Is Pre-K A Waste of Time?

There's plenty of research out there wrestling with the eternal question-- does pre-school actually make any difference in the long run?

It's an important question, but it's important to pay attention to exactly how it is being asked, because that little bit of nuance has everything to do with what policymakers think Kindergarten is supposed to look like.

As reported by Brookings, of all places, there's an instructive entry in the pre-K research sweepstakes. This one is from Tennessee, and it says that, no, pre-school doesn't make any difference in the long run. In fact, it might even make things worse.

Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey, professors at Vanderbilt’s the Peabody Research Institute, have been following 1076 small children for several years. Over 700 made it via lottery into pre-school. Through various statistical pairing legerdemain, the researchers were able to allegedly compare the progress of similar pre-K and not pre-K students. Hinted in a 2013 "early look" at the research, and more solidly underlined in 2015 "full release," the pre-schoolers not only lost their edge by the end of first grade, but by third grade were actually lagging behind their non-pre-ed peers.

So what the heck happened? The key, as always, is in what you think qualifies as "doing well" in primary grades.

By the end of second and third grade, control group children did better on academic tests than treatment group children.

Academic tests? Well, there's your problem. If you think that a good pre-K is one that gets those four year olds ready to do well on a standardized reading test, well, I'm tempted to say that you're an idiot, but let's go with that you have a woefully inadequate grasp of developmentally appropriate learning activities for small children.

Since the first advent of Common Core, developed by folks with no experience or understanding of child development and created by a system of backwards scaffolding ("If we want them to bench press 100 pounds in twelfth grade, then we should start with five-year-olds bench pressing fifty pounds and add four more pounds every year"), we have heard a steady chorus of folks explaining that the expectations for small children are bananas, cruel and wrong. But perhaps the argument that reformsters need to hear is that these early academic expectations just don't work, as witnessed by the Tennessee study. In fact, they opposite-of-work, teaching a whole generation of students from the very first day that school sucks and is boring and miserable and, shockingly, it turns out that tiny humans don't really put their whole heart and soul into sucky boring things.

The signs are everywhere. In Dallas, schools are trying "wiggle chairs" and balance balls so that students can fidget around. Helps their concentration and focus, say some teachers. Well, yes. You know what else would help? Recess and play. This is like cutting out school lunch time, noticing that students are distracted because they are starving, and concluding that the solution is to let them suck on rags soaked in salt water.

"Assessing" tiny humans is hard. Look at this description of a tiny human assessment system from Teaching Strategies, a company that markets TS Gold to early childhood teachers.

TS Gold requires early childhood teachers document how students are performing in 66 individual categories, while kindergarten teachers evaluate their students in 31 categories....To document how students are performing on these points, teachers must either upload a photo, a video, and/or enter anecdotal notes. For a kindergarten teacher with a small class (25 students), that is 2,325 pieces of evidence. Once documentation is done, each student also must be scored.

This is reminiscent of AltSchool, a school created by a Silicon Valley wunderkind that depends on near-continuous child surveillance, captured and collated by the magic IT guy behind the curtain.

There are two unexamined assumptions behind all of this foolishness. One is that education for the littles can only count if it is somehow converted to data that adults can feast on, and the other is that getting a head start on academic achievement and test-taking is more important than getting a head start on being a human being.

What is most frightening to me about all of this is that tiny humans do not have the adult compartmentalization skill of separating work or school from the actual world. To tiny humans, school and pre-school are the world, and if we teach them early on that the world is a miserable place filled with drudgery and soul-numbing pointless activities-- well, that doesn't lay much of a foundation for a happy, healthy future, does it.

How many sources and studies would you like to read showing that children need play? Here's the first one that turns up on a google search. Here's an entire website for an entire organization devoted to developmentally appropriate activities for children. It's not like the value of play and running and dirt and any degree of unquantifiable childlike wonder is not already known-- it is known, both in the cold hard scientifically proven way and in the warm mushy whole human heart way.

Universal pre-K continues to be touchy. On the one hand, it is a wide-open field where, unlike the K-12 biz, businesses do not have to sweep aside pre-existing public institutions. Many, many politicians have stepped up for universal pre-K, but then the whole business can take a nasty twist when, as in Massachusetts, citizens decide they would like to tax rich guys in order to pay for the pre-K.

