A practical implication of very low proficiency rates

I didn't come up with this myself, but it is now the conventional wisdom in Providence's high schools that the immediate priority in terms of raising test scores is to focus on the highest achieving students. If only 5% or so are passing, and getting to 10% or 15% would be a great step, you're talking about getting, say, instead of one or two kids in each classroom over the standards to getting three or four to pass. Realistically, most of the class has no chance. The "bubble kids" are now at the top of the class.

I'm not saying that's the official policy, anyone's acting on that, whatever. It is just clear that if you get together, analyze the data, and come up with a strategic plan... that's what the data is telling you. It is a rather different "call to action" than most ed reform advocates think they're making.

Common Core & Style

Fredrik deBoer:

My fundamental learning goal in teaching style is this: to demystify prose style. Very often, students coming to a formal consideration of prose style with a sense that prose style is a pure “feel” thing, that they know it when they see it but can’t put their finger on it. That’s romantic, but it stands in the way of their adopting prose style themselves. My intent is to demonstrate to them that style emerges from the text itself, that we can observe style the way we do any other textual feature, and that we can in type write with our own style by becoming more attuned to how great stylists write.

To that end, I teach a three part assignment sequence. First, students write a brief analysis of a writer’s prose, identifying its salient features and the textual properties that makes it stand out. Second, students parody a writer’s style, typically rewriting an already written passage in a caricature of another writer’s style, or writing their own narrative in that style. Finally, students write their own text, perhaps a narrative, review, or editorial, in highly stylized prose, working to inflect their own writing with some of the features they’ve recently identified in that of others. Assignment sheets for this sequence can be found in my Teaching Portfolio.

Since this is in the context of teaching freshman composition at a major university, it piques my interest in relation to "college and career readiness." How does the first part of this sequence -- students write a brief analysis of a writer’s prose, identifying its salient features and the textual properties that makes it stand out -- relate to Common Core reading?

Jumping to the chase a bit, the bottom line to me is that deBoer's assignment is arguably a better, clearer, if a bit unpolished "standard" than the Common Core equivalents, which would be:

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.4 Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.5 Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.6 Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

Compare this to, say, the NECAP Grade Span Expectation:

R-12-6 Analyze and interpret author’s craft within or across texts, citing evidence where appropriate by…

• R-12-6.1a. Demonstrating knowledge of author’s style or use of literary elements and devices (e.g., simile, metaphor, point of view, imagery, repetition, flashback, foreshadowing, personification, hyperbole, symbolism, analogy, allusion, diction, syntax, genre, or bias, or use of punctuation) to analyze literary works
• R-12-6.1.b. Examining author’s style or use of literary devices to convey theme

The NECAP expectation seems closer to what deBoer is asking his incoming students to be able to do as the first part of a multi-part assignment. The Common Core is, as always, oddly fragmented and over-specific. Students jump right into assessing how point of view or purpose shapes style without preliminary standards teaching what style is. Standard four is mostly about the meaning of specific words, five about overall structure, and six is about point of view but also in the grade level standards slides away from authorial point of view into character point of view. The parts don't seem to add up to the whole.

Anyhow, I suppose deBoer will see in a few years if students start having a slightly different reaction to this assignment, clicking into their PARCC-ready close reading drill, and if that is better or worse.

Nobody wants to fund foundational R&D; in ed tech and assessment. STILL.

Kerri Lemoie:

This week at MozFest in London there’s a session called “Hack the Backpack” where the Open Badges community is being asked to help contribute to long-standing open and unaddressed issues regarding the backpack. It needs some “love”. But why is the Backpack in such dire need of attention? Isn’t Mozilla working on it?

You’d think so. It’s actually unclear why it’s still called the Mozilla Open Badges Backpack at all since there is not a single full-time employee left at the Mozilla Foundation assigned to Open Badges. There is no Open Badges Team at Mozilla.

The team was disbanded well over a year ago. Not only was the backpack abandoned — technically put on “maintenance mode” — any real initiatives and plans for what the backpack was supposed to be were essentially put on hold since the spring of 2013. Resources at Mozilla for Open Badges were redirected to support Chicago Summer of Learning and after that to support Cities of Learning in late 2013-2014. The Open Badges team focused on the much hyped BadgeKit which was really only used as a private beta for Cities of Learning and then abandoned in the summer of 2014.

