The Washington Post has a great education blog, Valerie Strauss’s The Answer Sheet.
I wish the editorial board would read The Answer Sheet.
.
Instead, they wrote this absurd editorial, chastising Texas for backing away from test mania.
At present, Texas spends more on testing–$100 million yearly to Pearson –than any other state.
Students in Texas are expected to pass 15 end-of-course tests to graduate from high school. This is more testing than in any other state.
The outcry from parents was so loud that even the Legislature heard it, and Texas plans to cut back on its testing mania.
The Washington Post thinks this is terrible, just terrible.
Please, editorial board, read The Answer Sheet and learn about the folly of high-stakes testing.
Or read the report of the National Research Council on “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Valerie Stauss is a national resource, and Bill Turque does excellent local education reporting, but when it comes to the editorial leanings of the Post, it functions more like a subsidiary of Kaplan, which is nominally owned by the Washington Post Company, and which provides most of its profits.
The report you cite above was financed by the Carnegie and William and fFora Hewlett foundations, who also directed its scope. Both are heavily invested in corporate school reform:
“Carnegie Corporation of New York: A Perspective on School Reform and Human Capital
We’re also seeing that some of our charter management organizations (CMOs), some CMO systems, are getting good results with black, Latino, poor and immigrant kids. We’re seeing this in New York City, with thirty-four percent growth in the graduation rate over the years since Mayor Bloomberg came into office.”
http://carnegie.org/publications/carnegie-reporter/single/view/article/item/215/
Hewlett Foundation Joins Other Major Foundations and U.S. Department of Education to Invest in Education Innovation | Hewlett Foundation
“The foundations and the public sector are jointly focusing on promising programs in recruiting and training teachers and school leaders; expanding clear, consistent, college- and career- ready standards and high-quality assessments; and scaling new school designs. The group of foundations believes these innovations, assessed for their efficacy, have the potential to improve student learning, especially for those most in need.”
http://www.hewlett.org/newsroom/12-major-foundations-commit-500-million-to-education-innovation
The report seems to equate kids with windshields. And concludes that all we need is better tests.
Test-Incentives-Education-NAS-report1.pdf
“Lazier (2000) studied a change from hourly to piece-rate pay for workers who install windshields in cars: he found that productivity improved by 35 percent, one-third of which was produced by lower productivity workers leaving the firm and being replaced by higher productivity workers.
The knowledge that incentives will have different effects on different people depending on their ability to achieve the targets can be readily applied to examples within education. Lazear (2006) applies the theory to the case of incentives given to teachers— in a model in which teachers differ in their effectiveness in raising student test scores— and produces the result that incentives will cause some teachers to increase their effort and others to change occupations. In Lazear’s model, this differential reaction would lead to increasing effectiveness in the pool of teachers over time—as measured by the ability of the teachers to raise test scores—because the ones who leave are those who are less able to respond effectively to the incentives. ”
Click to access Test-Incentives-Education-NAS-report1.pdf
One of the top officials at Carnegie worked as Deputy Chancellor in Bloomberg’s Department of Education. The head of the Carnegie Corporation disburses Mayor Bloomberg’s annual “anonymous” gifts of millions of dollars to organizations. There is a close relationship between Carnegie Corporation and Mayor Bloomberg.
I wish the public knew about these alliances.
The report you cite above was financed by the Carnegie and William and Fora Hewlett foundations, who also directed its scope. Both are heavily invested in corporate school reform:
“Carnegie Corporation of New York: A Perspective on School Reform and Human Capital
http://carnegie.org/publications/carnegie-reporter/single/view/article/item/215/
Hewlett Foundation Joins Other Major Foundations and U.S. Department of Education to Invest in Education Innovation | Hewlett Foundation
“
http://www.hewlett.org/newsroom/12-major-foundations-commit-500-million-to-education-innovation
The report also seems to equate kids with windshields. And concludes that all we need is better tests.
Test-Incentives-Education-NAS-report1.pdf
“Lazier (2000) studied a change from hourly to piece-rate pay for workers who install windshields in cars: he found that productivity improved by 35 percent, one-third of which was produced by lower productivity workers leaving the firm and being replaced by higher productivity workers.
