The Failure of Test Prep Nation

Bill Gates said it would take us ten years to see if  "this stuff" (aka Common Core and its attendant testing baloney) would work  It's increasingly clear that we won't have to wait that long.

Right up front, I want to be clear-- I could not care less about the results of the PISA or the PIRLS or any other Big Standardized Test that pretends to measure the educational achievement and effectiveness of students, teachers, schools, or nations.

But this is the game reformsters wanted to play, the game at which they promised us a win, so by all means-- let's see if they delivered.

And the answer continues to be, "Nope."

New international testing results show a precipitous drop for US fourth graders in reading scores.

And yet, these are the students who have had a lifetime of test prep. They have been soaked in Common Core since Day One, and to an even greater extent, soaked in the discipline of using Common Core as directed test prep for each state's Big Standardized Test.

This was necessary, we were told over and over again, to keep the US competitive internationally. We were getting beaten by Estonia! Do you want to get beaten by Estonia? At one point, reformsters even tried to make our test-taking readiness, our best-of-show bubbling, a matter of national security! We needed Common Core and the attached battery of BS Tests to get the next generation ready to whip Estonia, to get the US back on top! We would become Test Prep Nation.

And so they arranged to hijack that next generation. Educational experts be damned-- kindergarten had better become the new First Grade (or maybe Second Grade) so that we could start cramming academics and test-taking skills into the brains of those little slackers. Third graders wouldn't even be allowed into Fourth Grade until they could prove they were willing and able to pass a standardized reading test (never mind their actual reading skills-- we need them to score well on that damn test).  Education experts and professionals and parents of all shapes and sizes said, "This is a bad idea. A really bad idea. Do you even have a shred of evidence that national standards and a test-based accountability system do any good, ever?"

"Hush up,' said (some) reformsters. "Just follow our plan and watch those scores rise."

And it hasn't happened. It hasn't even happened a little.

Not that we should brace ourselves for the apologies and walkbacks and reconsideration of these bold ideas. Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos offered this reaction:

Our students can’t move ahead – in school or in life – if they’re falling behind in reading. We must do better for students, parents & educators. We must #RethinkSchool

Sigh. Not entirely untrue on the necessity of reading skills, but there is a difference-- a deep, profound, significant difference-- between being able to read well and being able to score well on a standardized reading test (particularly a crappy one). And being able to read is a good first step, but it helps is the economy for poor folks isn't being trashed and the social safety net isn't in tatters and employers are paying a true living wage for work.

And teachers everywhere are bracing themselves for the inevitable "Well, the Core and the BS Tests are awesome. This should be working. Those damned public school teachers are screwing everything up. What we need are more vouchers and charters!"

Meanwhile, we have to watch our international standing. As (some) reformsters warned, low test scores are arriving at the same time that US international stature and leadership are decaying. Could it be that PISA and PIRLS scores really are the problem? Or could there be some other explanation that doesn't involve fourth graders?

Standardized Tests Are a Poor Substitute for Justice

John Kuhn is a Texas superintendent who has been watch the reform biz unfold for a while now. Here, in a quick two minute video, he connects the inequity of school funding to the injustice of offering poor schools not funding, not help, not resources, not support-- but standardized tests. The same politicians who keep some schools poor also demand that those schools hit the same marks that wealthy districts do.

It's the one thing that has never happened with standardized tests. No lawmakers or policy mavens declare, "This school has low scores-- we had better get them some more funding and resources and help right away." Instead, low test scores put a target on a school's back-- this one is ripe for privatizing, closing, replacing, chopping into easily-sold pieces.

Watch this, and pass it on.


2 School Districts, 1 Ugly Truth from S4E Media on Vimeo.

Remember this line: "Educational malpractice doesn't happen in the classroom. The greatest educational malpractice happens in the statehouse, not the schoolhouse."

ICYMI: First Snow Edition

Okay, you may want to curl up with some hot chocolate and a blanket, because this week turned up an awful lot of reading material. Remember, only you can amplify the voices you think need to be heard!



Our School Systems Deserve Better Than This

Charles Pierce at Esquire takes a hard look at charter schools and segregation. You will not have to guess what he thinks.

Green Dots Suspension Rates Continue To Be Remarkably High

As the debates about school discipline heat up, School Data Nerd looks at hard data from one charter group, and finds that they are booting kids out at a high rate.

Douglas County School Board Ends Controversial Voucher Program

A few years ago, reformsters captured the Douglas County (Colorado) school board and proceeded to launch the nation's first district-level voucher system. Turns out that mostly what they did was wake up local voters. Here's how a reformy tide can be turned back,

Turkish Gulen Schools in America

The Gulen chain is perhaps the most notorious charter chain in the US, serving as a fundraising project for a Turkish government-in-exile. Mercedes Schneider looks at some of the most current tools for tracking these guys.

