Is The Big Standardized Test A Big Standardized Flop?

Since No Child Left Behind first rumbled onto the scene, the use of a Big Standardized Test to drive accountability and measure success has been a fundamental piece of education reform. But recently, some education reform stalwarts are beginning to express doubts.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt the validity of the Big Standardized Test, be it PARCC or SBA or whatever your state is using these days. After almost two decades of its use, we've raised an entire generation of students around the notion of test-based accountability, and yet the fruits of that seem.... well, elusive. Where are the waves of students now arriving on college campuses super-prepared? Where are the businesses proclaiming that today's grads are the most awesome in history? Where is the increase in citizens with great-paying jobs? Where are any visible signs that the test-based accountability system has worked?

Two years ago Jay Greene (no relation), head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, was writing about the disconnect in test scores-- if test scores were going up, wasn't that supposed to improve "life outcomes." Wasn't the whole argument that getting students to raise test scores would be indicative of better prospects in life? After all, part of the argument behind education reform has been that a better education was the key to a better economic future, both for individuals and for the country. Greene looked at the research and concluded that there was no evidence of a link between a better test score and a better life.

On Forbes.com, contributor Frederick Hess (director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-tilted thinky tank) expressed some doubts as well. AEI has always supported the ed reform cause, but Hess has often shown a willingness to follow where the evidence leads, even if that means challenging reform orthodoxy. He cites yet another study that shows a disconnect between a student's test scores and her future. In fact, the research shows that programs that improve "attainment" don't raise test scores, and programs that raise test scores don't affect "attainment."

Test scores can be raised with several techniques, and most of those techniques have nothing to do with providing students with a better education. Drill the test prep. Take at-risk students out of electives and make them take test-related courses instead. And have teachers learn, over the years, how to teach more directly to the test. But do you want higher test scores or better education? Because those are two unrelated things.

The end result is that the test scores do not tell you what they claim they tell you. They are less like actionable data and more like really expensive noise.

Hess and Greene represent a small but growing portion of the reform community; for most, the Big Standardized Test data is God. For others, the revenue stream generated by the tests, the pre-tests, the test prep materials, and the huge mountains of data being mined-- those will be nearly impossible to walk away from.

But there is one critical lesson that ed reform testing apostates should keep in mind. The idea that the Big Standardized Test does not measure what it claims to measure, the idea that it actually does damage to schools, the idea that it simply isn't what it claims to be-- while these ideas are presented as new notions for ed reformers, classroom teachers have been raising these concerns for about 20 years.

Teachers have said, repeatedly, that the tests don't measure what they claim to measure, and that the educational process in schools is being narrowed and weakened in order to focus on testing. Teachers have said, repeatedly, that the Big Standardized Tests are a waste of time and money and not helping students get an education. Teachers have been saying it over and over and over again. In return teachers have been told, "You are just afraid of accountability" and "These tests will finally keep you honest."

After 20 years, folks are starting to figure out that teachers were actually correct. The Big Standardized Test is not helping, not working, and not measuring what it claims to measure. Teachers should probably not hold their collective breath waiting for an apology, though it is the generation of students subjected to test-centered schooling that deserve an apology. In the meantime, if ed reform thought leader policy wonk mavens learn one thing, let it be this-- the next time you propose an Awesome idea for fixing schools and a whole bunch of professional educators tell you why your idea is not great, listen to them.

Originally posted at Forbes.    

ICYMI: Post Show Edition (10/7)

Final performance and set strike last night, so I'm operating on too-little sleep. But that doesn't mean I didn't find you some worthwhile reads for your Sunday afternoon.

Tackling Bro Culture Is Hard

The Kavanaugh spectacle has opened up sopme discussion of dealing with bro culture in high schools. Here's a NYT take on the subject.

School Hopping Brings Chaos

A visit to Detroit shows how the proliferation of shake shady charters leads to a great deal of destructive disruption in students' educations.