The knowledge that incentives will have different effects on different people depending on their ability to achieve the targets can be readily applied to examples within education. Lazear (2006) applies the theory to the case of incentives given to teachers— in a model in which teachers differ in their effectiveness in raising student test scores— and produces the result that incentives will cause some teachers to increase their effort and others to change occupations. In Lazear’s model, this differential reaction would lead to increasing effectiveness in the pool of teachers over time—as measured by the ability of the teachers to raise test scores—because the ones who leave are those who are less able to respond effectively to the incentives. ”
http://jrnetsolserver.shorensteincente.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Test-Incentives-Ed
Yes, “all we need is better tests”
I don’t think this report addresses the flaws in high stakes testing, rat here it encourages a doubling down IMHO.
Test-Incentives-Education-NAS-report1.pdf
Further investment in test-based incentives still seems to be worthwhile because there are now more sophisticated proposals for using test-based incentives that offer hope for improvement and deserve to be tried.
Click to access Test-Incentives-Education-NAS-report1.pdf
Yes, and as has been widely reported, Bloomberg strategically makes donations to non-profits and community-based organizations in order to muzzle, if not control, them politically.
Sorry, the above was intended as a reply to Diane.
I believe it is Jo-Ann Armao who writes the education-related editorials for the Washington Post. This is what her bio says:
“Jo-Ann Armao is an editorial writer for The Post, specializing in education and local affairs in the District of Columbia. Armao came to The Post in 1984. Before that, she worked at the Charlotte Observer. She became interested in journalism while a student at the University of Buffalo, where, along with The Post’s Tom Toles, she worked on the student newspaper. Her professional career began as a reporter in 1973 at the Buffalo Courier-Express where she worked until it folded in 1982. She started at The Post as an assignment editor and over the years worked her way around the Beltway, reporting in Montgomery County, serving as Virginia editor and city editor before becoming assistant managing editor for metro news in 1996. After leading the local staff for nine years, she was awarded a John S. Knight Fellowship. She joined the editorial board in 2006.”
Anyone see any experience or degree in education? So why does she specialize in writing about education?
It makes me sick how the Washington Post editorials are ALWAYS against public school education and unions. They consistently degrade the great school districts in the Washington, DC area, including Fairfax County and Montgomery County schools. In the past three years, they have not had one good thing to say about Montgomery County schools, one of the best school districts in America.
And, not once do they mention that they have a bias in their ownership of Kaplan.
Many Montgomery County teachers unsubscribed to delivery of the Post after the Post hit them so hard with negative editorial after negative editorial several years ago during contract negotiations.
Sickening!
They are put on the education beat, but that doesn’t make them qualified to write about education policy or what is truly going on in education.
JoAnn Armao wrote endless editorials supporting Rhee for Washington Post
So this is why a Pearson person told me that Pearson thinks Texas is “Insane.” I was told they have a special section just for Texas. They do it for the money. Now we know “The rest of the story.”
In response to Michael. This is why CORE-CA separated from CORE nationwide in the 80’s. Celes King III saw this coming and would not have CORE-CA perverted by outside money controlling what happens. We do not take their money. We are truly independent and anyone who know us knows that. The King Family of L.A., not the MLK Kings, has over 114 years of continuous civil rights. When we speak they know it is us and not someone else. We have total credibility even if they do not like what we say or support. There is nothing like credibility. It is the coin of the realm. Take a look at all these organizations and look at who funds them and then ask the question “Do they want to keep their job?” If you do and you anger your funders how long do you think they will let it go on?
Maybe I’m just being slow but my Google-fu is usually pretty good. Is there a link to the article? I’ve searched by author name from the comments here but I can’t find anything recent by her, and I don’t see a link in the original article?
Ah, I found it in a secondary link from a Texas paper: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/texass-graduation-requirements-fail-to-make-the-grade/2013/04/07/adf51ac6-9df9-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html
The link doesn’t work for me either. I hope this means that the Washington Post removed their article from sight!
This is the link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/texass-graduation-requirements-fail-to-make-the-grade/2013/04/07/adf51ac6-9df9-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html
Here is the link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/texass-graduation-requirements-fail-to-make-the-grade/2013/04/07/adf51ac6-9df9-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html
I’m so sick of the patronizing tone of these newspaper editorials. These are the same newspapers that blindly parrot all of the reform marketing slogans on “choice” but they feel perfectly justified in lecturing parents and teachers on the CHOICE to speak out against the truly ridiculous amount of testing.
