Reformer Test Score Axioms

A few quick thoughts this morning. Here are a few axioms which have guided our testing and accountability reform advocates:

1. Low test scores are good (shows we need change).
2. Test scores going up is good (what we're doing is working).
3. Test scores always go up (we see to that).

If you believe those things, you'll do what we've been doing -- periodically changing the tests to produce low test scores and reset the scale to take credit for the inevitable gains.

Reformers have come to see test score inflation as a process as "natural" and apparently inevitable as price inflation, except it is a metric that they can spin as a good thing.

The problem is that 1) and 3) don't hold anymore. People are finally accepting that the reformers are now the status quo, thus bad scores just make them look bad now. And they've managed to promote a new generation of tests which will probably not inevitably creep up, at least without a lot more overt manipulation. For example, it is easier for a state to manipulate the scores of a test that only they take compared to a multi-state exam, where everyone is going to be sensitive to comparison with other states.

Is Finland Leaving Years of Educational Achievement on the Table?

Tim Shanahan argues that Finland's "illiterate kindergarteners" are not a useful exemplar for US schools, because Finnish children are much better off in general, health and welfare-wise, culturally homogenous, and because Finnish is particularly easy to learn to read (it is very phonetically straightforward, etc).

Those are all reasonable arguments, but it isn't clear why they don't serve equally well as arguments for starting reading and more academic instruction earlier in Finland. If Finnish is easy to read, the kids are well-fed and cared for by generally well-educated parents, shouldn't they be ready to get started in kindergarten?

On the other hand, if American five year olds are less well prepared for the more difficult intellectual task of reading English, isn't that a good argument for focusing kindergarten on more fundamental behavioral and social development, building a foundation of pre-literacy skills that will bring all children along reading in first and second grade?

If you believe Shanahan, you must also believe that Finland's already high literacy achievement could be even higher -- perhaps a whole "year of learning" higher -- if they would simply start their kids reading earlier. Obviously, we don't know what would happen, but I'm dubious.

The Limits of Verisimilitude in Vintage Base Ball

from Preston D. Orem’s Baseball from the Newspaper Accounts (1886):

A number of teams had small Negroes as mascots and would rub their hands in their hair for help in making a base hit. It was however very bad luck if a visiting player were mean enough to touch the hair of their mascot. For this reason some teams went to the trouble of maintaining their boy in a closed hack at the ball park and he would have to duck out as the players wanted to rub his top piece.

Mascots were short lived as such. The Phillies had a big “buck” Negro for quite a long time however. One peculiarity of this Mascotte was that, as long as he remained sober the team won, either at home or away. But this was very hard on the mascot as he was extremely fond of his liquor in large quantities and would get drunk whenever he had a chance to do so, which brought the Phillies nothing but bad luck until he was sober again. So Philadelphia hired a man just to watch the Negro’s every step and keep him out of temptation and sin.

What's TFA for Again?

Michelle Rindels:

CARSON CITY — Nevada's two largest school districts this week said they'd hired hundreds of first-time teachers over the summer with the help of recruiters, billboards and even a Clark County superintendent zip-lining through downtown Las Vegas in a superhero cape.

But when it was Nevada Board of Education President Elaine Wynn's chance to speak about the nearly 1,000 teacher positions statewide that still remain vacant and are being filled with stopgap measures such as long-term subs, she didn't mince words.

"I don't think I've ever been this alarmed in my job as I have been today," Wynn said at a board meeting Thursday, calling the situation a human resource crisis. "We're going to all sink. This is horrific."

OK, I don't want teachers to be so underpaid that only short term, barely trained, do-gooder missionaries will take the job, but if TFA, who have been in Nevada for a decade, can't fix this, what good are they?

The Price of Ed Tech will be a Vague Dread of a Malicious School

Marcelo Rinesi:

So the fact is that our experience of the world will increasingly come to reflect our experience of our computers and of the internet itself (not surprisingly, as it’ll be infused with both). Just as any user feels their computer to be a fairly unpredictable device full of programs they’ve never installed doing unknown things to which they’ve never agreed to benefit companies they’ve never heard of, inefficiently at best and actively malignant at worst (but how would you now?), cars, street lights, and even buildings will behave in the same vaguely suspicious way. Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models? Is your green A/C really less efficient with a thermostat from a different company, or it’s just not trying as hard? And your tv is supposed to only use its camera to follow your gestural commands, but it’s a bit suspicious how it always offers Disney downloads when your children are sitting in front of it.

