Things People in My Household Cried About Today

• Worried about taking her math benchmark test.
• Upset about losing her kindergarten homework.
• Stressed about completing her SLO's when her classes are full of students who arrived in the country during the school year.

Oh, the Honesty Gap

One of the formative anecdotes in ed reform, experienced personally or second-hand, is the story of a student who is informed by a guidance counselor or other advisor in school that he or she is just "not college material" or shouldn't apply to a top-tier college, or some variation on that theme. Often this is freighted with racism, sexism, class bias or for that matter, just local politics and relationships, and to be clear, these can be very hurtful experiences.

One response to this is to encourage every student, I mean scholar, to aim to attend a selective four year college from the day they arrive at school until they graduate.

On the other hand, the current trending reform meme is the "honesty gap:" that states' low academic standards are misleading kids about how well prepared they are for post-secondary education. This point of view holds that students and parents put a lot of stock on standardized test scores, don't have a lot of other data, and believe that a diploma is a de facto statement of college readiness.

The most obvious way one might double check their readiness for post-secondary education is to ask their teachers or indeed guidance counselor. Some of the time, the adult's honest answer is going to be "No, you aren't ready for that."

Some of the time that is going to be an incorrect answer. Then again some of the time the test is going to give the incorrect answer too. Some of the time they're both going to be biased against women/minorities/poor people.

There's no way to plow through this issue as it is being framed; it is a dead-end approach. The only thing that can be done is to back out and start over, beginning with being clear about what we thought a high school diploma meant traditionally and the implications of changing that. Ultimately though, our systems of college application and induction simply are not rational enough to design our primary and secondary schools around.

These are the People Bankrolling School Reform

Wednesday Martin:

And then there were the wife bonuses.

I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a “bonus” over coffee. Later I overheard someone who didn’t work say she would buy a table at an event once her bonus was set. A woman with a business degree but no job mentioned waiting for her “year-end” to shop for clothing. Further probing revealed that the annual wife bonus was not an uncommon practice in this tribe.

A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.

The Highlight of the Annual Sports Calendar, Tomorrow

Webcast starts 7:00 PM EDT, Saturday, May 16.

Mass Insight's PPSD Central Office Analysis is a Real Nothingburger

Mass Insight:

Dimension 4 essentially calls for some central office staff to serve as stewards of the change process. These staff steward change by continuously referring to and updating the theory of action as needed, communicating frequently with all stakeholders about the theory of action, and serving as strategic resource brokers (Honig et al., 2010, pp. 88-89). These change managers may help district leaders pursue both knowledge (such as experts in specific aspects of central office transformation) and fiscal resources (such as support from local businesses or foundations).

It goes on and on like that for about 35 pages.

The bottom line is that contrary to the mayor and conventional wisdom, the PPSD central office is leaner than similar cities, particularly in professional staff. We are a bit over-staffed clerically in the central office. But in particular Mass Insight would like to see a lot more data analysis, including collecting and analyzing more data on central office performance, so it seems unlikely this bold transformation would result in much more than just fewer clerks and more higher-end wonks and no actual cost savings (which is presumably what people want).

Understanding Civil Rights Advocacy Groups on Testing

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights:

For the civil rights community, data provide the power to advocate for greater equality under the law.

The people who do civil rights advocacy -- lobbying -- believe in the power of advocacy and lobbying to improve civil rights. To do civil rights advocacy they need data. Therefore, they need test scores.

The problem is that they seem limited to meta-success in this area. Their advocacy and lobbying in recent decades has accomplished little in the key areas of funding and desegregation. Their only win is holding onto what they perceive as the necessary tools to continue their advocacy. It is pretty thin gruel.

I also suspect that a lot of people who become civil rights advocates and lobbyists went to schools where it is at least possible to have and hide an in-school racial achievement gap -- that is, primarily white suburban or private schools. Thus they think disaggregating data at the school level seems like a big deal. In the city, the idea that you need data to demonstrate there is a problem with minority achievement that would otherwise be hidden or unknown just misses the point.

Also, there's some money involved.

If Only Education Could Be as Scientific as Medicine

Scott Alexander:

This pattern absolutely jumps out of the data. First- and second- place winners Nardil and Parnate came out in 1960 and 1961, respectively; I can’t find the exact year third-place winner Anafranil came out, but the first reference to its trade name I can find in the literature is from 1967, so I used that. In contrast, last-place winner Viibryd came out in 2011, second-to-last place winner Abilify got its depression indication in 2007, and third-to-last place winner Brintellix is as recent as 2013.

This result is robust to various different methods of analysis, including declaring MAOIs to be an unfair advantage for Team Old and removing all of them, changing which minor tricylics I do and don’t include in the data, and altering whether Deprenyl, a drug that technically came out in 1970 but received a gritty reboot under the name Emsam in 2006, is counted as older or newer.

So if you want to know what medication will make you happiest, at least according to this analysis your best bet isn’t to ask your doctor, check what’s most popular, or even check any individual online rating database. It’s to look at the approval date on the label and choose the one that came out first.