But a debate about pre-school is meaningless without clear statements about what exactly we want to support. A pre-school that is child-centered, developmentally appropriate, and unconcerned about meeting academic benchmarks is an excellent investment and worth providing every tiny human in the US. But a pre-school that is meant to prepare tiny humans for the world of academic-driven, test-centered schooling, or a pre-school that has its success measured in primary grade test scores-- that pre-school really is a waste of time.

Are High Standards Leading To Better Outcomes?

The Collaborative for Student Success was created to help push the Common Core State Standards, and it remains devoted to that goal, proudly announcing "The Results Are In: High Standards Are Leading to Better Outcomes," a headline we can take just about as seriously as a headline from the Ford PR department announcing that the new Ford Taurus Is Awesome!

CSS is an astro-turf advocacy group, a group built with money from the usual suspects to push the Core on the rest of us. The list of funders includes the Broad Foundation, ExxonMobile, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, and, of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its website lists it as a project of the New Venture Fund, a group funded by Gates to support the Core "through comprehensive and targeted communications and advocacy." You can check out more connections courtesy of the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, but you get the general gist-- these guys exists only to try to convince us all that the Core are wonderful.

This, of course, does not mean that they cannot possibly say True Things, so while we have to view these Results that are In with a suspicious eye, we can still evaluate their actual merits, if any.

The Results are pretty much meaningless, or possibly alarming. Here's the main claim:

Among third grade students – students whose entire academic careers have been guided by high standards – math scores increased by more than three percentage points.  

Let me rephrase that just a bit.

Among third graders-- students whose entire academic careers have been spent taking and prepping for the Big Standardized Test and who have never known a school that was not organized around testing-- math scores were better than they were for students who only had two, one, or zero years to be prepped and practiced for taking the BS Test.

There. Fixed that for you.

Delaware Governor Jack Markell, New Mexico Secretary of Ed Hanna Skandera, and CSS Executive Director Jim Cowen lined up to try to sell this big, fat nothingburger.

“Success in this economy requires a higher level of training and skill development than ever,” Delaware’s Gov. Jack Markell remarked in a press event on Tuesday...

Note that Markell just reduced the purpose of education to simple job training. Then note that at no point in the press conference do any of these worthies make any meaningful connection between greater skills and higher scores on a standardized test. Are they suggesting that the ability to score well on a standardized math test is a skill that's highly valued in the workplace? Because I'm betting not so much.

The big lie in the headline is the phrase "better outcomes," because there is only one outcome, and that is higher score on a narrow standardized test, an outcome which is largely meaningless. The almost-as-big lie in the headline is that these higher test scores are the result of "higher" standards when the most likely explanation is that students more saturated in test prep and practice tend to score higher on that test.

But the biggest omission in this piece of PR fluffery is an examination of the cost.

So we got third graders to score a few points higher on the test. What did it cost us to do that? Not just financial costs, though I'm sure there were plenty of those. But other costs as well-- how much recess was sacrificed, how many hours of art or music or phys ed or science or play? How much time was spent trying to get small children to stop enjoying themselves and sit down at a desk to learn test-taking skills? How much time was spent instilling a sense of anxiety about the tests so that the students would be more likely to actually try? How much less joyful and interesting were those first years of school, and how big a price will these students pay in the coming years for the new kind of relationships forged with school, in which the main point of school is to get ready for the test so that they can produce the scores that the school needs them to produce? And yes-- all the money spent on new materials and new training and the tests themselves, all the money that couldn't be spent on other things that might have benefited the students.

So we got third graders to score a few points higher on the Big Standardized Test. So what? What proven benefit will that earn them? What other outcomes can be shown to come from that single, small outcome? And what have they sacrificed and lost in pursuit of this tiny, meaningless "victory"?

WA: Buying the Court

When reformsters aren't busy trying to buy seats on school boards or flood a state with outside money to influence charter school legislation, sometimes they turn their money and attention to the courts.

Washington State has been a disappointment to many of its tech billionaires. Bill Gates and his friends had to spend several million dollars on several different tries to get a charter school law passed, and then the state court turned right around and declared that law unconstitutional (something about spending public monies on a private education-flavored business). There was some agitated freaking out and an attempt to do an end run around the ruling. 

But there is of course a simpler solution. Pack the court with judges who are more agreeable. And so  three judges in the Washington Supreme Court face challenges this year (the first such challenge since the 90s).

