PA: Career Education Standards for Littles

Coming to Pennsylvania schools this summer is a fine example of how creating academic standards can so easily turn into nonsense.

The state is launching Career Education and Work standards, and they are something else. But why? Well, here's the explanation:

Pennsylvania’s economic future depends on having a well-educated and skilled workforce. Career Education and Work standards reflect the increasing complexity and sophistication that students experience as they progress through school, focusing on the skills and continuous learning and innovation required for students to succeed in a rapidly changing workplace. The standards are written as grade-banded standards built around the concepts of career awareness and exploration, employability skills, growth and advancement, and personal interests and career planning. 

Blah blah blah. I guess it sounds better than simply saying "We need more meat widgets for employers." It's not that employability isn't a worthwhile outcome to shoot for, but when the discussion is framed in terms of what serves the needs of employers instead of what serves the needs of humans it's a bad sign.

But hey-- maybe these standards are actually awesome in a way that standards almost never are. Let's take a look.

Oh boy.

There are four main areas-- Career Awareness and Exploration, Employability Skills, Growth and Advancement, and Personal Interests and Career Planning. 

Now, if you want to see if a set of standards are bunk, check the K-2 band. You can get really silly standards by starting with the outcome you want at graduation, and then working backwards. So you want a high school senior to run a mile in 6 minutes. You just work backwards-- in 11th grade 7 minutes, 10th grade 8 minutes and so on until your standards say you want Kindergarten kids to run a mile in 18 minutes. This makes perfect sense to someone who is thinking about standards and not about actual human children (If you can't see it yet, just keep working backwards--20 minutes for pre-schoolers, 21 minutes for three year olds, and 25 minutes for newborns).

So what are some of the actual standards for K-2 students,

"Identify that there are different ways to prepare for careers" isn't too bad (go ahead and explain "career" to a five year old), but then we get this one:

Identify entrepreneurial character traits of historical and contemporary entrepreneurs and ways to integrate entrepreneurial traits into schoolwide activities and events (e.g., posters to advertise, create ideas).

Yikes. Some are debatable, like "Demonstrate proper and safe Internet and instructional technology use." I understand the value here, but my preferred internet safety technique for the littles (including the board of directors here at the institute) is for them not to use it at all.

Demonstrate cooperation and positive interactions with classmates, recognizing that people have different backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, and ideas.

That one's okay, but I worry that it will prompt a visit from the federal anti-diversity police. 

Build an awareness of the importance of a positive work ethic as a means to learn and grow.

This falls into the classic of problem that this seems like an okay standard, except that it can't be measured objectively.  

Explore career choices and identify the knowledge and skills associated with different types of careers.

Again, we're talking K-2 students.  Also, "Explain how workers in their careers use what is learned in the classroom." The board of directors could perhaps explain that Daddy's job as a writer involves sitting at the computer and whacking away at the keyboard. 

The standards hit some other issues as they move into higher grades. There's some focus on jargon, like learning the 4 P's for entrepreneurial branding (product, price, place and promotion) in 6-8 grade, or setting and achieving SMART goals in 3-5 grade. Grades 3-12 hammer the Entrepreneurial Mindset. 

Perhaps most hilarious is the whole K-12 strand on "develop a personal brand," because at the point in life when a young human is trying to grasp their identity and place in the world, what they should focus on how to "identify ways to market yourself as a job candidate" (grades 6-12). 

The whole exercise has the vibe of some too-serious grey flannel suit standing over an eight year old and barking, "All right kid-- have you figured out what job you want in life?" Plus the unspoken message that this, kid, is what your life is supposed to be about--your job. You can say, well, isn't it helpful to get students to think about their careers and work life, and I'll say, yes, but is that any more important than getting them to think about their actual lives? Should we have standards for their development of a plan for their lives and families and work-life balance as adults?

Well, those decisions are personal and none-of-the-school's business and nearly impossible to plan out because life doesn't work that way and, seriously, you want to talk to a sixth grader about how to live their adult life? Of course some of this sounds like SEL, and some of it falls under the conservative call for "success sequence" instruction. But if you have all of the above objections to requiring seniors to have a Full Personal Life Plan, then why do those objections not also apply to requiring a career plan?

