SAT: New Frontiers In Pointlessness

David Coleman, he who single-handedly built the architecture of Common Core ELA in the image of his own (untrained) biases about how language should be taught, is taking a step back from some of his College Board duties. That news has been accompanied by further evidence that the SAT is increasingly pointless.

Like most of the CC architects, isn't stick around to make sure his baby was properly installed and put to use; instead, he moved to start cashing in, which in his case meant a lucrative gig at the College Board, the folks who bring us the SAT, PSAT and AP courses. He's been serving as both president and CEO of the company, but last week he stepped back from the president spot and the company installed Jeremy Singer in the post.

Singer is a fine fit. He's been the COO at College Board since 2013; before that he was with Kaplan, the test prep people. His career also includes a stint at McGraw-Hill, a school turnaround outfit, and a web-delivered solutions company. This after he started out in the business development biz, highlighted by a stay at McKinsey.

Digital baloney and business growth are his things, so it's not surprising that announcements of his rise focused on the "technological transformation" of the College Board. But some of the comments in this EdSurge article are not very inspirational.

Some probable goals: expanding the "partnership" with Khan Academy, simplifying the college application process, and "easing the financial burden" of applying to colleges. So, I don't know-- lowering their prices?

But then Singer also offers observations like this. Reflecting on his time with Kapplan, the test-prep giant:

His experiences had revealed how inaccessible commercial test prep was for low-income students, and it instilled in him the idea that “great test practice should be available to all students, not only those who could afford it,” he says.

You know what would be really great for students? A test that measures something other than how much test prep you did to take the test. Singer was the one who Khanified the AP tests, and other CB officials think that's swell:

“The Khan Academy partnership really makes it possible for students to access high-quality learning that they didn’t have before,” says Kaine Osburn, chair of the finance committee for the College Board’s board of trustees and superintendent of Lake Zurich Community Unit School District 95 in Illinois. “The test prep market was inequitable, and now it’s equitable.”

Emphasis mine, because weren't students supposed to have access to the high-quality learning of an AP course, generally taught by teachers have been trained to teach AP courses? Are you telling me that students don't need to actually take an AP course-- just watch a bunch of Khan Academy videos? Are you telling me that a video provides more "high quality learning" than a live human teacher? Yes, videos can be useful for certain types of instruction, but if I stood in front of a class, delivered a lesson, and then, when students asked questions, I just delivered the exact same lesson again-- well, nobody would be hailing my high quality instruction.

Another big Singer goal is to "boldly reduce complexity," and he has a point in saying that the College Board has used lots of complicated little ideas that mostly just reduce transparency of the whole business. Singer reduce some of this. The stated goal is to make applying to college less scary and less complicated. Of course, a really good way to do that would be to apply to a college that didn't require SAT scores at all. But the College Board isn't that interested in making college application simpler.

The College Board is a business, not a public service organization, so many of these simplification ideas look suspiciously like market capture ideas. For instance, the College Board has been working with the Coalition for College Application (a collection of 140-ish colleges) to set up a system by which students can submit SAT scores and college applications through a single site. This helps cement what has always been SAT's greatest marketing tool-- the perception that taking the SAT is one of those things you have to do to go to college.

EdSurge noted that ACT has been expanding its reach through acquisitions. It's an interesting question to ask Singer, who arrived at McGraw-Hill because the publisher acquired a company he was running. His reply is that College Board prefers partnerships; he mentions AIR and Pearson, though he might also have mentioned the College Board's success in getting some states to use the SAT as their required Big Standardized Test. He also talks happily about how these days, they are happy to be competing with the Big Boys for tech department talent.

At no point in the article does he talk about working to make the SAT a more accurate and useful measure of student academic ability.

But that's the SAT-- a test that mostly measures student socio-economic background and, of course, how well the student has prepped for the SAT. It is one of the great testing tautologies in the US education scene. Meanwhile, the best measure of college readiness and predictor of college success remains a student's high school GPA.  I don't want to see the 1,700 people at the College Board hungry and out of work, but I still have to wonder why we're still bothering wit the SAT at all.

ICYMI: Jazz In Church Edition (1/13)

Today was m day to visit my brother's church to play some jazz versions of old hymns. Fun times, but it ace for a full family day. Nevertheless, I have some reading for you from the week. Remember-- if you think it's a good one, share it and amplify the voice.

