The Ed Skeptic

Lakota Stories in the Classroom is Here!

2011-09-04T11:28:00.000-04:00

Oh by the way.... Niche audience of ed policy nerds whom I've totally been neglecting as of late so that I could tend to my mistress, she's finally launched:

http://lakotastories.edublogs.org!

Lakota Stories in the Classroom has been in the works for fifteen months. By no means did I work on it continuously during that time, but when I did work on it, it was pretty intense. So, it's been extremely gratifying not only to receive emails from teachers I've never met who are excited about using the resource, but also, to see that the website (which has an even smaller niche audience than edskeptic.com) received over 150 hits on the day of its launch, and on average about 50 hits per day each day since.

I still, however, have the same self-criticisms that I've always had about the project. In an ideal world, I would want a curriculum that does justice to both the pluralist and the cosmopolitan multicultural ideals, never mind that they're mutually exclusive, as I wrote about in August. But, looking over the resource, I realize that maybe I haven't given Lakota Stories in the Classroom enough credit... I do mention other cultures besides the Lakota, however superficially. Not only does one 3-5 social studies unit mention other tribes besides the Lakota, in the very same unit, there's also a geography exercise that uses a map of South America!

In short, I don't think that Lakota Stories in the Classroom is perfect in terms of the American Indian educational ideal in general. I still don't know quite what that ideal is. But, the videos are way cool, and I hope that the website will help a little bit in terms of keeping the Lakota language (well, truthfully, a select list of 264 important vocabulary words) alive.

The Common Core and Cosmopolitanism

2011-08-10T15:08:00.000-04:00

So, I originally was going to post my response to Tom Hoffman's comment in the comment field, but it got a bit lengthy.... Re yesterday's post, Tom wrote: "The Common Core standards have absolutely nothing to say about cosmopolitanism." And he's correct. It's imprecision on my part to suggest otherwise.

Yes, Tom, the Common Core standards have nothing to say about cosmopolitanism, but they assume cosmopolitanism as an underlying ideal. Here, I take cosmopolitanism and pluralism as two (albeit dichotomous) responses to the Anglo-centric, racially homogeneous Dick and Jane reading curriculum that educational activists in the 1950s and onward rebelled against. If you'll remember, this

a.k.a., insufficient attention to the realities of a multicultural world, is why Johnny can't read.

Cosmopolitan multiculturalism says that students should learn from authors of a variety of cultural backgrounds. Students should be exposed to a world in which their role models are Jamaican, Polish, Japanese, Cherokee, Somalian, Puritan, Mexican, and Female.

Pluralist multiculturalism, however, says that students from a specific cultural background should be taught in a way that is relevant to their specific cultural background. Lakota students should learn about the strength of Crazy Horse, the fortitude of Sitting Bull, and the compassion of Spotted Tail.

I'm not really in a position to comment on how well the Common Core does cosmopolitanism, but having read the standards, I can say that it's clear that cosmopolitanism is a goal. No one can criticize the Common Core for being too blonde-haired and blue-eyed; it draws reading materials and teaching points from a wide range of cultural experiences. And this is sensible. To the extent that the Common Core standards aspire to be common, they should not privilege any one cultural experience (at least within the American context) to the exclusion of others. Such a claim does not necessarily call for watered-down, touchy-feely inclusiveness at the expense of rigor--although it's one possible (and wrong) interpretation. Rather, cosmopolitanism done right achieves the correct harmony of voices, such that no student feels alienated from the curricular material, but at the same time, ensures that major national and world historical events are addressed during the course of a child's education, and not replaced with trivial historical occurrences just so that some perfunctory form of multiculturalism is payed lip service to. Cosmopolitan multicultural education attempts to realistically mimic the contours of a diverse world.

My project--and this is perhaps a self-criticism--does just the opposite. If teachers followed my science and social studies units strictly (and based on how comprehensive they are, it would be possible for a teacher to use my curriculum and nothing else for an entire year), students would only learn concepts through the lens of Lakota culture. In the K-5 world created by my units, there are no Jamaicans, Italians, or Somalians. In my history curriculum, there is just "Lakota" and "other." And of course, the most prominent others are the American colonialists and the Western settlers; students learn an American history that focuses on conquest and the clash of two civilizations.

Why promote this kind of learning? In spite of the fact that my curriculum narrows rather than expands, and endeavors to make students future citizens of a tribe rather than future citizens of the world, I've come to peace with the idea that the unique legacy of a people like the Lakota justifies a curriculum that comes with perhaps ugly trade-offs. I won't go into a tirade about Indian boarding schools and forced assimilation, but suffice it to say, that in the community where I used to teach, it seemed that only thing that brought hope and energy to the poverty-stricken, gang-ridden, desperate rurality of the reservation was the possibility of cultural reclamation. My Lakota coworkers and friends really, really wanted to bring back their language and their culture, to rebuild a concrete identity for themselves, rather than continue to define themselves in terms of a lost one.

I would love to reconcile the cosmopolitan and pluralist ideals. I just don't know how. At least in theory, cosmopolitanism promotes empathy, cultural solidarity, and teaches students how to conduct themselves when they encounter difference. Cosmopolitanism would seem to be the antidote to narrow-mindedness and nascent racial bigotry. But, I don't know how cosmopolitanism would help the Lakota get their culture back. As it stands, the school where I taught had a mission statement wherein students where supposed to emerge as citizens of two worlds, the English world and the Lakota world, an ideal that was far from ever concretized. This, as a tribal elder once told me, is because the school leadership thinks of "Lakota time" as a thirty minute language lesson inserted neatly into each day, rather than an underlying philosophy of education that drives all instructional practices. If Lakota time were integrated wholesale, the school might actually achieve its cultural mission, creating a generation of Lakota citizens who would teach their kids the language and the culture, who would then go on to teach the language and the culture to their kids, breaking the cycle of lostness and forgetting.

The analogy, of course, is that a mostly white student population should learn Dick and Jane, a mostly Hispanic population should learn Dominic and Juanita, and so on. Such an analogy is precisely the basis of my self-criticism: there is a huge danger of parochialism and forced insularity that comes with a curriculum such as the one I'm working on. I offer no neat solutions, only what I hope is an honest acknowledgement of the problem. And in the end, I'll willfully assume responsibility for the problem if it makes even a minuscule difference in helping the Sicangu Lakota Oyate get their language back.

Lakota Stories in the Classroom

2011-08-10T00:09:00.000-04:00

This blog post might be alternatively named "Confessing My Schizophrenic Tendencies." In the education blogosphere, I have two radically distinct, and probably uncompromisable, personalities. Here I am, domain name "EdSkeptic.com," decrying most ed reform ideas currently being acted upon. In another place in cyberspace (I won't post the address at the moment because the domain is currently a mess), I am a cheerful multiculturalist, an education practitioner with a non-cynical mission. The project I'm working on is based on the idea that the education of Lakota students should draw from the Lakota language, Lakota beliefs, and Lakota cultural practices. (This concept is generalizable to all of American Indian education, but my main area of knowledge and interest is the Lakota.) I'm trying to create free dowloadable K-5 science and social studies unit plans that are aligned to South Dakota standards, but at the same time, focus on Lakota stories and teach the Lakota language. On Day One of each unit (e.g., "Plants"), teachers will play students a video that has a Lakota elder telling a story that goes with the unit (e.g. "The Origin of Prairie Flowers"). The unit will unfold from there, with activities and exercises that integrate Western concepts and Lakota concepts. (Or at least, that's the idea.)

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how this project fits in with the Common Core standards, which (depending on how they're implemented) may espouse cosmopolitanism rather than pluralism as an underlying ideal. And this leads to the question.... Is it a good thing to espouse cosmopolitanism rather than pluralism as an underlying ideal? There are reasons to think the affirmative. But this invalidates my whole project, which I'm pretty attached to, philosophically and otherwise. But there is much waxing edskeptic on my alter ego to come. Right now, I just want to post some of the Lakota storytelling videos. I'm pretty damn proud of them (except for a typo in the last video, a misspelled Lakota word) and they won't have a home on the internet for another month.

Here's Homer White Lance giving his rendition of the Lakota creation story. (This is geared towards grades 3-5.)

Here's Sylvan White Hat with "Iktomi and the Dreamcatcher." (Grades K-2.)

Here's Sylvan again with "Again Spider and the Ducks." (Grades K-2. As I envision it, the teacher will pause to read aloud the questions at the end, asking students for their answers before pressing play again.)

Finally, Sylvan on the Lakota virtues. (Grades 3-5, I think.)

One more. Here's Homer talking about generosity, one of the Lakota virtues. It's not really a story; it's just Homer talking. I think it'll be for K-2.

Feedback welcome. Thanks for watching.

What is the Meaning of "Stakes"?

2011-07-21T12:56:00.001-04:00

Over at Core Knowledge, Robert Pondiscio recently blogged about how a knowledge-rich curriculum will not raise test scores. Maybe over the course of three years, four years, or five years, but not immediately. The criticism he articulates is familiar, but Pondiscio puts it well: "The high stakes associated with reading tests may not preclude teaching a knowledge-rich curriculum, but it arguably disincentivizes it."

Yes, it's all about incentives. The best bet for teachers looking to maximize student test scores is to teach students testing strategies and to replace classroom sessions where students hold books and read them with classroom sessions where students practice filling out workbook pages like the following:

(I lifted this page from Spectrum Test Practice Grade 2, which can be found on Amazon.)

I know a teacher, in fact, whose entire curriculum was test preparation workbooks, the whole year long. And her students consistently earned the best reading scores in my former school.

Yes, through test preparation workbooks, second graders might learn different phoneme sounds; indeed, they might even learn how analyze words. They might learn how to eliminate wrong answers and choose the correct one after reading a short passage. But will they learn how to enjoy a book? How can we thrust a high school curriculum that includes To Kill a Mockingbird and the like upon students when our second graders are being trained in strategies rather than in reading?

Okay: let's say that you've bought the argument. High stakes testings comes with perverse incentives for teachers to replace content-rich curricular possibilities with test prep. What about the alternative?

In the past on this blog, I've pushed a platform that includes in-school teacher evaluations and no-stakes tests like NAEP to assess teachers and students. However, I've recently been challenged by a friend of mine on the question of no-stakes tests. Yes, with high stakes tests come perverse incentives. But with no-stakes tests, students have absolutely no incentive to do well, so (if they have a modicum of rationality) they'll do the easy thing, which is to fill in bubbles swiftly and without thinking. Thus, no-stakes tests tell us nothing at all.

Except for one thing. Some students are trained to take seriously every test that is put in front of them. Sometimes it's family culture that produces this result; sometimes it's school culture; sometimes it's national culture. So, students who score well are those who know the material and take the test seriously. When it comes to no-stakes tests, we cannot, alas, differentiate between students who don't know the material and students who do know the material but don't take the test seriously.

It's a good criticism, and damning to the idea that there are any standardized tests with psychometric measures that are actually valid. (Unless researchers come up with a way to measure students' test-oriented motivation, and only measure highly motivated students against other highly motivated students.) However, I think that there's a way to save no-stakes testing. Basically, since teachers and school leaders exercise control over the curriculum, they are the only individuals for whom there exists a perverse incentive to tamper with it by teaching to the test. So, on standardized tests, there should be no stakes for teachers (don't we all want content-rich curriculums?) but high stakes for students (for whom the test is determinative of whether they are promoted to the next grade, get to join Gifted and Talented or take advanced math, skip a grade, score high enough to enter a charter school lottery for middle or high school, etc.) It is up to the teacher to motivate students to do their best, but the teacher himself should have nothing at stake. Besides, of course, the oh-so-wholesome delight of seeing his students succeed.

Mike Petrilli on Scalby Primary and Why School Choice Maybe Should Be on my Agenda

2011-07-09T21:00:00.000-04:00

There aren't a whole lot of ed policy podcasts out there. And so, I listen to The Education Gadfly pretty much every week, even though it's quite clear that its home organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has an agenda. (Full disclosure: So do I. But my agenda doesn't align perfectly with that of Fordham, which is why I am reluctant to wholeheartedly endorse the Gadfly.)

Disclaimers aside, the July 7 episode features something really worth talking about. A relatively new segment, What's Up With That?, features the story of Scalby Primary, a UK school which has forbidden parents, guardians, and other adult chaperons at the annual Scalby field day from taking photos, lest said photos are posted online and used to abet pedophiliac activity. The segment prompted an extemporaneous rant from Mike Petrilli, vice president of the Fordham Institute and host of the podcast, about school choice. I'm transcribing Mike's words:

I've become such a believer that one of the main reasons why we need school choice in our system is these sorts of issues around school culture and norms. I mean, you basically, in my view, want to take all the really anal parents, and put them in one school together, and then take all the laid back parents and put their kids together. And they can each have a school that meets their needs more perfectly. So if the anal parents want to have a no-photo policy because they're afraid that these things are going to happen, fine. That's their choice. And if the laid back parents want to say, you know what, we're not going to stress out about this kind of stuff, fine. But what you're trying to do is push all these different parents in the same kind of school and they fight about things like this.

The thing is, in spite of my support of Diane Ravitch-y claims about being wary of silver bullets, saving public schools, and most importantly for me, worrying about the perverse incentives packaged into high stakes tests, I actually agree with Mike's statements. For a long time before charter schools were cool, I supported school choice in the form of magnet schools. I really liked the idea of having small, specialized high schools devoted to the arts, or to science and technology, or to the humanities, or whatever. As I saw it, specialized magnet schools had the potential to create cultures of solidarity, where the particular brand of learning promoted by a given school excites the interest of faculty and students alike. This seemed a preferable alternative to the one-size-fits-all typical American high school, with its dry textbooks and its teachers mismatched to content areas. I went to college with a girl who had attended Science and Math in North Carolina, and what was great about that school, besides its being one of the top-performing schools in the nation, is its promotion of nerdiness--for athletes, for non-AP students, for everyone. In fact, I'm sure that the culture fostered by Science and Math has a lot to do with its performance. (So: not excessive test prep, merit pay, cheating, etc.)

In short, I liked the idea of students living in an area where they had the option of going to a Science and Math, a Community School for Social Justice, a Core Knowledge High School (with its focus on the liberal arts), or a Bell Multicultural School. I liked the idea of students sitting down with their parents to really think about the educational setting in which they would flourish. I thought that the act of choosing a school would itself empower a student, who is at that age where it doesn't matter how good (or horrid) his clothes look, as long as he was the one to pick them out. Choosing a school is an adult act, and I think that a student faced with low grades or behavioral referrals, threatened (idly or not) to shape up his act or get kicked out, would be more willing to change his study habits and behavior. Autonomy is what I'm talking about. And so, I got really excited when Petrilli was talking about schools for anal parents and schools for laid back parents. Yes, Mike, I could see that working. Yes!

So why don't I spend more time talking about why school choice is (potentially) a good thing? Even though I haven't changed my opinion about the autonomy and empowerment that might come with a more choice-friendly system, the School Choice Movement (capitalization intentional) has become this monolithic entity, a portmanteau of the Merit Pay Movement and the High Stakes Testing Movement and the Anti-Rubber Room Anti-Tenure Movement and the Anti-Union Movement and the Corporate Charter School Movement. While I can clearly see the pros and cons of each listed item, when rolled up together, I'm ultimately most friendly to the critics of the cheerful choice-mongerers. The way the Fordham Institute, Education Next, Bill Gates, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and others have packaged their movement, the equivocal among us feel compelled to either accept or reject. And when it comes down to it, I'm much more committed to exposing the fallacies of high stakes testing than I am to endorsing a particular brand of magnet school-ism that, literally, no one who's anyone in the world of ed reform has talked about in ten years. Which is why being destructive rather than constructive is what's on my agenda.

What's Wrong with IMPACT?

2011-06-28T12:25:00.001-04:00

...A few things. But not everything.

IMPACT, Washington D.C.'s teacher evaluation system, has received a lot of press lately. There's Sam Dillon's piece, which gives the perspective of a terrified first-year teacher afraid for her job, and then Bill Kerlina's confessional in the Washington Post about why he, a young principle, quit his job.

I've never been a Michelle Rhee fan (IMPACT is her baby) but I'm here to defend it, kinda. First, some background. IMPACT is an evaluation system that distinguishes between teachers with and without "value added student achievement data," a.k.a., 4th through 8th grade reading and math standardized test scores.

"Group 2" teachers are those for whom a definitive value added statistic cannot be computed because they teach something other than 4th through 8th grade reading or math. So these are the social studies teachers, science teachers, lower elementary reading and math teachers, high school reading and math teachers, etc. According to the IMPACT handbook, Group 2 teachers are evaluated by in-classroom observations (75% of the total score), non-value added student achievement data (10%), value added student achievement data (5%), school/community involvement (10%), and professionalism (evaluated qualitatively). There are five in-classroom observations per year, three by the principal and two by master educators.

Common criticisms of IMPACT are as follows:

(1) People don't like the merit pay component.
(2) People don't like the fact that IMPACT scores can be used to fire bad teachers
(3) Support is not given to struggling teachers, only punitive measures
(4) Test scores are a factor, especially for Group 1 teachers
(5) No forgiveness/leniency for teachers in high-needs schools

As for (1) and (4), my main complaint is that the pet program of people who frequently use a battle cry of "Not Research Based!" to disparage their opponents lacks a basis in research, i.e. it is Not Research Based. In short, I'll be sympathetic to the critics of merit pay until it's proven that merit pay actually improves educational outcomes for low-income students. (And I do mean ACTUAL educational outcomes. I don't want no inflated-through-mindless-test prep faux-achievement achievement, I don't want no cheating scandals.)

But, (2) and (5) don't really bother me. Having seen and heard stories of teachers who were retained year after year, given two billion second chances to learn classroom management, etc., I have to think that it takes much more thought and effort to fire a teacher than to retain a teacher, even if said teacher is really, really bad. As for (5), it makes my skin boil to think that we should have lower standards for teachers in high needs schools than for teachers working in high-income neighborhoods. More is at stake for the students in high needs schools--we need better teaching, which means high standards for instruction. It wasn't clear from the Sam Dillon piece as to whether the teachers who were censured for failing to notice their students eating and texting during their lessons were in high needs environments. But, it shouldn't matter. It makes no difference how dazzling your history lesson is if students are engrossed by other things. If you're a teacher, you have to devote half your attention to what you're saying (which is why you have to know that material darn well) and half your attention to what your students are doing. While outlining the four causes of the American Revolution, or fielding a question, or explaining the assignment, or cold calling students, or whatever, the teacher should be circulating throughout the classroom, and without ceremony, taking the cell phone, or the sandwich, and slipping it into his/her pocket. (Yes, it's gross to put a sandwich in your pocket. So goes the life of K-12 teacher.)

