Posts Tagged ‘Testing’

Miracle schools, vouchers and all that educational flim-flam

April 17th, 2011

is the title of this piece by Diane Ravitch. It appeared at the website of Nieman Watchdog of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, as part of the “Ask This” which is subtitled “Questions the Press Should Ask.” Oh if only reporters and writers on education were knowledgeable enough about education to ask questions such as those posed by Ravitch, perhaps we could cut through all the misleading and inaccurate information, the attempts to manipulate the public discourse on education to exclude the voices of those – including both Ravitch (a personal friend) and myself – who say that our supposed pattern of educational “reform” is like the emperor’s new clothes – there is no there there, as Gertrude Stein once opined of Oakland.

You should read Ravitch’s piece. To whet your appetite, let me offer Diane’s first paragraph here, and then explore a bit more below the fold:

Be skeptical of miracle schools. Sometimes their dramatic gains disappear in a year or two or three. Most such claims rely on cheating or gaming the system or on intensive test prep that involves teaching children how to answer test questions. These same children, having learned to take tests, may actually be very poorly educated, even in the subjects where their scores were rising.

Please keep reading.

Diane offers some very tough questions to consider. Understand that as an educational historian and as someone very involved in policy questions, the questions she poses are derived from the record, from extensive reading/research into the information that is actually available. For example:

When a charter school reports miraculous results, be sure to ask about the attrition rate. Some highly successful charters push out low-performing kids and their enrollment falls over the years (and the departing students are not replaced). Recently Arne Duncan hailed a “miracle” school in Chicago—Urban Prep—where all the students who graduated were accepted into college. But 150 students started and only 107 graduated. The 107 graduates had much lower test scores than the average for Chicago public school students. The school did a good job of getting the students into college (perhaps that was a miracle) but they were not better educated than students in the regular public schools.

In another instance, one of the “amazing” schools singled out by the 2010 documentary “Waiting for Superman” admits 140 students, but only 34 graduated. That’s a 75 per cent attrition rate. Some miracle.

Or try the brief paragraph before what I just quoted:

Whenever a district has a dramatic increase in test scores, look for cheating, gaming the system, intensive investment in test prep. Testing is NOT instruction. It is meant to assess instruction, not to substitute for it.

Take this points one at a time

cheating – explore the recent USA Today examination of test results in DC public schools under Michelle Rhee

gaming – the so-called Texas miracle on their state tests, given in tenth grade, was accomplished by holding back lower performing kids in 9th grade. Some were held back several times until they dropped out, and if they said they MIGHT get a GED, they were listed at having transferred to an alternative educational program, not as dropouts. Or perhaps after having been held back one year they were skipped to 11th on the grounds they had made so much progress. In either case, they were not tested. All this was documented BEFORE No Child Left Behind was passed into law, and people in Congress cannot say they were unaware. Walt Haney of Lynch College of Education at Boston College wrote about it, as did others, and a number of us passed on the literature to key people in Congress. Yet somehow Rod Paige won a superintendent’s award and got promoted to Secretary of Education, in part because of a claimed 90% graduation rate in Houston schools, when in reality only a bit over 40% of those entering 7th grade graduated with their cohorts.

intensive investment in test prep – these seems to be the pattern in a number of charter schools and some public schools claiming significant gains. But what evidence there is that the “gains” on tests are not maintained in subsequent grades, and students as they ascend the educational grades arrive less and less prepared to do the kind of work necessary to be successful even in a high school course of students, to say nothing of what is necessary in colleges, which is why post-secondary institutions have had to expand the number of places in remediation courses.

Ravitch remind us – at least those of us who have been paying attention – that improving pass rates on state tests may mean merely that states are manipulating their cut scores. It is possible to pass some state tests with less than half the questions answered correctly. Since all that are published are scaled scores, converted from raw scores, unless one can see the conversion formula, the scaled scores are subject to manipulation for all kinds of reasons, including the state (or school district for district wide tests) wanting to be able to show “success” or to avoid the politically unacceptable prospect of large numbers of students not being promoted or not graduating from high school.

Not all “studies” are peer-reviewed by independent scholars. Some are not even rigorous, as Ravitch points out about the claim by Carolyn Hoxby that students who spent 9 years in a NYC charter could close the achievement gap differential between, say, Harlem in inner city NY and Scarsdale, perhaps the wealthiest of the New York suburbs. As Ravitch writes:

The press gave that study huge attention and credibility, but no one noticed that there were very few students who had attended a charter in NYC for nine years or that Hoxby did not provide a number for the students who had closed the gap. It appears that her study was an extrapolation, and it was an extrapolation based on NYC and NY state’s inflated and unreliable test scores (see above). When NYC’s charter scores are reported, they range widely from very abysmal (a six per cent pass rate) to exceptional (100 per cent pass rate).