Charter Lobby Still Spending Money in Connecticut

Wendy Lecker lays out the ways in which the usual charter lobbyists are still plying their trade in Connecticut to garner as much influence as they can.

Challenging the Myths About Teachers

Love Long and Prosper is a new blog to us here at the Curmudgucation Institute, and this is a worthwhile post to serve as an introduction.

100 Arizona Charter Schools In. Danger Of Closing


No, that's not one of my usual typos-- about 100 charter schools in Arizona re in danger of going out of business because they've botched their financial management. Just mazing.

Whatever Happened to the Waiting for Superman Kids

Gary Rubinstein always asks the good questions. Like, whatever happened to the students who were used as the focus of Waiting for Superman, the classic public-school-trashing film.

Fables of School Reform

Audrey Watters is one of the great chroniclers of ed tech. Here is another great look at the long history of reformy baloney.

How To Teach Virtue? Start with a Charter School

Nancy Flanagan has been watching reformster Checker Finn clutch his very expensive pearls for years, and she has a few thoughts about his latest outburst.

When You Give a Teacher A Gun

Mitchell Robinson takes a look at a piece about arming teachers, and he has a few thoughts.

Public School Students Are Being Erased From TV,  Movies, and Other Media

Steven Singer has noticed something odd happening with school aged characters in pop culture. They've stopped going to public school.

South Carolina Hasn't Enforced Class Size Limits Since 2010. It's Starting To Show.   

South Carolina continues to cut educational corners while hoping that its underpaid teachers can somehow pick up the slack.

Four Reasons Charters Are A Bad Fit For Rural Communities

For just a moment, I'm going to set aside the larger problems of charters and privatization nationally. Charter advocates and education reformers have recently turned their attention to rural communities. Last summer, Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) unleashed one of his wide-release op-eds to point out the "problem" of "charter deserts"--those markets where charter schools have made few inroads. Andy Smarick and Mike McShane just released an entire volume of essays about rural education, and at the 74, Arielle Dreher published a thoughtful piece about one of the tensions inherent in rural education--are schools supposed to educate students to revitalize the local community or to escape it?

There are fewer than 800 charter schools in the rural parts of this country, and some advocates of choice are anxious to open up that untapped market. But there are some reasons that charter schools are particularly bad fits for rural areas.

Rural Schools Are Part Of The Heart Of Their Communities

My children went to school in a tiny village where the two central institutions were the elementary school and the volunteer fire department. In rural and small town areas, grown adults still identify themselves by what high school they graduated from. Sporting events, school concerts, art displays--these are attended by all sorts of people who are not actual parents of the participants. Launching a charter school in this setting is about as welcome as having a guy move into the house next door and inviting your children to call him "Dad."

Rural Schools Run On Tight Budgets

One does not remove a few hundred thousand dollars from a rural school budget without really feeling it. Most rural districts are lean operations already, without fifteen jobs like Assistant Vice-Superintendent in charge of Paper that can be easily absorbed. Transportation may be a huge chunk of the budget, and there really isn't any way to tighten that particular belt. The minute a charter starts "redirecting" tax dollars away from a rural district, that district will feel the hurt.

Rural Communities Are Not Always Easily Entered By Outsiders

This is not to suggest that every rural community is straight out of Deliverance. But city folks often drastically underestimate how important it is to know the territory. Every small town can tell a story about some city big shot who rolled into town and thought he was going to institute sweeping changes, only to fall flat on his face.

In part, there is no mystery here. Someone who is a big-time operator in New York City would not imagine that he could just stroll into Chicago without first studying the lay of the land and getting connected to the right people. Why imagine that moving into a small town would be different. If anything, a small town is more difficult, because everybody knows everybody. True story: a sharp operator moved into our area as operator of the hotel in town and planned to make it the arts hub of the area. He planned to kick things off with a big festival featuring choirs from all four area high schools and to do that he called each director and told her that the other three were already on board. Those choir directors were neighbors and sang in the same church choir; his lies didn't help him get launched. Even when they are honest, outside operators have a hard time moving and shaking in rural areas.

