Did Race To The Top Work?

Not only is this a real question, but the Department of Education, hand in hand with Mathematica Policy Research and American Institutes for Research, just released a 267-page answer of sorts. Race to the Top: Implementation and Relationship to Student Outcomes is a monstrous creature, and while this is usually the part where I say I've read it so you don't have to, I must confess that I've only kind of skimmed it. But what better way to spend a Saturday morning than reviewing this spirited inquiry into whether or not a multi-billion-dollar government program was successful in hitting the wrong target (aka getting higher scores on a narrow, poorly-designed standardized reading and math tests).

Before We Begin

So let's check a couple of our pre-reading biases before we walk through this door. I've already shown you one of mine-- my belief that Big Standardized Test scores are not a useful, effective or accurate measure of student achievement or school effectiveness, so this is all much ado about not so much nothing as the wrong thing.

We should also note the players involved. The USED, through its subsidiary group, the Institute of Educational Sciences, is setting out to answer a highly loaded question: "Did we just waste almost a decade and a giant mountain of taxpayer money on a program that we created and backed, or were we right all along?" The department has set out to answer a question, and they have a huge stake in the answer.

So that's why they used independent research groups to help, right? Wellll..... Mathematica has been around for years, and works in many fields researching policy and programs; they have been a go-to group for reformsters with policies to peddle. AIR sounds like a policy research group, but in fact they are in the test manufacture business, managing the SBA (the BS Test that isn't PARCC). Both have gotten their share of Gates money, and AIR in particular has a vested interest in test-based policies.

So nobody working on this report is exactly free from bias or vested interestedness.

Oh, and as we'll repeatedly see, most of the findings here are over three years old. So that's super helpful, too.

Defining "Success" for RTTT and the Executive Summary

The study set out to examine six elements, and we want to be sure to look at that list because they constitute the definition of "success" for Race to the Top.

1) Improving state capacity to support school improvement efforts
2) Adopting college and career-ready standards
3) Building state data systems that measure student growth and inform instruction
4) Recruiting, retaining, rewarding and developing swell teachers and principals
5) Turning around low-performing schools
6) Encouraging conditions in which charter schools can succeed

Numbers two through five are recognizable as the four conditions that were extorted out of states in order to get their waivers and escape the penalties of No Child Left Behind. Number one is just a call to actually support the other items with more than prayers and best wishes. Six is-- well, that's a blunt as  the feds get about saying that they want to replace public schools with charters as a matter of policy.

The study breaks states into several groups. "Early RTT states" means states that got in the gravy train for rounds one or two; "late RTT states" are those that didn't jump on till round three. "Other states" or "non-RTT states" are those that, well, didn't get RTT grant money. Grant-getters were compared to not-grant-getters, and I'm going to keep my eyes peeled to note if, at some point in the meatier parts of the paper, we look at the notion that non-RTT states were still scrambling for waivers under threat of NCLB penalties, waivers that had requirements remarkably similar to RTT grant requirements. Frankly, this data set seems ripe for a study about whether the feds get more better compliance with bribery or with threats, but I'm not sure we're going to go there. We're still in the roman numeral pages.

The answer appears to be that there's not much difference between bribery and threats."When we examined changes over time in states' use of RTT-promoted practices, we found no significant differences between RTT and other states."

And right up front, the study lets us know some of the hardest truth it has to deliver. Well, hard of you're a RTT-loving reformster. For some of us, the truth may not be so much "hard" as "obvious years ago."

The relationship between RTT and student outcomes was not clear. Trends in student outcomes could be interpreted as providing evidence of a positive effect of RTT, a negative effect of RTT, or no effect of RTT.

Bottom line: the folks who created the study-- who were, as I noted above, motivated to find "success"-- didn't find that the Race to the Top accomplished much of anything. Again, from the executive summary:

In sum, it is not clear whether the RTT grants influenced the policies and practices used by states or whether they improved student outcomes. RTT states differed from other states prior to receiving the grants, and other changes taking place at the same time as RTT reforms may also have affected student outcomes. Therefore, differences between RTT states and other states may be due to these other factors and not to RTT. Furthermore, readers should use caution when interpreting the results because the findings are based on self-reported use of policies and practices. 