Ravitch also reminds us of the wisdom of the words spoken by Hal Holbrook in “All the President’s Men” – Follow the Money. In the case of education, we have the likes of Philip Anschutz, a billionaire who advocates for free market solutions (and for whom, I might mention, Michael Bennet worked before becoming Superintendent in Denver, and then a US Senator, and now apparently the successor in waiting to Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education). He was a funder of “Waiting for Superman” as was a man “previously CEO of a string of for-profit postsecondary institutions.” Similarly, the so-called Democrats for Education Reform has a board full of Wall St. hedge fund managers and big real estate moguls. Ravitch suggests asking why they are so interested in charters, and how they are connected with other ‘reform’ groups such as” Education Reform Now, Stand for Children, the state CAN organizations (e.g., ConnCAN), and a host of other groups promoting privatization and de-professionalization?” She also reminds us, as she did in her book, about the influence of the ‘billionaire boys’ club” of foundations such as Gates, Broad and Walton.

No high performing nations, as Ravitch reminds us, are pursuing the kinds of approaches we are seeing advocated by such groups and foundations, and unfortunately by the Obama administration. She challenges the administration with a number of questions, on continuing Bush administration accountability problems, on school choice, on merit pay (which lacks any supportive research base in education or in industry, and has clearly been shown to have no effect on test scores, which of course are the measurement of choice of the so-called reformers). Given the President’s recent remarks at Bell Multicultural High School in the District, in response to a question from a student, it is worth noting this question from Ravitch: Why does the president publicly say he is against standardized testing at the same time that his administration is demanding more emphasis on standardized testing?

Read Ravitch. Perhaps pass on the article to the editors, editorialists, and reporters dealing with education at your publication of choice.

Ravitch concludes her piece with simple statement:

Principles for reporters: Be skeptical; don’t believe in miracles; follow the money.

Perhaps were these principles followed, we might actually be able to have a meaningful public discussion on how to address the real needs and issues confronting our schools and our students.

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An incredibly important speech on education by Diane Ravitch

July 8th, 2010

That is a brief clip of Diane Ravitch addressing the Representative Assembly of the National Education Association on July 6, where she was receiving an award as the 2010 “Friend of Education.”

Please keep reading.

The complete text of Diane’s speech can be read here. She has given me permission to quote as much as I deem appropriate, including the whole speech if necessary.

I won’t do that. You can follow the link to read the entire text if so inclined.

Let me offer some selections to at least whet your appetite, as well as offer a bit of commentary of my own.

… in all of this time, aside from the right-wing think tanks, I haven’t seen met a single teacher who likes what’s happening? I haven’t met a single teacher who thinks that No Child Left Behind has been a success. I haven’t met a single teacher who thinks that Race to the Top is a good idea.

I remind readers that the Representative Assembly passed a resolution of no confidence in Race to the Top.

And as I talk to teachers, by the end of my talk, I hear the same questions again and again: What can we do? How can we stop the attacks on teachers and on the teaching profession? Why is the media demonizing unions? Why does the media constantly criticize public schools? And why does it lionize charter schools? Why is Arne Duncan campaigning with Newt Gingrich? Why has the Obama Administration built its education agenda on the punitive failed strategies of No Child Left Behind?

Newt Gingrich – now there’s a great ally for a supposedly progressive administration, eh? And during the campaign, Obama railed against NCLB, yet too much of the administration policy continues to rely on the failed policies of that approach.

I will continue to speak out against high-stakes testing. It undermines education. High-stakes testing promotes cheating, gaming the system, teaching to bad tests, narrowing the curriculum. High-stakes testing means less time for the arts, less time for history or geography or civics or foreign languages or science.

We see schools across America dropping physical education. We see them dropping music. We see them dropping their arts programs, their science programs, all in pursuit of higher test scores. This is not good education.

I have been told by some people in the Obama Administration that the way to stop the narrowing of the curriculum is to test everything. In fact, the chancellor in Washington, D.C., the other day announced she plans to do exactly that. That means less time for instruction, more time for testing, and a worse education for everyone.

Some of us have worried about this trend for years – I remember a group of elementary school art teachers asking their state for a test on art so their classes would not be eliminated. As it happens, my course is one in which there is a test that has high stakes – students in theory must not only pass a government course but also a state test in government in order to graduate from high school (although the latter requirement has some loopholes). Let me say that for too many students their course in government gets reduced, especially in the Spring as the test approaches, to drill and kill, practice for the test. For a subject that should excite them, because it has direct affect on their lives, they get bored and frustrated.

In speaking out, I have consistently warned about the riskiness of school choice. Its benefits are vastly overstated. It undercuts public education by enabling charter schools to skim the best students in poor communities. As our society pursues these policies, we will develop a bifurcated system, one for the haves, another for the have-nots, and politicians have the nerve to boast about such an outcome.

Public schools, as I said before, are a cornerstone of our democratic society. If we chip away at support for them, we erode communal responsibility for a vital public institution.

