Haven't Had a Juicy KPG Post On Common Core Watch in a While

Me, in comments:

Reading standard 9 is your example of progression across grade levels?  It seems to me that the standards are quite close and all are equally applicable at each of the grade levels.  You could certainly talk with third graders about how the Brothers Grimm's Rapunzel is adapted in Tangled, or ask 10th graders to compare and contrast the themes of Henry IV part 2 and Henry V.  The sequence is essentially arbitrary.

If the standards want students to learn about Classical mythology, they should say so.  It doesn't make sense to stuff it into a vocabulary standard, and there are probably only about a dozen words for which this actually makes sense anyhow, where you're not plunging into some obscure myth to find the vocab word (e.g.,Hygieia, Panacea), or explaining back story for words which are fairly common anyhow (cereal, atlas, panic).  And many of them seem completely irrelevant to 4th grade literary reading, which this standard supposedly addresses (plutocracy, chronology).

The example "how-to" writing assignment is terrible.  I'm tempted to call it "developmentally inappropriate," but it is really much worse than that.  It is just bad technical writing advice.  You can't write good instructions by just reading some other instructions, without doing the task yourself, or at least observing other people doing the task and talking to them.  That suggestion only makes sense if the authors are trying to pre-emptively validate a lousy form of assessment (and writing).  Any competent English teacher would cut it at the first opportunity.

Finally, are we really supposed to believe that the "heart" of the Common Core or any other body of standards is not the standards themselves, but actually the introduction and appendix?  Give me a break.

Also, she makes the (rather obvious to me) quid pro quo between Common Core and Core Knowledge a little more clear than most have:

In short, the heart of the Common Core literacy standards—the elements that earned the support of education leaders like Hirsch—have been gutted from the latest Indiana draft.

How the BIG Web Works Today

Dan Rayburn:

From a technical level, Netflix has their own servers that are sitting inside third-party colocation facilities in multiple locations. To connect Netflix’s servers to ISPs, Netflix buys transit from multiple providers, which then connect their networks to the ISPs. Netflix pays the transit providers for those connections and with that, gets a certain level of capacity from the transit provider. While Cogent is one of the companies Netflix is buying transit from, they are not the only one. Netflix buys transit from multiple companies, including Cogent, Level 3, Tata, XO, Telia, and NTT, with Cogent and Level 3 being the primary providers. Transit providers like Cogent then connect their networks to ISPs like Comcast in what’s called peering. This is where a lot of the confusion starts as many are under the impression that ISPs like Comcast are suppose to allow any transit provider to push an unlimited amount of traffic into their network without any compensation. This isn’t a Comcast specific policy, but rather one that is standard for all ISPs.

ISPs have something called a peering policy (comcast.com/peering), which are rules that govern how networks connect with one another and exchange traffic. ISPs like Comcast will allow transit providers like Cogent to connect to their network, for free, in what’s called settlement-free peering. However, once the transit provider sends more traffic to the ISP then they are allowed to, per the ISPs peering policy, the transit provider pays the ISP for more capacity to get additional traffic into their network. Remember, Netflix is the one paying Cogent and Cogent is selling Netflix on the principle that it can get all of Netflix’s traffic into an ISP like Comcast. As a result, Cogent has to take all the necessary business steps to make sure Cogent has enough capacity to pass Netflix’s traffic on from Cogent’s network to Comcast. But Cogent isn’t doing that.

My Latest at RIFuture: CFHS Four Years On

Me:

Taking a longer perspective on the CFHS data, a few things seem clear:

• The school’s academic performance prior to the transformation was not as bad as reformers thought or presented it.
• Rushing the process did not “save” the students in the school. The test scores of the student cohorts in the school during the process clearly suffered. They were worse off in reading and writing achievement according to the NECAP scores.
• In the four years since RIDE named CFHS “persistently low performing,” the gap between CFHS and RI state proficiency rates has increased on all four NECAP tests.

One thing that I noticed looking at the assembled charts is that the statewide and CFHS numbers generally bounce up and down in parallel, suggesting effects of scoring/scaling/etc.

