I'm Sure Blending Learning is Going to Work

Maciej Cegłowski:

Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE

This is the prevailing vision in Silicon Valley.

The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.

If you have spent any time using software, you might recognize this as an appalling idea. Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower. It works in theory, but there's no room for error in the implementation.

This vision holds that the Web is only a necessary first step to a brighter future. In order to fix the world with software, we have to put software hooks into people's lives. Everything must be instrumented, quantified, and networked. All devices, buildings, objects, and even our bodies must become "smart" and net-accessible.

Then we can get working on optimizing the hell out of life.

Marc Andreessen has this arresting quote, that ‘software is eating the world.’ He is happy about it. The idea is that industry after industry is going to fall at the hands of programmers who automate and rationalize it.

We started with music and publishing. Then retailing. Now we're apparently doing taxis. We're going to move a succession of industries into the cloud, and figure out how to do them better. Whether we have the right to do this, or whether it's a good idea, are academic questions that will be rendered moot by the unstoppable forces of Progress. It's a kind of software Manifest Destiny.

To achieve this vision, we must have software intermediaries in every human interaction, and in our physical environment.

But what if after software eats the world, it turns the world to shit?

Reality Check for Impatient Futurists

Doug Henwood:

Yes, it seems inevitable that someday "the end of work" will arrive, robots and computers will displace almost all workers, and we'll have to figure out what to do with the rest of us. The problem is with getting the timing right. This chart, and the rest of Doug Henwood's post, suggest that we're still not at that point yet.

Of Course I Spoke Too Soon

Elisabeth Harrison:

After eight years leading Central Falls schools, Gallo brings up another point of pride: elementary school test scores have been improving, and a dual language program shows particular promise.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is easy to see that on six of eight NECAP tests, Central Falls elementary scores are lower than they were seven years ago (as far back as RIDE has posted). It just looks like 2012-2013 was an especially low year, even for CF, and thus there is a one year upward trend despite the fact that the long term trend is flat at best.

My Analysis of the SIS Market

Managing an SIS product (from the vendor side) is like providing accounting software in a country where not only are multiple currencies used, and multiple theories about accounting standards co-exist, but the very idea of money is still in dispute. Some sectors of the economy run on fiat money, some pegged to the gold standard, others a currency representing in hours of labor, a few kibbutzes are doctrinaire communist, and a few others are exploring a pseudo-romantic historical fantasy about purely barter-based economies.

This is why even corporations like Apple and Pearson eventually get out of the business. Corporate scale irritation.

Nobody Says Central Falls Achievement has Gone Up

Dan McGowan:

(Lusi) noted that graduation rates increased, dropout rates went down and there were “marked improvements” in reading proficiency levels in fourth and 11th grade during her tenure. While Central Falls, a much smaller district with similar demographics, has garnered significant praise for raising student achievement, Providence students compare favorably to that city at nearly every grade level.

Not to pile onto Central Falls, but nobody praises that district for raising student achievement, because it is basically flat at the high school level since before the Great Firing, and the decline in scores across grade levels for grades 3-8 is truly disturbing, to those who bother to look.

Happy Solstice/Father's Day/Go Skateboarding Day from Garrett

Frequent commentator and former Wimp Factor 14 and Kafka Romance Dissolver rhythm section mate Garrett made me a collage:

Bridge of Allan Primary Gets a Positive Evaluation

Shona ES Taylor, HM Inspector:

How well do children learn and achieve?

We found children in the nursery class and school learn and achieve well. There is a very happy atmosphere throughout the school and almost all children demonstrate a sense of teamwork and belonging. They are very proud of their school and the success they experience in learning. In the nursery class, children show that they can persevere in tasks. They like to solve problems and relax with their friends at snack time. Children would benefit, as learners, if the structure of the session was reviewed to allow them more time to explore their interests in depth. There is further scope for staff to have deeper conversations with children about their learning. At the primary stages, children explained to us how they were improving their skills in evaluating their own work. They are beginning to identify more effectively what they do well and how they can improve. Through the many attractive displays of work and information boards, children illustrate how well they achieve. Four Green flags from Eco-Schools Scotland and a very recent ‘Green Machine’ award demonstrate children’s commitment to sustainability. A Rights Respecting School award, class charters and contributions to a number of charities outline children’s determination to be responsible citizens within their community. Children are proud of the many talents within the school and their contributions in music, drama and artwork.

The nursery and primary school my daughters attended in Scotland got their inspection report recently. It's positive overall. There's a second report which has ratings in specific categories, which is somewhat more of a "report card" format, where the scores are mostly "good" with a few "very good" (there's one more level above that). Since I can't figure out how to get back to that one, it seems they mostly want parents to see the narrative version.

Anyhow, nothing remarkable here. The inspector's view of the school maps very closely to my somewhat cursory observations of the school over the year, there's probably nothing here that surprises anyone. Which is exactly how such things should work the vast majority of the time. Evaluating a school is not some dark art, and it should almost never about surprising anyone with the revelation that a school that appears to be good is actually bad, or vice versa.

Handwringing about how, HOW!?!? would we possibly evaluate a school without primarily looking at test scores (and graduation rates) is just ignorant and uninformed. To be sure, it isn't easy or simple, there's got to be a well-designed formal process, but it isn't unknown territory.

Some Post-Reform Education Theses

The last 15 years have destroyed the intellectual foundation of American education

My favorite example is the argument in favor of teaching science and history for the purpose of improving "literacy." We don't have any working definitions of the core academic disciplines. Or a working definition of a "discipline" or its role in education. The basic definition of education has been hijacked as "college and career readiness," etc., etc. After Vietnam, the US military went back to Clausewitz to try to figure its role out again from first principles. We need to start over with Dewey.

Half-assed technocrats don't cut it.

Educational administrators are always going to tend toward technocracy, but right now we have a generation of terrible, uninterested, uneducated, ideological technocrats. It is the worst case scenario.

The international educational status quo is a decent starting point.

Every system has its strengths and weaknesses, but we don't have to act like we're solving a novel problem, as we have been, even as people go on and on about "international benchmarking."

Be realistic about where we are actually putting in real effort today.

For example, the current conversation about the difficulty of building social capital in low-income neighborhoods. This isn't something we're trying to do and failing. We are barely trying at all. We're not even adequately funding the existing public institutions (libraries, community centers, parks and rec., etc.) in low-income neighborhoods. Why don't we try that first before starting the handwringing?