Let's talk about (3). Lack of support was main complaint of Bill Kerlina, who to be quite frank, came across as a major crybaby. But, I contend that the IMPACT system is a step in the direction of more support, and better support, more so than its alternatives, which include the status quo. I really, really like IMPACT's emphasis on in-classroom observations. It forces principals to get into the classroom (the eternal temptation for school leaders to be beholden to paperwork in one's office), and also, creates a network of expert teachers who can see precisely what teachers are doing well and poorly. Test scores don't tell you much, and sometimes give false information about a teacher's quality. But, it's pretty hard to fake it for an entire lesson. Short of threatening your students with corporal punishment on a to-be-named date in the future if they don't behave, it's impossible to abracadabra a structured, well-functioning classroom. Such is only the product of months of deliberate, dedicated work. Perhaps right now, mentor teachers are coming into the classroom, filling out their forms, and leaving without giving teachers much by way of feedback. But, the first-year science teacher in Dillon's article certainly sounded like she got feedback. And the teachers who allowed texting and eating? Sounds like they got their feedback too, except they didn't like it.

In short, unlike standardized tests, in-classroom evaluations answer a ton of questions about teacher performance. Are they well-prepared? Are they able to simultaneously deliver material and manage student behavior? Are they interesting to listen to? Do they explain concepts clearly? Are they providing students with age- and developmentally-appropriate material? How's their rapport with their students? How receptive are they to student questions? Do they have ways to meaningfully gauge whether their students are learning the material, or is their style all lecture/homework? Are they accommodating students with special needs? Do they seem like they know what they're doing? Yes, most likely the system needs to be honed. Maybe make it so that low-performing teachers have ways to be in contact with their mentors--according to my calculations, mentor teachers evaluate about one teacher per day, so there should be plenty of time for extra support. But the movement from standardized test-based evaluation to in-classroom evaluation can't be a bad thing....

Except that this is not quite the trajectory. Remember when I said that there were Group 1 and Group 2 teachers? Group 1 teacher evaluations are 50% value added student achievement data, 35% in-classroom observation, etc., etc. According to the IMPACT brochure, the goal is to shift from a Group 2 evaluation framework to a Group 1 evaluation framework:

Over the next few years, we will be implementing developmentally appropriate standardized assessments for students in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. We will also be adding end-of-course exams for secondary English, math, science, and social studies. As these assessments are rolled out, more teachers will be moved from Group 2 into Group 1.

If things unfold as proposed, I officially retract all compliments, and predict a bleak future of cheating, cheating, and more cheating. Excuse the cheesy turn of phrase, but a Group 2 evaluation framework is the only way IMPACT can make a positive impact.

U.S. Teachers (Gasp!) Work More

2011-06-26T11:56:00.002-04:00

The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Business Insider are all abuzz, debunking the ever-persistent myth that teachers should make 3/4 the salary of equivalent professions because they only work 3/4 of the year, September through May. Actually, U.S. teachers outwork teachers around the world with 1,097 instructional hours per year, in spite of only middling U.S. test scores:

Yes, 1,097 is the number of hours teachers clock inside the classroom in front of students. This statistic does not include before- and after-hours time devoted to lesson-planning, materials-gathering, grading, IEP-ing, attending staff meetings, attending and/or conducting professional development sessions, calling parents, meeting with parents, and showing up at the uninspired but-oh-so-adorable basketball games of the ten-year-old girls whom you promise, week after week, that yes, I'll be there. I do not know whether "instructional hours" includes recess and/or lunch duty. All teachers at my school had both. Every single day.

Granted, assuming (as The Atlantic does) that U.S. teachers are only in session for 36 weeks per year, this works out to around 30 hours in front of students per week. If a teacher does nothing other than show up every day (see Cameron Diaz's character in Bad Teacher), then granted, it's a pretty cushy job. However, the preceding list adds up to way more than 10 hours. For a self-contained third grade classroom, lesson planning alone took 10 hours each Sunday--and I was damn efficient. Time spent grading and making photocopies Monday morning was extra. And so, the instructional time + planning time average is 1,913 hours per year, which is around 53 hours per week spread across 36 weeks. The number, to me, seems a bit low. But as the WSJ reminds us, the average U.S. worker clocks in at 1,932 hours per year, which if nothing else, justifies paying a 3/4 worker a 4/4 salary.

AND: Let me (again) insert myself for a moment to protest the myth of June, July, and August... For me, August was spent 40 hours per week at in-school professional development; half of June was spent cleaning the classroom and tying up loose ends from the school year that had just ended.

But enough about me. Let's talk about middling U.S. test scores. (Okay, fine, I'm implicated in that, but we all are.) Why, oh why, do U.S. teachers work so hard when their students' scores are so mediocre? This is the question that The Atlantic asks, and it immediately arrives at the D'oh! conclusion that U.S. teachers aren't paid enough, and that U.S. teacher training programs don't draw from an elite enough pool. But, it's not as if international test score rankings correlate with average salaries. Of the countries that rank higher than the U.S. in average salaries (U.S. is #9... from #1 to #8 run Luxembourg, Switzerland, Korea, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Australia, the Netherlands) only Korea is consistently among the top 5 countries on international tests. Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands usually make the top 10, but of the rest, there's nothing really to gloat about. And the infamous Finland pays less, on average, to its teachers than the U.S.

So my turn to immediately arrive at a D'oh! conclusion... One culprit, as I've complained about often on this blog, is dysfunctional school culture. The other? As someone who has taken both ed school courses and liberal arts courses, the education administered in ed schools is watered-down, condescending hooey. In an ed school, you don't learn World History; you learn History for Secondary Social Studies Teachers. I kid you not: The Complete Idiot's Guide to American Government appears on this U. Mass Educ 613 syllabus. How is one supposed to lecture on and answer student questions about the New Deal if one's information comes from a company that also professes expert knowledge in Self-Sufficient Living, Getting Rich, Online Genealogy, and Supercharged Kama Sutra? In spite of our K-12 system, U.S. universities are among the best in the world. When you're eighteen and paying out of your ears for a college education, at least you should be able to take full advantage of that, learning how to learn before learning how to teach.

And yes. With its BA + M.Ed teacher training system, that is precisely what Finland is doing.

My Mild Obsession with Canada Continues...

2011-06-25T18:15:00.000-04:00

Recently, I wrote about the lack of dialogue in the U.S. surrounding the success of Canadian high schoolers on international tests. In response, Dean Shareski reiterated his mantra of "I Don't Give a Crap," arguing that we shouldn't care about the results of Canadian high schoolers on the PISA because we shouldn't care about the PISA. His hypothesis about why, nonetheless, Canadian high schoolers outperform U.S. high schoolers on the PISA is that there are pockets of high-performing Canadian students who dramatically raise the national average. A plausible suggestion, so I decided to investigate.

It's summertime in the World of Ed, so I have more time on my hands than usual, but not quite enough time to undertake a thoroughgoing, probing analysis that could definitively prove the Shareski Hypothesis either invalid or not invalid. So take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

I randomly chose a PISA administration year--2003 as it turns out--because I don't have time to read four 96-page reports about the performance of Canadians on the PISA. (After all, I'm mostly curious about why Canadian high schoolers do well on the PISA; I already have all the evidence I need to have stubbornly made up my mind that they do indeed do quite well on the PISA.) Here's the 2003 report.

In 2003, it's true that Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, and Ontario are always at the top in math, science, and reading; Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick perform closer to the bottom, U.S.-level rather than Finland-level. However, that the worst-performing geographical regions in Canada perform as well as the U.S. average is pretty remarkable. Granted, Massachusetts taken by itself would probably be up there with Finland, and Mississippi would probably be much lower than Prince Edward Island--so this is not to say that there's not high variability in the U.S., just as there is in Canada. But, imagine if Mississippi were performing at the level of Prince Edward Island.... The Magnolia State might even meet the inane proficient-by-2014 requirements of NCLB!

What about pockets of high socioeconomic status correlating with high performance? Here are the stats:

As you can see, there's high variability between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile (as you'd expect anywhere), but there's really not a huge performance difference within a percentile between High SES schools and Low SES schools. Consider that there's a 119 point difference for Low SES schools between the 25th and 75th percentile. There's a 28 point difference between Low and High SES schools for the 25th percentile, and a 17 point difference for the 75th percentile. From this, the variability within schools is much higher than the variability within SES groupings.

A similar analysis can be made with respect to occupational considerations:

Significant here is the fact that students from presumably more rural regions (children of farmers or farm managers) perform quite well; routinely they do as well or better than the children of manual laborers, clerical workers, and in all but the 25th percentile, lower service workers. Now, we can't straightforwardly generalize about urban versus rural performance on the basis of this chart; children of manual laborers, clerical workers, etc., may well live in rural regions. However, in absence of other data, this seems to be a pretty good proxy for urbanity versus rurality.

Mike Caulfield hypothesizes that the accessibility and affordability of the Canadian college system incentivizes high school students to work harder. And such seems to be line with the wisdom of the highly successful Kalamazoo Promise Program and its equivalents. But, like with Finland, I would expect that there are multiple causal explanations with respect to the high performance of Canadian high schoolers on international tests. Caulfield may well be right, but there has to be more to it. Why, oh why, do I know so little about Canada?

Good Thinking, Bad Teacher

2011-06-24T19:27:00.002-04:00

There seemed to be a moderate amount of hype in the ed policy blogosphere about Bad Teacher, the latest Cameron Diaz flick about a blonde, bubble gum chewing English teacher in hooker heels who tries everything, from corporal punishment to sexing her way into a pre-printed copy of the upcoming state test, to win the merit pay bonus given to the teacher with the highest end-of-year test scores. Why? So she can buy a boob job and get the guy:

Alas, in spite of many predictions to the contrary, Bad Teacher was completely devoid of a political subtext. There were absolutely no subtle insinuations about the madness of the high takes testing movement, its perverse incentives, its innocent four-foot-tall victims. It was just a Cameron Diaz movie.

And this is a good thing. I like crude jokes, and laughed at all of them, but it's clear that this is a movie destined for the fast track to Netflix instant viewing. It is not a classic. It would be sad, very sad, if this were trying to be a movie with a message. Grown-ups don't need a Happy Feet.

Song of the Week

2011-06-23T15:19:00.000-04:00

Any teachers out there? When I was in the classroom, my students had a poems and songs binder. Every morning, we would read/sing three or four selections - it was amazing how this daily exercise would build fluency and vocabulary. Every week or so, I would introduce a new selection to add to the rotation.

Well, I wish I was still in the classroom, because I discovered an awesome candidate for Song of the Week. (May require an hour or so in transcribing the lyrics, but totally worth it.) This is Ojibwe rapper Tall Paul doing "Prayers in a Song," which is in English and Ojibwe, and about restoring the Ojibwe language. Not only is it a catchy song that I'm sure my former students would have loved, it's a great chance to teach Native and non-Native students alike about Native Language Restoration projects like the one currently going on in the Ojibwe Nation.

Oh, Canada?

2011-06-22T14:38:00.000-04:00

I have returned from hiatus. It was supposed to last a summer. Instead it lasted a year. I was busy with other projects that seemed important at the time. But I have returned, alas, because I need a place where I can rant about ed policy to my heart's content. Friends, loved ones, and my faithful dog are sick of hearing about it.

My latest rant is not actually about U.S. ed policy, but rather, about the world of U.S. ed policy scholarship and journalism. Those of you who have read this blog before know that while I am bitterly opposed to high stakes testing, I believe that low or no-stakes testing is informative (i.e., exhibits high levels of psychometric validity) and necessary. Therefore, I respect and pay attention to the NAEP (administered to 4th, 8th, and 12th graders within the U.S., measuring a variety of subject areas), TIMSS (administered internationally to 4th, 8th, and 12th graders, measuring math and science), PIRLS (sister test to the TIMSS in reading), and PISA (focusing chiefly on industrialized countries, administered to 11th graders, measuring reading, math, and science).

Today, I was perusing recent PISA and TIMSS results, looking to retroactively settle a debate that my boyfriend and I recently had about the international rank of France's public education system. (It went on a little bit longer than it should have because neither of us had access to a smart phone.) I noticed something that I've noticed before, but have never spent much time thinking about: Canadian high school students do a damn good job on international tests.

Consider the performance of Canadian 15-year-olds on the PISA:

Yes, as my archaic-looking Microsoft Word table illustrates, Canada wasn't exactly red hot in 2009 in math and science or in 2003 in science. Nevertheless, over time, Canada's performance on the PISA is pretty smoking--much more so than its sister to the south, the good ol' U.S. of A.

Canada is not, I should point out, as good on the TIMSS as it is on the PISA, with the exception of the 12th grade TIMSS. This makes perfect sense, since the PISA (again) measures 11th graders, and the TIMMS measures 4th, 8th, and 12th graders. So, there is something about Canadian high schools that is to be envied, admired, and quite possibly, imitated by we Americans.

But what? In general, the performance of Canadian 4th and 8th graders is fairly comparable to American 4th and 8th graders. But the performance of Canadian high schoolers ranks up there with Asia (China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan all do famously well on international tests) and Finland. So what happens in Canadian high schools that rockets its students to the region occupied by the world's best and brightest?

In case you read this far expecting an answer, I must confess that I don't have one. The purpose of today's post is instead to point out the lack of dialogue in the United States surrounding the high achievement of Canadian high schoolers. Newsweek, Time, and/or U.S. News & World Report runs a feature article every five minutes about cultural differences between the U.S. and [insert Asian country X with high international test scores here], and how this translates into the achievement of X's students, leaving many open questions about the social health of individuals living in X, and also, whether the U.S. would want to sacrifice its ability to foster creative, business-minded individuals who can Work in Teams and Network Like Nobody's Business for higher test scores. It seems, moreover, that a bazillion American researchers go to Finland each year on Fulbrights to find out exactly what Finnish public schools are doing. (And we know the answer: high levels of resources poured into the education system, teaching is considered a prestigious occupation and pays accordingly, but Finland is a small socialist democracy with overall low levels of poverty and a highly homogeneous sociopolitical culture, and can't really be compared to the United States in the first place. Etc.)

Why is nobody talking about Canada? From the world's most prolific ed blogger, Eduwonk, a mere ten posts mentioning the word "Canada" since 2004. Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier are always talking about Finland on Bridging Differences, but never their neighbor to the north. I tried to find a book by an American education researcher about why Canada's public high schools are so great, but I'm fairly certain that it doesn't exist.

So what is it? Percentage-wise, Canada spends less of its GDP on education than the U.S., and has a lower GDP (both per capita and overall) than the U.S., so it can't be spending. Is it simply that Canada has lower poverty/inequality than the U.S.? Or is it something structural: better school leadership, more teacher autonomy, less teacher autonomy, smaller class sizes, bigger class sizes, more differentiation/tracking, less differentiation/tracking, some combination of the aforementioned, something not aforementioned? Or is it something in the water? Readers (do you exist, still?), send me articles, studies, personal anecdotes. Send me a library record to a book about why Canada is so awesome, and I'll read it. (The book, not just the library record. I desperately want to know.)

Goodbye, Rhee!

2010-09-22T00:02:00.000-04:00

I am parachuting into the blogosphere for five minutes to promote the most thoughtful (and excellent in all categories) piece of education journalism I've read in awhile. I won't say the author, since I'm probably already guilty of sycophantism when it comes to D.R., but the topic is D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's boot out of the mayoral race. Education was the primary issue on the table, and the electoral results are being viewed as a vociforous public rejection of Michelle Rhee, the D.C. Superintendent of Schools. Ravitch (okay, fine) writes:

Journalists attributed Fenty's loss to the power of the teachers' union, but such an explanation implies that black voters, even in the privacy of the voting booth, lack the capacity to make an informed choice. When the Tea Party wins a race, journalists don't write about who controlled their vote, but about a voter revolt; they acknowledge that those who turned out to vote had made a conscious decision. Yet when black voters, by large margins, chose Vincent Gray over Adrian Fenty, journalists found it difficult to accept that the voters were acting on their own, not as puppets of the teachers' union.

In the post-election analyses, the most common complaint about Fenty was that he was arrogant and out-of-touch with black voters. Rhee spoke about her failure to communicate, though it is hard to think of any figure in the world of American education who had as much media attention as she has had over the past three years. Certainly, she did not lack for opportunities to communicate. Her critics say that her fundamental flaw was arrogance and an indifference to the views of parents and teachers.

Read the full post here. And someday in the near future, The Ed Skeptic will return For Real.

Thoughts on the $320,000 Kindergarten Teacher

2010-07-28T11:34:00.000-04:00

Man, blogging is addictive. I promised myself that I wouldn't this summer. I hoped that this would allow me to focus 200% on my curriculum project. But I blogged yesterday, and I'm unable to control this animal impulse to blog today... Slippery slope, that's all I have to say.

There's a really interesting article in the NYT, based on a paper presented in Cambridge this past spring, about the effect of kindergarten teachers on life-outcomes. The economist Raj Chetty's has confirmed the somewhat well-known (and disheartening) belief that even though the effects of a strong kindergarten teacher are felt early on, the difference between the effects of a strong and a weak kindergarten teacher disappears by middle school. Relevant here is an (albeit methodologically controversial) study released earlier this year about the impact of access to Head Start on children from low-income families. As I blogged about when the study was released, there's an effect, and it's strong, and then it disappears.

However, Raj Chetty's findings are that, even though the effects of a strong kindergarten teacher disappear while a child is in school, the reemerge later on in life. His study of thirty-year-olds has shown that these effects manifest themselves in all sorts of good ways: higher incomes, lower probabilities of being single parents, higher probabilities of saving for retirement, and so on and so on.

And thank you, NYT, for always being critical of basing measures of success on test scores alone. David Leonhardt writes:

The economists don’t pretend to know the exact causes. But it’s not hard to come up with plausible guesses. Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance. The tests that 5-year-olds take may pick up these skills, even if later multiple-choice tests do not.

How do the economists involved in this study want to improve the quality of kindergarten teachers? Pay them. A lot. Like, $320,000. Yes, per year.

Paying them, hm. Sounds familiar. But here's the perennial question: How can we tell which teachers are worth $320,000 if multiple choice test scores are invalid psychometric indicators that taint precisely what they purport to measure? (In the end, as we see all around the country, it's easiest just to turn a blind eye to this question.)

Oops....

2010-07-26T14:27:00.000-04:00

I went on hiatus for the summer and failed to explain why. Currently, I am working on an Indian education curriculum project that makes free standards-aligned unit and lesson plans available to teachers of Lakota students. (And to anyone who wants to teach about the Lakota in a way that is interesting, accurate, and fun.) The project integrates Western science and social studies concepts and the Lakota language and culture. It's an exciting project, and it's eating up all of my time these days. More important than whining about Arne Duncan, methinks.

