that 90 percent of parents believe their child is performing at grade level or better. As you might expect, I don't put a lot of stock in what Learning Heroes have to say, but I can believe that their finding on this point is not far off the mark. Setting aside the construct of "grade level" (as Petrilli also does), I'm not sure that this finding doesn't say more about parental love than parental academic acumen. Sometimes we lose sight of how a poll actually works, but I ask you to imagine for a minute-- a stranger calls you on the phone and asks you to say how smart and accomplished your child is. What do you say? "Yeah, my kids kind of slow and behind," probably isn't it.

But for Petrilli, this feeds into a narrative that reformsters have been pushing for over a decade-- the public schools are lying to parents about what is being accomplished.

Providing a more honest assessment of student performance was one of the goals of the Common Core initiative and the new tests created by states that are meant to align to the new, higher standards.

That's Petrilli's polite way of putting it. Arne Duncan, you will recall, said that white suburban moms were going to be upset to find out their kids weren't as smart as they thought. At one point reformsters were trying to sell us the Honesty Gap, a method of crunching numbers to determine just how much your state education system was lying to you. This has been the recurring narrative-- your teachers, your schools, even your state, has been lying to you about how well your kids are doing, and only federally crafted standards backed up by Big Standardized Tests can tell you the truth.

Pertrilli is no dope; he understands the challenge here for testing industry salespersons

Conscientious parents are constantly getting feedback about the academic performance of their children, almost all of it from teachers. We see worksheets and papers marked up on a daily or weekly basis; we receive report cards every quarter; and of course there’s the annual (or, if we’re lucky, semiannual) parent-teacher conference. If the message from most of these data points is “your kid is doing fine!” then it’s going to be tough for a single “score report” from a distant state test administered months earlier to convince us otherwise. After all, who knows my kid better: his or her teacher, or a faceless test provider?

He dismisses the old test reports as impenetrably complex, and touts instead the new, improved PARCC reports, which a transparent in the sense that one can clearly see that they provide next to zero useful information.  But Petrilli argues that these reports soft-pedal the real results, and that we should look sixth graders in the eye and give them the cold hard truth. Nobody, he says, wants to incite a riot and "tell parents to grab a pitchfork and march down to their school demanding an explanation for lofty-yet-false grades their kids have gotten for years on end," but on the other hand, he says, "maybe they should."

This is the new pitch. Grade inflation. Petrilli has been asking folks to chime in with a possible solution to the grade inflation problem. My response, when asked, is that first I have to be convinced it exists.

Petrilli's basic argument is that grades are high and BS Test scores are low, therefor the grades must be inflated. There are several problems with his assumptions here.

1) He assumes that the Big Standardized Test is an accurate instrument for measuring student achievement. There is virtually no reason at all to believe that is true, and many many reasons, from the narrow focus to the multiple choice approach to the just-plain-lousy questions.

2) Even if we assume that, say, the PARCC is a good, solid, reliable, valid test-- which is a huge ungrounded assumption, but let's play along-- we still have to face the first hurdle, the problem of getting students to take the BS Tests seriously. We repeatedly discover that they do not.

3) Even if we assume that the BS Test is a "good" test and that the students tried their hardest on it, we still don't have any evidence that a good score on the BS Test is an indicator that the student is headed for college success and a good life thereafter. Petrilli touts the "predictive analytics" of Ohio, but all that boils down to is a way to use previous performance on a standardized test to predict future performance on a standardized test. Big whoop. When Taking Standardized Tests becomes a lucrative career option, then we may have something here.

Petrilli wants parents to understand that their kids need to "step it up" and hopes that we see a day when As and Bs are only handed to those who are on track for success. But that opens a whole other question-- are grades supposed to be a predictor of future success or a measure of current achievement?

Well, let's set all that aside for the moment and consider his main issue-- is there grade inflation happening?

My completely unscientific answer is, "Probably maybe in some places." There may well be grade inflation on the lower end of the scale, where teachers may feel pressure to make sure that too many students don't flunk their class (particularly if dealing with the kind of learning support department that demands that students with special needs be passed No Matter What). Schools that practice the business of allowing students to just keep redoing work until they pass might fall under this category, as might schools that use social promotion to move on elementary students for reasons other than academic achievement. The problem in addressing all of these cases is that we have no objective yardstick by which to measure what a student should "really" be receiving as a grade (and as much as reformsters would like PARCC, SBA, etc to be that yardstick, they fail miserably at the task).

It's a complicated problem with no easy answers, made more tricky by the fact that "grade inflation" often occurs through the mechanism of overruling the judgment of the classroom teacher. The whole topic is worthy of discussion.

Meanwhile, there is supreme irony in Petrilli's raising of the issue. We know where the most extreme and notorious grade inflation has occurred over the past few decades-- in colleges and universities. And it has occurred, arguably, because of the unleashing of market forces. College students and their families have come to see themselves as customers and are comfortable declaring, "I didn't give this school $100 grand of my money just to see Junior end up with Cs and Ds in classes that I pay for. Fix it!"