Fund schools from general funds, not grants, especially private ones.

Some districts will waste their money. Get over it.

The ed-tech market does not work.

Actually the whole educational publishing market doesn't work either.

Enough with the standardized tests.

Professional teachers can evaluate their students. It is their job. They do it all over the world.

AP is a product, not a proxy for quality.

Increased AP enrollment just means the school is moving more product.

It is easy to mislead people about what "we" believed and did just a few years ago.

The memory hole is voracious.

Education can't be the most important problem in the world -- that we can only attempt to fix without spending more money.

Well, it is ok to give money to consultants, charter administration, and real estate scams.

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.

The Individualistic Fascism of Ed Reformers

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy:

The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged (terms like vision, quality, stakeholder, leadership, excellence, or best practices) insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will. This is a kind of individualistic fascism.

Retaining First Graders at Achievement First

Achievement First Providence Mayoral Academy Boards of Directors Retreat Thursday, July 24, 2014:

Brian (Gallogly) asked whether families are leaving

Three families leaving. Two kids, from one family, are going to Iowa. One kid leaving because of retention (few literacy skills for this scholar when she arrived in 1st grade, almost made it to the goal, but parent pulled her, AFPMA is calling throughout the summer but it seems they’re out)

This student had almost more growth than any other scholar. She started below kindergarten and made it almost to the proficiency level to be advanced to 2nd grade.

AFPMA recommends to her new school that she be retained. She’s going to a neighborhood school. Slight chance she’ll show up in August.

Retaining first graders is disturbing on a number of levels, particularly if students are actually progressing fast enough to catch up over the next year or two. But getting down to brass tacks, its damned expensive! Under the current funding formula, charters have no financial disincentive to retain students at great cost to the city and state, with the only clear benefit being to their test scores. We really need more data on the rate of grade retention in charters.

Changes: My New Role at Common Ground

One reason it has been a bit quiet here is I've been in a somewhat transitional phase in my life. Mark Shuttleworth's generous funding of SchoolTool wound down at the end of 2014, and Douglas Cerna and I have been successful so far in bringing in more funding through our company, SIELibre, but some additional income is necessary.

So I did extensive market research, futurology, watched TED talks until my eyes bled, and everything kept coming back to two sure thing high-growth sectors: organized labor and newspaper publishing.

As of the April issue, I'm taking over as editor of Common Ground, a little RI labor monthly primarily distributed through union halls. As a part-time gig, it is interesting. A chance to reach out to a different audience. We're going to re-vamp the (virtually non-existent) web presence and sharpen the editorial focus and design up a bit. I'm also going to be learning how to put together a newspaper, which I've not done before... Like most free-lancy writing gigs, exactly how well this pays depends on how quickly I get finished. If I'm fast it is pretty decent, but it might take me a while to get fast. Regardless, it is very much a part-time job.

It is going to cut into my blogging time -- having a big paid writing deadline every month tends to cut down on the writing for fun. I will also be pushing more stuff into a Common Ground twitter feed and some Facebooking at a certain point. I'll keep you posted on how all that stuff shakes out.

Epistemology for Second Graders

Justin P. McBrayer:

But second, and worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both. For example, I asked my son about this distinction after his open house. He confidently explained that facts were things that were true whereas opinions are things that are believed. We then had this conversation:

Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

Him: “It’s a fact.”

Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”

Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”

Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”

The blank stare on his face said it all.

I noticed a variation of this on one of Vivian's infamous weekly Pearson reading quizzes. There was a sentence in an "informational text" that stated (roughly):

Amelia Earhart is the most famous woman in the world.

The relevant question was: is that a fact or opinion? with "opinion" being the correct answer. But it is no more or less an opinion as any of the other assertions of fact that make up most of any "informational text" aimed at an 8 year old, e.g., Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897. Pearson is calling it "opinion" because it is an incorrect assertion of fact. That's different than an opinion.

I don't buy McBrayer's larger argument about kids today "not believing in moral facts" as a result of the Common Core, but he is absolutely right that the Common Core encourages teaching an incomplete and truncated epistemology.

The Best Way to Ensure Kids are Ready to Read in First Grade is to Require Them to Read in Kindergarten

Robert Pondiscio:

The broad thrust of Common Core for kindergarten is ensuring kids are ready to read by the first grade.

Many years ago, I took one look at the Common Core kindergarten standards and immediately resolved to stay away from them, because they made no sense, and I didn't know whether or not that was just the way kindergarten standards are written, or what. I'm not an early childhood person, so what the hell do I know? I'm sure this is the way 95% of people react to the standards as a whole.

In the intervening years, I've concluded that the kindergarten standards just don't make sense, period. Not just pedagogically, but as standards. For example, does the text of the standards support Pondiscio's claim? I would say not really, that the standards mostly emphasize what they emphasize all along -- textual analysis.

Also a narrow range of academic writing. They also have foundational reading standards at this level. Are the foundational reading standards "the broad thrust" of the standards here? Nobody can say definitively, because the intellectual midgets behind the 20 year "standards" project in American education didn't manage to create a formal system for indicating relative emphasis.

And beyond that, the standards certainly do require kindergarteners to read:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.4
Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.

Surprisingly "emergent-reader texts" is actually defined in Appendix A:

Emergent reader texts - Texts consisting of short sentences comprised of learned sight words and CVC words; may also include rebuses to represent words that cannot yet be decoded or recognized; see also rebus

But then in Appendix B, there are no specific examples of kindergarten texts except a few like this:

DePaola, Tomie. Pancakes for Breakfast. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. (1978)
This is a wordless book appropriate for kindergarten.

OK... Also, every other similar kindergarten standard pointedly does not require independent reading:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.10
Actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding.

So... ??? To quote Audrey Watters, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

School Reform == Financialization of Government Services

Charlie Stross:

12. A side-effect of (7) is the financialization of government services (2). ...

14. The expansion of the security state is seen as desirable by the government not because of the terrorist threat (which is largely manufactured) but because of (11): the legitimacy of government (9) is becoming increasingly hard to assert in the context of (2), (12) is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but (3) means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of (1)) unless there's a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.

My Take on Six Kindergarten ELA Standards

I've posted my first long-form Common Core piece in a while on Medium:

Much of the concern over the kindergarten standards revolves around the question of whether they are “developmentally appropriate.” I would argue that in addition to this issue, the kindergarten standards are fatally difficult to interpret due to the flawed design of Common Core ELA/Literacy standards as a whole. It is a fundamental premise of the Common Core that we can think of learning in kindergarten as part of a single continuum of skills and tasks stretching backward from college.