The Easiest Money Bill Ackerman Has Made

The umpteenth example of how charters can be great tools for profiteers (particularly if they are also legislators who get to write the rules of the game).

It Didn't Start with Trump

The Guardian takes us back to the roots of modern teacher-bashing. Let's go back to 1983 and Ronald Reagan...

What Top-Rated Schools Have In Common- Fewer Poor Kids

The Nevada Current takes a look at high-achieving schools and discovers a strong link to wealth.

Guilty Verdict for Man Who Defrauded Newpoint Charter Schools

A look at yet another scam artist who uses the unregulated freedom of charters to make himself rich at taxpayer expense. Will you be surprised if I tell this story is from Florida?

Don't Let Richmond Dictate Charter Schools

Laura Bowman's plea to keep Virginis relatively clean of charter blight.

The  Truth About Money in Public Education Politics

Yet another look at how dark money worms its way into local education elections.

What Happens When There Are No Public Schools      

Jeff Bryant takes us to Michigan for a look at the bad outcomes of bad choice programs.

DeVos Secret Vist To View Koch Program

Betsy DeVos visited Wichita last Monday, but it was a very quiet visit. Her online schedule shows Monday an unscheduled day, and neither the Department of Education nor the group she visited issued any news release. It was a local source-- Suzanne Perez Tobias at the Wichita Eagle-- that picked up the story.

So what did DeVos travel to Wichita to see? She traveled to Koch Industries to meet a teacher and some students from the Youth Entrepreneurs, a group founded by Charles Koch and his wife Liz in 1991. It started out as an eight week course at a Wichita high school "designed to improve the professional potential of at risk students." That's not a shocker-- the Koch brothers have been pretty clear about preferring business solutions to educational problems, as well as their desire to have schools crank out useful meat widgets for the business leaders of America. According to their annual report, the program was in 126 schools with 182 teachers working with 3,487 students.

Their foundational values are unsurprising for a Koch venture. Responsibility-- "take responsibility for your own life." Be principled-- act with respect, integrity and toleration. Knowledge-- seek and use the best knowledge. None of that low-quality knowledge. Freedom-- "respect the rightgs of others and study the links between freedom, entrepreneurship, and societal well-being." Passion-- Find fulfillment by improving lives of others. That may not sound very Kochian, but the next one does. Opportunity-- "You make your own opportunities." Sound judgment-- by which we mean using "economic thinking to create the greatest benefit while using the least resources."(Yes, that's incorrect usage.) Win-win focus-- cooperation creates value for yourself and others. It's an interesting list, a portrayal of the conflicted shore where Christian do-unto-otheriness crashes in to Ayn Randian "take care of yourself and let everyone else rot," a neighborhood where the DeVos and Koch families have long lived. I'm glad this course is only an elective.

The program notes its differences from the Junior Achievement program. YE is a yearlong elective course taught by teachers who get YE training. The program offers students and program alums the chance to earn money for a business or continuing education.

No local superintendents were informed of DeVos visit ahead of time; the teacher involved, Zac Kliewer, e-mailed to let him know that the students would be meeting Betsy DeVos on Monday. Kliewer tweeted a photo of himself, the students, DeVos, and Liz Koch on Monday, When media picked that up, well... per the Wichita Eagle:

After a reporter contacted Kliewer seeking information about DeVos’s visit, “He got a call from somebody with the Kochs, and they said, ‘We would prefer not to have any media coverage,’” Burke said.

The visit to Wichita came two days before DeVos kicked off a four-state tour entitled "Rethink School."

It's not entirely clear why the visit needed to be hush hush, nor even whether DeVos wanted to avoid association with the Kochs or vice versa. Maybe everyone was just trying to avoid that unseemly spectacle in which journalists presume to bother their betters with questions. No word from the Wichita Eagle on whether or not DeVos was attended by her high-priced security detail.