This is, of course, precisely the sort of market force that Petrilli and other charter fans want to unleash in the K-12 world, transforming families into "customers" who must be kept happy if the charter wants to avoid losing revenue. Giving families the ability to "vote with their feet" unleashes the very forces that contribute to and push for grade inflation in schools. Let's add that to the discussion. 

USED, Pay for Success and Stupid Pre-K Plans

The United States Department of (Privatizing) education is touting another boneheaded idea, this time aimed at preschool and using yet one more unproven approach-- pay for success.

What is that, exactly? Here's the explanation from the USED FAQ page:

Pay for success (PFS) is an innovative contracting and financing model that aims to test and advance promising and proven interventions while paying only for successful outcomes or impacts for families, individuals, and communities. Through a PFS project, a government (or other) entity enters into a contract with an Investor to pay for the achievement of concrete, measurable outcomes for specific people or communities. Service providers deliver interventions to achieve these outcomes. Payments, known as Outcomes Payments, are made only if the intervention achieves those outcomes agreed upon in advance. The government (or other) entity makes Outcomes Payments to repay Investors for the costs of services (and sometimes other projects costs) plus a modest return. Ideally, Outcomes Payments amount to a fraction of the short- and long-term cost savings to the government (or other) entity resulting from the successful outcomes.  

Pay for Success is the zippier nom de guerre of Social Impact Bonds. If you want my "for dummies" explanation, you can look here. If you want a grown-up's fully detailed explanation, complete with sad history, I recommend this piece by Tim Scott.

The basic idea is this. The government gets an investor to foot the bill for what's supposed to be a government program. Then if the task is completed successfully for less than the government had set aside to do the task, the government reimburses the investor for the program costs and as a bonus, the taxpayers' "savings" are magically transformed into the private investor's "earnings." It is this big time version of telling the babysitter, "Here's ten bucks to get supper. You can keep whatever change there is."

Let me rattle off just a quick list of why this is a dumb way to do business in the-- well, it's actually a dumb way to do just about any sort of business, but let's stick to why it's a dumb way to do business in the education sector.

1) It literally sets the interests of the contractor against the interests of the children. Every dollar that the contractor spends on children is a dollar the contractor doesn't get to keep.

2) It builds a system around doing the absolute least we can get away with. "Spend the least you can get away with," say Social Impact Bonds, "to get the lowest acceptable results." Nobody tells their children's school, "I want to know that you are spending the least money you can get away with to get the minimum acceptable education for my child."

3) If it remains in place, it guarantees that somebody is going to get screwed. Go back to the baby sitter example. I learn that the babysitter has successfully (or at least acceptably) fed my children for seven bucks. Why would I continue to hand her ten? Once we have established the cost for which the job can be done, all future negotiations will be about how much profit for her I build into my suppertime financing. If a Social Bond program were ever to succeed well enough to last longer than a year, that would put the government in the position of deciding how many taxpayer dollars the contractors would be handed as profit, and either the taxpayers or contractor gets screwed.

4) It not only encourages, but actually requires metrics for success that are simple and simplistic and completely inadequate for measuring actual success in a complex system like education.

5) It adds a not-very-helpful extra layer of bureaucracy. The investor deals with the government, and the contractor of the service deals with the investor. This creates a nice layer of plausible deniability for the government when the programs violate any rules-- kind of like when famous celebrity Chatty Talksalot hires a McCorporation to make her branded clothing, and McCorporation in turn hires subcontractors in the Third World to run a sweatshop, and then Chatty can say, "What?! I had no idea!" 

USED would like to graft this Pay for Success idea onto its terrible ideas about preschool, as captured in just one paragraph from their press release:

We should have a greater focus on evidenced-based practices, on measuring and improving outcomes for our youngest learners, and more incentives for promoting innovative approaches that promise to further improve child outcomes.

As we've seen, "evdience-based" is a meaningless weasel phrase. And as soon as we start talking about "measuring and improving outcomes" for four-year-olds, we are just plain full of it. Four years olds do not need to sit down and take a test so that their outcomes can be measured. They do not need to be run through academic based programs. They need to play. They need to explore. And they need to do it in an environment in which they are not required to demonstrate "outcomes" to officious adults.

PFS is not a substitute for government funding, but a different way of providing government funding –one based on rigorous evidence of impact once positive outcomes have been achieved. 

Baloney. There is no "rigorous evidence of impact once positive outcomes have been achieved" with four year olds (probably not with sixteen year olds, either, but let's set that aside for another day). There is no evidence base to indicate that the USED has a clue what rigorous evidence of preschool success would look like, and of course for a PFS program, it would have to look like something simple and easy to measure.

So if we tell McCorporation "We'll give you a hundred bucks for every kid who scores better than 75% on this reading test," what do you suppose the preschool program is going to look like? Not like anything that a small child actually needs to experience. This is a terrible idea for taxpayers, small children, and their families. But it's an awesome idea for investors who want to hoover up some of those sweet, sweet education tax dollars.