One Trick Klein

Tony Wan:

The watchword within the company is “One Amplify,” Klein’s code name for a reorganization effort aimed at uniting a company that once listed 12 “C-level” executives and three presidents across five divisions. Today, seven chief officers remain—and no presidents.

Good to see Joel Klein takes the same approach to running a business as he does a school district. Always be reorganizing!

"Opt-Out" has been Extremely Polite So Far

King5:

Not a single 11th grade students showed up to take the SBAC test at Nathan Hale High School this week, a Seattle Public Schools spokesperson confirmed.

It is more difficult to keep your 8 year old home for a week, but a lot of people could.

Also, kicking out the power cord, loundly breaking your pencil tips and/or humming "We Shall Overcome" 20 minutes into the test would also work.

Don't Miss Bruce Baker on NOLA

Bruce Baker:

Following this model requires significant depopulation, and much, much more.

You Can't Say Reform Plan was Fine Except Pace of Implementation

I've read a few comments lately saying, in effect, "The Common Core, et al, are fine ideas, but some states, etc., just tried to go too quickly."

That's a crock because an insanely fast pace of implementation was a central feature -- and prerequisite if -- the entire "Race to the Top" agenda. It is a "race," you see! If you could get in a time machine and show that the current plan couldn't be completed by 2015, you would have gotten an entirely different plan that might be implementable in a short enough timeframe. They wouldn't have said, "Oh, ok, as long as it takes to do the right thing is fine because we have deep faith in the power of our ideas."

Probably you would get a decision to not re-write the Common Core from scratch for no reason, but to use the superior version they already had in hand. For some reason everyone still pretends that wasn't a perfectly reasonable approach.

What I Learned from Snow Narrowed Streets

Ben Lindeke:

At the same time, the big concern for many engineers, drivers and civic leaders is how lower speeds will impact traffic flow. They amazing thing is that it doesn’t have to make a huge difference. When you’re talking about traffic flow on these urban commercial streets, speed is far less important than delay at intersections. A great example (from the UK) is the main street in the small suburban town of Poynton, which carries more than 26,000 cars a day. They recently dramatically re-designed the street to create “slow speed continuous traffic movement” by removing stop lights.

Having the streets narrowed by snow banks for six weeks, with parked cars at best half in traffic, and people walking on the streets at the same time (even when the sidewalks were shoveled!) was not an ideal situation by any means, and there were definite choke points around, say, every liquor store and bodega, but much of the time I couldn't help noticing that short trips didn't noticeably take longer with everyone driving slower and having to pause periodically to let people past parked cars.

A combination of driving a hybrid, using traffic avoidance software and spending a year in a roundabout-oriented country, has caused me to change my driving routes to ones that travel at a somewhat slower but steadier pace. You get there quicker, it is way less stressful, you save gas and it is safer.

CityArts! in the Neighborhood

I attended my first of what will likely be many end of semester "teachbacks" at the award winning CityArts! program. It is both free and two blocks from our house, so as soon as Vivian was old enough (8), we got her on board with a twice a week arts class. There's also a palpable sense of Providence's larger youth arts pipeline (CityArts -> AS220 Youth, for example).

One thing that was particularly nice is that it gave Vivian a chance to meet some kids in the immediate neighborhood. The biggest problem with our part of Elmwood is the absence of any social spaces. You have to really try to meet anyone, and you then you simply never casually run into people. We've barely interacted at all with most of the young kids in the houses immediately around us. We barely see them at all. The requirement that everyone have off-street parking even contributes to this. Some people never seem to set foot on the sidewalk. We started to feel like maybe it was just us, but after a few months in Stirling I couldn't go anywhere without seeing someone I knew. It is basically just a problem of urban design and infrastructure investment.

Anyhow, I digress. So Vivian became pretty good friends with a girl who it turns out lives about a block away and is homeschooled. She also got to know a boy who lives a couple doors down and goes to Paul Cuffee charter school. We're glad we were able to choose a public school which is considered a "neighborhood" school by distance if not sociology, and by no means the closest to us.

But let's be clear here, ultimately it just sucks to have all the kids in a neighborhood going to different schools, and it is in some ways worse for urban youth that it would be for kids in the suburbs.

On the other hand, yay for CityArts! Great to have some neighborhood resources for kids.

One Way High Performing Teachers Improve Lifetime Earnings

Susana Morris:

Only students in the advanced classes could attend workshops where you could learn about the magnet high schools anyone could apply for. If I hadn’t been in pre-Algebra, I would not have learned about the International Baccalaureate program that I would later attend and kick ass in.

There has been too little discussion of the actual mechanism by which having a "high performing" math teacher twenty years ago would have had an effect on your later earnings. Math was widely tracked back when Chetty et al were doing their research, getting bumped up or down made a big difference and as noted above, could have many knock-on effects.

In a sense, Chetty's research may have as much to say about tracking as it does testing. We don't know!

See also.

Missing the Stirling Crew

Plus they have way better weather right now!