Management and Directing

This weekend is arguably the biggest weekend of the year in my little corner of the world. Johnny Appleseed lived in this area briefly a couple of centuries ago, and on that thin peg we have hung a gigantic local festival, complete with crafts, food, strange tchotchkes, a car show, and a theater production.

Our local theater group owns and operates a refurbished local theater, a beautiful facility despite the lack of fly and wing space. The group puts on about six productions a year; the rest of the time the theater hosts other performances. I've been doing directing of one sort or another with that theater group for thirty years now, wearing a variety of hats (this time it's stage director, lighting designer, and pit orchestra conductor). This particular production (Mel Brooks' The Producers) has been a real adventure, but I wanted a real adventure to carry me past the beginning of the first school year of my retirement.

I bring all of this up because I never get involved with a theater production that doesn't get me thinking about teaching in general and leadership in particular (also because I like to brag on my little town). Community theater directing has to be, in some ways, more challenging than working with the Big Time Pros. BTP can be less-than-delightful because they are paying people; my casts are all volunteers doing this for fun. BTP can say "the lead should be able to sing, tap and act, and he should be blond, blue-eyed and 5' 3" tall" while community theater directors say "Okay, these are the fifteen people we've got to work with-- how can we make them fit into this show?"

Directing is just like management-- your job is to get the best possible performance out of your people. That means supporting them and providing what they need to succeed. It means providing a overall vision and direction, and many directors have lots of ideas about how to do this. Some are less productive than others.

Micromanagement is not uncommon. This director tells her actors every single exact move and moment, every little gesture, every bit of business. If there is a moment in the show that she hasn't covered (and there always is) the performers stand awkwardly paused because they don't know what to do. On the other end of the scale we find directors how under-direct, who tell the performers, "Just go out there and say the lines. Stand somewhere. Or maybe move."

The sweet spot is somewhere in between, and the critical part of the vision thing is to explain some sort of answer to the question "What are we trying to do here?" Tell the actors the essentials about their characters. Tell everyone in the production about the style and theme of the production. Tell them what emotional notes we want to strike.

In short, establish the guiding principles of your work.

If you can do this clearly and effectively, and if you have chosen guiding principles that are sound and that are supported by the work, then magical things will happen.

Actors have a million decisions to make in the course of a performance, and if your guiding principles are solid and sound and communicated, they can use their own expertise to make those choices in a way that contributes to the show. Mind you, each one will have her own way of filling in the blanks, based on who they are, what they know, what they've learned, and how their character fits in the whole piece. But you have to trust them. You may help them spot some choices they didn't see, or be a set of eyes to spot choices that don't fit quite right, but mostly you have to trust them, because as a director you simply can't make every single choice for them (there are to many choices) and as a director you can create a hard and fast set of rules that will serve every actor and every character being portrayed. And some choices are rooted in very practical issues (can this actor change costumes fast enough to make that entrance? can we build that particular set piece?) and sometimes the art takes a backseat to the limits of the facility (did I mention the theater's lack of fly and wing space?). And you have to make sure all the technical support, all the lights and sound and set are there to help support the actors in their work.

If you know what the play's about, if you know what the point is, if you can just keep your eye on the ball and not loose track of the main thing-- AND you can communicate that to everyone else, AND you can select people who are talented and able and willing to grow into the experience AND you can figure out artistic solutions to practical problems AND you can give them the freedom to use the skills and art that they brought to the table-- if you can do all that, then the curtain will open and your audience will be treated to an amazing, beautiful, moving display of magic wrapped around a core of something true.

All of that is true about theater and true about schools and true about classrooms.

Two performances left. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood. Unlike a school or a classroom, a show only comes to life for a short piece of time.

