Do 3rd Grade Tests Predict Anything?

The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) is a program of the American Institute for Research (AIR) along with an assortment of universities. They've just released a working paper version of some research that some people think is pretty significant. I've read it so you don't have to. Let me explain what they found, and why nobody needs to get excited about it.

AIR is better known for their work in test manufacturing and marketing, which gives them a dog in this particular hunt, but I'm not sure that really need concern us here.

"Assessing the Accuracy of Elementary School Test Scores as Predictors of Students' High School Outcomes" was written by Dan Goldhaber (AIR/CALDER/University of Washington), Malcolm Wolff (University of Washington), and Timothy Daily (EdNavigator). EdNavigator is a business positioned to help parents navigate a complicated education-flavored-products market--again, I'm not sure we need to be concerned here, other than to note that many of the involved parties are not exactly disinterested observers of the Big Standardized Test biz. Oh yeah--the Carnegie Foundation did some of the funding for this. 

There's a lot of fancy math in this paper, but the outcome is pretty straightforward--studying student test results in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Washington, the researchers found that third grade test scores correlate with high school outcomes, namely, high school test scores, advanced course-taking in high school, and high school graduation. 

The result is that third grade tests correlate with those factors about as well as eighth grade tests do. They also found that poverty and race/ethnicity correlate with a drop of those high school outcomes. 

There is nothing surprising here. They have been painstaking in their figuring and crunching and mathing the crap out of their data. But ultimately, they have asked the wrong question.

Because--say it with me--correlation is not causation.

We know, via many many many pieces of research, that Big Standardized Test scores are directly tied to socioeconomic status. Both third grade and high school tests.

We know that socioeconomic status correlates with other life outcomes, like graduation and jobs etc. We can even talk about how it correlates with baloney like the Success Sequence (which just puts things ass-backwards, declaring that if you wear large clothes, that's what caused you to get bigger). 

We know all about these correlations, and they point pretty clearly to SES as a cause. So research like this, while not a total waste of time, because I suppose if third grade scores were a terrible predictor of high school stuff, we'd know something was definitely cattywumpus somewhere in the system-- research like this isn't helpful because it's asking the wrong question.

What still remains unproven is this-- if you take a student who would have scored 60 on the third grade test and somehow get them to score 80 or 90, would that improve the student's later outcomes? 

We have (and have had for years) evidence that the answer is no, that raising student test scores does not improve student outcomes. 

We have been subjected to a multi-decade parade of reformsters asserting and assuming that raising student test scores would unlock a host of benefits for our students, our economy, our entire nation. But instead of proof, we've just had tautological research proving that students who do well in school do well in school., or evidence that your socioeconomic background is well-measured by the Big Standardized Test no matter what grade you're in. 

What we really need is research that asks the right question. This paper is not that.

ICYMI: Counting Down To School Edition (8/8)

 Yes, the clock has started at our house. I'll be heading off to be a trombone consultant for an old friend/student's band camp starting tomorrow, and my wife's summer days are numbered. Here it comes, lurching towards us like a misaligned tractor with a flat tire and three bales of hay stuck in the wheel well. In the meantime, here are some reads from the week.

Dyslexia Industry Scores California Court Victory

Well, that's one way to commandeer a district's reading program--use the courts. Thomas Ultican has the story of the California district where students will now get an extra helping of DIBELS, among other things.

Students Say Teach The Truth

From Learning for Justice. An award winning teacher asked actual human students about the "crt" panic. I missed this a month ago, but it's still worth your attention.

"Public education sucks" is a weak argument for school choice

Yes, Robert Pondiscio is a choice fan through and through. But he's not wrong when he picks apart one argument choicers use to make their case.

A $5 million fine for classroom discussions on race?

Well, yes. That's what Tennessee has proposed, and now a Mom for Liberty is taking the new law out for a spin. From Eesha Pendharker at Education Week.

Texas teachers say GOP's new social studies law will hinder and entire generation

The Texas Tribune talked to some actual teachers about how Texas's new anti-race stuff law will diminish a generation's understanding of the country's history.

Innovation Invites Hucksters

This New York Times piece isn't writing about education, except it kind of is. Beware technology soaked in snake oil.