However, a recent article in the New York Times about test prep for children entering kindergarten and inequity is so compelling that I have to give my endorsement. An excerpt:

In 2008, Mr. Klein made the score on a citywide standardized test the sole criteria for admission. Mr. Klein is a leading testing proponent for everything from grading schools to rating teachers, and he predicted that a citywide test would be a more equitable solution. Since then, there have been two major developments, neither looking much more equitable than the old system. Blacks and Hispanics in gifted kindergarten programs dropped to 27 percent this year under the test-only system, from 46 percent under the old system (66 percent of city kindergartners are black or Hispanic).
And a test-prep industry for 4-year-olds has burgeoned. Bige Doruk opened Bright Kids NYC in 2009, and there is so much demand that she says she’s opening a second site this month. She runs a two-month “boot camp” for the gifted test in the fall that includes eight one-on-one 45-minute sessions and two test-prep books for $1,075.

This is the must-read educational article of the summer. Read the full text here.

Oklahoma is the New Florida

2010-05-30T22:43:00.001-04:00

Remember when Florida almost passed a bill tying teacher pay to student test scores? Remember how everyone went nuts because Florida is widely considered a leader in the ed reform world? Oklahoma—which hasn't been known for its pioneering in several hundred years—passed a watered-down version of the law that Florida didn't. On Friday, Gov. Brad Henry signed Senate Bill 2033, allowing schools to implement performance pay programs. (Florida had gone further, proposing to punish schools which failed to implement such programs.) While many states, like New Jersey, are submitting—or are considering submitting—Race to the Top applications with a provision for a performance pay bill should they receive funding, many Oklahomans believe that actually passing such a bill will give them a huge edge when applications are reviewed. And maybe it will.

However, it is important to keep the following in mind. It is likely that the performance pay bill was passed not because it was widely thought that it would improve the educational prospects of Oklahoman youth, but because it was thought that more funds would improve the educational prospects of Oklahoma youth. Which brings us to the perennial question... Is it really worth it to do whatever it takes to get a Race to the Top grant? As Diane Ravitch put it when the Florida bill was being debated, "We may be the first nation in the world with a federal program intended to dumb down our schools and destroy the teaching profession." Ravitch argues in this particular blog post, her most recent book, and elsewhere, that the seemingly meritocratic system of performance pay disincentivizes teachers from taking on the most challenging students and teaching subjects other than the ones tested (like science and social studies). In other words, a system is not very meritocratic if teachers are incentivized to game the system. (Or more insidiously, if they are punished for failing to game the system.) Moreover, performance pay programs destroy state standardized tests as a valid psychometric measure of learning.

If Race to the Top had taken the form of a federal congressional bill, there could have been meaningful political debate about the pros and cons of the ed reform platform that the grant program advances. However, now the debate seems to be of a more pragmatic nature—should states pass legislative measures that would improve their chances of getting a grant, or shouldn't they? In other words, the Race to the Top reform platform isn't up for debate, so it's not being debated. Bypassing Congress has resulted in both genuine and instrumental (towards the goal of securing funds) support for performance pay, charter schools, etc., and of course, a fair amount of opposition. The thing is, those who are instrumentally supporting the Race to the Top platform don't really have a political voice—they can't, or they'd jeopardize their own chances at winning a grant. Thus, the polarization that Race to the Top encourages is not meaningful (in which case, again, it could have led to meaningful political debate).

However, we are seeing a highly political polarization, and thus a petty one. You are: pro-union, anti-corporate, pro-public, pro-children. Or you are: anti-laziness, pro-corporate, pro-charters, pro-children. Can't anyone out there see that safeguarding the jobs of undeserving individuals is undesirable, but that the proposed market-based solution (by virtue of its application to children rather than capital) would have externalities not present in corporate America?

Not Arne, that's for sure.

We're Keeping the Slave Trade: A Dubious Victory for Those Who Find Texas Scary

2010-05-22T13:48:00.000-04:00

A watered-down version of the revised Texas state social studies standards was approved by the State Board of Education yesterday. The end result is that the 5 million children housed in the Texas public education system will not begin using the euphemistic "Atlantic triangular trade" instead of the slave trade when learning about U.S. history. A reason to celebrate?

Randi Weingarten Speaks About (Not Out, or Out Against) Race to the Top

2010-05-20T14:49:00.002-04:00

Some would say that this is a political position, but I think it's sincere. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the two most powerful teachers unions in the country, speaks of her mixed feelings about Race to the Top:

This illustrates that the much-hyped UNIONS V. ED DEPARTMENT match-up is, well, more complicated than the media commonly makes it out to be. Go figure.

Arne Duncan Salutes Central Falls...

2010-05-19T15:54:00.000-04:00

...But what for?

A recent press release from the Department of Education on the Central Falls turnaround situation is utterly confusing. Arne Duncan's press statement makes it seem as if Central Falls High School is the model of, well, the school turnaround model. Au contraire! Central Falls completely and totally failed at instating a turnaround: all of the fired staff were rehired. (According to official materials from the Department of Education, a turnaround is when schools "replace the principal and rehire no more than 50% of the staff, and grant the principal sufficient operational flexibility...to fully implement a comprehensive approach to substantially improve student outcomes.") So what is Arne Duncan talking about? What is there to applaud about the Central Falls situation? It illustrates precisely that it's hard (and perhaps prohibitively so) to replace one teaching staff with a different teaching staff. Duncan, however, doesn't seem to notice that applying the turnaround model to Central Falls HS didn't work. Here's the text of the oh-so-ambiguous press release:

"On behalf of the Obama administration, I salute the administrators, union leadership and teachers in Central Falls and Rhode Island for working through what has been a very difficult period and coming to agreement on a plan to improve their school. Turning around a high school is very tough work that asks more of everyone -- students, parents, staff, administrators and the community. It is clear from this agreement that everyone is willing to give more in terms of time, training and tutoring. It provides for more engagement among students and teachers, more support and collaboration among the staff, more meaningful evaluation for teachers, and a greater voice for teachers in managing the school and driving reform. Now the hard work begins, but we can look forward to a day soon when the students in Central Falls High School will be getting an education that truly prepares them for college and a career."

It's always been my belief that while skepticism is healthy, cynicism is not. However, nothing like an Arne Duncan press release to turn a skeptic into a cynic... Time to drop $7.99 on a new domain name.

Wanted: A Water-to-Wine Miracle that Produces Three Million New Teachers

2010-05-18T14:58:00.001-04:00

As billions of Edskeptic.com fans worldwide may have noticed, there has been a serious lack of updates in the past month. My excuse? As I was being abducted by aliens, my dog ate my computer.

Moving on to more interesting things. Yesterday, the New York Times reported on Central Falls High School, which (I didn't know this) is one of Rhode Island's lowest-performing schools, and is located in the poorest city in the state. Anyway, the story is this. Under the Race to the Top-inspired turnaround model, all of the Central Falls HS staff were fired. Then, they were re-hired. And everyone lived happily ever after.

This story raises a giant question. Following the turnaround model, where are all these magnificent new teachers going to come from? In areas with populations less than 20,000 (like Central Falls), it is most likely that teaching positions are filled by local residents. Unless there is a sudden influx of newcomers armed with Rhode Island teaching licenses and ready to repopulate Central Falls High School, I don't see how this situation could have had any other outcome besides hiring back the whole staff. According to the 2008 Census, there are around 3 million K-12 teachers in the United States. Current teacher attrition statistics suggest that the profession isn't exactly growing. The Central Falls situation, then, is a sort of microcosm of reshuffling which, far from reforming the culture of a school, in all likelihood only serves to turn turnaround into turnover. (Or maybe worse, replace teachers with disgruntled employees.)

The turnaround model is based upon the philosophy that casting out the bad apples ain't good enough. In other words, failing schools are marked by a systemic culture of dysfunction that can only be reversed by radically altering the composition of the school. One way to do this is by charter-fying a public school, dispersing the student population among a network of local charters, and throwing together a fresh student body with very few of its original members. Another way to do this is by firing the staff and hiring a different one. Clearly, the latter was unsuccessful in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and the data prove to be ambivalent about whether the former would have been a better option. Anyway, my point is this. Abstractly, radically reforming the culture of a failing school is a great idea—the right idea, in my opinion. However, how to do this in a town of 20,000? And as the example of New York City shows, in a large metropolitan area of, say, 22.2 million, the question still stands. Where is a team of awesome individuals equipped with teaching licenses (and unified around the singular mission of running a functional school driven by a culture of excellence) going to come from?

It’s politically unsavvy to proceed with Step One of the turnaround model without having an answer. Unfortunately at this point, the question is more or less rhetorical.

Cash for Union Signatures

2010-04-25T23:35:00.000-04:00

Wow. Today's Wall Street Journal reports that Ohio, and possibly Connecticut, are offering "cash in exchange for signatures" from union leaders in conjunction with Round 2 of Race to the Top. I did some snooping around, and found nothing in other newspapers to support this. I believe it, but in the words of SNL's Seth Meyers, REALLY?!

In news from the other side of the Atlantic, British Conservative MP David Cameron is pushing for institutionalized education in the UK to learn from the United States. As The Guardian reports:

He pledged to take on a "culture of jaded defeatism, of dumbing down to the lowest common denominator, of mind-numbing political correctness".

A key plank of Conservative education policy is to allow parents to establish their own schools, based on models in the US and Sweden. So far, 106 parent groups have expressed an interest. The idea of parents setting up their own schools has come in for criticism. But Cameron said it was "pessimists, cynics and sceptics" who said the policy wouldn't work. "They say that people can't be bothered with the hassles. That parents don't care enough about their children and their communities to set up schools.

It's interesting to note that parent-established schools are markedly different than the charters advocated by Obama's education cabinet. In fact, parent-established schools are in line with the model of pre-revolutionary American schooling, the era of one-room schoolhouses and town hall meetings and the like. In other words, this is radical localism, and very different from the fashionable hedge-fund charters advocated by Arne. (I do mean fashionable; the link will take you to the Fashion section of the New York Times.)

In this case, even British conservatives are more liberal than a certain prominent American democrat whose last name makes me think of donuts.

Unions Cause Mass. Chaos!

2010-04-14T21:45:00.000-04:00

First off, I don't apologize for the terrible pun. You know you loved it.

When I started blogging, I had this idea that I was going to write about education policy. However, as I've realized, what's usually most relevant to reform is actually education politics. There's a difference. For example, as reported in today's Boston Globe, the great state (excuse me, commonwealth) of Massachusetts just got hit by a shocker. The MA chapter of the American Federation of Teachers decided to boycott the state's second-round Race to the Top application. That means that union members won't sign a document showing their support of the application. That means that the application will be very much weakened--one of the things RTTT applications are evaluated on is the extent to which everyone in a state is on board with proposed reform efforts. And, a possible $250 million is at stake.

True, as Corey wrote last week on her Thoughts on Education Policy blog, it's perhaps crazy that states are willing to make such dramatic and controversial changes for what, proportional to state education budgets, isn't all that much money. My guess is that Race to the Top is an excuse for anti-union reformers (who have always been anti-union) to gain momentum and new support, since this RTTT stuff is in the news a lot. In other words, the teacher union issue is suddenly getting mainstream attention, and therefore, the sides are getting more and more polarized--ostensibly because of the money, but really, because this has been coming for years.

To be honest, I'm pretty opinionated about a lot of things, but I don't know what to make of the teacher union issue anymore. Yes, I want good teachers to keep their jobs and to be respected. Yes, I want lousy teachers to be fired--really fired, and not just put in a rubber room. But there's so much propaganda, so much volatile, partisan speech, it's hard to have an intelligent conversation about unions these days. Is there anyone else out there who hasn't yet made up their mind? Can't we just talk about the good and bad practices related to unions, rather than rehearsing the same old hackneyed generalizations again and again and again?

As a parting gift, NPR's recent edition of Intelligence Squared is the closest thing to an intelligent debate about teacher unions that I've heard in awhile. (In fact, the whole premise of Intelligence Squared is intelligent debate.) You can listen here or find the podcast on, you know, whatever you use to find podcasts.

And for the exact opposite of intelligent debate, watch what Albany did:

A Lecture for High School Girls

2010-04-13T20:24:00.002-04:00

Sometimes when you're a gal with an education policy blog, you come across something that is so ridiculous, so hilarious, that you want to want to disseminate it to the world. (The Ed Skeptic gets about 6.8 billion unique hits per day, so I do mean the world....) However, there's sometimes a tiny glitch: it has nothing to do with education. But I've recently discovered that if you stare at something long enough, you can make it relate to education. (In the end, EVERYTHING relates to education.)

First, you should know that I came across this when I was paging through Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil--don't ask. My justification for posting it is twofold.

I rewrote the entire passage on the title page of Beyond Good and Evil when I was an undergraduate in college. (Get it? College? Education? It's relevant.)
Read the last line.

Without further ado, Nietzsche's words:

Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the dreadful thoughtlessness with which the nourishment of the family and the master of the house is provided for! Woman does not understand what food means: and she wants to be the cook! If woman were a thinking creature she would, having been the cook for thousands of years, surely have had to discover the major facts of physiology, and likewise gained possession of the art of healing. It is through bad female cooks--through the complete absence of reason in the kitchen, that the evolution of man as been longest retarded and most harmed: even today things are hardly any better. A lecture for high-school girls.

A Very Serious PSA about CA's Proposed Budget Cuts

2010-04-10T12:32:00.002-04:00

This video is being passed around among educators like a California wildfire. Check it out:

Hot for Teachers w/ Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green from Megan Fox

Diane Ravitch Live: The Bootleg Edition (Part II)

2010-04-09T15:04:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, I wrote about what Diane Ravitch, Marty West, and Dan Koretz said at the 4/6/10 Harvard Graduate School of Education Askwith Forum. To summarize, Ravitch relayed the arguments she made in her new book. There is a huge expenditure of time, money, and political capital on debating the effectiveness of charter schools, though in reality, only 3% of New York City’s students attend charters. (And NYC is the charter school capital of the nation.) What about the remaining 97% of NYC students housed in public schools? How can we improve our public schools? Ravitch is against quick fixes, and advocates reform efforts that are research-based. These tried-and-true educational practices are not new, nor are they hip and sexy B-school innovations. Diane wants better teaching and a better curriculum. Non-high stakes tests like the NAEP can measure our progress towards these ends without incentivizing teachers to teach to the test. Research dollars should be spent on improving our public schools.

As I wrote yesterday, Ravitch’s is not an uncontroversial position. Here’s what Marty West said in his scathing remarks:

There are many things to be admired about Diane’s new book. However, there is something missing. Diane ignores the failings of the system the reforms set out to improve. Incentives and sanctions are right for business enterprises, but not for schools, she argues. Her view seems to be that incentives can either be in a system, or not. But that’s not how the world works. There are incentives within the structures of all systems, and the question is, what are these and how can they improve?

Open democratic governance may be a laudable goal, but it’s naïve. Given that voter turnout for school board elections is in the single digits, we cannot trust that democratic governance alone will be able to reform a system that is failing America’s students. Diane uses data in her book like a lawyer, presenting weak evidence when it’s linked to her story, and goes lengths to discount the strong evidence when it goes against her story. This is true of her use of the lottery-based charter studies in Boston. In fact, parents were expressing the most demand for the best charter schools, which is exactly how a market-based system should work. Also, in regard to the Washington D.C. voucher system, there were overall effects, and no differences across subgroups. She perjures this, and says that vouchers don’t help subgroups. This negative formation is different from concluding that there is “no difference” between charters and public schools, which is accurate. Also, Diane does not talk about effect of competition enabled by charter sector. Charters raise the bar and helping public schools improve.

A central theme of Diane’s book is—Beware of Panaceas. She says it’s hard to improve a school, and it is. However, to say that the reforms advocated by the charter school movement are not research-based is inaccurate. We need to go in the direction that works.

I’m going to skip over Dan Koretz’s remarks, which were, for the most part, laudatory. This is what Diane argued in response to Marty West’s criticism that she offers no alternative solutions that could reform a failing system:

Dr. W. Edwards Deming is from a business background, and he opposes merit pay. If you hire good people, he argues, the organization suffers if you create competition between people who work alongside each other. Teachers don’t have their students randomly assigned, so it’s not fair to base their salaries on the test scores that their students receive. Competition is appropriate for the private sector, but the education sector is concretely different from the private sector.

Studies have pointed to the rising need for the remediation of basic skills in the first year of college. Time and money is devoted to teaching reading, writing, mathematics to students who come from a system that passes them through year after year that does not do social promotion. Teachers are not slackers. They are not waiting for someone to dangle more money before they get their students’ scores up. They’re working hard.

So, we need long-term plan for improving teaching profession. First, we need to recruit the very best, just like Japan does. Second, we need to make sure that teachers major or—as in the case in Germany, double major—in the academic subjects that they are teaching. Finally, principals need to have taught, so they know how to help teachers improve their practices. We need excellent, well-prepared teachers, and the principal should be a master teacher.

It’s funny. Arne Duncan says that the assessments we use are no good. Then he turns around and wants teacher pay to be based on these assessments. One of my favorite examples of American assessments was posted by a reader on the Bridging Differences blog. The reader described two parallel testing items appearing on the Finnish and the American 12^th grade science assessment. On the Finnish exam, the student was presented with a description of a virus, and had to explain what the virus was, what drug they would use to combat the virus, and why they made this choice. On the American exam, the student was given four choices, and asked to identify which one was an element in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Massachusetts has done a great job at standards-based education—not just accountability. We can learn from them. And the Washington Post needs to stop referring to “failing schools”—teachers may be heroic individuals doing a terrific job. But, they face incredible challenges, and we need to support their efforts. What should be done? We need a team of experts to go to a low-performing school, identify what’s wrong, and help it implement the reforms needed for it to get better. If school culture is toxic, only then should we shut a school down. But give the school a real chance to improve!

There are studies that use mathematical modeling to show that if you have five excellent teachers in a row, you close the achievement gap. I asked an economist responsible for one of these studies if he could point me to a school district where this has happened. No, he said. But the model shows that this should be the case. In my opinion, we need a twenty-year plan to reform the teaching profession. We need to learn from other countries that train their teachers well and give teachers the respect they deserve.

The debate between Marty West and Diane Ravitch vis-à-vis market-based reform measures and accountability has a salient takeaway. It’s hard—and probably wrong—to make generalizations. Again and again, Ravitch emphasizes that she’s rooting for the best charter schools; these schools would not exist without the charter movement. However, the accountability structures of the past decade have produced many, many unforeseen by-products—and this is to the detriment of American education. So, the proper comportment towards experimental reform measures (i.e. applying the principals of the business sector to the education sector) should be one of skepticism.

I like this.

Diane Ravitch Live: The Bootleg Edition (Part I)

2010-04-07T23:00:00.003-04:00

Last night, Diane Ravitch spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a part of their Askwith Forum series. I was there, and man, it was an all-star lineup. Along with Diane, you had Dan Koretz, psychometrician, critic of the high stakes testing movement, and author, most recently, of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. And, you had Marty West of the pro-charter school, pro-market journal Education Next. I realize that with “all-star lineup,” the implication is that all these folks are playing on the same team. And it’s true that each discussant shares in a serious desire for educational excellence for all American children. But there, the commonalities end. And sparks flew in a major way. It was about as exciting as things get if you’re an ed policy nerd.

