Breaking News: It's Easy To Cheat On Line

iReady is one of many test prep businesses that have popped up since No Child Left Behind reared its misbegotten head. They say they're in the "curriculum associates" business, but for you civilians in the audience, here's how these things work:

Shocked! I am shocked!

See, one of the challenges of the Big Standardized Test is that it's only given once a year, so schools have to approach this potentially school-whacking test (in Florida, it results in the school getting a letter grade) armed with no information other than last year's scores. For many schools, that's not enough. "What I need," administrators say, "is a way to spot the students who are going to screw us by getting low scores. And if you could target exactly what we should drill them on, that would be cool. And if you could sell us the drills, that would be most awesome of all."

So many of these tests sprang up, tests that were sold as diagnostic, but which were diagnosing only one thing-- how would this student fare on the BS Test.

There have been plenty of these, and what's most remarkable about them is what a terrible job they do of actually predicting BS Test scores. But they are also excellent at wasting money and time, as well as driving home the notion that school is mostly about  taking lots of tests in order to get ready for other tests. This, incidentally, is why states that make noise about shortening the BS Test aren't really helping anything-- test prep testing remains as obtrusive as ever.

That's the situation in Florida, where iReady has been deployed for several years. As the i suggests, iReady combines test prepping with on-line personalized [sic] algorithm selected mass custom drill. The beauty of the online approach is, of course, that students can be hounded by their cyber-taskmaster at home. That's been a point of contention and non-clarity for a while,

But Boca News Now reports there's another issue.

Parents throughout South Palm Beach County are using iReady on behalf of their children, possibly skewing scores — and usefulness — of the $6-Million diagnostic computer system.

Yup. It turns out that when you give students computer work to do outside of school, well-- sometimes parents cheat. I know! Next someone will be claiming that some projects at the elementary science fair were not completed by students working all on their own.

You may have looked at various work-at-home cyber education models and thought, "Surely they must know it's an issue, so surely they must have sophisticated safeguards in place." Well, not so much. iReady's crack team looks for sudden jumps in score. Apparently iReady's crack team doesn't know much about cheating:

However, BocaNewsNow.com has learned this is apparently not fool proof as parents log in and complete coursework with just enough errors to make the results seem plausible.

Well, yeah. 

iReady also provides little of the information that could be useful to teachers (e.g. showing that third grader Chris logged on at 11 PM last night).

But don't worry. BocaNewsNow reports that the district is looking at yet another test prep service-- this one called TenMarks, from the fine people at Amazon.com. That should be just awesome, in a totally non-cheaty way.

ICYMI: Goodbye, January Edition (1/28)

As we bid January goodbye, here are some readings for the day. Remember-- you can promote the voices you value by sharing their work. Not everyone has time to write, but if you have time to read, you have time to hit a share button. Amplify the voices that matter.

Does Social and Emotional Learning Belong in the Classroom?

I don't generally put my own stuff on this list, but this particular post has been spreading and stirring up conversation, and I actually put extra thought into it, because I think this is emerging as a critical issue in education. So if you didn't get around to it, now's the time. 

The Tuscon Jacakalope

The story of how a district's rumored blacklist was finally dragged into the light.

Mismatched Assumptions

Julian Vasquez-Heilig on how some assumptions about grit and high stakes testing don't really fit together.

Paul Vallas Wants to Be Mayor of Chicago, Maybe

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the news about Paul Vallas running for mayor of Chicago (maybe) and reminds us why that's not good news.

Why We Chose Public School

Jan Ressenger talks about how her family made the decision to choose public schools

Meanwhile, In Puerto Rico

EdWeek reports on the latest plans for the education system on the beleagured island. Spoiler alert: it's not good.

The Amazing Power of Plain Old Arts Education

Nancy Flanagan with a reminder of the power of arts and music for students.

For Some Reason

I've tried to develop a new habit in the morning. Before I get busy with the important work of using the internet to point out everyone and everything that's wrong, I post a video clip on Facebook, some piece of music. It's a way to make myself breathe before Internet Derangement Syndrome takes hold. I recommend it.

