Finn And Hess Accidentally Argue For Teacher Tenure

Chester Finn (honcho emeritus, Fordham Institute) and Rick Hess (AEI education guy) are concerned about the threat of rampant wokeness, particularly in the reformster universe. And they are not afraid to exercise some strenuous prose in service of the point:

School reformers have long seen themselves as plucky champions of change. Today, however, as funders and advocacy groups chant from a common hymnal of wokeness, the rules have changed and courage is hard to find. In its place we see cravenness and appeasement from reformers desperate to avoid the all-seeing eye of the progressive mob.

Hess has been particularly alarmed by the ousting of Steven Wilson from the helm of Ascend charter network. Wilson (who is white) has impeccable reformy credentials-- Harvard grad, years with Edison education, Pioneer Institute-- ran into some trouble over a blog post, and in "the progressive-driven culture war that has consumed charter schooling" a petition was raised and Wilson was canned.

Finn, only mostly retired

Hess and Finn list some other areas where the rising tide of progressive wokeness has threatened the charter world. The ultimate effect is "self-styled reformers biting their tongues for fear of alienating funders, angering advocates, or becoming targets themselves."

I'm not here to comment on the issue of wokeness in the reform movement. The break in the social justice- free market partnership that fueled the movement for years has been discussed at length for about three years, and it is as sad as any divorce. They grew apart. They want different things (in fact, have always wanted different things). Now they keep fighting about how to bring up the kids properly. Not news.

But I can't help noticing something else. Here they are, worried that some people are being driven out of schools, or even keeping silent because they are afraid that if they express their political or social beliefs it might cost them their jobs, and I'm thinking if only there were some sort of policy or law that protected educators from that sort of firing. But of course there is-- the due process requirements usually lumped under the shorthand term "tenure."

Hess, as is usually the case, has a somewhat nuanced position on tenure. Finn, on the other hand, would like to take it out behind the shed and shoot it. Both like to imagine a world in which teacher job security is strictly based on the quality of their work (which we don't know how to measure, so we'll just keep using student test scores until we come up with something better), but of course that's not the world we live in, so teaching remains a political act and teachers-- even charter teachers-- continue to answer to several hundred different bosses, any one of whom might have a particular reason for wanting a teacher fired. This should not be news to anyone in the education universe, and yet the obvious solution--due process job protections-- doesn't seem to occur to Hess and Finn. Instead, they close with an impassioned plea for a tone-deaf stand:

There is now a loud, punitive-minded cohort of “reformers” who honestly believe that data is a tool of white oppression and that leaders who champion academic rigor should be fired as bigots. The many of us who abhor their nihilistic doctrine — and believe that improving our children’s schools is far too serious a cause to be undone by their shenanigans — must stand up and be counted.

Finn and Hess might do better to acknowledge that the objections they decry are not manufactured out of thin air, but are rooted in reality. Calling those who bring those concerns to the table "nihilistic" and their concerns "shenanigans" simply proves their point for them-- that what Hess and Finn call "true reformers" don't really care about issues of race and class at all. "Nihilistic Shenanigans" would make a great band name, but it's a lousy way to characterize the behavior of people you claim as your allies, and suggests that they aren't really your allies at all, but just handy props that refuse to stay in their proper place.

In the meantime, I'm not sure what "stand up and be counted" actually entails. Whatever it is, I bet it's easier to do if you don't have to worry about losing your job because of it.

TN: Doubling Down On Bad Reading Policy

Among the worst policy ideas of the past decades, we have to count third grade reading retention laws. These laws can sometimes give schools a brief bump in test scores, but the consequences for actual human students are not good. And some folks in Tennessee have decided that more of a bad idea would be super.

Why tell a eight or nine year old child that they failed third grade, even though they did passing work on everything but the reading test? The theory is that third grade reading ability correlates with later academic success, and since too many policy makers don't know the difference between correlation and causation, well, let's just hold them back. If you are cynical, you might also notice that this keeps the bad test-takers out of fourth grade, where the more high stakes testing occurs ("Look! Our fourth graders now read better than ever!").

Time to get to work, you little slackers

The policy also latches onto the idea that punishment, threats and fear are the best motivators. Maybe it's the teachers who have been holding back, or maybe it's those little eight year old slackers, but if we threaten them all with some tough consequences, maybe they'll try a little harder and the teachers will really teach and the students will try to learn, because that's probably the most likely explanation for why the third grade test scores are low.

