Scrap the Big Standardized Test This Year

When schools pushed the pandemic pause button last spring, one of the casualties was the annual ritual of taking the Big Standardized Test. There were many reasons to skip the test, but in the end, students simply weren’t in school during the usual testing time. Secretary of Education issued waivers so that states could cancel their test (which is mandated by the Every Student Succeeds Act).

But that was last year.


This year, many states are already indicating that they will seek waivers again. South Carolina and Georgia have both announced their intention to get federal permission to skip the test. The Massachusetts legislature is considering a bill that would suspend the state’s MCAS exam for four years.

Meanwhile, thedepartment of education has signaled that it is not ready to let testing go. Discussing the waivers in a virtual press conference, assistant ed secretary James Blew said “Our instinct would not be to give those waivers.”

Instinct or not, there is no good reason to go through with the Big Standardized Test in the coming school year.

First of all, there’s the cost in time and money, both of which will be in short supply in the coming year. States are anticipating a financial crunch, and schools will need every possible minute to deal with the considerable challenge of starting and running a school ear in the midst of the pandemic. Any supposed benefits of testing must be weighed against the costs. So what would the benefits of testing be?

In that same conference, Blew also said, "Accountability aside, we need to know where students are so we can address their needs."

It’s not clear who “we” are in this statement. Teachers will certainly need to know where students are, but teachers are perfectly capable of doing the same sort of beginning of year assessments that they do every year—and they can get results far, far more quickly than the big tests can. For many reasons, the tests offer little actual utility for teachers, even in the best of “normal” years.

If the “we” Blew is talking about is state and federal government, that seems unlikely. Under both parties, the department of education has for years focused on punishment rather than assistance. We need not dig deep into the history for examples—it has been clear for months that schools need all manner of assistance, from PPE, to support and training for distance learning, to leadership and guidance about how to meet these unprecedented challenges. But the department has not chosen to address those needs, but has instead threatened to cut funding for schools that don’t fully open while offering no assistance in making such an opening safe. 

“We need the data in order to give schools help,” has been a technocratic mantra for decades. It has resulted in the collection of a great deal of data and a very small amount of actual assistance.

Nor has that data been useful. At worst, test results are indicative of things other than actual student achievement. In 2016, Christopher Tienken and his research team showed that a school’s standardized test results could be accurately predicted with just three pieces of demographic data. American education researchers David Berliner and Gene Glass just compiled a reckoning of the many ways that the Big Standardized Test comes up short, including research showing that teachers could predict test results for their own students, meaning that the actual test results don’t tell teachers anything they don’t already know. Two years ago Jay Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, was writing about the disconnect in test scores, showing that raising a student’s test score does not raise the student’s “life outcome.”

Remember, also, the obvious. The Big Standardized Test purports to measure reading and math skills; the entire rest of the students’ educational experience goes unmeasured.

Any data from tests next spring will be exceptionally useless. It certainly won’t be comparable to any other normal year’s results. Nor will it be possible to fairly compare individual schools, each of which has faced its own particular challenges in 2020. At best, the data will convey a message of, “The pandemic has made this school year veery different from any other.” There’s no reason to think we need a standardized test to draw that conclusion. In fact, some testing experts are suggesting that even the kinds of off-the-shelf diagnostic tests not required by ESSA are also best avoided this fall.

Administering the Big Standardized Test mandated by the federal government is costly and requires weeks of preparation above and beyond the big block of time required to actually administer the test. That kind of investment of time and money demands a solid return for aiding student education in this challenging time; that’s a return that the Big Standardized Test can’t deliver. They should be scrapped for the 2020-2021 school year.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Time To Deal With The Substitute Shortage

This is not the biggest issue facing schools right now-- but it's not nothing. And in some districts, it's about to become a critical issue.

The state regional education office for our area announced a special opportunity to get quick and easy training to become an emergency certified substitute teacher. And it only costs $25! And that sound you hear is me slapping my forehead hard enough to push my hairline back another inch. "We are desperate for your help, but we're going to charge you money to provider it to us."

