The End Game: Pensions

It is probably just the historical moment, but right now it certainly feels like the driving force at the core of school reform is an aversion to pensions. That's the end game. Unions are bad because they lead to pensions. Bad teachers hang around to get their pensions. Tenure is bad because it allows people to hang around and get overly large pensions. Charter schools are good because... no pensions! TFA-ers... don't want pensions!

Obviously, this is not what people consciously think, but if Mike Bloomberg could wave his wand and give all teachers 401K's, it would seriously take the wind out of the reform sails. That is to say, the money would suddenly start going to different think tanks, lobbyists, NGO's, etc.

Looking at the RI Student Growth Model

Elisabeth Harrison:

Here’s the Rhode Island Department of Education’s newly minted tool for comparing school performance.

The website graphs both proficiency rates on annual state tests of English and Mathematics and individual score changes from one year to the next. Education officials call it “the Rhode Island Growth Model Visualization Tool.”

Starting next year, the state will start keeping track of growth data for individual teachers and classrooms.

This tool is pretty uninteresting aside from its implication for future school and teacher evaluation. In particular putting growth on the X axis and overall achievement on the Y for all the views makes it hard for me, as a a parent or member of the general public looking at schools and districts, to draw any non-obvious conclusions.

The big flaming omission here is the inclusion of only one year's worth of data. If there is a practical reason for that, they should say so. Probably it is simply to obscure the instability of the scores year over year.

What you should check out, just to get a sense of where all this is going, is double clicking on some schools and get the breakdown by grade, which in some cases should narrow you down to the scores of just a handful of teachers. Then you can see, for example, that the fourth grade teachers at Vartan Gregorian might be on the hot seat soon. Or it is just random noise? There's a 30 point spread between the growth percentiles in grade 4 and 5 math at Reservoir, where I'm pretty sure it is just two teachers per grade level, but only a 6 point spread in reading. I'd love to see how these numbers jump around over the past five years. RIDE should have that data, and CPU cycles are cheap!

For more on student growth percentages in teacher and school evaluation, see Bruce Baker.

The District Practically Runs Itself Anyhow

Linda Borg:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- School Board President Keith Oliveira said he takes full responsibility for the fact that only three out of nine board members turned up for Monday's meeting.

It is not particularly easy to figure out how many of them were nominated by Taveras.

Natalia Rosa-Sosa, Megaly Sanchez, Maila Touray, and Julian Dash also missed the meeting when the new superintendent was selected.

They Are Trying to be Smarter, and It Just Makes the Task Stupider

Alice Mercer:

Looking through the sample performance task is like looking at Common Core in general. It’s a hodge-podge. Some of the tasks are great and could be “world-class”, some are the same-old, and some remind me of the Pineapple Race test passage, in that they are trying to be smarter, and it just makes the task stupider. My notes are in italics, make of it what you will:

Sample Performance Tasks for Informational Texts (Fourth and Fifth Grade)

Students explain how Melvin Berger uses reasons and evidence in his book Discovering Mars: The Amazing Story of the Red Planet to support particular points regarding the topology of the planet. [RI.4.8]
Since the text is not included in the exemplars, I can’t tell if there is something gripping about it that would make it compelling for students. I’m also trying to figure out what the idea here. Is it to learn about the topology of Mars, or how scientists determine points about Mars topology? It’s still better than this next task…

Students identify the overall structure of ideas, concepts, and information in Seymour Simon’s Horses (based on factors such as their speed and color) and compare and contrast that scheme to the one employed by Patricia Lauber in her book Hurricanes: Earth’s Mightiest Storms. [RI.5.5]
This is really comparing apples and oranges. Why would you want to compare these classification systems? If you’re going to teach them about classifying hurricanes, shouldn’t you be teaching them about “official” scales, instead of a “scheme employed” by one author? What are they learning about content matter when you teach this? It’s a central weakness of the standards in that they want to be content relevant, but without content standards, they just seem to vaguely point to science and social studies, and to have tasks that involve high level thinking about stuff that is often banal, and has NO connection to the big ideas of the subject. It replicates all the worst tendency of Open Court’s coverage of science and social studies by creating a paint-the-wall-by-polka-dots curricula.