'Old' Rick Hess was a Patchouli-soaked Hippy

Peter Cunningham:

As Hess put it (in 2004), “Washington ought to establish clear and uniform expectations regarding student mastery in reading and math at the fourth-, eighth- and perhaps twelfth-grade level.”

No reformer in 2015 considers this to be an acceptable position. Not (just) because of the "Washington ought to establish" part, but even more because Hess only calls for standards at grades 4, 8 and 12. The easiest way to improve the Common Core standards would be to delete the standards in grades K, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9-10 and 11-12. Keep grade 4, 8 and "college and career readiness."

Seriously, that would be way better.

Unfortunately, Old Rick also thought this:

The performance of schools and districts should be judged primarily on how much students are learning while in school—not on the absolute level of student achievement.

Which leads to wanting multiple versions of standards at every grade level.

We Know How to Do This

C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson and Claudia Persico:

Our analyses also reveal sizable effects of increased school spending on low-income children’s labor market outcomes and their economic status as adults. For children from low-income families, increasing per-pupil spending by 10 percent in all 12 school-age years boosts adult hourly wages by $2.07 in 2000 dollars, or 13 percent (see Figure 4).

So... according to Chetty et al, we could get the same increase by giving low income kids essentially all high-performing teachers throughout their 13 years of school -- which we totally do not know how to do, or by increasing spending 10%, which we absolutely know how to do.

Of course, the strategy is to go with the approach we don't know how to do, and which is probably impossible.

Personnel Changes at PPSD HQ

Kate Nagel:

"While I was on vacation in July, I was told that Jose Gonzalez and Dr. Tomas Ramirez had been brought in and were told to resign immediately," said (State Senator) Metts, who said he has concerns in particular about how a particular current PPSD employee is "being given a hard time."

"The only thing I know, is when you look at the demographics of the school department and you see how many minorities are currently there and you look at the staffing...if you're saying that diversity and EEO is your goal, the last thing you do is get rid of minorities," said Metts. Metts said additional conversations he had with people in the city further raised concern with him.

"My wife and I went out for ice cream...my wife is a retired guidance from Roger Williams [Middle School]," said Metts. "We ran into a female minority math teacher she knew, who recently got her administration degree. [This teacher] didn't get a job in Providence, but she got one in the suburbs. What does that say?"

PPSD recently appointed a new interim superintendent, and long-time spokesperson Christina O'Reilly is no longer with the department.

Mayor Jorge Elorza's spokesperson Evan England responded to the press inquiry, and pointed out on Tuesday that no actual firings have taken place. "There were no terminations this summer (or since)," said England.

So... we'll see how this plays out. It may end up determining whether Chris Maher glides smoothly into the superintendent slot permanently.

Will Black Lives Matter Change School Reformers?

As with most headlines posed as questions, the answer is probably no.

However, there are some important connections that should be interesting to watch. Most clearly, from my vantage point on the internet, is Campaign Zero, which has set itself up as the wonkier branch of BLM. They've released a 10-point agenda to "end police violence in America," which looks sound and well thought out on the whole. Three quarters, at least, of their planning team have heavy school reform connections. I'm assuming right now that this all seems consistent to them, but I have to wonder how it will play out over the next five to ten years.

Consider their first point "end broken windows policing." OK, but don't "no excuses" charters practice the disciplinary equivalent? Isn't pushing students out of charters into district schools that are made up of charter school lottery-losers, transients and charter-rejects the clearest manifestation of a school to prison pipeline?

Number two is "community oversight." Haven't charters and increased federal and state regulation, such as the SIG program, imposed by reformers, dramatically decreased community oversight of urban schools?

Why should we "Increase the number of police officers who reflect the communities they serve," when reformers have pushed policies that clearly would and did decrease the same for teachers? Why shouldn't we have "Police for America" recruiting Ivy League grads into police academies?

Why would we think "invest(ing) in rigorous and sustained training" works for cops but not teachers?

Why is for-profit policing bad but for-profit educational entities ok? Why is it ok that prominent charter schools fine low income students for behavior issues?

How can you attack the militarization of police while accepting a school reform agenda that in some cities embraces military-style schools?

The clearest point of consistency between Campaign Zero's agenda and the school reform agenda is pushing back against public sector unions. They will certainly find that the police union has sharper elbows than the teachers'.