Charter operators have a history of bypassing the local community they enter, of doing charters to the locals instead of with them. In cities where the power centers may be located far from the neighborhoods in question, that may be successful. In rural areas, it's less likely to succeed.

Rural Communities Are Limited Markets

Charters are launched with primary attention to business concerns, not educational ones. It is more appealing to launch your charter business in a city with a half a million potential customers than a rural area with five hundred potential customers. Rural areas offer little in the way of the attractive real estate deals that have powered some urban charters. Nor do rural areas have large numbers of wealthy backers willing to help finance a charter operation. If you are hoping, directly or indirectly, to make some money running your charter, there are riper markets to approach than rural ones. Even if you hope to do good, but want to be sure you have a solid financial basis, there are better places to launch than in a rural area.

When Do Rural Charters Make Good Sense

The small community of Tidioute, Pennsylvania, lost its public school due to budget cuts in the larger district of which they were a part. So to keep the heart of their community intact and their children's education local, they re-opened their local school as a charter school, operated and controlled by local folks.

It is the one approach to rural chartering that makes sense--a local school under local control created to meet a local need. That's a good charter.

Originally posted at Forbes   

Why The Reading Wars Will Never End

I made the mistake of tossing a comment into the middle of a twitter thread on Monday. Not a nice quiet subject like vaccinations or abortion or Trump's wall, but reading. As soon as it became apparent that thread would blow up and swallow my feed, I could have asked to be cut loose or just muted the participants, but I was curious. How much longer would this go on? The answer is that after five days, the argument is still flopping around like a beached herring.

The latest explosion in the ageless reading wars was sparked by Emily Hanford, who has been making the rounds with variations on an article asserting that science tells exactly how people learn to read and teachers should be doing more of that.

Will Hanford's piece, or some blistering response to it, finally settle the reading wars once and for all?

Of course not.

Teach phonics. Don't teach phonics. Whole language! Decoding is everything. Knowledge base is everything. On and on and on we go. It will never end.

The reading war will not go on eternally because Some People are obdurate dopes. I mean, Some People are obdurate dopes, but that's not the heart of the problem.

The heart of the problem is that we don't know how to tell what works. And that's because we don't have a method to "scientifically" measure how well someone reads.

Yes, we have tests. But testing and pedagogy of reading are mostly locked in a tautological embrace. I think decoding is The Thing, so I create a test that focuses on decoding, then implement classroom practices to improve decoding skills and voila-- I scientifically prove that my decoding-based pedagogy works. Mostly what we're busy proving is that particular sorts of practices prepare students for particular sorts of tests. Big whoop.

We get stuck because we don't know what Being A Good Reader really means. Chris can read a book about dinosaurs and tell you every important fact, idea, and theme after just one reading, but ten times through a book about sewing and Chris can't tell you the difference between a needle and a bobbin. Pat reads the sewing book and can't pass a test about it, but can operate a sewing machine far better than before reading the book. Sam can read short passages and answer comprehension questions, and so aces tests like the PARCC-- but Sam can't read an entire book and come away with anything except the broadest idea of what it included. Gnip and Gnop (I'm running out of gender neutral names) can both read the same article, but when they're done, Gnip understands exactly in detail what the article says, but doesn't realize it's bunk, while Gnop only about half gets what the author says, but can explain why it's all baloney. Blorgenthal reads car magazines daily, voraciously, with great understanding, but can't get through a single paragraph of their history textbook. I know a woman who keeps devouring books about Jewish theology and building a deeper and deeper understanding, but who could not finish a work of fiction if you paid her. And lots of folks can't make any sense out of poetry (including the vast number of people who misread "The Road Not Taken")

Now go ahead and rank all these people according to how well they read.

As with writing, we can mostly identify those who are on the mountaintop and those who are in the pits below, but on the mountain side, it all gets kind of fuzzy.

In writing, at least, we talk about purpose and audience. Doesn't purpose make a difference in reading? Does it make a difference if the purpose is artificial, like, say, reading in order to take a test or to satisfy a teacher? (And no, Common Core's artificial division of fiction and information doesn't really address these questions.)

We know a bunch of different problems that struggling readers can have, and we know solutions to some of those problems (though many wash up on the shores of The Student Has To Care Enough To Want To Do The Hard Thing). We know that past a certain point, readers get better by doing more reading.