Diane Ravitch spoke first—the reason for the event was the recent release of her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. I attempted to transcribe everything she said. I'm not going to lie—the woman’s my hero and this is the first time I heard her speak. So there were times when I stopped typing and, um, gazed at the platform with fawning admiration. So, you get the highlights—this is the Cliff’s Notes version in case you haven’t (shame, shame) taken the time to read the 242-page invective on the past decade of ed reform. I still plan to review the book on this blog; I just haven’t been able to separate myself from my Ravitch-sycophantism in order to give it an objective trial. But enough about me. Here’s Diane:

There were many titles I was considering for my new book. One was No Silver Bullets. Another idea was Measure and Punish, which ended up being the heading for my chapter on No Child Left Behind. Another was Data Mania. And finally, there was Lies Our Policy-Makers Told Us About School Reform.

I ended up going with The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Contrary to what reviewers said in the New York Times and elsewhere, I didn’t do a 180-degree turn on my views. Readers of the blog, Bridging Differences, that I write with educator Deborah Meier, know that I’ve been criticizing No Child Left Behind for years. Moreover, I’m not opposed to testing, just the misuse of testing for accountability purposes. There’s a naïve belief out there that test scores are infallible and certain, and this is not the case. And, I am not opposed to choice—except when it undermines public education. In fact, I’d like to quote John Maynard Keynes, who once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Some said that I should have known better about No Child Left Behind in the beginning, but I guess those people are smarter than me.

We need a quantum improvement in American education across the board. Charter schools were originally set up to be new schools created by teachers to solve the problems of public education. They were supposed to be experimental schools run by teachers, where students who had the most trouble learning in public school would get a chance to succeed in a different environment. The founders of the charter movement, including Albert Shanker, then-president of the American Federation of Teachers, believed that lessons learned from charter school experiments could brought back to public schools. In other words, the relationship between charter schools and public schools was supposed to be a collaborative rather than a competitive affair.

Like I’ve always said, all children in a democratic society should have a high-quality education. As John Dewey wrote in 1910, "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must be what the community want for all of its children." I thought that accountability and choice would further this goal, but market-based education has turned into a large effort to privatize public education. The new reformers have argued that structural change and managerial change will improve our schools. And the media refers to the education industry—note choice of the word ‘industry’. All that matters to them is, Did the scores go up? But measure-and-punish is a ridiculous philosophy, and the goal of proficiency by 2014 is a ridiculous goal. No nation has ever reached goal of one hundred percent proficiency in reading and math—and yet we’re closing public schools because they’re not on track to make it one hundred percent. Meeting this goal at any costs has caused states to lower standards. It has changed the metrics of the test and cut scores to create the appearance of gains that students didn’t make. It has narrowed the curriculum by eliminating science, social studies, music, and art, in schools that are not improving their scores. And, it has replaced instruction with test prep.

NCLB, in other words, is a punitive law. In 2009, more than 30,000 schools—one-third of all public schools—failed to make adequate yearly progress. In Science magazine, it was predicted that in 2014, no schools in California will make adequate yearly progress. Are we going to shut all the schools in California down?

Moreover, it would be unethical for Congress to mandate reforms that are not research-based. School closings and privatization are based on educated guesses about what might work. Congress does not know how to reform schools because Congress is not made up of educators. Congress lacks the knowledge, wisdom, and experience to reform schools.

But Congress is not even behind the new federal education agenda. It was a shock that Obama embraced what used to be known as the Republican agenda for reform. Privatization is now the mainstream agenda. Race to the Top required no Congressional authorization because it was paid for with stimulus money that was already authorized for use at the education cabinet’s discretion. Obama’s cabinet wrote its own priorities without Congressional oversight. Democrats in Congress would have stopped them, had they had to receive authorization. It’s not at all surprising that Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spellings, is a Race to the Top supporter.

The president and secretary like to say that they support whatever works, that they are not partisans or ideologues. But, the reform strategies they support are not research-based. Duncan’s Chicago reforms have been largely discounted by researchers. Chicago still one of the bottom-performing districts in the nation, along with Washington D.C., Cleveland, and Detroit. In general, the NAEP, which is a no-stakes test which measures reading and math for fourth and eighth graders, is a good measure of performance. And the NAEP shows little to no improvements as No Child Left Behind has unfolded. In reading, there have no improvements from 1998 to 2009—and this is the decade of accountability. We are setting ourselves up to miseducate a generation.

The public thinks that tests are a barometer—they simply tell you what’s going on. But, testing conditions vary. Student scores are not, as the Obama administration seems to think, simply a measure of teacher effectiveness. Teaching to the test improves test scores, actually. But it narrows the curriculum, and is not what we want our teachers to be doing.

The media loves the story of the one charter school they find where every senior goes to Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Princeton. But, there are excellent charters, and there are abysmal charters. Most are somewhere in the middle. But on the NAEP, charters have never out-performed public schools—and especially not for minorities, not for ELL students, not for special education students. Only 17% of all charter schools performed better than the public school on the NAEP. 47% are the same as public schools with equivalent demographics. 36% perform worse in matching studies where charters compared to public schools. In New York City, it is true that charters save money on capital spending and rent. But, the public schools lose out on art rooms, music rooms, and so on. I’m rooting for the best charter schools; I want them to succeed. But I want our nation’s public schools to succeed as well.

New York City, the “ground zero” of the charter movement, only has 3% of its students in charter schools. We invest a lot of time, money, and resources in order to turn this 3% into 6% percent. But what about the remaining 94% of students left in the public schools? In spite of how much time we spend fighting about it, the charter movement isn’t big enough to make a difference. Charter schools won’t close the achievement gap. We need to improve our public schools. We need to implement high curricular standards and recruit the best principals. We need to look at countries like Japan, which seeks out the best individuals for the teaching profession, and treats them with respect. We need to revitalize the teaching profession, and not punish individuals who are doing their best.

Dying to know what Marty West said in response? It was caustic, smart, challenging, and I’ll write about it tomorrow. STAY TUNED.

Tales From a Catholic School

2010-04-02T17:15:00.000-04:00

Twelve-year-olds are hilarious.

A death in the family brought me to my hometown, and that meant that yesterday, I got to go to visit my twelve-year-old cousin’s school. It’s a Catholic School, and in honor of Holy Thursday, the students were performing “The Living Stations of the Cross,” a tribute to Jesus Christ’s last day as a non-reincarnated human being. My cousin had been selected as Christ’s understudy, and had expressed excitement at a rumor that the leading actor had come down with the flu.

Well, as it turns out, the rumor was unfounded. When I walked into the church with my cousin’s parents and grandfather, there was Jesus, looking hale. My cousin’s mother said to him, “You’re alive!”

Without skipping a beat, he replied, “Not for very long.”

Sadly, Not an April Fool's Prank

2010-04-01T22:48:00.001-04:00

The latest issue of Rethinking Schools came in the mail. In general, I'm lukewarm about the publication. However, getting the new issue reminded me that last quarter, Rethinking Schools printed a fantastic article by Kelly McMahon, a Milwaukee Public Schools kindergarten teacher. The article was too good to summarize, and not yet posted online, so I began retyping it so that I could quote it at length. And then, I got frustrated. Sad. Confused. And I couldn't go on. Why, oh why, would Milwaukee Public Schools do this to those nascent young minds who were young enough to still be excited about yellow buses, school lunches, their teacher, and learning? Here's an except:

I have spent the last six years teaching 5-year-old kindergarten for Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) in Milwaukee, Wis. During this time, I have seen a decrease in district initiatives that are developmentally appropriate, and an increase in the amount of testing and data collection for 5-year-olds. Just when I thought the district couldn’t ask for any more test scores or drills or practice, a new initiative and data system pops up for my school to complete. My school has not met our Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the past three years. Due to our failure to meet AYP, we are now a School Identified for Improvement (SIFI), with Level Two status.

The students in my classroom during the 2008-09 school year completed more assessments than during any of my prior years of teaching kindergarten:

Milwaukee Public Schools’ 5-Year-Old Kindergarten Assessment (completed three times a year)
On the Mark Reading Verification Assessment (completed three times a year)
A monthly writing prompt focused on different strands of the Six Traits of Writing
28 assessments measuring key early reading and spelling skills
Chapter pre- and post-tests for all nine math chapters completed
Three additional assessments for each math chapter completed
A monthly math prompt
Four Classroom Assessments Based on Standards (CABS) per social studies chapter (20 total)
Four CABS assessments per science chapter (20 total)
Four CABS assessments per health chapter (20 total)

I recently learned that my students will also be expected to complete four benchmark assessments beginning in the 2010-11 school year.

This list does not include the pre- and post-Marzano vocabulary tests (which I refuse to have my students complete because the assessment design is entirely developmentally inappropriate) or the writing and math portfolios we are required to keep...

Okay. Let's assume, for a minute, that multiple-choice tests are developmentally-appropriate for kindergarteners and have high levels of psychometric validity. (By the way, they're not and they don't.) With this much testing, when does Ms. McMahon's class have time to learn? How can it raise its test scores if it's always being tested?

As my heart bled for Ms. McMahon, I realized that--wait a second. My school was bad, too. That's why I'm an opponent of the high stakes testing movement in the first place. And I decided to make a list of what my third graders were subjected to each year:

Basic Spelling Inventory (three times a year)
Basic Phonics Inventory (three times a year)
High Frequency Word Assessment (three times a year)
Grade-Level Reading Passage Assessment (three times a year)
Writing Sample (three times a year)
E-Learning Written Math Assessment (two parts, three times a year)
E-Learning Math Skills Battery (four parts, three times a year)
GMADE/GRADE Testing (three times a year)
STEP Testing (once per year)

Items 2, 3, and 4 had to be administered individually, which meant that students were learning without a teacher while I was testing. Paired with items 7 (small groups) and 1, 5, and 6 (whole group), these assessments generally took a week each administration. The GMADE/GRADE took another week each administration. The STEP took two weeks. That means 8 weeks of the school year was spent testing. 8 weeks. That's about 2 months. Yes, out of 9.

Oh, and I should mention. 1/3 of the students in the school were put into a remedial reading program, which meant that they had additional DORA/DOMA testing three times a year. All this is an addition to regular unit tests, which were actually necessary to see if students were mastering, say, the third grade math concepts that I was explicitly teaching.

The insanity knows no bounds....

Educational Succession in the Lone Star State

2010-03-31T11:19:00.008-04:00

An article in today's Washington Post is called "A message for Washington on schools: Don't mess with Texas." It's about the Texas State Board of Education's Don McLeroy, the Tea Party, and the Texan educational succession.

Will future generations of politically-malcontent young intellectuals romanticize the Tea Party movement just as mine couldn't help but admire historical accounts of attempted proletariat revolutions? I wonder.

The Common Core Standards and the Elimination of Anarchy from the American Classroom

2010-03-29T15:44:00.003-04:00

Andie lunges, grabs my hair tie, and runs across the room. “Not the ponytail,” I tell Mitch, who’s fuming over some pilfered school supplies. “Let’s get her.” We jump over desks and each grab an arm. “Your Bratz notebook’s gonna regret being born,” I whisper into Andie’s ear. She runs away, horrified.

Standard 3.C.1.4. seems pretty straightforward. It reads: Explain why communities have rules. To be fair, there’s a chapter in the textbook titled, “Why Communities Have Rules.” Now, surveying the battlefield of a classroom, I realize that assigning questions about the bold-print words perhaps would’ve done the trick…

Standing on his desk, Danny throws his fists in the air and emits a primordial scream. Nope, the end-of-chapter questions wouldn’t give us nearly as much to talk about.

Seven minutes are up, and I declare “NO RULES!” to be over. I deploy the lethal combination of tactical bribery and psychological manipulation, and order is restored to the classroom with a fair amount of speed. It’s clean, too. They know I’m anal. Soon I have twenty pensive third graders arranged in a circle, and they’re wondering, “Why’d Teacher just have us do that?”

Experiential learning is not for every single day. It’s terrifying from the standpoint of classroom management, especially when the whole idea of the exercise is to throw classroom management out the window in order that your students learn about the relationship between law and order. (We had a nice Socratic discussion connecting detention to retributive justice as well.) Sure, there was some of this:

“That was fun!”

“I love anarchy!”

“But what if everyone had weapons?” I ask.

Wild applause and chanting. “STATE-OF-NAT-URE! STATE-OF-!”

But how many nine-year-olds could use both “Thomas Hobbes” and “chaos” correctly in the same sentence…in an unrelated writing assignment…three weeks later?

The Common Core Standards (Obama’s attempt at a “college and career ready” national curriculum) scare me. There has been a lot of controversy as to whether there’d be standards in all subject areas, or just math and literacy. Science standards are controversial because we still can’t seem to agree upon whether evolution should be taught in schools. Social studies standards are controversial because supposedly, if you’re deciding upon what historical figures to focus on, this is going to betray a certain ideological bent.

The compromise is the The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies and Science—never thought I’d say this, but can we please get an acronym? These standards, alas, are revelatory of a trend that is becoming increasingly common in low-income schools. At my school, for instance, teachers were told to “just focus on reading and math.” In other words, we were to integrate science and social studies into the literacy block. “Integrate” means reading about animal adaptations and Harriet Tubman. (And accordingly, answering the questions about the bold-print words.) This, I have no problem with—except when it’s to the exclusion of science and social studies as their own subjects. I was not a perfect teacher, and perhaps others were more talented at integration. But, if I didn’t have 30 minutes per day deliberately set aside for my students to learn about social studies and science, my focus would have been on vocabulary, decoding strategies, and crafting written responses rather than concepts. These concepts (e.g. why communities have rules) are easy to address superficially. But for kids to get it—I mean, really get it—there needs to be something that the educational literature refers to as a meaningful learning experience. The goal is to create a rational understanding that is not necessarily present when a kid is successfully able to parrot back a bold-print definition. Really getting these concepts is essential to readiness for college, careers, and life.

“Teacher, I didn’t like the state of nature. Tomorrow I want to learn.”

Interested individuals have until the first week in April to submit feedback on the Common Core Standards. Think it’s a spineless move to purge science and social studies from the American classroom just because these subjects are subject to political hullabaloo? Be an activist by clicking here.

RTTT Winners: Delaware and Tennessee

2010-03-29T14:07:00.002-04:00

Today Arne Duncan announced that Delaware and Tennessee have won first-round Race to the Top grants. Delaware got $100 million and Tennessee, $500 million. Both states were awarded more than was expected, but more states were expected to win first-round grants. Read Duncan's speech here.

Reading Scores Stay Stagnant

2010-03-27T13:44:00.001-04:00

The New York Times' Sam Dillon reports on national test trend score trends: math scores have improved, while reading scores have stayed stagnant.

You may have heard of NAEP--they're the "Nation's Report Card" folks and an arm of the U.S. Education Department. They administer standardized reading and math tests at grades 4 and 8, and use the results to make pretty graphs like this:

With an increasingly disproportionate amount of focus on test preparation skill-drill, it's little wonder that reading scores didn't improve....and that math scores did. I don't claim to know the extent to which improved math scores is a measure of meaningful improvement in math, but I guess it's heartening to know that scores went up. If eighth grade students repeatedly practice questions like this during their math block every day for a year, a lifelong love for algebra may not be galvanized, but they would learn about deriving the correct operation and mathematical expression from word problems that actually have real-world applicability. If high stakes testing in math means that more time is spent on deciphering challenging word problems and less time on coloring worksheets and crossword puzzles, I am for it.

Reading is another matter. In the past on this blog, I've used "test preparation skill-drill" to indicate a wide range of reading practices, but the common denominator is the substitution of short passages contrived to measure a student's use of canned comprehension strategies for literature. The genesis of this curricular approach is found in the textbook-ization of reading, the basal readers of yore and the read-passage-answer-workbook-questions algorithm of modern commercial curriculums like Houghton Mifflin and McGraw-Hill. The advantage, of course, is that it is cheaper to buy a textbook compilation with 30-50 stories than to buy 30-50 books when the goal is to have print directly in front of every individual student. Further, in cases where the teacher is no more than a warm body, reading textbooks are teacher-proof, giving explicit directions as to what should be said to students before, during, and after a passage or story to maximize comprehension (i.e. answering questions correctly).

Thing is, the read-passage-answer-workbook-questions algorithm changes the way reading is taught. In an ideal world--say, one in which E.D. Hirsch was the U.S. Secretary of Education and equipped with the supernatural ability to mold classrooms after his own image--all fourth graders would be reading novels like Number the Stars. A content-rich lesson on World War II, the rise of Hitler, and the Holocaust would precede the start of the book. Not only is this information valuable for its own sake, it is literally impossible to make sense of the events of the story without understanding the historical context. Over the course of several weeks, students would read the book, answer meaningful questions and ask them, all while the teacher uses the book to guide students towards their own thoughts about the world, its history, and human nature. The idea is to teach in a way that students are thinking about the implications of Number the Stars even when the reading block is over, to inspire students to have thoughtful conversations with their families and their peers, to be self-motivated to literature on their own. There is something special about a chapter of Number the Stars that is not captured in a 500-word passage on pizza.

Your assignment is to critically reflect on the following:

If schools spend billions of dollars each year on commercial reading textbooks, are we even giving teachers a chance to teach this way?
Check out the McGraw-Hill workbook that accompanies the third grade reading textbook, available for free online here. Many (including Sam Dillon) speculate that reading scores remain stagnant because students aren't reading on their own. Is this surprising if they're not taught how to read a book--I mean really read a book--prior to high school?

"If Schools Compete, Kids Win"

2010-03-23T00:34:00.000-04:00

I’ll admit it. There is no question facing the ed policy world that brings me an equivalent amount of inner turmoil. I just can’t decide. Ironic, because the question is that of CHOICE.

I finally received Diane Ravitch’s new book in the mail, so I’ll be outlining the case against school choice later this week. For the other side of the story, I turn to two economists, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, whose widely acclaimed Nudge (2008) I recently read. (For those who care, Sunstein currently holds a place in the Obama administration, heading up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.) Nudge is an attempt to reclaim two words that seem contradictory to each other, and in fact, have sometimes been used as slurs in recent politicking, “libertarian” and “paternalist.” The libertarian paternalist is someone who believes that the government shouldn’t make choices for individuals (à la libertarianism), but that, because there is no such thing as a neutral arrangement of options, it is justifiable for government policies to engineer those outcomes that are considered to be best for the individual (à la paternalism). (Get it? Libertarian paternalism?)

The classic example is school cafeterias. Studies have shown that it matters where you place desserts, where you place the chocolate milk, where you place the carrot sticks. Again, there is no such thing as a random or neutral arrangement. You have to put those desserts somewhere, and where you put them will affect how many kids choose to purchase them. Sunstein and Thaler don’t want school cafeterias to maximize profit; they want school cafeterias to maximize health—and this is crucial—without taking away a kid’s freedom to make unhealthy choices if he so desires. (This could be accomplished by, say, banning chocolate milk and dessert.) The libertarian paternalist believes that the person in charge of the school cafeteria should “nudge” students to make healthy choices by going with the arrangement where students are most likely to buy carrot sticks and least likely to buy desserts.