Bifurcated – even worse than what we have by geography, where wealthy communities have excellent public schools rich in resources and the students have access to all kinds of elective courses, and poor communities, whether in inner cities, inner rings of suburbs or the hinterlands, lacking equipment, with decaying buildings, and overwhelmed with students arriving st school with less background and current problems.

democratic society – if we really believe in it, economics would not be the sole basis on which we make arguments about our schools.

Last year, a major evaluation showed that one out of every six charters will get better results, five out of six charters will get no different results or worse results than the regular public schools. A report released just a couple of weeks ago by Mathematica Policy Research once again shows charter middle schools do not get better results than regular public middle schools.

Unfortunately, the general media coverage of the Mathematica report was badly flawed, focused on the schools that did ‘better’ while not including any of the caveats about even these schools. Charters COULD be used to offer alternative ways of teaching/learning to specific groups of students. Diane’s next two paragraphs are very important:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, on whose board I served for seven years, has tested charter schools since 2003. In 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009, charter schools were compared to regular public schools and have never shown an advantage over regular public schools. Charter schools, contrary to Bill Gates, are not more innovative than regular public schools. The business model and methods of charter schools is this — longer school days, longer hours, longer weeks, and about 95 percent of charter schools are non-union.

Teachers are hired and fired at will. Teachers work 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They are expected to burn out after two or three years when they can be replaced. No pension worries, no high salaries. This is not a template for American education.

NAEP is the national report card on education. It is considered the gold standard of educational evaluation. It does not show that charters do better. One reason why some “reformers” like charters is that in many states they are a way around unions, and their teachers can be fired at will.

Let me skip down a bit:

And perhaps we should begin demanding that school districts be held accountable for providing the resources that schools need. Just like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top requires and pressures districts to close low-performing schools. The overwhelming majority of low-performing schools enroll students in poverty and students who don’t speak English and students who are homeless and transient. Very often, these schools have heroic staffs who are working with society’s neediest children. These teachers deserve praise, not pink slips. Closing schools weakens communities. It’s not a good idea to weaken communities. No school was ever improved by closing it.

Reread that please. Yes, you will read stories that supposedly focus on “high-performing” schools dealing with such students. In some cases the claims for high performance are based on selective use of data. In most cases the schools on which such focus is made get more resources (as do many charters), have longer days, etc. The “success” is claimed on the basis of test scores. What is not yet offered is any evidence that there are long-term gains in learning: that the students are developing skills and knowledge that they can apply outside of the test environment. Meanwhile we reconstitute schools. We use one of the four models approved by this administration, even though NONE has any research to demonstrate that they improve education.

There are passages about the right to unionize, which Diane supports, but which “reformers” oppose. Read this paragraph, and perhaps you will understand two things, (1) why teachers are reacting so positively towards Diane; and (2) why we feel unfairly besieged, that the playing field is tilted:

I have spoken out repeatedly to defend the right of teachers to join unions for their protection and the protection of the teaching profession. Teachers have a right to a collective voice in the political process. It’s the American way. I don’t see the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or the pundits complaining about the charter school lobby. I don’t see them complaining about the investment bankers lobby, or any other group that speaks on behalf of its members. Only teachers’ unions are demonized these days.

Teachers, and those who support them, ARE being demonized. By constrast, Hedge Fund managers (who are making major investments in things like charter schools for tax benefits) and Wall Street Firms (who came close to destroying the economy of this nation and the international community) get bailed out with our tax dollars, continue to pay bonuses, and spend millions to prevent appropriate oversight and regulation. Then they want to have a voice telling us how we should teach, how our schools should be run.

There is so much of value in the speech. By now I hope I have at least convinced you to take the time to read the entire thing.

Let me offer only a few more snippets, skipping over some very important material:

Around the world, those nations that are successful recognize that the best way to improve school is to improve the education profession. We need expert teachers, not a steady influx of novices.

One argument against Teach for America, for example. Now if those in that program actually stayed in teaching, people like Ravitch and me would have far fewer objections. The constant turnover in the schools in which they serve is unfair to those kids. The program benefits many in the TFA corps, and it certainly benefits TFA. It is not clear that the students are getting all that much benefit, and the model is not something that can really address the needs of the millions of students in inner city and rural schools.

The current so-called reform movement is pushing bad ideas. No high-performing nation in the world is privatizing its schools, closing its schools, and inflicting high-stakes testing on every subject on its children. The current reform movement wants to end tenure and seniority, to weaken the teaching profession, to silence teachers’ unions, to privatize large sectors of public education. Don’t let it happen.

The consequences of letting these “reforms” go forward unchallenged will be great damages far beyond the arena of public education. It will be further destruction of what is left of the union movement in this country. It will be increased privatization of what is left of the commons in this country/ It will be a narrowing of opportunity for too many of our young people. It will diminish us as a people as our young people receive narrower and narrower educations.