More to the point, how do you manage any of these as standards? How will teachers assess the student development of a personal brand? What will the criteria be? How will teachers assess the required career plan? Will they have to assess its realism? Its completeness? Its accuracy? Will it become a teacher's job to say, "Pat, I know your self-assessment is that you have a keen mind and a wicked sense of humor, but I'm taking off a ton of points because you are actually kind of dull." Will it become a teacher's job to say, "Your career plan calls for you to graduate from med school, but I've had you in biology class and this isn't happening."

I mean, every teacher has wrestled with these sorts of conversation, with some coming down on the side of "Who am I to try to predict this kid's future?" or on the side of "I am going to be the best possible cheerleader for this kid's future" or, occasionally, on the side of "When this kid is a success some day, I'll be the teacher in the anecdote about how they'd never make it." These conversations about the future are part of the gig. But to make them states standards is to make them a part of the measured program, a part of what schools must assess. 

Of course, this may well end up one of those standards that exists as a piece of bureaucratic baloney but is ignored in the classroom. That is probably the best we can hope for. Should we talk to young humans about future plans? Sure. Should career planning be reduced to a set of state standards? No. Actually, hell no. 

Federal Voucher Bill Is A Boondoggle For The Wealthy

As I type, the House is marking up a budget bill that has nestled somewhere in its entrails the Education Choice for Children Act, a bill that has little to do with actual school choice and a lot to do with handouts to the wealthy. 

Going in, it was not in any substantial way different from the 2024 edition, which means it included these special features. (Some of this may change quickly this week).

Who qualifies? Pretty much everyone. Proponents will argue that it is aimed at relief to low-income folks, but it very much is not. Here's the trick. The usual "rescue the poors" voucher bill will tie eligibility to some percentage of the federal poverty level (for example, the current voucher proposal in PA sets eligibility at 250% of federal poverty level). But ECCA sets eligibility to a household income under 300% of area median gross income. 

So if you live in Scarsdale, where the median household income is $238,478 per year, then you can earn up to $715,434 a year and still be eligible for a voucher for your kid.

Deluxe tax dodge. These vouchers will use the tax credit scholarship model, which means they will be funded by contributions from donors. Those donors (individual or corporate) get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit; they can contribute up to 5% of their adjusted gross income (or $5,000--whichever is greater). 

That results in a $10 billion dollar revenue hit to the federal government in the original bill (reports say it's now a $5 billion tag). Unless 90% of that cap is used up for a "high use calendar year" in which case the cap goes up another 5%. That all represents money that the federal government doesn't get, leading to either cut services or more deficit.

The bill also lets the GOP dodge voters. Vouchers continue to have a problem-- voters don't vote for them. Ever. Last fall we saw, once again, that even when voters vote for Trump, they vote against vouchers. ECCA-- like every other piece of voucher legislation ever-- gets around the problem of voters by simply leaving them out of the deal. What do the voters in your state want? House Republicans don't care. 

ECCA telegraphs its focus by saying very little about the vouchers themselves. What can they be used for? Buncha stuff. How much will the vouchers be? Will they be enough to let a poor child go to a high cost school? Doesn't say-- let the scholarship granting organization figure it out. Any mechanisms for making sure that education vendors are not fraudsters? None. Any oversight mechanisms to determine where the money went, how it was spent, whether it actually did any good? Nope. The only time oversight comes up is in the usual Hands Off clause declaring that the government can have no say in how the money is spent, nor can it tell private edu-vendors how to do their thing, even and especially if they are a private religious school with a whole batch of discriminatory policies. It's a federal subsidy for discrimination-- discrimination against persons because of LGBTQ status, religious beliefs, behavioral or academic issues, or just any old unnamed reason (though it now includes some weak protections for students with special needs). 

There is not a speck of this bill aimed at the issue of making sure that young humans get a decent education. That is at the heart of much of the voucher movement, which is less about getting every child in this country a decent education and more about turning education into a commodity that is strictly the responsibility of parents, while the government just washes its hands of that whole promise of a decent education for every child. Not our problem, parents. You're on your own. 

The genius of ECCA is that it combines the end of the American promise of public education with a bunch of goodies for the wealthy. We already know that school vouchers are used primarily by folks who already have their kids in private schools, and this certainly includes that feature, but ECCA adds a tasty tax shelter on top. 