Center, leftmost, and bald guy with cute tie-- those are the targets

This is not a coincidence. Court critic GOP State Rep Matt Manweller reached out to recruit all three of the candidates running in races, and he had the McCleary decision in mind (that would be the case in which the court ended up fining the legislature for every day it failed to fully fund Washington State schools). Manweller suggested that the court had actually been corrupted by Dirty Union Money. You remember the whole thing about balance of power between branches of government? Here are Manweller's thoughts on how to use politics to bring the court to heel:

How can I bring those nasty unions to heel?*

State Rep. Matt Manweller, R-Ellensburg, said he thinks the mere threat of unseating a justice will make the court think twice about piling on more sanctions in the McCleary case.

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/article81681377.html#storylink=cpy

So here's Chief Justice Barbara Madsen, the author of the 2015 decision that ruled Washington's charter law unconstitutional. She is being opposed by Greg Zempel who doesn't like how capricious and random the court's decisions are. Zempel has been backed by a pile of money from Stand for Children, an Oregon reformster group that has funneled money to his campaign from Connie Ballmer, wife of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix; and Vulcan Inc., owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Vulcan and Ballmer were big financial backers of the charter law that was struck down.

Also facing reformster-backed challenge is Justice Charlie Wiggins (who is nothing if not a snappy dresser). Charteristas must sense a vulnerability because as we come down to the wire, they have pumped almost a million dollars into the campaign of Federal Way Municipal Court Judge Dave Larson. Larson has popped up in the news before, standing up to keep An Inconvenient Truth out of classrooms. Vulcan tossed in $300K and Gates threw in $200K of his own. Meanwhile, one more fly-by-night PAC, Judicial Integrity Washington has dropped $350K on a tv ad smear campaign against Wiggins featuring ads that other members of the legal community likened to the infamous Willie Horton ads used against Dukakis way back in the-- well, shut up, kid. Some of us remember that.

And to round out the trio, Mary Yu is facing a challenge from the Manweller-recruited David DeWolf, a former law professor and fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based thinky tank that has made a name for itself pushing Creationism Intelligent Design with its "Teach the Controversy" program. This race doesn't seem to be getting a ton of coverage or a ton of money; I have a sneaking suspicion that DeWolf is not a serious contender.

So if you are in Washington State, you may want to pay attention to those boring old supreme court justice races, because these three incumbents are being made to pay a price for crossing the charter and reformy crowd. And should they lose the election, public education in Washington State will pay a price as well.

*Yes, that's a real picture of Manweller, from his Twitter account

Welcome to Charter Cafeteria

Welcome to the new Charter Choice Cafeteria! Can I help you?

Wow! It's so clean and shiny here. And is that.... is that steak??

Why yes. We believe that all students should have the chance to eat steak for lunch.

Well, that's great. My usual public cafeteria only has meatloaf every other day, and it's not so good. So I would really love steak for lunch. Can I just--

Just a second. Charter Choice Cafeteria is only open to a few students. You need your Lunchtime Strivers Club Card to eat in here.

Well, how do I get one of those?

Just put in your application for the CCC lottery. You fill out these six forms available between the hours of 9 and 10 at our downtown office. Then submit them at the proper address and later we'll hold a drawing-- you have someone who'll take care of all that for you, right?  Here's a flier.

Um, I guess. You know, nobody on this flier really looks like me. Anyway, do you serve steak every day?

The steak is today's meal. We serve other things the rest of the week that are totally as good as any steak, at least as far as you know. Very steak-like.

Sure. Hey-- that rail seems awfully close to the serving counter. Don't students have a hard time squeezing through there?

We find that some students don't fit easily into the serving line that we have created for our meals here. We find that students with a certain background need that extra guidance; any students who find that they don't fit well in our serving line are certainly free to return to the regular public cafeteria if that's what they think is best.

My buddy just tweeted from that cafeteria. He says that they've stopped serving desert and condiments because they're budget has been cut to fund you guys!

It is shameful how the public cafeteria is not giving all students access to an excellent high-performing meal.

Can I talk to somebody about this?

Our cafeteria manager is located in offices at this number. But they are two time zones away, so make sure you check the time before you call. I'm sure you'll be able to leave a message with their office staff.

But our cafeteria manager is right there. When we want to complain we just holler and she comes out to talk to us.

Oh, we don't allow any of that here. Any students who break any of our rules for decorum and proper obedience are subject to strong and immediate disciplinary action.