5 Necessary Additions to Teacher Prep Programs

In the search to improve teacher preparation programs, the focus has often been on tweaking some traditional features, like methods courses that focus on bulletin board construction and education professors who haven't been in a classroom since Ronald Reagan was a governor. But if we really want to beef up the preparation of teachers, there are some larger steps we need to take. If you run a college teacher program, consider adding these requirements. If you intend to become a teacher, the following should be elements of your preparation program.

Major Level Course Load

If you are going to teach English, you should take the same sort of course load that an English major takes (in fact, you should probably just go ahead and be an English major). Ditto for all subject areas. For elementary teachers, the requirement is the same, but you can pick your specialty.

There is no substitute in the classroom for knowing what you're talking about. That doesn't mean the teacher needs to be infallible. But if you have to teach the history of World War I and the last time you learned about it was in high school, you'll be challenged to come off like an expert. Beyond the academic benefits of having students learn from a teacher who knows, a teacher has far fewer classroom management issues when the students believe she knows what she's talking about. Be an expert in your field.

Be Involved In Performance

If you are going to work in front of an audience for a living, you should practice it. Join band or choir. Take a role in a theater production. Do something that requires you to get up in front of an audience and do your thing while simultaneously paying attention to crowd response. A good teacher is able to read the room; experience in the performing arts will help you develop that skill. Ideally, your experience should be in a small ensemble. As part of a hundred-piece marching band on a football field, audience reading is of limited use. But if you're working with a jazz trio, you will quickly learn about losing a room's attention and figuring out, on the fly, how to win them back.

Take A Course In Which You Stink

Nobody becomes a math teacher because math was their worst class in high school and they hated every minute of it. And yet, you will teach those very students. You probably plan to teach a subject that you aced, and despite what the critics say about the teacher pool, you are probably no dummy. Which means that your subject matter knowledge bank is filled a bunch of things you know because you just... well, you just know. You have skills that you just kind of have, somehow.

How do you help a student complete the journey from Being Deeply Lost and Confused all the way to Understanding the Subject Like a Boss if you never had to complete that journey yourself? Everyone has had that teacher--the one who doesn't really explain things but just keeps repeating them (and, in the worst version, looks at you like you're a dope for not getting it).

You owe it to every future student who will struggle in your class to go struggle in a class yourself. Feel the stress and frustration and burden of Not Getting It. Practice the attack skills that are needed by someone who needs more than just ten minutes of instruction and a single assignment to Get It.

Work At A Low-Level Job

You may very well do this already, but if you don't, you should. Not simply for the classic "this will help you realize how badly you want to use your college education to avoid this kind of work" reasoning, but because this is the world that a large number of your students are going into. In fact, if you teach high school, many of them are already there. Teachers are college educated, and if not careful, they develop a kind of college tunnel vision. But college is not everyone's destination after graduation. I'll gladly argue that all students benefit from studying Shakespeare and ancient history and algebra and classic American literary movements--but not all students benefit in a "this will help in college" way.

Some firsthand experience in the working world will help you maintain a more well-rounded perspective. Note: if you are in some parts of the country, you may be a teacher with twenty years of experience still also working at one of these low-level jobs. That's not helping your professional balance; that's being taken advantage of by your employers.

Take Up A Sport

It doesn't matter if it's a competitive sport like football or an individual sport like kayaking--get involved in an activity that involves bodily exertion, mental focus, and physical stamina. On that list of Things Nobody Tells You About Teaching is the fact that, done well, it is physically demanding. Not as demanding as roofing or professional wrestling, but definitely more demanding than office work. You will be on your feet all day, and you will not get to set your own pace--there is no "I'm just going to take five minutes to regroup" in teaching. So build your physical stamina and mental toughness, as well as getting involved in physical activity that will help shed stress.

Note: If you are going to be an elementary teacher, you'll want to work on your bladder-holding skills as well.

Originally posted at Forbes

More Charter Business Begging

Remember the days when part of the charter school sales pitch was that they could do it all better and cheaper? Those were the days. Now we are more likely to find charters demanding greater and greater chunks of taxpayer dollars.