Okay, enough with the book report. What I really want to talk about is Sunstein and Thaler’s chapter on school choice. They argue, first off, that children from wealthy families have automatically more choice than children from low-income families because they can afford to send their children to private schools. Extending school choice to low-income families is thus an egalitarian move. However, since many low-income parents will keep their children at their neighborhood school rather than a school with higher test scores, it’s necessary to educate parents on their options—that is, to nudge parents towards high-performing schools. A study done in Charlotte, NC shows that when you give low-income parents a simple fact sheet listing schools by test scores and acceptance rates, they are much more inclined to select schools with higher test scores. And guess what? The low-income children who win the lotteries to attend high-performing schools have higher test scores and less suspensions than those who don’t.

Sunstein and Thaler acknowledge the Ravitch-ian argument that school choice undermines the efforts of public schools, which clearly have an interest in retaining talented students as they strive to improve. They don’t have a good rejoinder; nor do they seem to be troubled by the idea of using a school’s test scores as the measure of its merit. So, I’d like to help the economists out, and say why I’m sympathetic to the idea of school choice.

If you believe in the concept of a pluralistic society, you reject the notion that there is one “best” or “right” kind of life. It would be undesirable for everyone to be a poet; it would be equally undesirable for everyone to be a lawyer. Hence, pluralists think that an individual should be empowered to decide what kind of life he wants to live. Neither the government nor society have the right to pressure an individual to follow Path X. (Nor should he drift down Path X because his education didn't empower him.)

Theoretically, school choice and pluralism go hand in hand. Let’s forget the politically-contentious language of “charter schools” and “the charter movement” and instead talk about magnet schools—that is, high schools created to advance a specific mantra or mission, like science and math, music, architecture and design, and so on.

As a third grade teacher, it was obvious to me that each of my students had unique talents and interests. Why force Sophie to go to a one-size-fits-all high school if, from an early age, she’s extremely energized whenever she’s learning about cell structures and life cycles? Won’t she have a better high school experience at a place that structures the day to allow for more lab time, regularly applies for grants to purchase lab equipment and conduct science-related field trips, and hires teachers who have a particular passion for science? If Sophie lives in an area where there is a wide variety of high-performing magnets, at the end of middle school, she will be confronted with an important decision as to where to attend. Maybe Sophie has had some serious discipline problems in the past. Sophie's parents allow her to attend the science and math magnet if she agrees to shape up. Sophie is now empowered because she made an adult decision. Plus, she feels invested in the school she chose. And in addition to getting a fresh start at a new school where much of the student body shares her interests, now Sophie gets to dissect things and design her own experiments. The combination of positive peer pressure and feeling like her particular talent is valued could change this kid’s life. And, if going to this school improves Sophie's chances of becoming a biologist one day (rather than holding low-paying desk job X), all the better for pluralism.

Okay, I made that story up. But, I think the vision of a pluralism-promoting education system creates a much stronger case for school choice than Sunstein and Thaler’s simplistic claims that

The best way to improve our children’s schools is to introduce competition. If schools compete, kids win.

On its own, that argument cannot stand up to Ravitch.

Randomized Testing is...

2010-03-18T13:43:00.002-04:00

... a boring blog post title. But I can't be ridiculously creative every time.

Thanks to Robert Pondiscio of CORE Knowledge for his lovely post about The Ed Skeptic! (Please ignore the fact that I just referred to this blog in the third person - quick, see what Pondiscio has to say here.)

Pondiscio likes the argument that we shouldn't test reading; he has some pretty innovative ideas as well. A few years back, he wrote an article for the New York Sun advocating randomized testing. No need to make every student sit through those mind-numbing multiple-choice passages in April. Imagine this instead:

A randomly generated list of students are escorted to the school library to sit for an exam in third-grade science, for example. A few months later, the inspector returns, this time with a list of fifth-graders to take a reading exam. The results of these random tests can be used to judge the school's Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.

This strategy responds to the fact that an increasing number of schools are eliminating science and social studies from the curriculum because they aren't tested. Testing all students in all subjects is overkill. Randomly testing some students in all the subjects might mean that science and social studies actually get taught:

The unpleasant truth in many struggling schools is this: If it isn't tested, it isn't taught. If we want children to be truly educated, we need an accountability system that cannot be gamed, designed with the law of unintended consequences factored in.

Also, thanks to Pondiscio, I now know that Walt Gardner's blog exists. Gardner's is yet another voice hammering home the point that we need to be skeptical of current accountability efforts. (And, in case you were curious, no relation between Walt and Howard Gardner, the multiple intelligence guy.)

Conflict! Treachery! War over Standardized Testing at the Washington Post!

2010-03-16T23:32:00.001-04:00

Standardized tests aren't that bad, writes Jay Mathews of the Washington Post in response to his colleague Valerie Strauss' claim that standardized tests are that bad. The present debate between Mathews and Strauss touches upon all the standard arguments for and against those tests. Strauss argues that, from a psychometric standpoint, tests tell us little, and that teaching to the test does so much harm that they fail as an accountability tool. Mathews accuses Strauss of not providing evidence for her claims, and then—irony alert!—argues that it seems to hims that poor test scores accurately correlate with the low-performing schools in his area, and good test scores with the high-performing schools in his area. (A classical logical fallacy in the social sciences—could it be perhaps that his perception of a school's general performance is affected by his knowledge of its test score trends? And also, it's never a good idea to make an argument based on what your impressions "seem" to indicate after you challenge the other person to support her claims with empirical data.)

Further, Mathews writes in support of standardized testing that,

In Vermont, they looked closely at results from measuring schools by the quality of student portfolios and found little difference from the results obtained through standardized tests.

I'm not a huge fan of the portfolio approach—that is, having students submit year-end compilations of projects and assignments to a centralized office, where scorers then measure performance on the basis of a rubric. (If the stakes are high, I'm not confident that students would be submitting their own work.) However, the advantage of student portfolios is that teachers aren't incentivized to replace teaching and learning with those blasted test preparation workbooks. If there is little difference between the results obtained through student portfolios and those obtained through standardized tests, our conclusion should be that student portfolios are at least as good a psychometric indicator as the current tool. The cost is higher, but it's not prohibitive. And, what's a wee bit more money when you have Race to the Top dollars to spend? If that's the price of eradicating test prep skill-drill from our nation's schools, I'd gladly pay it.

For the most part, I like Jay Mathew's blog. But this time, it seems that Strauss is the hands-down winner. (See Strauss' response!)

The Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind

2010-03-14T12:52:00.002-04:00

Looks like the Obama Administration is proposing a radical overhaul of No Child Left Behind after all.

As Andy Smarick writes on the Fordham Institute Blog, The Gadfly:

The proposal would overhaul–in effect eliminate–the core of NCLB’s accountability framework...There would be no more AYP, no “in need of improvement” status. There would be no more public school choice or free tutoring for students in failing schools. There would be no more “corrective action” or “restructuring” for the failing schools themselves.

Instead of back-end accountability--using Annual Yearly Progress as an algorithm to measure whether failing schools have made sufficient improvement upon the previous year's test scores--the move is towards front-end accountability, requiring states to adopt "college and career-ready" standards. And, Smarick seems to analyze the situation well when he writes that the reauthorization proposal is a move away from federalism and towards state educational autonomy.

The is ironic. The trajectory of education policy under the fiscally-conservative G.W. Bush Administration was precisely towards strong centralized control. Bush is from Texas, and Texas is the leader in the political push for state and local school control. (Texas, after all, refused to apply for Race to the Top funds; Gov. Perry said that "taking the money would force the state to adopt national education and testing standards and result in Texas losing its autonomy in educating children.")

In some ways, from a political standpoint, Obama's pro-charter school, anti-union, anti-centralization reauthorization proposal is a conservative's wet dream. "We don't think we should micromanage the schools from Washington. We want to hold educators accountable but let them be creative," said Arne Duncan to reporters at a Friday press conference. So, mandates are replaced with market-style incentives; accountability systems and structures are funded, but the federal government is choosing to now play the role of sugar daddy, making Race to the Top and the Investment in Innovation Fund ("i3") permanent fixtures to keep the cash a'flowing. (Okay, so the federally-dispatched cash isn't exactly in line with Milton Friedman conservativism, but notice how Texas was the only conservative state to take a principled stand against Race to the Top. 10 out of the 16 RTTT finalists were, in fact, red states: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, and South Carolina.)

What needs to happen now is a conversation about the college and career-ready standards. What, in other words, are the advantages and disadvantages of standards versus curriculums? On one hand, what happens when social studies and science are too "controversial" for standards? On the other hand, could (gasp!) putting rigorous, well-defined standards at the center of public education eradicate high stakes testing culture? Are Obama's common core standards rigorous and well-defined? More to follow from The Skeptic.

Teach for the World?

2010-03-12T16:54:00.000-05:00

Man, oh, man. Yesterday's New York Times has Nicholas D. Kristoff outlining a completely original, one-of-a-kind blueprint for Obama's education administration to blow billions on. Are you ready for this? You sure? Combine the Peace Corps and Teach For America and what do you get? Teach for the World!

First, the facts:

Teach for the World (TFW) would be a one-year commitment in a developing country.
The target is recent high school or college graduates.
TFW would cover travel and give volunteers a small living stipend.
Corps members would stay with a host family.
Like the Peace Corps, the program would be funded by the government.

For the record, I'm not one of those liberals who likes to say edgy-sounding things about race and culture just to show other liberals that they took one critical theory class as an undergraduate. (For the record, I didn't even take a critical class as an undergraduate.) However, Kristoff's cheerful proposal shows a total lack of awareness as the complexities of the kind of diplomacy he's endorsing. As with the Peace Corps, Teach for the World poses as diplomacy, but really, its primary purpose is for Americans to have a brief adventure in the developing world. As Kristoff writes,

Teach for the World also would be an important education initiative for America itself. Fewer than 30 percent of Americans have passports, and only one-quarter can converse in a second language. And the place to learn languages isn’t an American classroom but in the streets of Quito or Dakar or Cairo.

Kristoff claims that TFW would bring the study abroad experience to more American youth, and the implication seems to be that it's better for that token brush with international multiculturalism to be in a developing country than, say, Europe or Australia. But study abroad programs already exist in developing countries. And the reality of the service component of such programs is this--the Peace Corps, for instance, is only two years long. During the first year, you get to know the community and the language, work on building relationships and trust. During the second year, you quickly assemble a project regarding an issue that you're interested in--but usually don't hold expertise--then pack your bags and return to America, digital camera replete with pictures of yourself posing with natives. Don't get me wrong--I know and respect quite a few Peace Corps volunteers. But most recognize that the program is for broadening their cultural horizons, that their impact on the community is necessarily constrained by time and the realities of their post-college skill set. So, my point is this. If the goal is to expand study abroad in the developing world, call it study abroad in the developing world.

Complaint number two. The teaching. It's hard, really hard, to be an effective teacher. During my first year as a Teach For America corps member, it didn't matter that I had a college degree or experience working with kids. I put in 70 hours per week, and was constantly assessing and re-assessing my practices to figure out how I could improve my students' learning. No matter. During years two and three, when I began to understand what it meant to be a successful at my job, I wished more than anything that I could go back in time and rectify the mistakes that I made during my first year--the latter being a natural part of inexperience.

But, Kristoff seems to believe that any American with a high school diploma would improve the educational state of affairs in Developing Country X, one rural village at a time. This is a laughable assumption--especially since Kristoff doesn't mention teacher training. (Teach For America at least gives its corps members five weeks over the summer before their first year, plus two additional weeks of cultural/community orientation.) And, this sends the diplomatic message that the adults within these rural villages can't help their own. An effort to actually improve the educational infrastructure within Developing Country X would provide hardworking adults who currently live in rural villages with the education and training they need to educate the next generation.

Not only does the lasting-infrastructure approach acknowledge that there are cultural differences and particularities that we don't want Western-driven educational programs to erase, there are two empirical facts that are hard to ignore. First, if the goal is improved educational outcomes in the developing world, it's a much more efficient use of resources to train a community member who is planning to stay within the community to teach. Second, a community member who is already trusted by the community and already speaks Dialect X will waste much less time at the beginning of the process than a recent high school graduate trying to navigate cultural nuances and complexities. This process of cultural navigation is an integral part of the adage--don't teach subject matter, teach children. But by the time a TFW corps member would begin to do this effectively (remember, these things take time), her one-year commitment would be almost over.

I'm not one to uncritically sing the praises of Teach For America, but the advantage of its sister program, Teach For All--a program that Kristoff does not seem to be aware of--is that it concentrates on building lasting infrastructure within developing countries by partnering with local leaders who wish to start their own domestic teacher training corps.

I'm all for encouraging American high schoolers and college students to study abroad. But please, let's not pretend that this is diplomacy.

Once Upon a Time in an Elementary Classroom

2010-03-09T21:27:00.000-05:00

Gotta juxtapose venomous political commentary with levity, right?

Once upon a time, it's my second year on the job. It’s science, and we’re working on a reading passage about bees. We get to the comprehension questions, and I volunteer an eight-year-old I'll call Julius to take the first one. “What function do the drone bees perform?”

Julius is clueless.

“Let’s go back to the passage, paragraph two, and see if we can find the answer,” I prompt.

Julius reads aloud. “The drones are males who assist the queen bee in the process of fertilization…” He pauses. “Oh! I know! The drones are the ones who get to make love to the queen!”

Don't Test Reading

2010-03-08T22:56:00.010-05:00

Read these sentences from the story. "Spring comes when it’s good and ready. The calendar can’t make spring be spring." When Shawn’s mother says this, she means that spring

A. happens slowly, not all at once.
B. comes from nature, not from the calendar.
C. comes as soon as you are ready, not before that.
D. happens when the calendar says it does, not after that.

Do you know the answer to this question? I don't. Clearly, C) is incorrect, since Shawn's mom is not suggesting that spring comes when Shawn is ready. D) is also incorrect, because it's precisely the opposite of what Shawn's mother is literally saying. However, A) seems to be a plausible interpretation of what Shawn's mother means - which is precisely what the question asks the reader to analyze. Turning the page of a calendar implies a quick change in seasons, and Shawn's mother seems to suggest that this is not the case. However, B) is also a plausible interpretation. Just like with A), the implication is that Shawn should be patient, that good weather will come. B) is more literally connected to Shawn's mother's statement; choosing A) shows an understanding of what's at stake in the claim.

What would you choose if you were a third grader?

Many complain that high stakes testing stifles creativity; I'll admit that in my dramatic moments, I've used the language of—future worker-pawns robotically selecting what the institution has determined to be the 'correct' answer from a prearranged menu of four options, and the like. However, I really shouldn't talk this way because it implies that the act of testing itself is what stifles creativity, and clearly, that's alarmist. One week in April per year is not going to reverse the sunny effects of a life-affirming classroom that instills in students a sense of autonomy and wonder.

Let me be precise about what I mean when I say—high stakes testing stifles creativity. In microeconomics, production theory deals with the idea of converting inputs into outputs. If your goal is a certain output, the most efficient inputs are the ones that contribute to the maximization of this output. Production functions are often thought to be intuitive; if I want my dog to be healthy, I will feed him and take him for walks. So, on the input-output account, high stakes testing seems pretty benign. Here, if I want my third graders to perform at a high level on the standardized test, I will teach them reading and math, and I will teach it well.

However.

Many schools—especially ones in low-income areas—have realized that there's a more efficient input towards the goal of maximizing testing performance than teaching academic subjects in a way that is rigorous and meaningful. This more efficient input is—test taking strategies! As I hope to have made clear from the sample question at the beginning of this post (taken from the 2006 3rd grade Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test), multiple choice questions are often quite confusing. (The correct answer was B), by the way.) Even when tests are well-written, strategic test-taking involves a different set of actions than does reading and enjoying a chapter book—or reading, enjoying, and writing about a chapter book. In reading tests like the 3rd grade FCAT, individual passages are about 500 words long, and there are about 8 or 9 questions per passage that total out at about 400-500 more words. It's more important to read the questions and answer choices carefully than the passage, and so it's come to be that teachers direct students to slowly read the questions first, then read the passage, underlining parts that may provide clues to answering the questions. Then, students are to again slowly ponder the answer choices while frequently referring back to the passage.

This read-questions-and-answers-then-scan-text-strategically approach isn't natural, but it works. Thing is, you can't introduce this strategy to students the week before The Big Test, or only a few will use it. You might be able to guess where I'm going here. To achieve high performance on standardized tests, it is perfectly sensible for teachers to have students read 500-word passages instead of chapter books all year long, and to read them in a way that will get them in the habit of strategically attacking multiple choice questions.

This is the bastardization of reading, folks. And it's precisely the sort of classroom practice that is galvanized when school accountability is the end-all. (In fact, microeconomic theory could quite easily support the claim that teachers who don't maximize time spent on testing strategies are irrational agents.)

And to make matters worse, many psychometricians have argued that certain forms of preparation lead to "test score pollution"—that is, they invalidate the results of the test. (All sorts of studies showing this were done in the early '90s; in the current educational climate, this is a forgotten issue.)

What is to be done? Don't worry, Arne Duncan, I'm full of constructive solutions.

Make it illegal for Race to the Top funds to be spent on commercial test preparation materials. This will send a strong message that replacing the language arts block with multiple-choice practice is unethical, and the media and parents will be alerted to act as watchdogs. If a school is found spending RTTT dollars on test prep materials, require them to repay the grant amount to the state (or perhaps federal) government in full.
Don't test reading. I am very deliberately attacking the substitution of mind-numbing 500-word passages for novels. For reasons that I don't have room to discuss here, I'm much more optimistic that critical thinking in math can be measured by the multiple choice format and that testing math doesn't lend itself to test score pollution in the same way that reading does. If every school in America administered the same rigorous math assessment for grades K-12, dataphiles at state education departments would have one incredibly useful measure of how well students are doing (by classroom, school, district, state, region, etc.). Creating such an assessment system, and eliminating the standardized test in reading, would promote the goal of meaningful accountability while delimiting that harm that strategic test preparation can do.

Reforming high stakes testing could be your legacy, Arne. Have at it.

Jimmy Goes to School

2010-03-06T19:24:00.017-05:00

Some deep person once said something about art conveying what words cannot. This video needs no other preface. (Other than this: Lindsay Moss, I am in awe of your brilliance.)

Round I Race to the Top Finalists Announced

2010-03-04T22:55:00.004-05:00

16 out of 41 states were chosen as finalists for Race to the Top grant money. Now states will have to sing, dance, and power point their way to the winner's circle in front of panels of judges (names undisclosed) at the Ed Department. Here's a breakdown of the 16 finalists and how much money they are eligible for (based on population).