So let me get this straight. If I can manage to fill out this application for the lottery and I am lucky enough to be selected and I fit in your serving line and I don't get thrown out for acting uppity then I might get to eat something that sort of resembles steak on some days-- and I can never complain to the management. Otherwise, I just have to go eat at the public cafeteria where they have even less to offer because they also have to pay for everything you're doing over here.

Exactly. Because every student deserves a chance to eat steak.

But just a chance?

Well, sure. You didn't think anyone was going to spend the money to make sure that every single student actually got to eat steak, did you? We can't waste money trying to actually help all students. You get a chance, and a few students actually get steak, or at least something kind of like it. What more do you want?

PA: State Rep Compares School Boards to Hitler

Brad Roae is running for re-election for the PA House of Representatives for District 6. First elected in 2006, Roae has had some interesting things to say about education in Pennsylvania.

Hitler blamed the Jews for everything that was wrong with the world and school boards blame charter schools.

This was on Facebook, in response to a question about the currently-off-the-table HB 530, a bill that was supposed to provide big fat early Christmas presents to the charter school industry in PA.

Roae's district is just up the road from me and just down the road from Erie, where the schools have made some headlines with their economic issues, to the point that their board was seriously considering closing all of its high schools. Erie is one of several school districts that highlight the economic troubles of school districts in Pennsylvania. It's a complex mess, but the basic problems boil down to this.

First, Pennsylvania ranks 45th in the country for level of state support for local districts. That means the bulk of school district funding comes from local taxpayers, and that means that as cities like Erie with a previously-industrial tax base have lost those big employers, local revenue has gone into freefall, opening up some of the largest gaps between rich and poor districts in the country.

Second, Pennsylvania's legislature (the largest full-time legislature in the country, one of the most highly paid, and one of the most impressively gerrymandered) decided in the early 2000s that they would let local districts skimp on payments to the pension fund because, hey, those investments will grow the fund like wildfire anyway. Then Wall Street tanked the economy, and now local districts are looking at spectacularly ballooning pension payments on the order of payments equal to as much as one third of their total budget.

Oh, and a side note-- the legislature also periodically goes into spectacular failure mode about the budget. Back in 2015 districts across the state had to borrow huge chunks of money just to function, because Harrisburg couldn't get their job done.

Third, Pennsylvania is home to what our own Auditor General calls the worst charter laws in the country. There are many reasons for that judgment, but for local districts the most difficult part is that charter school students take 100% of their per-capita cost with them.

So Erie City Schools, despite some emergency funding from the state, will run up as much as a $10 million deficit this year, with a full quarter of their spending going to charter and pension costs. Meanwhile, the legislature is trying to phase in a new funding formula (or, one might say, its first actual funding formula). This is going to be a painful process because, to even things out, it will have to involve giving some cities a far bigger injection of state tax dollars than richer communities will get. Politicians face the choice of either explaining this process and making a case for fairness and justice, or they can just play to the crowd and decry Harrisburg "stealing our tax dollars to send to Those People." Place your bets now on which way that wind will blow.

Oh, and that formula is supposed to get straightened out over the next twenty years!!

Meanwhile, guys like Roae want to blame teachers and school districts. You can't give teachers raises and benefits. If Erie (and school districts like it) want state aid, then they should cut costs and stop blaming charter schools. Meanwhile, Roae has been lauded by the PA cyber industry as a "champion of school choice."

Roae, who graduated from Gannon in 1990 with a business degree and worked in the insurance biz until starting his legislative career, ought to know better.

When hospitals throughout Northwest PA wanted to cut costs, they didn't open more hospitals. If you are having trouble meeting your household budget, you do not open a second home and move part of your family into it.

Education seems to be the only field in which people suggest that when you don't have enough money to fund one facility, you should open more facilities. Charters are in fact a huge drain on public schools in the state. If my district serves 1,000 students and 100 leave for a charter school, my operating costs do not decrease by 10% even if my student population does. In fact, depending on which 100 students leave, my costs may not decrease at all. On top of that, I have to maintain capacity to handle those students because if some or all come back (and many of them do) I have to be able to accommodate them.

And while you can argue that losing students to charters may allow me to reduce the number of teachers in my school, in effect "moving" those jobs to the charter, the charter will still have to duplicate administrative costs.