Machine Learning Sucks At Covid

Cory Doctorow takes a look at some AI tools, and he hits hard. I'm going to give you the lead because it's kind of awesome:

The worst part of machine learning snake-oil isn’t that it’s useless or harmful — it’s that ML-based statistical conclusions have the veneer of mathematics, the empirical facewash that makes otherwise suspect conclusions seem neutral, factual and scientific.

If you don't trust A.I. yet, you're not wrong

Completing this trio of pieces, a pair of law professors in the New York Times explain why AI is not the special magical soup it's sold as. And what Europe is doing about it.

A very McCarthyism feel

As I've posted previously, Idaho has an education indoctrination task force, headed up by their ambitious Lt. Governor. Ed Week checks in to see how that's going (spoiler alert: very scarily).

Time for a four-day school week?

There's innovation, and then there's innovation. Nancy Flanagan offers some thoughts about reimagining education. 

What I Don't Want My School to be Like This Covid Year

Steven Singer contemplates the measures that need to be on the table for the coming fall.

FL: Bullying By Mask

 Florida (state motto: Death to public education!) has been leaping to capitalize on the current COVID disaster, as witnessed by this extremely on-point headline: 

Florida Will Pay for Parents to Move Kids Into New Schools if They Experience ‘COVID-19 Harassment’

That's a very apt way to characterize a voucher program--the state will pay you to pull your kid out of public schools. 

You may have been wondering how Florida made the leap to a voucher for covid harassment, but the fact is, they were already halfway there. Florida already has the Hope Scholarship, a voucher program that allows students to get a voucher if they allege bullying. Note that under this program, the state will pay you to leave your school based on the allegation alone--there doesn't need to be proof that it actually happened or that the school failed to remedy the situation. 

So all that this new policy really did was just expand Florida's definition of bullying to include “any threatening, discriminatory, insulting, or dehumanizing verbal, written or physical conduct an individual student suffers in relation to, or as a result of, school districts protocols for COVID-19, including masking requirement, the separation or isolation of students, or COVID-19 testing requirements.” So, basically, anything at all having to do with the pandemic.

Of course, private schools are not subject to Ron DeSantis's mandate that public schools may not have a mask mandate, and so some private schools are going ahead and mandating masks (and some are waffling and, supposedly on Twitter, legislators are offering to find masked schools for parents who are searching). But then, some private schools in Florida are maintaining their right to bully and discriminate against LGBTQ students. So once the state pays you to pull your kid out of public school, you may or may not be able to find a more agreeable option (and you may or may not have enough money to do it, as vouchers don't necessarily cover costs). 

This may all seem kind of hypocritical or nonsensical, but you just have to remember--all education policy in Florida is aimed at getting kids out of public schools and into private, profitable schools. Everything else can be tweaked to meet that single policy goal.

Raging Against Reality, Crisis, and Education's Kobyashi Maru

So here comes yet more panicky news from NWEA, hollering that Learning Loss is consuming New Jersey. It is, in many ways, baloney. First, everyone keeps ignoring the loss of standardized test prep and practice that is a factor in test results, and second, the Learning Loss here is reported based on what NWEA imagines the scores on last years test would have been had students taken them. 

I'm a little tired of pointing out the many, many, many problems with the continued chicken littling about Learning Loss, pushed most often by people who intend to make money by selling a solution. 

We are being subjected to a constant crisis narrative, and as well chronicled in this post at Your Contractual Obligations, certain folks have been trying to drive education in a particular direction for decades, using a tale of impending doom soaked in deficit language. The great Pandemic Learning Loss tale is the same story, with one critical difference. 

All previous crises, from the handwringing of Why Johnny Can't Read to the imminent national collapse of A Nation at Risk, have depended on a manufactured problem. NCLB and RttT made the crisis manufacture process more efficient, by requiring test scores that could be then used as "data" that "proved" what dire straits the country was in. 

What's new this time is that there is some basis in objective reality.

There's no reason not to believe that students mostly learned less last year than in a "normal" year. When people squawk about Learning Loss, they're not making up an issue out of thin air. As education crises go, that's kind of a first.