My musical tastes run pretty broad and deep, but the other morning I just wanted a song I half-remembered from Three Dog Night. (For you youngsters, Three Dog Night was an inescapably popular band in the early 70s. Their thing was three lead singers who didn't just harmonize, but riffed off each other like the horn line in a small jazz band. They had a monstrous hit with "Joy to the World," a terrible song that your grandmother probably called "Jeremiah was a bullfrog" because it was the only line she could remember.) Anyway, the song I was thinking of was this one:



As soon as it started playing, I had that sinking feeling, that realization that, like Sean Connery's Rapey James Bond, this was one of those hallmarks of my youth that I would no longer be able to enjoy.

The message here is one that was prevalent in early 70s (heck, it was still around when genius Paul McCartney and genius Stevie Wonder teamed up to give us the not-so-genius piece of goop, "Ebony and Ivory.") It's a message about racial harmony, peace, love and understanding, and it goes like this:

For some reason, black and white folks have trouble getting along. For some reason, there is tension and strife. Let's all just agree to get over it and get along.

This sounded nice to me when I was young. It sounded nice to lots of young white kids. But let me propose an analogy.

You are a student at a school. You are bullied daily by a gang of bigger, stronger kids. Every day they subject you to one form of indignity or another. Some days you just take it and get beat up. Some days you try to fight back. But after 100 straight days of bullying and abuse, you and your tormentor are called into the principal's office. The principal says, "It seems that you two just can't get along for some reason," as if you are somehow both equally to blame. Your first thought is probably not, "Oh, yeah. I'm going to get justice here." And your mood probably does not improve if your tormentor says, "Yes, I'm not sure why we've had all this conflict, but I'm certainly willing to leave the past behind."

The problem, of course, is that we do not have racial strife in this country "for some reason."

I blame, in part, our national ignorance about history. Too many people think the basic narrative is, "Yes, well, the South held blacks as slaves and then the Civil War freed them and that was pretty much the end of it. Maybe there was some Jim Crow sort of thing?" The weight of history that whites don't feel is staggering. Forced segregated housing in major cities like Chicago. Systematic obstacles to the vote. A justice system that refused to punish whites for assaulting or killing blacks. Even simple indignities like Robert Moses building overpasses low enough to bar buses from carrying poor blacks out to the nice beaches. A web of systemic and institutionalized racism stretching over decades.

As teachers, we're supposed to know better. If we stormed into the office and said, "This kid keeps acting out in my class for some reason, so put them in detention," any decent principal would tell us to get back out there and find out what the reason is. "For some reason," is not a reason-- it's a decision to avoid learning what the actual reason is.

And yes, I know it's complicated. Complicated to sort out the lines between the races and complicated to track down culpability through generations and complicated to figure out what our own individual responsibilities and actions should be. But that's part of my point. "For some reason" is about the facile erasure of all complications. It's like going out to eat and one person orders six lobsters and the other gets a baloney sandwich and at bill time, lobster person says, "Well, I guess the only thing to do is split the check evenly." Pretending that racial tension and conflict exist in this country "for some reason" is a terrible example of false equivalence, and we should have gotten smarter over the last forty years.

Meanwhile, here's a better sample of the band's work. No, I will not post the bullfrog song.

More Reformer Heresy

A prominent reform voice now says that reform is off track.

There have always been members of the reformster movement who have been willing to call out their colleagues. Jay Greene (no relation) has questioned testing orthodoxy, and Rick Hess has often shown a willingness to put intellectual honesty ahead of hewing the party line. We even get the occasional display of full-on apostasy, like the Alt-School rebel from a few weeks ago, or Diane Ravitch herself, who famously defected from the NCLB camp.

Kate Walsh (NCTQ) recently leveled a hard critique at reformsters which echoed a criticism from two years ago by Robert Pondiscio. In response, Pondiscio has written a piece for the Fordham blog that is probably going to earn him some cranky e-mails from his reformy colleagues. You may not be a regular Pondiscio reader, but you should read this.

"Education reform is off track. Here's how to fix it," is not a full-on dismissal of the faith, but it includes some hard words indeed.