And every actual classroom teacher knows that some combination of a wide variety of tools is necessary-- and different-- for every student. There is, in fact, science to (sort of) back them up. So the war can be over, right? Everyone can go home? If only.

The most important lesson of the reading wars is that when any one side wins, students lose. In schools where all decoding was dropped and students were left to touch and feel their way through texts, the students suffered. And we are, hopefully, just emerging from as period when the mechanic were ascendant, with their insistence that reading was comprised of free-floating "skills" that could be developed and applied completely separate from context and content knowledge. That has been bad for everyone.

People know what the answer is. A full tool kit, applied thoughtfully by a professional. When one side is winning, many kits are missing some of the tools. But to have the argument that the house must be built with only a hammer or only with nails is just foolish.

So why will the argument not die?

Well, partly because Some People are obdurate dopes. But also because we will always have a chorus of people saying, "Can that kid read? How well? Prove it." Reading, as much as anything in education, demands that we measure what cannot be measured. So we create ways to measure a text's "reading level," and it's mostly bunk. We crank out reading tests, and some are diagnostically useful, but as a means of precisely quantifying how well a student read-- bunk. Reading assessment brings us up against the biggest challenge in education-- how to make visible a process that goes on entirely inside the student's head. And every attempt to measure the process/skill/knowledge requires test manufacturers to simplify it, to take something with twelve dimensions and squeeze it down to two.

Every attempt to measure means a truncated understanding of what's going on, which in turn leads to a distortion of the relationships between the many tools, which in turn leads to the false sense that one tool is The Only True Tool. And the war breaks out anew.

The attempt to make the invisible visible accurately really requires a whole toolbox full of artificial activities to try to tease out what's going on in there, and those tools will always be imperfect. That's fine. I am not arguing that we just give up on the whole business and go home. Nor do I know how to design a test that would really absolutely measure reading or literacy in a way that would let us slap a nice clear number on it. I am imploring teachers, reading experts, policy wonks, reformsters, bureaucrats and politicians to remember the nature of how we generate the "data" and to stop mistaking it for a Great Objective Truth handed down from God. Stop imagining that any single test tells you how well a student or many students read. Let the reading wars rage on, but most of all, never let there be a winner.

GA: Cyber Schools Failing Here, Too

In what could be news only to someone who has not been paying any attention to cyberschooling in the US, a report from Georgia's Department of Audits and Accounts found that the state's cyber schools "underperformed."

Mind you, I'll argue that the state's College and Career Ready Performance Index is a lousy way to measure the performance of schools. But those are the rules that reformsters want to play by, so that's the yardstick we're stuck with. And by that yardstick, Georgia's virtual schools are failing.\

This is not a shock. The CREDO study in 2015 found that cyber charters have an "overwhelming negative impact," with student falling a full year behind their regular classroom peers. This matches the anecdotal information one can capture from classroom teachers to whom many cyber-students return. The cyber situation has been so bad that the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools issued a report calling for cybers to shape the hell up. In Pennsylvania, a magical cyber school playground, not a single one of the states cyber charters has ever scored a "passing" grade on the state's evaluation. And Indiana is just now coming to grips with a cyber charter sector that is both failing and corrupt.

So Georgia is just one more guest at the failing cyber charter party.

While the audit's findings are bad, they aren't exactly news. In July of 2016, the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a piece looking at the Georgia Cyber Academy, a huge cyber with over 14,000 students:

Georgia Cyber Academy students log onto online classes from home, where they talk to and message with teachers and classmates and do assignments in a way that will “individualize their education, maximizing their ability to succeed,” according to an advertisement. But results show that most of them lag state performance on everything from standardized test scores to graduation rates.

Ah, that individualized, personalized education. GCA started out catering to homeschooling parents in 2007 before becoming the state's largest school. The story notes that while some students succeed at the online academy ("You have to be the kind of student that enjoys having more responsibility. You have to be good at managing your time," says one student.) The graduation rate was 66%, and the turnover rate was huge-- one quarter of the student body "leaves" each year. Class sizes are large. Attendance is a problem.

And this is one I hadn't heard before, but it makes sense-- students can be disruptive in cyber school, "doodling on a PowerPoint slide projected to the whole class instead of demonstrating how to solve the math problem on it." However one cyber teacher notes that a disruptive student can be muted, which is... good?