Roae need only look at the schools all around his district to see schools that are cutting programs, closing buildings, jamming more students into classrooms, and offering the taxpayers of the district less in their public school system. Charter school costs aren't responsible for all of that, but they are certainly responsible for a lot of it, and that is doubly frustrating for school boards who, unlike Hitler, feel some responsibility for watching over the tax dollars that they were elected to spend wisely. And yet, unlike Hitler, they have no say at all over how those dollars are spent by the charters and, under Pennsylvania's lousy charter laws, nobody really has oversight once those public tax dollars go into private charter operator hands.

It's like board members get ten dollars from a taxpayer for lunch

Taxpayer: Couldn't you get us a better lunch with the money we gave you?
Board member: Well, the state said I had to give three dollars to that guy.
Taxpayer: Well, did he at least buy lunch with it.
Board member: I have no idea.

We could discuss the widespread fraud and scandal of Pennsylvania charter schools (if you hate the idea of your NWPA tax dollars going to Philly, you'll really hate what happens when they go to Philly charters), but that's really beside the point. If PA legislators think charters are such a good idea, they could come up with a funding system that didn't bleed the public system dry in order to get charters running.

Meanwhile, voters in District 6 might try voting against someone who thinks that after you rob Peter to pay Paul, you yell at Peter for not being thrifty enough to withstand the theft, and then compare him to Hitler.

ICYMI: Catching Up with Reading (10/30)

I've been home for about a week and I am just about back up to speed. There's a lot to read this time around. As always, I encourage you to share wildly whatever you like here. 

What Are the Main Reasons Teachers Call It Quits

NPR takes a look at why some folks are getting out of the teaching biz. No surprises here, but nice to see NPR catching on

LA Unified Takes a Hard Look at Charter Schools

Charters have taken it on the chin in LA, and there's a definite shift in attitude there.

A Public Education

Friend of this blog Phyllis Bush ran an op-ed this week that gets to the heart of what does and does not make a public education.

State-Run Kids: Suleika's Story

Here's a moving story of what the charter mess in New Jersey looks like to the families and children of the city.

Black Children Deserve the Stability That Neighborhood Schools Offer

Andre Perry absolutely nails it in discussing one of the worst effects of charter schools-- the loss of a stabilizing institutions for a community

What I Miss

Friend of this blog Mary Holden (it's nice to have all these friends) has been writing an honest and personal account of her departure from the classroom. Here's her look back at what she misses.

King of the Castle

Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) takes a look at the infamous Massachusetts charter that makes its teachers pay to leave.

Wall Street Firms Make Money from Pension Funds, Spend It On Charters

Actual reporter (you know-- the old fashioned type who actually goes out and finds thing out) David Sirota reports the maddening but predictable news that public teacher pension funds are helping fund the attack on public education.

The Vivisection of Literature

Another examination of how the study of literature has been beaten up in the rush to High Standards

The Absurd Defense of Standards Post-Common Core

Jane Robbins takes a quick look at how some folks are in a Kentucky spitting match over the Core

NAACP President: Why We Should Pause the Expansion of Charter Schools

Since they made the charteristas all sad, the NAACP has had lots of folks trying to tell them what happened, why it happened, and what they should really do. Here's the president of NAACP to explain what they did and why they did it.

How (Not) To Grade Schools

Bellwether Education Partners is a right-tilted thinky tank from the same basic neighborhood as the Fordham Institute. Chad Aldeman is one of their big guns, and this month he's out with Grading Schools: How States Should Define “School Quality” Under the Every Student Succeeds Act. It's a pretty thing with thirty-two pages of thoughts about how to implement school accountability under ESSA, and I've read the whole thing so that you don't have to. Let's take a look under the hood.

 







Introduction

Aldeman offers a few thoughts to start that give a hint about where he might be headed. School evaluation has been too rigid and rule-bound. We've focused too much on student test scores instead of student growth. But the window is now open for a "new conversation," which kind of presumes that there was an old conversation, and I suppose for people in the thinky tank world it might seem as if there were a conversation, but from out here the actual education field, school accountability has been imposed from the top down with deliberate efforts to silence any attempts at conversation.

In other words, the news that school accountability has been too rigid and rules-bound is only news to people who have steadfastly ignored the voices of actual teachers, who called that one from the very first moment that No Child Left Behind raised its rigid, inflexible, and not-very-smart head.

So to have this "new conversation," policy folks should brace themselves for a certain amount of "Told you so" or "No kidding" or even "No shit, Sherlock." Or alternately, as this new conversation is probably going to resemble the old one insofar as actual teacher voices will be once again excluded, something along the lines of, "Remember what happened the last time you ignored us?"