Open In All the Wrong Places

Bob Braun:

The response from Anderson to CASA’s formal request under the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) was, yes, such an algorithm exists—but, no, you can’t have it. Why? Well, because it wasn’t developed by the Newark public schools. Rather it somehow came from that private sector giant—secretly-determining so much of what is happening, and what will happen, to Newark’s children: the Foundation for Newark’s Future (FNF).

It is nice that inBloom is open source, and kind of Student Achievement Partners to offer you a curricular shit sandwich for free, but the benefit of that stuff doesn't come close to the disutility of keeping really essential processes secret.

NECAP Quickies

See also:

• The most important number is that for the second year in a row, Deborah Gist's RIDE met only one of her 33 "Performance Measures and Goals" for the state. This year the number "nearly" meeting the goal (within 2%) went from 1 to zero. Performance in 14 of the measures declined. These goals were always unrealistic, so it is sort of unfair to hold RIDE to them, but the confidence with which the goals were issued was an important rhetorical club for reformers, so they don't get a pass now.
• The one goal they did meet comfortably both years, this year by 14.3%, was for graduates enrolled in college gaining a year of college credit within two years of graduation. Of kids getting into an "institution of higher learning," apparently 82.6% are "college and career ready" right now. This suggests that all the rhetoric about college readiness distorts the true situation -- kids getting all the way to college and flunking out is not the crux of our problems.

• Providence's high schools seem to be recovering from the horrific Brady-era slump. Updating my personal benchmark of number of neighborhood high schools with over 50% in reading:

  • 2008: 3/8
  • 2009: 5/9
  • 2010: 4/8
  • 2011: 1/8
  • 2012: 1/8
  2013: 5/7

  Yeah, cutscores are bogus, but my sense is that getting more than half the kids roughly on grade level constitutes a palpable shift in a school.

  The Brady administration did great harm to Providence's high schools -- this confirms it.

• The one high-performing neighborhood high school not destroyed by Tom Brady, Deborah Gist and their minions, E-Cubed, continues to demonstrate the potential staying power of the small schools model, with 73% proficiency in reading. Wouldn't it have been nice if we could have counted on four schools in that range every year for the past half-decade?
• I wish RIDE could decide how many schools Blackstone Valley Prep is. They're still reporting it as one elementary and one middle school. That is, they don't seem to be releasing school level data consistently from BVP.

Why Isn't Sandra Fluke Running Against...

...Bill Shuster?

Time to turn Central PA BLUE!

Nobody Knows How to Raise NECAP Math Scores

I've got a new post over at RI Future.

One side note -- North Providence did see a 19% jump in students scoring higher than "1" on the 11th grade math NECAP, and we don't have the demographic breakdowns yet, but the interesting thing about their scores last year was that whites, males, and not economically disadvantaged students all underperformed in North Providence last year compared to their peers statewide, while low-income, female and minority students all outperformed their peers. I suspect that some complacent white guys were scared straight by the graduation requirements, but it took a weird demographic situation to cause that to result in a clear test score gain.

What Do the Providence Grays have to do with Black History Month?

Peter Morris and Stefan Fatsis:

So where does that leave William Edward White? Baseball pioneer or baseball footnote? When he trotted out to first base at Messer Street Grounds in Providence, White may have been the only person who knew that a black man was playing in the big leagues. And even that assumes White thought about the fact that he was black, or even partly black. In the racially bifurcated America of the times, “you were black or you were white,” Hobbs says. If no one else knew—if society couldn’t respond and react—it’s reasonable to question whether White should be recognized as the first African-American major-leaguer.

Strands of Standards is an Anti-Pattern

Yesterday I came across Liping Ma's article from last November's Notices of the American Mathematical Society, entitled "A Critique of the Structure of U.S. Elementary School Mathematics." I believe it is free to the public, but I'm on a university network, which sometimes gives me permission to access journals that are blocked to the public (if you can't see it, let me know). It is 15 pages, and covers as much history as math. I recommend reading it if you're at all interested in this stuff.

