How To Innovate On Assessment (And Why States Won't)

At Bellwether Education Partners, Michelle Croft marks Testing Season by wondering why states have not been using their new-found sort-of-freedom-ish-ness under ESSA to innovate with the Big Standardized Test.

Despite rhetoric over the years about innovations in assessments and computer-based delivery, by and large, students’ testing experience in 2022 will parallel students’ testing experience in 2002. The monolith of one largely multiple-choice assessment at the end of the school year remains. And so does the perennial quest to improve student tests.

It's a fair point. States could be getting clever; they aren't. 

Croft cites a couple of possible explanation for the tepidity of the states. First, states are still staggering under the interruption of the BS Test over the past couple of pandemess years. Second is the challenge of meeting the accountability requirements of ESSA. States have the option of applying for the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority, but the major impediment is that new testing systems would have to be backwards compatible--in other words, people (well, state and federal education bureaucrats) would have to be able to compare new scores to scores under the old system. That right there is pretty much a game ender.

Croft has a couple of ideas about targets that a new system should aim for. One is to improve score reporting so that it can "meaningfully and easily communicate results to educators and families." Another is to try to improve "teacher classroom assessment literacy." 

Regular readers know my feelings about high stakes testing, which I would call the single largest, most destructive, most terribly toxic scourge on public education in the last 25 years. At the same time, I absolutely believe in accountability for public schools. But I am in absolute agreement with Croft that the state response to ESSA re:accountability has been--well, she says "tepid" and I would say "crappy." So, without getting into the nitty gritty devil-dwelling details, what requirements do I think a new, revamped system would need to have? What goals should we set out to meet?

Don't throw good money after bad. Suck it up and face the unfortunate truth that the last twenty-some years of BS Test data are junk, and there is absolutely no point in trying to pursue backward compatibility. We don't need the new data to be comparable to the old data, because the old data aren't particularly useful to begin with. Now is the perfect time to cut losses and start over.

Figure out what it's for. One of the fatal weaknesses of BS Testing accountability is that a single test was supposed to be useful for a dozen different purposes. That is not how tests work. Every tool is made for a particular purpose; you cannot use a hammer to hammer nails, drill holes, screw in screws, cut lumber, paint siding, and comb your hair. But the Big Standardized Test was supposed to be a measure for a myriad of purposes, from informing curricular choices to allowing state educrats to compare schools to evaluating teachers to telling parents how their kids were doing. It should not be a radical notion to declare that you intend to settle on the purpose for a tool before you design and built that tool. 

Note: this discussion should also include some "why" questions, e.g. why do we need to track individual students' results over their career? There may be good answers to some of these why's, and knowing them would help better focus the instrument we're designing. 

Also note: the discussion of purpose should stick to real things. Croft works back around to the notion that we need to track students and school achievement so that we can allocate resources and support, an argument people have been making for several decades despite the fact that has never, ever been how it has worked. Low test scores have not gotten schools extra help.

Create assessments that actually assess. Pro tip: whatever purpose you settle on, a multiple choice test will not be the best way to assess it. In fact, an assessment that can be scored by a computer probably isn't it, either, even though so many people seem to really, really want a computer-managed assessment system. 

Don't build it backwards. One of the problems with that insistence on computer assessment is that you immediately put yourself to the business of asking what a computer can assess instead of what you need to assess. That has been one of the major failings of the modern assessment system, which has asked what it can assess quickly, simply, and profitably, rather than what needs to be assessed. It's the old story of the drunk looking for their keys under the lamp post even though they lost the keys a hundred yards away-- "I'm looking here because the light's better." 

None of these things are going to happen, mostly because they are time consuming, because they are costly, and because the people making these decisions will get their advice from test manufacturing companies and not actual educators. Quality assessments that can't be scored by an algorithm are expensive and take time (particularly if you let people see them in order to better interpret the results, requiring the test manufacturer to come up with new materials every year). Croft, in another post, notes that she and her husband found accessing  and interpreting their child's results daunting (and they are trained psychometricians), but test manufacturers have been resistant to transparency both because of proprietary info concerns and because building a better interface would cost more money. 

