Trump Teams Up With Catholic Church For School Vouchers

The Tablet is a magazine of Catholic news and opinion; they got their hands on a recording of the April 26 conference call phone meeting between some 600 prominent American Catholics and the "best [president] in the history of the Catholic Church."

According to Christopher White, reporting for The Tablet, the call included Cardinal Timothy Dolan (New York), Cardinal Sean O'Malley (Boston), Archbishop Jose Gomez (Los Angeles), Bishop Michael Barber (Oakland, and chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops committee of Catholic Education) and superintendents of Catholic schools in several major cities. On the administration side, the call reportedly included Betsy DeVos and Ben Carson.

Well, those were some good times

Trump, who somehow worked in his childhood growing up next to a Catholic school in Queens, wanted his audience to know that he is their guy, that he wouldn't even allow the Paycheck Protection Program to move forward unless it included the ability of churches to use tax dollars to pay the salaries of workers in religious institutions. He also touted his "greatest economy in the history of the world" until it was "unfairly hit" by the coronavirus (which, he noted, could have been stopped a lot earlier "at the source, and everyone knows what I mean when I say that."

He touted his anti-abortion credentials, a position that is a new one for him, with his evolution on the issue corresponding with his decision to run for office. Makes sense-- raise your hand if you know someone, or ten someones, who supports Trump because anti-abortion. Trump also mentioned his pushback on the Johnson Amendment-- the one that says tax-exempt groups can't make political endorsements.

After this fifteen minute campaign stump speech, the floor was open to a combination of asking questions and kissing Dear Leader's ring.

Cardinal Dolan led off. Trump called him a "great gentleman" and "a great friend of mine" and Dolan said the feeling is mutual. Dolan has been pretty effusive about Trump, welcoming him to last Sunday's virtual mass and going on Fox to say he was "in admiration of his leadership." This is not a new thing. Dolan delivered the invocation before Trump's swearing in, and just a few months ago welcomed Attorney General Barr to Dolan's SiriusXM show to burble about what it's like to work for Trump.

Dolan's main thrust for the call was Catholic schooling. He called DeVos, Carson, and Kellyanne Conway "champions" and "cherished allies in our passion for our beloved schools." He thanked Trump for making sure that Catholic schools were included in the stimulus package, and identifying the main issues as "parental rights, educational justice, and civil rights of our kids." But he painted a grim picture for the long term, saying that "tuition assistance" for parents to keep sending their kids to parochial schools was needed.

“Never has the outlook financially looked more bleak, but perhaps never has the outlook looked more promising given the energetic commitment that your administration has to our schools,” Cardinal Dolan told the president. “We need you more than ever.”

Trump moved things right back to the point of the conversation-- vote for him in November. A defeat for him would mean "a very different Catholic Church," which means I don't know what, other than the usual play to the notion that somehow, in this country, Christians would be oppressed if Dear Leader were not there to lead them and I swear I will never fully grasp how the least Christian man to enter the White House somehow maintains Christian support. It's particularly striking because US evangelicals, the other wing of his religious support, historically are not big fans of the Catholic Church, at all.

The other big Catholic wigs were lined up for more of the same. Boston's Cardinal O'Malley said that Catholic schools have been unsurpassed in our country for moving people into the middle class. He also called for tuition support for parents."

To him, Trump said, "We'll be helping you out more than you even know."

Superintendents from LA and Denver called for school choice, with Escala of LA making the bold claim that Catholic schools in California "have saved the government over two billion dollars." Trump liked that savings figure and asked if they could come up with a national figure that he could use to argue with Congress. I'm guessing coming up with a national figure would be easy, unless you wanted it to be fact-based.

Bishop Barber called Betsy DeVos a great ally to Catholics, and said yay for Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, "whom he characterized as supporters of school choice."

At one point, Trump made a fairly straightforward pitch. “What a similarity we have and how the other side is the exact opposite of what you’re wanting so I guess it’s an important thing to remember.”

Not all Catholics have been loving this. The more liberal National Catholic Reporter said "the capitulation is complete," accused the Bishops of providing "campaign footage" and said this:

Without a whimper from any of his fellow bishops, the cardinal archbishop of New York has inextricably linked the Catholic Church in the United States to the Republican Party and, particularly, President Donald Trump.

US Catholic leadership appears to be all in for Trump, in particular looking to him to provide that all important parent tuition assistance. I suppose that could take the form of an actual taxpayer funded subsidy straight to Catholic school parents, but vouchers or education savings accounts would spread the wealth and better obscure the fact that taxpayers would be subsidizing private schools that are free to discriminate on whatever basis they feel compelled to use. The Catholic Church needs some financial backing for their schools, and they've done very, very well where vouchers are legal.