In Memphis, school leaders have decided that's still going to easy on the little punks.

Proposed last spring, the district has now implemented a failure rule for second graders.

The policy comes courtesy of chief academic officer Antonio Burt, who is steeped in reformia, from his time with TNTP to his stint improving TVAAS scores to his time with the Achievement School District to his work as Director of School Transformation in Pinellas County, Florida.

The policy is now in place, and this year's kindergarten students will be the first to be affected, so they had better stop messing around and get to work. The chicken littling that put this policy in place is based on TNReady scores, the state's Big Standardized Test that just raised cut scores after years of being a giant clusterfarpfegnugen. This policy (and the third grade one) keep talking about "reading at grade level" as if that were a scientifically set thing, but grade level discussions often have the same problem as the old No Child Left Behind directive to make all children above average-- if your "grade level" is pegged at the top of a bell curve well then,, yes-- half of your students are reading "below grade level."

But beyond that is the fact that after years of these policies, we don't have a shred of evidence that they actually work. Yes, they get you a brief bump of scores on the test (almost as if these policies incentivize teaching to the reading test), but no long term benefits. They are the educational equivalen of private equity strategies that pull money out of a business right now while weakening the business's strength in the long term. Only instead of Toys R Us, we're talking about tiny human beings.

I cannot say enough bad things about this policy. The only thing that keeps it from being the worst idea ever is that it doesn't rely on the single data point of test results. But it's still indefensible.

"But our children can't read," will be the protest. If that's true (and I'd question whether "read" and "score well on standardized reading test" are the same thing), then threats and punishment will not be the answer. If the best motivation you can think of for a small child is a threat, then you probably should not be working with small children. Do you think it's the teachers? Then get them the training you think will help. Do you think it's a lack of resources for the children? Then get them the resources. Do you think that holding them in second grade "until they can read" is for their own good, I defy you to show me a shred of evidence to back that up.

Otherwise, get rid of this stupid, stupid policy.

ICYMI: Good Lord Is Thanksgiving Really Next Week Edition (11/24)

I find that in retirement holidays sort of sneak up on me. I suppose it's because I'm not exposed to the daily reminders from students and the school calendar. Mostly I like it, but sometimes I'm surprised. In the meantime, here are some readings from the week. Don't forget-- share what you like (from its original source). That's how the word gets out.

Rising Tide Review

Fordham released a "report" suggesting that having charters in a community improves all the schools. Yongmei Ni has a review of that report at the National Education Policy Center. Spoiler alert: Fordham's work is not entirely believable.

A Strike for Racial Justice and Democracy in Little Rock Schools

At Jacobin, Eric Blanc has a terrifically thorough look at what exactly has been going on in Little Rock, and how this is one more strike that is about the common good.

An Army of Children Toils in African Mines  

Not about US education, but an eye-opening look at one of the horrifying evils that feeds our modern tech.

When Testing Trumps Teaching, the Students Suffer  

Tiffany Moyer-Washington in the Hartford Courant makes a good case for what we already know. Share it with someone who doesn't get it yet.

East Lansing Public Schools Had a Surplus

All kinds of unusual in this story from the Lansing State Journal, from the surprise surplus to what the board decided to do with some of the extra money.

PA Tax Credits Don't Benefit Poor  

We have tax credits in PA, and the secrets of how they are used is carefully guarded, but Avi Wolfman-Arent did figure out that private schools are not exactly filling up with voucher-bearing poor kids.

LA Federation for Children and Out Of State Money

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at how out of state money pours into local school board elections.

Voucher Programs Hurting Rural Schools  

About that whole "vouchers will help students escape failing schools" thing. Turns out it's  not entirely accurate. Patrick Redmond at the News Sun has the story.

Unequal Access and Denial of Opportunity

Jan Resseger looks at how the portfolio school reform model is just not working.

Trump's Pledge Delayed By Education Department

One not-awful Trump pledged to do  was erase the student loan debt of disabled veterans. But the ed department is stalling it. Not so much nefarious as the kin d of incompetence when someone with no administrative experience takes over an agency she wants to kill. Politico has the story.