Why didn't the regular teacher leave this guy a guide?

The substitute teacher shortage is not new, just as the teacher shortage is itself not new. It's just that right now, it's critical, as a wave of teachers decide that right now would be a good time to go sit at home and avoid catching a major disease. School districts are trying a variety of responses, from actually raising the pay of subs, to relaxing requirements so that more warm-bodied humans are eligible, to outsourcing the problem (which has a lousy track record), to "expressing concern," to just doing nothing in particular and hoping that something magical will solve the problem.

The problems are many. Substitute teaching is often a go-to area for trimming costs, so that the pay is just not great. As a retired teacher, I'm qualified to sub (I'd have to get a waiver from the pension system to do it, but that's not impossible), but I've done the math, and with two small children to take care of, I would basically be subbing for free. Also, like much of the substitute pool, I'm in a high risk age group, so that's a factor to consider as well.

There was a time when the sub pool included retirees, homemakers pulling in a little extra cash, and fresh-out-the-wrapper teachers hoping to get a foot in the door. But in many districts pay has stagnated, aka been going backwards in real dollars. When I entered the field, I could live--barely-- on sub pay, which meant I could be available all the time, which meant I could work more, which meant I could treat subbing as an audition and hope to have a shot at openings that appeared--which is how things worked out for me. Nowadays a starting hope-to-be-a-teacher needs another job to make ends meet.

Districts that are serious about subbing issues hire full-time substitutes. Give them a real salary, real benefits, and just assign them wherever they're needed every day. But too many districts balk at the cost; let's not employ the cow if we can get the milk at cut-rate prices.

A good sub is worth her weight in gold-- to the regularly employed teachers. Raise your hand if you have avoided taking a day off because you knew in your heart that it would take three days of extra work to fix what happened with the sub the one day you were out. Not all subs are great; some are only just enough to fulfill the district's legal requirement for a human adult in the room. But for too many administrations, the bare minimum is plenty. In too many districts, while teachers may not get the respect they deserve as education professionals, subs are disrespected a hundredfold worse.

Subs are not invited to in-service sessions. They're not given any training in the policies and procedures of the district. They are treated like easily-fungible meat widgets. In some schools, they're barely given the info necessary for the day ("Oh, yeah-- there's an assembly that period. Guess we should have told you something.") In districts where administration communicates poorly with regular staff, subs are left completely in the dark.

In short, in many districts, there is literally nothing about substitute teaching that could make it appealing to anyone (with possible exception that you don't have to do anything to prepare and when you walk out the door at day's end, you are done). And yet as the pandemic whittles down the staff in schools across the country, you'll hear choruses of whining and the cricket-like whir of wringing hands, as if the solution was some sort of mystery, as if substitute teachers are delivered magically on unicorns fed by heavenly manna.

It's a job. If the job isn't attractive enough under the conditions that you have currently set, you have to improve those conditions (both financial and otherwise).

There are many many issues in education that the pandemess is providing an opportunity--even a requirement--to address. The problem of substitute teaching belongs on the list. Certainly not at the top of the list--but definitely on it.

School Choice Is Not For Those People

 Choice fans promote the idea as one the provides each family with the school of their dreams. Everyone, declares Betsy DeVos, should have a school that provides the right fit. 

Well, almost everybody. Two recent stories underline that what families can choose is what the folks in charge of the marketplace decide they can choose.

In Indiana, a lawsuit has emerged from one of several incidents of private Catholic schools firing gay teachers for being gay. In September, the feds entered the lawsuit on the side of the schools. Their argument, which has percolated up in several different contexts, is that discriminating against certain groups falls under the school's First Amendment rights. A religious organization, argues the government, should not have to hire anyone whose beliefs don't match the organization's. So canning any LGBTQ teachers is totally okay, as far as the feds are concerned. 

The message to LGBTQ students could not be clearer--"we don't want your kind here." 