Florida: $350 to 700 million

New York: $350 to 700 million

Georgia: $200 to 400 million

Illinois: $200 to 400 million

North Carolina: $200 to 400 million

Ohio: $200 to 400 million

Pennsylvania: $200 to 400 million

Indiana: $150 to 250 million

Massachusetts: $150 to 250 million

Tennessee: $150 to 250 million

Colorado: $60 to 75 million

Kentucky: $60 to 75 million

Louisiana: $60 to 75 million

South Carolina: $60 to 75 million

Delaware: $20 to 75 million

Washington D.C.: $20 to 75 million

Rhode Island: $20 to 75 million

Guess who's missing? Texas, by not applying. California, by not having a strong enough application, apparently. (And by not having a strong enough application, I actually mean--having all those union personalities...)

Open Education: I'm Obsessed

2010-02-24T21:12:00.005-05:00

I'm spending a little bit too much time reading the Open Education website. To date, here's the top seven-ranked user proposals and my comments.

Funding for open source text books and lesson plans. Yes. Rock on. Read Diane Ravitch's The Language Police and learn why this is such a pressing political issue.
Make teachers observe each others classes occasionally. Good suggestion for a school principal. But this is ed policy that we're talking about. Is the government the most efficient vehicle for implementation here?
Fund research into optimal school start times. I will admit my bias. This is probably a decent suggestion for education reform in general. But I really only care about reform efforts that will provide kids from Title I schools with an excellent and meaningful education. Prove to me that this will help close the achievement gap, in other words.
Bring back music in schools. Not only does music education have the instrumental effect (pun very much intended) of stimulating the sort of logical thinking that makes for better math students, we need music education for all sorts of reasons that have to do with creativity, independent thinking, and more generally, not turning kids into bubble-filling robots. Let's use Race to the Top dollars to fund the arts even if doing so has no impact on reading scores. Radical!
Scrap social progression. Yes. But again, it's hard to turn what ought to be a district-wide philosophy into enforceable policy. Think Rod Paige.
The Department of Education should live webcast all meetings. I'd watch them.
Stop measuring quality by standardized tests. It's a shame that this proposal wasn't more constructive. (As in, arguing in favor of qualitative assessment tools, or making the case for the portfolio/capstone approach.) But thank the dear lord that this got a ton of votes. THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN.

Be a nerd! Submit your own ideas at http://openeducation.ideascale.com/.

The Internet and Democracy: The Opening of OpenEducation

2010-02-23T22:18:00.000-05:00

Ever since his campaign, Obama has expressed interest in using the internet to create a space for the open exchange of creative ideas between those who hold political power and those who don't. As discussed in a June New York Times article, the implementation of this has gone through various incarnations, and the results have been, er, embarrassing. (Americans seem to care more about FBI disclosure of UFO information and the legalization of marijuana than pressing political issues like health care and education.)

However, the Obama administration hasn't give up on the idea. As discussed today on the Open Government Initiative blog, there is now an Open Government website for every major federal agency. Pick an agency, post an idea, and other users will comment on and rate your entry. Top-rated entries are aggregated here, and presumably, they will make their way to an agency official whose job it is to make policy proposals.

Needless to say, I'm thrilled about the Open Education branch of this. So far, the website has not received a lot of publicity, and the quality of discussion yo-yos dramatically. However, I'm (gasp!) optimistic about the potential of this sort of forum to bring the high-quality discussion that occurs in the blogosphere (e.g. the Bridging Differences and Class Struggle comment sections) to the attention of policy-makers.

The Open Education web address is http://openeducation.ideascale.com. Do it for democracy, baby.

The Great American High School Commencement Speech Competition

2010-02-22T11:49:00.002-05:00

President Obama has promised to give a year-end commencement speech at the high school which has made the most dramatic, exciting, and effective structural changes in the name of student achievement.

Cool. But the thing is, even though the competition is ostensibly a way for students themselves to get involved in reform efforts at the level of the individual school, the onus is on adults to make dazzling changes that will win a visit from Air Force One (and perhaps the greatest rhetorician in the history of American politics). Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post has a brief but excellent discussion here.

P.S. The Ed Skeptic has returned from hiatus! I promise regular updates and to reduce the deficit by 2011.

The Case for Pederasty

2010-02-04T22:53:00.012-05:00

Last time the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act came up, I thought it'd be helpful to write a letter to then-President George W. Bush containing a few modest proposals for American public education. I waited for months, but did not receive a response. Now it's that time again, and I'm beginning to think that Arne Duncan and the gang might benefit from my suggestions. Here's the letter:

January 12, 2007

Dear President Bush,

American democracy has reached a critical juncture. Congress must soon decide whether to reauthorize the educational policy measure known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the ground-breaking response to what you have rightly identified as a crisis in the American education system. I write, Mr. President, with the belief that your No Child Left Behind Act is a start. But, I must emphasize, it is only a start. Children are our future, and the future of democracy rests largely on the effectiveness of the American education system. Without certain revisions that I will happily explicate for you, NCLB is not and cannot be the educational edict that saves America.

As you yourself have explained, Mr. President, the aim of NCLB is to reduce bureaucracy and increase teacher accountability by allowing school districts to develop their own educational reform strategies based upon the particularities of students under their jurisdiction. The problem correctly recognized here is that different children have different needs. Within each school district, however, there is a wide range of students. Here is my radical view—NCLB does not go far enough. If an academic program were developed for each and every child on a case-by-case basis, perhaps we wouldn’t have Susie getting addicted to dope and pregnant because all her peers are stupider than her and she finds math class boring. Or dyslexic Joey getting so frustrated by his English homework that he joins a street gang and dies in a knife fight at age 12. Personalized public education, pigs on the wing, granted. Nevertheless, educational reformers seem to forget that mere teacher accountability is not the key to the strongbox containing the latent trove that is the inchoate mind. On the contrary. Kids, by nature, are curious as hell. They want to learn. But placed in the wrong environment—the mediocre babysitter’s club of classrooms constellated across America, for instance—Susie and Joey aren’t going to learn jack.

What lacks in the classroom, in other words, is stimulation. No Child Left Behind does not live up to its name because it insinuates a change in the thinking about education that just isn’t there. Individualized attention needs to be given to every single student and nothing short of a complete turnaround in educational philosophy is going to do this. We need to be behind each child in a different kind of way—

I’m talking about pederasty.

Now you may, Mr. President, consider this proposition an impetuous hearkening to times past, but I assure you that this is not the case. Fifth century Athens was and is considered by many the height of human civilization. In calling it that, it’s not that we’re put ancient Greek civilization on a pedestal. Much rather, the denizens of that era designed and built the pedestal, and then themselves climbed onto it (which they could do, no sweat—they were fit as hell). Fifth century Athens was flourishing, and that’s because their educational arrangement served the needs of a flourishing people. In other words, we have incontrovertible evidence that pederasty works.

Regrettably, pederasty—that is, anal intercourse between a man and a boy with the boy as a passive partner—has a bad rap in the United States. It is illegal. However, such a set-up has a marked didactic element which American lawmakers seem to have overlooked. Flash to fifth century Greece. When a boy reaches the ripe age of twelve or thirteen, he is courted by respectable, respected men who wish to become his lover. These men bring gifts and praise the boy’s beauty, and after a period of time, the boy accepts that one who has sufficiently demonstrated his intentions to be good and noble. The man (the erastēs, or lover) serves as an intellectual mentor to the boy (the erōmenos, or beloved) for the next ten or so years, until the boy is ready to be married. Often, the lover himself has a wife and kids—his pedagogic-erotic relationship is completely independent of the oikos.

During the course of the affair, the boy and his lover meet frequently. Their relationship is akin to that between professor and pupil in the renowned Oxford tutorial system, only much less formal. The man trains the boy in rhetoric, letters, and the virtues, catering his instruction to the boy’s intellectual development, and when the lessons are done for the day, they have sexual intercourse. It is not expected that this latter will bring the boy libidinous pleasure. Rather, sex is meant as recompense for the man’s didactic expenditure. It is not until the boy is fully grown and is himself a lover that it is appropriate for carnal gratification on his part to be had. The role of the boy is that qua student, qua recipient of his lover’s dalliance, and nothing more. This in itself is edifying: the boy is conditioned such that it is not erotic desire, but sheer love of knowledge, that motivates him to learn. It is only upon complete dianoetic habituation to what at first seems counter-intuitive that the student can become a teacher.

The length of this process coincides without the exact amount of time it takes for the boy to become no longer beautiful, and on that day when deemed an anaphrodisiac, he graduates. The man who was once a boy then courts other boys whom he can teach that learning for learning’s sake is a highest good. So it was that the youth of Athens were educated, socialized, and put on their way to become flourishing specimens of nobility and manhood—paradigmatic manifestations of the Greek ideal.

Mr. President, you know well that if there’s anything we Americans want, we Americans want to flourish. We’re not satisfied with just being the United States; we want to be the flourishing United States. Every problem in our society—be it social, economic, socio-economic, or militaristic—can be traced back to the fact that we’re not sufficiently flourishing. And the fact that we’re not sufficiently flourishing can be traced back to our system of education. If I haven’t made it clear by now, the primacy of a solid educational system to a flourishing society cannot be overstated. And so to state over: flourishing education, flourishing society. Flourish, flourish, flourish.

America’s never seen a golden age, see, and it’s high time she does. The founding of a federally-regulated pederastic network would certainly do the trick. After a period of time, of course, the government would no longer have to play matchmaker between men and boys. Men would court their love interests just like in ancient Greece and the role of the United States federal administration in the affair would simply fall away. State and municipal governments would only have to work to maintain local gymnasiums, those hotbeds of activity in Greek society which would surely come to assume a similar position in the daily going-abouts of the American citizenry, with its nude athletic competitions and whatnot.

The perks to this system are obvious. Margaret Meade said it best: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” Now think about the power of a large group of thoughtful, committed, randy grown men! I’m telling you, think about it! With our country’s perceived education crisis snuffed out, the gaiety that would ensue! New-sprung interest in festivals, parades, outdoor theater would bring communities together and make America a force to be reckoned with at the annual Edinburgh Festival. The financial benefits of a cultural reawakening needn’t even be enumerated, and of course, the educational system itself would be economically self-sustaining. We would no longer have to have state lotteries to raise funding for teacher salaries (gambling, anyway, promotes frivolity and avarice—vices, both, with which our good country could stand to do without). We could relieve the citizenry of property taxes, or at least reallocate the funds to, say, the National Park Service, the Department of Homeland Security, or some other ancillary department devoted to the betterment of the demos. Or, we could use our newfound fiscal edge to the disadvantage of other countries. It’s been too long since we’ve had a successful military conquest, and those, as I’m sure you know, breed patriotism and literary efforts of lasting significance. America needs a Troy: Mexico? Canada? The sky’s the limit! (Or not—put the money into rocket science!) Further, it’s a sad fact that in parts of this country, there is a certain stigma associated with homosexuality. However, a system such as proposed would undoubtedly stamp this out. Upon our country’s acclimation to stated modifications, that upon which the entire American system of education rests may well be no more socially eschewed than multiplication tables.

Mr. President, you and I both know about the famine of the upcoming generation when it comes to a principled morality. Now in Greece, older men are documented to have been inspired by the beautiful bodies of their beloveds to instill in them beautiful souls, and would train the boys to have virtuous thoughts, make prudent decisions, and to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Surely twenty-first century pederasts, of the same human fiber as their Greek counterparts, would as well be stirred by the Form of Beauty to indoctrinate their wards appositely. We lament the inability of parents to rear a right-thinking child, knowing that mothers and fathers are more and more failing to act as mentors after whom Johnny can model behavior. But, as an adult male pederast will be about the same age as a Johnny’s pop, and moreover will serve a far more influential role in his development, complaints of declining morality will forever vanish from our lips.

Now, all this is not to say that there are not disadvantages to replacing our country’s entire public education system with independently-operating adult male pedagogue-pederasts. There are, and the most important ones need to be acknowledged. First of all, only beautiful boys are pursued by pederasts, which means the instruction of females would thereby be terminated. However, everyone in Athens knew Socrates was just kidding when he suggested that there be some philosopher she-kings running the polis—female souls are of an inferior material, good only for their ovaries and cooking. American women would probably relish the opportunity to take off their career suits and high heels, to walk around barefoot caring for the household—I would! Also, there is the concern that concomitant to the pursuit of knowledge is heavy drinking, and that alcohol-induced bacchanalian reveling would come to pass as commonplace. But, it’s just wine, and as numerous studies done by reputable individuals at important-sounding medical research institutions all across America show, that stuff’s actually good for the heart. Finally, to paraphrase Plato: love is not attracted to ugliness. Which is to say, there’s the question of whether only exceedingly attractive young boys would attract suitors, that your Obesity Charlie won’t get a chance to learn. But just as unattractive males and unattractive females find one another and fall happily in love (think Disney’s full-length animated feature film Shrek, which I’m confident you’ve seen), surely there will be an ugly old man who sees something beautiful (God knows what) in Charlie, and be glad to take him under his wing.

Mr. President, our schools are in dire straights. To safeguard the future of the present generation and democracy, needed is more than nominally tweaking the bureaucratic structures of our current educational institutions (yes: your No Child Left Behind). When our children are bored in the classroom, they’ll turn to things they find more interesting, like cutting school, daytime television, and drug abuse. The proliferation of all of the above is proof that—our children are bored in the classroom. If each student were engaged in an intimate sexual relationship with his teacher, perhaps this wouldn’t be the case. César Chávez once said: “A word as to the education of the heart. We don't believe that this can be imparted through books; it can only be imparted through the loving touch of the teacher.”

It’s time we took Chávez seriously.

Dutifully,

[For the record, I signed my name.]

A Citizen of America

Drawing by Lindsay Moss

This Is Interesting...

2010-02-03T23:15:00.003-05:00

...And it's not getting a lot of press. The 2011 budget proposal eliminates funding for the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) provision in No Child Left Behind. Last year, EETT received $100 million.

Could this be political? Are the shady 21st Century Skills partnerships receiving too much bad press?

Fun from a conspiracy theory perspective, but my suspicion is that Obama's just looking to save $100 million.

Budget Time

2010-02-01T16:32:00.000-05:00

Check out the funding increase proposed for the Department of Education in today’s budget talks.

I’m cheering for the following:

Invests $210 million in Promise Neighborhoods, an initiative that integrates school reform with strong family supports and effective community services across an entire neighborhood, so that youth successfully complete high school and continue on to college. A fiscal acknowledgment that it’s absolutely necessary to get families and communities involved in creating a positive culture in neighborhoods schools!
Increases aid for needy students, reforms Federal student aid programs, and simplifies the financial aid application process. I usually write about K-12, but Godspeed to you, Arne Duncan, as you attempt to simplify the FAFSA.

But of course, there is still reason to be skeptical:

Supports the next generation of scientists and engineers by helping States develop and implement math and science instructional practices that are aligned to rigorous college- and career-ready standards and by supporting districts and nonprofit organizations that develop, implement, and evaluate promising and effective programs. Today in his otherwise excellent Atlantic Business blog post, Derek Thompson writes, “One common critique of NCLB is that is narrowed the curriculum. By shining its harsh light on math and reading scores, it encouraged teachers to concentrate their energies in those two subjects, to the exclusion of sciences and arts. Duncan's logic is reasonable: Teachers will teach what the administration says it will test. So if you start measuring science achievement, teachers won't ignore the sciences.” Yes, the administration does not want to ignore the sciences. Math and science, after all, make American human capital more productive, and therefore, more competitive in the global economy. But productivity is not the only predicate to education, and it’s time to devise new forms of accountability (rather than just extending multiple-choice testing to hitherto untested subjects). Otherwise, education will remain narrow in its definition—it’s not fact-recall that we should worry about, but the mentality created by the “thinking like the test-maker” approach to problem-solving that waters down literature and history, even when tested and therefore taught.
Provides $1.35 billion to expand Race to the Top for school districts as well as States to carry out systemic reform, and $500 million to continue the Investing in Innovation program to test, validate, and scales up effective approaches to student learning. Nothing peeves me more than accountability systems that use their own structures to gage their own effectiveness… Again, more of the same isn’t the answer!

Henrietta and the Pot

2010-01-31T13:29:00.003-05:00

Let's face it. It's Sunday, and nothing exciting is happening in the World of Ed. But there are plenty of old teaching stories in the archives...

Once upon a time, I was a teacher...on the first year of the job...in a reservation town that I had never heard of in a state I had never been to.

Scene: set.

As a newcomer in a town of 450—and a white newcomer at that—I met many people within my first few weeks of reservation life. Almost everyone had advice to impart. “You know, all the stereotypes about the Rez are true,” said a community elder. “The drugs, the alcoholism, the heartbreaking poverty, the suicide—it’s all true.” I nodded seriously, not really believing him. But then it’s the second week of school. I’m out on the playground, supervising recess, and a boy whom I'll call Joe comes running up to me. “Teacher, can I go in and get my pot?”

I look at him incredulously, not really knowing what to say. And Joes’s just standing there impatiently, clutching Henrietta—now the unofficial third grade mascot, Henrietta’s a lanky yellow hen who played an integral part in my childhood dream of becoming a career ventriloquist. “Um, why?” I ask Joe, stalling.

“Henrietta’s been a bad, baaad chicken,” is his response. “And I’m making her into chicken soup. I need my pot.”

All this is said as if I’m in idiot, unable to grasp the most elementary of situations. I allow Joe to run inside, and he struggles back to the recess area, carrying a very heavy, and very invisible, pot.

Chicken Soup for the Teacher's Soul, anyone? Anyone?

On Getting a Head Start

2010-01-30T14:46:00.006-05:00

This month, long-awaited research findings were released concerning the effectiveness of Head Start, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program that has provided free preschool education to children from low-income families for the past 45 years.

The report, a joint product of the Department of Health and Human Services and Westat, a Maryland-based research firm, contains many surprises. The biggest one is this: though Head Start has a positive effect on student learning during the program itself, by the end of first grade, there are few statistically significant differences between Head Start and non-Head Start children. In other words, Head Start kids do get a head start, but by the end of first grade, their peers catch up.

There has been much discussion about these findings in the World of Ed and everywhere else. A New York Post headline reads— “Head Start: A Tragic Waste of Money.” It’s hard to take the article seriously, however, because Andrew Coulson, among other things, puts phrases like “gold standard” in quotes. But, it captures the basic complaint quite well. Head Start costs a lot, and that the cost just isn’t worth it. A head start proves to be of no advantage in the long run.

What, then, is happening in Head Start classrooms? Is the program just a federally-funded babysitting service where children sometimes work on their ABCs?