Its probably the best thing I've ever read on the subject of standards. It doesn't touch on the Common Core itself, but is clearly applicable.

Unlike virtually everything I've read about the Common Core, Ma regards the most important and influential role of "standards" as defining the scope and nature of the subject as taught, particularly in reference to the corresponding academic discipline.

Ma's argument is that American elementary school mathematics was profoundly but nearly imperceptibly transformed by the switch from what she calls a "core-subject model" to a "strand" model. The difference to Ma is that a "core-subject" "...is a collection of skills or a self-contained subject with principles similar to those of the discipline of mathematics."

Instead, since the New Math, we've used "strands":

As we have seen, the strands structure allowed an unlimited number of possibilities for changing the names, number, content, and features of the strands. After this, U.S. elementary mathematics lost its stability and coherence. After only four years, the same mathematics professors who wrote the first Strands Report changed the strands without explanation. In a strands structure, no strand was self-contained; moreover, the relationship among the strands was such that individual strands could be readily changed. Anyone writing a framework could easily change the content of mathematics education by changing a strand. Later, when the main authors of the mathematics framework were not mathematicians but teachers and cognitive scientists, they retained its structure, but changed its strands to fit their views of mathematics education.

Put another way, once you see an academic subject as a bags of stuff, you're not going to be able to resist trying to solve every problem by changing around the stuff in the bags, and there is a very strong tendency to do that willy-nilly, as we have seen.

In ELA/Literacy, I would say the Common Core has gone further and is simply disdainful of English/Language Arts as a discipline. If one asks "What is English?" and reads the CC ELA/Literacy standards, they will find no answer.

The challenging part of Ma's thesis is that it is difficult to imagine the alternative to "strands," and it is unclear how applicable it is to other subjects that simply cannot be reduced to as unitary a focus as Ma argues elementary mathematics can be. After all, while Ma argues against the efficacy of pushing advanced math topics (as "strands") down into elementary math, she is not arguing for their later exclusion.

I'm definitely taking from this the idea that expressing standards as a set of interwoven strands is an "anti-pattern," that is, "a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive." The response, I think, would be to start with a much more disciplined and, well, disciplinary definition of the subject at hand. It also requires an approach to developing advanced skills that's a bit more subtle and pedagogically informed than simply pushing direct precursors down to the lowest grade level possible and hammering on them year after year.

Watching Pundits Walk Back School Reform

Matt Yglesias:

Of course it takes many decades to understand the truly long-term consequences of cash grants for children, but the best evidence we have shows a large positive impact of welfare checks on life outcomes for kids who benefitted from the pre-Depression version of cash assistance for poor single moms. And even though domestic poverty in a rich country is actually quite different from absolute poverty in low-income countries, we see similar impacts for the global poor. It turns out that we could do an awful lot to improve human welfare by focusing our efforts more narrowly and more intensely on spreading the wealth around.

Yglesias is pretty much a prototypical young (neo-)liberal young wonk blogger with an unfortunately typical affection for contemporary school reform, perhaps attributable in part to formerly dating Sara Mead (or maybe vice versa). Anyhow, posting a stream of "new" studies about poverty and learning would seem to be a way for the savvy young pundit to begin walking back from the "schools (or teachers) only" precipice the reform community has chosen to stand on.

I started to write this post the middle of last week and was thinking about including a line indicating that this would be more than we would ever get from Tom Friedman or David Brooks, but then, Brooks:

... we’ve probably put too much weight on school reform.

Of course, David Brooks cannot transcend his essential David Brooks-iness, and the rest of the column is still insufferably self-satisfied, middlebrow, paternalistic bullshit, but it does actually represent an important shift in momentum and Conventional Wisdom.