It remains to be seen how the bill will look when folks are done marking up and fending off various Democratic amendments. But there's no version that isn't an assault on the very idea of public education, no version that doesn't foster discrimination, no version that isn't mostly about one more gift to the wealthy. Call your rep and say no. 

GOP Proposes Unregulated AI

The current regime may not have a clue what AI actually is, but they are determined to get out in front of it.

First we had Dear Leader's bonkers executive order back in April to set up an AI task force that would create an AI challenge that would boost the use of AI in education. Plus "improving education through artificial intelligence" (an especially crazypants turn of phrase) that would 

seek to establish public-private partnerships with leading AI industry organizations, academic institutions, nonprofit entities, and other organizations with expertise in AI and computer science education to collaboratively develop online resources focused on teaching K-12 students foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills.

Does the person who whipped this together think AI and critical thinking are a package, or does this construction acknowledge that AI and critical thinking are two separate things? The eo also promises all sorts of federal funding to back all this vague partnering. The eo also contains this sad line:

the Secretary of Education shall identify and implement ways to utilize existing research programs to assist State and local efforts to use AI for improved student achievement, attainment, and mobility.

"Existing research programs"? Are there some? And "achievement, attainment, and mobility" mean what? 

The eo also touts using Title II funds for boosting AI training for teachers, like reducing "time-intensive administrative tasks" and training that would help teachers "effectively integrate AI-based tools and modalities in classrooms."

Bureaucratic bloviating. Fine. Whatever. But House Republicans decided to take their game up a notch this week by adding this tasty piece of baloney. Budget reconciliation now includes this chunk of billage. The first part has to do with selling off some pieces of the broadcast spectrum, but the second part--

no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10- year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.

There are exceptions, mostly of the "anything that helps AI companies expand or make money is okay" variety.

A ban on AI regulation is dumb, particularly given that folks are still trying to figure out what it can or can't do. 

But a ban on regulation for the next decade??!! Who knew that the GOP would be involved in launching Skynet? 

"Sir, it looks like Skynet is about to send something called a terminator to kill us all. Should we take action to prevent it?"

"Stand down, kid. The Republican party has forbidden us to take action. Kiss your children goodbye."

Seriously, we can already see that AI is taking us to some undesirable places, and God only knows what might develop over the next decade. To tie our regulatory hands, to unilaterally disarm and give up any ability to put restraints on the cyber-bull in our cultural china shop is just foolish.

Of course, what the proposed anti-regulation and the eo have in common is that they prioritize the chance for corporations to profit from AI. That's common to many actions of the regime, all based on the notion that there is nothing so precious in our country or culture that it should be protected from impulse to make a buck. What the GOP proposes is a "drill, baby, drill" for AI with the nation's youths, education system, and culture playing the part of the great outdoors.

Anti-regulation for AI is worse than the other brands of deregulation being pushed, because while we have some idea what deforesting a national park might look like, we have no way of imagining what may appear under the banner of AI in the next ten years. New ways to steal content for training? Out of control faux humans who intrude in scary and dangerous ways? Whole new versions of identity theft? There are so many terrible AI ideas out there (international diplomacy by AI, anyone) and so many more to come--even as AI may be actually getting worse at doing its thing. Not all of them need to be regulated, but to pre-emptively deregulate the industry, dark future unseen, in the hopes of cashing in-- that's venal, careless stupidity of the highest order. 

ICE vs. Filipino Teachers

This week news broke of an ICE raid on Maui, with the US official thug patrol out to grab any brown people who might present “threats to national security or public safety, or who otherwise undermine the integrity of U.S. immigration laws.”

The “targeted, intelligence-­driven operation" included rounding up some of the Filipino teachers who work in Hawaiian schools. Said one special agent

For the safety of the agents and the occupants, residents of the home were briefly detained and interviewed in addition to the search. At the conclusion of the search, HSI special agents left the location without any arrests made.

 I'm sure that left the Filipino with a warm, fuzzy, welcome-to-the-United-States feeling inside, and that this will in no way affect Hawaii's attempt to shore up the teacher shortage with imported educators.

But here's a thing worth noting-- Hawaii is not the only state with Filipino teachers. 