There's a lot of pretty language, but quid pro quo-- money for votes-- seems to cover it. Nobody here is talking about the value of or cost to public education, nor even about the notion that maybe the government and taxpayers (and not just Trump) might look for some give from the Catholic schools like, say, a little less discrimination. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church would do well to remember that when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. And the politics of Trump is solidly anti-public education.

How Will The Free Market Save The Most Challenging Students

Yesterday, Debbie Meyer put up a post at Project Forever Free that, unfortunately, does not strain the limits of credulity. It's about her journey as a parent and advocate, about the struggle to get her child the educational services that he's entitled to, and her subsequent work in helping other parents learn how to do the same.

Struggles between parents of students with special needs and the public school system are all too common. And yes, sometimes the parents want things that are simply not realistic and yes, the published versions of these battles are often missing critical information because the school cannot defend its position by opening up confidential student records. Even so, there can be no doubt that sometimes it takes a good-sized legal firestorm to get public school administrators off their butts and busy getting those students the educational services to which they are absolutely entitled.

I am not going to argue for a single second about the rightness of Meyer's story or suggest that there's something wrong in the advocacy work she does.

But it brings up a question that nags at me about charters, vouchers, ESAs and the whole spectrum of free market choice-centered ed reform ideas. Aside from my philosophical objections to such systems, I want to ask-- what happens to a child like this in a free market education system?

Early on in the article, Meyer says this:

I successfully advocated for my illiterate, suicidal fourth-grader to get a free and appropriate education at a school specializing in proper instruction for dyslexic kids and struggling readers.

"Free and appropriate education" is only a thing in public schools. If you tell me that parents like Meyer shouldn't have to hire lawyers and make phone calls and call for meeting after meeting and all manner of exertions to get their child that FAPE, I will absolutely agree with you. The level of advocacy that she talks about shouldn't be necessary, but here's the thing-- it's possible for parents dealing with public schools. A charter or private school--if they even accepted the student in the first place-- can offer a much simpler response to a parent like Meyer. "There's the door."

I understand how charter-choice fans envision certain parts of a free market education system would work. I think they're wrong, but I grasp their vision. But I've never seen an explanation of what is supposed to happen to a child like this.

A pubic school system cannot wash their hands of a child. Even if they say, "We can't/don't want to educate that child in our building," they must then foot the bill for a specialized school that can do the job. There is no corresponding responsibility in a choice system.

How is it supposed to work. Of the charters that will spring up, one will be interested in offering a costly program that will only serve a few students? In a voucher system, the voucher or ESA will provide enough money to cover tuition at a specialized private school for such students? Will charter and other private schools fall all over themselves competing for students who are difficult--and expensive--to educate? None of those things seems likely, at all. In a public school system, parents like Meyer ultimately have the law on their side (even though it shouldn't have to come to that). Who is on their side in a free market system? It can't be enough to have a politician say, "Here's a check. Good luck to you searching the marketplace for someone who both can and will educate your child."

Yes, this is the result of a philosophical issue, a fundamental shift from "The government is responsible for providing your child with a free and appropriate education" to "You now have the freedom to search the marketplace in hopes that it happens to make available what you need. See ya."

It's a philosophical issue, but these stories always remind me of parents I had known, and it is painful and distressing to watch them have to devote their time and energy to forcing a school to honor its legal obligation, but then I imagine them calling and sifting through a marketplace school by school and after they've rejected or been rejected by every available choice realizing that there is literally nothing else they can do, nobody they can call, nowhere to turn.

If you're a free marketeer, I invite you, sincerely, to tell me what I'm missing. In his book about Success Academy, Robert Pondiscio has an insightful line: "A significant tension between public schools and charter schools is the question of who bears the cost and responsibility for the hardest-to-teach students.” The answer, of course, has most often been that the public schools will shoulder that responsibility. But a mostly free market system where a small parallel public system is maintained as a catch-basket for students with special needs seems unlikely to make anyone happy.

Another possibility--one I've never seen discussed--is to make charter and choice schools bear the same weight of law as public schools, but I don't know how you would even begin to enforce such a thing--"Because Pat applied here, you have to accept Pat and you have to institute a program to meet Pat's special needs." How many ways would that school find to convince Pat's family to withdraw?

The public system may not much like the Debbie Meyers of the world some days, but they have to deal with them anyway. The free market education world does not, and I have to believe that's bad news for a lot of children.

This Is Not What School Will Look Like

Good lord-- the advice/guidance/clever thoughts about how to re-open schools, particularly if any state decides to follow Trump's latest unfiltered brain fart, seem to have been generated, once again, by people who have not been inside a school since they became adults. In some cases, the advice appears to come from people who have never met tiny humans at all.

The CDC joins many folks advising that school desks should be six feet apart. This raises several issues.

First, many classrooms have zero desks. Primary grades often have few or minimal desks. High school labs or shops have benches, not desks.