It Wouldn't Be Hard to "Fix" Contemporary School Reform (If You Wanted To)

Gary Stern:

Having talked to many, many parents, educators and others about these issues, I’m going to attempt to categorize some of the main changes that people want. Here we go:

1. A review of the Common Core standards themselves. The Common Core isn’t going anywhere. But many educators want to see a grade-by-grade, standard-by-standard review, involving teachers and administrators and resulting in revisions for New York. Would this require a freeze of the roll-out? I can’t see it happening.

2. A freeze on standardized tests. Lots of legislators are calling for a “moratorium” on high-stakes testing. But states have to do testing to comply with federal law. A moratorium would be a complex undertaking. Would the new, Common Core-based tests be replaced by others? A review of the controversial “cut scores,” which produced a high failure rate, seems more realistic.

3. A halt to plans to ship identifiable student data to the inBloom cloud. Many parents, educators and legislators have questions about security and privacy. I could see the whole thing being postponed — or at least the passage of an opt-out option for parents. Recently, though, people on all sides have urged a broader discussion about the use and security of student data. The inBloom debate and a recent Fordham Law School study have revealed how little educators know about other forms of data collection and deeper privacy concerns.

4. A look at the costs of reform. School districts are steaming over the dollars they’ve had to spend on developing new teacher evaluations, providing Common Core training and materials, and more. Districts have been cutting back for years, now operate under the property-tax levy cap and have to use 15-20 percent of their budgets for state requirements. But anyone who has been waiting for the Legislature to reduce unfunded mandates knows that it just doesn’t happen.

5. Better communication and leadership from the Regents and King. In recent weeks, a bunch of people have told me that the problems caused by the implementation of the Common Core and other reforms can be fixed without tremendous hardship. But they say that King and the Regents need to sincerely acknowledge the most common criticisms they face and then be willing to sit down with educators to hash out what must be done. I’ve talked to a few moderate, measured types who say they are mystified by the state’s lack of public-relations savvy.

On the other hand, if the goal of school reform is simply a transfer of power away from teachers, then you can't do these things.

Also, fixing CC in NYS would require throwing a bunch of underperforming vendors under the bus, including Pearson and Student Achievement Partners at the top of the list.

Nothing to Worry About, Everything is Just Fine

The Problem with inBloom

Edward Snowden:

I think a person should be able to dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it’s going to look like on their permanent record.

Imagine what your middle and high school years would feel like knowing that anything might be going on your permanent record, which your dream college may ask permission to access (who can say they wouldn't in 5 years?).

For Those Deciding Between a Career in Finance or Engineering

Mark Ames:

These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010. That DOJ suit became the basis of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of over 100,000 tech employees whose wages were artificially lowered — an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen by the high-flying companies from their workers to pad company earnings — in the second half of the 2000s. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied attempts by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe to have the lawsuit tossed, and gave final approval for the class action suit to go forward. A jury trial date has been set for May 27 in San Jose, before US District Court judge Lucy Koh, who presided over the Samsung-Apple patent suit.

In a related but separate investigation and ongoing suit, eBay and its former CEO Meg Whitman, now CEO of HP, are being sued by both the federal government and the state of California for arranging a similar, secret wage-theft agreement with Intuit (and possibly Google as well) during the same period.

The secret wage-theft agreements between Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar (now owned by Disney) are described in court papers obtained by PandoDaily as “an overarching conspiracy” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, and at times it reads like something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced those laws. Today’s inequality crisis is America’s worst on record since statistics were first recorded a hundred years ago — the only comparison would be to the era of the railroad tycoons in the late 19th century.

In finance, you'll collude with your employer screw your customers (i.e., the entire rest of the economy), in return for a nice cut of the booty. In engineering, your employers will collude to screw you.

Of course, you can always leave and found a startup, where I'm sure the financiers you're dependent upon will treat you quite fairly.