After recapping Walsh's complaints, Pondiscio points out that the reality is even worse:

If shares in the education reform movement could be purchased in the stock market, neutral analysts would grade them “underperform” and probably “sell.” We’ve seen gains in student outcomes particularly among disadvantaged subgroups. But those gains have been mostly in math and almost entirely in the younger grades. The “historic” rate of high school graduation is frothy at best, fraudulent at worst. It is not possible to look at the big indicators of K–12 performance over the last few decades—NAEP, PISA, SAT, and ACT scores—and claim that ed reform at large has been a success. The payoff is simply not there.

I'm going to disagree about what the Big Indicators of K-12 performance are, but reformers staked their success on moving those needles and Pondiscio is correct-- those needles have not been moved.

He gives reform credit for the moral goal of making it Not Okay to hold students-- particularly non-white or non-wealthy ones-- to lower standards. But he says the glory days, the high water mark, of reform came twenty years ago, and the few gains achieved are all a decade in the past. "Ed reform peaked early and failed to live up to the hype." I could quibble about the peak, but the failure to live up to the hype is dead on. And he's not done.

Since then we have mostly overplayed our hand, overstated our expertise, and outspent our moral authority by a considerable margin as we morphed from idealism to policymaking. Education reform’s policy prerogatives have transformed schooling in ways that parents don’t much like—test-based accountability, in particular, focused on just two subjects—and without clear and lasting benefits to justify them.

Indeed, many reformster ideas have turned out to be hugely unpopular, in part precisely because they offer no benefits to students and their families. And I'm going to bold this next quote:

If you want the public’s permission to fundamentally alter the relationship between Americans and their schools, there has to be a clear, compelling, and demonstrable upside in time for people to see it. If the reform policy playbook was going to drive transformational, system-wide gains in American education, we’d have seen it by now.

Exactly.

This is almost all of the harshest of his criticism, and much of it I could have (and occasionally have) said myself. But it's worth noting what Pondiscio, one of the few reformsters to have actually worked in a classroom, sees as the fix for reform.

A conceptual failure lies at the heart of ed reform’s underperformance: the mistaken assumption that education policy, not classroom practice, is the most important lever to pull to drive enduring improvement. But educational failure is not a tale of unaccountable and union-protected layabouts refusing to do right by children. More often than not, it’s well-intended people trying hard and failing—and not despite their training, but because of it. In short, we have a product and practice failure more than a policy and process failure.

We're going to have long, contentious conversations about that "not despite their training, but because of it" part, but his basic critique is solid-- reform has focused on policies passed by state and federal level amateurs that have reshaped a bunch of government baloney, but which have deliberately and sometimes aggressively ignored the people who actually teach in classrooms. But there, in the classroom, is where education happens, and all attempts to affect education must be measured by what happens in the classroom. Ed reform has been cavalier in its dismissal of the classroom and of classroom teachers, often setting an explicit goal of making reform teacher-proof, or reducing the job to something that can't be affected by the person performing it. That goal is unattainable, but a great amount of damage has been done (and continues to be done) in trying to attain it (see also: Big Standardized Tests).

Pondiscio notes again the growing schism between the free market and lefty wings of reform, says that charters will never be more than "boutique" schools, and offers this blistering critique of school choice just in time for School Choice Week:

The inconvenient truth is that, even within the ed reform movement, school choice is regarded with suspicion. Choice generally means charter schools, not true educational pluralism, and our support is limited to schools that are willing to subject themselves to the oversight of an increasingly technocratic movement that lacks the record of accomplishment required to impose its prerogatives. Our movement may claim to care about low-income parents and people of color, but we don’t quite trust them to choose unless we strictly limit and monitor their choices. This is ed reform’s own moral failure: Our soft bigotry of low expectations hasn’t gone away. We just apply it to parents now.

In the How To Fix It portion, there is still much for the pro-traditional public school fan to disagree with. Pondiscio calls no excuse schools ( "which once meant there’s no excuse for adults to fail children") an unambiguous victory, and nods to the idea of sending poor black kids to college as the main point of the whole business. He says many nice things about Doug Lenov, and he name checks a variety of education practitioners each of whom is a debate-starter in their own right.