Success Academy's Radical Experiment

Everybody wanted to write about Eva this week for some reason. Here's the New Yorker's take on the queen of Success Academy

Tolerating failing schools in New Orleans-- as long as they're for black kids

Andre Perry takes a look at the latest bad news for fans of the NOLA chartering experiment

What Is Motivation Porn and Why Does Higher Education Seems Addicted To It

A great look a thing I didn't even realize was a thing, but as soon as I read this, I could see it everywhere. Grit, anyone?

Update on Summit Schools

Leonie Haimson took a trip to one of the schools running the Summit school-in-a-box program. In some ways, it seems even more unimpressive than I thought it would be.

Influencers and the Hillary Campaign

While technically water under the bridge, a reminder that Democrats are no BFFs of public education either. And some of this water is still flowing around making trouble.

A Portfolio of Schools

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat kicks off a series of stories about the portfolio approach to reform, and it will probably not make you happy.

Voucher Schools Can Teach Whatever They Want

HuffPost did some heavy-duty research into what is actually taught at the mostly-religious schools that benefit from vouchers in this country. You may have expected the emphasis on anti-evolution and anti-science, but there's a also a healthy dose of political conservatism (and get them women back in the kitchen). How Betsy DeVos wants your tax dollars to work.

Kindergarten to Work Second Shift

In Florida, a parent offers a great response to the school district that wants her kindergarten student to go home and log onto the computer to do more school work.

She Breaks Rules While Expecting Students To Follow Them

Lisa Miller reviews the Moskowitz memoir and identifies some of Eva's central problems, like how she is proud of being a rebel, and demands that all of her students never rebel at all. It gets better.

How America Is Breaking Public Education

Always interesting when the mostly-conservative Forbes goes against type. The thesis here is a good one-- "we've disobeyed the cardinal rule of success in any industry: treating your workers like professionals."

Teach Kids To Start Unions

Rachel Cohen interviews Malcolm Harris, who has many intersting things to say about Kids These Days

IN: Diminishing Education

Indiana's State Board of Education has voted to diminish the value and purpose of education in the state.

The BOE has adopted a new set of graduation requirements that will begin taking effect with the freshman class of 2019. With these standards, the board aligns themselves with the "college and career ready" crowd and leaves behind notions that education has any purpose other than to train students for future employment.

You can check out some of the specifics here, but this is one of those times when the devil is not really in the details, but is in the broad goals and purposes of the program. Graduates in the class of 2023 will need to meet the following requirements:

* Rack up enough course credits.
* Complete "post-secondary competencies" by doing one of the following: earning an honors diploma, finishing apprenticeship or career-technical courses or meeting college-ready standards for ACT, SAT, ASVAB tests.
* Learn and demonstrate employability skills.

The first is same old, same old. The second is, sadly, not new at this point. Just the status quo obeisance to the Cult of Testing, with the door open, at least, for something other than the usual testing gods.

But that third one.

Please note-- I do think it's a great idea for graduates to be able to find work. Getting a job is not a bad thing.

But to say that you cannot graduate until you prove that you can be a useful meat widget for a future employer-- that idea represents a hollowing out of educational goals. Be a good citizen? Become a fine parent? Lifelong learning? Developing a deeper, better more well-rounded picture of who you can become as a person, while better understanding what it means to be human in the world? Screw that stuff, kid. Your future employer has the only question that matters-- "What can you do for me, kid?"

The suppose Awesome Features of the new requirements don't make it sound any better. It opens the door to personalized learning, which-- well, problems with modern PL aside, saying you will now make everyone go to the same destination, but they can pick how they get there is the silliest version of personalization since Henry Ford offered cars in any color you want, as long as it's black.

But hey-- the new requirements will be locally flexible and workforce-aligned, so that your local business operators can stop by and say, "Whip us up forty good applicants for these jobs we might want to fill." Sure. I offer this deal-- I'll have my school take over vocational training for your plant the same day that you guarantee a job for every single graduate that we train for you. The requirements also make much of how the personalization comes because the students will be selecting their life career path, which leads me to believe that the Board has not actually met any fourteen-year-olds.

The new standards throw in rigor and currency, while tossing skills gap and other concepts that only make sense if you believe that the purpose of the education system is to serve business and corporate interests. If you think public education should serve the interests of students, parents and the community as well, then Indiana's great new idea is a great step backward.