Hmm. Well, that doesn't bode well for the upcoming 200 pages.

Fun Side Note

To determine whether or not RTTT stuff influence "student achievement," the study relied on test results on the NAEP.

Let me repeat that. When the USED and a team of researchers, looking at the efficacy of a major education policy program over the past many years, wanted to know if US students were learning more, achieving more, and testing better, they skipped right over the PARCC and the SBA and the various other BS Tests currently being used for all manner of accountability and went straight to the NAEP.

Tell me again why all students need to take the BS Tests every year?

Also, the study would like us to remember that any differences that occurred in test results could have come from influences other than Race to the Top.

The Most and the Least (Troubling)

Across all states (RTT and non), the most widely and commonly adopted practice was the creation of the big data systems for tracking all the student data. So your state, RTT or Non, may not have gotten all the rest of these things taken care of, but when it comes to data mining and general Big Brothering, they were on point. Feel better yet?

The widest non-adoption was the RTT policies regarding teacher and principal preparation. In general adoption of the fed's clever ideas was low, bottoming out with the idea of evaluating teacher and principal prep programs and giving the "good" ones more money-- this policy was adopted by absolutely nobody. I'm wondering if states mostly left the teacher pipeline alone because they knew it was falling apart and they didn't want to bust it entirely. In some cases states did not so much beef up teacher prep as they simply abandoned it, implementing programs where humans who have qualifications like "certificate from another state" or "any college degree at all" or "a pulse accompanied by respiratory activity" could be put directly into a classroom.

History Lesson

No study like this is complete without a history lesson, and this study delivers a few pages of RTTT history. It was part of the giant American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, with a whopping $4.35 billion-with-a-B dollars were spent to try to get states to adopt policies that suits in DC believed would make education more better, though their beliefs were based pretty much on "This seems like a good idea to me."

There are charts showing who got what when for how many districts. My own state of Pennsylvania landed a whopping $41 million; the chart doesn't show how many local districts signed off on the application because in Round Three state education departments were allowed to gloss over just how many of their local districts had told them to go pound sand over this whole "We'll give you a million dollar grant to help you implement a ten million dollar program" business.

Also, there have been some RTTT studies attempted before. They found that implementing all this stuff was difficult. So there's that.

How We Did It

We also get a whole section about how data was collected and crunched. For a massive study of this depth and breadth, the methods are kind of.... well, tame? Unimpressive?

Data came from three places. The NAEP results. The Common Core of Data which is different from that other Common Core you may have heard about. The CCD is just all the public info about schools and ed departments etc. And then, to get each state's particular specific, the researchers called up representatives from state education agencies. So, some test scores, some public data, and phone interviews with "somebody" in the state office.

Those phone interviews were conducted in 2012-2013, aka right after Round Three states had gotten their money. Hence the separating of RTT schools into two groups-- those who had had a while to get things running and those that were still on their way back from depositing the check at the bank.

There's also an explanation here of how they tried to connect test results to program implementation and basically gave up because they were getting noise and junk for results.

Now for some more specific results.

State Capacity for Edureformy Stuff

This really breaks down into three aspects (which break down into ten, because government work, sigh), three "success factors." The third one was significantly raising achievement and closing the achievement gap, and "no state interview questions aligned to the third subtopic, so it was excluded from the analysis" which, wait-- what? We didn't ask about this, so we didn't include it in the study??

The other two were articulating the state's reform agenda, and building state ability to scale up and implement reformy stuff. The study found that, as of spring 2013, there was no difference between RTT states and non-RTT states. So, as of three and a half years ago. Well. That's sure helpful.

The biggest area of difference was when it came to strategies for turning around failing schools and for spreading practices by super-duper schools. RTT states did this more than non-RTT schools. No comments on whether any of those strategies actually did anybody any good.

Oddly enough, all types of states were pretty tightly aligned on one feature-- allowing for very little input from all stakeholders in defining priorities. No, that's not me being snarky-- that's an actual finding of the study.

Standards and Assessments

RTT states used more standards and assessment practices than non-RTT states. Virtually all states were on the Common Core bus, but it turns out that non-RTT states were less likely to have spent a bunch of money helping school districts with the implementation.