In fact, the standards and assessment paradigm designed for secondary school breaks down when applied to six year olds. This is why all high performing countries, the ones we are supposedly trying to compete with, have separate curricular documents for primary and secondary schools, reflecting the goals and demands of each level.

The DEY report cited six examples of kindergarten standards for which “there is no evidence that mastering these standards in kindergarten rather than in first grade brings lasting gains.” Gentry defends each one in turn, and I shall point out how this discussion illuminates flaws in the design of the standards as a whole.

Wait, What's a Standard Again?

Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin:

We know that the CCSS has led to a shift in reading assessments that have been around for a long time. For example, reading experts Fountas and Pinnell used to suggest that ending kindergarten in the A-C of books range was okay. Now, with the CCSS-informed shift, if a student has not progressed past level B by the beginning of first grade, he is designated as requiring “Intensive Intervention.”

One reason even the most cold-blooded, cost/benefit analysis-driven, technocratic discussions of the Common Core are so ungrounded is that not enough attention is paid to the point McLaughlin makes at the end here: that failure to meet a standard should by definition be regarded as something that requires fairly specific, directed intervention. Or... perhaps not?

Recent standards tend to be aspirational in their drive for more "rigor." They delineate things which are demonstrably possible for some students, and perhaps desirable for all. But particularly at the early elementary level, what we don't know is if they are so necessary that a failure to meet the standard indicates a deficit with serious long-term implications. We don't know if we're investing untold millions in "remediating" students unnecessarily, particularly when considering the opportunity cost in not spending money on, say enrichment for the same children (without even getting into the web of related issues like the psychological effects of unnecessarily telling a student they are "behind").

Think of FedWiki as Desktop Application

I'm doing the Thinking Machines FedWiki Happening, trying to wrap my head around the federated wiki concept. At this early point, the first breakthrough is to realize that my mental map of the thing makes more sense if I think of "FedWiki" as an application rather than a webpage. Like, if you want to do FedWiki stuff on other people's sites, you need to start by "launching" your own FedWiki (i.e., navigate to it). Sometimes it saves files locally, like a desktop application.

Basically, it is enough unlike "surfing the web" as we know it that you have to shift your perspective a bit. It is a shift from how regular wikis work but also a shift from how the web in general conventionally works.

It Depends On What You Mean By Accountable

Chad Alderman:

To see how a move away from annual testing would affect subgroup accountability in other cities, I pulled data from Providence, Rhode Island and Richmond, Virginia. The results confirm that a move away from annual testing would leave many subgroups and more than 1 million students functionally “invisible” to state accountability systems.

As a reminder, No Child Left Behind focuses attention on the progress of groups of students within schools. To be confident that the test results aren’t pulled up or down by a few students and to minimize year-to-year variability, states usually imposed minimum group sizes of 30 or 40 students.

Both Rhode Island and Virginia used relatively high group sizes under NCLB-Rhode Island used a group size of 45 and Virginia used 50. As part of the NCLB waiver process, which allowed states to use relative ranking school accountability systems as opposed to more of a relative ranking system and less of a formulaic trigger, both Rhode Island and Virginia lowered their group sizes. Rhode Island lowered its group size all the way down to 20, and Virginia dropped its group size to 30 students. After these changes, both Virginia and Rhode Island estimated that far more students and subgroups would “count” under their new rules. ...

To see the effects in Rhode Island, I applied Rhode Island’s group size of 20 students to the city of Providence. Providence is relatively poor and has a large number of Hispanic students, and even under a grade-span approach where schools were only accountable for the performance of, say, 5th graders, all schools in the district had enough low-income and Hispanic 5th grade students for the groups to count. But only six out of 22 schools would be accountable for black students, only eight would be accountable for English Learners, five for students with disabilities, and only one for white students.

Without annual test results and under Rhode Island’s old group size of 45, 0 Providence schools would have been accountable for black, white, or students with disabilities.

This all sounds pretty dire, unless you understand that by "invisible" Alderman means "not plugged into the algorithm that spits out a school rating." If you look at publicly reported NECAP scores, you'll see that RI reports groups sizes down to 10 and has for years. The data is not invisible, in fact, it has always been even more visible than the subgroup size Alderman recommends.

Alderman's argument only holds up or is even relevant insofar as you believe "accountability" must be an externally imposed, automated, algorithmic process, as opposed to, say, a system of periodic and ongoing review and inspection by stakeholders at the school, district and state level.

I Don't Even...

Karl Herchenroeder:

On education, Bloomberg said the U.S. should deliver the kind of schooling that will help people become self-sustainable and increase a sense of dignity. If a person has the option of going to Harvard or becoming a plumber, he said he would suggest thinking about the plumbing career.

“The Harvard graduate on average will never catch up to a plumber,” Bloomberg said. “Partially because the first four years — instead of spending $60,000, you make $60,000

Finally My Story Can Be Told

Grinders (2014) "TRAILER" from Nick Genova on Vimeo.

There Are No Parking Spaces in Providence

For years, Providence had an overnight street parking ban for most of the city. Basically every house and apartment had to have off street parking. This is, of course, insane and has been loosened up in recent years.

As a result, the parking situation after heavy snowfall is a little different than in other cities. In the neighborhoods, instead of having to dig your car out of its plowed in parking space and perhaps putting a chair on it to discourage someone from taking your cleared it immediately after you leave for work, everyone digs out their driveway/lot and then nobody touches any of the parking spaces.

Nor has the city plowed them out this year (I think they have occasionally in the past). I'm sure if they did, people would be pissed about having to dig their driveway and possibly sidewalk out again.

But in the meantime, in the vast majority of the city you can't park on the street without leaving your car at least a third of the way out in traffic.

And don't even get me started on the sidewalk situation. Residences around here have actually been doing a lot better, but there's barely any pretense of the city managing to even clear bottleneck sidewalks like overpasses and bridges, and seemingly no enforcement of businesses with very long frontages in key places (used car lots, etc). Is it a violation of the first amendment to fine churches for not shoveling? I mean, when a church across the street from a school only shovels up to their door and leaves 2/3rds unshoveled?