Presumably local districts are free to add to this sorry list and bring their educational goals back in line with something a little more like education, but that can't erase the job training for meat widgets heart of these new requirements. The Board adopted them by a vote of 7-4, from which we can deduce that seven members of the Indiana Board of Education don't really understand their job.

Tolerating the Minimum

From the moment at her confirmation hearing when she fumbled the question about IDEA, Betsy DeVos has faced a huge disconnect between two impulses.

One is the impulse to make sure that students with special needs get the services they need. I've read enough to believe that DeVos is essentially sincere on this point. But it runs smack into her other impulse, which is that the government shouldn't tell anybody how to do anything.

This surfaced in her recent speech at Jeb Bush's Charterpalooza. Now here it is again at EdWeek, in a special commentary about students with special needs.

DeVos is spinning off the Supreme Court decision about Endrew F., a student whose parents wanted more than the "de minimis" offered by their home school district. They went to court to have the district pay for a more appropriate school setting for their son, and won, mostly. As an extra prize, they won the chance to become propes in DeVos's pro-choice arguments, a position that they have forcefully declined. But DeVos has kept it up anyway.

"When it comes to educating students with disabilities, failure isn't acceptable. De minimis isn't either," writes DeVos.

That's a noble position, and in many ways superior to the Duncan position that all effects of special needs could be erased by the power of high expectations (though she kind of believes that, too). It just doesn't fit very well with the rest of her plans for education. It's nice to say that failure is unacceptable, but unacceptable to whom? And who is going to make the school do something about it, if the government's position is that they shouldn't be strong-arming anyone?

First, if the government is going to dump a bunch of regulations and barely enforce the rest, exactly who is going to insure that students with special needs aren't failed? From her confirmation hearing onward, DeVos has consistently refused to envision a scenario in which her department would step in and tell a school, "You can't do that." So wishing for equity and extra effort and appropriate programs for students is, without the weight if any enforcement behind it, just wishing.

Second, DeVos thinks this is an argument for choice. It isn't.

Every family should have the ability to choose the learning environment that is right for their child. They shouldn’t have to sue their way to the U.S. Supreme Court to get it. 

She repeats this line from her Charterpalooza speech, and it's a line that's thick with irony. Because, of course, if Endrew's parents were unhappy with the program offered him at a charter or voucher school, they couldn't sue anyone at all. The charter operators could simply smile and say, "Well, if we aren't satisfying your requirements here, you are certainly free to vote with your feet." And then they could point at the door.

Students like Endrew are expensive to educate. That was kind of the point of everything that led his parents to the Supreme Court. Charters are businesses, and as such, they have to make prudent fiscal decisions, and every business that ever existed learns that some potential customers just aren't worth it. Every business makes a distinction between customers they'll try to collect, and customers they will deliberately try to NOT collect. There is no business model based on providing goods or services to every single potential customer-- not for individual businesses or for whole industry sectors.  For charter schools, high needs, high cost students like Endrew are not desirable-- and right now no court in the land can force those schools to properly serve a student like Endrew.

Endrew was fortunate that his parents found a school that could help him. But not all students with special needs will be so lucky. So what happens to a student that nobody wants to serve. If the public school is so strapped for resources, hollowed out by the costs of charters, and no charters are willing to accept that student, then what should the parents do? And exactly who is responsible for that student?

Students with special needs represent a special challenge. They are in danger of being more marginalized as more folks push the idea that schools are job prep centers, aimed at making every student a valuable asset to a future employer. But some non-zero number of students will never meet that standard. If we are evaluating humans strictly on cost-benefits basis, some students will cost far more to educate than they will ever put back into society. But those students are still someone's child, and they are still capable of love and kindness and everything that makes being a human more than just being a useful meat widget. 

In any choice system, certain students-- some special needs, behavioral problems, low function, etc-- will be the hot potatoes. Nobody in the marketplace is going to want them. Betsy DeVos thinks a choice system is a perfect way to serve those students, but she's simply wrong. That's because in a choice system, the choice belongs to the school, not the parents. Providing choice without oversight, without attaching either funding or mandates to certain students, will create a system in which some students are well served and some students are out in the cold. If the public school system is the only school being told "You must educate these children" even as they are being stripped of the resources needed to do the job, those students will be abandoned in a mess that even the Supreme Court can't fix.

We shouldn't tolerate minimum efforts by schools to educate all students. We shouldn't tolerate charter and choice schools doing less than the minimum to educate all students. And it might help if the USED didn't tolerate a minimum effort from itself to getting a fully-funded equitable education for every student.