Diane urges those listening to her to be politically active, to remind people that there are millions of teachers, we vote, and so do our families, to not support anyone who is an opponent of public education.

Stand up to the attacks on public education. Don’t give them half a loaf, because they will be back the next day for another slice, and the day after that for another slice.

Don’t compromise. Stand up for teachers. Stand up public education, and say “No mas, no mas.” Thank you.

Diane Ravitch received a rousing ovation for this speech. As a teacher, as a UNIONIZED teacher in a public school, I understand why.

I thought it important that as many people as possible encounter HER words, not just cursory news accounts. I think it important that voices that speak for teachers and for public schools be given as much of an audience as those who have described themselves as ‘reformers’ and seek to suppress or denigrate any opposing point of view.

That is why I asked Diane, a friend, if I could quote extensively. That is why Diane told me “You are free to cite or quote whatever you wish.”

Thanks for reading.

Please pass on the link for her speech.

Peace.

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(Re) Emerging Trend: Disruptive Innovation

May 4th, 2009


By Jason Flom

(This article is cross-posted on Ecology of Education)

Let’s take an imaginary trip through some snapshots from our Educational Landscape Photo Album:

  • Here’s Achievement Gap on a culinary tour of Urban Areas, circa 2009. Bigger than ever and looking healthy.
  • Take a look at High Stakes Test — that trickster keeps giving our schools bunny ears.
  • How cute! In this one the Basil Readers team spelled out BLAND using only textbooks.
  • Oh, check out the Teachers’ faces when they realized Standardization got rid of all the food at the annual picnic except for potato salad. Good times.
  • Don’t show this one to too many people, but here is the Education Technology Crew, looking like CIA agents as they scheme of ways to get around blocked sites.
  • And finally, the memorable series of the Kids playing 21st century games on their cell phones:
    • Climatic Sorry!
    • Petro-opoloy
    • Financial Market Jenga
    • Hungry, Hungry Energy
    • International Squabble
    • Meal or No Meal
    • Who Wants to be an Immigrant?

Collectively, such snapshots (though fictional) illustrate current themes that point to the idea that education is undergoing a transformation: from the complacency of yesterday to the eventuality of tomorrow. As a result, we stand today in a period of disruption and change. Budgets are suffering, drop out rates are on the rise again, curriculum is being narrowed, and for every one writer who offers constructive ideas, there are three others doing their impressions of Chicken Little: “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

You can barely open the paper, surf the internet, or tweet merrily without bumping up against some big debate about the nature of learning, what our schools should and should not be doing, and/or reform for this century or some other.

This is very good news.

While evolutionary biologists can argue over the exact mechanisms that lead to specific mutations, an undisputed fact remains: disruption stimulates change.

And, when it comes to development, growth and innovation, change is not only good, it is necessary.

For example, the rapid demise of the dinosaurs left the landscape in comparative chaos. Mammals capitalized on the available resources, and over time, changed considerably (exhibit A). Had the reign of the dinosaurs not ended, the mammals might have had a much more difficult time thriving, because, let’s face it, mammals taste delicious. (Full disclosure: I do not eat mammals, but I hear many animals — people included — enjoy them often enough. exhibit B)

The colosal failure (fail whale?) of reptilian megafauna cased a disruption in the biosphere that effectively spurred rapid growth, cultivating previously unavailable niches that in turn, spurred more growth. (While anyone watching My Super Sweet Sixteen might wonder if that growth has, in fact, been good, when I see my daughter laugh, I’m inclined to believe that it has been.)

So?

So, the current turmoil in our nation’s school system amounts to a national disruption that is stimulating change.

Robert Bruner, Dean of Darden School of Business at University of Virginia, recently posted an article to his professional blog entitled, Innovation in Disruptive Environments. He opens by considering how “innovators respond to uncertainty.” He goes on to suggest the importance of collaboration and networks in surviving (and ultimately thriving) during periods of challenge and disruption. He writes:

Successful inventors in history, such as Thomas Edison, were champions at collaboration with people of diverse expertise. In his book How Breakthroughs Happen, Andrew Hargadon wrote, “What set Edison’s laboratory apart was not the ability to shut itself off from the rest of the world, to create something, to think outside of the box. Exactly the opposite: it was the ability to connect that made the lab so innovative. If Edison ignored anything, it was the belief that innovation was about the solitary pursuit of invention. Edison was able to continuously innovate because he knew how to exploit the networked landscape of his time.” What really mattered was Edison’s network of invention. Hargadon argues that the most successful inventors are very good at technology brokering: borrowing here and there to create something new. Furthermore, good inventors recombine what they gather; as Hargadon says, “All innovations represent some break from the past…By the same token, all innovations are built from pieces of the past”—very few are truly revolutionary, radical, or discontinuous. What matters is the inventor’s network of connectivity to the past, and to inventions in the present.