How these dissonances will play out over time, I don't know, particularly when there is such an imbalance in wealth and power backing the two reform agendas. If you gain some prominence as a school reformer, you're set for life. Police brutality activists, not so much. It will be interesting to watch.

Wait, Trump's Grandfather was Al Swearengen?

Al Solotaroff:

This time, he did divulge about his father, going on at length and with real feeling. Fred Trump, the second in a line of self-made magnates (his father, Friedrich, had earned his fortune in the Klondike gold rush, selling lodging, food, booze and possibly women to hordes of miners), was possessed of the singular family gift: He could see the future and beat everyone else to it.

That would explain a lot.

Get on the Bus

Matt Breunig:

When pressed on this, one of the responses you will hear is that they don’t see practically (speaking in political terms) how we can get busing. But why would people oppose busing, one has to wonder. Is it because they don’t want to send their kids to school with poors and blacks? But wait, isn’t that the same reason they don’t like charters? Isn’t the opposition the same to both things? Why advocate one thing that runs up against a brick wall due to racism and dislike of the poor but not another thing that runs up against the same brick wall?

There are two basic answers here.

The first is that the charters don’t promise integration (and in many cases brag about how segregated they are, e.g. KIPP gleaming about how uniformly poor and black their schools are). So the reformers sidestep the hurdle of the racist affluent white liberal by basically giving in entirely to their desire for segregation, which charters don’t threaten that much if at all.

The second is that practicality is defined here in terms of what you might call the Left Wing of the Fundable. You can get money to push for charter schools and privatization and breaking teacher/public unions (all things the education reformers push, including right now Students First pushing a SCOTUS case that aims to eliminate all public sector union security, not just for teachers). You can get a fellowship at a think tank to push for those types of things. They are thus practical in the sense that there are enough rich people and institutions with somewhat mixed interests that are willing to pony up the money necessary to push them through our hilariously undemocratic political system and to fund a healthy number of advocate jobs. The same money doesn’t exist for busing advocacy.

Let's Have a Little Common Core Rant for Old Times Sake

Me, at Slate:

As is typical for Common Core advocates, Karen Babbitt misrepresents Massachusetts previous standards, which did not simply "primarily (ask) students to identify story elements." Among many fiction standards there was one grade 5-6 standard which stated "Identify and analyze the elements of setting, characterization, and plot (including conflict)," but even in that case, the example given immediately after the standard was “What qualities of the central characters enable them to survive?”

For that matter, the example question she cites: "How does the main character change over time?" is not particularly well supported by the Common Core standards. The relevant 8th grade standard would seem to be "Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text," but she is suggesting the opposite process. Of course, you can just shrug and say, "Well, close enough, whatever," but that's a sure sign that these standards are not actually very good at all, when the most seemingly straightforward examples don't quite fit.

Back to Garden Variety Bullshit at RIDE

Ken Wagner:

For my part, I am committed to promoting personalized student learning, where every student participates in a challenging and exciting learning environment that meets his or her individual needs. I am eager to work together to support and hold the ladder steady as our students climb toward success.

Yes, feel free to go according you your needs, in whatever way you find challenging and exciting -- as long as you're going up the ladder I'm holding for you (as fast as possible, or everyone will be fired, including me).

And pay no attention to the tests, charters, and ed-tech corporations behind the curtain.

This is What You Call an "Essential Question"

Charlie Stross:

Assume you are a historian in the 30th century, compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD. What are the five most influential factors in that period of history?

Please note that this is a 600 year span—around the duration of the entire mediaeval period. Events a mere 20 years apart, such as the first and second world wars, merge together when viewed through the wrong end of a temporal telescope, just like the 30 years' war or the Wars of the Roses. Individual people, even hugely influential thinkers and rulers and tyrants, are a jumbled mass of names with dates attached. This is a question about the big issues—the ones big enough to remember half a millennium hence, like the Black Death, the Crusades, or the conquest of the Americas.

Did I Achieve the Standard?

There is no point in having adults take a mini 8th grade math test if you don't tell them if they passed.

We Could Use an Economic Frame for the Question of "Developmentally Appropriate"

Stephen Camarata:

In 2006, Dr. Ashlesha Datar, a social scientist at the RAND Corporation, conducted a study comparing children entering kindergarten “on time” to those whose parents held them out for a year. Professor Datar reported: “I find that entering kindergarten a year older significantly boosts test scores at kindergarten entry. More importantly, entering older implies a steeper test score trajectory during the first 2 years in school.”

