Ken Bernstein, retired teacher, posted this comment:
“There are other issues that need to be included, even if there are no problems with erasures. States report scaled scores. They can and do change the conversion rate from raw to scaled in order to show “improvement” year to year. The year before I taught in Virginia the school in which I taught had a 58% pass rate on the Middle School American History test. The year I was there the pass rate was 81%, my own was 89%. Sounds great, right? Except they had lowered the cut score and changed the conversion. If the previous year’s raw scores had been converted using the same matrix, the score would have been 71% or so. Thus we showed “improvement” but not that much.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
there are lies, damned lies, and statistics
-Mark Twain
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“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”
Attributed to Mark Twain, who definitely wrote that
“The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.”
🙂
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The same thing happens in reverse–a couple of years ago when NYS wanted to show that the tests were not rigorous enough in 3-8, they altered the scaled scores so that a third grader could make two errors and drop from a 4 to a 3–in some tests you could get 90% of the test right and be barely proficient, 85% could drop you to a 2. Manipulation of the scaled scorings can be worked to prove any point–improvement or deficiency all done by the man behind the curtain
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Lest we get drawn into the diversions of the bean-counters’ ever-diverting game, I think we need to keep our eyes on the prize — the real purpose of public education in a democratic society — and keep asking ourselves whether a candidate system of accounting really serves that purpose or not. There’s the rub that neither erases nor can be erased.
Also, we need to understand the phenomena that come into play whenever we place human beings into absurd situations, denying them the powers they would normally have in more rational settings to resolve the absurdities that are forced on them.
Two of the strategies that people adopt to regain a modicum of power against the absurdities of absolute authority are these:
1. Jury Nullification of Unjust Laws
2. The “Hogan’s Heroes” Strategy
We can expect to see more and more people in the jury boxes, school stalags, and teaching trenches resorting to these last ditch maneuvers until such time as the war on public education is over.
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What is the Hogans Heroes strategy? I was able to figure out the first one (breaking the law because the law is bad… kind of like civil disobedience). Very curious about how people make decisions in impossible situations.
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no, jury nullification is the jury decides not to convict even though the evidence clearly warrants sustaining a conviction. Perhaps the most famous example in English-speaking jurisprudence was the refusal of a British jury to convict William Penn and William Mead for disturbing the peace by doing Quaker preaching. The judge even ordered them to return a guilty verdict, they refused, he fined them and imprisoned them – the jurors that is.
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See TV Tropes • Hogan’s Heroes for basic info.
The first duty of a POW is to escape, but these POWs do just the opposite, working within the system, as it were, to undermine it.
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Sergeant Schultz’s “I know nothing I see nothing” said with a heavy German accent.
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Hmmm… ok, for shame, for shame… I now get to expose the lacking in my own education… history/civics… my worst subjects (although I’m improving)… reading/mathematics… my best (which is why I knew NCLB was a farce from the beginning due to the undeniable statistical flaw of defying the “normal curve”)…. point being… are there any websites (or books) you could recommend so that I can get a better gist of these “strategies?” Thank you.
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Unfortunately these days it seems that even the judges don’t know what “jury nullification” is. And if they know they tell the jury they have to rule within a certain set of parameters outside of which jury nullification falls.
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I did a major study of the Washington State WASL Test (and helped bring it down, I think) and found that not only were cut scores gamed to show what was required by the state superintendent, but the rubrics were actually changed in mid-scoring session if there were too many 4’s (or 1’s for that matter). Students whose tests were scored prior to the change did not benefit from the change, thus students with the exact same answer could receive different scores.
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We have had similar manipulation of test data in Pennsylvania. Last fall Pa. Secretary of Education Tomalis attempted to present state test data for charter schools in a way which made them appear better than public schools.