With this in mind, the educational uncertainty and disruption currently affecting us today might become our stepping stone by utilizing three behaviors:

  1. Reflection and Planning: Long term, sustainable growth should be intentional and well thought out. We need to reflect on what is known and contemplate what might be. What’s our blue sky? What is achievable today? Tomorrow? And how can we ensure that the next generation of educational innovators can stand on our shoulders with solid feet to envision their tomorrow?
  2. Partnership and Collaboration: An education system that leaves no child behind requires that diverse vested interests work together in teams and partnerships to identify patterns, trends, and emerging relationships, before setting a course. It behooves us to include diverse knowledge and wisdom and ideas.
  3. Action and Exploration: Like scientific research that can take years (even decades and centuries) to mature into customer ready products, we need additional environments (like charter schools) for innovators to explore and develop new methodologies for reaching the wide range of students, interests, and cognitive needs of our diverse population. With strategic efforts we can then determine which strategies work locally and which could be applied on a larger scale. Then, repeat process.

Education’s soil is being turned, and now is the time to plant seeds for tomorrow. Not for today’s gains, our own glory, or to get a politician re-elected, but to ensure that this disruption’s growth amounts to long term innovation for our children, their children, and the world they live in.

As the Chinese proverb states, “One generation plants the seed, the next enjoys the shade.

Graphic: jaylopez

Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen, page 17.
Hargadon, page 32.

Follow Jason Flom on twitter (@jasonflom)

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Why We’re Still ‘At Risk’ – The Legacy of Five Faulty Assumptions

April 21st, 2009

I claim no credit for the title, which comes from this Education Week piece by Ronald Wolk, who was a co-founder of The Chronicle of Higher Education and founder of Education Week, and is chairman of Editorial Projects in Education, which puts out both Education Week and Teacher Magazine. The piece appeared online yesterday, and will be in print tomorrow. And it is as cogent as anything I have read on the problems with how we make education policy in this country. You will have to register to read the article, and as a non-subscriber will only be able to read for free two articles a week, but this is worth one of the two of your allotment. Consider:

After nearly 25 years of intensive effort, we have failed to fix our ailing public schools and stem the “rising tide of mediocrity” chronicled in 1983 in A Nation at Risk. This is mainly because the report misdiagnosed the problem, and because the major assumptions on which current education policy-and most reform efforts-have been based are either wrong or unrealistic.

Wolk considers the people running public eduation and leading the “reform” movement “knowledgeable, dedicated, and experienced” but argues that they

are so committed to a strategy of standards-based accountability that different ideas are marginalized or stifled completely.

One could write a book about each of the five major assumptions on which education policy rests, but in this limited space, a few brief paragraphs will have to suffice.

Let’s list the five key assumptions upon which he says education policy is based. I will list in bold italics the assumptions as he pens them, and for each offer the final statement he offers on each in a brief blockquote.

Assumption One: The best way to improve student performance and close achievement gaps is to establish rigorous content standards and a core curriculum for all schools-preferably on a national basis.

The issue is not whether standards are necessary. Schools without standards are unacceptable. Society should indeed hold high expectations for all students, but those expectations should reflect the values of the family and society-doing one’s best, obeying the rules, and mutual respect-and not simply the archaic academic demands of college-admissions offices. We should be preparing young people for life, not just for college.

Standards don’t prepare students for anything; they are a framework of expectations and educational objectives. Without the organization and processes to achieve them, they are worthless. States have devoted nearly 20 years to formulating standards to be accomplished by a conventional school model that is incapable of meeting them. We will make real progress only when we realize that our problem in education is not one of performance but one of design.


Assumption Two: Standardized-test scores are an accurate measure of student learning and should be used to determine promotion and graduation.

Except in school, people are judged by their work and their behavior. Few of the business and political leaders who advocate widespread use of standardized testing have taken a standardized test since leaving college. It is probably a safe bet that the majority of them, even after 16 years of formal education, could not pass the tests they require students to pass.

“But I took those courses years ago,” they say. “I can’t remember all that stuff.” Exactly.

A common justification for standardized testing is that it’s the best proxy for student achievement we have until something better comes along. The performance-based assessment used in many charter schools (and now statewide in Rhode Island and New Hampshire) is better.


Assumption Three: We need to put highly qualified teachers in every classroom to assure educational excellence.

If we want effective teaching, we should change the ways schools are organized and operated, and shift the teacher’s primary role from an academic instructor to an adviser, someone who helps students manage their own education.

Assumption Four: The United States should require all students to take algebra in the 8th grade and higher-order math in high school in order to increase the number of scientists and engineers in this country and thus make us more competitive in the global economy.

If the nation wants more scientists and engineers, then educators need to find ways to awaken and nourish a passion for those subjects well before high school, and then offer students every opportunity to pursue their interest as far as they wish.