Data Systems

No significant differences here. All states adopted these practices. The only distinguishing feature was that RTT states were more likely to be doing data collection with early childhood programs as well. Interesting, and creepy.

Teacher and Principal Certification and Evaluation Practices

RTT states were doing more of these practices, including "high-quality pathways" to the jobs as well as using test results as part of the evaluation process. Again, the assumption that these are actually a good idea is not addressed.

Nearly all states were reporting on teacher shortage areas. Perhaps that's because following your teacher shortage areas is an actual useful practice.

Also noteworthy-- RTT states were far more likely to be embracing "alternative certification pathways," as well as allowing more to be set up. This is a policy outcome that directly contradicts all the pretty talk about supporting and improving the teaching profession, because you don't support the profession by throwing your weight behind programs that de-professionalize it by suggesting that anybody with some interest and a pulse can be sent into the classroom with minimal training. And all of that goes double for principalships.

RTT states were far out in front on using test scores for evaluation; no word on whether that was primarily through the widely debunked Value-Added measures, or if some other data masseuse was being used. However, hardly anybody was using test results to make compensation or professional advancement decisions.

Oh, and all that baloney about how states were supposed to find the best teachers and shuffle them all around for maximum impact and equitable distribution of teachery swellness? If you think that ridiculous policy idea can't actually be implemented in any way shape or form, it turns out almost all states agree with you.

Turnarounds

RTT states did more of this than non-RTT states. But instead of reading this part of the report, lets pull up any of the reporting about how the School Improvement Grants, intended to fund the turnaround revolution, turned out to be an utter failure. I'm starting to realize that this study has no interest in whether or not any of these policies are actually bunk.

Charter Schools

Early RTT schools did a "better" job of implementing the RTT practices aimed at increasing the reach and market of charters. So, to repeat, the US Department of Education is actively involved in helping charter schools sweep aside public education. This is really not what I want my tax dollars to be doing, thanks. But the report reminds us that the RTT application process favored those states that would let charters grow unhindered and uncapped, free to glom up as much real estate and as many students as they could advertise their way into.

So that's our point-by-point breakdown. Let's now talk about another concern of this study.

English Language Learners-- How Did Race To The Top Work Out For Them?

ELL students were more likely to be targeted by policies in the RTT states, though within the three subgroups, there was no difference between states, even if there were demographic differences applying to ELL population.

Discussion of Findings

Still with me? God bless you. We're about 100 pages into the report and they are now going to "discuss" their findings. Some of this is not so much "discussion" as it is "redundant restatement" of findings. But there are some interesting moments, particularly in the list of Questions Raised By These Findings.

Why did RTT states show more adoption of RTT policies than non-RTT states? I'd be inclined to go with "They were being paid a pile of money to adopt them," but the study suggests that the policies could be the result of differences between the states before the RTT competition. Or maybe states implemented a bunch of this stuff as a way to compete for the RTT money.

Why don't our 2012 and 2013 data match? One of the oddities of the report is that areas where some states seemed more RTT-soaked in 2012 were not the same in 2013. The authors don't know why, though it certainly points at the limit of self-reporting.

Why isn't it possible to find a connection between RTT implementation and student test results? They lean toward two possibilities-- we can't really figure out what the pattern of achievement was before RTT happened, and we can't really separate out all the other possible factors over and above RTT that could have changed test scores in that time period.

The Rest

Then follows about seven pages of end notes, and then we're into the appendices, which is a big lumpy festival of data and graphs and the numbers we squeezed out of the interviews. Dear reader, I love you, but I am not going to dig through these 150-ish pages for you.

My Findings about Their Findings

So what are my takeaways from this piece of something?

1) They spent three years and change turning their data into a report. About what was happening three years ago.

2) They put "relationship to student outcomes" in the title, then noted immediately and repeatedly that they had absolutely nothing to say about Race to the Top's relationship to student outcomes.

3) I was not entirely fair in reducing the question to "did RTTT work?" because that's not exactly what they asked. What they mostly really asked was "Did RTTT get states to implement the policies we wanted them to implement?" At the end of the day, this study carefully dodges the far-more-important question-- are any of the policies linked to RTTT any actual damn good for educating students? What we have here is a report that carefully asks if we hit the target while carefully ignoring whether the target we're looking at was actually the right target.