What Is Accountability and Why Does It Matter?

Alderman acknowledges that accountability covers a wide range of functions, from transparency for the general public on one end to rewards and punishments by government on the other end. He posits that somewhere in the middle that "accountability can act as a tool for improvement through goal-setting, performance benchmarking, and re-evaluation." And he also notes that accountability measures are state government's way of signalling what it values.

So accountability can be very many things. Who is it for?

Well, teachers and school leaders, who are supposed to be able to use the data to do a better job. And parents, too. And also the political leaders who are responsible for the oversight of public tax dollars. And on top of that, ESSA requires states to grade schools in order to stack rank and  target some for some manner of fixing, including targeting the bottom five percent.

Aldfeman barrels on, pretending that meeting that last set of ESSA mandated stack-ranking, school-grading requirements will meet all the various versions of accountability that he has listed. He suggests in passing that we're really talking about different degrees of transparency for different groups of accountability viewers, but that's not really true either.

Neither Aldeman or, for that matter, the feds have seriously or realistically addressed the problems that come when you try to create an instrument that measures all things for all audiences. This is bananas, and it's why the entire accountability system continues to be built on a foundation of sand and silly putty. The instrument that tells a parent how their child is doing is not the same as the instrument that tells a teacher how to tweak instruction, and neither is the same as the instrument that tells the state and federal government if the school is doing a good job, and none of those are the same as an instrument used to stack ran all the schools in the state (and, it should also be noted, none of those functions are best done by a Big Standardized Test, and yet policymakers seem unable to let go of the assumption that the BS Tests are good for anything).

It's like weighing the entrees at a restaurant as a way of determining customer satisfaction, chef quality and efficiency, how well the restaurant is managed, compliance with health code regulations, reviews for the AAA guide, and the stability of the building in which the restaurant is housed. It's simply nuts.

Aldeman cites assorted research that is all based on the assumption that narrow poorly-written standardized math and reading tests are actually measuring something useful. They are not. Virtually all of the data generated by these tests is junk, and as their use becomes more widespread and students become more weary of them, the data becomes junkier and junkier.

Bottom line-- real accountability requires a wide range of instruments for a wide range of audiences, and we have not remotely solved that challenge. Not, let me note, that it isn't a challenge worth solving. But as long as we base the whole system on the BS Tests, we will not be remotely in the right neighborhood.

How Should States Select Accountability Measures

Again, Aldeman is working from some bad assumptions about what the system is for. Can you spot the key word in this sentence?

The trick, then, is to design accountability systems in which schools are competing on measures that truly matter

A competition system is not a measuring system. If I tell you that Chris is the tallest kid in class and Pat is the shortest, you still have no idea of Chris's or Pat's actual height.

Aldeman gets his next point right-- an accountability system should be simple, clear and fair. Well, partly right. His idea of "fair" is that the system only measures things that schools actually have control over. So he's skipped one other key attribute-- the accountability system needs to be accurate and measure what it actually says it measures. So, for instance, we should stop saying "student achievement" when we actually mean "student score on a single narrow standardized math and reading test that has never really passed tests for validity and reliability."

Aldeman notes the four required elements per ESSA:

1) "Achievement rates" aka "test scores."
2) Some other "valid and reliable" academic indicator. The word "other" assumes facts not in evidence.
3) Progress in achieving English language proficiency
4) Some other indicator of school quality or success

Aldeman offers a chart in which some possible elements are judged against qualities like simplicity, fairness, disagregatability, and giving guidance to the school. So measuring grit or other personal qualities is iffy because measuring and teaching it are iffy. Teacher and student surveys get a thumbs up for measuring stuff, but thumbs down for being actionable, though I think a good student or staff survey would provide a school with very specific issues to address.

Aldeman says to avoid redundant measures and reminds us that ESSA doesn't put a maximum limit on measures to be used.

How Can States Design School Ratings Systems That Are Simple, Clear, and Fair?

A fake subheading that simply covers an introduction that says, "And now I will tell you how." It does include a fun sidebar about how K-2 should be included in the accountability system. Aldeman notes that leaving them out previously was because of things like the unsolved challenge of how to assess the littles; he does not offer any new insights about that issue that have turned up since NCLB days, and in fact subjecting the littles to any kind of formal or standardized assessment is a truly, deeply indefensible policy notion, and serves as nothing more than a clear-cut example of putting the desires of policy-makers and data-grubbers over the needs of small children.