Assumption Five: The student-dropout rate can be reduced by ending social promotion, funding dropout-prevention programs, and raising the mandatory attendance age.

The key to graduating is learning; the key to learning is motivation. There are innovative public schools that graduate most of their students because they personalize education, encourage students to pursue their interests and build on that enthusiasm, and offer multiple opportunities to learn instead of a one-size-fits-all education.

Wolk concludes as follows:

It is neither wise nor necessary to bet the future on a single reform strategy, especially when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of schools are demonstrating every day that there are other and more successful ways to help children learn and succeed.

But we can pursue two strategies only if we act to assure that the dominant strategy does not smother the fledgling movement in its crib.

I do not agree with all he presents in this piece. For example, in my opinion and in the opinion of far too many on the ground in Chicago, he gives Arne Duncan far too much credit for Renaissance 2010, the program Duncan used to reshape public schooling in the Windy City. The track record of that approach is not as sanguine as many would have us believe, and here I would note that Education Week has not given as many column inches to critics of that approach as I would have like to have seen.

I am also a bit critical in his framing that while he rightly talks about engendering enthusiasm for math in science by appropriate approaches in the lower grades (about which more anon) he ignores the damage that can be done to students and to our nation if we place too much focus on those subjects at the expense of other domains, including literature and the arts, historical and cultural knowledge, and preparation to be a citizen. We run a serious danger with our current obsession with math and science of producing a generation of technocrats without the ability to reflect morally, and we cheat many children of a chance to discover their true passions in fields that may not return the direct economic benefits we presume to see in science, math and technology, but without which our lives and our nation would be immeasurably less rich.

Still, despite those criticisms, this article provides the person reading it with insights that those of us who have been attempting to make a difference in education all know. There is no one path. Our overemphasis on standardized testing is limiting and destructive and really does not inform either us or those tested completely. There are other ways of assessing. Invoking interest in the early grades can be key to developing the kind of student passions we need. And we misunderstand and misapply the idea of standards.

Let me repeat one line I find key: We should be preparing young people for life, not just for college. Not only not just for college, also not just for employment in fields as we currently imagine them. Unless we inspire students to be willing to explore beyond the boxes we can currently imagine, we will stultify the creative impulse that has been at the heart of America’s genius, in science and industry to be sure, but also in the arts and politics. It is that creative impulse, too easily stultified by the kinds of approaches that have driven our educational policy in the past quarter century (since A Nation At Risk in 1983, although similar thrusts can be seen back over the past half century), that have enriched America not only financially but also in our willingness to take on societal inequities as we saw in the New Deal and the Great Society. As one born in 1946 who lived through the latter, it was the willingness of people to imagine a world different than the one which was given to them that challenged America to be different: think of the young people whose commitment fueled the Civil Rights movement as just one example of this.

Read the entire piece by Wolk. Let it provoke your own thoughts. Go beyond what he says – he would never claim to have all wisdom on the subject.

And remember these two points. First, Wolk says of the business leaders who seem so insistent on our current approach to standards and testing It is probably a safe bet that the majority of them, even after 16 years of formal education, could not pass the tests they require students to pass. My adolescent students are well aware of that, and our testing regimen makes them cynical. Do we really want to be inculcating cynicism as part of our educational process? Second, If we want effective teaching, we should change the ways schools are organized and operated, and shift the teacher’s primary role from an academic instructor to an adviser, someone who helps students manage their own education. Ultimately one key part of the job of teacher is to empower those who pass through our care to learn how to learn on their own. That is far more important than any single fact or formula we manage to have them absorb. Yes, we need to teach them the different ways through which we currently organize knowledge, but should also recognize that they may come up with better ways to do so, for themselves and for society as a whole, but only if we are willing to let them take risks, to try new things and new ways of perceiving.

I read Wolk’s piece late last night. I pondered it for a while. When I arose this morning, I decided there was nothing more important that I could do for public education today than to make the piece more widely known.

Well, almost nothing more important. The most important thing I can do is what I do every school day – head off to my classroom determined to empower all of the students who come through my care.

What will you do?

Peace.

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Grading Education, Getting Accountability Right

April 13th, 2009

(by Kenneth J. Bernstein aka teacherken, originally posted at the Daily Kos)

If you send two groups of students to equally high-quality schools, the group with greater socioeconomic disadvantage will necessarily have lower average achievement than the more fortunate group. . .

Low-income children often have no health insurance and therefore no routine preventive medical and dental care, so have more school absences as a result of illness. Children in low-income families are more prone to asthma, resulting in more sleeplessness, irritability, and lack of exercise. They experience lower birth weight as well as more lead poisoning and iron-deficiency anemia, each of which leads to diminished cognitive ability and more behavior problems. Their families frequently fall behind in rent and move, so children switch schools more often, losing continuity of instruction. . .

The words are of Richard Rothstein, formerly the principal education writer of The New York Times, and co-author of an important new book on educational assessment. They come from an interview he and his co-authors recently did. In this diary I will explore the interview as well as offer commentary of my own.