And aaaagh, I wish the parents at our school could appreciate that causing traffic to back up out into the left turn lane of a stroad so that you can watch your child walk all the way across the schoolyard and enter the building is not increasing your or anyone else's safety.

It is Worse than This, Actually

Robert Bruno:

First a clarification. The phrase “right to work” is a misnomer that has little to do with the right of a person to seek and accept gainful employment. Anti-union proponents use “right to work” to refer to an option under federal labor law that allows workers employed by a unionized employer to receive the full benefits of a labor contract without paying for any of the cost to gain those benefits. In fact, no employee anywhere in the country has to join a union and no employer has to sign a labor agreement.

As Tom Geoghegan explains clearly in his new book, it isn't just that workers not paying union dues work under the same contract, but that non-union workers in a "right to work" shop receive the same services from the union, including legal representation.

In Europe, if you decide you aren't going to join the union at a site where there is a union-negotiated contract, your employer will probably give you the same benefits as the union members, for a variety of practical reasons, and no dues go to the union. But the union has no obligation to non-union workers whatsoever. On the other hand, they do have a financial incentive to be responsive to and actively serve the membership. It is hard to deny that the European system results in a stronger labor movement.

Of course, this is mostly an abstract argument. Switching to the European model isn't exactly on the table as a political option in 2015.

Ed Reform's Other Achilles Heel

Without slack labor markets, particularly for those with bachelors degrees but no non-teaching professional training, the whole ed reform edifice falls apart. Everyone leaves teaching, and that's that! For the past, what, seven years, the idea that someone with a BA in English, History or education was generally employable has seemed increasingly fanciful. I'm not betting on a tight labor market, but it is at least conceivable now. TFA is the canary in the coal mine for this phenomenon.

The first Achilles heel of course is just kids, with parental support, refusing to take the damn tests. I'd note that the whole "opt-out" conversation is still quite moderate. Once you hear "strike" and "sabotage" (And let's be clear, sabotage is real easy here. Kick out the plugs. Tear the test, etc. Answer everything "A.") displacing "opt-out," things will be getting real.

A Success Never Equalled by Educational Technology

Patrick Reusse:

And then the world changed in 1983, when the TRS-80 Model 100 portable was released for sale. TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack … the developer and the outlets where you could buy one.

Everyone called it the “Trash 80.’’ They were so reasonably priced that we could buy them ourselves if the newspaper balked. They weighed 3.1 pounds and could run for hours with four AA batteries.

There was no longer a class structure in the press box. The Portabubbles were gone (except for a few holdouts such as Roe). The Silent Writers were sent crashing to a well-earned graveyard.

We all were carrying Trash 80s. The question among the former underclass in the press box went from, “Hey, do you have an extra roll of paper for this piece of bleep?’’ to “Hey, do you have any extra batteries for our little buddy here?’’

Somebody surely is working on a printable Raspberry Pi laptop for schools? Yes? I'm afraid to look, tbh.

Wikipedia, Sigh

Mark Bernstein:

Yesterday, ArbCom announced its preliminary decision. A panel of fourteen arbitrators – at least 11 of whom are men – decided to give GamerGate everything they’d wished for. All of the Five Horsemen are sanctioned; most will be excluded not only from “Gamergate broadly construed” but from anything in Wikipedia touching on “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.”

By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia. Liberals are the new Scientologists as far as Arbcom is concerned.

The optics are terrible: of the 14 arbitrators in the case, between 11 and 13 are men.

Some All-Nude Zoopraxography While You Wait for Spring Training

Rob Edelman:

Of the 781 images in Animal Locomotion, 16 relate to baseball. Their plate numbers are 273-288. The first is labeled “Base-ball; pitching.” Five are “Base-ball; batting.” One is “Base-ball; batting (low ball).” One is “Base-ball; catching.” Five are “Base-ball; catching and throwing.” One is “Base-ball; throwing.” One is: “Base-ball; running and picking up ball.” The final plate is “Base-ball; error.”

All the models are identified only by three different numbers: 25, 26, and 30. According to the prospectus, the “greater number of [human models] engaged in walking, running, jumping, and other athletic games are students or graduates of The University of Pennsylvania—young men aged from eighteen to twenty-four—each one of whom has a well-earned record in the particular feat selected for illustration.” With this in mind, the most likely “baseball models” are in fact ballplayers. The most noteworthy is Thomas Love Latta (1865-1961), a catcher and captain of the varsity nine. The other two are Robert Edward Glendinning (1867-1936) and Morris Hacker Jr. (1866-1947).

STEM It Up, Kids!

John Skylar:

"I hate science." In six years of graduate school, this has to be the phrase I’ve heard most frequently from my colleagues.

People who have dedicated their lives to science.

People who made a decision when they were about 16 years old to focus on science, who went through four years of undergrad and an average 6 years of graduate school, and 4-10 more years of training.

People who’ve spent every moment since 2000 entirely dedicated to making new facts using the scientific process.

"I hate science." Why this instead of, "I love science?"

Frankly, everything about the career, the business of science, is constructed to impoverish and disenfranchise young scientists, delaying the maturation of their careers beyond practicality.

You'd think it would be a bit easier to find science teachers among all the people bailing out of academic science careers.

Culinary Incubator

If Providence doesn't have one of these, we totally should:

Dash is 550 sq ft commercial kitchen available for hire on an hourly or monthly basis. Our commissary style kitchen allows food creative's, bakers, chefs, butchers, cart owners, or anyone involved in a food start-up, to prep their wares in a well appointed new kitchen. Dash is also available for cooking classes, recipe development, pop-up and tasting events, or private dinner parties.

In 2015, good food is one of our greatest economic development assets.

Also, tasty!

The Open Source SIS Market

I've been working on, essentially, a 10 year report on SchoolTool's development. This is one of the things which has been deterring me from blogging lately.

Anyhow, I did some retrospective research on the open source SIS "market," over the past decade, and it is somewhat of a cautionary tale for open source advocates.

Through the whole decade, there was a family of PHP open source SIS's in a more or less "complete" form, being used at some schools in America and elsewhere. We took a fairly brief look at the code early on, and it was pretty obviously terrible PHP. Like most early PHP, the code wasn't much more than a bunch of templates turning a database into web pages. If the templates are badly written, there is just not much to redeem the application. My snap judgement was that, if you wanted a good PHP SIS, to do anything other than start over from scratch would be a massive waste of time.