There are way better ways to assess schools, teachers, students, etc than those we've been using (try Jack Schneider's Beyond Test Scores for an example), and lots of reasons to understand that the Big Standardized Test is a terrible solution (read Daniel Koretz's The Testing Charade for many of them). After twenty-five years of this baloney, we really ought to be better at it. 

Is The Big College Enrollment Dip Bad News?

Looking at reports that the pandemic resulted in many, many missing college students, Mike Petrelli (Fordham Institution) is musing that perhaps this is not bad news.

On top of the pandemic dropouts, we've also got the plummeting number of students signing up for a college education. And while regular readers know that I don't very often agree with Petrilli, in this case I think he may have a valid point or two.

Petrilli notes the correlation between college and positive life outcomes, though it's worth noting that this is a correlation only, and like the fabled correlation between third grade reading levels and high school success, it probably points at some other factor that is behind it all (spoiler alert: socio-economic background). Petrilli delivers a sideways nod to this by noting that the benefits of college more precisely correlate with completing college.

Petrilli crunches some numbers. 65-70 percent of high school grads enroll in college (that's pre-pandemic). 37.8% of college students don't complete a degree within six years.  Equals about 900K persons leaving college without a degree every year. 

So why is college completion at such a low rate? Petrilli notes that the problem might be that many students were never prepared to succeed in the first place, and he uncharacteristically doesn't blame this on terrible public schools (this time). Makes me nostalgic for the days when reformsters would point at college remediation courses as proof that K-12 schools needed to be more Common Corey. Instead, he says this:

To put it succinctly, many young people don’t do well in college because they aren’t very good students in an academic setting, they haven’t done very well in school, and they don’t like it all that much. Which may make us wonder why we encouraged them to go to college in the first place.

He's not wrong. Today's young adults have been subjected to a lifelong barrage of pressure that they should head off to college. These are the same folks who were once the eight year olds that Arne Duncan wanted to be able to tell they were on track for college, back when the feds believed that success was defined as "everyone enrolls in college."

I taught 11th graders of all levels for decades, and I could see how this played out. Many of my students aimed determinedly at blue collar work, the jobs, as Mike Rowe, that make civilized life possible for the rest of us. But the "get into college" bug was everywhere, and I lost count of the number of times I delivered a sermonette entitled "After you get in, they'll expect you to be able to Do Stuff." Along with another one entitled "If you don't like school stuff, college is probably not going to excite you." For my students in the career and technical ed track, I started each year by explaining that this course was aimed at workplace skills and language use tailored for students who would, in two years time, be out on their own in the "real world." It was not, I explained to the walls of my classroom, not going to cover college-specific academics, because a welder doesn't have a pressing need to know how to create an MLA-compliant term paper.

Nevertheless, I would repeatedly hear some version of, "I'm definitely going to college, but I don't want to take the college prep class because it's too much work and/or too hard and/or not what my friends are taking."

I often imagined this conversation between colleges and high schools.

College: Why did you send us this student? They aren't ready to be here at all!

High school: Did you look at the transcript we sent you, or the letters? They were an indifferent student who took our non-college-prep courses. We told you they weren't ready. You accepted them anyway.

College: Well, their check cleared. And we make extra $$ by making them take remediation courses. This is all your fault. You guys suck.

This behavior by colleges only fed the problem. We could tell students they needed the college prep classes to get ready for college, but they already knew a dozen students from last year's senior class who had done poorly in non-college classes and they had been accepted.

So Petrilli argues that maybe the students who aren't in college are the ones who wouldn't have succeeded there.

He also argues that it's may be a positive sign that we're getting over our college fixation, and that the pendulum is swinging back toward a healthy respect for career and technical education, and as someone who taught in a district where CTE was always a strong feature, I would applaud such a shift.

And third, he holds out the hope that this all might create pressure on colleges to shape up, and stop admitting students who will only be tuition paying members for a few years before they drift off, leaving nothing but their money behind and-- yeah, he's dreaming on this one.