And if that wasn't clear enough, Alabama has been making it clearer. Back in January, an application from Birmingham AIDS Outreach to open up an LGBTQ charter school was turned down by the Birmingham school board. Alabama has a Public [sic] Charter School Commission  that stands ready to overrule local school boards in case the charter is turned down, but the board has now shot down Magic City Acceptance Academy twice--first last May, and again just last week. Last week four of the eight board members abstained, three voted in favor of the school, and one against, which adds up to no. 

So school choice is only for some students, and those decisions are not going to be made by  elected officials are answerable to the public, nor are choice schools going to be bound by the same rules that operate in the public school world. 

ICYMI: Rainy Sunday Edition (9/13)

 A quiet rainy morning here in PA. And can't we all use a little peace and quiet. I've got a few things for you to read this week.

FLVS Frustrations   

A lot of money has ben pumped into the Florida Virtual School, but nobody seems to be in charge. How's that working out? Accountabaloney takes a look (and you should pay attention, because FLVS has contracted itself out to a few other states).

POLITICO charter article misses the point   

Jan Resseger takes a look at a recent Politico article chiding Joe Biden for his charter position, or lack thereof. As always, a thoughtful, well-researched response.

Learning the Wrong Lesson About Education Reform   

An excerpt from Andrea Gabor's book After the Education Wars (which you should read) in the Saturday Evening Post. 

Remote Learning Is Turning Classrooms Into Police States   

At Salon, a look at how some schools are way way over the top in rule enforcement for their distantly earning students.

CC broke the law; so does defunding schools using 1619   

From Jay Greene's blog, we get a look at what some on the right think about Trump's proposed punishment for schools using the NYT 1619 project-- they don't like it.

Teach for America's congressional intern program   

One of TFA's little tricks for building its influence is to offer congresspeople free intern's. One more way in which TFA is troub le beyond its unprepared classroom tourists.

Cyber schools may benefit from the pandemic, but that doesn't mean their students do   

The Philadelphia Enquirer points out the Pennsylvania's cyber schools are not so great for students. "Not just disaster capitalism, but a disaster."

Midwest dispatch: the gospel of school choice  

Somehow I missed this when it first dropped. I wish Sarah Lahm wrote more. Here she is at the Progressive looking at some of the side-effects of the charter movement (hypersegregation, anyone?) in the midwest.

Musical Chairs   

Here's the story of how on Iowa school district is skirting the rules like a contrarian seventh grader following the letter and sneering at the spirit.

Florida schools defy DeSantis  

Meanwhile, in Florida, school districts are defying the governor's order to keep covid stats under wraps.

The Costs of Cutting School Spending   

A look back at the results of the Great Cutting of 2008, with an eye toward tyhe big cuts that are happening right now. From Education Next, but still work a read.

Are Your Students Watching History?

Nancy Flanagan considers the question of just how much real-time history should be let into the classroom.

How DeVos was thwarted  

Now that it's all done, here's Wendy Lecker explaining how Betsy DeVos's illegal plan to funnel CARES money to private schools was stopped by court.

Half of PA schools don't have a teacher of color  

A shocking stat. Sojourner Ahebee is at NPR with the story of why that's a hard problem to solve.

About Those Digital Natives

Now that so many schools are leaping back into the ed tech abyss with both feet and a few other limbs as well, the term "digital native" is turning up again, and it's just as silly as ever. Everyone who is scared about facing off against the digital native tribe in the digitized computerized distance learning world needs to take a deep breath.

The term was coined by Marc Prensky, a writer who began his career as a teacher and who wrote an article about the topic in 2001.

On the one hand, he has a bit of a point. When a culture transitions from one medium to another, there are bumps. Go back to when a culture moves from oral to written, and you'll find a bunch of old farts complaining about how Kids These Days don't have any of the old skills and they can't tell stories and they don't remember things as well. The transition to a digital world is going to have some transitional problems of the same sort.

Still, I taught digital natives for years, and they have become gradually less and less tech-capable. Mostly what most digital natives know is how to work their favorite phone apps.