Instead, over the past decade, a succession of people have tried to redeem this codebase, forking the project in multiple directions, some investing non-trivial amounts of time and money in the process. I haven't followed these projects closely, spent any more time looking at how they work internally or externally. All I know is that none of them have become as popular as they should have. None of them turned into the Moodle of SIS's and seized a dominant position, even though they had every opportunity to. One reason I'm not naming names here is that I don't have any specific argument about quality other than something is wrong because they should have taken over six years ago but didn't.

This is a case of first mover advantage in open source, not just in terms of the application category, but language. Creating a new PHP SIS from scratch with superior architecture to the existing family would not be very hard. Gaining mindshare vs. the existing player is a big hurdle. "I'm going to solve the problems in the package you already know about" is an easier sell than "Move to this thing I've started from scratch, and by the way, I'm just some guy on the internet." Even starting a new SIS on a newer or perhaps more sophisticated language or platform is a clearer sell. This is an area (open source SIS) where the small profit isn't worth a lot of investment, marketing and advertising.

Essentially, there is a serious path dependency in a given product category based on the quality of the first mover. If latecomers are trying to redeem a faulty core instead of building on a solid foundation, the whole sector suffers.

One branch of this tree (at least) has become a successful commercial product.

One big challenger emerged from India: Fedena. It is based on Ruby on Rails and generally was built from scratch using modern web technologies. It might have swept the field except the prospect of making real money overcame whatever the initial rationale for open sourcing the project was, and they forked away and essentially abandoned the open source version two years ago from their ongoing commercial development. So that's that. As SIS's move more and more to cloud hosting, there's even less reason to try to market one as open source.

Shout out to Open Admin for Schools, a Perl-based open source SIS Les Richardson has maintained for schools in Alberta for probably 15 years or so, from which he probably makes some nice side income while saving schools in the region time and money.

Many, many people have written local SIS's and offered them as open source. This is a lovely idea but so far never works. It is just too much time to generalize, complete, package and market (even minimally) the product, particularly if all those tricky steps are seen as a side-light to a project which is probably the side-light of your actual job. They multiply the time involved by whole numbers, not fractions.

Finally, what about SchoolTool? Why didn't we take over 5 years ago, especially with relatively generous and consistent philanthropic backing? Well, I'll go into that more in the full report, and to be sure, I wish we had moved more quickly. But yes, we helped to clog up the market too. There were several years there where we seemed just around the corner from being "done" and having a "complete" SIS product, and with some influential backing, maybe we'd be a bad product to compete with.

Really just got to "complete" a year or two ago. And then growth can be very slow if you're talking school by school. You've only got one buying cycle a year, and people are waiting around to see if it works for other schools around them, so... it takes a while. We're starting to grow in earnest now. Hopefully it is not too late.

Or Maybe They'll Hold Their Breath Until They Turn Blue

Joe Weisenthal:

It's getting harder and harder for employers to fill jobs. In this environment, the balance of power should begin to tip more toward workers.

They could do that, or they could demand that the Fed increase interest rates to slow overall economic growth, so that they don't have to hire people at higher wages. It is the official policy of the nation, after all.

Common Core Carrot

One fundamental problem with Obama-era reform is the premise that one should not be eligible to receive a high school diploma until one proves he or she is ready for college. That was never the presumption before. You would not ask a student who barely squeaked out of high school with a C- GPA and the minimum number of credits where they were going to college, as if they had just punched their ticket to higher education.

On the other hand, I think the Common Core ELA/Literacy standards are decent at determining if a student possesses college level "literacy," that is, as such things go. It seems to me to be a decent template for a new SAT, but woefully inadequate as the basis of a K-12 curriculum.

Having said that, it makes way more sense to say "OK, if you pass this Common Core test you can go to community college for free," than it does to say "You must pass this college-readiness test to graduate from high school at all.

So... we'll see if the Common Core becomes part of the debate on the issue.

Sorry for the Light Posting...

I've been busy.

Bringing in the Connecticut Mob

Elisabeth Harrison:

Governor-Elect Gina Raimondo announced her plan Tuesday to nominate Stefan Pryor for Rhode Island’s newly created Secretary of Commerce post.

The outgoing Education Commissioner in Connecticut, Pryor chose not to seek a second term, a move political observers saw as evidence he had become a liability for Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy, who faced a close battle for re-election.

If anyone had the slightest doubt about the depth of Raimondo's connections to the Connecticut school reform keiretsu, it should be now dispelled. This is wingnut welfare for Democats.

Incompetency

As far as I can tell, and I've looked, nobody in ed reform is working from a set of formal, rigorous definitions of "curriculum," "standards," "outcomes," or "competencies" sufficient to distinguish between these things consistently. As in "X is an outcome but NOT a competency/standard/outcome/curriculum because it meets criteria A, B and C and fails to meet criteria D."

I'm not even saying there are competing models. There don't seem to be any models at all.

I don't see any reason to think outcomes-based, standards-based, and competency-based systems have not been a 25 year continuous project with slight re-branding.

PROFITSHIP!

The Problem With Close Reading Is How Few Texts Merit It

David Coleman's essay, Cultivating Wonder? (via, via), features an example centered around a short piece by Martha Graham from what was apparently the original This I Believe Edgar R. Murrow radio series in the 1950s. It begins:

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing, or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated, precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, the sense of one’s being, the satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. Practice means to perform over and over again, in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Coleman's wonder cultivating questions is:

How does the idea of practice unfold in Martha Graham’s “An Athlete of God”?

The first paragraph, and the text as a whole, sounds pretty good the first couple times through, especially if you approach it as the work of a Great American Genius. But really, it is kind of a mess. It is a short, popular text, penned to be read aloud once, written by someone not known for writing such things.

Graham's piece never resolves the basic question of whether "practice" is something undertaken by only an elite through specific actions, by everyone just by living, or some combination of those. If we learn by practice do we not learn by not practicing? If we practice nothing do we learn nothing? Can we not learn by something we experience once?

The more you dig into the text, the less it makes sense and hangs together. It does not address that when she says "dance" she really only means a very specific kind of dance, probably. She says dance holds an "ageless magic for the world," but that's highly contingent on context. She ends by praising the smile of the acrobat, but the acrobat smiles because it is his job. He is not an artist, he is an entertainer. To closely read this text you have to conclude Martha Graham knows or cares little about the world outside of dance.

It wasn't meant to be re-read and doesn't stand up to it.