The factor that Petrilli does not mention is that a college education has become a cost-inefficient prospect that involves tremendous debt without a commensurate return. One need look no further than teaching, which has become really expensive to get into, but which doesn't pay much better than it did a decade ago. And it just keeps getting more expensive, leaving students gambling a ton of debt on what they've been told is the key to getting into the middle class. I shouldered the bulk of the debt for my two older children's college education, and didn't finish paying it off until after I'd retired; I cannot imagine what they would have gone through trying to manage that kind of debt in their twenties and early thirties. It's nuts. College would be an elites-only luxury, except that college as we have it can't afford to chase that small a market, so instead we keep increasing the ways that students can wrack up debt. There was a time when I worried that I would be cut off and not allowed to accrue any more college debt for my children and boy, what a naive dope I was. They would have let me sink myself as deep into debt as long as I was willing to keep digging, and I was a grown-ass adult. What chance do young people have?

So the big dip could be a good thing, or at least a healthy thing, unless you think there's some sort of international college diploma-counting competition for world supremacy (and not, say, a How Cheaply Can Your Labor Force Sell Themselves competition), or unless you think it's not healthy for a country to get higher education only to the upper classes. Because if that was the case, then it would be bad news. Here's hoping that someone in the halls of ivy figures it out.

ICYMI: Can It Be April Already Edition (4/3)

Every Sunday I offer up a compendium of notable readings from the previous week, because there's just so much out there and just in case you missed something, here it is. You can make sure you don't miss this weekly digest or any other scintillating posts by subscribing via the little box over in the right column (I have no idea where it is on your phone). There's also a Facebook page where you can catch all the writing I send out into the world.

So here's some reading for this week. Remember that if you think something is valuable and worthwhile, you can amplify by sharing the post through whatever avenues you use. 

Shares in education publisher Pearson slump

Let's start the week with a little schadenfreude for everyone's favorite education profiteers. Reported by The Guardian.

Union says Urban Pathways charter school teachers being cut over organization efforts

Some charter operators don't care for teachers unions very much, and this one in Pittsburgh has decided to take the not-very-clever approach of firing teachers who try to talk union. 

CRT debate repeats past battles about state history textbooks

Rebecca Griesbach at Hechinger becomes one more writer to notice and lay out how the CRT panic certainly looks like plenty of other previous panics over education.

Relay Graduate School forced onto DC Black community

Thomas Ultican always does his homework. This time, he's looking at how several top-notch educators lost their jobs for standing up to a plan to inflict no excuses training (from a fake graduate school) on teachers in Black neighborhoods of DC.

The politics of calling for no politics: 2022 edition (South Carolina)

Paul Thomas looks at how CRT panic is playing out in SC, and the truth behind calls for "no politics"

The lesson in Republican embrace of "Classical Education."

Annie Abrams at The New Republic (warning--limit to number of free articles) looks at the charters pushed by outfits like Hillsdale College and asks if there are any useful lessons in this regressive approach. Maybe. 

Girl pressured by teacher to write out Pledge of Allegiance is awarded $90K

Well, there was certainly no commie indoctrinatin' going on at this Texas high school. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Why teachers are afraid to teach history

Rachel Cohen with an excellent, even-handed, well-sourced story about how the various anti-CRT gag laws are playing out on the ground. In teh New Republic (warning--free story limit applies).

We all know teachers are underpaid, but who imagined it was this bad?

Emily Tate, writing for Mother Jones, talked to a lot of teachers. She also had access to an eye-opening data set from the NEA, and it's worth reading this article just to get a peek at that. 

Teacher fired for giving LGBTQ pride bracelets to students

Yet another reminder that your state doesn't have to have a Florida-style gag law for teachers-- they can go ahead and squelch teacher expression about "controversial" issues. This is an Ohio district that forbids political and religious topics.

The censorship story I can't tell you

Kelly Jensen at Bookriot has a story from Alaska, where conservatives are looking to cleanse the Anchorage public library.