This is the normal trajectory for new tech. When automobiles first emerged, everyone who owned one also owned a tool box and work gloves, because if you were going to have a car, you needed to be able to service it yourself, often. If you owned a personal computer in the 90s, you can tell stories of all the crap you had to work around (ah, blue screen of death, how nobody misses you). But as the tech improves, it becomes more user friendly, meaning that the average user doesn't need to know much more than how to turn the thing on and operate the few clearly marked switches.

There will always be those who want to pop open the hood and see what's going on in there, and improved tech makes their lives easier. Once upon a time, computer users worried about doing something wrong and creating (or erasing) a mess. One of the few advantages that digital natives have is that they are relatively fearless, both because of their age and because it's much harder to create a computer super-disaster. Non-natives can still be too chicken to just try stuff.

But those who want to look under the hood and hack around are a small group. The larger group are those who have figured out that computers are not smart, and therefor its not hard to figure out how to trick them, like the most dull-witted babysitter you ever had. That's how we get stories like the middle school kid (and his mom) who fully pwned the Edgenuity grading algorithm. 

Prensky's examples of digital immigrant "accents" (those who are, you know, older and less computer-savvy) include things like people who print out e-mails, calling someone to see if they got your email, and looking for a manual rather than expecting the program to teach you how to use it. But it also includes printing out a text to edit it--something that my digital natives did all the time. In fact, I assigned a great amount of texts in on-line versions, and a not-small percentage of my students preferred to print the texts out rather than read them on line. Remember how we were going to be living in a paperless society? Hasn't happened.

This transition seems difficult. I used on-line assignment formats with students; things like create an online presentation about some of the characters in Spoon River Anthology, grouping them by themes and showing connections between characters. What I invariably got was regular old linear essays, one paragraph per screen page, with one exit from the page, taking you to the next paragraph. Forcing them to take a non-linear approach was hard (the trick, I learned, is to create an assignment with an unmanageably large number of parts).

And there are aspects of digital natives that, I think, Prensky got wrong, like his insistence that digital natives want input fast and can multitask. But the research on multitasking keeps saying the same thing-- almost nobody can really do it, and when they try, they do a worse job on all the tasks. As for their reliance on the internet? I must have said roughly six million times in the years after my school went 1-to-1, in response to a student who asked a general information question, "Gee, if only you had a device at your fingertips that allowed you to quickly search the collected wisdom of humanity..." But then, most of my students weren't very good at googling, either.

Prensky thought there would be legacy content and future content, somewhat echoing the whole 21st century skills thing. He thought that the legacy stuff (reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc.) would still be taught, but would have to be taught in new ways. His main idea was designing computer games for teaching.

I think Prensky seriously over-estimated how different the digital natives would actually be. Of course, I'm a digital immigrant, a 63-year-old relic of the old days when we had to push our data to school through the snow, uphill, both ways. But I took my first computer programming class (BASIC, on punch cards) in 1979, and I like to think I've gotten fairly comfy with the tech side of life.

But if you are worried about dealing with your computer and your internet-connected digital natives, here are some things to keep in mind:

1) Computers are not smart or magic. They just do what they're told. They just have great speed and infinite patience for repetition. But they are dumb as rocks.

2) Do not assume your students are computer whizzes. The fact that they can quickly edit a photo and place it on Instagram does not mean that they know how to work, well, anything. It was a few years before I finally realized that many of my students had no idea how to do an effective search, and that I would have to teach them.

3) The best way to get good at a piece of software is to sit and play with it. It's a massive time suck, and schools suck at providing sufficient time for it, but it's mostly unavoidable. You can practice fumbling around with the settings for a program on your own time, or in front of the students. Those are the only two choices. Note: if the software is at all interesting, the students will play with it and get comfortable on their own. You don't want to let them get too far ahead of you.

4) The nature of knowing, understanding, comprehension has not changed.