Georgia Connections Academy also promises individualized education at a tuition-free online school, but the audit found it lacking as well. Online reviews of GCA are, for the most part, pretty brutal.

Cyber charters tend to lean on certain excuses. Their students are more mobile. Their students are already behind. Their students are disproportionately problem children. These may be valid depictions of their student body, but if so-- well, that's the gig then, and if they want to be in the business, their "individualized" programs should be able to work with those students.

I've always said that there are students for whom cyber charters are a good solution, particularly students with some particular special needs. But for the broader student population, cyber charters are an experiment that has run too long. There's no longer any mystery about cybers-- they do a lousy job of educating students. It's long past time to pull the plug on this failed chapter of "innovation."

Bill Gates Is Still Pushing Common Core

Sigh.

You've undoubtedly heard the news over the past couple of days-- the Gates Foundation is going to throw $10 million at teachers to help promote "high-quality" curriculum.

There are several problems with this, and none of them are new.

First, despite the headlines, this money is not actually being thrown directly at teachers.

“We want to identify the content-specific professional development services, products, and models that are working really well for young people, and also study the attributes of those solutions that make them effective so we can share that learning with the field,” said Bob Hughes, the foundation’s director of K-12 education.

This guy, again, still. 

In other words, they are going to throw money at outfits that do professional development so that those PD providers can train teachers better. This is yet another variation of "It's the implementation" that translates roughly as "My grand idea would have worked if teachers understood better how to properly perform my great stuff."

This golden oldie never dies-- just this week I was embroiled in a Twitter thread in which someone explained that a particular practice would work if teachers just understood it properly. Back in 2016, the Gates Foundation was trying to explain what they had learned about their large-scale failures in education, but the only lesson they have ever come up with is "We've learned that the unreasoning resistance, educational ignorance, and poor training of education professionals makes it hard for our brilliant ideas to shine properly."

This, apparently, is more of that.

But wait-- there's more. Buried in that loaded term "high-quality" is an old friend. Because "high-quality" means "certified fresh" at EdReports.com.

EdReports was launched back in 2014 with funding from the Usual CCSS Suspects. It was launched as a sort of antidote to one of the many problems that emerged with adoption of the Common Core. Because there was no central authority on the Core, and, in fact, the guys who wrote it dispersed quickly to lucrative new gigs, there was nobody in place to stop textbook publishers from moving inventory by ordering a case of "Aligned to Common Core" stickers and slapping them on every dusty text sitting in their warehouses.

So EdReports' job was to check resources and determine whether or not they were actually Core-aligned.

They were tough. In the first year, almost every publisher flunked Common Core math. Now they have worked their way through many other areas-- well, math and ELA-- and you can see the results in handy charts. And prominently featured is whether or not that text is properly aligned. EdReports has dutifully scrubbed its site so that it now talks about "college- and career-ready standards" instead of the dreaded "Common Core," but the mission hasn't changed. EdReports will tell you how well a textbook is aligned to the Common Core Standards.

Which means Gates is still-- STILL-- spending money to get the Core into every classroom.

Mind you, this is chump change compared to the $1.7 billion that Gates is spending in his continued effort to singlehandedly force the redesign of American education. But the Gates Foundation keeps saying things like this:

A standards-aligned, high-quality curriculum is an essential feature of a coherent instructional system that can maximize its potential benefit. We hypothesize that such a system may consist of the following elements, as well as others:

Every adult human who ever set foot in a classroom has some "hypotheses" about what makes a good school. Only one of the richest men in the world has the power to try to force his hypotheses on everybody else. And to just keep trying and trying and trying, with a hammer sculpted out of a stack of money.

This continues to be the most recurring annoyance of much ed reform. Bill Gates has no more expertise regarding public education than my garage mechanic, who's a nice guy who was once in my class. But if my guy wants to put his ideas into action in a school, he has to run for school board and convince the taxpayers that he can be trusted with the job. He'd have to cooperate with other board members, and because he's a good guy without an overinflated ego, he would undoubtedly ask the opinions of professional educators. But because Gates and Broad and Walton et al have a giant pile of money, and no special misgivings about their judgment, they just go ahead and flex their money and start shoving their ideas down the system's throat.