Consider the implications of this research. Simply waiting until a child is older dramatically increases scores on kindergarten entrance exams. Is the child more intelligent? Does she have a higher potential than she had the year before? No! It is simply a matter of schools trying to teach too much too soon. Parents are responding by simply waiting until their child is more mature and his or her brain is more fully developed in order to take on academic material that should be taught to older children.

There are lots of problems with trying to cram academic work down to earlier grades, but in addition to causing avoidable frustration and bad feelings about school and education, it is also just cold-bloodedly inefficient. It is a waste of resources. I'm a bit dubious about any specific claims about kids not being able to learn certain things at certain ages in terms of brain development, in part when the discussion becomes very binary -- kids this age can't learn that. Well... maybe, but some can so...? If all this data crunching really worked, we'd be able to do more subtle analysis of the difference in the time expended to teach a concept at a certain developmental stage or age. Like, it takes 30 hours to get 75% of kindergarteners to learn X, while if you just wait until the beginning of first grade, 75% can learn it in 5 hours and be just as well off.

I would be enthusiastic about that idea if I actually believed that most learning could be chopped up and measured so finely, and if I believed that at the end of the process people could drop their preconceptions and accept that the endpoint of all their data analysis was to essentially teach less and just play more.

Also, it is a reminder of how crazy, crazy, it is that we report and analyze this data based on grade level and not age/years of schooling. It should be obvious to anyone that this convention obscures a lot of meaningful information, yet we keep going with it.

STEAM-ing Along

I can report that three out of three summer art programs the girls attended had a science or technology theme this year, so RISD appears to be accomplishing... something.

Whether science camps were also exploring the arts, I don't know.

The Way the Web was Supposed to Work

Cory Doctorow:

If you had a mobile device that was yours and that you trusted and that didn’t give your information to other people, it could amass an enormous amount of both explicit and implicit information about you. … Then, as that device moved thorough space, the things around it could advertise what kinds of services, opportunities, availabilities they had to the device without the device ever acknowledging that it received them, without the device telling them a single thing about you. Because your device knows a lot about you, more than you would ever willingly give out to a third party, it could actually make better inferences about what you should be doing at this time in this place than you would get if it were the other way around, if you were the thing being sensed instead of you being the thing that’s doing the sensing. I quite like that model. I think that’s a very exciting way of thinking about human beings as entities with agency and dignity and not just ambulatory wallets.

An Incredibly Discouraging Example

New York 8th Grade ELA Test -- Example of a 4 out of 4 points written response:

53. The dolphin in "The Pod" is symbolic. What does the dolphin represent? How does the symbol help the reader gain a deeper understanding of the central idea of the story? Use details from the story to support your response.

In your response, be sure to

• identify what the dolphin represents
• explain how the symbol of the dolphin helps the reader gain a deeper understanding of the central idea of the story
• use details from the story to support your response

The dolphin in "The Pod" is symbolic. What the dolphin represents helps the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the central idea of the story.

The full credit sample response:

The dolphin in "The Pod" is symbolic. The dolphin represents Jesse. In lines 77 to 78 it states, "The dolphin was disoriented. It kept heading back to shore." The dolphin heading back to shore represents Jesse distancing himself from his family after the accident. He is confused about what to do, now that his future is changed. He doesn't the (sic) sympathy his family gives him, so he swims to shore. "It looked as scared as he felt when they'd wheeled him into the emergency room that afternoon." The dolphin reflects what Jesse had felt the day of the accident. The dolphin in "The Pod" represents Jesse.

The symbol of the dolphin helps the reader gain a deeper idea of the central idea of the story. It gives us an idea of how things were going for Jesse and his family. The dolphin represents Jesse and the pod represents his family. In lines 82 to 84 it states, "Bud, you've got to save yourself... Nobody's going to do it for you. If you give up you're finished." This shows how Jesse is sort of giving advice to himself as well as the dolphin. Jesse needs to save himself. In the story it also states, "...the young dolphin turned toward deeper water and began to swim toward the pool. Waiting dolphins arced nearer as if in welcome... They had been worried because he'd been gone for so long. This represents his family because they are worried about him and they just want him to come home.

The dolphin in "The Pod" is symbolic of Jesse, and because it represents Jesse it gives the reader a better understanding of the story. What Jesse and his family had been through.