Put another way, the eleven (eleven!!) members of the study group have spent 200-plus pages talking about Race To The Top as if the point of the program was not to improve education, but just to spur the adoption of certain education policies on the state level.

It's like the feds said, "Go build this apartment building according to these blueprints." And then later, after the construction period was over, the feds sent an inspector and told them, "We don't care who's living in it and if they're happy living in it and if it's a safe and comfortable place to live. Just check to see how closely the builders followed the blueprints."

Maybe this is just how government functionaries work. Maybe when you've pushed a program that has shown zero educational benefits and quite a few destructive tendencies, all you can do is evaluate it by just saying, "Well, yes, we sure built that, we did."

Race To The Top (and waiveriffic RTTT Lite) was a disastrous extension of the worst of NCLB policies that brutalized the teaching profession and demanded that states turn schools into test-centric soul-mashing data centers, all while making a tiny toy god out of bad data badly used. The best thing you can say about is that it was so bad, so disastrous, so universally indefensible that it did what no issue in the last ten years could do-- it created bipartisan Congressional will to actually do their job. It is the rotten center of Obama's shameful education legacy. And nobody really needs 267 pages to say so.

Student Suicide

I knew it was a growing issue. I didn't know it was this bad.

Between 2007 and 2014 the suicide rate for children aged 10-14 doubled. Doubled. That's according to the Center for Disease Control. If you want to put that in perspective, the rate of death by auto accident has been dropping steadily since 1999 (the beginning of the charted data), cut by more than half. In 2014, the suicide rate climbed above the death by car accident rate (homicide was lower than both, and steadily dropping). The suicide rate had held steady with a slight dip up until 2007.

I don't know why; I suspect nobody does. More fragile kids? Tougher, more unkind world? Something to do with the internet? If you tell me that Kids These Days need more grit, I swear I will reach through the internet and slap you. Just this week we had the news of an eleven year old girl who had survived freaking cancer committing suicide over bullying. And NPR has been running a series for a month entitled "A Silent Epidemic: The Mental Health Crisis in Our Schools"

There are people paying attention. In Pennsylvania, we have mandatory suicide prevention training for teachers-- all it amounts to is a run-through-it-yourself on-line slide show with a concluding quiz, but it still gets some hard information to us, which is no small thing. Mental health issues and suicide are issues that everyone has "heard something" about, and often that is bunk. And I can tell you that hoping that instincts and folk wisdom will just kick in when the moment comes-- well, that's a bad plan.

I teach in a small town school system that sits at the heart of a rural area. When you look up "All-American classic small town life" in the dictionary, you find a picture of my town. And I've been getting intermittent training about this issue for four decades, since one of our staff members' children took his own life. I've watched an old friend go through the heartbreak with the loss of his son. And not long enough ago that I can easily set it aside, one of my former yearbook editors came home for Christmas break to the family home situated on the river. They found her footprints leading out across the ice to the water; they found her body downriver many weeks later. Her parents are good, successful people. She was smart, capable, loving, goodhearted. My yearbook students, before they leave senior year, paint a block in the wall of the yearbook room. I see her block every day that I go to work.

It is easy for those of us who deal with students to think that all the drama and fraughtitude and angstiness is SOP. Life is tough and hard and has lots of sharp edges that bruise tender shins, but hey, it's always been that way and always will be and these kids will grow out of it, get over it, and be just fine. And for the majority that is still true. But not for all of them. Again, I am not prepared to say whether life has become harder to deal with or if they are less able to deal. But something has changed, and those of us who work with students have to believe that, and act accordingly.

NPR included a list of six myths, six "pointers" for dealing with this stuff as teachers offered by David Jobes, the head of Catholic University's Suicide Prevention Lab. They are kind of standard issue, much like what we get in our "training," but they are worth repeating here. Hell, they're worth repeating everywhere. Here are some things to remember.

1) Be direct. People are often afraid to talk directly about suicide, as if saying it out loud is like calling Betelgeuse. Experts say no-- just come out with it. Jobes suggests something as simple as "Sounds like you're really down, have you thought about taking your life?"

2) Depression and suicide do not go together like love and marriage. The majority of depressed people don't commit suicide. By Jobes's count, maybe half the people who commit suicide are depressed. Other mental health issues can be a factor. Or not.