Second, let's do some math. Imagining that each properly buffered student is in the center of a 6' x 6' square. That's 36 square feet of space, meaning that a class of twenty students would need 720 square feet of classroom-- so 20 feet by 36 feet, just for students. Increase the space if you want furniture like a teacher's desk or bookshelves or cupboards. The 36 square feet is not a new idea; apparently 35 square feet has been a long-standing standard for child center designs, though this article argues that 54 square feet is a better figure for the littles. For the older students, guidelines seem to fall around 30 square feet--but that decreases as the number of "stations" increases.

There are apparently "classic works" about the size of school rooms, and without putting further research into school construction, I can say that classrooms mostly probably have enough room to kind of pull this six feet distancing thing off-- if all classes are fifteen students or fewer. So all schools have to do is expand their teaching staff enough to bring class sizes down to the fifteen-or-fewer level. And find enough classrooms for all those additional classes they have to create.

So that problem is solved, provided we can simply teleport students into their seats. The problem, of course, is that students move around.

Authorities are suggesting, "Well, just stagger the movement between classes." On the elementary level, that's sort of doable. Though a teacher who is taking her class of fifteen to the library now has to monitor a string of students 84 feet long, which may be a bit of a challenge. On the high school level, the challenge is much larger. Since students do not move from class to class in one solid group, staggering class dismissals means that some students will "pile up" in front of classrooms where the students have been dismissed yet. This in turn creates more travelling bottlenecks in the hall. Routing students between classes so that no collections occur in the hall will be a major challenge for administrators. Teachers are also going to have to look at arrival time as a seating chart factor-- if Pat is the last to class and has to walk through other students' bubbles to get seated, then that's a problem.

The CDC says, "Eat lunch in the classroom" and that seems fine-- someone will have to deliver the lunches (can't have the students go through the line without sacrificing lunch lady social distancing), and every classroom will have to have a fridge for brown baggers. Doable. Though if your contract includes a duty-free lunch period for teachers, that will have to be revisited.

Entrance into the building in the morning? That could be kind of slow, particularly for schools that already have security sweeps and metal detectors. But if 100 students are waiting in line to enter, and they are standing 6 feet apart-- well, that's going to create its own kind of obstacle in the neighborhood.

Busing? Run the busses at 1/6 capacity and make six runs in the morning and afternoon? In an area like mine, where a bus run is sometimes 30-45 minutes, that would be a challenge, but maybe that's where you give different grades different start and finish times during the day. Going to be a challenge for multi-child families.

No recess? Or recess in distance bubbles? Phys ed class? I don't want to think about what elementary school kids will be like without any physical activity. Other classes are going to suffer as well; what exactly will a band or orchestra look like with members sitting six feet apart? Chorus?

And how does it work when a teacher has to keep saying, "Yes, I can help you with that problem, but only from over here." Teachers will have to master a whole new level of diligence for even the simplest things, like several students needing to sharpen pencils at the same time, or handing out workbooks or papers.

All of this, as expensive and annoying and ridiculous as some of it may seem, is probably doable at most schools (some specific locations will even have advantages, like schools where the rooms open on the outside and not on a hall). But none of these challenges is the largest one.

Students.

How do you convince students to comply with all of this?

What elementary students will comply with not running over to hug their best friends? What kind of play or social development occurs when children are required to play by themselves? When someone is sad and crying (an event that, I am told, occurs roughly every 22 minutes in the primary grades), which teacher is going to say, "I'm not going to hug you, and nobody else in here is allowed to, either."

On the high school level, where students take a certain delight in bucking the system, what is going to happen when all you have to do to be a rebel is get close enough to someone to touch them? And just how far will some schools go to put their foot down and discipline their way to compliance ("I'm sorry, Mrs. Wiggleworth, but Pat is suspended for repeatedly standing four feet away from other students").

And what kind of dreadful school culture grows in an environment where you are never supposed to get close enough people to look them in the eye or touch them?

I could go on and on; I'll bet those of you who are teachers have already thought of a million issues. The main point is this-- when folks like the CDC say, "Well, just space classroom desks six feet apart and have them eat lunch in the classrooms," they don't seem to understand that they have addressed roughly 6% of the issues that will come up in coronavirus school. It's going to take a huge amount of thinking through, and it would be useful (once again) if the Big Cheeses In Charge actually consulted the people who will be the boots on the ground for any such venture.

P.S. I have skipped over the part where a team of forty-seven maintenance people wipes down the entire school with bleach every half hour. Extra staff, extra people to distance around, and oh, the fumes.

Khan Academy:This Is Better

We are just going to keep seeing these kinds of headlines until this mess is behind us: Khan Academy founder: Balance between in-person, online learning could be ‘silver lining’ of crisis.

Is it? Is it a silver lining that some ed tech folks are going to grab some market share over this? Khan Academy has seen a steady uptick in the use of their product, which, for those of you who somehow missed it, is a huge library of instructional videos (some of them especially aimed at test prep for SATs).