The fight for Black lives needs to happen in schools

Wenimo Okoya writing for Hechinger talks about the issues of suicide by Black youths--and what schools can do to help. 

Get those kids a dome

Andy Spears with this infuriating Tennessee tale. No money for schools, but half a billion for a stadium.

Admit it: testing our kids has been a failure

Fred Smith at The Daily News (warning--they want your email address to read) points out what teachers already know-- the Big Standardized Test needs to go.

Education reformers are waging a war on play

Nora de la Cour at the Jacobin magazine has a well-detailed look at how ed reform has been bad news for play, and that means bad news for children.

NPR: School choice in Oklahoma

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider did an interview for an NPR show spotlighting school choice. The links to give it a listen are here.

A broad, vague, nuts law in Indiana

An op-ed from the South Bend Tribune highlights how an Indiana law allows charters to waltz in and take public real estate for $1.

The end of Mr. Fitz

This week, David Lee Finkle ended his long-running teacher comic strip Mr. Fitz. So this is the perfect time to hunker down and scroll through the archives and take a look at this great slice of education cartooning.

Uh Oh. Don't Say Gay Compliance Angers Moms For Liberty

Well, I (among others) told you so. The letter has been tearing around the internet and, apparently, Florida, and yesterday, Moms For Liberty grabbed a high handful of dudgeon and sputtered onto the Tweeter machine:

The letter writer is, of course, absolutely correct. This is exactly what the backers of the "Don't Say Gay" law asked for, and then asked for again when they insisted repeatedly that it was mean and misleading to call it a "Don't Say Gay" law. 

Now all that's missing is for a parent to exercise the right, baked right into the law, to take some school to court for making their child use a bathroom based on gender, or for using books that include mothers and fathers. 

Or someone may be trolling the Don't Say Gay folks and this is just a goof from the social medias, That doesn't really change the accuracy of the letter or the outrage of some people reading it. I agree that I will eat my hat if a teacher actually sent or will send it.

Meanwhile, to fight back against this outrage against which it is now time to "take a stand," folks like the Moms for Liberty will have to decide if they want to defend the law by saying out loud that it is supposed to be a Don't Say Gay law and not apply to any heterosexual stuff. Grab some popcorn and stay tuned.

Moms For Liberty's Big Takeover Plans

Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms For Liberty and experienced Florida rabble rouser, appeared on Steve Bannon's show to share some of her thoughts about ongoing culture battles, and at one point she laid out her plans for what comes next:

BANNON: Are we going to start taking over the school boards?

JUSTICE: Absolutely. We're going to take over the school boards, but that's not enough. Once we replace the school boards, what we need to do is we need to have search firms, that are conservative search firms, that help us to find new educational leaders, because parents are going to get in there and they're going to want to fire everyone. What else needs to happen? We need good school board training. We need lawyers to stand up in their communities and be advocates for parents and be advocates for school board members who are bucking the system. Right now, parents have no recourse within any public education district.

The "no recourse" talking point sits awkwardly next to a description of the recourse (democratic elections) that Justice (who was defeated when she ran for re-election to her own school board seat) plans to take, but sure. Parents will take over school boards, fire everybody, and hire The Right Sort to replace them. And while some training is needed for school board members, the main thing is to run, because

But what my message today is – get out and run for school board. It's a part-time job. It's not a full-time job. Anyone can do it. You do not need to have a background in education and we need more people.

Justice was on Bannon's show War Room: Pandemic, because angling for political victories and advocacy spins is just like what folks are going on in Ukraine these days. She talked about the heroism of Ron DeSantis, and of course parental rights:

Parental rights are rights that every parent has, and the government does not give them to you, and they cannot take them away. Every parent has the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, their medical care. That includes mental health, by the way, their education and their values, education, their morals, their religious and character training. All of these things lie within the responsibility of the parent. We, as parents, are happy to own those responsibilities within our rights.