He attempted to say each charter school is a district which are measured with different criteria than individual schools.
http://tinyurl.com/8eq3pj6
However, the U.S. Department of Education said this was not allowed in November. It ordered Pennsylvania to recalculate the charters’ AYP status on the school level and publicize the results by January. So under the federal order, charters must have the school-level and district-level grades.
In January it was announced that under Tomalis’ system, 77 charter schools — or 49 percent — made AYP when they were measured as school districts. But when tabulated as individual schools, only 43 — or 28 percent — made AYP, according to a Allentown Morning Call analysis of state data.
By comparison, 49 percent of the state’s public schools made AYP and about 61 percent of the state’s 499 school districts that administered the PSSAs did, too.
http://tinyurl.com/cfhgwa9
Tomalis was not reprimanded and remains Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Education.
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Another breaking news item: http://truthinamericaneducation.com/common-core-state-standards/rnc-passes-anti-common-core-resolution-at-their-spring-meeting/ (If you post about this, I will be shocked.)
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Stunning. But is it real?
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Great news if true.
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The Republicans are stuck on this one… the Tea Party crowd hates anything with USDOE fingerprints while the business community (and edu-business in particular) love the national standardized tests that will accompany CCSS… it isn’t surprising that the tea-party wing prevailed on this argument.
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Why would you be shocked if Diane posts about it?
Anyway, even if the result is good, and they oppose Common Core, the RNC isn’t doing it because CCSS hurts kids. It’s because of the “Black Helicopter,” anti-federal-government crowd. Utah pulled out of SBAC last year because of that.
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If what George Buzzetti says is right, and D.C. is spending a staggering $29,000 a year per student, where’s all that money go? Consultants, one to one administrator to student ratio, who knows? A fetid state of affairs where the students and everyone in the system up to the superintindent is cheating the taxpayers out of their money.
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George is high on the per pupil expenditures in DC. There are several things that raise DC’s per student spending compared to other jurisdictions. One, which is unavoidable, is the cost of security. The other is the cost of special education. DC for years has lagged on its ability to meet the special ed needs of its population. Given that there are lawyers who specialize in SPED cases, they wind up with a number of situations of very expensive private placements for kids.
Take away the SPED and security costs and DC’s per pupil tends to be mildly higher than some surrounding jurisdictions, lower than others (for example, Arlington, which IIRC has the highest in the DC metro area).
DC Schools also had a lot of unnecessary people put on the payroll under a mayor named Marion Barry, whose first elected position in DC was on the school board. Rhee cleaned some of that out, but there were a lot of people burrowed in.
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teacherken: thank you for your postings.
A question re per pupil expenditures. In the war of words between Mayor Emanuel/CPS and the CTU during the recent strike, it was regularly leaked [you know by which side] that one of the highest costs was teacher salaries, pegged at $76,000+ average [not median]. Two postings on ed blogs claimed [but presented no proof because no access to internal records] that what CPS did was take the [on average] much higher salaries of administrators and central office staff who were out of the classroom but still had their teaching credentials, and added those into the mix of certificated teachers who were actually in the classroom on the front lines of education—thus skewing the ‘average salary’ of in-classroom teachers significantly [and misleadingly] upward.
I understand re SpecEd and security costs. However, do you have access to any information that might tell us about what the ‘real’ average salaries of in-classroom teachers is like in any of the major school districts, or is it just hopelessly buried under excuses like ‘too complex’ and ‘confidentiality’ and ‘need to know’ ad nauseum?
Thank you.
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I last examined finances of DC schools in detail about 4 years ago for an appearance on a cable TV show.
I know that over time as the percentage of students in charters has increased, that complicates the reporting.
In general, most of the charter schools in DC have relatively less experienced teaching staffs, in part because many do not pay as well as DCPS.
AFter the reign of Rhee, the experience level of DCPS is also down.
I have no idea how Chicago would calculate averages.