Take this op-ed from Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, appearing today in the Washington Examiner. Rees started her advocacy career with the uber-conservative Heritage Foundation, spent some time in education for the Bush administration (including some time as Dick Cheney's education advisor), hopped to a consulting firm, before landing with NAPCS.

I'm not holding Rees responsible for the title of her piece; these are typically given by the editors, and this one is both a) not really representative of the content of her piece and b) not very bright. "Public school buildings belong to public school students-- including charter students" is just dopey. Public school buildings belong to the taxpayers; charter building ownership is a more tangled web, depending on the state. But to date I have not seen a story about a charter school closing and giving its building and equipment to its students.

Rees' complaint is a common one these days-- why can't charter schools have access to public tax dollars to help build their physical plant? Why can't the state and federal authorities throw more money at charter education so that charter schools can have Nice Places?

Charters are not just poor-mouthing in hopes of getting some more cash. This issue goes right back to the Big Lie of Charters, the lie that says you can operate two or three or ten school systems for the same money you spent to run one. The physical plant is the first place that lie runs into trouble-- you can't buy, build or operate ten school buildings for the same money you used to operate a single school. That has never not been true, but charter fans couldn't start the charter revolution by saying, "...oh, and you're going to need to raise more tax dollars to finance all this." So charter creep has been incremental-- first, sell the idea of charters and how they'll do more with less. Talk about how the money should follow the child, but don't mention that, actually, that won't be enough money and we're going to need more. Get the charter foot in the education door and then, once you feel more safely entrenched, it's time to ask for more.

Rees slips the critical point of her argument in via dependent clause:

Even though charter schools are public schools, supported by state and local tax dollars...

That, however, is the crux of the problem. Charters are not public schools, nor does the fact that they are paid with public tax dollars make them public schools. Defense contractors are paid with tax dollars; they are private businesses, not public companies. And charters have been very aggressive about asserting their private business nature (eg the White Hat charter management case in which White Hat successfully argued it was a private company and was entitled to keep all the equipment and supplies and money left in its defunct charter schools). Read the astonishing research by Bruce Baker about how the public can end up buying a charter school building twice and still not owning it. Real estate companies are among some of the early adopters of chartering, recognizing that a charter school would make good cover for some real estate profiteering.

Charters aren't transparent, don't answer to elected representatives of the taxpayers, don't have to follow various rules, don't have to serve all students. They are not public schools. They're private businesses, no more entitled to a taxpayer subsidy or handout than any other private business.

Rees argues that charters have to spend money on buildings instead of students. They also spend a ton of money for advertising; should the taxpayers foot that bill as well? Rees argues that charters don't always have the amenities. That sometimes they have to set up in strip malls. That they need about $375 million to bring charter physical plants up to speed. But none of this is news. None of this can be a surprise. This is the business that charter operators chose to go into-- what other business opens up shop and then tells the government, "Actually, this is pretty expensive and I'm going to need you to give me some taxpayer money to help out." It is interesting, though, that Rees admits that many charters are "making the best of inadequate facilities that lack essential school features." How, exactly, did these charters get off the ground if they lack the basic requirements to operate? And why is that the taxpayers' problem?

As Rees notes, nine states have already fallen for this pitch, thereby increasing the burden on taxpayers-- even if those taxpayers never had a say in whether or not they wanted to foot the bill for a few more private schools in their neighborhood.

Rees wants to paint this as a fairness issue, but what is fair about having taxpayers fund a private business?

Rees' solution is simple enough-- give charters more taxpayer dollars, or taxpayer-owned buildings. That's not my idea of a solution. I'm willing to support the public funding of charter schools, as long as we agree to a few stipulations. If charters want public tax dollars, either directly by having the money to build, or indirectly by taking over taxpayer funded public schools, then here are the rules--

The charter school building is the property of the taxpayers, and it will be overseen by a board elected by those taxpayers. Charter management will answer to that board.