In the late winter of 2014, a handful of the Open Badges founders formed the Badge Alliance to support the work of the community and keep the Open Badges Specification and infrastructure moving forward. It was funded in a cooperative effort by the MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla but after 6 months, the Badge Alliance lost its anticipated 2 year funding stream. By December 2014, both the Badge Alliance staff and the Open Badges team at Mozilla were gone.

The Open Badges community, mostly unaware of this, remained and continued to grow. Through June 2015, the Badge Alliance staff kept going anyway — unpaid and unauthorized. They persisted with the hope that the funding would return and out of concern and loyalty for the work and community. Without that effort the Open Badges community calls and the specification work would have come to a screeching halt leaving a leadership vacuum and throwing the growing but still nascent ecosystem into uncertainty.

I could have gotten in on the ground floor, or more accurately the sub-basement, of this scene starting 12 years ago or so, but at the time it was clear that the potential funders of the work were 5-10 years away from understanding what was necessary, and much worse than that, doing this work correctly is a massive multi-disciplinary project. It is exactly the kind of thing futurists are referring to when they talk about the demand for jobs that don't exist today. And yet, they just don't seem to grasp the difficulty of this work, and the huge long term investment that would be necessary to even get the infrastructure and core standards working properly.

Anyhow, I haven't been following this scene extensively, but based on my knowledge of the problem space, the economics and politics of open source development, and foundations, this all rings quite true.

This explains a few things, including TFA

Paul Rosenberg:

But the golden age for elites causes their population to grow as well—both through reproduction and through social mobility. As a result, “The class of the wealthy and powerful expands in relation to the whole population,” which eventually creates scarcity for them. In particular, “There are not enough positions, power positions governing, in business and government, to satisfy all elite aspirants. And that’s when inter-elite competition starts to take uglier forms.” That can be measured in terms of “overproduction of law degrees, because that’s a direct route into government, or the overproduction of MBAs,” and, higher up, in the increased competition for House and Senate seats, where the money spent on such contests spirals ever upwards.

“So the competition intensifies, and when competition intensifies, there are losers. There are many more losers now than there were 40 or 50 years ago,” Turchin said, and “Many of them are not good losers,” meaning they devote themselves to frustrating others, further eroding the cooperative ethos societies need to keep functioning.

This in turn connects with the role of the state in moving toward increased instability. “During this pre-crisis phases of the secular cycle, the governments tend to get more and more indebted,” Turchin said. “The reason is, most simply, the inter-elite competition becomes very hot. You have a lot of frustrated elite aspirants, and the states try to respond by providing them with jobs…. even in the historical societies… they would expand the army, so that offices could serve…. That puts a lot of pressure on the state coffers.” (Even nowadays, when elite opinion rallies around the idea that “middle class entitlements” are the great threat to fiscal solvency, Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson have pointed out that the actual primary threats are “the excessive costs of oligopoly in health care and defense spending” plus “the contingent liability of another financial crisis,” all of them rooted in elite special interest demands on the state.)

Getting channeled into school reform

Matt Bruenig:

I think the typical TFA person is earnest about wanting to help poor kids. However, they are not very knowledgeable about what it is that poor kids are dealing with. I don’t mean that they haven’t experienced being a poor kid (though that’s true too). Rather, I mean that they aren’t familiar with the empirical facts about the ways in which material conditions majorly influence educational attainment and life outcomes.

The reason their interest in helping poor kids gets channeled into educational stuff is because the idea that education is the universal solvent of economic problems is the hegemonic ideology of the country. Additionally, the educational story we tell in our society matches what they have personally experienced (as people who’ve excelled academically). By living in this society, they also have probably heard “bad schools” talked about a lot, perhaps by their own parents.

Because they aren’t very knowledgeable, and the hegemonic tendency of the society is to emphasize education, it’s not surprising that the naive college student signs up to be a brave education warrior. It helps also that there is a huge amount of organization that exists to give them the ability to plug in to TFA and other education reform outlets. An earnest, but ignorant, college student who wants to help poor kids can fire off a TFA application on their own campus and get right into the fight (and as Williams shows, feel really good about doing so). Similar outlets don’t really exist for any other kind of cause (there is no Welfare State for America, for instance).