Howard Schools Plan In Motion

The Howard district has actually tried to balance the level of poverty across it schools. They plenty of rough pushback, but they did it anyway. The Baltimore Sun tells the story of how they managed to do the right thing in the face of nasty threats.

The New Deal For Education  

Cheri Kiesecker tracks another move toward implementing the cradle-to-workplace pipeline. It's not a happy story.

2019 Bulwer-Lytton Awards

This annual competition celebrates really bad opening lines for unwritten bad works. I do love it.

President Grant and the Reconstruction That Wasn't

I've finished the biography Grant by Ron Chernow, the author who famously wrote that bio of Alexander Hamilton (and a really good one of Rockefeller, too). In the end, Ulysses S. Grant remains a little more opaque than some of Chernow's other subjects, but the history that Grant himself lived through is a striking reflection of our nation in a troubled time. He failed at business. His in-laws were a slave-owning Southern family. He won the Civil War, and then he presided over Reconstruction, a period that is both hugely important and hugely ignored by US citizens. We are still paying the price for that ignorance.

There are better and deeper studies of Reconstruction than the handful of chapters that it gets in this book, but the context underlines just how quickly things fell apart and how little time and space Grant had to come up with a federal response.

The challenges started with the moment of Confederate surrender; Grant earned the loyalty of many Southern military leaders by allowing officers to keep firearms at surrender. It gave Grant unique leverage in dealing with the returning states.

The problems of Reconstruction were both simple and, perhaps, unsolvable. How to bring the Southern states back into the country they had rebelled against; under what terms to you welcome traitors back to the fold? At the same time, how to bring former slaves into the nation as full citizens. These had been faced by Johnson, whose solution so clashed with that of Republican Congress that he was impeached.

But the bigger problem was left to Grant. You can abolish the institution of slavery, but how do you get rid of the mindset that made it possible. In a land dedicated to the prospect that all people are created equal, you get a lot of cognitive dissonance by upholding laws that allow people to be bought and sold and owned, and the American solution to that cognitive dissonance was to believe that African-Americans were not people.

The end of slavery did not mean the end of that belief.

In 1867 the Bureau of Education was created to educate freed people; Congress kept gutting its budget.

Under Grant, the vote was extended to freed men. That move enraged and enflamed Southerners. The Klan and other such groups sprang up, intent on reversing Reconstruction. Sometimes history talks about "intimidation" of Black voters, but I'm not sure that word really captures a period in which African-Americans were dragged from their homes in the dead of night and beaten, tortured, killed. Black Republicans were elected in the deep south and that just spurred greater reaction. The specific examples are too numerous, and all horrifying. In Meridian, Mississippi, in 1871, three Black citizens were arrested on charges of delivering incendiary speeches; in court, the Republican judge and two of the accused were killed, kicking off riots in which thirty Blacks were gunned down, "including all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions." Black militiamen were arrested on trumped up charges of murder, then dragged out of ail and lynched. When we read today about countries were judges and elected officials are murdered for daring to hold office and do their jobs-- that the US South during Reconstruction.

The level of domestic terrorism unleashed by the Klan during Reconstruction is almost inconceivable. Congress brought up various acts to combat it, but Southern white representatives saw these as just a way to deny them power in their own states. By 1872, Grant had largely suppressed and broken them, and yet within a year, there was more of the same. In April of 1873, Black politicians won leading positions in Grant Parish. A mob of several hundred whites stormed the courthouse, burned it, and slaughtered the men inside. Grant sent in federal forces; 72 men were indicted, and three were convicted.

This is repeatedly the story of Reconstruction. The North won the war and lost the peace. Federal troops were sent to the South to protect freed people, but Grant was reluctant to completely obliterate the states' right to govern themselves, and as long as the states governed themselves, they would make sure that such government remained firmly in white hands. They would undo the results of the war.

We can blame it all on the South, but Chernow makes it clear that one of the things holding Grant back was a lack of national will, a collective white sigh of "This stuff again? Are we still having this argument." Political fatigue is not simply a modern problem. And Northerners were not, on the whole, any better than Southerners when it came to recognizing the humanity and personhood of freed people.

The political solutions had failed. Blacks had been beaten back from taking any political power. And in 1876, politics failed again. The election was an unresolvable, corrupted mess, with the end result that the South was able to hold the Presidency hostage. "We'll let this election go," they said, "if you remove every last trace of federal support for Reconstruction." And so the troops went home, Northerners gave a sigh of relief that that was all over with, and Southerners worked at maintaining a new status quo that in many ways resembled the old pre-war status quo. Jim Crow took over.