Should the charter fold, the building and all its contents will continue to be taxpayer property.

The charter will operate with complete transparency, accounting for every dollar of taxpayer money that it spends (and do that spending under the authority of the elected board).

The charter will serve any and all students in the area from which it draws its taxpayer dollars. That includes all students with special needs and ELL students.

The charter will not close mid-year.

If you want to claim public tax dollars by claiming to be a public school, then act like a public school. If you want to be a privately owned and operated business, then suck it up and deal with the invisible hand of the free market like every McDonald's and Walmart and furniture store struggling to make it in the marketplace.

The Learning Path

Everyone has their favorite metaphor for understanding education. This is mine.

An area of learning is a block of territory-- let's call it a square ten miles-- to be explored. Some of the territories are well-traveled, tramped flat by the footsteps of a million people who have gone before. Some are rougher, more untamed, more filled with little-examined places.

Our method of exploring these territories is our process of learning.

The classroom teacher sets out a path for students to explore the territory. There may be places to stop and rest along the way, and the path may have been carefully cleared of obstacles. Sometimes students wander off the path, and the teacher has to go find them and bring them back-- that's one reason the teacher should know every inch of the territory like the back of her hand. Not only will students wander off the path, but sometimes a student will see something interesting and unusual off the prepared path, and the teacher needs to be knowledgeable and flexible enough to take the whole class off-path and grab that unique teachable moment. But within the set time, they would have to make their way to the set exit point. Of course, the better the teacher knows the territory, the less the class has to depend on a pre-cleared path.

In more rigid classrooms, the teacher (or curriculum director or course-of-study-in-a-box) lays down railroad tracks. Each student is strapped into a seat; nobody leaves the train. The students proceed together along a pre-set path at a pre-set speed, and the teacher's job is to travel with them, pointing out the pre-selected sights along the way. At each stop on the track, the teacher and students would look at what that stop's lesson is. At every stop, every student gets off, gets the lesson, and gets back on the train. See something interesting away from the tracks? Can't stop for it. Of course the teacher doesn't really need to know about the territory; she just needs to know about the parts right next to the tracks as they lead to the exit point.

True personalized learning would work like this: we'd drop the students off somewhere in the territory. Then the students would each select where they wanted to go and what they wanted to look at. When they had satisfied their curiosity about one location, they could move on to another. The teacher would be an expert guide, able to answer questions, offer directions, and provide explanations at every location within the territory. In a traditional time-based school, the deal would be "You have 180 days to cover as much territory as you can, and then you'll move on." Each student would create her own path, select her own destination.

The personalized [sic] learning that is being marketed is just another train, because most often what is actually personalized is not instruction, but pacing. Every student still rides the same train on the same tracks to the same destination. The only difference is that when students get off at a stop, they can stay at that stop until they get it, and then board the next train. Proponents are silent on what happens if after 180 days or 13 years, that student is still on a station far away from the exit point, and there are no more trainings coming to pick her up.

The underlying theory of Common Core is that all we need to teach students is the skills involved in riding a train, so we practice having the students sitting up straight, properly fluffing a pillow, practicing walking in the aisles. The train has to stop every 500 feet for a Train Riding Practice test before the final Big Train Riding Test, so this train never does cover very much territory.

Charter operators want to build their own train, and to do it they need to take the wheels from the public train. Sometimes the charter ends up being a caboose sitting by itself in the woods, the students stranded and the operators long gone with the money they took for tickets. Other charters figure their train will go faster if it's painted really nice. And some charter operators just dump the students by themselves in the middle of nowhere with a baloney sandwich and some string cheese.

Education policy is written by men who have never actually visited the territory, but they have seen pictures, so they will decide based on pictures where the paths should be cleared or where the tracks should be laid. Cyberschool students also ride a train, but they never get off it, they have to shovel their own coal, and the windows are all painted black.