A brilliant post by G.F. Brandenburg about NAEP scores.
Shows how little has been gained by the Bush-Obama demolition derby of testing, closing schools, firing teachers and principals, opening charters.
It is all a mighty failure that has not improved test scores or education
Hoax!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s almost enough to make one suspect that the advertized purpose was not the real purpose.
I’m convinced. We’ve got to find a way to improve our nation’s 12th grade NAEP scores, and the current plan isn’t working.
“Shows how little has been gained by the Bush-Obama demolition derby of testing, closing schools, firing teachers and principals, opening charters.”
Actually it basically shows nothing about those policies. Attempting to tie NAEP scores to those policies is, as Wilson puts it “vain and illusory”. The scores themselves are invalid, as proven by Wilson and it’s not logically possible to tie such policies to the test results (even though statisticians would have us believe one can).
Listen folks, while Diane is laid up, I have been reading Lenny Isenberg’s latest post , and I want to share it with you. I met Lenny hers ago, when he created www. perdaily.com because he wanted a place where teachers could connect with each other. He knew that 52 states with thousands of systems meant that “THEY” could isolate us and do as they please, and nobody would see them systematically ending public education. Now he writes at CityWatch. Here is the LAUSD debacle.
The LAUSD Dinosaur: Dismantling the Economics of Scale
09 May 2014
Written by Leonard Isenberg
MY TURN-The only justification that I have ever heard for the continued existence of LAUSD is the economics of scale. Simply stated, this is the notion that larger organizations can buy goods and services for significantly less money than smaller organizations, because of the quantity and consequential discounts they are able to get because of their size.
You can see this principle in practice in a companies like Costco or Home Depot, where these companies abilities to buy larger quantities for less gives them a significantly lower unit cost, which ultimately gives them a market advantage over smaller businesses whose unit costs are higher.
At LAUSD, the second largest school district in the country, where economics of scale should thrive, nothing could be further from their daily reality.
The majority of what LAUSD purchases is acquired from “agreed upon vendors,” whose status as such insulates them from market competition that might ultimately have given them lower costs in educating students.
In addition, not only does LAUSD not benefit from the economics of scale, they rather incorporate the worst ills of any too-large organization that suffers from the lack of coordinated management that comes from being so very large, cumbersome, and unaccountable. Cue the dinosaur business model.
The following teacher’s comment illustrates how work is typically done at LAUSD:
“We’re all upset about layoffs to both certified and classified personnel. However, I want to point out that about 5 years ago, it took a team of FIVE painters more than a week to paint my slightly larger than average-sized elementary classroom.
“Meanwhile, my class met in the auditorium — a wonderful place to work with 6 year olds. In the many times I entered my room to retrieve materials, I never once saw any of them actually painting, but I did catch a lot of coffee breaks.”
While LAUSD drones often repeat vacuous platitudes like small learning communities, most are reluctant — or unable — to sequence enough facts together to understand that the same accountability that hypothetically makes a smaller school better for learning might also far outweigh any potential savings derived from the economics of scale.
By eliminating the waste and corruption that is endemic to a dinosaur like public school districts, because responsibility and accountability are necessarily lost … not to mention the actual implementation of anything even remotely resembling the real principles of economics of scale.
When accountability is lost, the interests of the unaccountable bureaucracy takes precedence over the fundamental purpose of the organization, which in this case is supposed to be the offering an excellent public education. These antithetical interests can be expressed in several different ways, each with devastatingly negative effects.
Petty Crime:
It can run the spectrum from graffiti to white collar fraud: LAUSD has 10 painting crews working full time for the District according to one of the painters that came out to my site (a $3,700 a month office space that LAUSD rented in the Miracle Mile, in lieu of putting the class at one of its existing sites) to clean up graffiti in the common lobby area where the few students who attended this class decided to tag.
The painter told me that he made over $65,000 a year and spent about 80% of his time cleaning up graffiti.
In calculating the cost of 10 crews of 10 each, the cost of graffiti and other avoidable waste runs in the millions, which makes these crimes in a large organization like LAUSD anything but petty.
LAUSD is self-insured because the cost of private insurance would be prohibitive given the incredibly high level of theft.
Computers stored in locked rooms disappear without any sign of breaking or entering.
Cars are vandalized and other District property is destroyed by students who have been socially promoted so much that they are incapable of being engaged at the grade level the District arbitrarily puts them in out of a sense of political correctness in lieu of common sense; the idle mind truly is the devil’s playground.
Mismanagement:
I received a phone call one time from an AT&T supervisor who told me that LAUSD was their largest customer in Los Angeles County and that they were paying more simply because of the way their billing was set up. She wanted to change it, but couldn’t find anybody to talk to that had the authority to make the changes.
Although our school had a few students who were at basic in math and fewer students who were beyond it, we nonetheless had $125,000 worth of Geometry books sitting in our main office, even though the money would have been far better spent on getting three new teachers to deal with the students where they were really at academically.
In addition, LAUSD and State of California funding rules make it impossible to pragmatically use money saved in one area to fund programs that are short in another.
So when I tried to get students to clean up after themselves after nutrition and lunch to save custodial expenses, my principal told me that this money could not be used for a purpose that might have served as a real incentive for the students to be engaged in this project.
Japanese schools have no custodian, the students clean up after themselves- now there’s a radical notion.