But his bottom line is solid-- if schools are going to be lifted up in this country, it will be because of focus on teaching practices, not government education policy. Of course that policy can either help or hinder what teachers do (well, I'd say mostly it can only help by getting out of the way and keeping other things out of the way as well, or maybe by helping with a fair, full, and equitable dispersal of resources).

Watch for response pieces from other reformsters, ranging from anger to politely veiled anger. If I had to predict the counter arguments, I would put my money on these:

"We just haven't done it right, yet". Common Core watchers will remember "it's the implementation," aka the Core are awesome, it's just that everybody is doing it wrong. This is the argument that the idea is sound, we just need to tweak how we do it.

"We were thwarted by those evil ____________" Insert your favorite villain, such as "teacher unions" or "sycophants of the status quo."

"What do you mean!! We had totally awesome success with _________" Insert your favorite bogus statistic or fake proof of concept result. The powers of denial are great, particularly when you are well paid to exercise them.

There will be more, along with some backchannel namecalling, I'll bet. This does not fit much of the reform orthodoxy. But, to recap, there are points here that I agree with:

If reform ideas were going to change the face of education for the better, we would be there by now, and we're not.

If you want to change the entire premise and function of public education, you'd better be able to offer compelling proof that it will pay off in useful ways. They haven't.

If you want to make education work better, you need to talk with people who work in schools, not people who work in politics.

If we're talking about improving education, we have to talk about practices. That, admittedly, is a huge, huge complicated and contentious conversation, with few easy answers. But it's the conversation we should be having. Conversations about policy matter to the degree to which they affect practice.

Yes, there's not much here that some of us haven't been saying for years, but it matters that it's being said this time in the Fordham blog. And lord knows this would still leave a Grand Canyon's worth of space to argue about what better practice would look like. Read the whole piece. I may have been a bit harsh with Alt-School guy last week, but I must admit, it's always nice to see one more person get it and be honest about it. Yes, I suppose it's possible that this is another reform pivot, but the ideas Pondiscio expresses are consistent with what he's talked about for years. This time he just seems less... patient. Time will tell. In the meantime, grab some popcorn and enjoy those juicy pull quotes.

Does Social and Emotional Learning Belong in School?

"Experts Agree Social-Emotional Learning Matters, and Are Plotting Roadmap of How To Do It.." 

That's the headline at EdWeek, and only half of it is non-scary and unobjectionable.

Because there's no question that social-emotional learning (SEL) is an important part of the growth of any human being. I am not being simply snarky when I say that we can look around right now and see the damaging effects of adults whose SEL was either stunted, twisted, or non-existent. We know that employers want what we used to call "soft skills," and we know that finding your way toward being fully human in the world has a whole lot to do with emotional maturity and the ability to deal with other human beings in a healthy manner.

So I'm not going to argue for a moment that SEL is not important. It is. Hugely.

But it does not automatically follow that SEL belongs in the classroom as a formal, codified piece of the program. Here are the reasons to come to a full, thoughtful stop before implementing any such program or policy.

Doing it for the right reason

Referring to the work of The Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development,  the EdWeek article notes "social-emotional learning strategies center on research that has linked the development of skills like building healthy peer relationships and responsible decisionmaking to success inside and outside the classroom."

Nope. If you are doing SEL because you think it's going to get students better grades and better jobs, then you are doing it wrong. While SEL may well pay off in those areas, the very essence of learning to be a better human being is about things above and beyond getting a reward. Otherwise we're talking about being kind to others because it might help you get your way, or being polite and attentive to the person you're dating because it might get them to put out. Your goal influences what you're really doing, and what you're really doing is mimicking human social and emotional behavior in order to gain a benefit, which at best makes you a phony and at worst makes you a sociopath.

Students need to learn the SEL stuff because it will make them better human beings, better spouses, better neighbors, and better citizens. The world is better with more good people in it; it is not better with more jerks and sociopaths.

Defining the Qualities

Back at the beginning of my career, I worked with a team with whom I clashed, mostly because their idea of a Good Student was one who was compliant and obedient, whereas I preferred those who were feisty and independent. I can't imagine what would happen if we had to work together to write social and emotional learning goals.