Larry Summers is the Diane Ravitch of Economics

Larry Summers:

This is the third and, in my view, best way of responding to stagnation concerns. Consider my favorite example: debt-financed infrastructure spending. Notice several things: First, when your growth rate exceeds your interest rate -- which is surely going to be true for a long time for short-term debt -- then you can issue debt, roll over the debt to cover interest and still have a declining debt-to-GDP ratio. Further, debt-financed infrastructure increases GDP by increasing productivity, which makes us wealthier and stimulates demand in an economy that is demand-constrained. Finally, if we fix Kennedy airport today, we don’t need to fix it tomorrow. If the concern is the obligation placed on future generations, then our accounting leads us seriously astray if it teaches us to fret over the Treasury debt that will be left behind but not the deferred maintenance liability that will be left behind.

To put the point a different way. If government is going to issue more short-term debt, what it should do with the proceeds? Is it best to buy back long-term bonds where the government is borrowing on behalf of the public at record low interest rates? This is what quantitative easing does. Or is it better to invest the proceeds in real assets that will increase the economy’s capacity and diminish the need for future government investments.

I’ve emphasized infrastructure because that is probably where the most can be invested. But there are other areas, as well. I am confident that reversing the cutbacks we have made in biomedical research in recent years would pay for itself through the demand stimulus effects and through the savings in health care costs that would ultimately result.

Insofar as they are complete pains in the ass when you disagree with them (that is, when they're wrong), but utterly delightful to have on your side when you agree.

Probably the Same Situation in Education

Paul Krugman:

You see, both the Keynesian revolution and the classical counterrevolution had one great virtue for ambitious academics: they involved both new ideas and more elaborate math than their predecessors. (It’s often forgotten, but Keynesian economics and the Samuelsonian modeling revolution went hand in hand.) New Old Keynesian economics, on the other hand, involves turning away from hard math back toward rough-and-ready assumptions based on empirical observation. Aspiring up-and-coming economists may be able to publish empirical papers in this vein, but theoretical analyses are likely to be met with giggles and whispers. Just because the stuff works doesn’t mean that it will be publishable.

So I think we’re in for a long siege in which the economics that works remains virtually absent from economic journals (except policy journals like Brookings Papers) and largely untaught in graduate programs.

Which makes sense, since economics thinking underpins a lot of our current school reform (that and pension theft).

The Telescreen in Your Pocket

Brian Merchant:

“Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

That's a text message that thousands of Ukrainian protesters spontaneously received on their cell phones today, as a new law prohibiting public demonstrations went into effect. It was the regime's police force, sending protesters the perfectly dystopian text message to accompany the newly minted, perfectly dystopian legislation. In fact, it's downright Orwellian (and I hate that adjective, and only use it when absolutely necessary, I swear).

But that's what this is: it's technology employed to detect noncompliance, to hone in on dissent. The NY Times reports that the "Ukrainian government used telephone technology to pinpoint the locations of cell phones in use near clashes between riot police officers and protesters early on Tuesday." Near. Using a cell phone near a clash lands you on the regime's hit list. 

An Annoying Common Core Mystery

Me:

What Common Core advocates have gained, or think they have gained, by discarding the ADP, I do not know. It is a mystery, and the source of many conspiracy theories.

The Solution to this Problem is MOAR STEM MAJORS

Chris Spaeth:

What can I do? I can't stay in basic research when the government that funds it is actively trying to choke off funding in a quest for the abstract concept of "deficit relief." Maybe I go find a company to work for and join the exodus of PhD level researchers out of academia. At some point, the NIH becomes a vestigial government organization that gets a budget too small to be useful. Private companies will have to take on the load of basic research, thus cutting their effective time to make product, and increasing their overhead costs. I imagine many of them could go out of business. In addition, new companies that spring up as a result of basic academic research from Universities will be stifled or prevented all together.

You see,

The deal, which passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday and will likely sail through the Senate soon, sends $29.9 billion to the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2014. That's $1 billion more than NIH funding last year. But it's also $714 million less than NIH funding before sequestration cuts went into effect. Adjusted for inflation, it's smaller than all of President George W. Bush's NIH budgets, save for his first year in office.

By the Way, the Finnish Economy is Apparently Tanking

Paul Krugman:

One might suspect that a 4% drop in GDP over the past six years would cause a dip in international test scores.