16 Policies for the Next President

Bellwether Education Partners, a reliably reformy right-tilted thinky tank, recently issued a compendium of policy ideas for the next President. "16 for 2016" comes with sixteen writers and sixteen ideas, though it's not entirely clear which candidates it's aimed at-- presumably not Hillary, whose contacts among the right-leaning world of corporate education privatizing are probably better than Bellwether's, and presumably not Trump, who neither takes nor comprehends advice.

Hmm. What do all these policies have in common?

So let's think of this as both a thought experiment and a look at the kind of policy ideas reformsters will be pitching to Congress, as well as a signal of the kinds of things reformy types would like to push these days. I have read this so that you don't have to, but since there are, in fact, sixteen of these things, I am going to summarize pretty brutally here.

1) Seed More Autonomous Public [sic] Schools

Sara Mead argues that we've proven that bad urban schools can't be turned around, but (citing a 2015 CREDO study) some charters do some better with some students similar to the urban poor students. So instead of trying to turn around low-performing schools, let's just open a bunch of charters to replace them. This is not so much about improving education as it is about opening markets to charter profiteers.

2) Transform School Hiring

Chad Aldeman has a point-- many schools have crappy hiring practices. He observes that it is a homegrown business, with the majority of new teachers working within twenty miles of their home town. And if you read here regularly, you already know how much I agree with this:

Despite complaints of a “teacher shortage,” districts act like the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to teachers, and they treat teachers as if they’re immune to financial incentives. 

Aldeman recommends adding performance tasks to the hiring process (something that many districts do "unofficially" by using hopefuls as substitutes before finally hiring them). Why is any of this part of recommendations on the federal level? Because some of these ideas are costly, and Aldeman suggests some federal grant incentives to help districts, particularly poor ones, do better.

3) Bring the Blockchain to Education

Oh, this dumb idea again.

Technocrats are sure that teacher professional development can be handled just like bitcoins, and that we can just plug teachers in to earn badges that show their competencies. This is a dumb idea for so many reasons, but the biggest one is that this kind of competency-based learning ignores what we know about authentic assessment. My earning of a badge doesn't measure any competency except my ability to earn badges. On top of that, these sorts of proposals (many companies are working on this model) have staggering implications as far as data privacy-- to work we need to put everything there is to know about you in a data file, and that data file needs to be open to the world, all maintained by whatever corporation manages to win market control, partnered up with the federal government. What could possibly go wrong?

4) Share the Risk of Student Loans

Andrew Kelly checks in with a new idea-- make colleges and universities share the risk on the loans their students take out. Practically, speaking, this might mean charging institutions a percentage of the outstanding balance on "non-performing" loans. This might arguably make institutions more interested in keeping their costs affordable. Kelly acknowledges that it would also give them an incentive to take very few low-income students who would be more likely to default on their loans. Colleges and universities point out that this holds them accountable for behavior completely out of their control. I'd like to point out that it would also give colleges and universities an incentive to cut programs that don't reliably lead to big loan-paying incomes.

5) Get Schools in the Fight Against Child Sex Trafficking

On the one hand, definitely. The writers are absolutely correct in saying that schools should be a safe haven for students, and that the school community is a good place to both keep a watchful eye and inform people about what to watch for. On the other hand-- hell, one more social ill that schools have to somehow fix on top of everything else. Do you suppose someone will finance this, or will it be one more unfunded mandate?

6) Scale Great Mentoring to Reach More Kids

Steve Mesler, Olympic gold medalist and  co-founder of Classroom Champions, thinks that we should have mentors out there to help every students to "persevere like an Olympian" (and he has a company to work on it). Scaling up mentoring for all kids means "a shift away from the one-on-one model" to a (surprise) computerized online techy model. There are some folks with super-cool ideas. Just give them about $90 million of grant money and they will whip this right up for you.

7) Network Early Childhood Education Providers

The Head Start "network" is not getting the best results. Let other early childhood providers network, share best practices and, of course, drive it all with data while encouraging innovation. In other words, rip the early childhood biz out of the cold. clammy hands of the feds and surrender it to the warm, friendly embrace of private corporate providers. But keep that federal money flowing.

8) Give Good Food To Kids

Local foods for local schools. A cool concept, but as acknowledged by the writers, depends on the capacity of local farmers. The writers get into a lot of the wonky bits of this, and it reminds me that the US food system is a behemoth that has been both absorbed and seriously warped by huge corporate interests; in many ways, it resembles the future that corporate interests seem to have planned for education. So while I like the idea of Farmer Jones bringing his harvest to my school cafeteria, I'd need a lot of reassurance that we're talking about anything that homey and simple.

There's also a bit here from Tom Colicchio (yes, that one) talking about putting quality over cost, which is another idea that I like except that, of course, the cost factor will be fought tooth and nail. He offers some wonky info about procurement procedures that might help.

9) Make Competitive Grants Work

Yes, sure. Also, make pigs fly out of my butt. Competitive grants are a hallmark of the Obama administration, and they work exactly as you would expect-- the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the rewards go to the people who are good at the grant-grubbing process, not the people who are good at education. Juliet Squire suggests that the process would be better if the feds were more clear about accountability and implementation, and if they didn't require that grant applicants propose unrealistic goals. Those are not bad ideas, but they don't address the fundamental badness of the competitive grant idea itself.