I confess to being highly skeptical about video instruction. If I stand in a classroom and deliver direct instruction, take no questions, and if prompted will only re-deliver the exact same instruction over and over again, then I am a lousy teacher. But somehow if I do all that on a video on line, I'm now a visionary genius. It's not that I see no place for instructional videos--I've watched plenty of great ones. But that's not teaching. It's particularly not teachig with younger vstudents.

“Even when we didn’t have school closures, their value was if I’m a teacher in a class with 30 students, how do I cater to their individual needs? ... So I’m hoping that as we come out of this the silver lining will be we will understand how to leverage both in the best possible ways,” Khan continued. “How to blend them, if you will.”

I think they can be blended in the same way that a sprig of decorative parsley is blended with a lobster dinner. It can be a nice extra touch, but A) everything will be just fine without it and B) if your lobster dinner is equal parts lobster and parsley, send it back.

Also, "Go watch this video" is not very awesome individualized instruction.

Khan offers other advice, too.

“What we’ve been doing is trying to provide extra support,” Khan said. “We’ve published schedules for parents and teachers so they can understand how to structure the day. We’ve just published some learning plans so students can understand not just how to keep learning through the end of the school year, but how to leverage summers so that the learning doesn’t stop.”

Schedules?! Yikes. And exactly what expertise does KA have in structuring the day? Go ahead-- scan their staff for folks with classroom teaching expertise, or whatever kind of formal training background that would qualify you to tell parents how to structure a day.

This is the hubris and opportunism of Silicon Valley ed tech-- I've come up with one useful little tool, so I'm now an expert on how the entire construction project.

Look, I know this is hard, and everybody wants to find a way to help, but too many ed tech outfits seem to think the pandemic pause is their moment, their chance to rise to greater prominence, to build their brand, to drive the bus. It's not helpful.

Rethinking Accountability For Education, Post-Pandemic.

It made sense for states to cancel the big end-of-year standardized reading and math test even before it became obvious that many students will never be back to school this spring to take the tests. In this extraordinary year, the tests were never going to supply valid data that could be compared to other years. 

Now that this year looks to be a “short” year for students, the same argument should be made for next year’s test as well. If (please, God) students go back to school next fall, most will be starting out with less preparation than any class in recent memory. Not only will they have been shorted academic content, but primary students who haven’t been in a classroom in over half a year will not easily slip back into a school routine in just a day or two. In other words, next year will also be a short year. The Big Standardized Tests would once again be a waste of time, time that could be better spent on instruction.

But for the past 20 years, the Big Standardized Test has been the center of accountability for school districts, individual schools, and classroom teachers. With the test on hold, this is the perfect time to revisit accountability tools for education.

Some folks have tried to suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic underlines the importance of testing and therefor underlines the importance of our old high stakes testing system. In fact, it does the opposite. COVID-19 testing is a simple binary; do you have the virus or not? But it is absurd to suggest that a single standardized math and reading test can somehow answer a binary question like, “Is this child well-educated or not?” Even ed reform fans have known for a while that the big standardized test does not deliver useful information. The pandemic reminds us that when it comes to testing, you need something that provides a clear answer to a clear question.

It’s time to scrap the big standardized high-stakes tests entirely, and replace them with a system that would provide real accountability. Any such system will need to start by answering a few simple questions.

The defining question for any accountability system is this:

Accountable to whom, for what?

The “to whom” part is the hard part of educational accountability, because classroom teachers serve a thousand different masters.

Teachers need to be accountable to their administration, to their school board, to their students, to the parents of their students, to the taxpayers who fund the school and pay their salaries, to the state, to the students’ future employers, and to their own colleagues. School administrators also need to be accountable to those various stakeholders, but in different ways. Each set of stakeholders also has a wide variety of concerns; some parents are primarily concerned with academic issues, while others give priority to their child’s emotional health and happiness. 

Parents may want to know if their children are on track for future success, or how their children’s progress compares to others. Those are two different measures, just as “How tall is my child” and “Is my child the tallest in class” are two different questions, each of which can be answered without answering the other.

Taxpayers want to know if they’re getting their money’s worth. State and federal politicians may want to see if benchmarks they have imposed on schools are being met. Teachers want to know how well their students are learning the various content the teachers have been delivering. Administrators may want to identify their “best” and “worst” teachers. School boards may want to know if their new hires are on track.

Answers to every single one of these questions require different measures collected with different tools. Some questions can’t be answered at all (there is no reliable way to rank teachers best-to-worst). One of the biggest fallacies of the ed reform movement has been the notion that a single multiple-choice math and reading test can somehow measure everything.

The reform dream was to be able to reduce school quality to a simple data point, a score or letter grade that tells us whether a school is any good or not. This is foolish. Ask any number of people to describe their idea of an “A” school; no two descriptions will match. A single grade system must by definition be reductive and useless for anything except as a crude tool for punishing some schools and marketing others.