3) We can prevent suicides. This is hard to think about; nobody wants the deceased student's friends telling themselves it's their fault. It isn't. There can be other signs like increased stress, insomnia, withdrawal. It's tricky, because all the signs can also occur without being signs of suicidal thoughts, however if we look at the full picture, we can sometimes see what's coming. If we pay attention and get involved, we can make a difference because--

4) Suicides do not always take place in an impulsive moment. It takes time for issues to build up that much pressure, and that can be followed by time to plan and prepare and, sometimes, drop hints like crazy about what the student has planned. They fantasize about it, collect information, drop hints to friends, make mention in class writings. They will generally not talk to parents, but to others-- they often indicate what they have in mind.

5) We've now got suicides on the books by children as young as five, and it breaks my heart just to type that, but like many problems that are overlooked, one of the issues is that we don't believe what we're seeing even as we are looking directly at. If a small child is setting off signals and you're telling yourself, "Well, it just can't be because it just can't-- not with a kid that young." Well, apparently, tragically, gut-wrenchingly, it can be.

6) Afterwards, your school needs small groups to talk and share, not a big auditorium assembly lecture.

There are many guidelines out there, and plenty of trained professionals, so get help when you need it. This is one of those issues that really shouldn't be part of a teacher's job, but we're the ones who are there, with the students, and that makes it our job. Read up on this stuff. And then just pray that the day never comes in your career that you need to know any of it.

Where the Free Market Fails

Donald Trump has proposed that we just get rid of Obamacare and replace it with free market forces. This is as original as any of his policy ideas (i.e. not at all), but it's still a bad idea because health care is like education in that the freemarket cannot possibly succeed in accomplishing what we claim to want as a society.

I'll explain in a moment, but first, let me insert my usual disclaimer that "free market" is a suspect term to begin with. At this point in human history, all markets are controlled and manipulated to some degree by the government. "Free market" is just a name for a particular type of government control. The last time there was a truly free market, a pair of humans were trading a shiny rock for a pointy stick somewhere near a cave.

Putting that aside, Trump's idea to leave health care "customers" at the mercy of the free market is nuts for the same reason that letting the free market run loose in the education sector is nuts.

Health care operating strictly on free market means that everyone gets the health care they can personally afford, which means the wealthy get great healthcare, middle class citizens (both of them) get mediocre health care, and the poor get no health care at all. People who are already sick, on whom the health care biz can never hope to make money, will also get no healthcare at all.

Because the one area where the free market will always fail is in the area of providing a good or a service to all citizens.

Milton Friedman said, "The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit." And there's our problem-- because there are some citizens in the country who cannot offer sufficient benefit to a company with something to sell.

It is the fundamental nature of the free market to sort customers into two groups-- those from which my business can benefit, and those from which it can not. Whether I'm making a fast-food burger, a fancy shmancy motorcar, or a pair of stereo speakers, my business plan involves saying, "We can only serve customers who are willing to pay $X.00. Anyone who isn't going to pay that will not be a customer." There is no office in this country where businesspersons are getting together and saying, "Okay, how can we best get this product into the hands of people who cannot meet our minimum price point?" The very closest we get is outfits like the phone companies, where the discussion is along the lines of, "How can we balance losing a little money up front for the promise of bleeding our customers for all the money we can get in the long run." And that's not very close.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "Sorry, but if you can't pay the price of a Lexus, you can't have a Lexus."  That's how the system by and large works.

But there is something wrong with a system that says, "Sorry, but you're poor, so you'll just have to die" or, "Sorry, but you're poor, so you'll just have to go to a crappy school."

It is true that there are times-- bad times, disgraceful times-- when our current health care and education systems say exactly that. But there is at least the hope that we and they can do better. But a free market system must mark some people as too poor for the product. It has to. It is absolutely guaranteed that it will.

For a free market system to work, it must figure out which part of the market it can afford to profitably serve. That means it must absolutely also determine which part of the market it is not going to serve.

Imagine if the feds went to Ford Motor Co. and said, "You must get a car sold to every family in America-- and not just a mediocre car, but a good one. Every family."