One thing this demonstrates is that Common Core advocates and critics are actually on the same page in some ways. Critics argue that the Common Core will lead to trite, stereotypical, repetitive writing where readers simply seek to find the single "right answer" in a text rather than a deeper understanding. This example confirms that indeed, that is exactly what Common Core backers want as well. There is a big difference between saying "Inevitably and unfortunately, some kids will end up writing very formulaically," and "Here's an example of someone getting the formula right."

Bear in mind that example and anchor essays are extremely important in writing standards. Phrases like "demonstrates insightful analysis of the text" are meaningless in isolation.

I disagree with the question's use of "symbol," at least insofar as it accepts the dolphin as a symbol for Jesse as the correct answer. One generally doesn't think of a symbol in literature as representing an individual. A symbol represents something more abstract. This imprecision is pretty consistent with the whole Common Core approach to literary analysis: "Well, close enough, whatever, we don't want to get hung up on what these "tier 3" words mean in English class."

Finally... the "main idea" of this story is actually fairly ambiguous. Jesse is recovering from an injury, and drives away from his family for a while. Finds the injured dolphin, separated from its family. He helps it, although ultimately tells it that it has to help itself, and it does. And then he goes back to his family as well. So... main idea...? Go back to your family and don't give up? Hopefully someone will find you and point you back in the right direction repeatedly? If you leave the house and visit the beach you may find inspiration in nature?

South Providence Superintendent Forum

OK, I skated over to the the Juanita Sanchez Educational Complex yesterday to a forum with PPSD Interim Superintendent Chris Maher.

My capsule summary is that nothing came out of his mouth that was nearly as stupid as that shit I was reading yesterday on the Mass Insight website. At Mass Insight he was president of a craven, opportunistic, sloppy, overstretched educational consulting firm. I say that based on my reading of their published work, which is crap.

Anyhow, if it was 10-15 years ago, and he was just an urban district administrator from somewhere, I'd think he seemed like a great choice. In 2015, you never know what kind of privatizing fifth columnist you might be dealing with, regardless of what comes out of his mouth in public.

Nonetheless, I couldn't quibble with anything Maher said or did yesterday (and you know I'm good at quibbling), starting with saying "this is a listening forum" and then shutting his mouth and demonstrating his understanding of the teacher's concept of "wait time" with the small (25-ish) and reticent assembled group. I talked a bit about our "vibrant and disorganized" neighborhood, the sheer number of schools and kids in the area, our lack of political strength to resist any of the reform plans that have rolled down the hill in the past 15 years, and some of the damage that has been wrought by that. I think there were three actual parents who said something or asked a question a the event (plus a few teachers, students, politicians, public meeting enthusiasts, etc) out of the thousands of parents in the area, which should have reinforced my point.

I still have borderline PTSD from too many Tom Brady era PPSD forums that we all knew were going to be completely disregarded. I didn't go to any Lusi-era events because I trusted her enough to not deal with the fight/flight response any district event triggered. I must admit I was a massive dick to the nice ladies manning the door at last night's event for no particular reason.

Let me just pause and say that the era Tom Brady/Deb Gist/Arne Duncan was really horrible, particularly for Providence high schools. We were set back so far, so quickly, for no apparent reason other than imposing uniformity and control. The whole process killed something inside me.

Anyhow, Maher doesn't seem to be a malign soldier like Tom Brady, or an overmatched Donnie Evans, or just weird in the way Deb Gist was weird. He has been a principal, which is pretty damn important to being a superintendent if you ask me. He is at worst an A-list reformer, which believe me, is better than getting a B or C lister. I can almost convince myself he left Mass Insight to work directly in a school district because he knows their consulting work is a charade.

One interesting sign is that new state Commissioner Ken Wagner spent his first official day touring Providence summer programs with Maher. If I was RI education commissioner, I'd see Providence as the key to improving education in the state. Deb Gist never seemed particularly interested in understanding Providence schools -- considering the size of the state she could have known many of them well -- and was content to bomb them from 50,000 feet as if she was commissioner of Texas or California. From the outside, figuring out what was going on in the relationship (friendly, ambivalent, hostile? pretending to be one but really the other?) between PPSD and RIDE was basically impossible. Everyone suspects that Wagner will push the crap-tastic EngageNY curriculum on Rhode Island, which would conflict with Maher's stated desire to give schools more autonomy. If these two guys can have a productive relationship, and Maher can diplomatically protect us from RIDE's bad ideas, that would be an improvement.