However.

Dealing with that reality is turning out to be a challenge that the world of policy and edu-business is ill-equipped to face.

First, we don't know exactly what the problem is. Edu-pundits keep calling for data and measurement, but we don't have an instrument to do that. We've wasted the past couple of decades developing Big Standardized Tests that serve no real purpose except as a tool for policy makers--not educators. A bad measure of some math and reading multiple choice questions is not going to give us a full picture of where students are educationally (and it never has). We've been using a foot-long wooden ruler to measure clouds, and now that we'd really, really like to get an accurate cloud measurement, all we have at hand is a crappy useless box of rulers.

Teachers know--or will know, after a few first fall weeks--what specific students need. Some parents know. But none of this helps bureaucrats and politicians set global policy and objectives.

So we don't know on a large scale level what, exactly, students are missing. And we have a batch of bad solutions for filling the gap.

Accelerate. Sure, teachers will all just somehow teach a lot more, faster, because they've always been able to do that--they just chose not to. 

Tutoring. The idea of tutoring is sound enough, but the number of people required to tutor 55 million students (give or take a few million) is daunting. Not to mention training and paying them.

Teacher differentiation. Best shot we've got, since teachers do it already. But every week filling up last year's gaps is a week less spent on this year's usual material. Meaning that even in a best case scenario, the pandemic pause will ripple on through the coming years. Remember--this year's high school seniors haven't had a "normal" year since they were freshmen.

Do some big outside the box thing. Now is a good time to question some of our assumptions about what public education needs to look like. Just don't imagine that you are coming up with some cool idea that will Totally Fix Everything.

There's a lot of raging and anger about this, and it just like the raging about masks and vaccinations and the prospect of more pandemic disruption in the fall, in that they all boil down to simple gut-level cry of "I don't want things to be the way they are!!! I want to do something to make them Not This Way!!"

It's education's Kobyashi Maru. In Star Trek, a training exercise in which all options are bad to serve as a test not of how trainees can come up with wins in a no-win scenario, but to see how they would deal with it. We can't make the gappage not be there, and there is no simple program that will suddenly reset education and students to the place they would be in some imaginary non-covid alternate universe. Some of us are not dealing with it well; instead, they're getting kind of ragey.

Raging at people because they will not create/implement any such magical fix won't help. It especially won't help if one's version of raging is to try to spur people to action by trying to raise the panic level ("An entire generation of students is falling behind and they will all end up jobless and eating dog food off a hot plate while living in a van down by the river!!") Nor does it help to get personally angry at people because you've convinced yourself that they could Fix All This but they just won't, perhaps for nefarious reasons. 

The pandemic pause happened. The interruption of "normal" schooling happened. Most students missed out on some stuff. Nothing is going to change any of that.

There will not be a single Big Fix for this, which is actually true of every education issue ever, though people tend to forget it. The good news is that humans are actually pretty resilient. It's also useful to remember that the whole list of standards that students Have To Meet by a certain grade are relatively recent, and many students have already met the standards for their age from a generation ago; your state standards were not lowered on stone tablets from a burning bush, but were made up by some guys just a decade or two ago. And some benchmarks, like "read by third grade = later success," are matters of correlation, not causation. Many of the factors that drive markers, like high scores on the Big Standardized Test, are not school-related at all, which is one reason why all of this mess will probably hit poor students harder than wealthy ones. 

No single Big Fix. Just steady dogged work to help our nation's young humans, student by student, to get back in educational gear. And it won't help any of them if folks insist on freaking out.

James T. Kirk dealt with the Kobyashi Maru by cheating. We don't have that option. We can, instead, suck it, take a deep breath, hunker down, and do the painstaking work. And that will still be true whenever the pandemic pause finally ends. 

Should School Board Elections Be More Partisan

 Aaron Churchill, the Ohio research director for the Fordham Institute, this morning wants to make the case for partisan school board elections.

Lots of states have non- or bi-partisan school board elections. Ohio doesn't note a party affiliation. In Pennsylvania, candidates can cross file and run in both R and D primaries, and so are listed as both parties on the final ballot. Churchill notes that this fall districts are pre-occupied with things like masking and "critical race theory" (in other words, things actually not directly related to actual education) and school board are, for sure, currently heating up. 