Coleman seems uncertain as well about Graham's meaning and ultimately states, "The mystery of what Graham means can be illuminated only by further reading," which could be translated as "finding a better text on the subject." But then again, what is the subject? Why would one read this in the first place? Where would it fit into the curriculum other than as a moral exemplar of hard work and grit?

Does Smarter Balanced Think 15% of 5th Graders are "College and Career Ready" in English?

I'm working on a longer piece trying to decipher what Common Core and Smarter Balanced are saying about growth in ELA/Literacy after 8th grade.

Specifically, Smarter Balanced (one of the two big Common Core testing consortia) recently released their achievement level recommendations for grades 3-11. This is particularly noteworthy because the achievement levels are on a continuous vertical scale. That is, all grades are scored on the same scale. As I understand it, these scores should be comparable across grades. That is, if a 4th grader gets a 2560 and an 11th grader gets a 2560, they are at the same level as far as Smarter Balanced and their interpretation of the Common Core are concerned.

Here's what it looks like for ELA/Literacy:

Notice how the expected/required growth levels off after 8th grade, when there is a two year gap in testing (apparently?). Essentially the same amount of growth is expected in grades 9, 10, and 11 as in 8th, and considerably less than the elementary grades.

And notice how the cut score for a "4" in 5th grade is virtually the same as a passing "3" in 11th grade. Smarter Balanced thinks 15% of 5th graders will achieve this level.

Thus, consulting their estimated percentage of students at each achievement level graphs, we see that Smarter Balanced thinks that 15% of 5th graders will be college ready in ELA/Literacy, and 41% of 11th graders will be. The 5th grade rate of actual college readiness as 10 year olds, not just being on track for it eventually, is over a third of the 11th grade total.

I noticed a while ago that the 8th grade standards were extremely close to the "college and career readiness" anchor standards, and wondered how it would play out over time. Turns out they're sticking to that idea.

At the end of the day, these "rigorous" standards think you're pretty much set with your learning in ELA/Literacy if you're meeting the 8th grade standard. You've got a little to learn about reading, writing and literature the next four years, but not much.

I... just don't get it. The harm is that "rigor" is being pushed down to the lowest grade levels, but for not much benefit in high school. Am I missing something here?

Why is Common Core More Precise About College Readiness in Kindergarten than 11th Grade?

Smarter Balanced:

...a score at or above "Level 3" in 11th grade is meant to suggest conditional readiness for entry-level, transferable, credit-bearing college courses.

I've looked at some of the supporting materials, and I think the 11th grade test is considered at the level of college readiness. It is "conditional" insofar as you might literally backslide so much in the 12th grade year as to be not ready at graduation time after initially passing the test in 11th grade. But if you don't pass in 11th grade, you'd take the 11th grade test in 12th grade to try so show your college readiness. I think! It is clear as mud.

Just the fact that it is ambiguous at all is bizarre. I mean, I'm sure in the logic of American post-NCLB accountability there is a good reason, but in the larger world it is just... crazy. If it is an end of school test it isn't reasonable to present it as an 11th grade assessment. It just isn't. If you want to give the end of 12th grade test to 11th graders fine. Or if it is really an 11th grade test, you should be able to clearly specify how it is different from the final college readiness standards, right?

This is particularly disorienting coming back from spending some time with the K and grade 1 math standards. There it is totally different. You need to learn to count to 100 in K because you need to be able to add within 100 in 1st grade, and it takes some time to learn the numbers in English so you aren't tripping up trying to add threety-four to fivety-seven (or at least that's the argument, as I understand it).

The wacky way this plays out in practice though is that we act as if we know in great detail what a student has to learn when in early elementary school to be on track for college, but once we get to high school, especially in English, it is basically shrugs and hand waving. You would think it would get more specific later.

I suspect the explanation for this is an overload of early literacy experts on the various panels.

It is Sociology, not Physics

Fred Clark:

We should note that this Internet “entropy” isn’t random. The downward spiral always leads to the same place: racist, misogynist and homophobic slurs. That’s not really entropy — it’s a concerted attempt to impose order.

About a decade ago, I was briefly considered an expert (as much as anyone was) on social media. I gave some talks at influential conferences (not that I was influential), talked on BBC America radio once. That kind of thing.

I definitely leaned toward systems that would make it easy for people to create decentralized peer to peer conversations within trusted groups, and discourage open-ended commenting. For example, when Gary Hart became the first well-known politician to start blogging, I remember immediately leaving a comment (ironically) arguing that he shouldn't have open comments, that no good would come of it, and he should use trackbacks to other blogs, which is the way geeks thought (hoped) things were going in 2003.

Needless to say, when Twitter took off, it was a major move in the opposite direction. I guess my reaction was, "Apparently I don't know anything about what people want from social media, but there is no way this ends well," and I pretty much stopped talking about the subject.

I'm starting to feel like I was right all along.

OK, Let's Look at This Counting to 100 Issue

Longtime readers know I avoid getting into math discussions, but I got sucked into this one, partly because my 5-year old spent a few dinnertimes recently proudly counting to 100, so I can relate.

Jason Zimba:

While it is true that many of the oldest state standards only asked kindergarten students to count to 20, more recent standards went higher, to “at least 20” or “at least 31” or up to 100 (see Washington D.C., Georgia, Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington). One reason older standards were limited to 20 was that those standards didn’t distinguish clearly between rote-counting (saying the number words) and cardinal-counting (telling how many). CCSS makes this crucial distinction evident. The National Research Council’s report “Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood: Paths Toward Excellence and Equity” is also clear that counting to 100 is appropriate in kindergarten.

This is in response to Carol Burris referring to counting to 100 as "developmentally inappropriate" and citing the previous Massachusetts curriculum which only required counting to 20 in kindergarten.

The Common Core standard we're discussing is:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.K.CC.A.1 Count to 100 by ones and by tens.

Getting caught up in what more recent state standards said is a waste of time. What does it prove? Besides, I looked up Minnesota's sandards, since I think they're the highest achieving of the lot Zimbra refers to, and their 2007 standards only required "Count, with and without objects, forward and backward to at least 20," so...? Virginia's SOL's, for what it is worth, are more rigorous than Common Core:

The student will
a) count forward to 100 and backward from 10;
b) identify one more than a number and one less than a number; and
c) count by fives and tens to 100.

Again, so...?