Or if the feds went to Apple and said, "You must sell every single person in America a new iPhone. You cannot turn down a single customer. Regardless of their financial resources, you must get your current new phone into their hands, without fail."

Or if the feds went to Arby's and said, "You must feed every single American lunch, every single day, no matter what they can afford to pay for, and even if they aren't very excited about eating the food on your menu."

That would be nuts. It would be bad business, and no even semi-smart business leader would tolerate it.

And yet, if you want to talk about free market education or free market health care, that is the gig-- to provide your service to every single American, regardless of what they can afford to pay (or the government can afford to pay on their behalf).

It is the most fundamental part of the mission, and the free market has absolutely no clue about how to do it. On this point, the point of serving every citizen, the free market fails, and for that reason, the free market is uniquely unfit to take on the work of providing health care or education to the country.

Common Core: Victim of Inadequate PR?

We've often heard that poor old Common Core was a swell thing that fell victim to bad implementation. But over at EdSource yesterday, Pat Reilly identified a different culprit.

Messages, backed up with data and brought to life through emotive language, are fundamental to changing minds in the 21st century. Yet too often, education advocacy is stopped in its tracks because critical concepts aren’t delivered with a strong message, leaving them misunderstood at best and politicized at worse.

See where we're headed? Common Core was the victim of poorly done PR.

A phrase meaningless on its own, Common Core became an easy target for misinformation because no one invested resources to determine the best terminology to bring the Common Core’s important purpose to life.

Well, hey. That's just.... not entirely wrong.

Contrast the Core with No Child Left Behind, a combination program title and marketing slogan that encompassed a whole mass of policies and rules under a single roof that was short, pithy, and pre-empted disagreement (Oh, you don't like this. So tell us-- which children exactly do you intend to leave behind?).

But what the heck was Common Core, ever? It was presented as standards, but described (every state will be on the same page) like curricular scope and sequence. It would come hand in hand with tests to show that everyone was on point, right up until the point that tests turned into a kryptonite tar baby and everyone scrambled to claim the tests and the Core were two different things. Maybe, as I speculated years ago, it was an attempt to avoid the NCLB problem of having the whole host of policies hanging in front of the same giant target. "Maybe," said perhaps some policy maven, "if we split up, they won't get all of us."

But Common Core descended like stealth lightning, and after they'd been around a while, a good chunk of the population still had no idea what the hell they were. They became like a new product, marketed as "Stuff." And time only vagued them up worse-- if "Common Core" ever meant anything at all, those days are gone, with the term now being applied to a host of policies and programs that are about different things.

Maybe the problem was always bad communication, bad branding, bad marketing.

Except, no. Reilly tosses in the old charge of letting policy get politicized, but CCSS was birthed in politics, sold tlhrough political channels, and created with political tools. Politics ran in the Core's blood from Day One.

Then there's the New Coke problem. Even great marketing will fail to sell a crappy product, and the Core was and is a crappy product, an ineffective solution to a non-existent problem.

Reilly calls out other over-academic jargonized reformy baloney, like the "achievement gap" which means any number of different things. Reilly compares the problem to a game of telephone, but I'm not sure that's correct. Language is built to illuminate, reveal, communicate, but the power of language is not always used for good. Language can also be used to hide, to obscure, to bury ugly and alarming images behind a veil of blah-de-blah-blah.

Much of the treat of modern reformsterism is a liberal use of language to hide meaning rather than reveal it, to use language to mean its own opposite, like the impassioned pleas to make teachers "free" of union rules that or the repeated insistence that states created the Core in the first place or the deliberate replacement of the phrase "common core" with the more politically safe "college and career ready standards" or the use of "student achievement" when we actually mean "test scores."

In the end, Reilly calls on ed reform folks to use strategic communications, and this is the part where I reveal that Pat Reilly is the CEO of PR & Company, a PR firm that counts education as one of its "specialties."  So this has been one more shaggy dog advertisement. She's really just trying to sell us something, and the Common Core is still failure because everything about it, from its poorly conceived standards to its top-down central planning approach to unilaterally creating a national curriculum-- everything about it was bad news. Bill Gates and others spent million upon million upon million of dollars to package it, brand it, and sell it. And yet both conceptually and in execution, it is still one of the most monumental failures of our age. No amount of PR or strategic communication would ever have changed that.

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