Drawing by Lindsay Moss

The consensus seems to be that the HHS/Westat report is good science. The randomization process used is statistically sound, and it is precisely for this reason that its conclusions are so damning. But, implicit in the design of the study is a scenario that rings false for many low-income families. The goal of the four-year randomized study was to measure the effect of Head Start on both students’ academic achievement and parental practices. What was being tested was access to Head Start services, rather than the effect of Head Start services per se. 4,667 eligible 3- and 4-year-olds were randomly assigned access to a Head Start program or to a control group. Those in the control group could participate in a variety of non-Head Start early childhood programs, or could stay at home.

But, what wasn’t discussed in the study is the fact that it allows children from low-income families to attend preschool for free. In other words, the design of the study doesn’t factor in the costs and tradeoffs that low-income families consider when deciding whether to have their children attend Head Start, a fee-based preschool or nursery, or stay at home. For single-parent homes, access to Head Start means that a mother or father isn’t forced to perform an insane juggling act where, at all hours, she or he is both the breadwinner and the caregiver. For families with access to Head Start, there doesn’t have to be a hard choice between paying for daycare during work hours or forgoing wages to take care of the kids at home. The report shows that, in the long run, Head Start parents read more to their kids and have more desirable parenting styles (according to measures developed by developmental psychologists) than their control group peers. Perhaps this is due to the removal of a financial strain on low-income households regularly faced with imperfect tradeoffs.

In this case, a federally-funded babysitting service isn’t the worst thing in the world. But a print- and numbers-rich environment emphasizing creative play would be better.

Regrettably, there was no qualitative team charged with the task of figuring out what, in practice, Head Start children were doing all day. If Head Start teachers treat their classrooms as babysitting corrals rather than as space in which to narrow the educational achievement gap, it is not surprising that the effect of Head Start is not a lasting one. But, we don’t know whether this is happening. And indeed, kids from low-income households are more likely to attend dysfunctional schools, and this could be causally responsible for razing the effect of both Head Start and alternative forms of early childhood care available to the control group. (Again, it is not that Head Start kids are worse off than their control group peers, but rather, that the effect of Head Start is not statistically significant at the end of first grade.) The dysfunctional school thesis is supported by the study data:

While there were very few statistically significant differences in experiences for the Head Start and control group children, the overall findings for both groups can contribute to an understanding of the school environment experienced by both groups of children. For example, nearly 50 percent of the 4-year-old cohort and 40 percent of the 3-year-old cohort were in [kindergarten and first grade] classrooms where the teachers reported well-behaved students…

Compared to classrooms in mid- or high-income areas, 50 percent is not high. Not at all.

…with slightly smaller percentages in classrooms with teachers reporting occasional misbehavior and much smaller percentages in classrooms with teachers reporting frequent misbehavior…

The latter is good, we presume?

…Teachers were asked about the reading, language and math activities that were provided in their classrooms on a daily basis. On average, kindergarten children in both cohorts and across both the Head Start and control group were exposed to about one-half of the reading, language, and math activities on a daily basis. In 1st grade, this dropped to about one-third of the activities.

The wording is ambiguous, but seemingly, the authors of the report mean that classrooms in low-income areas spend half or a third as much time on academics as do classrooms in mid- or high-income areas. And this brings up everything we already know about America’s educational achievement gap: dysfunctional school culture, teacher flight, nihilistic attitudes about the chances for a child from a high-risk home to have a fulfilling and successful life...

(But thanks to Race to the Top, dysfunctional schools are going to be even more accountable for their dysfunction, and all this is going to change, just like Obama promised! Am I right or am I right?)

It's All About The Buses

2010-01-28T21:23:00.002-05:00

It's a sunny April morning during my first year of teaching. I'm leading a line of students from the main building of the school to our classroom, which is located in a doublewide just outside the west entrance. It is about 10am, and our group is spotted by the district superintendent, who is heading to his office. The man takes a hard look at the line of students, and says to me, “You know what the three best parts of teaching are?” I shake my head. “June, July, and August!” He walks away with a hearty chuckle.

This story takes place at a failing school in a high-poverty rural community. During my time as a teacher, there was much talk of reform. Reading programs and discipline systems came and went. No one, however, seemed to realize that a minor scheduling adjustment might dramatically spur student achievement.

My state, like many, measured the school year in terms of hours rather than days. In other words, to meet state requirements, the administrators just had to schedule (roughly) 1,440 hours of school. During my first year, I noticed that during the last two hours of the day, the kids seemed spent. They were easily distracted, unenthusiastic, and not learning a whole lot—the polar opposite of the first two hours of the day. After talking to many teachers who had been observing the same thing for years, I brought it up at a staff meeting. “Since lots of research shows that student learning benefits from a longer school year, why doesn’t our school have 6 hour days for an extra two months? And I mean, we teachers would have less time off in the summer, but overall, we’d have shorter, more productive days.”

Silence.

And then, I realized that it was the most naïve thing that anyone had ever said at a staff meeting. I wasn’t thinking at all about economics.

At this school, it’s not about feeding the kids. 100 percent of the K-12 population is on federally-subsidized breakfasts and lunches, and funding adjusts to the number of days of the school year. As it was explained to me, however, the 8-hour school day is a dictate from the school's transportation director. The buses have to make fewer runs if there are fewer days in the year. The longer the school day, the more economically-efficient the busing situation. When you factor in driver salaries and the cost of gas—some students have a 1.5 hour commute each way, each day—the amount saved by having nine months rather than eleven is significant.

Yes, it’s true, that many individuals like my superintendent wouldn’t have fought too hard to reallocate funds into the yearly transportation budget to make a longer school year possible. There’s certainly something screwed up when the head of a school district says… to a TEACHER… in front of a group of STUDENTS… that the best part of a job is the part where you don’t have to work (or be around the ragamuffins, in other words).

Not everyone in the ed world is like this guy. And $4.35 billion is suddenly out there. Why aren’t more people talking about the school bus situation?

Some argue that KIPP schools are successful because they foster a certain culture of learning within their walls, that KIPP teachers are hard-working and passionate, and so on. But it can’t be denied that KIPP kids spend more hours learning than their peers. In DC, for instance, KIPP is alive and educating during the months of July and August. All students attend summer school from 9 to 1 each day, and during the regular school year, there’s Saturday school twice a month. KIPP DC can do this, of course, because it doesn’t rely on buses to bring in students from all over the metropolitan area. Same thing with NYC and Chicago. But in rural areas, suburban areas, and cities without extensive public transportation networks, more school days can’t happen without more bus runs.

If the alternative to school during the summer months is camp, programs at the public library, and educational play, the former is not needed. But in high-poverty areas, camp is less likely to be an option, and mandatory summer school suddenly becomes very important. Unfortunately, sometimes saving on transportation costs trumps all else. If schools weren’t notorious for fecklessly wasting overhead—honey, I've seen purchase orders for color print cartridges that would bring tears to your eyes—this perhaps wouldn’t be such a tragedy.

The Test Score Gap

2010-01-21T22:23:00.005-05:00

Law Three: Meanwhile, whenever we see the word "achievement," replace it with "test scores"—unless other evidence is cited. ( Deborah Meier, Bridging Differences)

Hallelujah, praise be, to Deborah Meier!

Unfortunately, we have a long way to go before Meier’s Laws are codified. Today, for instance, Juan Rangel wrote a short piece for the Huffington Post that made it all sound so simple: unions are bad, Race to the Top is good, and if Race to the Top can succeed in dismantling unions, then American children will learn.

When it comes to Race to the Top, I have two great fears. First, I fear that districts will spend RTTT funds on more commercial test preparation workbooks and curriculums. Second, I fear that test scores will marginally rise, and that Arne Duncan and the gang will applaud themselves for improving student achievement.

This is in spite of the fact that many psychometricians emphasize that excessive test prep invalidates test scores. And, as outlined brilliantly by Michael Gunzenhauser in his 2003 “High-Stakes Testing and the Default Philosophy of Education,” high-stakes testing and test prep have already had the effect of changing the meaning of public education—especially, we should add, for learners from the least-advantaged backgrounds.

As is obvious in Rangel’s piece, unions are frequently set up as straw men to obviate more serious criticisms of Race to the Top—Meier’s, for instance. I don’t believe in preserving the jobs of incompetent teachers for sentimental reasons, and I’m sure that Meier doesn’t either. However, when Race to the Top is defended on the grounds that only biased parties would oppose this reform measure—again, those lazy 9-to-3:30 Solitaire-playing-while-the-kids-do-worksheets union teachers—we are failing to have real conversations about what it will take for this giant and unprecedented federal expenditure on education to improve student achievement in a way that is meaningful.

Drawing by Lindsay Moss

Problem is, unlike the “default philosophy of education” described by Gunzenhauser, the substantively-rich “education for democratic citizenship” that Meier is always advocating (more concretely, the sort of critical, independent, creative inquiry manifest in her Mission Hill school) is not easily measurable. What critics of Race to the Top need to inject into public debate is hard evidence that there are (1) educational outcomes that are desirable but not readily measured by traditional methods, and (2) modes of accountability besides student test scores that help show which teachers are replacing lessons with Edhelper worksheet packets. The goal of many RTTT critics is not to eliminate all oversight of public schools, but rather, to remove the incentive for teachers to desiccate the meaning of education through test prep.

Here’s a study idea—researchers, have at it! It is based on a belief that you can tell which teachers are teaching, which students are learning, just by observing classrooms and reading lesson plans. A rubric could be developed to measure students on a scale from 1 to 5 in the following categories:

Motivation
Time-on-task
Quality of completed assignments

Teachers could be measured on a scale from 1 to 5 in the following categories:

Behavior management
Organization
Classroom demeanor (including ability to inspire, creativity, etc.)
Classroom environment (including clear procedures and a consistent schedule)
Age-appropriate and goal-oriented lesson plans
Standardized test skill-preparation

Hypothesis I: The internal hierarchical ranking of teachers in a given school by April test scores and rubric evaluations will be the same if #6 is included in the calculation. If this proves to be correct, then it would be unnecessary to use April test scores as the indicator of student achievement since the rubric evaluations would produce the same information (who is the most effective teacher in the school, who is the least effective, etc.)

However, we could then ask the question—is it appropriate to place #6 in the rubric evaluation calculation in the first place? Hypothesis II: When #6 is excluded from the calculation, the internal hierarchical ranking of teachers would shift around. While it is very unlikely that the least effective teacher would, according to the new algorithm, suddenly move to the top of the list, if the ordering according to rubric items 1-5 is different than the ordering according to rubric items 1-6, we might conclude that the most effective classroom teachers are not the same as the teachers who do the most test prep.

Yes, it would time-consuming, expensive, and the unions might not like it. But such a study could show that there are valid and objective ways to measure teacher competency other than student test scores. Further, most educational experts, if pressed, would probably agree that test preparation workbooks undermine test scores as an indicator of achievement. However, how to prevent teachers who want to keep their jobs—or reap a heftier paycheck from a district which has jumped on the merit pay bandwagon—from using them? If the use of test preparation workbooks drives rubric evaluations downward (or at least, items #3 and #5) districts and states could actually disincentivize this detrimental and increasingly common classroom practice.

Perhaps, in the end, my hypotheses might prove to be completely wrong. I’d love to find out.

Race to the Top Application Deadline I

2010-01-19T22:06:00.001-05:00

The first round of Race to the Top applications were due today. Word has it that 40 states are competing for funds (Texas, usually on the forefront of data-driven ed reform, is not one of them). Further, according to the Washington Post, it seems Obama will be seeking $1.35 billion in additional funds.

Perhaps because Race to the Top is not its own legislative package (it was rolled into the 2008 economic stimulus legislation) it is not receiving near the attention of Obama's health care reform efforts. Perhaps this is intentional: some (including myself) interpret the grant competition as an attempt at a radical overhaul of the American education system that would not have the political capital to garner adequate congressional support if its details were spelled out in an independent bill.

Round One winners are announced in April. We'll see what happens.

"Avatar" and Education

2010-01-18T10:55:00.017-05:00

Colonialism doesn’t have a happy ending.

That was my instinctive reaction after viewing James Cameron’s magnum opus. And then I read the media’s take on “Avatar”: David Brooks’ editorial about the movie being a white guilt Messiah fantasy and other pieces like it. Yes, as I watched the mesmerizing Pandoran world come alive on the screen, it struck me that the accompanying storyline evinced a rather shallow form of progressivism. It had a screw-the-man message and acknowledgements that there are cultures other than Western ones, that “primitive” cultures are more sophisticated than they immediately appear, but the Na'vi were unable to save themselves, and found as their liberator a noble and brave white man. Granted, a white man with a disability, but a white man nonetheless.

But, I stand by my initial reaction as pointing to a more serious flaw of the movie. Really: colonialism doesn’t have a happy ending.

What should have happened is this. Hometree is destroyed by the United States military, and the movie ends. Or, if James Cameron still has money in his budget, he could show what happens next. Military intelligence officers identify the least resourced (and therefore, least fiscally lucrative) spots on Pandora, and systematically relocate the different tribes. Some fight, others submit, but the outcome is the same for all. Treated as unproductive heathens, no longer are the Na’vi allowed to have free reign of the land. The Na’vi attempt to restore their lives and their culture on their designated plots, but time passes, and soil and spirit prove barren. Many Na’vi die of starvation and disease. Things are so bad that when missionaries come to inculcate the Na’vi into the Western way of life, they are frequently welcomed. The missionaries’ presence, however, is hardly more than a gift horse: kill the Na’vi, save the man! Before long, Na'vi culture has more or less vanished. The Na'vi wear Western clothes. They rarely hunt (where they live, there is not much to hunt) or cultivate the land (again, the land is barren). For nourishment, the Na’vi come to depend upon unhealthful, mass-produced commodities [1] dispensed by the government (out of its sense of charity, no less), and diabetes becomes a major issue. Poverty culture usurps Na'vi culture, and with poverty culture comes drug and alcohol dependency, abusive domestic relations, and gang violence—all in all, what always emerges in places marked by the absence of hope and the overpowering presence of an all-pervasive boredom. Though the Na’vi were once the keepers of the land, that philosophy is frequently mere lip-service. Many Na'vi children eat junk food and litter with impunity. In fact, this could be the last scene of the movie. Yes, I’m beginning to see it. A twelve-year-old Na'vi boy in a Thug Life shirt, gang-related tattoos up and down both arms, walking slowly down a road, walking nowhere, downs a 32-ounce Mountain Dew, and carelessly tosses the empty bottle into the patchy grass.

Drawing by Lindsay Moss

I am talking, of course, about the Rez. What does all this have to do with an ed policy blog? I used to teach at a Bureau of Indian Education grant school on a reservation in rural South Dakota. Indian schools like the one I taught at face particular challenges that are not often addressed in ed policy discourse. On the Rez, many community leaders have a radical educational project in mind. They would like to reverse the historical effects of colonialism using the educational system. This means a sort of education that is rigorous, but also, that is culturally empowering.

Such is not an easy task. A few community members, some of whom were related to my students, think it an impossible one. “We can’t ever go back to wearing buckskin and living in teepees,” one mom told me at an unforgettable parent conference. However, such a defeatist attitude seems to grow out of the misconception that reversing the effects of colonialism means turning back the clock. In fact, it is not. As explained in a 1974 Current Anthropology article (published during the wake of AIM and the Wounded Knee standoff) the goal is to

create a contemporary Sioux culture that is neither pre-reservation tribal nor Anglo American with a façade of nativeness. Most young Sioux are more concerned with issues and actions than with ideologies; but by expressing what they believe and by responding to current issues on the reservation and in the off-reservation Native American communities, they want to gradually build new tribal institutions which are authentic and contemporary.

How can Indian schools build tribal institutions which are both authentic and contemporary in an era of high stakes testing and standards-aligned commercial curriculums? How should non-Indian individuals and organizations and tribes work together towards this goal? How should Indian schools overcome the challenges of poverty, dependency encouraged by decades of (sometimes well-intended) welfare policy, teenage alcoholism and gang violence?

Clearly, there are other questions in the 21^st century besides figuring out the most efficient way to capitalize upon institutionalized education’s economic potentiality. Attempting to address them may not produce James Cameron’s Hollywood ending, but it’s time to stop fantasizing that merely narrowing the test score achievement gap is synonymous with educational justice.

[1] Seriously, click on the link. It’s the year 2010. No fresh fruits or vegetables.

TFA Under Fire

2010-01-11T18:05:00.002-05:00

Stanford’s Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt have found, counter-intuitively, that participation in Teach for America does not increase civic-mindedness. Their recent study, published in the sociology journal Social Forces, makes use of survey data from accepted TFA applicants between 1993 and 1998, and compares matriculants who complete their commitment to non-matriculants and drop-outs. As McAdam and Brandt write in the study’s abstract:

Specifically, graduates lag behind non-matriculants in current service activity and generally trail both non-matriculants and drop-outs in self-reported participation in five other forms of civic/political activity measured in the study. Graduates also vote at lower rates than the other two groups. Finally, fewer graduates report employment in “pro-social” jobs than either non-matriculants or drop-outs.

Given Teach For America’s recruiting strategy, this is not surprising. Teach For America recruiters are given explicit instructions to target business and finance majors and those on the pre-law track. The social justice hippie-types will, presumably, find the organization by themselves; finance majors, on the other hand, need to be persuaded that it’s a good idea to forgo a job with McKinsey to teach middle school in a high-poverty area for two years. (Perhaps TFA hopes that future members of the business elite will have more by way of expendable income to shower upon the organization after their commitments have been completed. Or perhaps TFA has radical societal-shaping aspirations by enticing tomorrow’s AIG shareholders to live the country’s poorest areas: appeal to John Dow’s sense of prestige to get him to join the corps, confront him with heart-wrenching poverty, and hope that the empathy that emerges will impact decisions made from a remote 35th floor New York office sometime in the future.)

McAdam and Brandt’s study is a major blow for TFA. Another major critique of the organization also comes from Stanford; Linda Darling-Hammond has been arguing for years that TFA teachers are inadequately prepared for the challenges of the classroom, and do not, contrary to the organization’s claims, make a “significant impact” on student achievement. Many agree with Darling-Hammond but nonetheless support TFA: the good of the organization comes in the impact made by its alumni. However, if alumni are not taking jobs in the public sector, donating to charity, or joining their local school boards, and if they are not serving as effective teachers during their two-year commitments, perhaps it is accurate to agree with TFA alumnus Rob Reich (also a Stanford professor) who is quoted by the New York Times as saying that TFA is more or less a resume-booster.

Full disclosure: I am also a TFA alumnus and a former TFA recruiter. While I took my commitment to teaching very seriously, I remain convinced that TFA is so obsessed with gathering the data that it needs to justify its existence to the outside world, it alienates those who came to the organization for the teaching experience. Further, TFA is so steeped in corporate jargon and methods, I sometimes wonder if the finance majors I recruited were significantly changed or moved by their experience. It is perfectly possible, in other words, to do TFA for two years and remain completely detached from the community wherein one is placed as a corps member. This is not to say that there are not passionate, hard-working individuals affiliated with TFA as teachers or support staff—there are—but I am not surprised by the overall gist of McAdam and Brandt’s findings. Between disenchantment and detachment, it seems that there are very few individuals left to carry out TFA’s civic mission.