10) Build Charter Schools Like Affordable Housing

What James Wilcox means is not "build charters like crappy, poorly-maintained housing that nobody who had a choice would choose." What he means is "offer lots more tax credits to people who build charter schools." These would presumably be over and above the generous breaks offered under the New Markets Tax Credit that allows investors to double their money in seven years. Because throwing money at public schools is terrible and stupid, but throwing money at charters is awesome and smart.

11) Connect Career and Technical Education to Real Post-Secondary Opportunity 

I'm a huge fan of CTE-- while other parts of the country are trying to get it back, here in my region it never left and it has always been super-excellent education for many of my students. And any such program benefits from a high school version of a job placement program.

However, what Alex Hernandez reminds us is that there's a slim line between offering job placement services for students and turning a CTE program into a taxpayer-funded training program for specific industries and employers. Hernandez suggests that we could even go as far as apprenticey programs (we call them work release here) where students leave school and learn in the workplace. All of this is great as long as the school system maintains its commitment to the students and NOT to their future employers.

12) Provide Sector Agnostic Federal Support for Schools

Andy Smarick's argument is detailed and developed, but it boils down to one more privatizer plea for the feds to stop favoring public schools, which is pretty close to getting the feds to drop their commitment to a public school system in this country.

13) Expand Accountability in HIgher Education

This reformster argument always puzzles me, because the higher education system comes really close to their dream of a free market education system. But Michael Dannenberg loses credibility right out of the gate by citing the US News rankings. But he has an ear-worthy argument here about institutions of higher learning that have become endowment investment businesses with universities loosely attached-- and which somehow fail to reap the rewards of their funding wealth. He also scolds them for calcifying inequality rather than erasing it. He is perhaps oversimplifying (poor students fail to thrive at big time universities for reasons other than affording the education), but he has a point. Of course, part of his point is that the feds must interfere with this market and take a stronger hand in telling management how to manage and spend its money.

14) Creating Real Second Chances for At-Risk Youth

It's legit to note that some alternative schools are more holding pens for problem students than a legitimate attempt to find an alternative path to success. I'm less impressed that Gary Jones pivots from there quickly to the notion that the feds should finance more private (charter) schools to meet the need. Who exactly are we creating second chances for?

15) Give Education Power to Families

Ben Austin likes school choice. He pretends to be shocked that federal law does not explicitly note that education exists to serve the needs of children, on his way to making the old argument that schools put adult interests ahead of student interests. This is a bad argument based on a flawed premise-- public education was never about providing a service strictly for students, but about creating an American public that is educated and prepared to participate in a democracy. Students and their parents are stakeholders in the system, but so are future neighbors, employers, taxpayers, co-workers, and fellow voters. Austin would like the system to be changed so that it explicitly is all about the children and so that parents can file more lawsuits. He appears to want more Vergara's, and not ones that get reversed on appeal.

RiShawn Biddle wants more choice, because " we know that expanding school choice and empowering parents can be key to improving student achievement," which is a bold statement, a ballsy statement, a statement for which there is not a speck of evidence. Biddle wants a charter choice system, and he deploys all of the same old arguments, including all the ones that have been repeatedly debunked (waiting lists? really?).

16) Democratize Data

Aimee Rogstad Guidera is here from the Data Quality Campaign, an advocacy group for lots of folks who hope to make a bundle playing with data. She's here to argue that schools should be data mining like crazy, and using the two smoke screen arguments preferred by all the folks who want to make a mountain of money in the data mines-- parents need it, and teachers need it. This is baloney. Teachers are already prodigious collectors of data, and it is far more deep, wide, and nuanced than anything available from the  Data Overlords. Parents who want access to rich data about their children (you know-- the human beings that they have raised from birth and who live in the same house) can get ahold of the child's teacher.

Neither of the groups need the prodigious mountains of data argued for here, but talking about them is far less off-putting than saying, "If you let us collect all the data about your child, we can make a mint selling it to various other interested parties." And no-- I have no idea what it means to "democratize" data

So there you have it

Some points worth thinking about, and a whole lot of swift repackagings of the same old reformster profiteering sales pitches. As I said at the top-- Clinton already knows all of this and all Trump really wants is a tub of gasoline and a blowtorch, so I'm not sure to whom this pitch is aimed. But it's on the reformster radar, so it should be on our as well.

The Lesson of Detroit

Last week a group of children in Detroit, Michigan sued the governor, the state board of education, the superintendent of public instruction, the director of technology, management and budget, and the state school reform/redesign officer.

The lawsuit runs over 100 pages, but the table of contents provides a pretty clear outline of the argument:

1) Literacy is a fundamental right
2) The state of Michigan's role in securing educational rights (subheadings: it has one)
3) The failure to provide access to literacy in plaintiffs' schools
4) Failure to deliver evidence-based literacy instruction and intervention programs in plaintiffs' schools
5) Failure to ensure educational conditions necessary to attain literacy (including failure to provide course selection, to maintain a decent physical plant for education, to meet students' needs, to provide a supported and stable staff, and to demand accountability with charter and school closings).
6) The state's failure to implement evidence-based reforms to address literacy

The details and accounts of the state's failure is stunning, almost unimaginable, from a "lake" in a classroom cordoned off with tape to the math classes taught by an eighth grader for a month-- and that's not because nobody was paying attention, but because that was the solution the school came up with for their staffing issue.