The title of the book is Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right. The cu-authors are Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder, and is co-published by Teacher4s College Press and the Economic Policy Institute. The interview appeared on the website of Education News, which while it is run by someone whose personal orientation towards education is quite different than my own, often provides links for important news about education.

I have not yet read the book. It is in my queue. But I know enough about Rothstein’s work from previous reading, both while he was at the Times and of earlier books, to know the cogency with which he approaches our crises in education. I believe that the interview can stand on its own as an introduction to a different approach about assessment.

Let’s be clear. We have to have assessment that includes some evaluation from outside the classroom or the school – given the amount of tax revenue (the authors say almost 15% of all American taxes) that goes to public education, such assessment for accountability is not only unavoidable, it should be welcomed – if done properly. Our approach under NCLB, however, is not proper, gives us a distorted picture of what is happening, narrows instruction to what is tested, and thus damages the education of the students it purports to help.

All of this has been known in educational circles for years, well before the push to NCLB in the early part of this decade. Let me offer some commentary from the three authors.

Let’s start with Jacobsen:

Our current accountability systems focus narrowly on standardized test scores in reading and mathematics. This test-based accountability system has only resulted in a corruption of the goals of public education. It has created incentives to focus only on reading and math instruction at the expense of other important goals, including not only other academic subjects such as science and social studies, but also other skills which are less easily tested through a paper and pencil exam, such as students’ ability work cooperatively in groups, develop a commitment to civic and community responsibility, and develop an appreciation for the arts and literature.

A concern about such narrowing is not new. Rothstein reminds us:

. . . we describe a commission led by Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger that issued a 1958 report denouncing excessive stress on tests of math and reading. The report insisted that “Our conception of excellence must embrace many kinds of achievement at many levels….There is excellence in abstract intellectual activity, in art, in music, in managerial activities, in craftsmanship, in human relations, in technical work.” And the report urged that test scores not be the sole mechanism of school accountability. It said, “Decisions based on test scores must be made with the awareness of the imponderables in human behavior. We cannot measure the rare qualities of character that are a necessary ingredient of great performance. We cannot measure aspiration or purpose. We cannot measure courage, vitality or determination.”

I include this snippet because of the date of the report: in October of 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Those old enough to remember will recall the panic it caused, that we were falling behind a rival (at that time a military rival) and we had to respond. This lead to a heavy emphasis on science at math. The report presented cautions that unfortunately were not taken seriously. If one sees parallels with, say, A Nation at Risk in 1983, with fears of falling behind economically, or current pushes seemingly demanding more emphasis on math and science, you are not alone.

The authors do not totally reject the idea that one important function of public education is to prepare people to be productive in the workforce – after all, remember that one co-publisher is the Economic Policy Institute. But that goal cannot be seen in isolation, and we need to be very careful about making major changes in our schools based on economic projections that are tenuous as best. In the paragraph immediately following the one just quoted, Rothstein notes

the work-related skills now required of school graduates are different from those of the 1950s, but also not as different as many people think. In an appendix of Grading Education, we reprint an article I co-authored with Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, in which we showed that, contrary to popular belief, American schools currently produce enough high school and college graduates to fill openings in the technologically advanced jobs of the modern era. Of course, we argue, our schools have an obligation to educate every child to his or her maximum potential, and we are not presently doing so, but we should not use flawed economic projections as a basis for denouncing the performance of our public schools.

Jacobsen recites the goals that education should include:

Throughout history, American leaders have generally agreed that schools should assist students in developing knowledge and skills in a broad range of goal areas, including: 1) basic academic knowledge and skills; 2) critical thinking; 3) appreciation for the arts and literature; 4) preparation for skilled work; 5) social skills and work ethic; 6) citizenship and community responsibility; 7) physical health; 8) emotional health.

and notes when they authors surveyed a representative group of educational leaders and the public, they found that

while teaching basic academic skills is important, it is not so much more important that we should be satisfied if other goals were sacrificed. Consequently, in Grading Education, we propose an accountability system in which schools would be held accountable for student achievement in all of these eight areas. Only with such an accountability system, can we avoid the goal distortion that results from accountability only for a few basic skills. Our proposals include an expanded federal data collection system, covering both standardized tests and performance assessments.

Ironically, there is a U. S. precedent for such an approach in the early development of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP):

Unlike today’s NAEP exam which is almost exclusively a paper and pencil exam, early NAEP also collected data using survey and interview questions, and observations of student behaviors. With the exception of the arts and music exam in 1997, however, such performance assessments were eliminated by the federal government in the
1970s.

The authors note that previously NAEP required things such as writing a letter of application in response to a help-wanted ad, or how they would respond if they saw a park attendant acting in a racially discriminatory fashion or evaluating the calorie consequences of food choices – think how important a real world skill the last is at a time when our childhood obesity is exploding, with concomitant pressures on health and medical costs, as well as time lost from school and from work.