Incorporating Student Achievement

Of course, by "student achievement," we just mean "test scores." Aldeman recommends we start out with a simple performance scale index for points. He suggests five performance levels, with emphasis on proficiency because "proficiency is, after all, a benchmark for future success in college and careers." Which-- no, no it's not. There isn't an iota of data anywhere to connect a proficiency level on the BS Tests with college and career success, particularly because the proficiency rating is a normed ranking, so it moves every year depending on the mass of scores and the cut scores set annually by state testocrats.

So we're talking about using the test scores, which are junk, after they have been run through a normed scale, which adds more junk.

Using Growth as the "Other" Academic Indicator

Aldeman pays tribute to the "growth mindset" as a worthy stance for schools, though we are once again talking only about growth as it applies to standardized test scores. If the student grew in some other way, nobody cares.

The problem with coming up with a measure of student growth is, of course, that nobody has successfully done it yet. Aldeman mentions several models.

* Without using the words "value-added," Aldeman nods to the model that uses obtuse, opaque, and unproven mumbo-jumbo to make the claim that student performance can be statistically stripped from other characteristics. Aldeman suggests this is disqualified because it is neither simple nor understandable; he might also mention that it is baloney that has been debunked by all manner of authorities.

* Aldeman mentions the student percentiles model, a stack-ranking competitive model that compares a student's test score to the score of other students who had a similar score last year. Like all such normed models, this one involves goal posts that move every year, and like all percentile-based models, it guarantees the exact same distribution year after year. No amount of school quality will raise all students to the top 25%.

* Aldeman favors a transitional matrix, judging schools on how many students move from one group to another (say, below basic to basic). This is also a bad idea. Aldeman has elsewhere shown sensitivity to the unintended consequences of some of these policy choices, so I'm not sure how he misses the obvious implications here. A school's best strategy will be to invest its energy on students who are near a threshhold and not those for whom there's no real hope of enough improvement.

Creating an Overall Index and Incorporating Subgroup Results

Aldeman wants to use the two indicators we've got so far and average them for an overall index, and this is the score by which we'll "flag" the bottom 5%. These indexes would also be computed for subgroups so that schools can also be flagged for failing to close their achievement gaps.

To be clear, this approach assumes that identifying schools for improvement is an important lever at the state’s disposal. That’s intentional, because there are positive effects associated with the mere act of notifying schools that they need to improve. That’s especially true for accountability systems bearing consequences for schools, but it’s even true in systems relying purely on information and transparency. 

In other words, threats work. At least, they work on raising test scores (and he's got some research from reformster research rock star Eric Hanushek to back it up). This is a deeply irresponsible policy idea, ignoring completely the question of what schools give up and get rid of in order to raise their test scores. Cutting recess, phys ed, art, music, etc. In my own district I have seen schools strip student schedules so that middle school students with low test scores spent their entire day in English and math class, with no history, art, science or other non-tested subjects.

This is the test-centered school at its worst. This is a lousy idea.

Incorporating Other Measures of School Success Into Final School Ratings

Here Aldeman brings out the English model of school inspections, in which trained and experienced educators visit the school for an extended inspection, both detailed and holistic, of how the school works, how well it ticks, how well it serves students, and how well it matches the notion of what a good school should be.

This is a good idea.

Though I can imagine that for schools that have been "flagged" because of test scores, the inspection visit might be a bit harrowing.

I would offer one editing suggestion to Aldeman for his system. Keep the school inspection system and get rid of everything else.

Yes, yes, ESSA has kept us beholden to the BS Testing system. But any sensible, realistic, useful accountability system is going to shrink the use of the BS Test down to the absolute minimum the feds will let the state get away with. Making the test scores the foundation of the rest of the accountability is the absolute wrong way to go.

Conclusion

Aldeman notes that ESSA somehow focuses less attention on punishing "failing" schools than on actually helping them, which, maybe, depending on how you read it. It would be worth it for the feds and states to back away from that, since they have shown absolutely no aptitude for turning around failing schools.

There is one other huge hole in Aldeman's plan, and that is the space where we should find the voice of the community in which the school is located. He has dodged one of the big accountability questions, which is this-- if the community in which a school is located is happy with their school, exactly what reason is there for the state and federal bureaucrats to get involved? I remain puzzled that the right-leaning policy folks continue to remain uninterested in local control of schools.