A lot of outrage has been expressed as the lawsuit's details have spread, supported by photographs from many sources. Yesterday, columnist Nancy Kaffer tried to explain to Detroit Free Press readers what the suit was about and just how bad things are for the largely African-American student population of the five schools named in the suit. But here's the part of her piece that jumped out at me:

Detroit's traditional public school district (the former Detroit Public Schools, now the newly created Detroit Public Schools Community District) has operated under state oversight for most of the last 16 years. The schools haven't gotten better. Nor have schools removed from the old DPS and placed in the state reform district, the Educational Achievement Authority. Nor have, in aggregate, the charter schools that were supposed to offer parents better options (at the literal expense of traditional public schools) delivered on that promise. The State of Michigan played a strong hand in the creation of this three-part system, and so the suit argues that it is responsible for fixing it.

Michigan has run the entire table of reformster ideas-- takeover of the district, creation of an achievement district, and charter operators brought in to replace the publics. Detroit is now a reformy buffet. Moreover, Detroit should be a beautiful display of how well the various reformster policies work. Except that it isn't, because they don't.

Detroit is a case study in state authorities looking at a system in crisis and saying, "Let's try anything, as long as it doesn't involve actually investing money and resources in the children of Those People." Detroit has been a city in crisis for a while now, and that has allowed leaders to say, "We have a chance to fix education in this city and let some people make good money doing it. And if we can only get one of those things done, well, let's go with the money-making one."

When a crisis happens-- a hurricane hits, the bottom is ripped out of a local economic driver-- that opens up a gaping area of need in a state, officials can respond one of two ways. They can call on people of the state to rally, to provide aid and assistance to the affected communities. Or, they can try to build some sort of firewall between the affected communities and everyone else, try to insure that everyone else is protected from any effects, any cost created by the affected communities. The citizens of a state are like mountain climbers roped together and hanging onto the side of a precipice. When one loses his grip (either because of accident, weather conditions, or because he was pushed), the others can either try to haul him back up, risking trouble themselves, or they can cut the dangler loose. If they're extra cynical, they can sell the dangler an umbrella "to break his fall," and congratulate themselves on having saved him before they cut him loose.

Michigan's leaders have treated the tragedy and decline of Detroit as an opportunity to sell umbrellas. They have stripped poor non-white citizens of democratic processes, of their very voices, while stripping critical systems like education and water for parts. The ship has been sinking and Michigan's leaders have decided to fill the lifeboats with bundles of cash rather than human beings.

Michigan's leaders have had the chance to try just about anything with Detroit schools, and they have tried everything-- except actually trying. They are a rich relatively at the hospital telling the doctors taking care of their sick family member, "Do anything it takes. Well, anything that doesn't cost any more money."

I find it striking that the lawsuit uses the language of reformsters, from "educational rights" to "evidence-based," and I do hope the lawsuit has legs (similar lawsuits have not fared so well in the past). But like New Orleans, Detroit is a reminder that what some reformsters say ("Let's try creative new solutions to provide education") and what they actually do ("Let's avoid spending any money on Those People-- at least not any  that we can't at least recoup as revenue") are two different things.

ICYMI: Catching up on your reading (9/18)

Money and race, money and race. Some weeks it feels as if that's all this is really all about. Remember to link and share and pass on the readings that speak to you. Everyone can amplify the voices they believe should be heard.

Will equity without adequacy be enough to help Connecticut's neediest children

Wendy Lecker looks at what is being done-- and not done-- to meet Connecticut's obligations to its children.

To Market, To Market 

Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) talks to Catherine DiMartino about some of the brutal realities of marketing in the education biz.

Breakdown of the Common Good

Ed Eiler writes about the threat of selling off the common good.

All Viable Solutions to Teacher Shortage Cost Money

Yet another writer reaches the not-mysterious conclusion that the teacher shortage mostly has to do with the desire to avoid spending money on education

When It Comes To Education Policy, This Is Personal

Mitch Robinson has joined the team over at Eclectablog, and that's good news for everyone.

How Gender Bias Affects Teacher Salaries

Do you suppose that teacher salaries are affected by the fact that teachers are mostly women?

Back to School 2016

Jersey Jazzman offers his back to school thoughts for this year. Made me feel better. You should read it.

Teaching the Next Generation To Spot a Con Artist

This Presidential election cycle reminds us of one of the more important aspects of education.

The Price Black Students Pay

How the no-excuses mindset hobbles young minds.

Did You Know Charter Schools "Bury Their Dead"?

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at some recent attempts by the charter industry to regain their footing after a long, hard summer, and what these attempts reveal about the flawed thinking of charteristas.

New Report on the Teacher "Shortage"

Back in the summer of 2015, we were all making noises about the coming teacher shortage crisis. (I even did a state-by-state rundown.) And it wasn't really new in 2015; lots of folks had called it sooner than that, looking at data like the college teacher program numbers.