Churchill notes that a "small body of research" shows that, lacking partisan labels, voters choose based on an assortment of bad reasons, and it's certainly true that an awful lot of US citizens do a crappy job of fulfilling their civic election duty. I'm just not convinced that adding an R or D label to school board elections doesn't just add one more bad reason to choose a candidate.

Is there a Democrat or Republican approach to education? Neither party has ever shown itself to be particularly interested in or knowledgeable about public education. "When leading our local school district, I will follow my party's line," is a terrible pledge for candidates from any party. Nor does party affiliation reveal a particular bent. A Democrat could be a public education supporter, or a corporate education reformster with privatization on their mind. A Republican could be a traditional GOP supporter of public education (as long as it doesn't get too spendy) or a raving Trumper intent on keeping masks and Black Person Stuff out of schools. 

Churchill asks

Are nonpartisan elections really insulating public schools from divisive politics? Or is it naïve to think that school boards are apolitical governing bodies? If indeed there are ideological differences about how to run schools and educate children, shouldn’t the electorate get a hint about where candidates are likely to stand?

Yes, yes, and yes. But this is a non-sequitor set of questions--knowing party affiliation doesn't tell us what the person's ideological stances are.

In fact, it's entirely possible to develop a whole system of ideas and beliefs about how children learn and how schools should work without actually having to reference political ideologies at all. Really.

Churchill is frustrated that in the last school board elections he didn't have any idea where the candidates stood, and he wants more transparent elections, and that's all good--but slapping an R or D on the ballot doesn't get us there. 

In fact, there's nothing but down side to forcing school board candidates to declare allegiance to a particular political party. For instance, do we really need to have school board candidates take a hard stance on whether or not Trump won the 2020 election just to get past a school board primary? US politics are soaked in a deeply toxic brine right now, and we'll never keep that out of the world of public education (because everything that soaks the larger society soaks schools, too), but there's no reason to make it easier for that toxic brine to penetrate school board elections.

Reformsters often assert that teachers unions are too involved in these elections and end up controlling the school boards. I'd love to read about those cities where the board is in thrall to the teachers and therefor teachers get everything they ever want. And supposedly in the big cities, school board membership comes with all sorts of power and perks and wealth and fame, though I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone who launched a major political career with school board membership. (I'll look for it in the comments.)

School boards are local institutions, and they deal with local issues in ways that national politics don't necessarily apply to. Should East Egg elementary school get a new roof? Are we all pissed off about last season's football coaching? Is the absentee make-up work policy fair? People who think, write, talk, and live national policy often forget one thing about local school districts--on the local level, people, school districts, and school boards can go days, weeks, months at a time without thinking about a single national education policy issue, no matter how hard thinky tanks and bloggers and federal bureaucrats are yammering about them. Knowing where you might stand on national ed policy issues does not tell whether or not you support expanding local AP options, or whether there should be an elementary choir program, or whether or not it was a damned shame that the principals were re-assigned last year.

Injecting partisan politics might generate a great deal more heat (especially right now), but it won't generate any more light.

Want more transparency? Do what unions do-- get together, ask the candidates the questions you care about, and publish the answers to your people. Stage public debates or talk sessions. Push candidates to get their message out there--whatever it might be. Require full disclosure of funding sources. If your race is so small that your candidates have tiny budgets, raise a bunch of money and buy each candidate the same amount of media exposure to use as they wish--buy them some transparency. 

And if you're really concerned about this on a national level, then work on the other school board election problem. In small districts in my neck of the woods, it's not uncommon to have too few candidates for the unpaid board seats. I don't know the national figures for this, but I suspect that we are not a unique phenomenon (the Curmudgucation Institute doesn't have the budget to research this, but I invite a think tank to do so). If so, how do we get more people to become involved in helping to run their local district? I'm betting the answer is not to encourage them to link themselves to partisan politics.

NEA and AFT are wrong on vaccinations

Fred Klonsky has said this today, but I'm going to say it, too. 