Way back in 2014, in an article now accessible only via Wayback machine, Joseph Willams at takepart, a website that has since shut down, reported on the rise of the Philippines as a source for teachers. Heck, Williams pointed back to a PBS piece from 2011 about four Filipina teachers who took jobs in Baltimore. Williams found teachers transplanted from the Philippines to Louisiana, Arizona, Los Angeles, and Kansas.

And a decade later, it's still a thing. There are agencies devoted to placing Filipino teachers in the US. There are websites explaining how to get a job here. There are still periodic stories about how this is working out, like this 2022 Washington Post portrait of a Filipina teacher trying "to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona." There are whole youtube channels by Filipino teachers, like this one from Alyssa who appears to teach in Arizona. Her channel covers everything from how to find a US job, to filling out the paperwork, to issues like what to do if a student lies. She has posted 271 videos, has almost 39K subscribers, and also runs a busy Facebook page.

Here's short video on the issues involved, focusing on a teacher in the schools of Shelby, Montana, a city of fewer that 4,000 people. 

The video hits several of the issues involved, but the title-- What if your Filipino teacher disappeared-- points to one in particular. These teachers come on J-1 visas, which are good for 5 years for teachers. The video is from 2019. 

But these programs have always been problematic, a kind of low-cost outsourcing that let's policy leaders use the "teacher shortage" as an excuse to look for cheaper "solutions"--anything to avoid the basic free market lesson that if nobody wants your job, you have to sweeten the offer. Instead, the "exchange" teacher program lets states look for a place where people think te unsweetened pot looks like a good deal. I can't fault the Filipino teachers for grabbing a good opportunity. I can't even fauilt small towns like Shelby for searching for ways that fill gaps and don't break their bank. But this is a patc h, not a solution. And sometimes it's not even that.

In some cases the programs are borderline human trafficking. In 2017, one of these placement companies lost a lawsuit filed by 350 Filipino teachers "who were held in virtual bondage." And that was in Baton Rouge-- you know, coastal Louisiana where 7500 teachers were laid off after Hurricane Katrina. I'm pretty sure that's a region where there were options beyond outsourcing to law-cost Filipino teachers. But Filipino teachers are cheap, and while they depend on those visas, they are unlikely to cause trouble. 

Now, the current regime looks to gather up any immigrant who has any kind of smudge on their record (because to fulfill the promise of deporting millions of hardened criminals, the regime has to redefine "hardened criminals"), and it has to be scary for some of those teachers here on a visa as "exchange" teachers. 

I'm wondering how many of the targets in Maui were relatives of the teachers, but I feel certain the Maui teachers won't be the last exchange teachers to get a visit from ICE. These programs, like much of US immigration, have problems, but my solution of choice wouod not be to turn the US into a hostile police state where immigrants have to worry about someone kicking down the door to drag them away. 

I don't love the Filipino teacher patch for US schyools, but it is clearly working for some folks. Being in ICE crosshairs will clearly not help it work better.

ICYMI: Mom's Day Edition (5/11)

Like any other holiday, Mother's Day is not celebrated by everyone, for a variety of reasons, and that's okay. But if you're celebrating the day, have an excellent one. In the meantime, we have a lot to read this week.

What’s Killing Democracy?: 8 Paths to America’s Intellectual Decline

Julian Vasquez Heilig looks at eight factors contributing to the dumbing down of the US. 

If Approved, Religious Charter Schools Will Shift Yet More Money from Traditional Public Schools

Legal scholar Derek Black takes a look at some of the likely consequences should the Supreme Court say that Oklahoma's Catholic charter school is okay.

President Trump fires Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden

A trio of reporters for the Associated Press dive into the story of Trump's latest diversity-related firing.

DC families feel stranded as second charter school closure disrupts education

More charter school closings. Reporter Phylicia Ashley at ABC7 News asks "who will be held accountable for charter schools taking millions of public dollars, then shutting down operations." Spoiler alert: nobody.

What makes me mad about AI in education

Irina Dumitrescu wrote an excellent response to that James Walsh article that pissed everyone off. This post also serves as an excellent explanation of what there is not to like about AI in ed.