Nor does Gates appear to be a quick study. Google "Bill Gates" and "doubles down" and watch the headlines stack up. And here we go again with more of the same. Next time a professional development session rolls around to help you "strengthen" your curriculum, you may want to ask who's paying the bills.

ID: IBE HP VP BS

Idaho Business for Education (IBE) is "a group of nearly 200 business leaders from across the state who are committed to transforming Idaho’s education system."

IBE works with the legislature and key Idaho stakeholders to help set our students up for success in school, work and life, and build the workforce that will lead to a vibrant economy for years to come. Our 2019 initiatives include the School Readiness Act, Career and Technical Education, and more.

They appear to work pretty closely with their elected officials for legislative goals. So, kind of like an Idaho-sized ALEC (although Idaho has had a pretty good relationship with full-sized ALEC). And like ALEC, IBE enjoys special access to legislators. That includes a "legislative academy" that traditionally takes place on the first day of the legislative session. While legislators were waiting to find out what their leadership is lining up for the year, IBE gets to brief them on business's thoughts and priorities.

This year, the bar is set high:

The world’s next industrial revolution presents a “huge opportunity” for Idaho, if the state can modify its school system to match it.

It's those teachers! They're the ones!

I love these unintentional scare quotes. Michael Schmedlen, Hewlett-Packard’s vice president for worldwide education, delivered the message of opportunity, because if we're going to reconfigure the entire education system, maybe we should talk about why.

Following the reform play book, Schmedlen started by telling scary stories.

Nearly two-thirds of today’s students will work in jobs that have not yet been created. Tomorrow’s workers will move much more from job to job. They will work in a competitive, diverse and global workplace. Students will need critical thinking skills, and they will need to learn to collaborate and innovate.

Sigh. It's been over a year since Matt Barnum decisively debunked the whole 65% of tomorrow's jobs haven't been created yet statistic, yet here it is again, still without any foundation.

The rest is interesting from a corporate honcho, because it's so cool and dispassionate and prescriptive ("workers will") while failing to acknowledge, as is usual, why this ugly future is on the way. Imagine if a corporate exec said it this way--

In the future, we will be offer no loyalty or job security to our employees-- we'll just keep giving the job who can do it well enough for the cheapest price, wherever they are in the world this week, and we'll dump those workers next week if we find a cheaper replacement. Workers had better be quick at picking up work requirements, because we don't want to waste time training them, and keeping meat widget costs down is more important to us than hanging on to experienced worker. I read the critical thinking, collaborate, innovate thing off some 21st century skills list thing, but yeah-- you need to be quick on problem solving and getting along because we expect you to cope with all this disruption and instability on your own-- or else we'll replace you with someone can. Meat widget problems are not management problems.

Schmedlen offered other keen insights.

Education should adapt quickly, he said. Schools need to offer highly sought-after skills — which can include traditional disciplines such as math, science and reading. But schools also need to improve their instructional approach and reform assessments.

While communities, states and nations need to change their education systems, Schmedlen cautioned against simply throwing money into technology, without studying the existing education system in detail. “Then you can create a roadmap for reform.”

Schools need to offer highly sought after skills because businesses are too cheap to do training (particularly if they have to do it often). What does the roadmap look like? Who knows.

But Schmedlen's co-presenter, Marcela Escobari, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, is there to add one little hint about what the subject should be:

Escobari couched the challenge in human terms. Too many workers are juggling multiple, part-time jobs to make ends meet — or they are dropping out of the labor market entirely.

“The low-skill jobs are becoming crappier,” said Escobari, to some nervous laughter.

Nervous laughter indeed. Because all the education in the world, even if it's designed by businesses to serve as their vocational training, will not turn crappy jobs into great jobs. IBE members will not be saying, "Well, now that you're so well-trained, we'll pay you better." It's not the K-12 education system's fault that businesses don't want to pay their meat widgets a living wage.

Here's the thing. Where I live, there's a popular welding program offered to our students, and plenty sign up to get that training because they know there are excellent jobs that pay really well available to welders. That's how it works-- you make a job attractive, and people line up to get the training for it. Train a bunch of people and then maybe we'll make the job better is not how it works-- but that is a good argument for shifting all responsibility for economic health from government and business onto education.