You can read the salary schedule for the new contract here
I will make several observations of what I see there
1. the pay is for 208 days. That is longer than most workyears for teachers. Most schools are on 180 days for students, with perhaps 4 additional days built in for bad weather. Usually there are up to another 10 days for teachers – prep weeks (mine was four paid days), teacher work days (we had 4). Thus an average teacher around the country is paid for between 188 and 198 days. Take 188 as the most common, and you are adding 20 days to that, which should mean the base pay is 20% higher.
2. When calculating the averages, I do not know if Emanuel and company included the pension pickup.
3. There are people who are officially labeled as teachers in many systems but who do not teach students – they may be department chairs, they may be testing coordinators, they may be mentors. They are still paid on teacher scale, but (a) often they get paid for more days (in my school they used to be 11 month rather than 10 month employees) and they often get a stipend on top of that. If such were included in calculating averages that would also distort the average in an upward direction
Just a few cautionary notes.
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teacherken: thank you for your reply.
Even more thanks for your cautions. How refreshing that someone with strong opinions refuses to make hard-and-fast inferences without the necessary hard data to back them up.
I look forward to more postings.
🙂
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Nothing like changing the rules of the game to make it look like you are doing better. Another one played out in a lot of places is to drive off the low performers, have they leave and mostly go out onto the streets and then into the criminal justice system to make the districts and individual schools API scores look like they went up. This is how warped and unconcerned about our youth they are. In 2002 with 156,000 more ADA LAUSD had only 14,500 students or 2% not come to school everyday. In 2010-11 with 156,000 less enrollment than in 2002 over 115,000 students or 17% did not come to school everyday. Staticians run those numbers and see what you come up with and why? Could it be test scores as that cost LAUSD over $1.3 billion in lost revenue that year alone, but Deasy and Garcia now loudly state “We are doing Better now.” Did they or didn’t they. What are you really measuring?
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Krazy TA good analysis of how teachers salaries can be twisted for their political teacher destruction purposes and P.R.
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Florida has become the master at this three card monty game of who is officially called a “teacher”. Twice the voters of this state passed a class size limit amendment to the state constitution, much to Jeb Bush’s chagrin and millions of dollars spent to defeat it. That is one of the reasons he has been so single minded in his attempts to destroy the Florida Education Association and end the profession of public school teaching to pay back the teacher for defeating him on the class size amendment and the first attempts at merit pay and VAM (killed twice then passed last year).
So how does the state get around the will of the people now enshrined in the constitution? The law says that in primary grades you shall have no more than 18 students per teacher. In upper elementary the ratio is 1:22. In middle and high school 1:24. So now districts name all manner of employees “teachers” and they take the building total of “teachers” and divide the appropriate number of students among that falsified number.
So a school, on paper, may have 10 actual classroom teachers but 16 people listed on the payroll as “teachers” so it can assign 350+ students even though the law would expect no more than say, 220 – 240 students in those classes. Pretty neat, huh? Spirit, not the letter, and all that. Funny how that goes against the traditional conservative allegiance to the “plain meaning” of the law and extra-legal maneuvers though. The state Supreme Court was not amused and slapped the legislature down over the trickery once but the legislature just got busy finding other ways to ignore the voters and the state constitution.
Currently the legislature is toying with several ALEC-advised ideas to get free of the class size amendment. Always because of the “cost” which the voters did not “anticipate”. Yet they have no qualms of siphoning of millions of dollars to pay for unregulated charters, many of which have gone bust or ended up in a courtroom over numerous shady practices or to pay Pearson for testing services that fails to deliver year after year and has brought great embarrassment to the state department of education over the failed FCAT tests.
The ultimate legislative play (still guided by Jeb Bush’s foundation and the cronies put in place throughout the state government) is the push for online classes and schooling, which are now ALEC-mandated by Florida law for all high school students, where a teacher can be assigned 60 – 100+ students which totally circumvents the class size amendment altogether since online schools did not exist when the law was passed.