Teachers and their unions are not opposed to accountability; they are opposed to accountability measures that are random and invalid. Meanwhile, accountability discussions never seem to include measures that would hold politicians accountable for getting schools the support and resources that they need. A good example would be the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a law that Congress passed to hold schools accountable for properly educating students with specials needs, and also a law that Congress has never come close to fully funding. 

K-12 school accountability is possible and desirable. Robust and useful methods are out there (check out Jack Schneider’s Beyond Test Scores for a good example). But any system that could offer true accountability in education requires long, complicated conversations (involving more than policy wonks, lobbyists and politicians) about what exactly we want to measure, how it can be measured, and how we want to use the data. The high-stakes testing model was slammed into place without any such conversation. 

The argument has often been that such conversations would take too much time. Well, we’ve got plenty of time right now, and a situation that can help clear our thinking about what we really, really want from schools. Let the conversations begin.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

ICYMI: How Many Weeks Has It Been Now Edition (4/26)

Well, on it goes. Here's some reading from the week. Remember, your choices about which voices to amplify make a difference.


COVID Stimulus Funds for Private School Vouchers 

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at Jeb Bush's old crew at ExcelInEd (formerly FEE) and their idea that stimulus funds should be repurposed to boost school vouchers.

Parents Worried about Special Ed Vouchers   

Rebecca Klein at HuffPost looks at the issues and concerns surrounding the question of whether or not to allow IDEA waivers for school districts struggling wit getting crisis education to students with special needs. Also, there's a picture of Betsy DeVos that makes it look like she has a halo, so that's something.

9 Ways Schools Will Look Different   

Anya Kamenetz at NPR looks at some predictions about how Corona-school might look when it starts up. Important to note that Corona-school looks kind of expensive.

Compassion and Grace  

Accountabaloney looks at a remarkable piece of guidance from, of all things, Georgia's state school superintendent. Worth the read.

Why Don't We Have Internet for All?  

The Have You Heard podcast looks at the origins of the digital divide.

Every Chid Left Behind  

Nancy Flanagan on how a little flexibility and care might avert some of the "crises" we're facing.

6 Reasons Students Aren't Logging On  

At EdWeek, Peter DeWitt looks at some of the reasons that online crisis education isn't getting traction with everyone.

Tacoma Teachers Struggle To Connect With Students

from the News Tribune, a look at the specific issues faced by teachers in tracking down their missing students. (See? It's not just you.)

A Trombonist Wonders When An Audience Will Gather 

Okay, not actually education related, except that this is one of my former students.

Defending the Future of the Big Standardized Test

What has happened to our beloved Big Standardized Test? Why do people keep picking on it? And can we lift it back up to its hallowed heights of the past? I have a report sitting in one of my tabs here that wants to answer those questions, yet somehow falls short. It's FutureEd's report The Big Test, and it is yet another attempt to repackage reformster alternate earth history. It's not super long, but I've read it so that you don't have to. Thank goodness I took my blood pressure meds today. Buckle up and let's go.

Who Are These People?

FutureEd is a project of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. It was founded by Thomas Toch, whose previous work included some edu-flavored thinky tanks and executive director of Independent Education, a private school network in DC, and an editor at US News. He is one more self-declared education policy expert who has apparently never taught in a K-12 classroom.

FutureEd launched a few years back, with declarations of independence and lack of bias; one more entry in the "new conversation" pageant. But its independence was all that one can expect from a group funded by the City Fund, the Waltons, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Their senior fellows are drawn from 50CAN, Bridge International Academies, Education Trust, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Alliance for Excellent Education, and NewSchools Venture Fund. It's a whole blooming field of Reformsters without any traditional public education advocates anywhere in sight.

Their stated mission these days-- " committed to bringing fresh energy to the causes of excellence, equity, and efficiency in K-12 and higher education." This report is part of a series of initiatives on the future of standardized testing being funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

So that's where this report is coming from. Let's dive in.

Setting the Stage

It's a solid dramatic opening, starting with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp  announcing plans to cut testing because, he said, "Georgia simply tests too much." How did we get here? This opening section is going to introduce a set of familiar themes that the full report plans to hammer home.

Pressure to reduce testing has come from many, often confounding sources: teachers’ unions and their progressive allies opposed to test-based consequences for schools and teachers; conservatives opposed to what they consider an inappropriate federal role in testing; suburban parents who have rallied against tests they believe overly stress their children and narrow instruction; and educators who support testing but don’t believe current regimes are sufficiently helpful given how much teaching time they consume.

Not sure what's "confounding" here other than some of the familiar inaccuracies in this list. There's the old "teachers and their unions don't want to be held accountable" trope. Conservatives upset by "what they consider" as overreach (but, you know, that's just their opinion). A nod to Arne Duncan's "white suburban moms" who don't want to find out their kids aren't so smart. Note that these parents "believe" that tests cause stress and narrow instruction-- it's just a thing they believe, for some reason.