It underlines the way in which the parental rights movement at its most extreme seems to have nothing at all to do with a children's rights movement. I'm a parent, and I absolutely get the rights and responsibilities that parents have to protect and guide their children, but there's a line past which it all starts to become creepy, as if you own this child and will engineer the tiny human to turn out to be exactly what you choose them to be, and much of the parental rights activist rhetoric lives close to that line. "I have total ownership and control of my child" is exactly how you get to the notion of "My child didn't turn out exactly the way I demanded they turn out, so somebody else must have messed with their head." Parental rights are a real thing, and parental responsibilities are a very real thing, but children are actual human beings and not lumps of clay to be crafted by other adult humans.

Justice and Bannon are sad that folks are lying about Florida's bill, which is just a parental rights and anti-grooming bill and not-- they interrupt themselves before they can say what it is. But Justice says she doesn't see the big deal "We said no sexual orientation instruction or gender identity instruction in grades K through three" and many of her fans and Bannon think is should be K through twelve. Yes, why is everyone so upset that supporters of the bill equate teachers, LGBTQ persons, and pedophiles? (Also, implying that Disney only opposes the law because they are interested in sexualizing children.) As with all talk in support of the law, Justice and Bannon skip past the part where any parent can decide for themselves what constitutes "instruction" about sexual orientation or gender identity, so teachers now have to watch out for any lesson that could lead to Pat talking about having two Mommies at home. Though it would be entertaining if the first parent lawsuit under the bill is some parent arguing that boys and girls restrooms are a means of instructing about gender identity. Maybe fans of the law should just wait until we see how the court challenge turns out.

Justice throws around some numbers about public school failure, which serve mostly as a good example of why school board members and other people who want to talk about education policy should know something about it (she cites 29.8% of Kentucky third graders reading on grade level, but she appears to be talking about proficiency, which is above grade level). This, somehow, is related to talking about gender identity and sexual orientation in first grade.

Justice could be on the show because she was in DC to talk to some GOP House members. She can't imagine why Dems don't want to talk to her (I'm not sure, but one possible explanation that comes to mind is that she didn't call their offices to make an appointment). Which brings us back to the point at the top-- Moms For Liberty wants to talk about how to take over the states (because states rights are at the heart of all this stuff). 

PA: Activist Takes Out A School Board (Update)

Make of this story what you will. An angry Libertarian activist just managed to remove five members from a school board.

Beth Ann Rosica is the head of her own consulting business; she's also an active Libertarian and advocate in the Greater Philly corner of Pennsylvania. She writes regularly for Broad and Liberty ("Thought-provoking and shareable ideas for free thinkers in Greater Philadelphia and beyond"), is tied to Independent Women's Voice (a right-tilted Club for Growth and Leonard Leo funded advocacy group) and has been a vocal opponent of vaccine and masking mandates. And she's the executive director of Back to School PA, a PAC funded by venture capitalist Paul Martino, teamed up with Clarice Shillinger, a former GOP staffer who's been busy launching lawsuits and school board takeover bids around the state (you can read more about the group here).

Anti-maskers in PA got a big boost last December when the PA Supreme Court threw out a state mandate for school masking based on the argument that the state department of health had no authority to impose such a mandate. Most districts took that as a cue that they could not impose mandates of their own. 

Not West Chester Area School District, or other districts in Chester County. There the board members voted to keep masking rules in place. Anti-maskers weren't having it, and Beth Ann Rosica took the board to court, filing a petition to have the five board members removed, claiming “permanent and irreparable harm due to their fabricating, feigning or intentionally exaggerating or including a medical symptom or disease which results in a potentially harmful medical evaluation or treatment to the child and as such, the (school directors) are to be held accountable.”

This week the court granted her wish. The board members are removed from office, with the court directing Rosica and the Board to each propose some replacement members, and the school district and the board members to share the costs of the proceedings.

It's not clear exactly why the judge reached this conclusion; Judge William Mahon reportedly wrote that his decision came after there was no response to the petition from the school district or its counsel. Attorneys have filed a motion to reconsider arguing that April 4 was the actual deadline for responding to the petition. 