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This happens in other states, as well. My daughter was a student in a Chicago suburban public school district that claimed to have a 15-to-1 ratio! Yeah–because they took the total # of students & divided that by counting every single adult hire (administrators, custodians, school lunch personnel)! This was published in a popular magazine–many of the school districts exaggerated their pupil-teacher ratio, but none as blatantly inflated as ours! When I called the reporter to advise him that the information was incorrect, he casually replied, “Well, that’s what they told me,” and refused to look into it any further.
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George Buzzetti: I can’t accept thanks for merely raising a question. But thank you for the kind thought.
🙂
Chris & retiredbutmissthekids: your two responses exemplify why I view this blog. Useful, on task, edifying.
The accountabully underlings of the edubullies seem to fit Andrew Lang’s description: “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts—for support rather than illumination.”
I remember how the HS I worked at made it seem a lot more secure that it really was by fudging the numbers. I learned about it from the students, some teachers and security people, and even a very upright police officer. The numbers for students who possessed and used and sold drugs on campus, carried knives on campus [including for personal protection against other armed students that threatened them], and theft were remarkably low. Why? Three big reasons that reinforced each other: it made the school much more appealing to the parents of high-scoring test takers who were thinking of enrolling their kids at the special magnet programs [higher test scores here we come!], it made the top administrators look like freakin’ management geniuses, and it significantly cut down on paperwork and other requirements associated with such matters.
Please understand: in the case of a possession of a tiny bit of marijuana, I don’t think tackling a student of small stature to the ground, clubbing her/him senseless and publicly hauling her/him off to jail in handcuffs is an effective or useful or moral way of dealing with such behavior. I don’t approve of the behavior, but the motivations behind the under-reporting was not the welfare of the students or the staff but the reputations and promotional chances of a few individuals combined with the desire of same not to interrupt their free time with work.
Disclaimer: this isn’t meant to discount all the effort and upright conduct of those administrators, security personnel and police officers who do the right thing.
But the incentives were, and are, in place to bend the truth to suit the purposes of those in authority. “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.” [Mark Twain]
Thank you both again.
🙂
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Education Reform is to Failing Schools as Gun Control is to Gun Crime.
Neither one addresses the real problems but are very hard to argue with because everyone believes, “we have to do SOMETHING.”
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nice try, but the two are completely not comparable.
Education “reform” was supposed to “improve” US educational performance especially in international comparisons which were used to scare people – never mind that when controlled for degree of poverty US schools perform as well or better than those of any other nation. By that standard the “reforms” have failed, in part because they are contradictory. We claim too many drop out and the solution is to make things more difficult to achieve? Ponder that for a moment.
By contrast, there is absolutely solid evidence and research on how gun control has lessened gun violence where it can be enforced. Remember, the issue with guns is about far more than mass shootings like Sandy Hook Elementary, as horrible as that is. It is also about accidents, it is about suicides.
Since this is a blog focusing on educational issues, perhaps you might confine your commentary accordingly and not introduce irrelevant and inaccurate comparisons.
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Well, I feel it is relevant. And really, it is that supreme “shut down” attitude that simply perpetuates bad policies.
I bet where “education reforms” can be enforced, they work, too. Unfortunately, all the factors that cause education to fail just hang in there.
Discourse continues to be one step forward, two steps back.
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nice try but non responsive to my points. I will try again, with some more information.
1. Most of what is being advocated as ‘reform’ has been tried in the past, and failed.
2. You attempt to equate gun control and education reform as equivalent, particularly in what you consider their failures. I point out that your frame on gun control is wrong, because the measure proposed have the proven capability to reduce deaths by guns.
3. Given that this is a blog on education, introducing something irrelevant to the question at hand seems inappropriate.
Diane will not censor you, unless you are obscene or deal in personal attacks.
I am suggesting that the topic of gun control was clearly irrelevant to this thread.
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Yes, “we” (the Overclass) have to do “something” (grab everything in sight).
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You missed my point.