Every critical opposition to the test is either inaccurately characterized, or carefully marked as what Those People believe. What's missing from the list is what's missing from the entire report-- there's not a shred of blame given to the tests themselves.

Testing, the report assures us, was going to be awesome. It would make sure we were getting a "return on a national investment in public education that reached $680 billion last year." It would "spur school improvement." It would ensure that needs of underserved students were being met. It would highlight achievement gaps and allow for "objective" comparison of "achievement" across all lines. It would identify needed adjustments to instructional programs. And here just four paragraphs I, is the report's first clue about the BS Test's fundamental problem-- you need different tests for different purposes, not an unfounded belief that a single test can somehow meet a dozen different goals.

What has fueled test resistance? "Union communications and lobbying campaigns, right wing media personalities, and misconceptions about the extent of state testing." Yup, the tests get a bad rap because of PR campaigns based on counterfactual stuff. And this, repeatedly, will be the guiding principle of this report-- when your beloved program is running into trouble, look everywhere for causes except at the program itself. In a classroom, when a teacher says, "My lesson is perfect but those little SOBs messed it all up," this is what we call bad teaching.

And their misconceptions are up to date. They note that Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos has waived the BS Test requirements for this school year. "The move, and the consequent loss of a year’s worth of longitudinal data, could further reduce the standing of state tests." Sigh. If you don't understand that the year's worth or longitudinal data was already gone, washed away in a pandemic tide of school closings and trauma, or if you imagined that somehow we could just pull the students back in to at least take the test so we'd have some data, as if that data wouldn't be junk, then you really don't understand the situation.

They do correctly note that ESSA is a "bulwark" against the rising call to do away with BS Tests entirely. And here's where they're headed with all this:

But a close analysis of the political landscape of standardized testing makes clear that unless a new generation of tests can play a more meaningful role in classroom instruction, and unless testing proponents can reconvince policymakers and the public that state testing is an important ingredient of school improvement and integral to advancing educational equity, annual state tests and the safeguards they provide are clearly at risk.

Yes. Yes, they are. Thank heavens.

History Lesson: The Rise Of Testing

Back in the 1960s, there was "scant information" about how well students were doing. Well, unless you count report cards and stuff. I'm not sure if the implication is that prior to the 1960s things were great, or if we just don't care that far back, or if we're avoiding the consideration of all the great things that were accomplished by people who came through that terrible system (how did we ever get to the moon?) But for bureaucratic purposes, something else was needed, particularly to see if the War on Poverty was working. So we got the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), about which we've had serious questions ever since.

So then we got accountability movements and standards movements and local school districts still kept worrying more about their local concerns than in producing satisfying data for federal bureaucrats. So every state had to set standards, and then every state had to test those standards, and those movements got us unironically stated ideas like "The increased requirements reflected a belief that for every child in America to achieve high standards, schools needed to track the learning of every student every year against those standards and be held accountable for the results" because weighing the pig helps it grow. The report does include this accurate sentence:

National leaders simply didn’t trust local educators to do the right thing for low-income students and students of color, so they tried to force them to act, in part, by imposing far more transparency and accountability via testing. 

The sentence is accurate even if you stop twelve words in. And in fairness to the feds, plenty of regions have proven themselves to be extraordinarily untrustworthy when it comes to looking out for non-wealthy non-white students. What has never been clear is how the BS Test would help. We know that test results mostly reflect socio-economic background. Nor has an underperforming school that was otherwise a secret been "uncovered" by BS Test results. One has to wonder why this accountability never extended to obvious things like states and districts that spent far less on non-white non-wealthy students than others, or legislators who refused to address either the symptoms or causes of poverty and systemic racism.

The report suggests that No Child Left Behind was "designed to shed a bright light on education inequities" but then notes that states responded by narrowing instruction to fit test subjects, by piling on "practice" or "progress" tests to check students' BS Test prospects, and by using tests that could be scored quickly and cheaply. Thing is, all of these responses were totally predictable, and were, deliberately or not, exactly what NCLB was designed to do. And all of these lessons were ignored when the feds shifted us to Common Core related PARCC/SBA/Whatever tests.

Building Backlash

So, there we were in the 90s with states holding an "indifferent commitment" to higher standards-- a moment that could have prompted the feds to ask "are these standards really higher" or "does it work to try to impose this stuff top down" or even, "why is our initiative failing"? They didn't ask those questions, but instead doubled down and resolved to fail harder.

The report marks the founding of Achieve, a group of politicians and businessmen (but not educators--never actual educators) that helped lay the groundwork for Common Core and continued to advocate for standards, testing and other reform disruptors. Funny story about Achieve-- they've just decided to close up shop.