Why rehash this? Because the version of history that many of us were brought up on, especially in the North, especially if we're white, was something different.

"There was slavery. Then there was a war," it says. "And the war ended slavery, and so at that point, Blacks and Whites were on an even playing field, and wherever they are now, 150 years later, is their own doing."

No.

There was never a level playing field. Here and there, African-American citizens may have gotten the rights they were entitled to, sometimes with a huge fight, but that was the exception, not the rule. Read works like The Warmth of Other Suns, to get a sense of how long the reach of Reconstruction's failure has been. Works like Stony the Road give a picture of some of the ideas underneath it all, but I'm always struck by just practical things. In 150 years, White families have had generations to build ladders of money and property-- maybe not vast wealth, but enough to give your children something to stand on. Black families haven't had that chance, through the days of sharecropping up through the days of redlined neighborhoods where houses would never accrue any real value. And the housing issues have, of course, been turned directly into education issues.

What we forget is how very short Reconstruction was. If we count the Johnson years (and that would be generous), it was barely more than a decade. Less time than we have been in Afghanistan. Mostly it rested on the back of a single two-term President. Is it any wonder that we still have so much work to do.

Booker Returns To The Corporate Fold

On Monday of this week, Cory Booker went full charter school in an op-ed for the New York Times, a choice that made a little more sense when I looked at my Wednesday e-mail from Whitney Tilson.

Whitney Tilson is a successful hedge funder who started Democrats for Education Reform mostly because at that point, Republicans for Education Reform would have been unnecessary. The GOP was already behind the idea of privatization; it was the Dems who needed a push in that direction. In some states, actual Democrats have repudiated the D in DFER, and since Betsy DeVos became the public face of so many of their favorite policies, they've been struggling for Democrat leverage. Look for them and their friends every time you hear of a poll that shows how much Real Democrats love charter schools.

Cory Booker was a hot young star and a friend of DFER, so things were looking good. But then suddenly the 2020 election actually involved more education discussion than just thirty seconds about universal pre-K, and Booker's close ties to charters and, yes, Betsy DeVos, were looking like an obstacle.

Apparently, Booker has decided to just lean into charter support. Monday's op-ed was a compendium of the usual pro-charter baloney. Students are trapped in zip codes with bad schools; this is not baloney, but the idea that we should let some privatized amateurs rescue a few of those children instead of investing resources in the improvement of the public schools-- well that is baloney. The back seat of my car is filled with fast food boxes and twinkie wrappers-- clearly the only solution is to buy a second car.

And Booker tries to dance along the thin line that has been frustrating reformsters for the last three years:

For-profit charter school schemes and the anti-public education agenda of President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are hurting teachers, students and their families. Of course, we must fight back against these misguided and harmful forces. But we shouldn’t let the worst actors distort this crucial debate, as they have in recent years.

Dude. You worked side by side with DeVos, cheering a multitude of for-profit schemes (and please don't insult our intelligence by trying the old "for-profit charters are evil but non-profits are fine" dodge. There are plenty of ways to profit from non-profit charters, and you have seen most of them). Hillary tried this stuff. Mayor Pete is trying it right now.

Booker is going to assert that "high-performing charter schools" are some kind of entirely different beast, and he's going to try to attach "public" to them. They aren't. He's going to try to paint the privatization and charter mess in Newark as a success, which is a generous read. Then there's this gem:

As Democrats, we can’t continue to fall into the trap of dismissing good ideas because they don’t fit into neat ideological boxes or don’t personally affect some of the louder, more privileged voices in the party.

Can we fall into the trap of dismissing bad ideas because they are bad? Because I don't have a problem with unaccountable, privately owned and operated, non-transparent, selectively creaming, public school draining, redundant, segregationalist, profiteering charter schools because they ofend some ideological box of mine.

And about those "louder, more privileged voices" in the party-- well, that brings me back to Tilson's Wednesday e-mail, in which he stumps for Booker.