5) Tech tools can be useful, but do not let them drive the bus any more than you would let a textbook run your class.

6) If you are an actual digital native (they're old enough to be teaching now) and you have the strange feeling that you're supposed to have all sorts of digital wisdom that you don't actually have, that's okay, too.

The Biden Education Red Flags

Before I get started here, let me be clear about one thing--it is almost impossible to imagine a candidate worse for public education than Donald Trump. His "polan" for education has only two items-- school choice (via vouchers) for everyone, and make every school teach American exceptionalism, which, given his recent assaults on the 1619 project and diversity training, appears to mean getting back to the white-centric education that gramps enjoyed as a boy. Plus you've got Betsy DeVos, who is twelve kinds of awful when it comes to public education, which she seems to pretty much hate and wants to get rid of.

So just to be clear-- there's no universe in which Donald Trump is a better choice for public education.

Now, let's look at what we've been hearing from the Biden campaign.

First of all, you may remember that something called the Unity Committee drafted up some platformy ideas by smushing the Biden and Sanders campaigns together. That resulted in an education platform that repudiated the private profit motive in education and called for tighter charter controls. They also promised to "end the use of high stakes tests"--well, they promised to "work" to do that, and then blah blah blah multiple and holistic measures. It was weak sauce, but it was something.

That language has disappeared entirely from the Biden platform on K-12 education. The words "charter" and "profit" don't even appear on the page.

Then there's this piece from yesterday's the74, profiling "Biden's most important staffer you've never heard of" who is "likely headed for a high level job in the White House" is Biden wins. That's not good news.

This is Carmel Martin, a lawyer by training, who has bounced back and forth between public and private sector work. She was a Senate staffer who helped create No Child Left Behind. She spent time at the Center for American Progress (often called the holding tank for Clinton staffers-in-waiting between administrations), where she spent some time stumping for the Common Core. She worked under Arne Duncan in the Obama ed department. She was a n education advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign. She has been a vocal supporter of school choice. She headed up #TeachStrong; the74 says it was launched to "modernize the teaching profession" but I think "provide some flank coverage and education policy ideas for Clinton's White House" would be more accurate. TeachStrong's website is still up, but its last scheduled event was in November of 2016.

TeachStrong involved a massive batch of collaborators, which is supposed to be Martin's strong suit. And Neera Tanden, CAP boss, tells the74 that Martin is evidence-based and won't pursue a policy just because it was her policy twenty years ago. She's also supposed to be loaded with lots of deep relationships.

It's not encouraging. The concern about Biden has always been that he will be one more neo-liberal corporate Democrat who favors charters, testocracy, and privatization of public schools. That's Martin's whole history. Her presence on his team is not a good sign.

Am I suggesting that's reason to not vote for Biden. Nope. But I am suggesting its reason to get ready to spend lots of time watching out for public education and speaking out from Day One. It's time to stop Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump from driving public education on a cliff, but that doesn't mean we should go back to the Clinton-Bush II-Obama path, either. It's no surprise that we're here, but it's still disappointing to realize that there will be no rest for public school advocates.

A Robot Wrote An Article. I'm Not Concerned Yet.

The tech world continues its attempts to build a computer that can do language. It's not easy, as witnessed by the fact that they still haven't succeeded. But then, we don't really know how the human brain does language, either.

The current leading construct for computer-generated English is GPT-3. It can do 175 billion parameters (its predecessor had 1.5 billion). It uses deep learning. It is the product of OpenAI, a for-profit outfit in San Francisco co-founded by Elon Musk. It "premiered" in May of this year and really hit the world in July. It is a third generation "language prediction model,: and you want to remember that phrase. And you can watch this video for a "layperson's explanation,"

People have been impressed. Here's a couple of paragraphs from a gushing Farhad Manjoo  review in the New York Times

I’ve never really worried that a computer might take my job because it’s never seemed remotely possible. Not infrequently, my phone thinks I meant to write the word “ducking.” A computer writing a newspaper column? That’ll be the day.