There follows here a fun new version of the CCSS origin story-- in this one CCSSO and NGA were just finishing up their draft of the Common Core coincidentally at the same time that the Obama administration was launching Race To The Top, and so governors asked if they could be allowed to use federal funds to help implement Common Core and some aligned tests. This leaves out many parts, some of which are included in depth in this great piece by Lyndsey Layton (if you've never read it, do so now-- seriously, I'll wait) and also seems to miss the part where the RTTT and the waivers that followed sort-of kinda required states to adopt CCSS. The report says that states were "spurred in part by the prospect of federal largesse," which skips the part where states were facing the 2014 NCLB deadline requiring them to have 100% above-average standards testing results for their students or be penalized UNLESS they agreed to the Obama administration plans. So, spurred by largesse and also kind of extortiony stuff, too.

Enter the Tea Party, which didn't like the federal overreach (and which fed a crazy huge number of bizarre claims about the Core). Also, it's worth noting that not every conservative who objected to the policies was a Tea Party radical. And enter also the teachers union; the report again levels the critique that the teachers didn't like the tests of "the new accountability they represented" and a rank and file who didn't like their livelihood dependent on test results. The report seems to want to blame the opt-out movement on teachers, which is a real slap in the face to the many parent activists who actually made the movement happen. The report focuses on the lobbying and PR resistance launched by these groups; it does not consider the possibility that teachers didn't like having their evaluation linked to test scores soaked in VAM sauce because of the giant pile of evidence that the evaluation system was invalid and unreliable. The report, bizarrely, cites three books about the issue-- The Test, by Anya Kamenetz; The Testing Charade, by Daniel Koretz; and Beyond Test Scores, by Jack Schneider. It mentions these books adding fuel to the fire, but the report does not crack those books open to consider any of their criticism of the test. That would have been a wise move; Koretz does a particularly good job of laying out why the BS Tests have failed, and failed to gain fans.

Obama Retreats

Remember when Arne Duncan and the Obama administration retreated on the whole testing thing? Yeah, me neither. Duncan made some noises about how maybe testing was going too far, and how it was a Bad Thing that schools were narrowing curriculum to boost test scores, without ever considering his own policy role in those occurrences. The report mentions the cap idea-- that states make sure only 2% of class time be spent on testing-- which simply missed the point. It's the test prep that sucks up a ton of time, the narrowing of curriculum that damaged education for many students. From out here in the cheap seats, all I ever saw was Duncan/Obama trying to have it both ways, to look and sound sympathetic without ever providing any useful relief to the problem and especially to never, ever take any ownership of it.

Eventually ESSA happened, which sort of provided some relief, but still worshipped at the altar of the testing cult and added some crazy-pants ideas, like using the SAT and the ACT as the official Big Standardized Test for the school, a purpose for which they were neither designed nor suited.

What Legislators Did

One piece of actual research in this report is a look at what states introduced and enacted in the way of test-relief bills. Lots introduced, sixty-some enacted. Reducing the number of tests was most popular, with shortening the test and capping testing time right behind.

This pushback, the report confirms, has been mostly bipartisan-- sort of. While occasionally anti-testing bills have bipartisan origins, it's also true that in some areas, one party or the other is leading the charge. And they cite a bunch of lobbying, mostly by teachers unions.

What About Teachers And Their Unions

"Teachers' take on testing is complex," says the report, saying that teachers favor testing when its useful, but not when it isn't, which doesn't really seem that complex unless you are actively resisting the insight that the BS Tests have not been useful. The report's take on the unions is complex in the sense that it's, well--

Teacher union leaders are forthright about not wanting their teachers held accountable for their students’ achievement on standardized tests, and about their opposition to high-stakes school accountability more generally.

There's no footnote for this assertion, but I have yet to ever hear or read a union leader saying any version of "we don't want teachers to be held accountable..." I've heard lots of people say that the BS Tests and VAM goop (the report never gets into VAM) are a lousy way to measure teacher effectiveness, but the repeated implication that teachers are anti-accountability, which in turn implies that they are lousy slackers trying to hide their slackness-- I've heard that plenty, and I'm hearing its echo here. They do offer some Randi Weingarten quotes including the correct observation that "there was a fixation on the teachers and the consequences for the teachers rather than a fixation on what children needed."

They cite a survey from the Center on Education Research indicating that teachers like standardized tests, plus a survey from Educators for Excellence, a teacher union-alternative reform group says so, too. Education Next, another pro-reform publication found that public likes the tests, and NWEA-- a test manufacturing company-- said their research also shows all the standardized test love. No, says the report, it's just those damn unions throwing their weight around.

Time On Testing  

This point was popular with Duncan. People object to the BS Tests because they are confusing it with all those other tests.

For instance, schools use a lot of interim tests and practice tests and let's-find-out-which-kids-need-extra-prep tests, none of which are actually mandated by the feds. Which is true, but fails to understand how high stakes testing works. Imagine you lead a school band, and you know you have a major performance coming up, a performance that has high stakes for you and your musicians. If your boss says, "No big deal-- don't rehearse or prepare or anything, just hand out the music and sight read it the day of the concert," would you listen to that advice? Of course not.