Shockingly, things have not improved on this front. At the Learning Policy Institute,Leib Sutcher, Linda Darling-Hammond, and  Desiree Carver-Thomas last week released a study about current and future problems with teacher staffing. Their title--"A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S."-- gives you an idea of where they're headed.

There are some great features in this report. I highly recommend the interactive map, which lets you compare states on many of the salient issues with a click and a glance. For instance, the Teaching Attractiveness Rating (which rates the attractiveness of the career in the state and not how good-looking that state's teachers are) provides a quick visual answer to the question, "What would be the best state to go get a teaching job?" Oregon and Wyoming are at the top; Arizona and Colorado are at the bottom.

The full report is a whopping 107 pages, but in addition to the interactive map, there's a 16-page "brief." I recommend reading the report, but let me hit some highlights to whet your appetite.

First, the report actually gets the term "shortage" a little righter, defining a teacher shortage as " the inability to fill vacancies at current wages with individuals qualified to teach in the fields needed." Of course, that's not how laypersons understand the term-- to many folks "teacher shortage" means "not enough teachers." But as I have said many times, if I can't get anyone to sell me a Porsche for $1.95, that does not mean there's an automobile shortage. If I'm a brutally abusive misogynist, my inability to find a wife does not mean there's a woman shortage. If I prepare every meal by searing my menu items until they are black, charred, and inedible, my hunger is not an indication of a food shortage.

It never ceases to amaze me that so many acolytes of the free market refuse to see the invisible hand when it's smacking them in the face-- if you can't find enough teachers willing to work under your current conditions, that does not mean there's a shortage of teachers. You are your own problem.

Why can't we find enough teachers? 

The report considers the reasons for the "shortage."

Increased student enrollment is pushing demand for teachers all by itself. They predict a 20% growth in teacher demand per year moving forward from 2015. If nothing else were happening, demand for teachers would be increasing all by itself.

But of course other things are happening. The profession continues to hemorrhage teachers. The writers say that we're losing 8% of the teacher force per year. Of those leaving, only one third are retiring at the end of a teaching career. The rest are leaving before retirement age, " most because of dissatisfaction with aspects of their teaching conditions."

Meanwhile, the pipeline for new teachers is drying up. Anecdotally, I can report that several schools in my region, including a couple that originated as teachers colleges, are shutting down some or all of their education programs because of low enrollment. The writers say that if current trends remain undisturbed, we're looking at 200K available new hires in a world with over 300K teacher openings. And the number of re-entrants will not be enough to make up that difference.

The report points toward that attrition rate, saying that getting the pipeline worked up is not enough-- a big part of the solution is to hold on to the teachers we have (a real problem for states or districts that are still determined to fire their way to excellence).

Coming and Going (and always too soon)

The report offers four factors in recruitment and retention:

1) Compensation. Yeah, I know we're supposed to do it because we love the kids. But new teachers also want to be able to afford to have kids of their own, and teacher salaries have been backsliding since the 1990s, so that a college student looking at the future sees teaching as far less financially rewarding than other fields. Here's a brutal factoid from the report-- in thirty states, mid-career teachers who head a family of four are eligible for three or more public benefits programs.

2) Preparation. "A growing body of evidence indicates that attrition is unusually high for those who lack
preparation for teaching," says the report. This has bad implications for all the states that are trying to address staffing issues by letting anyone with a pulse have a classroom. This also gets back to point #1-- real preparation costs money, and lots of it, and prospective teachers may not want to go into debt in a field that makes it hard to pay debt off.

3) Mentoring and Induction. Really important, but requires a lot of care, time, and therefor money.

4) Teaching conditions. Teachers in high-poverty schools are twice as likely to leave, and that seems to link pretty directly to lousy working conditions-- and that doesn't mean the students. It means the resources, the materials, the physical plant, and the administrative support. "Beyond resources, teachers’ plans to stay in teaching and their reasons for actually having left are strongly associated with how they feel about administrative support, collegial opportunities, and teacher input into decision-making."

In general, the following factors are related to higher rate of teacher turnover-- being new, being non-white, having little preparation, working in a high Title I school, teaching special ed and ESL classes, teaching in high-poverty schools, and teaching in the South.

And when it comes to frustration with teaching conditions, lack of autonomy and high-stakes testing are biggies.

So what should we do?

What would a paper about the teacher "shortage" be without policy recommendations? Here are a few.

1) Create competitive, equitable compensation packages. The writers suggest that compensation be beefed up and that it be weighted depending on the students and the school. This is hugely controversial, and yet teachers actually talk about it all the time. "I'm an English teacher who takes home papers every night, while that phys ed teacher who takes nothing home ever gets paid the same. Grrr." or "I could take my science background out into a private sector job for $50K tomorrow-- why shouldn't I be paid more if I'm worth more on the open market?" We keep these discussions to ourselves because we know it's rude and that a system in which teachers compete with each other for the limited tax dollars funding the school-- well, when you talk about work conditions, nobody wants to work in teacher thunderdome.