Currently NAEP, which is still the best standard by which to compare the results among NAEP, has the unfortunate result of downgrading US performance because of how it sets its proficiency levels. As Wilder notes of the Lake Wobegon demand that all children be proficient as measured by some state established standard and cross-checked by NAEP),

the law does demand that all students in each state pass a single challenging standard. This guideline comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) definition of proficiency as “demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter.” However, there are no countries in the world, even the highest performing countries, in which all students are able to reach a challenging standard. In Grading Education we demonstrate this fact by predicting how students in Korea and Singapore—the top scoring countries on international math assessments— would score on the United States’ NAEP. We found that over 25 percent of students in Singapore and Korea would score below the 8th grade NAEP proficiency cut score in math. It is impossible for all U.S. students to reach a challenging level of proficiency by 2014 or by any year.One standard cannot be challenging to most and achievable by all.

The authors recommend an assessment program that, while still including tests and other quantitative measures, would also include the qualitative data that comes from expert evaluation

…expert evaluations of schools and student work, conducted on a regular cycle. Even the most sophisticated test questions are not fully adequate to reveal students’ abilities. Therefore, mandatory school evaluations should be conducted by professional inspectors to inform the public about how well schools are progressing towards the eight goals described above. Inspectors should observe lessons in every classroom, meet with members of the school community, shadow students selected at random and observe daily school and classroom practices. Observations would enable inspectors to make concrete recommendations based on their expert knowledge, and subsequent inspections could evaluate a school’s progress in addressing areas identified as in need of improvement. Schools deemed in need of great improvement should be visited more frequently and schools meeting or exceeding standards could be visited less often. The
reports of inspectors should be made available to the public, and if schools repeatedly fail to make the necessary changes to ensure student progress towards the multiple goals of public education, states should intervene and replace inadequate administrators and
faculty.

Here I can speak from some experience. Maryland schools get reaccredited by a process of evaluation that includes visits from teams of educators sent out by our region, Middle States. Every teacher is observed at least twice, by two different educators with some degree of experience in the content. The building is evaluated physically, the school climate is assessed. Non-teachers are interviewed. But all of this takes place AFTER the school has engaged in a year-long process of self-evaluation, a process that includes defining a clear philosophy and set of goals, and evaluating the relationship between school and the larger community, recognizing that the education of students is not limited to what happens within the walls of our classrooms and schools. I have in the past serve as chairman of the committee that dealt with our school’s philosophy and goals and am slated to do so as we begin the process again this coming fall. Like the process of National Board Certification, where the candidate is required to examine in detail his/her teaching in light of primary goal of serving the needs of the students, this process requires a great deal of honest self-reflection. High and/or improving scores on external tests is considered insufficient. As Wilder notes, such an approach is already used elsewhere in the world:

Other countries have long known of the goal distortion that occurs when educational institutions are held accountable for only some of their many goals. Employing this knowledge in their accountability policies, many countries including England, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, the Czech Republic, Portugal, and France depend upon a system of school inspections that includes student test scores as only one indicator of performance for holding schools accountable. Although the specifics of school inspections differ from country to country, the principles are the same: employ trained professionals to visit schools to assess if their practices—curriculum, instruction, facilities, leadership, materials, etc.—are likely to graduate students who will become successful, productive citizens. In cases where inspection demonstrates deficiencies in a school’s practices, the responsible national or local agencies intervene to improve the school’s methods.

The entire interview is worth reading. What the authors offer is something far more useful than the kind of narrow focus on tests that has been consuming our educational policy for the past 8 years. The detrimental affects of such an approach should have been anticipated, given what we know about fields other than education:

For example, police commanders have sometimes given police officers ticket quotas in an attempt to ensure that policemen work effectively. Policemen respond to such quotas by issuing more traffic tickets, but this has resulted in police ignoring other important responsibilities that are more difficult to measure, such as prevention of crime by community policing. When medical services have been held accountable, for example, for easily measured reductions in infant mortality, these services may achieve such reductions by shifting resources to hospital obstetric services and away from prenatal care for pregnant women. The services reduce mortality but then have higher proportions of low birthweight and seriously disabled births, because prenatal care was de-emphasized.

I urge you to read and ponder the entire interview. Even before you read the book, you will begin to be prepared to respond to those people who insist a test-based approach to accountability is the only possible solution. We do need to make changes to our system of public education, but the path we have been following not only has not achieved the goals it ostensibly seeks, it cannot, any more than all children will be proficient by 2014. The authors will help you understand why a different approach is needed. They go further in proposing a path that would be far more effective, if only we could get policy makers to step back and look honestly at ALL of what we know about schools, assessment and evaluation.

Peace

(Note: This article was posted on behalf of the the author with direct permission. It originally appeared on the Daily Kos.)

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