The national teachers unions (and a few other unions as well) are wrong on vaccinations.

Randi Weingarten has said it should be locally negotiated:

"In order for everyone to feel safe and welcome in their workplaces, vaccinations must be negotiated between employers and workers, not coerced," Weingarten said in a statement.

The NEA says that teachers should be given the option of weekly testing.

It's not clear why, exactly, the unions have taken this position. Certainly there are plenty of members who do not support mandatory vaccinations, but it's not like the nationals have been reluctant to take positions without worrying about internal opposition (for example, Common Core support and endorsing Hillary Clinton and too many years of test-centered accountability). 

The cynical view among the anti-union crowd is that this is an attempt to negotiate... something. 

Meanwhile, it seems entirely likely that it some districts, boards will resist mandatory anything at all. So the national position leaves concerned teachers hanging on their own in those districts.

It's true that some aspects of covid response will have to be worked out on the local level-- the only level at which people really know what's appropriate for that district and building. But some things are true everywhere.

Adults can be vaccinated. Children can not. Teachers already undergo mandatory vaccinations as well as mandatory background checks before they can enter a classroom. There's no reason not have mandatory covid vaccinations for the fall, and a regular covid check to go with it. I'm no fan of mandatory government stuff, but if a public health crisis that leaves children uniquely exposed doesn't qualify, I'm not sure what does. 

Fear and Silence in the Classroom

It comes down to administrators.

States have moved from passing vaguely-worded laws about That Race Stuff and on to the penalty phase. I don't know know exactly how well the anti-CRT crowd understands what they're doing, but it doesn't really matter. At this point, it is all about scaring administrators.

Tennessee has emerged as a big player in the Stifle Teachers Olympics, and they've come up with a proposed penalty system for punishing naughty schools that "knowingly violated" the state's vague and poorly defined law by withholding state funds for the district:

First violation during the school year: 2% of annual state funds or $1 million, whichever is less;
Second violation during the school year: 4% of annual state funds or $2 million, whichever is less;
Third violation during the school year: 6% of annual state funds or $3 million, whichever is less;
Fourth violation during the school year: 8% of annual state funds or $4 million, whichever is less;
Fifth violation during the school year: 10% of annual state funds or $5 million, whichever is less.

You may ask, "How can the state enforce such a law?" The answer is, it won't have to. 

Cue the quiet freaking out of administrators, because if there's anything they don't want to deal with, it's budget cuts. 

And Tennessee is already swarming with Moms for Liberty, whose definition of objectionable content is pretty broad. These are the folks who object to a textbook including a book by Ruby Bridges about her experience desegregating schools; it upsets them because it portrays raging white opponents to desegregation (aka "reality") and because the story doesn't end with redemption (aka "reality"). These folks see critical race theory everywhere, and they've already been trying to get local politicians to strong-arm the district considering the text.

In other words, Tennessee school administrators already know that there are scads of activists just waiting to cry "CRT!!" at the first sight of anything they find at all objectionable. 

There will be school administrators who steel their spines and stand up to do their jobs, which are to make it possible for teachers to do their jobs. But that will not be all the administrators.

You may ask, "How can the state enforce such a law?" The answer is, it won't have to. Panicked administrators will stage pre-emptive staff stifling. They will hold beginning of the year professional development on the topic of "For God's Sake, Don't Bring Up Anything That Could Possibly Remotely Be Connected To This." They may demand to see teacher resources and start banning works from the school. They may issue a list of forbidden topics, lists that look a lot like "anything remotely related to race and history." 

Enforcing the anti-CRT laws will be hard, but it won't matter, because teachers are going to be gagged before the first Liberty-Lovin' Mom gets on the phone to turn someone in. The combination of these laws and the many mechanisms being put in place to turn in your local district may result in very few actual penalties, but they create an atmosphere of fear, an atmosphere that stifles teacher speech. And that goes double for right to work states where teachers can lose their jobs just for opening their mouths; district leadership may not disagree with what that teacher wants to say, but they will see teachers who risk an avalanche of phone calls as just too much potential trouble. 

In short, these laws are not really about penalizing some bad teachers; they are about silencing all teachers.