Gun crime will not go down as a result of “controls” that will lead to less accidents and less suicides. Failing schools will not be fixed by reforms that don’t fix poverty and illiteracy.
Not all “reforms” are bad. There are a lot of strategies that if targeted to the right place do no harm, and strengthen practices. However, these “fixes” are one-size-fits all, and in the worst schools are misaligned with the real problems.
The analogy does not equate gun control to ed reform, it compares the relationship between the problem/solution of two key issues in our culture where leaders manipulate events/situations to put into practice policies that only serve to further a larger agenda.
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your point is wrong. Gun crime has gone down in the past with gun control laws.
Get your facts right.
End of conversation from my end.
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Yes, especially in Chicago. Bye.
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Read my book, “Yes, We Are STUPID in America!”. In Georgia, students are considered proficient in certain subjects by getting less than one-half the answers correct on the CRCT (Georgia’s instrument used to measure AYP). How can that possibly be? Would you go to a doctor that only got one-half of the answers correct on his medical licensing exam? I don’t believe he would be considered proficient. Even at that, Atlanta had to resort to cheating to make AYP. That’s pitiful.
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well, that depends upon how the test is constructed. It is possible that the test is so badly constructed that even good student only get about 1/2 the questions right.
I will note that on the AP US Government & Politics exam, for a number of years it was possible to get a 3 on the 5 point scale that represented a passing grade with less than 50% of the possible raw points.
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If “cheating” includes setting of cut scores… EVERYONE cheats… The establishment of cut scores is much more “art” than “science” and more “political art” than anything else. As I’ve commented before, everyone knows today how the “new improved” tests are going to play out: kids in affluent districts will score high and kids from poor districts will score low. As long as we use standardized tests based on age-based grade levels instead of mastery tests this will be the result. We need to move away from the factory school notion that time is constant and performance is variable.
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except that is NOT how it played out in Virginia when the cut scores were set for the Standards of Learning exam in US History at the High School level. Normally one takes the middle point of the suggestions of the experts of what is appropriate. Virginia set the first cut score HIGHER than ANY of the expert evaluations. End result? Fairfax County, which has a nationally recognized successful school system, had a huge “failure” rate. The following year not so much. When one plays those kinds of games in setting and moving cut scores, when the public – and too often the press – do not understand what is going on, someone can claim “success” for a program when no such success actually exists.
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thenextlevel2000,
I think your analogy is a good one! I caught on right away…in fact I like it!
I guess tchrken is such an expert that that he must pontificate, even when it is not necessary to do so.
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Glad you followed the logic:)
The publicity campaign that has been waged against teachers works in the same way as the campaign against guns (not to start another debate or anything!) but it is similar.
All teachers are bad. All schools are failing. We must move forward, we must fix it all. Sadly, teachers have had their heads down, plowing through, working hard, and now have no one to back them up. That is why reform is taking hold the way it is. Either parents have to change, or students have to begin to fight back because no one is there to defend the teachers!
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the next level2000,
I agree with you on every point.
Unfortunatelyfor us, the education reformers don’t know much about education, and they are making up the “rules” .
When you don’t know anything about the “stuff ” you want to “fix’ , you can’t fix it, but you can create a collossal mess…which is what they have done.
Let’s stick together and keep fighting for the return to sanity and real education “repair.”…we don’t need to be
re-formed.
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Another point to be made as to “who are the cheaters” can be found in Todd Farley’s 2009 book, Making the Grade: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry. Not only do the test scorers juke the scores, but Todd also cites an example (pp. 93-96) of a state D.O.E. rep. coming in and, upon learning that most of the scores on the writing tests are low, tells the supervisors to ‘ “give more threes.” ‘
But–you WILL have to read this book!
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It is a great read!
In some places you will laugh out loud, in others you will really be disgusted that teachers and schools are being being judged by the “data” that is being generated by the testing and “correcting” of these “stadardized” tests.
“Making the Grades” is a revealing title. 🙂
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