Nothing Terrifies Texas Leaders Like Kids Learning Slavery Was Bad

Brian Gaar at The Barned Wire pokes at Greg Abbott and other Texas leaders hunting down diversity in education at the Austin school district.

Chromebooks and Tariffs: Here We Go.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider connects some dots that folks outside of the classroom might not have considered. But if your local district put students in Chromebooks (described by one wag as "like laptops, but broken") during Covid closure, and Dear Leader's tariffs are going to affect computer tech made in places like China, then what comes next? 

The Grinch Who Stole Teacher Appreciation Week

Nancy Flanagan says, yeah, teacher appreciation gifts are fine and all, but maybe we need to look a little closer.

Teacher Appreciation: An Oxymoron

Nancy Bailey writes about things teachers would really like to have (#1 A leader they can respect and trust).

My School Visit was Cancelled. I Fought Back and Won.

Author Erica Perl was supposed to talk to students in a Virginia elementary school, but then a parent complained that a snail in the book is non-binary (because that is, in fact, how God made snails). The principal folded and decided to break the author appearance contract. But Perl is not just an author-- she's a former trial lawyer. This is a swell story.

Resisting the MAGA curriculum.2

Mike Klonsky heard Stephen Miller promise patriotic indoctrination of students, and Klonsky thinks maybe we could do better than the scary curricular ideas of the regime.

West Point Is Supposed to Educate, Not Indoctrinate

Speaking of which, Graham Parsons used to teach at West Point, but he just quit. In this New York Times op-ed, he explains why, and what awful stuff is happening there.

We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how

Guillaume Thierry uses AI plenty, but he is still worried about people who anthropomorphize this inhuman, soulless software, and he would like everyone to just knock it off.

How vouchers will destroy public education

Mark Fernald is a former New Hampshire state senator, and he has big concerns about the granite state's growing love affair with school vouchers.

Study finds segregation increasing in large districts — and school choice is a factor

At Chalkbeat, Erica Melzer looks at a study showing that segregation is increasing, and school choice is one of the mechanisms making it happen.

What We Talk about When We Talk about AI in Education

It's not education. Let Audrey Watters explain it. "Talk about AI is clearly meant to inspire awe, not foster understanding."

School districts hit with extortion attempts months after education tech data breach

Remember that big Power School data breach? Well, the trouble stemming from that is not over yet.

Red State Blues

Greg Abbott may have finally purchased his voucher legislation, but as Jennifer Berkshire writes, the culture warriors on the school board level took a drubbing.

Call To Action Before The upcoming Budget Session

Florida is running its usual budgetary shenanigans to undermine public schools. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains this round. 

The Quadruple Threat to Children: A Budget That Picks on Our Nation’s Youngest

Bruce Lesley breaks down four major cuts in the proposed Trump budget that would be more bad news for children in this country.

The five-alarm fire that public education is facing

Hilary Wething at the Economic Policy Institute offers her own list of challenges before us.

DEI is NOT a Marxist plot

Thomas Ultican explains how wrong the MAGA complaints about DEI are. Warning: CTY and Chris Rufo make an appearance.

Trump’s Preliminary Budget Proposal Suggests His Public Education Priorities

Dear Leader released the rough outlines of a budget this week, and Jan Resseger takes a look at what it tells us about his plans for the future.

Has America Given Up on Children’s Learning?

As is usually the case with Dana Holdstein at the New York Times, some parts of this article are better than others. But it's still worth a read, if for no reason other than to be reminded how education remains a political orphan.

Faribault soccer league organized by Somali leaders is as much about community as wins and losses

This is a very cool story, courtesy of one of my nephews. He's a sports writer and while he usually covers more national and Penn Statey stuff, he keeps busy writing up local sports in his Minnesota community, which leads to some really cool stories like this one. 

Elsewhere, at Bucks County Beacon, I watched some cyber charter hearings and came away not very hopeful, and at Forbes.com, I waved to Teacher Appreciation Week. 

Today is Irving Berlin's birthday, and my favorite Berlin tune is Blue Skies which, like many classics, holds up through a wide variety of interpretations. Here's just one. 

As always, you're invited to sign up for the newsletter and get all the stuff straight to email.

