Poor Tennessee! It is locked in the embrace of fake reformers who promise miracles, and a far-right legislature that wants to believe them. Worse, having won a Race to the Top grant, it has to produce miracles, even if they are fabricated out of whole cloth.
One of the alleged miracles-to-be is the Achievement School District, led by Chris Barbic of TFA and YES Prep. Barbic came to Tennessee to take charge of the lowest-performing schools and promised to raise them up to the top 25% in the state in only five years.
Now come the lies. Gary Rubinstein here unravels the manipulation of data to show how unimpressive the gains are as contrasted to the miracle claims.
Gary writes, after analyzing the numbers:
“Suddenly, it’s not so good anymore. The ASD grew by 1.1% more than the state in that period while the ASD actually went down by .7% more than the state went down. At this rate of losing .35% of ground each year to the state, the ASD will never get out of the bottom 5% in reading, and for math where there is a 30% difference between the ASD and the Tennessee average, if they creep up at .5% a year it will take 60 years for them to get to the 50% mark, let alone the top 25%.”
As Gary shows, there were no miracles, other than the miraculous tales told by the reformers to their true believers.
The clock is ticking. Three years to go until the bottom 5% is in the top 25% of all schools in Tennessee. Anyone want to place bets?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love Barbic’s response to Gary’s tweet: “Growth is growth.” He’s pretty much saying, “Okay dude, you got me.” Then he says it’s better than the alternative. Really? Getting an extra question correct on a multiple choice test is his idea of “growth?”
Why is the “alternative” the status quo? A real alternative would be to alter funding, sending far, far more to failing schools than already-successful ones. Oh, I know. That’s just throwing money at the problem. The important ingredient is austerity, lest we forget.
What’s infuriating about “data driven” is it does exactly the opposite of what it set out to do. They always play with the results, in one way or another. Even if you bought into the basic premise you’d have to admit that this happens a lot.
So what’s the plan? How does anyone who promotes these accountability plans address that huge weakness? Or do we just collect more and better numbers and then pay absolutely no attention to how they’re used?
Why should people in Tennessee be paying for this if it’s in no way useful to them, as applied?
“Data-driven or Data-drivin’?”
Drivin’ Miss Data
Is oh so much fun
Taxiing errata
Mistakes on the run
Miss Data is driven,
Along for the ride,
And never is given
The chance to decide.
Some DAM Poet: TAGO!
😎
Keep em coming poet, you make my day. I may share these with my students.
Chiara: decades and decades ago W. Edwards Deming cogently explained that “Management By Objective” or “Management By The Numbers” or “Management By Results” (currently known as “data-driven decision making”) was a proven failure.
From an article entitled “Present Practices and Better Practices” under the subsection “Numerical goals”:
[start quote]
A numerical goal is a number drawn out of the sky. A numerical goal outside the control limit cannot be accomplished without changing the system. A numerical goal accomplishes nothing. What counts is by what method. Three words. If you can accomplish a goal without a method, then why weren’t you doing it last year? There’s only one possible answer: you were goofing off. May be numerical goal be achieved? Yes. We can make almost anything happen. But what about the cost? What about the loss? Anybody can achieve almost anything by distortion and faking, redefinition of terms, running up costs.
[end quote]
(THE ESSENTIAL DEMING: LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES FROM THE FATHER OF QUALITY W. EDWARDS DEMING, 2013, Joyce Orsini, ed., p. 55)
The last sentence is a succinct recap of the current approach to numbers and stats used by the leading charterites/privatizers and their enablers and enforcers. Hence the quote from a Barbic tweet: “Growth is growth.”
“Growth is growth”?!?!? What about all that talk about “rigor” and “high standards” and “world-class this and that” and “being competitive in a globalized world economy”—is he telling us that mediocrity, and even failure, is acceptable whenever we reference the vanity projects and cash cows of the leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time”?
😡
This is the difference: True education in the search for truth relies on scholarly in depth research. What is happening now if the antithesis. We had it in Indiana when our illustrious Supt. of Public Education manipulated numbers to show “growth” where little or none had taken place.
This kind of stupidity is proliferating.
ALEC owns our TN legislature and the Haslams own the news.
alec owns Ohio’s and West Virginia’s legislatures, too.
A few months ago, Charleston W. Va.’s toxic water caused a disaster. Yesterday, Toledo, Ohio, required federal aid because 100,000 residents have toxic water.
Good luck to TN.
The Columbus dispatch/disgrace is a right-wing paper. Ohio is in a race to the bottom and, it may beat both W. Va. and TN.
In the meantime, the TN Board IS adopting cursive writing standards! http://waynegersen.com/2014/08/02/writing-well-in-tennessee/