Once the naive college student gets plugged into education reform organization (and especially TFA), they are then path dependent on education reform. Some might defect, but for the most part, there is nothing you will ever be able to do to convince them to decide that they’ve basically been wasting their time. Nothing. They are going to be education/school guys to the very end.

This is what school choice looks like

Julie Vassilatos:

We're veterans of choice in our family. I can tell you what I see in my neighborhood.

This is what school choice looks like: no schoolmates in your neighborhood for your whole life.

Yeah, pretty much.

A Couple Points on "Competency-Based Education"

Here are a few things I've gleaned from reading up on the latest buzz for "competency-based education."

The most important word in "competency-based education" is not "competency," but "-based." That is, the reason we need to switch to the current system using standards to "competency-based" is not that "competencies" are better than "standards," in part because neither are defined precisely or consistently enough to draw an important distinction, and in part because the real concern is that the whole standards movement has not actually changed the foundation of the educational process. Standards are grafted onto the school system, instead of the system being built from the ground up to be "based on" standards. Of course, what they're saying about breaking down structures regarding time and course credit is not new at all, it is just a re-boot/re-branding of the most ambitious standards, outcome and mastery-based concepts.

There are two distinct schools of thought regarding the differences between standards and competencies, which I'm going to give names to:

• fine-grained/high-tech: These people think competencies are more specific than standards. This comes from the use of competencies in job training, where the whole point is to break down a job into clearly defined tasks and sub-tasks so you are sure someone with a particular certification knows all the steps in, say, TIG welding. These people also tend to favor high-tech approaches to the process because these systems is difficult for humans to manage.

• coarse-grained/humanist: These people tend to think of "competency" with a the positive and expansive connotation, where "competency" means flexibility and fluency beyond merely meeting a standard, focusing on application and transference.

  I don't have a problem with those things, but it is pretty clearly a post hoc attempt to hijack the original jargon. To me, and I think most people, saying someone is "competent" at something indicates that they can deal with routine cases fine, but they are not someone you want for a difficult, surprising case. You're probably fine if your vasectomy surgeon is just "competent" as long as he's done a few thousand before, but if you need an oncologist or trauma surgeon, "competent" is not what you're looking for.

  This is not a niche perspective, by the way. New Hampshire breaks the 29 Common Core ELA/Literacy standards down into nine overall "competencies."

  These competencies can be readily evaluated and tracked by humans.

The problem is that I haven't seen this distinction clearly articulated, although I can't be the only one who has noticed. So it is certainly confusing to the reader, especially insofar as one is likely to gravitate to the version one is more comfortable with and pretend the other doesn't exist.

Things I Don't Have Trouble Imagining

Linda Borg, et al at the ProJo:

People tend to talk about integrating the children. (Anna Cano) Morales (Chairwoman of the Central Falls School Board of Trustees), the director of the Latino Policy Institute, thinks it's time to talk about integrating the adults.

"Why aren't we talking about the segregation of adults?" she said. "Imagine we had teacher exchange programs between Central Falls and North Providence? What if we just did it? What if we were able to offer high-quality instruction to all students? Maybe it means a Pawtucket teacher spends a semester in Burrillville and a Burrillville teacher spends a semester in Pawtucket.

I can tell you what would happen: not much.

What's particularly crazy about this statement is that Cano Morales has been chair of the CF board of trustees since at least 2008. That predates by a couple years (at least) the mass firing at Central Falls High School if you're having trouble with dates. That's basically the entire span of NECAP testing -- a period in which CF's scores saw practically no increase, comparing beginning to end. If the teaching staff collectively is the problem, who is accountable for that if not Cano Morales?

The Heart of Competency Education

Chris Sturgis:

At the heart of competency education is the assumption that by maintaining a laser focus on learning, allowing time to be a variable and powerful competencies to set the bar, we can create an education system that produces high achievement for students from all income levels, across all racial and ethnic communities.

That is obviously incorrect. At the heart of competency education is the assumption that the most effective way to model the educational process is as a set of competencies, and at the heart of any push to increase the use of competency education is the implicit or explicit claim that we have at hand a proven and widely admired set of competencies to guide the work. If you don't have those competencies readily available, all you've got is a not-very-novel idea.

I've been trying to do a longer piece on this new "competency-based education" buzz, but the whole thing is so slippery and hand-wavy that its difficult.

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.