People are starting to pick up on the idea that the Common Core encourages more "informational texts." And close reading. That the Common Core places a heavy emphasis on close reading of informational texts, due to its own "backward engineering" and rigid structure, hasn't quite sunk in. Never mind that close reading is primarily used for literature, unusually literary non-fiction (like the Gettysburg Address) or perhaps dense argument.

Thus, in the first example above, the idea is not to learn about the content, it is to study how the author has structured the text.

In the second example, you're studying the use of classification systems as structural elements in informational text. And you are going to be doing a lot of that kind of thing.

This is very plainly explained in the text of the standards and supporting documents like those Alice is citing, but it is still difficult for teachers to wrap their heads around, because it makes no god damned sense to make this kind of structural analysis a central objective for 5th graders. But there it is.

Just for comparison, Finland's "description of good performance at the end of fifth grade:"

The pupils' skills in interpreting and utilizing various texts will have developed so that they

• achieve a fluent basic reading proficiency
• know how to use strategies to improve reading comprehension
• know the main phases of information acquisition
• are used to utilizing the library and capable of searching for the information they need in printed and electronic sources
• find the main elements in texts in which there are words, sound, and illustration
• distinguish opinion in age-appropriate texts and consider the text's dependability and meaning for themselves
• use their reading skills for both benefit and fun

This is why you won't see international benchmarks for Common Core ELA.

While the Particulars are Idiotic, I'm Glad We're Having the Conversation

Elisabeth Harrison:

The Rhode Island Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union says Barrington may risk discriminating against special education students with a program that would admit a limited number of students from outside the highly ranked district.

Barrington has announced plans open 10 seats to out-of-district students in a competitive application process. Families would pay tuition of $12,800 for students who gain admission to the Barrington schools.

In describing the pilot program, Barrington school officials told RIPR that students needing special services would not be eligible because of the extra cost associated with their education.

The ACLU has sent a letter to Barrington School officials warning that this could violate numerous laws designed to protect students with disabilities.

It would be nice if the reform community at least showed some consistency and started advocating for cross-district enrollment by lottery when spaces are available.

Apparently They Haven't Thought This Through at All

Bob Plain:

Patrick Guida, the chair of the Barrington School Committee as well as the vice chair of the state Board of Regents, said there are potential legal issues to grapple with before the district could put the plan into effect, such as whether the plan would effectively discriminate against students with special needs or even those who couldn’t afford to pay the tuition.

“If there are any legal issues we would cancel the whole thing,” he said, but added: “By virtue of us making this opportunity available, we ought to have some opportunity for discretion.”

I don't find it very reassuring that this guy is the vice chair of the Board of Regents, on a number of different levels.

Also, wtf is this?

Tim Duffy, the executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, said Lincoln is considering a similar proposal and that is not unlike the mayoral academy in Cumberland set up by Mayor Dan McKee, that serves students from Cumberland as well as neighboring towns.

Crossing the Webinar Threshold

It seems like enough businesses are interested in SchoolTool that I'm going to have to start creating webinars. That's a good thing.

The free software community is used to getting by with text.

Things Grownups Do

You might want to watch this one with your eyes closed:

The Over/Under is 5 Points in Reading, 10 in Math

RIDE:

At a surprise news conference this morning (May 7, 2012) at the Pleasant View Elementary School, in Providence, Governor Lincoln D. Chafee and Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist announced that the school is the recipient of the first Rhode Island Innovation Powered by Technology Model School Grant.

The $470,000 grant will finance a plan that educators at the Pleasant View Elementary School developed to redesign the school and transform its instructional practices through the use of technology.

It is certainly worth mentioning, although apparently not to RIDE, that Pleasant View was also in the latest batch of "persistently low-achieving" schools. It is a little puzzling to have Commissioner Gist praise the school's "forward looking leadership" considering RIDE's view of its overall performance.

Having had a similar lump of money ($300,000 for hardware, plus me and a part-time tech on site for a couple years) for technology at the beginning of a turnaround in 2000, I can tell you it is nice but it doesn't go as far as you might think, especially if there is $0 a year budgeted for long-term support.

Um... What Happened to The Money Follows The Child?

Elisabeth Harrison:

Ever wished you could send your kids to a Barrington public school without actually moving there? Well, now you can.