Closing Cleveland's Failing Schools

2010-01-07T21:31:00.003-05:00

It looks like 18 Cleveland area schools will be shut down due to mediocre performance. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is happy about this, and so am I....with a caveat.

First, let me say this. Of Arne Duncan's reform efforts, encouraging the closure of failing schools is something I support. Frequently, the media focuses on teacher quality (and in the same disdainful breath, teacher unions and teacher tenure) without acknowledging that even excellent teachers have trouble making learning happen in chaotic, dysfunctional schools. School culture, in other words, has a huge impact on how well teachers teach and how well learners learn. And because dysfunctional school cultures have a nasty habit of self-perpetuation, and tend to survive many hirings and firings on the administrative end, closing failing schools often seems like the best option. Yes, a dramatic turnaround might be a more desirable option (since closing one school and founding a new one is politically difficult, pricey, and time-consuming) but a successful turnaround often requires strong, enlightened despot-style leadership, and such is hard to come by. Founding a new school requires talent, true, but it's much easier to set the tone for a fresh start when there's a new building, a new staff, and a shuffled-up student body.

Now the caveat. Closing failing schools and opening new ones takes an enormous amount of work: politics in dealing with liberated teachers and administrators, recruiting new talent, dealing with the logistical nitty-gritty in terms of districting and busing, and hiring building contractors are but a few of the many challenges school boards and managers face. And there are time constraints. Incompetent teachers and administrators need to be sorted from competent ones, and there should be structures in place to ensure that when August arrives and there are eighteen open positions, the former don't get rehired. For Cleveland's proposal to be successful, it needs to be more than a grandiose reshuffling effort.

As Usual, Ravitch Gets It Right

2010-01-06T22:04:00.000-05:00

The author of The Language Police and Left Back spells out why the profit motive and public education shouldn't mix. Unfortunately, Diane Ravitch and her Bridging Differences co-author Deborah Meier are lonely soldiers fighting the good fight.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Race to the Top

2009-12-31T12:52:00.003-05:00

In his June 2007 Phi Delta Kappan article, Paul D. Houston outlined the seven deadly sins of No Child Left Behind. Two years later, it’s apparent that Obama follows in the tracks of Bush’s unenlightened educational trailblazing.

Believing that schools are “broken”: NCLB and Race to the Top cite USA’s middling performance on international math tests as evidence of a broken system. However, as the late Gerald Bracey famously argued, there are many reasons why tests like the TIMMS are ineffective comparison tools. For instance, many countries have 20-year-old seniors competing with 17 and 18-year-old Americans on the tests. Further, many countries track students into vocational and trade schools at the beginning of high school, meaning that the only students competing on the tests are the academically-tracked cream of the crop. The reason why American schools are in need of reform is not because they are wildly ineffective, but because systemically, American education is wildly unequal. (Unfortunately, America’s failing to be competitive gets a lot more press than America’s failing to be democratic.)
Conflating testing and education: As Houston argues, “A number of states were making significant progress on their statewide plans before NCLB was implemented, and they had to step back from more sophisticated uses of assessments to meet the lower standards set by NCLB.” To Houston, standards should not mean standardization; skills appearing on tests should be a starting point rather than an end goal, a rudimentary framework for deeper, more meaningful learning experiences. Race to the Top, however, puts standardized testing as the centerpiece of its agenda. Though the aim is more accountability, more transparency, the danger is that education will become more and more crude as schools forego more meaningful learning experiences to focus on 100% mastery of finding the main idea and determining the author’s purpose in dry, forgettable passages.
Failing to understand the complexities of poverty: It is now widely known among educational researchers and practitioners that when only a certain percentage of children must meet the “proficient” benchmark, the tendency is for schools to use data to hone instruction (and give extra tutoring services) to those students closest to making the mark. This is considered “efficient use of data,” and yet, in the process, we ignore the most disadvantaged students from the most disadvantaged schools. These are the same students most at-risk for joining gangs, doing drugs, and getting pregnant while in middle school or high school. In racing to the top, how many more children are we going to leave behind if our policy-makers fail to address “testing triage” directly?
Use of fear and coercion: Houston writes that, “NCLB relies for motivation on the blunt force of threats and punishments....By using fear and coercion as a change strategy, NCLB ensures compliance but blocks the pursuit of excellence for teachers and children. While you can beat people into submission, you can't beat them into greatness.” In several years, we’ll see the effects of Race to the Top’s incentivizing states to conform to its model of reform. If the effects are positive—as measured by the standardized assessment measures that are an integral part of this model—we can only hope that improvements are genuine, and not just the result of coercion and fear prompting schools to spend their Race to the Top funds on test preparation workbooks.
Lack of clarity: The AYP measure of improvement is confusing to parents, says Houston. What structures do Arne Duncan and the gang have in place to create more dialogue between parents and teachers, between teachers and schools, between schools and states?
“Just leave it to the experts!”: According to Houston, “No federal law that takes the professionals out of the decision-making process will ever work…Jamming a comprehensive set of mandates down the throats of those who must carry out the mandates is doomed—not just because of the insurgency it creates, but because many ideas that look so good in Washington just don't work in Weehawken.” These days, much of the resistance to Race to the Top comes from unions which object to merit pay and basing tenure on student test scores. It all too easy for law-makers to dismiss such criticisms; here it looks as if obstinate lobbying groups are trying to safeguard the jobs of those who don’t deserve them. The conversation between Washington and Weehawken needs to shift from the interests of teachers to the needs of students. Maybe merit pay is objectionable not because lazy, incompetent teachers will lose their jobs—after all, teachers who are not incompetent should have nothing to worry about—but because perhaps teachers have community-specific insights and ideas that haven’t occurred to lawmakers. The conversation needs to be a mutual sharing of expertise, not pitting my interests up against yours.
Undermining our international competitiveness: Houston writes that “…the greatest sin committed by NCLB is a sin of omission. NCLB fails to address the core question for America: How do we sustain our place in a global environment?” This is the one issue that Race to the Top does address—its language is on par with A Nation at Risk in terms of being economically attuned. What, then, are Race to the Top’s sins of omission? Presumably, American education wants to race to the top, but it also doesn’t want to leave children behind. Can a $4.35 billion grant competition do both? We shall see.

The Meaning of Bubbles

2009-12-30T14:05:00.006-05:00

Today, Valerie Strauss posted an email from a critic on her Washington Post blog. Patrick Mattimore, an attorney, found fault with Strauss’ naysaying of high-stakes testing. A redacted version of Mattimore’s argument goes as follows (I quote directly):

Multiple choice tests provide fast results, allowing teachers to provide immediate feedback and corrections. They are accurate, easy to administer and understand, objective, can be norm or criterion referenced, and most importantly, can test a variety of complexities of student knowledge. To suggest that filling in bubbles is an endpoint of instruction misses the obvious point that the bubbling activity is a means for checking how well students are learning. Critics claim that the tests stifle creativity by forcing students to think in terms of right answers instead of possibilities, unfairly brand students, and measure only narrow ranges of ability. But, a well-constructed multiple choice test will not only measure a student’s retention of facts, but test that student’s ability to apply what she has learned to novel problems and to make connections and inferences. A multiple choice test that incorporates a taxonomy of higher levels of thinking will force students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information. Standardizing the tests insures that our students are being challenged on like measures and enables us to see across the board what is working and what is not. As an assessment measure, standardized multiple choice tests may not paint a student’s complete academic portrait but they certainly provide us with a reasonable snapshot. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should insist upon standardized national assessment measures for all our students in every grade and those assessments should be primarily multiple choice.

Here are my comments:

There are reasons why many teachers are opposed to high-stakes testing - reasons that have nothing to do with their salaries or reputations, or with teacher unions. Here are a few of them:

Tests are not as accurate as those like Mattimore make them out to be. Many students in Title I schools must take periodic benchmark multiple-choice tests. These tests are administered so frequently that, by the time April rolls around, many students have testing-ennui. I was once praised for my progress with a very difficult student whom I saw make random patterns on his bubble sheet without looking at the test booklet. Similarly, I have seen normally high-performing students get so burnt out by April, they speed through their tests so that they can read the books under their chairs.
Many psychometricians argue that multiple-choice test prep workbooks undermine the validity of the testing measure. Nevertheless, taxpayer dollars are spent on workbooks like Holt's TAKS Test Prep and Spectrum's FCAT Test Prep. Many teachers, especially in Title I schools where the stakes are highest, do nothing but test prep skill-drill in the month leading up to the test. Which brings me to my next point...
The presence of high stakes testing in the American classroom changes the nature of learning. Many Title I schools given the label "corrective action" by NCLB are willing to do whatever it takes to make AYP. This means dropping social studies and science from the curriculum, teaching reading and math through test preparation workbooks so that students are intimately familiar with the format of the test and with testing strategies, and focusing most on a middle group of students that have the best chance of moving into the next-highest proficiency bracket (while ignoring the needs of the high and low achievers). Again, psychometricians argue that these strategies render the testing measures invalid.

A final note: I would be happy to have once-a-year standardized testing, provided that there was more regulation associated with them. It is very inappropriate for schools to spend 8 hours per day exclusively on reading and math when the state standards indicate that social studies and science should be taught. Such practices, along with test preparation workbooks which skew the validity of the assessment tool, should be banned. (These regulatory measures would be highly unpopular with textbook companies, but it's safe to say that Title I teachers and students would be relieved.)

Mixed Measures of Accountability

2009-12-29T12:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will be holding a second round of public meetings in January to get input from states and experts on the assessment competition component of Race to the Top.

Hurray, public input! Hurray, democracy!

One major outcome of the first round of public meetings was the Department of Education’s concession that “mixed measures” of accountability for principals and districts are more appropriate than evaluating principals and districts solely on the basis of student test scores. Hopefully, there will be similar gains this time around. It’s old news by now that the Education Department is setting aside $350 million to give to those states which are able to come up with innovative assessment systems that measure the common core standards compiled this past summer. This is a synthesis of two of the four main bullet point goals of the Race to the Top initiative: “Adopting college- and career-ready standards and assessments” and “Building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve their practices.” The idea is to preserve state autonomy by having state DOEs come up with assessments that are based on these standards. But, the assessment competition can be seen in another light: outsourcing the very difficult task of creating assessment systems that are meaningful, time-efficient, cost-effective, and scalable. Because Arne Duncan and the gang are incentivizing all states to adopt the common core standards—willingness to do so is a component of the rubric being used to evaluate grant proposals—it is possible that, in the future, states won’t need to reinvent the wheel if a single accountability system exists that serves the needs of all states. With a common testing tool, this of course would mean that states would be able to be pitted up against one another to measure educational gains. We’d at last have a data-driven basis for arguing that Texas is doing a better job educating its students than Massachusetts, or vice versa.

So far, so good. Or at least, not so bad.

However, my worry is that states will be too eager to trade “meaningful” for “time-efficient” and “cost-effective.” It’s not just a matter of developing good multiple choice questions around the common core standards. I want state DOEs to think about the way that standardized multiple-choice testing affects the culture of schools, especially Title I schools for whom the stakes are highest. Bringing the “mixed measures” approach to evaluating educational progress means exploring assessment tools other than standardized tests. Even when data is collected on parental involvement, attendance, etc.—assessment measures sometimes used in AYP calculations—it seems that a school’s reputation ultimately rests on its scores. Granted, a parental involvement statistic is touchy-feely and meaningless unless accompanied by excellent test scores, the equivalent of a “Good participation!” comment next to a grade of C on a student report card. However, there needs to be some real acknowledgment that excellent test scores are often the result of relentless test prep skill-drill rather than passionate teaching and meaningful learning.

But how do you measure meaningful learning in a way that’s test prep workbook-proof? How do you make sure that schools are actually improving educational outcomes and not just exploiting accountability systems which only measure the outward appearance thereof? Hopefully, this is Arne Duncan’s $350 million question. But of course, I’m skeptical.

The Success of Success For All

2009-12-28T00:08:00.002-05:00

Breaking news: Jay Mathews of the Washington Post celebrates scripted curriculums. To Mathews, programs like Success For All have already proven their efficacy, so rather than wasting time and money on coming up with new commercial curriculums, schools should just use the ones that are already around. Even if they are, er, from 1987.

So let’s talk about Success For All (or in Edspeak, SFA). The program requires extended reading and math blocks, data-driven homogenous grouping, cooperative learning, one-on-one tutoring, periodic assessments, biweekly teacher collaboration sessions, and a parental outreach organization. Oh, and I almost forgot: SFA workbook materials and instructional scripts.

Many researchers have found that the implementation of SFA dramatically improves students’ reading and math test scores in randomized trials. However, SFA must be implemented lock, stock, and barrel—teachers should not use SFA materials without also extending their reading blocks and expect results. This raises interesting questions about the causal basis of students’ test score gains. The elements of the SFA program can be easily divided into those that are commercial and unique to SFA (SFA workbook materials and instructional scripts) and those that are non-commercial and non-unique (extended reading and math blocks, data-driven homogenous grouping, one-on-one tutoring, etc.). If SFA is implemented correctly—as is the case with most schools posting gains in randomized trials—it is very possible that the non-unique, non-commercial elements of SFA are causally responsible for test score gains. If there are two schools, one of which uses small, homogenous reading groups and one-on-one tutoring, and one which doesn’t, it is not surprising that the former will have higher test scores, regardless of the curriculum that is used.

This is important for a number of reasons. Many teachers—including this one—hate using scripted curriculums because it limits their autonomy and leaves them with no time to teach the books that they are passionate about. If teaching is supposed to be a creative profession, then darn it, let teachers orchestrate meaningful learning experiences for their students.

Further, critics like Jonathan Kozol argue that SFA’s monotonous creed of rote-learning actually serves to inhibit the burgeoning creativity of nascent individuals—the very same individuals who, historically and in the present, are the victims of institutionalized racism. SFA, after all, targets schools with struggling readers, and these schools serve students who are usually Black or Latino, urban, and poor. (Kozol’s critique, as laid out in his Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, set off the SFA wars of 2005 and 2006. Those from the Success for All Foundation shot back that Kozol ignored the evidence—the good-hearted folk behind SFA target the least advantaged students precisely because they are the least advantaged students, and the numbers show that SFA improves these students’ reading and math scores.)

But, what is common to Kozol’s critique and the grumbles and gripes of teachers in SFA schools is a frustration with the commercial components of the SFA program—the script, the dry, uniform lessons, the workbooks. However, if the positive results of SFA are causally linked to its non-commercial aspects, there seems to be no reason why the commercial aspects of SFA should be adopted. After all, small group instruction and parental outreach are not copyrighted. Many schools that have never heard of SFA use small group instruction and involve their parents (some because they are required to in order to comply with their NCLB improvement plans, some because these are good, commonsense practices). It seems, then, that the success of Success For All can be attributed to the fact that several educational practitioners in the late 1980s came up with a great list of commonsense, holistic, district-level reform measures that improve student learning.

Of course, researchers would need to test this. And that would mean hacking SFA into its constituent parts, having some schools to adopt the program full keel, and other adopt only the non-commercial aspects of the program in a randomized trial. Those at the Success For All Foundation would probably not be too excited about such a study. But as more and more schools across the nation are adopting scripted curriculums—to the chagrin of those who have to use them—science should pay no heed.

The Waffle House Model of Reform

2009-12-27T02:58:00.005-05:00

Now that the Senate has passed a bill which promises to reinvent the health care system, it is time for the reinvention of institutionalized American education.

Notice what the Senate did not do. The centerpiece of the bill was not 50 different accountability systems according to which the federal government could measure hospitals against one another. There was nothing in the bill about doctors receiving compensation relative to the health of their patients. And it seemed that the justification for health care reform was a belief that health is inherently good for individuals. (Not because China, India, and Japan are surpassing American workers in physical vitality.)

Next year, $4 billion will be granted to the 13 state education departments which come up with the highest-scoring proposals for overhauling the education systems in their states. Notice who is finally giving money to whom. Race to the Top is based on the idea that top-down one-size-fits-all reform measures cannot work. Different states have different needs, and the idea of decentralized reform does justice to the idea that American education has always been a local endeavor. Gone are the “unfunded mandate” days of No Child Left Behind—here is real acknowledgement from the federal government that education reform requires cash. Lots and lots of it.

Unfortunately, and due in part to the rubric that will be used to evaluate proposals, states must necessarily conform to a very narrow definition of reform to win funds. In many respects, recipients of Race to the Top funds will be treated as franchises—schools will vary in outward appearance and will serve different clientele, but standardized operational protocol will ensure that substantive differences are only nominal. This is the Waffle House model of reform, and to Arne Duncan and the gang, this is the only way to save the nation’s kids from poorly-administered schools and poorly-trained teachers. Though there are not direct quantitative measurements of Waffle House products, such are not necessary, since Waffle House franchises with bad food and slow service alienate patrons and fail to be financially self-sustaining. Students don’t usually leave a district because a teacher isn’t teaching, but pushing schools to be more data-driven will bolster the revolution in educational transparency started by NCLB. This is the equivalent of forcing schools to post profits, and holding low-performing schools accountable for improvement before they have the chance to go under.

How, then, does this promote uniformity? The enemy isn’t high stakes testing. The enemy is high stakes testing culture. While schools with a history of success on year-end standardized tests generally do not have to change their practices, schools with a history of failure (that is, many schools in low-income neighborhoods and regions) have to make changes which will improve educational outcomes. But, since educational outcomes are measured by tests, the test becomes the end-all, and the goal of improving educational outcomes is lost. Schools that kowtow to high stakes testing replace chapter books with 500-word Find-the-Main-Idea! passages, remove social studies and science from the curriculum in grades where those subjects aren’t tested, and do test prep, test prep, and more test prep to ensure that students are used to the format of the test they see each April. Further, such schools are often required by NCLB to “monitor” the progress of individual learners—this takes the form of more standardized “benchmark” testing every month or two. A well-documented phenomenon is that many schools use this data to focus on the students closest to scoring “proficient” on the state test—which means that they don’t focus on students who are already predicted to receive that score or higher and those who are predicted to score at the basic or below basic level. Moreover, time spent on benchmark tests means less time teaching and learning—many of the benchmark tests used by schools are long, outmoded, and boring. Taking these tests is a draining exercise, and the students subjected to them are many of the same students against whom teachers have to wage a propaganda campaign whose message is—Stay in school! Stay engaged! Learning is fun!

If rigid accountability structures and merit pay and trying to get the competitive edge on China, India, and Japan improve the educational prospects for the nation’s most disadvantaged students, kudos to Race to the Top. But ten years from now, when we attempt to measure the impact of this initiative, we should demand to know if educational prospects were improved in a meaningful way. High stakes testing culture could very well be the top-down one-size-fits-all reform measure that Race to the Top inadvertently promotes.

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