The Failed Case for Super-NAEPery

At The74 (the nation's most uneven education coverage), Goldy Brown (Whitworth U and AEI/CERN) and Christos Makridis (Labor Economics and ASU) have a bold idea that involves putting fresh paint on a bad old idea--the national Big Standardized Test.

Their set-up is the usual noise about how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) peaked around 2013, which is true if you also believe that the rise that carries I-80 across the Bonneville Salt Flats is also a peak. They are more accurate when they say that "student outcomes" (aka "Big Standardized Test scores") have "largely stagnated" over recent decades. 

Yep, it's a roller coaster

Let me digress for just a moment to note the oddness of that idea of stagnation--as if test scores should keep rising like stock prices and property values. Each cohort of students should be smarter and better than the one before, a thing that would happen... why? What's the theory here? Each year's children will be genetically better than those that came before? That every teacher will significantly up her game with every passing year (because the students rotate out at a much higher rate than the teachers)? Schools get better at gaming the tests? If the expectation is that each successive group of students will score higher than the group before, what is supposed to cause that to happen? And how does it square with the people who think that education should be going "back" to something like "basics"? I mean, doesn't the vision of non-stagnating test scores include students who are all smarter and more knowledgeable than their parents? 

Okay, digression over. The authors also point out that Dear Leader and his crew have "downsized" the staff that oversees the NAEP (while simultaneously insisting that NAEPing will continue normally)-- but they argue that the kneecapping will "create an opportunity to rethink the role this tool can play."

In particular, the Trump Administration could explore using the NAEP to promote greater transparency among schools, parents, and local communities, as well to enhance academic rigor and ensure genuine accountability in a comparable way across schools and states. That would mean replacing a disparate collection of state tests will a single national assessment administered to every fourth and eighth grade student every year.

Yikes. I checked quickly to see if Brown and Makridis are over 15 years of age, because if so, they should remember pretty clearly that the feds have tried this exact thing before. Every state was supposed to measure their Common Core achievements by taking the same BS Test, except then that turned out to be two BS Tests (PAARC and SBA) but then those turned out to be expensive and not-very-good tests and states started dumping them, while folks from all ends of the spectrum noted that this sure looked like an illegal attempt to control curriculum from the federal level.

With national standards and national testing, supporters argued, we would be able to compare students from Utah and Ohio, as if that was something anyone actually wanted to do. As if in Utah parents were saying, "Nice report card, Pat, but what I really want to know is how your test scores compare to the test scores of some kid in Teaneck, New Jersey."

No, these guys have to remember those days, because they are well versed in all the same bad arguments made at the time.

Parents, educators, and state leaders agree that more information — not more bureaucracy — is needed to make informed decisions for their children and communities, as well as to foster greater competition. Making the NAEP a truly national assessment would provide this information in a consistent, credible, and actionable manner.

Right. Test scores would be great for unleashing free market forces in a free market, education-as-a-commodity choice system. Also, competition doesn't unleash anything useful in education. Also also, choice fans have mostly stopped using this talking point because it turns out charter and voucher schools don't actually do any better on BS Tests. Get up to date, guys-- today it's all "choice is a virtue in and of itself" and "parents should get to choose a school that matches their values."  

The writers call for the NAEP to be cranked out every year instead of every other, and for every student instead of the current sampling. No sweat, they say, because every state already has stuff in place for their own state test. 

But an annual universal NAEP would be great because it's a "consistent and academically rigorous measure of student performance." There's a huge amount of room to debate that, but it only sort of matters because the writers have fallen into the huge fallacy of NAEP and PISA and all the rest of these data-generating numbers. "If we had some good solid data," says the fallacy, "then we could really Get Shit Done." We would Really Know how students are doing, we would Really Know about how bad the state tests are, and we would Really Know where the issues in the system are.

It's an appealing notion, and it has never, ever worked. For one thing, nobody can even agree on what critical terms like "proficient" mean when it comes to NAEP. But more importantly, the solid data of NAEP never solves anything. Everyone grabs a slice, applies it to the policies they were busy pushing anyway, and NAEP solves nothing, illuminates nothing, settles nothing. 

The writers also want to use the test illegally in a method now familiar to both political parties. Tie Title I funding to compliance with NAEP testing mandates and presto-- "States would have a stronger incentive to align their instructional practices with higher expectations." In other words, test + money = federal control of local curriculum. Not okay.