Is there a way to do this fairly? I don't know, though I do know that some school districts pay learning support teachers a stipend for the extra hours spent writing IEPs. We know merit pay doesn't work for any number of reasons, but I also know that a teacher working in a tough urban school that serves a high-poverty neighborhood ought to be paid more than average, yet probably gets paid less.

2) Enhance the supply-- particularly in certain areas. Offer forgiveable loans and service scholarships. Work to recruit, particularly from the area that needs the teachers. Create residency models in hard-to-staff districts and schools. These are all swell-ish, but they ignore the biggest issue of all-- make teaching conditions less crappy, including giving back teachers their autonomy and doing away with crappy timewasters like the BS Tests.

When you talk about recruitment in teaching, you have to remember one thing that is unique about the job. Unlike any other profession, almost every potential future teacher gets twelve years of job shadowing. The conditions under which current teachers labor are what the next generation of potential teachers think normal. Talk to any teacher and she will tell you about the teacher who made her see how exciting and full of possibilities the career could be. However, no teacher will tell you, "Yes, I saw the chance to devote myself to bubble testing and bubble test prep, and I saw how I could have a job where I'd be a glorified clerk, making few decisions for myself, and boy, I thought, that's the job for me."

Every teacher in a classroom right now is either a recruiter or an anti-recruiter. That's why retention efforts count double-- not only do you keep a good teacher and, with some effort, encourage them to be better, but that teacher in turn becomes a recruiter of the next wave of teachers. Every teacher who leaves the classroom because she Just Can't Take This Crap Any More takes a whole raft of potential future teachers with her.

3) That's why this one-- Improve teacher retention, particularly in hard to staff schools-- is so hugely important. Reformsters who see retention efforts as a clever trick to give the Evil Union more goodies need to open their eyes and take off their anti-union rage glasses. The paper suggests stronger mentoring, better school environments, and better principals. Again, we should also get the elephant out of the room and do away with high stakes testing and other crap that robs teachers of autonomy, of the chance to actually use their professional judgment.

4) Develop a national teacher market. Probably not. The best source for teachers in a community's school is the people in that community. Yes, we need people who can bring an outside perspective-- inbred school staffs do nobody any good. But a national teacher market clearing house probably won't make a huge difference. On the other hand, the proposal of more easily portable teacher credentials and pensions would be a nice touch, as long a sit doesn't become a means of exporting the lousiest state's worst credentialling practices, which, given the number of states who are getting ready to put teacher credentials in cereal boxes, is a real danger.

Anything else?

Before leaders start complaining about how expensive this will all be, the report points out that about $8 billion is wasted each year because of teaching turnover.

I have no idea how they generated that number, but I do know that the root of the teacher "shortage" is the root of many other labor "shortages" in this country used as excuses to outsource. There is no real mystery to what it would take to Strengthen the Profession.

Money.

Not just money to pay competitive salaries (and I mean real competitive salaries and not just illusory salaries constructed to look competitive while actually keeping personnel costs down), but the money to reduce teaching loads so that teachers have time to mentor and support one another, money to make teacher training less prohibitively expensive, money to make sure that every teacher has all the resources and support necessary to be successful, and even money to provide more support staff so that teachers can teach. And, of course, sweeping away the soul-choking baloney of testing tyranny would mean that some corporations would have to give up some of their rivers of revenue generated by the testing octopus. We find millions to spend on testing, but refuse to spend any more money on schools or the people who work in them.

When a millionaire can't find a good gardener to work for $1.95 an hour with nothing but a single short hose and a micromanaging amateur supervisor and requirement to maintain the two-acre garden in just three paid hours per week, the solution is not to train more gardeners or lower the standards for the work. The solution is not out there somewhere in the world of future gardeners or factories where technicians are developing new plant seeds or in the nation's gardening schools. The solution is close at hand, right in the millionaire's wallet.

John King's Evidence-Based Revisionist History

The US Department of Education and Secretary of Education John King are out with a one-two punch of silly bureaucratic blather and revisionist history.

Friday's PR release carries the pithy title "U.S. Department of Education Releases New Guidance on Using Evidence to Strengthen Education Investments During Back to School Bus Tour" and it provides a handy link to Non-Regulatory Guidance about Using Evidence To Strengthen Educational Investments.

Punch Number One-- Some Friendly Guidance

So let's start with the blather. I'm not entirely sure what the word "investments" is doing in there, other than the Department's love for the business world. The twelve-page document is designed "to help SEAs, LEAs, schools, educators, partner organizations and other stakeholders successfully choose and implement interventions that improve outcomes for students."

The document covers two points-- how to implement this evidence-based stuff, and an explanation of what evidence-based means to USED.