If you’ve had children in public schools for the last ten years, you have been lectured to death on testing. We get it. The NYTimes and the Washington Post want our kids tested. But where does it end? The focus on testing gets more extreme every year. It wasn’t bad enough that they were evaluating children based on one score, now we’re told children are actually being tested to act as a “teacher evaluation” tool.
This isn’t why people send children to school.
The Washington Post editorial page has a lengthy recent history of misrepresenting the truth about American public education. Worse, it continues to support and advocate for “remedies” that do little to improve schooling.
The lead education editorial writer, Jo-Ann Armao, has made the claim that American public education is broken and teacher unions are to blame. She has consistently touted more testing, charter schools and abolishment of tenure as “the fix.” But Armao gets it wrong again and again, and again.
If unions impede student learning, for example, how does Armao explain high achievement in many strong union states (Maryland and Massachusetts come to mind), and bottom-of-the-barrel achievement where unions are weak or non-existent (the deep South, for example)? She cannot.
A USA Today investigation into cheating in the District schools under Michell Rhee found that for a school to be “flagged” for possible cheating a “classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test, meaning that ” a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.” When half of all the schools in the system are flagged for grossly abnormal wrong-to-right erasures on tests and ” the odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance,” then it’s more than likely that “some cheating” took place. And, even Rhee has admitted that “some cheating” may have occurred during her reign as superintendent of the DC schools.
But, in a fit of editorial obtuseness, The Post(Armao) said “there are many innocent explanations for changed answers.” The Post told the public, inaccurately, that Rhee and her cronies “were cleared by an outside firm.”
See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/cheating-allegations-cant-mask-real-gains-in-dcs-schools/2011/03/30/AFeh8Q5B_story.html
However, Rhee and her top minions, including current chancellor Kay Henderson, were very reluctant to have any kind of investigation. Consider also that the “investigations” that finally took place were quite limited. The school system refused to release the names of the schools that were initially investigated, and it refused to release the limited-in-scope “investigative” reports. In essence, the “test security” company, Caveon, that performed the very limited inquiries into the DC testing irregularities, performed much like the Wall Street ratings agencies (Fitch’s, Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s) that signed off on the toxic, collateralized securities peddled by the investment banks. Those agencies took the big fees and gave the banks what they wanted: AAA ratings for securities that were dogs. So too, Caveon took the money and looked the other way. It suggested, as did DC school officials, that all the red flags signaling rampant cheating might be due to students who just checked their work. Interestingly, that “checking” was virtually always from wrong answers to right ones.
Here’s how Post education reporter Bill Turque covered the DC limited inquiry:
“Caveon founder John Fremer said he was doing exactly what his client, DCPS, asked. Had it asked for more, he said, more could have been done. The Utah-based firm could have analyzed answer sheets at greater depth–far beyond erasure rates, which Fremer says are the crudest and least reliable marker for possible testing misconduct.”
“It could have searched for patterns of collusion, looking for unusual levels of agreement on answers among students seated near each other. It could have checked for logical inconsistencies in answer patterns, determining if students were doing unusually well on the harder questions while getting easier ones wrong. It could have gone back and looked at prior-year performance by students, or the performance of classrooms under certain teachers in the past.”
“I could do everything you could ever want done,” Fremer said.
Obviously, like the big bankers and hedge funders who caused the financial meltdown and still do not want prosecutors nosing into their corrupt practices, Rhee and Henderson (and others) do not want full scrutiny. They know what an independent, in-depth investigation –– like the one in Atlanta –– would uncover.
The Washington Post The Post ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, wrote fairly recently that when “Eugene Meyer bought this newspaper in 1933 he put at the top of his seven guiding principles…”
Two of those “guiding principles” are these:
‘The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth can be ascertained,’ AND ‘The Newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it.’
The Washington Post and its editorial page, including Ms. Armao, would do well to remember and abide by Meyer’s principles. But they seem to be having a difficult time of it.
Isn’t the Washington Post controlled by Kaplan at this point?
So, given that, what would you expect?
The Washington Post is solvent because it owns Kaplan Learning. If Kaplan goes, so does the Post.