In an education reality where the total capacity of all colleges and universities is 30% of high school graduates, most vocational and industrial arts programs have been eliminated in furtherance of the political canard that everyone is going to college.
Even if they were, the wages derived from an industrial arts education as opposed to a fast food job would help pay for such an education in a present reality of increasing tuition even at public schools.
A food service program that phased out non-student workers as they retired in favor of student food service personnel that gained greater expertise year after year during their four years of high school, might offer not only employable skills after high school graduation, but also a culinary feast derived from the myriad of cultures that now make up Los Angeles.
Wouldn’t this diversity of culture serve as an excellent expression of what it means to be a Los Angelino in the 21st century, while bringing down the exorbitant cost of food service?
Of course this could also be done with computer, electrical, plumbing, construction, and other trades necessary to run a school.
The problem is that the interests of the businesses that presently provide these services to LAUSD have been allowed to take precedence over the needs of students to be productive members of our society.
White-Collar Crime and Incompetence:
Whether it was the misguided decision to build the most expensive high school in history on a toxic waste dump or the innumerable other ill-conceived projects that LAUSD engages in throughout the District, these astronomical costs have bleed the District to the point where the fundamentally simple task of having a small enough teacher-to-student ratio can no longer be funded … unless it is exclusively done on the backs of teachers at the top of the salary scale.
Only a dinosaur would be unaware of the conflict of interest that its law firm had in representing both the developer of the ill-conceived Belmont project and LAUSD.
Getting students to occupy this high school site of questionable safety might have gotten the law firm off the hook for paying the District’s losses in this fiasco by eliminating one of the necessary elements — damages — to sustain the prima facie case, but it left intact a faulty administrative process that is only waiting to get taken by the next multi-million dollar bad decision.
Like building new Taj Mahal-like schools of questionable necessity to anybody but the powerful construction lobby in Los Angeles.
I taught at Palisades Charter High School when Ramon Cortines was superintendent for the first time.
Somebody decided that the stairways to the second floor classrooms were potentially at risk of collapsing during an earthquake, even though there had been several large earthquakes since the school was built and there were no cracks anywhere on the campus concrete.
So rather than fix this problem during the summer, when nobody was on the campus, they waited until September and started jackhammering next to my room during school time.
When they exposed the rebar that held the support pillars, they cut it and replaced it with more rebar that in all honesty didn’t look any different than what they had cut out.
Two thoughts occurred to me:
1. What would have happened if we had an earthquake while the structural support of the stairs and second story supports were open and compromised?
2. Was the purpose of this multi-million dollar contract to benefit the safety of students and teachers on the campus or the construction companies that get rich doing work of questionable value?
Care to share your own LAUSD experience in how the district sabotaged the economics of scale? If you are afraid of retaliation, do it anonymously, but do it, if you ever want this offensive and illegal way of doing business to change.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at Lenny@perdaily.com)
What did NCLB advocates mean when they said, “That which gets measured, gets done.”?
Jb2, they meant you can control only what can be measured. Actually they were wrong. They have measured math and reading scores for more than a decade, with minimal effects.
Out of surgery and coherent already??? You’re amazing, Diane.
No kidding. I hope you’re feeling okay, Diane.
jb2: an old variation on that phrase is “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
Regardless of lofty aspirations and [allegedly] theoretical advantages, it is a worst management practice. [Please refer to the work of W. Edwards Deming]
From Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013), pp. 1, 55, and 147, for the following observations:
“What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value.” — Art Costa, professor emeritus at Cal State-Fullerton
“Initially, we use data as a way to think hard about difficult problems, but then we over rely on data as a way to avoid thinking hard about difficult problems. We surrender our better judgment and leave it to the algorithm.” —Joe Flood, author of THE FIRES
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right thing.” — John Tukey, mathematician, Bell Labs & Princeton University
Thank you for reminding us of Ionesco:
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
😎
I read on the NPR website that a larger portion of the students taking the test were Hispanic and that white students had dropped from 74% down to 58%. Under those conditions it could be seen as good to have flat scores. This might be how they cook the books to make public ed. look bad. See the bottom of this article http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/06/310181788/nations-report-card-shows-stagnant-scores-for-reading-math
I’m not surprised at the results. The tests are geared for a homogeneous population, so the minorities’ scores fall behind while the scores of the white middle class remain at the top. As in any standardized test, some will do well and some will not do well and the rest will fall in the middle. Anyone heard of the bell curve?
That’s why the idea of the entire US population being proficient in ELA and Math is an impossible dream, especially given the current test question creators and scoring rubrics.
NAEP is an interesting concept, but it should be considered an anomaly and not a driving force in the education of our youth.
Let’s re examine our goals. Scoring well on a test should be at the bottom of the list, or not on the list at all.
Discussions of NAEP results have been so politicized over the decades that nobody should to listen to any argument that uses NAEP results as evidence. NAEP results have shown that America’s schools are woefully inadequate; that America’s schools are no worse than they’ve ever been; that America’s schools are a huge success story; that Americans are complacent and ignorant; and now that NCLB is a failure. When someone has something to say about NAEP, I hear “blah blah blah blah blah blah NAEP blah blah blah blah blah blah.” Change the channel immediately, no matter what’s on.
Agreed! NAEP is not even on my list of worries.
It would be nice to think that some reformers and politicians would reflect and think deeply about why the NAEP results look like they do but, alas, they will undoubtedly, find this yet one more reason to blame teachers….