The district opens a pilot program this fall for 10 students who live outside the town. Barrington School Committee Chair Patrick “Buzz” Guida says administrators are finalizing what criteria they will use to select the students.

“We’re looking to test it to see if it works,” Guida says of the pilot program. “If it works well for the students who are in district and those who might be coming from another community, then it might be something that we’d want to pursue in the future.”

Guida says the program will be aimed at students who could be “enriched” by Barrington’s school offerings. The district is open to applications from any student at any grade level, with the exception of those needing special services.

As with many things in life, there is a cost. Parents would have to provide their own transportation and pay $12,800, the equivalent of Barrington’s average cost per pupil. (Even at that price, it sounds like a bargain compared to tuition at many private schools!)

What do we have to do to just make this part of the overall "choice" system and covered by the funding formula? Can they really exclude special needs students? Can we get a lottery?

Don't Be Snowed on the Complexity of Unwritten Common Core Assessments

I'm glad Dana Goldstein is taking on the subject of computer scoring of essays and the Common Core, but I'm afraid she has been led somewhat astray by her sources, particularly the Common Core's Appendix B.

But of the eight state standardized-test writing prompts Shermis looked at in his study, none required students to demonstrate knowledge beyond what could be gleaned from a specific text, and four required “relatively content-free” responses. The Common Core, meanwhile, has much higher ambitions for student writing. Here is an example of a Common Core essay prompt—the kind students across the country should be encountering over the next five years:

Compare and contrast the themes and argument found in the Declaration of Independence to those of other U.S. documents of historical and literary significance, such as the Olive Branch Petition.

Brown University computer scientist Eugene Charniak, an expert in artificial intelligence, says it could take another century for computer software to accurately score an essay written in response to a prompt like this one, because it is so difficult for computers to assess whether a piece of writing demonstrates real knowledge across a subject as broad as American history.

Dana cites the second half of an example question meant to demonstrate mastery of Reading Standard 9 for Informational Texts at the 11th/12th grade level:

Analyze seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features.

Or, more succinctly:

Produce an analysis of the themes, purposes and rhetorical features of a text.

Since there are no standards for what is required for this sort of analysis beyond clarity and logical argument, and those are covered by a different standard, something like this would be perfectly adequate to accurately and completely satisfy the standard:

Based only on a reading of the Declaration of Independence and citing only evidence from the text, answer the following:

1. What is the theme of the text?
2. What is the purpose of the text?
3. How does the listing of grievances (highlighted in yellow in the text) support the purpose of the text?

The standard does not require you to write an essay -- it is a reading standard, not a writing standard. Doesn't require compare and contrast between two documents. It doesn't require any content knowledge outside the text, although it would probably be very helpful. It does not require you to be familiar with those texts beforehand, although it would help, and it certainly doesn't require prior knowledge of something as obscure as the Olive Branch Petition. It does not permit evidence from outside the text, which is completely consistent with the approach and philosophy of the standards as a whole.

This prompt is much more computer-scorable. It is also easier, while still being more closely aligned to the text of the standard. If your state uses my prompt, the tests will be cheaper, the results returned more quickly, probably with more reliability and validity, and your scores will be higher. I don't see any reason why these couldn't be multiple choice questions, actually.

Which approach do you think will win out?

I Hate Your For Your Philanthropy, and I Will Forever. As Will My Children.

Russo:

Nobody but perhaps a handful of us really want Gates and Broad and all the rest to fail, give up, and go off and do something else with their loot. Which is what they'll eventually do if they make lots of bad decisions and decide they are going to end up lumped in with Annenberg and so many previous efforts. A better feedback loop would help prevent this.

I absolutely do want them to go off and do something else with their loot. And if they do so they won't be lumped in with Annenberg, which was perhaps ineffective but at least benign. This will stop when hundreds of thousands or millions of people around the country start to actively resent them, personally, for the destructive impact of their "philanthropy."

I think they should all go into transportation policy and fund bike trails. That would be awesome! Or, you know, just having libraries is nice.

Filed Away for Future Claim Chowder

Dr. Tony Bennett:

Armed with these bold reforms, Louisiana will soon lead our country in quality public K-12 education.