Snapchat Chief Joins Pearson Board

Michael Lynton is joining the board of Pearson, everyone's favorite educational behemoth. (h/t Caitlin McCarthy).

Who is he? An educational expert? A big name in the study of pedagogy? A guy with expertise in leading a school system? A person who's created a lot of valuable and successful educational material?

Nope. He's the chairman of Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, that social media app that your students love and you can't figure out how to work. Lynton is also the former chairman-CEO of Sony Entertainment. And he's not completely new to Pearson-- he worked for the publishing giant back in the late 90s as head of their Penguin Group.He has some other entertainment and publishing world credits as well.

Why Lynton? A plausible explanation is that Pearson has long banked its health on being able to conquer the digitizing and datafication of education, and Lynton fits that vision. 

“The Pearson board and leadership already has strong digital talent and expertise, and Michael’s appointment augments that perfectly,” Pearson chairman Sidney Taurel said in a statement. “His experience and perspective will further strengthen Pearson and drive our transformation to be a more focused, simpler digital learning company.”

A fresh set of eyes may be called for, as Pearson's attempt to conquer US education via Common Core hasn't exactly gone as planned. Just last spring there was speculation they might be getting out of that market.  But Lynton is a believer:

Education is the next frontier in the digital revolution and Pearson is uniquely well placed to lead the way. I’m impressed by the major investment in the products of the future and the creation of a single, global learning platform.

A single global learning platform. There is no reason, of course, to believe that such a platform would be good for education. But, wow-- would it ever be profitable as hell, particularly with its ability to gather, mine, and crunch data, a long-favorite vision of Pearson honcho Michael Barber.

Snapchat made a name for itself as a platform for sending messages and pictures that would immediately disappear, but I'm not sure I see how useful that approach would be for education. But if my students are any measure, Snapchat has been hugely successful at reaching the teen market, and I'm sure Pearson would find that helpful.

If nothing else, Pearson's acquisition of Lynton is a reminder that in the world of corporate ed reform, education credentials are not only unnecessary, but not particularly desirable. It's a business, run with business values and business goals.

School Violence: The New Normal

There was a shooting yesterday in New Mexico. Two students were killed; the shooter is dead as well.

Hadn't heard about it? Or the shooting the day before in Colorado? That's understandable-- I just completed a cursory search of various news sites online, and only a couple included the story at all, and none included it as a major story. It's true that many sites use some form of click-based ranking-- the more people who click on the story, the more prominently it's featured on the page. I'm not sure whether that makes me feel better, or worse. Probably worse.

We have a new standard for coverage of school shootings in this country-- it's only news if it sets a new record of some sort. Usually that means highest body count. That's grim news indeed-- if your goal is to become famous as a school shooter, and you're paying attention, then you have to know that you'll only get there with a super-high body count. This may qualify as the most perverse incentive ever.

It was not always like this.

There was a time when any death in a school was news. It was shocking. It was alarming. Schools would shut down over the slightest hint that they might be targeted by some shooter.

We seem to have turned a corner. As many folks have noted, about the time we decided that the deaths of twenty children at Sandy Hook were sad, but not a reason to actually do anything. When we decided that the price of freedom is to occasionally have small children killed, their bodies violated by bullets-- well, after that point, there hardly seems any reason to make a fuss about it any more. Just another day. Dog bites man. Shooter kills students. Thoughts and prayers.

What seems most incredible these days are the conspiracy theorists who cry "False flag" for these shootings. Their concern is that the government will use the shooting as a reason to implement gun control. Which is truly ridiculous. The national debate about gun control is over, and the gun fans and the NRA won-- we're going to continue to do nothing, and we'll just write off the shooting deaths as the price of freedom.

Meanwhile, those of us who work in schools drill for active shooters as regularly as we drill for tornadoes or severe weather. Taxpayers will pay for door lock systems and camera surveiilance around the building. Occasionally we'll be subject to really alarming active shooter drills. And if we discuss solutions at all, it will be ridiculous ones, like arming teachers in the building.

I don't have any quick and easy answers to any of this, but I can't help noticing that this is one more sad commentary on how little we as a society actually value children. And if we can't even get serious about keeping them safe from harm, how can we get serious about giving them a decent education.

No, we've decided that a certain small percentage of our children are expendable, less valuable than my right to carry a gun around, to keep a firearm in my home or car or holster because, you know, if a man's not free to blow a hole in something or someone with a gun, then a man's just not free at all. And if the cost of that freedom is a few children killed every week, well, so be it. And in the meantime, we might as well adjust to this new normal by ceasing to make a fuss about it. IF it ain't a new record, it ain't news. Dog bites man. Shooter kills students. Thoughts and prayers.