So who will decide what a good SEL quality is? Who will decide things like what a "positive sense of community" looks like, or what a proper approach to relationships with others might be. Every time the subject of SEL comes up, folks go straight for the low-hanging fruit like "Students should not bully each other." But that barely scratches the surface. Who is going to decide what the proper way to be part of community is, or how to properly manage friendships, or how (and when) to question authority, or to what degree a person should subsume their own concerns to the Good of the Many?  As human beings, we have devoted centuries to battles between different moral, ethical and political systems trying to address what the "correct" social and emotional rules should be. Who exactly thinks they are prepared to codify all of that for K-12 students?

What yardstick will we possibly use?

Of course, if SEL is to become part of the accountability landscape, we'll need assessments.

We've already got folks who think they can measure "grit," and the whiz kids at NWEA scored an actual grant to continue their study which posits they can "read" social-emotional skills in students based on how fast those students answer multiple-choice questions on the MAP test. The notion that standardized bubble testing methods can be used to measure the character of a child is one of those So Ridiculous I Can't Believe Anyone Is Discussing It With a Straight Face things, but it's happening. Schools are doing it. I'm getting reports from parts of the country that SEL measures are being used as a significant part of student grades-- and yet there is not one shred of evidence that anyone has developed an assessment of SEL stuff that I any more accurate than boiling eyes of newt under a full moon.

And THAT eye of newt baloney is over and above the problem (see previous point) that those test manufacturers have decided what qualities of character the students are supposed to have.

Possibly even worse-- in many cases the SEL units will come folded into the whole computer-driven personalized [sic] software, meaning that we will be treated to the spectacle of computers teaching young humans how to be better humans.

Massive school overreach

From the EdWeek piece, here's Dr. James Comer, a professor of child psychiatry at Yale University Child Study Center (and part of the above commission):

“When I started, I remember being told that the parents will raise them and we will teach them,” Comer said. “We’ve come a long way now in understanding that child rearing begins at home, but that it has to be complemented every step of the way and that all of the institutions along the development pathway have to be involved... I think we are making that progress, but it’s terribly complicated and we have to learn and grow and be flexible along the way.”

So, does "complemented" mean that your school's SEL program is going to reflect the values you put forth at home?

Because this is how Outcome-Based Education shot itself in the face back in the nineties. Schools said, "As part of the new OBE, we will be teaching your children to reflect the proper values," and parents across the country replied, "The hell you will."

How do SEL advocates anticipate handling the first parent-teacher conference in which Mrs. Teamommy wants to know why her child got a low grade because the test showed the child didn't have the proper respect for authority, or displayed insufficient grit, or failed the self-esteem quiz. Will "respect and honor gay marriage" be on the final? And if a dominant culture sets the rules for what SE qualities are "desirable," what happens to students of the non-dominant culture?

And not just school overreach-- what about that data?

The assessment of SEL, particularly as it is tied into personalized [sic} computer-managed mass-customized learning, would be a huge gold mine of data. I'm not sure we can overstate just how huge it would be. Profiles of student academic skills, both on the individual and macro level are attractive and valuable, but collecting what amounts to complex psych profiles of millions of students is hugely valuable to corporations, and even governments. This is the kind of marketing and PR shaping information that companies spend billions of dollars for now, and this would be rawer, deeper, richer, and track an entire generation from childhood.

On the individual level, it's scary. BlobCorp's HR department says, "We need to hire fifty people who are good with math, fair readers, don't question authority, and just generally function well as drones. Pull up the spreadsheet and find me those fifty people." (If we're not careful, they'll be able to add "and who are not likely to develop health problems.")

On the macro level, it's scary. BlobCorp can consult the data to craft its messaging, to find the marketing that would most help them sell widgets. And of course it would be awesome for politicians as well, who could use the data to both get elected and to keep the drones in line. For a government with even the slightest totalitarian tendencies, this kind of data mine would be more valuable than an army of jackbooted thugs. And once the population is measured, next those people in power can decide where they want to nudge the people next.