They would also like the test to provide feedback to parents about their individual students. This also repeats a critical error of every BS Test to come down the pike. Tests are designed for a particular purpose and one should not attempt to apply them to a host of other purposes-- doing so gets you junk. Also, I still don't believe that conversation in Utah is happening. But this notion--

A national benchmark can support local autonomy while enabling cross-district comparisons that inform parents, educators, and policymakers alike.

Producing a test that generates data useful to all three groups is less likely than capturing a yeti riding a unicorn that is pooping rainbows.

The writers also argue that states could save money if the feds forced them to replace their current batteries of BS Tests with NAEP instead in just 4th and 8th grade. I suppose that depends on the test manufacturer who secures this national testing monopoly.

Their last argument is that universal NAEPery would "offer a balanced form of federal oversight." That means "less intrusive than programmatic mandates" which are not so much intrusive as they are illegal. At any rate, national standardized tests intended to drive programmatic choices are still pretty damned intrusive. 

Now for the wrap up. Starting with this understatement:

Federal initiatives to improve student outcomes have historically produced mixed results.

Yes, and theater trips to see "Our American Cousin" have historically produced mixed results for Presidents. Of the whole list of "mixed" results, they include just the Obama era attempt to use test scores to drive teacher improvement (well, not "improvement" exactly, but teaching to the test in order to raise scores). 

They say one right thing, which is "that policy tools must be both well-designed and responsive to local implementation contexts." But they follow that with "designating NAEP as the national assessment meets both criteria." And no, no it wouldn't, and we know it wouldn't because the last time we tried this national BS Test thing, it went very poorly. This is such a classic reformster construct-- "Historically this thing has failed, so we think the solution is to do it some more, harder."

In an era of educational fragmentation, the NAEP stands out as a uniquely credible and underutilized tool. Repurposing it as the primary national assessment — administered annually to all 4th and 8th graders in states receiving Title I dollars — would promote transparency, reduce redundant testing, and align incentives around higher academic standards. This reform would offer a shared benchmark to evaluate progress across states and districts. At a time when parents, educators, and policymakers are calling for both accountability and flexibility, a restructured NAEP provides a rare opportunity to deliver both.

Is that what parents, e3ducators, and policymakers are calling for, really? Doesn't matter, because NAEP provides nothing special for accountability (certainly not before we have a long, long conversation about accountability to whom and for what) and it certainly doesn't provide flexibility, not even under their repeat of the old argument that states could decide how to meet the national test standards, which is like telling someone "You can get to Cleveland any way you want as long as you arrive at E.9th and Superior within the next six hours seated in a blue Volkswagon, listening to Bob Marley, and eating a taco. Totally up to you what meat is in the taco, though. See? Flexible."

You know what's really flexible? An end to federal mandates for a nationalized Big Standardized Test. 

AI Is Bad At Grading Essays (Chapter #412,277)

A new study shows results that will be absolutely unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention. ChatGPT is not good at grading essays.

A good robograder has been the white whale of the ed tech industry for a long time now, and failing with impressive consistency. Scholar Les Perelman has poked holes in countless robo-grading products, and I've been writing about the industry since I began this blog. And this comment from the Musings of a Passing Stranger blog in 2011 is still applicable:

What Pearson and its competitors do in the area of essay scoring is not a science. It's not even an art. It's a brutal reduction of thought to numbers. The principles of industrial production that gave us hot dogs now give us essay scores.

The main hurdles to computerized grading have not changed. Reducing essay characteristics to a score is difficult for a human, but a computer does not read or comprehend the essay in any usual understanding of the words. Everything the software does involves proxies for actual qualities of actual writing. This paper from 2013 still applies-- robograders still stink.. 

Perelman and his team were particularly adept at demonstrating this with BABEL (the Basic Automatic B. S. Essay Language Generator), a program that could generator convincing piles of nonsense which robograders consistently gave high scores. Sadly, it appears that BABEL is no longer on line, but I've taken it out for a spin myself a few times-- the results always make robograders look incompetent (see here, here, here, and here).