This is only the first of several such court challenges; four other Chester County districts have been challenged, using the same template that Rosica used. That was created by Shannon Grady, CEO of GOAthletics and author of The Lactate Revolution (her LinkedIn profile says she's "the global leader in application of lactate dynamics for human performance optimization, a nationally recognized expert in the field of applied Physiology and Exercise Science, with over fifteen years as an industry leader in sports performance management"). Says Grady, "I’m not trying to ruin school board members’ lives or sue them for money. It’s just, know your place.” Also,  “We do not co-parent with our school district, the CCHD, or the state,”

It's hard to tell exactly where this is headed next, but for the moment, the usual folks are delighted. One observer cheered that now students will not have to wear their masks of slavery. And on Twitter...

They've got a list of people to cancel, and they're coming for them. Stay tuned.

Update: The judge got the district's attorney to admit that he messed up by miscounting days, and then rescinded the order. So the district gas a school board again-- for the moment. The petition to remove the board members will move forward. 

Housing Benefits For Teachers?

Years ago, a friend of mine began her teaching career in a small town out West, located a stone's throw from the Canadian border and not near much of anything else. The job came with a rent-free house to live in, a necessary feature of a job in a place where there was little real estate to come by.

Nowadays, there are versions of that problem cropping up all over the country, particularly in places where the gap between housing costs and teacher salaries are so great that teachers, particularly new ones, must either commute huge distances or just pass the district by. 

It's a serious problem for districts, who can have real trouble recruiting teachers. And even if they do hire teachers who end up making long commutes, they lose the benefits of having those teachers as active members of the community in which they teach. As for teachers, housing troubles just add one more item to the list of pinches they feel from low pay. 

One national study found that 35% of teachers are "rent burdened." In other words, if you remember the old rule that 30% of your income should go to housing costs, 35% of teachers are above that line. And that's just looking at rent. 

There are various patche4s out there, like grant programs for new teachers who are first time home buyers. Homes for Heroes is another such program that says it's out to give back to teachers and other community workers.

Many districts take on the job of building and renting housing for district employees. California has several such programs that allow teachers to rent new homes at below-market costs. A study looked at the various locations in the state where such a program could be or is being operated (every county in the state has some LEA-owned property that could be so developed). Several districts in North Carolina offer subsidized housing for teachers. Currently the state of Hawaii, another location with many districts in which teachers can't afford to live, is working on developing state-owned below-market-priced housing for teachers. Heck, even Florida just set aside $100 million to help teachers, law enforcement officers, nurses, and firefighters buy homes. 

The benefits of having teachers live in the community where they teach are huge, as are the benefits of having teachers who don't spend their days worrying about how to keep a roof over their heads, or wondering if they'll ever be able to settle down and start a family. When you start out as a teacher, you don't expect to be rich, but you also don't expect to be homeless or to be spending many hours of your day driving back and forth to work. The housing crunch gives an unexpected hiring advantage to districts like those in my area, where a teacher's salary can buy you an affordable but nice home.

The most obvious solution is to pay teachers more, though in out of control markets like Silicon Valley, I'm not sure there's enough "more" to ever solve the problem. Subsidizing housing for teachers is a cheaper solution for districts and states, though there can be a lot of devils in those details, with the least desirable option being a creepy company town. On the other hand, having a brace of fellow beginning teachers living nearby to commiserate and brainstorm would be a nice benefit. 

I almost didn't write this post. It seems outside the realm of policy debates and instructional ideas, but that's kind of the point. We've got whole groups of beginning teachers who should have their brain free to think about how to teach and how to prepare lessons and maybe even how to push for important policy ideas, but instead a whole lot of them are all tied up worrying about things like what they can afford to eat and which bills to pay and which second job to land and how they are going to find a livable place to come home to and just how they're going to stitch together a life with their paycheck. How many teachers are we losing because of that moment when they look at their paycheck and look at housing market and just think, "Shit. I can't do this" and dreams of starting out an independent life as a young twenty-something just kind of shrivel up and die. 

If we aren't going to pay teachers well, the very least we could do is find ways to help them stretch that tiny paycheck a little further.