Turns out that Booker had a couple of meetings with Tilson last week, and now Tilson is convinced that Booker is "viable." He'll beat Trump "handily." He published the "courageous" op-ed that I'm assuming was Exhibit A in Booker's "You Rich Guys Can Trust Me" pitch. Also, they're longtime friends, and Booker helped Tilson's daughter with a class project.

It appears that Booker has decided to join Mayor Pete and Bloomberg and that other guy whose name I've already forgotten in trying to tap the Rich Guys Who Are Scared To Death of Warren and Sanders wing of the party. And why not-- Booker might as well run as himself and not court whiplash by trying to veer leftward. A later paragraph in his op-ed suggests he might be trying to stake out a place in the Make Everybody Happy Lane:

As a party, we need to take a holistic approach to improving outcomes for children who are underserved and historically disadvantaged. That must mean significantly increasing funding for public schools, raising teacher pay, fully funding the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, investing in universal preschool, eliminating child poverty — and yes, supporting high-performing public charter schools if and when they are the right fit for a community, are equitable and inclusive, and play by the same rules as other public schools.

"Equitable and inclusive and play by the same rules as other public [sic] schools" is a mighty tall order, one that charters have pretty consistently kicked back against. After all, they will say, the whole point of being a charter school is to not have to play by those rules. The funny thin here is that if Booker actually meant that-- if he actually meant that charters must be owned by the taxpayers, and operated by taxpayer-elected boards, and must raise the tax money needed to operate, and operate with complete operational and financial transparency ,and students teachers and staff all have all their rights and protections, and all students must be accepted even if that means the additional expense of providing necessary programs for special needs, and teachers must be fully certified and free to unionize, and must be operated by fully qualified trained educators, and cannot be used in any kind of profit-making shell game-- if he actually meant all that, then he wouldn't be quite so far removed from Warren and Sanders. But then, if he actually meant all that, I don't think Whitney Tilson would be writing him a glowing letter of recommendation.

No, it appears that Booker remains a good friend of corporate ed reform, the kind of guy who, had he been elected in 2016 ,would have been perfectly happy to install Betsy DeVos or Eva Moskowitz or Michelle Rhee as Secretary of Education and pursue the same failed policies that we suffered under in the Bush-Obama years. I'm already on record-- my expectations are low and I will vote for Cory Booker-- hell, I'll vote for Cory Booker's dog-- should he win the nomination. But until that day comes, public education voters should steer clear

The Waltons Try To Disrupt Elizabeth Warren (updated)

Elizabeth Warren was in Atlanta at Clark Atlanta University to talk to black voters, when the rally was disrupted by a group of charter school supporters, angry about the hard line stance Warren has staked out on the charter school industry.

The group of grass roots charter supporters had, they said, "come from all over the country," and if that doesn't send up a little red flag, then perhaps their perfectly matching t-shirts and signs might.

Intercept reporter Ryan Grim was there, and with some interviewing and online searches, he unraveled the whole thing pretty quickly in a series of tweets that are collected in this write-up.

The group said they raised money on GoFundMe, which turned out to be true-- however, the funding was stacked with  anonymous $1,000 donors.

The group included Memphis Lift Parent Institute, Sarah Carpenter is the founder and chief exec, but she didn't do it alone. The group was aided by Strategy Redefined, a Nashville education consulting firm, and Natasha Kamrani, head of Tennessee's chapter of Democrats for Education Reform and the wide of Chris Barbic, the original head of Tennessee's ill-fated Achievement School District. Grim says that the group is 100% funded by the Waltons; published reports say they've given Memphis Lift $1.5 million since 2015. Since their 2017 filing shows $375, 200, with $200 coming from public contributions, that 100% seems just about right. Here's a glowing profile of the group on the Walton Foundation site.

[Update: Per Matt Barnum* the group also include Howard Fuller and a few other activist groups funded by Walton and City Fund money.]

It's not unusual for the Waltons to find and fund black faces to put forward their charter agenda. And while Memphis Lift sometimes claims to be agnostic about public-vs-charter schools, that is one big batch of charter-loving folks backing up this grass roots group.

As Grim tweeted, "A group funded by some of the richest people in the world, the Waltons, just disrupted an @ewarren speech on the 1881 Atlanta washerwoman strike. Can't make this stuff up." It's not a new game; charter advocates have often loaded up parents and students, made them some t-shirts, and deployed them as citizen lobbyists.