The study of bad essay grading is deep. We have some classic studies of the bad formula essay. Paul Roberts' "How To Say Nothing in 500 Words" should be required reading in all ed programs. Way back in 2007, Inside Higher Ed ran this article about how an essay that included, among other beauties, reference to President Franklin Denelor Roosevelt was an SAT writing test winner. And I didn't find a link to the article, but in 2007 writing instructor Andy Jones took a recommendation letter, replaced every "the" with "chimpanzee," and scored a 6 out of 6 from the Criterion essay-scoring software at ETS. You can read the actual essay here. And as the classic piece from Jesse Lussenhop, part of robograding's problem is that it has adopted the failed procedures of grading-by-human-temps. 

Like self-driving cars, robograding has been just around the corner for years. If you want to dive into my coverage here at the Institute, see here, here, here, here, here and here for starters. Bill Gates was predicting it two years ago, and just last year, an attempt was made to get ChatGPT involved which was not quite successful and very not cheap. Which is bad news because the "problem" that robograding is supposed to solve is the problem of having to hire humans to do the job. Test manufacturers have been trying to solve that problem for years (hence the practice of undertrained minimum wage temps as essay graders). 

That brings us up to the recent attempt by The Learning Agency. TLA is an outfit pushing "innovation." It (along with the Learning Agency Lab) was founded by Ulrich Boser in 2017, and they partner with the Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Georgia State University, and the Center for American Progress, where Boser is a senior fellow. He has also been an advisor to the Gates Foundation, Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign, and the Charles Butt Foundation--so a fine list of reform-minded left-leaning outfits. Their team involves former government wonks, non-profit managers, comms people and a couple of Teach for America types. The Lab is more of the same; there are more "data scientists" in this outfit than actual teachers.

TLA is not new to the search for better robograding. The Lab was involved in a competition, jointly sponsored by Georgia State University, called The Feedback Prize. It was a coding competition being run through Kaggle, in which competitors are asked to root through a database of just under 26K student argumentative essays that have been previously scored by "experts" as part of state standardized assessments between 2010 and 2020 (which raises a whole other set of issues, but let's skip that for now). The goal was to have your algorithm come close to the human scoring results; and the whole thing is highly technical.

Now TLA has dug through data again, to produce "Identifying Limitations and Bias in ChatGPT Essay Scores: Insights from Benchmark Data." They grabbed their 24,000 argumentative essay dataset and let ChatGPT do its thing so they could check for some issues.

Does ChatGPT show bias? A study just last year said yes, it does, which is always a (marketing) problem because tech is always sold with the idea that a machine is perfectly objective and not just, you know, filled with the biases of its programmers. 

This particular study found bias that it deemed lacking in "practical significance," except when it didn't. Specifically, the difference between Asian/Pacific Islanders and Black students, which underlines how Black students come in last in the robograding.

So yes, there's bias. But the other result is that ChatGPT just isn't very good at the job. At all. There's more statistical argle bargle here, but the bottom line is that ChatGPT gives pretty much everyone a gentleman's C. To ChatGPT, nobody is excellent and nobody is terrible, which makes perfect sense because ChatGPT is not qualified to determine anything except whether the strong of words that the writer has created is, when compared to a million other strings of words, probable. ChatGPT cannot tell whether the writer has expressed a piercing insight, a common cliche, or a boneheaded error. ChatGPT does not read, does not understand. 

Using ChatGPT to grade student essays is educational malpractice. It is using a yardstick to measure the weight of an elephant. It cannot do the job.

TLA ignores one other question, a question studiously ignored by everyone in the robograding world-- how is student performance affected when they know that their essay will not be read by an actual human being? How does one write like a real human being when your audience is mindless software? What will a student do when schools break the fundamental deal of writing--that it is an attempt to communicate an idea from the mind of one human to the mind of another?

This is one of the lasting toxic remnants of the modern reform movement--an emphasis on "output" and "product" that ignores input, process, and the fact that there are many ways to get a product-- particularly if that's all the people in charge care about. 

"The computer has read your essay" is a lie. ChatGPT can scan your output as data (not as writing) and compare it to the larger data set (also not writing any more) and see if it lines up. Your best bet as a student is to aim for the same kind of slop that ChatGPT churns out thoughtlessly.

Add ChatGPT to the list of algorithmic software that can only do poorly a job it should not be asked to do at all.