The Process (and Irony)

Okay, listen carefully boys and girls, because this is some pretty heavy-duty stuff. Here's the process for implementing evidence-based interventions:

1) Figure out what problem needs to be solved
2) Pick a solution that looks like it would work
3) Get ready to implement the solution
4) Implement the solution
5) Check to see if it worked

Oh, and there's a graphic-- five balls in a circle with arrows pointing from one to the next. I think I speak for Americans everywhere when I say thank God there are federal bureaucrats out there willing to provide us with this kind of hard-hitting guidance, because God knows, we would all be out here spinning our wheel randomly. Granted, I've translated the Department's guidance into what I like to call "Plain English," but I am absolutely stumped as I try to imagine who was sitting in DC thinking that this needed to be published. Was someone sitting in the Department saying, "You know, I bet people don't understand that they should pick out solutions that will fit the problem. They're probably picking some other solution. Probably a bunch of school districts out there thinking they need a new math series to get their reading scores up. We'd better address this. Oh, and add a graphic."

Yes, there are people who mess this five-step process up-- but those people know perfectly well what the process is.

In fact (and here's the irony part), it's hard to imagine this document being produced by the process that it depicts. Which local stakeholders were consulted, what data collected that resulted in a needs assessment tat said, "School districts don't know the process for implementing programs." And then who scanned the world of possible solutions and said, "The best answer to this problem is to publish an encyclical with a graphic." And how will the department be following up on this to see if it worked.

See? The fact that you can list the steps of a process doesn't mean you can or will implement it (and there is a whole rant about the efficacy of competency based education that goes right here, but I can already see this is going to run long).

What Does Evidence Mean, Anyway?

This whole business leans heavily on the term "evidence-based," so the Department lets us know what that term means. Spoiler alert: not what a layperson would think it means. But that's not the department's fault-- the new ESSA has its own definition of evidence-based, and let's just say that it's a good thing this is not what "evidence-based" means to your doctor or a district attorney. Also, there's evidence-based and there's evidence-based, so let's consider the different varieties of evidence-based--

Strong Evidence means there's a least one good research paper that suggests the intervention will improve student outcomes (which, of course, actually means "raise test scores") or a related outcome (which means whatever you want it to). There should be no legit research that contradicts the findings, it should have a large sample, and the sample should overlap the populations and settings involved. In other words, research about rural third graders in Estonia does not count if you're looking for an intervention to use with American urban teens.

Moderate Evidence is one good "quasi-experimental study" and then all the other stuff applies. Not really clear what a quasi-experimental study is, but the department still considers moderate evidence good enough.

Promising Evidence requires a correlation study because (and this really explains a lot) even the federal government doesn't know the difference between correlation and causation. I just smacked my forehead so hard my glasses flew off.

Demonstrates a Rationale, like Promising Evidence, somehow doesn't appear on the No This Doesn't Count list. All this means is you can make an argument for the practice.

All four of these are enshrined in ESSA and the US Department of Education's heart as "evidence-based," even though a layperson might conclude that at least two of them are sort of the opposite of evidence-based. Hell, by these criteria Donald Trump is currently mounting an evidence-based campaign for the Presidency.

Punch Number Two-- And Now, John King in Bizarro World

"We have made major progress during this Administration in directing investments in education to evidence-based strategies," U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said. "Relevant, rigorous evidence must be an essential part of a strong framework for decision-making. We hope this guidance will help decision makers as they consider, choose, implement, and refine their strategies to support students."

Um, no.

This administration has given us

* support for Common Core
* forced implementation of Big Standardized Tests
* insistence that results of BS Tests be proxies for student achievement
* required use of test scores as measures of teacher and school quality
* advocacy for and investment in charter schools
* mandate for "fixing" students with special needs by just expecting them to do better
* endless push for computerized learning
* policies based on premise that students who get higher test scores will get better jobs, better life
* assertion that school districts and teachers routinely lie about student achievement
* list of approved and allowable strategies that must be used for "failing" schools
* extension of federal oversight and management of state and local school systems
* Race to the Top
* School Improvement Grants
* and other program based on the notion that competitive grants are the best way to fuel improvement


None of this was evidence-based, not even by the fuzzy definitions above. In fact, the more evidence rolled in, the less evidence-based any of it appeared to be. To call this bureaucratic basket of baloney "evidence-based" or "successful" requires a disconnection from reality that would make Don Quixote look hard-nosed. If it's a deliberate lie an act of political spinsmanship, it is a whopper of trumpian dimensions.

The last eight years ended with Congress, a body that has been incapable of bipartisan agreement on anything, bipartisanly agreeing that the Department of Education had overstepped and screwed up. I suppose we could argue that the Department was "successful" in that it pushed Congress so far that they finally got off their butts and re-authorized ESEA. But that reauthorization included an actual attempt to take power away from a federal department, something that happens roughly as often as parades of unicorn-riding yetis on Pennsylvania avenue.

The Tour

This is all part of the most recent part of the Opportunity Across America tour, in which King takes a bus ride while cheering for high quality education, uplifting teachers, and affordable college. It is a push for the idea that education will end poverty, yet another assertion that is not evidence-based. It's also doubly damaging because it suggests that the entire battle against poverty and poverty's effects can just be dumped on the schools and no other efforts need be made.

King has done several of these. I have a new theory about why he keeps taking these road trips-- I believe that King is searching for the portal back to the alternate universe that he keeps describing. I have no real proof or data to back up this theory, but I'm going to go ahead and call it evidence-based anyway.