I would note that it looks like the NECAP GLE's do not include any specific expectations for counting in kindergarten at all, which would seem to be a serious oversight.

In terms of international comparison, it seems like most high performing countries do not require counting to 100 in the equivalent grade, but ultimately it is a little hazy from this distance because at this grade level (kindergarten), the exact start age becomes rather important, and it is hard to feel too authoritative about that from wikipedia and some web searches.

Anyhow, moving on, the line about earlier standards not distinguishing between rote and cardinal counting is beside the point if we're taking Massachusetts as the starting point, as it seems clear on the matter:

K.N.1 Count by ones to at least 20.
K.N.2 Match quantities up to at least 10 with numerals and words.

All this standards comparison is inconclusive. The only thing that would be convincing is if there was a consensus among the standards and curricula of high performing systems about counting in kindergarten, and there is not.

Finally in the last sentence, we get at least a reference to something substantial, a National Research Council report. Now this is an interesting read! They actually try to explain the rationale and refer to peer reviewed academic research! And, upon closer examination, insofar as I can follow everything up, it seems consistent in arguing that yes, five year olds can be taught to count to 100. Indeed, they argue that pre-school students can count to 39 at age four. So... this is a considerable outlier compared to the existing curricula of high performing countries.

They do discuss important international differences in counting based on the language. Asian languages handle counting more systematically, putting particularly young children at an advantage.

There is a strong equity angle in the report, emphasizing that because English counting is so irregular, less familiarity with the quirks of counting in English puts some populations at an immediate disadvantage, which should be remediated as soon as possible.

I found this convincing that kindergarten students can count to 100. This is not a huge leap anyhow because, as I mentioned, my kindergartener daughter just learned that in school.

There is one more point I would quote from the Common Core, from the introduction to the math section, which I think is telling about the course of this debate:

Standards define what students should understand and be able to do.

What do we mean by "should," when we are talking about five year olds? If we were reading an IETF specification (for example), we would know:

In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. Authors who follow these guidelines should incorporate this phrase near the beginning of their document:

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Note that the force of these words is modified by the requirement level of the document in which they are used.

1. MUST This word, or the terms "REQUIRED" or "SHALL", mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.
2. MUST NOT This phrase, or the phrase "SHALL NOT", mean that the definition is an absolute prohibition of the specification.
3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

Why can't learning standards be written this way? Because the entire field is sloppy and immature.

As it stands, we never really know if we are arguing about whether all students "should" or "MUST" do something when we are talking about the Common Core, particularly down at the kindergarten level. In practice, it means MUST. To argue that it is appropriate to act as if students "can" do something at five is not the same as proving that they MUST.

And ultimately we slide back around to the question of curriculum vs. standards. The NRC report does a good job of arguing that counting to 100 should be a goal of the curriculum in kindergarten, but whether this MUST be achieved by the end of the year is not addressed. Indeed, first grade picks right up with "See, Say, Count, and Write Tens-Units and Ones-Units from 1 to 100" as a major goal and makes clear that this is an ongoing process throughout these years with students progressing at different rates.

My problem with the standard as written is simply that to me, to the extent you're going to have standards for kindergarten, they should reflect not what you want to include in the curriculum, but benchmarks that if not met would represent an issue that required immediate remediation. I am not convinced that not counting to 100 in kindergarten meets that test, but I suspect not counting to 20 would. But maybe that's not the right test? Who the hell knows? It isn't defined.

We simply don't have the language to speak clearly about these issues. It is a disaster.

In Case You're Looking for the Kindergarten Curriculum in Singapore

Here it is: Nurturing Early Learners: A Curriculum Framework for Kindergartens in Singapore.

In case you're wondering, for example, if in Singapore kindergartners are required to count to 100. For better or worse, they aren't. Just up to 10!

Depression at Blackstone Valley Prep

I've got a story in the new issue of Common Ground on student survey data on depression and suicide at Blackstone Valley middle schools, focusing on Blackstone Valley Prep. The centerpiece is this table of 2013 SurveyWorks! data from RIDE:

Read the whole thing, but here are some additional thoughts on the piece:

• This was a lot tougher to write than the standard test score snark. Much more sensitive, and frankly, greater opportunity to look like an ignorant jerk if you get it wrong.
• The data set is weird. First, there is no way to determine the validity (i.e., whether the kids really did feel sad or hopeless for two weeks in the past year). The completion rate is very high for a survey and the question, so if this was a random sample the margin of error would be extremely low. But it is not a random sample, it may be very biased, and the bias may vary by site. A large percentage of non-responders may be depressed.
• On the other hand, this may be the only school level depression data ever published for a "high-expectations, high-support" or "no excuses" charter school, so it is worth a look!

• There have been anecdotal reports about stress and depression at "no excuses" charters. For example:

  Hello. My name is Katie Osgood and I am a teacher at a psychiatric hospital here in Chicago. I am here today as a concerned citizen and an educator.

  In my hospital, we are seeing a disturbing pattern among patients coming from the Noble St Charter School Network of schools. We’ve seen an alarming number of students being admitted to the hospital with depression, severe anxiety, and increasingly with actual suicide attempts all directly tied to these schools’ discipline, academic, and retention policies.

• I just focused on the Blackstone Valley schools for four reasons:
  1. Most of the schools with the highest reported depression scores were there.
  2. The completion rates were relatively consistent and high across those schools (10% or more above most PPSD schools, for example).
  3. It is treated as a discrete market for school choice.
  4. The number of schools is small enough that you don't have to rely on what would be extremely complex statistical analysis (you'd have to try to correct for participation rate and selection bias at each school) to make sense of the entire state data set. With 10 schools, you can just look at all the numbers and draw your own conclusions.
• If having non-experts look at all the data and draw their own conclusions is not sufficient, then data-driven parental and student choice can't work.
• This data has been consistent over the past three years. It isn't an anomaly. I actually sat on this for over six months waiting for the 2013 data to come out.

Ultimately, all the caveats about this data only apply to comparison. The survey data about student reports of depression and suicidal thoughts among students at BVP (and Segue, at least) is clear, consistent, complete and disturbing. We don't know why -- what collection of out of school factors, in school factors, and selection bias among students choosing the school -- but the fundamental issue cannot be dismissed without explanation, especially if the schools in question are considered models to be emulated and expanded.