A central issue of BS Testing is that proponents imagine that the test is frictionless and simple, that if a student has the skills, they can be quickly and seamlessly used anywhere else. But authentic assessment means that the assessment task closely resembles the practiced skill, and nothing resembles taking a poorly designed multiple choice test on a computer more than, well, doing that same thing. The BS Tests, just as in the days of NCLB, have been designed to be cheaply and quickly administered-- NOT to measure the things that we say we want to measure. So schools spend plenty of time practicing doing the exact things that the BS Test wants to measure.

Solutions For The Future?

Well, the report hints at liking the competency-based all-testing, all-the-time model, where we just keep hitting students with little standardized tests all through the year. Also, the ESSA allows states to putz around, so there's that. But the report is showing the same old problems. At one point they quote an expert who says

States, with the cooperation and collaboration of local districts, need to develop systems of assessment that balance the state [accountability] program with assessments that actually help kids learn.

And then later quotes another expert who says they need testing "that requires actually getting
the school-improvement side of state accountability systems right.” Plus testing has to address parents, they say, who are more interested in their child's performance than school system performance. Those are not the same thing, and they would require different tests used in different ways. As long as the dream is a single test that can serve a dozen different purposes, the BS Test will be a waste of time and money.

Hurry! Hurry!!

The report imagines a race against time, citing the "pincer movement" between the union and the Tea Party that almost hurt testing in 2015 while ESSA was coming into being. But, they say, "the support of education organizations like the Education Trust and the Council of Great City Schools won the day on Capitol Hill." Well, maybe. But it's not really a great thing when those kind of corporate reform edu-amateurs carry the day. Dismissing Diane Ravitch as a polemicist instead of listening to what she has to say is also not useful.

But the report is concerned that with reauthorization of ESSA looming in the--well, it will probably happen sooner or later-- and the tide running against testing, maybe the next version of an education bill won't have the BS Test's back. And the last paragraph of the whole thing shows a breath of honesty and then, well--

That leaves school reformers in a race against the clock to create testing systems that are more valuable to educators and parents and that offer meaningful windows into school and student performance without overwhelming teach- ers and principals. That is, they’re in a race to change the national narrative on standardized testing.

No! Not the same thing. "Come up with tests that are useful and not-sucky' is not the same as "craft some better PR to control the narrative."

So What's Missing Here? 

When you build a hammer out of jello and builders reject it as a useless tool, you do not have a PR problem or a narrative problem. You aren't the victim of lobbying by the carpenters' union or some radical Wood House Society. Your problem is that you have created a hammer that doesn't do the job it was intended to do.

The BS Test has always had a jello hammer problem, on top of claims that not only could it be used to hammer nails, but it could also drive screws and strip paint and smooth concrete and patch drywall.

The BS Test was created with a promise that it would be usable for multiple purposes, and yet it was actually created for none of them, but to be easy to administer and score. It measures what test makers think is easy to measure, not what anybody actually wants it to measure. The report is worried that losing the tests will also lose "the safeguards they provide," but all these years in, and nobody has really made a case for the safeguards. Where are the compelling stories of schools that were struggling, but then BS Test results turned them around? Because we have far more stories of how some states (looking at you, Florida) have used this accountability system to target schools for privatization, or to signal vultures that this neighborhood would be a good place to move in an edu-business (still looking at you, Florida).

If the BS Tests had generated usable, accurate data-- if they had actually been useful-- then they might have been widely embraced, despite their top-down imposition. But they were wielded as a threat ("This is how we'll catch all those terrible teachers who are ruining schools") and their data was tied to punishments, not improvements. And their data has been shown, again and again and again, to be flawed and unreliable. They have taken the broad, expansive vision of US education, to provide a strong foundation for young people to nourish their interests and abilities and build the future they dream of, and reduced it to a meagre, cramped goal-- get a good score on a math and reading standardized test. High stakes testing has forced a small, uninspiring, dim view of what schools should be.

If the folks at FutureEd are really concerned about the future of the Big Standardized Test, I suggest they stop looking everywhere but at the test itself. I suggest they listen to the critics and consider what truth those critics have to offer. If they don't like listening to teachers and parents, I can recommend fellow thinky tankers like Jay Greene, from the very reform Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, who has pointed out at great length that raising test scores shows zero connection to improving student life outcomes. I suggest they consider, really honestly, what might be wrong with high stakes testing policy itself; stop treating it as a PR problem and look at it as a product problem.

The authors are sad that this year's test has been scrapped. I have more bad news-- next year's test may very well also be a waste of everyone's time, to be either canceled or to generate data from a situation so unique as to bear no comparison to any other data. At this rate, we might get used to living without the BS Test, and I haven't seen anything to make me think that would be a bad thing.