There's a lot of money and power behind the charter school movement. Expect more of these shenanigans if Warren continues to lead the Democratic pack. The charter industry is not gong to let her go without a fight.

*Update: There's a good further account of the meeting and more details about the group that protested here by Matt Barnum in Chalkbeat

The One And Only Lesson To Be Learned From NAEP Scores

It has been almost a month since the NAERP scores have dropped, and some folks are still trying to torture some sort of useful insights from the numbers (here's Mike Petrilli at Fordham writing a piece that should be entitled "What to learn about being better a hitting the wrong target").

The world of education is a fuzzy one, with some declaring that teaching is more art than science. But then the National Assessment of Educational Progress is issued. “The Nation’s Report Card” is greeted as a source of hard data about the educational achievement of fourth and eighth graders (and in some years, high school students), theoretically neither biased nor tweaked as state tests might be. 

NAEP scores were released three weeks ago, and they have been percolating down through pundits, ed writers, ed bureaucrats, and ordinary ed kibitzers. So now that we have had weeks to absorb and process, what have some folks offered as important lessons, and what’s the only lesson that really counts?

Some have offered lessons that are simply misreadings of the data. The three NAEP levels (basic, proficient, and advanced) do not necessarily mean what folks think they mean, which is why Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was incorrect when she claimed that NAEP showed two thirds of students don’t read at grade level. NAEP’s “proficient” is set considerably higher than grade level, as noted on the NAEP site. (This is a lesson that has to be relearned as often as NAEP scores are released.)

It’s worth noting that there is some debate about whether or not NAEP data says what it claims to say. There are arguments about how levels are set, with some arguing that the levels are too high. An NCES report back in 2007 showed that while NAEP considers “basic” students not college ready, 50% of those basic students had gone on to earn a degree. A 2009 report from the Buros Institute at the University of Nebraska also found issues with NAEP results. It’s possible that those issues have been tweaked away in the decade since, but that would have implications for any attempts to trace trends over all that time.

NAEP is extraordinarily clear that folks should not try to suggest a causal relationship between scores and anything else. Everyone ignores that advice, but NAEP clearly acknowledges that there are too many factors at play here to focus on any single one.

Betsy DeVos argues that the NAEP scores show that the U.S. needs more school choice. Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, which has long supported charters schools over public schools, argues that the NAEP scores are evidence that the U.S. public education system is failing. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that the scores are proof that the country must courageously pursue more of the reform initiatives that he launched while in office. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute called the poor results “predictable”as he blames them on the Great Recession, and pointed to a few small data points as proof that the kinds of reforms backed by Fordham work. The National Council on Teacher Quality claims that the static scores are the result of college teacher education programs that don’t teach teachers the proper ways to teach reading and math. It’s clear that when your only tool is a hammer, the NAEP looks just like a nail.

Critics of education reform like Diane Ravitch note that the NAEP scores showthat a “generation of disruptive reform” has produced no gains, that the NAEP trend line stays flat. DeVos singled out Detroit as an example of failed policies, yet the policies that have failed in Detroit are largely those reform policies that she herself pushed when she was an education reform activist in Michigan. And some policies may improve scores without actually helping students; Mississippi in 2015 joined the states that held back students who could not pass a third grade reading test, meaning those low-scoring students would not be in fourth grade to take the NAEP test. It would be like holding back all the shorter third graders and then announcing that the average height of fourth graders has increased. 

In all discussions, it’s useful to remember that the increases or decreases being discussed are small– a difference of just a few points up or down. NAEP scores have shown neither a dramatic increase or decrease, but a sort of dramatic stagnation. That is arguably worse news for education reformers, who have been promising dramatic improvements in student achievement since No Child Left Behind became the law almost twenty years ago. 

So what’s the one actual lesson of NAEP? One continuing belief for some students of education policy is that if we just had some cold, hard data, we could really get some stuff done. We could settle arguments about curriculum and pedagogy and policy, and by making data-driven decisions, we could steer education into a new golden age.

Well, here’s our regular dose of cold hard data. It hasn’t settled a thing. 

That’s the one actual lesson of NAEP; the dream of data-informed, data-driven decision making as a cure for everything that ails us is just a dream. Data can be useful for those who want to actually look at it. But data is not magical, and in education, it’s fruitless to imagine that data will settle our issues.

Originally posted at Forbes.com