We know how this goes. The people to whom this kind of data is so valuable will not hesitate to help fund it and push it, while at the same time doing their best to shape it so that the SEL programs suit their needs, and not the needs of students.

But but but but but but....

Don't we already teach SE skills? In fact, aren't most of the "This Teacher Changed My Life" stories in the universe really centered on how a teacher helped the storyteller gain SE insights and growth? Don't some cranks (like the writer of this blog) belittle and decry standards-based education precisely because it has overlooked SEL? In short, isn't this not only part of what we do, but one of the most important parts of what we do?

Yes, we do this, and yes, it's important. But there is a huge difference between bringing SEL into the classroom in an organic, human manner, and instituting it as required (and assessed curriculum).

First, I'd argue that bringing SEL in formally is just about the least effective way to handle it.

Second, requiring students to comply with the curriculum leads to another host of issues (including some listed above). The traditional organic method comes with its own buffers. Students can gravitate toward teachers who best reflect their own beliefs, their own location on the journey, and simply ignore the rest. If you think your algebra teacher is a selfish prick, you can navigate that as you wish (itself an SEL skill) without worrying about your grade resting on it. In fact, traditionally we'd consider it hugely unprofessional to make a student's grade rest on the teacher's opinion of the student as a human being. IOW, I may think a student in my class is a jerk, and I may even try to nudge her away from being a jerk, but at the end of the day, it would be unprofessional of me to drop her grade because of her jerkiness.

Making SEL a mandatory, assessed part of the program simply coerces compliance. It runs the risk of creating a backwards effect by teaching students that social-emotional skills are just empty actions that one imitates to earn a reward, and not an authentic part of being human.

At its best

SEL is essential. It is important. It has always been with us under flowery descriptors like "learning how to be fully human in the world" or "becoming your best self" or more mundane labels like "learning to get along with others" or even just "growing up." Teachers, because they are the non-parental adults who spend the most time with children, have always been instrumental in this process. And it has always been bad for the society and the culture as a whole when some folks fail to grow up into healthy, functioning human beings.

The body of literature is huge, encompassing humanity's greatest philosophers, the great religions, even the half-decent self-help gurus. There is even some scientific literature to throw into the mix (take a quick look at what's out there about Emotional Intelligence).

And education reform, under the guidance of technocrats and data worshippers, has pushed us steadily away from the social and emotional dimensions that are a critical part of the growth and development of every young human.

And yet, though all that is true, none of it makes formally incorporating SEL into the classroom a good idea.

At its worst

Extending the bad ideas of technocratic data-driven education to SEL is exactly backwards. It's insanely backwards, like someone who decides "I am going to marry that beautiful stranger over there, and here is my ten step plan to make it happen." SEL happens within an authentic human relationship; as with all other education, pretending you can design a system that will deliver the learning without developing the relationship is just a snare and a delusion.

In fact, it's worse than a snare and a delusion.

In 1984, Big Brother wasn't just watching and gathering and collecting all the information. Big Brother was also crafting and controlling, using all manner of techniques to instill the proper values in His citizens, teaching them to interact socially and emotionally in the correct way.

SEL at its worst is about emotionally engineering humans. It's about imposing someone else's values on a vulnerable human being, essentially stripping that human of their autonomy and will. And worse, from re-education camps to certain cults, we know that it can be done. Because the power and wealth attached to such a massive endeavor are so great, the entire business is guaranteed to be warped and twisted by those who stand to profit. At its worst, we are talking about crafting human beings to order and harvesting both them and their data in the service of those with power. We are talking about pushing them to be the people that someone else thinks they should be. This is not just bad policy, inappropriate pedagogy, or culturally toxic-- this is evil.

So....?

It would nice to be able to say something clear and definitive-- "SEL is always a sign that Something Evil is afoot," or "Don't let paranoia carry you away on this stuff." But once again the answer is that we have to pay close attention and speak out when we need to. Big Brother always watches; so must we.

Common Core Still Alive in DC

Remember when Betsy DeVos said that Common Core was awful "And at the U.S. Department of Education, Common Core is dead." (It was just last week on January 14).