Pearson's Indigestible Potato Word Salad

Pearson's Weekly Test 8 for second graders:

Potatoes

Potatoes are one of the foods we eat. People eat potatoes for lunch and dinner. They also eat them for breakfast. They are not fruits or vegetables. They are part of the plant's roots.

It is very easy to grow potatoes in a garden. A potato grows from its "eyes." These are dark marks on the potato. Have you ever left one in your kitchen for too long? It will start to grow. You will see little green bumps. These bumps will grow into a new potato plant. But the plant will not do well in the kitchen. A potato needs to grow in the ground.

In the past, some people only have had potatoes to eat. One of these places was Ireland in the early 1900s. One year the potato crop did not do well. People had nothing to eat. Many of them came to America at that time. They hoped to find a better life.

The Irish found many ways to cook potatoes. That way no one got tired of eating them. Today, some of our favorite snacks come from potatoes. Who does not love potato chips and French fries?

There are a number of specific flaming issues here:

• Mis-dating the Irish potato famine by nearly a century and misrepresenting its length.
• Blandly asserting that potatoes are not fruits or vegetables with no explanation. What are they then and why?
• Confusing green spots and eyes.
• Weird, obviously false non sequiturs like "no one got tired of eating (potatoes)" for every meal.
• The lack of distinction between the potato tuber and the entire plant.
• This should be written specifically as if it was explaining a potato to a student who had never actually seen a potato, just potato products.
• Complete lack of a "main idea" or coherent focus.

At this point, we have to seriously ask whether or not this essay was written by a human or a computer program. It could be explained by a sequence of indifferent editors chopping apart some other text(s), but it is almost impossible to imagine this as even a caffeine (or meth) fueled stream of consciousness from a single author.

You can't really blame the Common Core for this mess, although you can question the premise of the whole Common Core process -- that having the same players that wrote our supposedly bad old curricula our entire ELA curricula all at once in a big hurry to meet an equally rushed, vague yet over-specific, set of new standards would have a positive result.

The big, BIG problem here is that teachers should know that Pearson is also likely writing the tests which will be used to assess their students, their own performance, as well as the performance of their school, their supervisors, their district, the state, and perhaps the program which certified them to teach. While "multiple measures" will come into play, those additional measures will be either derived from the test scores (e.g., growth measures) or be considered valid insofar as they correlate strongly to the test scores.

Not only can the teacher not easily ignore these exercises, there is tangible risk in teaching students to question or critique them too closely, as this would be likely to lead to students answering questions "incorrectly" on standardized tests.

Pearson is committing educational malpractice right out in the open, and we need to get a little more bold about shining light on it. This is not a doctrinal or philosophical dispute, it is just negligence. This is worse than just giving kids Fun with Dick and Jane.

RIP Herb Neumann

Peter Verdone:

On Sunday, November 9th 2014, Herb Neumann died. It was cancer that took him down. He was one of the toughest guys there was but just one thing was tougher.

I never met Herb in person. Over the years I learned a lot about him. He was a legend in the New Jersey/NYC area. He skated and rode bikes and did it all his way. He was the guy who would go bigger and go faster. He published his ‘zine Geek Attack back in the day when zines mattered. He skated vert and down hills, he rode road and mountain bikes. He designed his own skate trucks and numerous other parts for skates and bikes. He owned a skate shop, Skate Werks, and passed his passion on to the next generation. He was a special part of his community. Many people are in mourning today.

I hadn't actually re-located Herb online since I started skating again, or for that matter met him when I was reading his 'zine and skating in the 80's, but his perspective on skateboarding and, well, being a geek sure resonated with me at the time I was stitching together the various parts of my identity. I'd come across my cache of Geek Attack stickers while unpacking Saturday and stuck one on my current board. I guess that's in memoriam now.

Peter Greene and I have a Remarkably Similar Job History

Peter Greene:

This is why I now say that all teachers should not only get a job outside of school, but also have the experience of being bad at something.

My lower functioning students have to get up every day and go to a place where all day long, they are required to do things that they are bad at. They have to carry the feelings that go with that, the steady toxic buildup that goes with constantly wrestling with what they can't do, the endless drip-drip-drip of that inadequacy-based acid on the soul.

It's up to us to remind them that they are good at things. It's up to us to make a commitment to get them to a place of success. It's up to us NOT to hammer home what they already know-- that there are tasks they aren't very good at completing.

I was also an incredibly bad farm hand for a summer.

Individualized Parental Homework

Following up my previous post, it should be possible, using the miracle of technology, to simply give parents the kind of math homework they desire for their early elementary students (with the default being "none"). Want 100 math facts every night? OK! Want a fun math puzzle of the week to discuss over dinner? We got ya' covered!

Just keep the parents happy. It has no effect on achievement anyhow. It is academic theatre.

A 7 Year Old + Intentionally Obtuse Math Homework is a Potentially Explosive Mix

My second grader had a full-on meltdown over her math homework this morning... to be sure, there were a variety of factors in play, tiredness, perhaps thrown off by having Tuesday off, etc. But this was also one of those Common Core worksheets where kids have to apply a specific math strategy, in this case, adding two digit numbers by decomposing them a bit so that you're adding groups of 10.

This is often a good idea and worth teaching, but the fact of the matter is that this particular presentation did not make it seem easier at all. It just seemed like a harder, more obtuse approach than the traditional method.

By the time I took over at the breakfast table, she was essentially done, except for howling over the last bonus question, which in the past might have been a more interesting variation on the day's theme, but today the approach seems to be to prepare kids for badly worded multiple choice questions on high stakes tests by intentionally giving them a badly worded multiple choice question at the end of every worksheet. I'm not being cute or flip when I say that, that just seems to be the strategy. In this case, Vivian was upset because she seemed to understand that since this was a bubble question she was not supposed to write the answer to the addition question in the blank in the prompt, but since the bubble answers were just about how to best decompose the addition problem not solve it, it drove her nuts to not have any place to write the "answer" to the addition problem.

This was an illuminating experience in understanding first hand why some parents get their knickers in a twist about this stuff. Put together a high-strung kid and a high-strung parent, and this'd hit critical mass real quick.

The funny part to me is that second grade math homework, in general, is just a waste of time anyhow. There is no benefit whatsoever to sending this stuff home -- even if it was of much higher quality. Unfortunately for the Common Core, most of the people who like it also like sending home homework. Make a mental note for future elementary math reformers -- cut the homework, or make up some fake palliative exercises designed exclusively to keep parents happy without screwing up the pedagogy.