Chipping Away

While a lot of anti-PARCC/SBAC/Common Core testing argument justifiably is attacking the roots of the testing problem, I do think an effective line of attack is to ask again and again why -- exactly -- we need to give third graders significantly longer tests than the SAT or college placement exams. The SAT is 3 hours and 45 minutes. Accuplacer, the "college readiness" test used by actual colleges to place kids in regular or remedial courses is untimed, but the College Board notes that each of the 6 English and math sections generally takes 15 to 30 minutes, so an hour and a half to three hours for most kids in total.

In particular, I'd strongly encourage anyone who has been spending time with the PARCC, SBAC or any other Common Core sample tests, to look at the Accuplacer sample questions. I'm not saying Accuplacer is great, but a lot of the questions look as easy or easier than many middle school Common Core questions. I'd love to see a comparison by someone who has been spending more time with the Common Core sample items.

Of course, the risk is we'd win the argument and just get shorter high-stakes tests or, god forbid, and 8 hour SAT. I think it is good ground for us to fight on, however, and helps to undermine the credibility of the entire testing regime. Seriously, if 3-4 hours of testing is enough to classify an 18 year old going to college, why is it not enough for a 9 year old? I don't think there is a good answer to that question.

Post-band Practice Snack

Understanding Internet Discourse in 2015

Scott Alexander:

But as it is, even if many journalists are interested in raising awareness of police brutality, given their total lack of coordination there’s not much they can do. An editor can publish a story on Eric Garner, but in the absence of a divisive hook, the only reason people will care about it is that caring about it is the right thing and helps people. But that’s “charity”, and we already know from my blog tags that charity doesn’t sell. A few people mumble something something deeply distressed, but neither black people nor white people get interested, in the “keep tuning to their local news channel to get the latest developments on the case” sense.

The idea of liberal strategists sitting down and choosing “a flagship case for the campaign against police brutality” is poppycock. Moloch - the abstracted spirit of discoordination and flailing response to incentives - will publicize whatever he feels like publicizing. And if they want viewers and ad money, the media will go along with him.

Which means that it’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship case for fighting police brutality and racism is the flagship case that we in fact got. It’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship cases for believing rape victims are the ones that end up going viral. It’s not a coincidence that the only time we ever hear about factory farming is when somebody’s doing something that makes us almost sympathetic to it. It’s not coincidence, it’s not even happenstance, it’s enemy action. Under Moloch, activists are irresistably incentivized to dig their own graves. And the media is irresistably incentivized to help them.

Lost is the ability to agree on simple things like fighting factory farming or rape. Lost is the ability to even talk about the things we all want. Ending corporate welfare. Ungerrymandering political districts. Defrocking pedophile priests. Stopping prison rape. Punishing government corruption and waste. Feeding starving children. Simplifying the tax code.

But also lost is our ability to treat each other with solidarity and respect.

Similarly, this is a at best borderline example of doxxing, since at most it exposes a locally prominent public official through their official contact information. It is much more annoying as an example of sexism expressed through using an informal picture of a female public official instead of her official one. But if it is someone's introduction to the idea of doxxing, you're immediately leading them in the wrong direction.

It is also a confusing example because unless I'm missing something, the people who would be most upset by the memo would be Pearson and NJDOE, who presumably already know how to get a district superintendent on the phone.

A second post by Bob Braun is a better example of inappropriately including someone's personal information in a post, and, unless I'm missing something, Braun has removed the relevant address, so... lesson learned, at least by Braun? Was an apology required? The larger problem with the post is that he's barking up the wrong tree entirely due to a mis-understanding of how the economics of open source licensing works, which is understandable.

The controversy around Braun's posts is a good example of what Alexander calls "The Toxoplasma of Rage." I highly recommend his post.

Could We Have a Token School Board Member WIthout Direct Charter School Ties?

Via Elisabeth Harrison, we have two new school board members and one reappointed. One "formerly worked at the State Department of Education in the office of charter schools and now heads the admissions department at the Rhode Island Nurses Institute Middle College Charter School. The second "has children in Providence public schools, serves on the Highlander Charter School Parent Teacher Organization." I don't know how that works... is he a Highlander parent too? The third has a child in a charter school. To be fair, #3's policy views are probably as close to mine as you could get, overall. But still even he has a kid pulling money out of the district he's going to be overseeing.

The idea that this is a fair competition between systems is a joke. The game is obviously rigged. And it goes without saying that Elorza is on the board of the charter schools which represent the greatest fiscal threat to the city.

Raimondo Proposes Cutting Out-Of-District Transport & Textbook Obligations

Linda Borg:

The proposal would also allow public school districts to eliminate busing of private and parochial school students for a savings of $2 million. Raimondo’s plan would remove the requirement that districts provide transportation to out-of-district students. ...

The governor’s budget also ends the requirement that districts have to “loan” textbooks to private and parochial school students.

The state currently sets aside $115,745 to reimburse districts for this expense, which the budget would eliminate. Duffy said the biggest savings to the districts will be the cost of administering the program, which involves tracking the books and getting them back to the district.

It is unclear whether non-district charter students are considered "out-of-district" for transportation purposes. I tend to doubt whether this will make it through to the final budget, but it is definitely good to have it on the table, and a sign that Raimondo is not going to go full-bore for privatization. This isn't some kind of dog whistle, it is proposing to remove a subsidy to private schools.