Turns out that even as she said those words, the Secretary or Education had already given the Core a little kiss of life. As reported at EdWeek, the Department of Education, in a letter dated on January 11, told Maryland that the PARCC test would be super-duper in meeting their federal requirements.

Imagine I tell you that our home has banned canned food. And then I tell you that the official approved Food Access Device will be a can opener. Or my state has banned cars that use leaded gas, and that all authorized gas stations will sell only leaded gas. Or I announce that the dress code for my school forbids jeans and t-shirts, and then I put up a picture of an officially approved outfit, and it's t-shirt and jeans.

That's the kind of mixed message we have here.

The PARCC test was created for one purpose, and one purpose only-- to see how well a state's schools had implemented the Common Core State [sic] Standards. That's it. That's what it is designed to do.

This is good news for the remaining PARCC users (Colorado, the District of Columbia, Illinois, New Jersey, and New Mexico) and that in turn is good news for PARCC, a test that has been dumped by sixteen states. Or as the head of the company that manages the testing product put it:

"This is really great news," said Arthur VanderVeen, the CEO of New Meridian, the company that manages the PARCC consortium. "We think this confirms that the states that administer the PARCC test, or [use] its test content, are administering the highest quality assessment that's available."

At least, that will make good PR copy. Meanwhile, let the record note that on January 14, when Betsy DeVos said that Common Core was dead at the department, the department had already given its seal of approval to a critical part of the Common Core program.

IXL: Caveat Emptor & Personalized Misery

As the computerized version of personalized [sic] learning continues to gather steam, we can anticipate increasingly aggressive marketing. Remember-- you don't win in a free market by having the best product, but by having the most effective marketing.

Marketing for these algorithm-driven software packages of mass-produced custom education belongs to a special class of marketing-- marketing that is designed to sell a product to people other than the actual end users. If your not sure why that matters, imagine if you didn't buy the car you drive, but it was purchased for you by parents. Or if the grocery shopping for your house was done by your children. How would that affect the way those products are marketed? Education has always suffered from this problem-- teachers get stuck using products that are purchased by district administrators who will never have to actually work with them.

So we get products with ridiculous levels of puffery, like this software that claims to be in 70% of all US districts. And we get a variety of other claims that are either beside the point (like software that will make the administrator's job easier, but will add more fruitless labor for teachers).

Edubiz marketeers can smell the sweet green chum of tax dollars in the water. I'm not arguing that all sharks should starve to death, but more than ever, part of an admistration's job to separate the predators from the pedagogy, to distinguish between baloney and steak. And that means paying attention, doing de diligence, and taking care of their homework.

Here's a good example.

IXL has been in the algorithm-selected digitized worksheet biz for many years, all the way back to 1998 when they were selling Quia Web, a sort of web learning platform. Nowadays, their pitch is perfectly suited to the computer-centered personalized [sic] learning crowd:

IXL helps students excel! With thousands of topics in math, language arts, science, social studies, and Spanish, there's always something new to explore. IXL sets a new standard for online learning, offering unlimited algorithmically generated questions, real-time analytical reports, and dynamic scoring to encourage mastery. Released in 2007, it has since become the world's most popular subscription-based learning site for pre-K to high school. With more than 7,000 unique and challenging skills to master, IXL offers a dynamic and enjoyable environment suitable for any learning style. Students who use IXL are succeeding like never before.

IXL's algorithm can "generate" worksheets and kick out "analytical" reports on the road to "mastering" skills, and if you start to browse, you see that IXL meets the usual standard of measuring only those things that can be measured with computer-scored questions. We'll get back to the dynamic scoring in a bit, but "succeeding like never before" is a bold piece of puffery, lacking any indication whether that's a good thing or a bad thing (Trump is a President like never before, but I'm not sure that's great news).

The content is unimpressive. Skills are pushed way down into lower levels. The 11th grade language set focuses on mechanical items that can be drilled with computerized bubble questions, but because its focus is on Things That Can Be Computerized, the material about reading and writing is largely inadequate. But this will always be the problem for any computer-centered education delivery system-- if you are delivering your "product" through a garden hose, you will severely limit what "product" can be delivered, and software is a hugely limiting delivery system.