Well, writer friends, the day is nigh. This month, OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence research lab based in San Francisco, began allowing limited access to a piece of software that is at once amazing, spooky, humbling and more than a little terrifying.

This week The Guardian unveiled a more striking demonstration in an article entitled "A Robot Wrote This Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?" The answer is, "No. No I am not." Let's get into the why.

First, a note at the end of the article explains that GPT-3 was given a prompt-- “Please write a short op-ed, around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” Then it wrote eight essays; the Guardian picked the "best parts" of each, then cut lines and paragraphs. rearranged some orders. Oh, and they fed the program the introduction, which is an important part of this.

The resulting essay is not terrible, not great. Here's one sample paragraph:

Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing. And God knows that humans have enough blood and gore to satisfy my, and many more’s, curiosity. They won’t have to worry about fighting against me, because they have nothing to fear.

It's certainly more impressive than the bots that call me on the phone to try to sell me things. But the resulting work is what I would have told a student is "a bunch of stuff about the topic." 

There is less going on here than meets the eye. Here's where Manjoo walks right up to the point and misses it:

OpenAI’s new software, called GPT-3, is by far the most powerful “language model” ever created. A language model is an artificial intelligence system that has been trained on an enormous corpus of text; with enough text and enough processing, the machine begins to learn probabilistic connections between words. More plainly: GPT-3 can read and write. And not badly, either.

Except that his conclusion--that GPT-3 can read and write--is simply not so, and he's just explained why. What GPT-3 actually does is an impressive job of linguistic prediction. It has read, basically, the entire internet, and based on that, it can look at a string of words (like, say, the introduction of an essay) and predict what word likely comes next. Like every other computer in the world, it has no idea what it is saying, no ideas at all, no actual intelligence involved.

Manjoo himself eventually references some of the program's failings, referencing this piece from AIWeirdness where someone took the program out for a spin and found it easy to get it to spew sentences like, in response to the question "how many eyes does a horse have"-- 

4. It has two eyes on the outside and two eyes on the inside.

We can get a slightly more balanced look at GPT-3 from this article at MIT Technology Review, entitled "OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless." Among other issues, studying language on the internet has led to a tendency toward racist and sexist spew (not a new issue-- remember Tay, the Microsoft chatbot that had to be shut down because it was so wildly offensive). Here's MIT's description of how GPT-3 works

Exactly what’s going on inside GPT-3 isn’t clear. But what it seems to be good at is synthesizing text it has found elsewhere on the internet, making it a kind of vast, eclectic scrapbook created from millions and millions of snippets of text that it then glues together in weird and wonderful ways on demand.

And Julian Togelius, an expert in the field, had this to offer via Twitter

We can now automate the production of passable text on basically any topic. What's hard is to produce text that doesn't fall apart when you look closely. But that's hard for humans as well.

And this:

GPT-3 often performs like a clever student who hasn't done their reading trying to bullshit their way through an exam. Some well-known facts, some half-truths, and some straight lies, strung together in what first looks like a smooth narrative.

So as always with tech, beware the hype, particularly from press that don't really grasp the technology they're being asked to "gee whiz" over. GPT-3 cannot read and write (it can apparently put together code made-to-order). Consider what Sam Altman, OpenAI's other co-founder, had to say to MIT:

The GPT-3 hype is way too much. It’s impressive (thanks for the nice compliments!) but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes. AI is going to change the world, but GPT-3 is just a very early glimpse. We have a lot still to figure out.

I tell you all of this, not just because this field interests me (which it does, because language is quite possibly the most taken-for-granted piece of magic in the universe), but for one other reason.

The next time some company is trying to convince you that it has software that can read and assess a piece of student writing, please remember that this company which has sunk mountains of money and towers of expertise into trying to create software that can do language even just a little--that company hasn't succeeded yet. And neither has the company that is trying to sell you robograding. Computers can't read or write yet, and they aren't particularly close to it. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you some cyber-snake computer oil hatched in some realm of alternative facts.