IXL has a whole page of "inspiration" on its site, and as is usually the case, this is not so much aimed at telling teachers "this is how this will help" as it is aimed at telling superintendents "this is how much your people will like it" or "this is how much easier your job will be" or even "at last you can slap this in teachers' hands and stop worrying about whether anything's being taught or not." It stresses being "data driven" because that brings tears of joy to every administrator who dreams of sitting in their office and managing their district by scanning screenloads of data. There are videos, including a couple of teachers who make the usual self-incriminating endorsements ("Before this product, I didn't know what the hell was going on in my classroom, but now I look at these cool data screens and I'm totally on top of things.") And we are reassured that for students this is just like a computer game, and they just can't wait to play; this sort of claim always reminds me of my own students, who generally are super-excited and obsessed with a new phone app for about two weeks, after which they lose all interest. Gamification is a fool's game.

IXL has a page devoted to its privacy policies which include the usual sort-of-reassuring language (we will not disclose any of your personal identifiable information except when we have your permission or, you know, other stuff) mixed in with not-at-all-reassuring language (if someone buys us, along with all your data, we'll tell you it's happening, but otherwise all bets will be off).

But overall, when one peruses IXL, there's nothing much to alarm the average human. The materials are neither more nor less crappy than the collections of publisher-created worksheets that we used to get with a textbook series.

But there are other places to look for information about IXL.

Meet Common Sense Media.  This is a website based in San Francisco that is "dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the 21st century." They're big on tech and tech-related reviews, and they are sponsored by many of the usual suspects-- Bezos Family Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates, the Hewlett Foundation, the Broad Foundations, and many more of the same.

The review section of Common Sense takes an amazon-style look at many products and services, and the folks there have a few things to say about IXL. The reviews stretch from 2013 until 2017. There are 108 parent reviews, and 314 kid reviews. Here's a sample of some of the kid review headlines:

Do not try it! Will make your kid(s) cry!

Don't use it.

IXL is evil.

If you hate your kids...

IXL FRIKIN' SUUUUUUUUUUCKS

Haha People think this helps kids? Ahaha.

If you think you're going to achieve something, something else will smack you back down.

Who thought this was a good idea?

Well, maybe these are just the complaints of frustrated children and teens who just couldn't quite cut the mustard, who are just bitter because this website dashed their delusions of awesomeness. Maybe more rational adult voices will give us a better picture...

Poor learning website

Worst website ever

Don't waste your money

Ebola

Won't LEARN math; instead How to take Tests

Yeah, the adults all hate it, too.

There seem to be a couple of recurring complaints.

One is that the program is expensive, and like any good monetized piece of internet software, it makes its money with a steady drip, drip, drip of charges. So there's that.

But what draws the most loathing and anger is the non-teaching high-penalty dynamic scoring system. A student is supposed to earn her way to a score of 100 to qualify as a confident master of the particular skill. But as the student gets closer to that 100-point threshold, the penalties become fiercer. People repeatedly tell of being in the 90s, missing one comma or decimal point and being booted down to the 80s or 70s. And as one parent notes, "it doesn't teach you what you did wrong like a human would."  Parents and students also note that the program is very repetitive, and therefor very boring. But the frustration seems to be the most-reported emotion.

What most comments point toward, but don't really address, is the focus on gathering points. Almost none of the reviewers talked about actually learning skills or concepts, but discussed working through the program as a matter of generating the right answer in order to earn more points. Learning? Who cares-- personalized [sic] algorithm-selected mass-custom worksheet drill is about repeating the steps, jumping through the hoops, pressing the lever to get a piece of cheese. If you think a rat that has been living in a Skinner Box for months is no a well-educated rat, then using a program like this will make sense to you.

Of course, none of this appears in the happy, shiny world if IXL marketing, and if the person making the purchase decision makes no attempt to find out how the program actually works, or how people who have actually used it (that weren't selected by IXL's marketing department) feel about it, then it's more bad news for the people who actually have to use it.

This is how bad personalized [sic] learning via algorithm-selected mass-custom worksheets gets. It's a terrible way to educate actual live human beings.