Archives for the month of: August, 2013
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The Ethics of Loss Aversion

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
20

I recently received an email from a parent in North Carolina who told me that the legislators there want to adopt merit pay for teachers. They are very impressed with the Chetty-Rockoff-Friedman study that claimed that a great teacher could have lifelong effects on students, like raising their lifetime earnings by about $500 a year. And they are impressed by the Roland Fryer study claiming that teachers get higher test scores from their students if the technique called “loss aversion” is applied to them.

For starters, the Chetty-Rockoff-Friedman study was not a study of merit pay. It was an analysis of school records from the 1990s in a big city where there was no merit pay. The best conclusion one can draw is that some teachers are more effective than others, but there is no clear indication in their work about how to identify them or whether you can get more of them by offering bonuses.

The Fryer study is, in my view, ethically problematic. Fryer, be it noted, is an economist who is obsessed with using money as a lever to change behavior. A few years ago, he created a plan to pay students if they got higher grades or test scores, but concluded that it didn’t work.

Fryer is at Harvard, where his work is subsidized by the Broad Foundation.

The “loss aversion” theory goes like this: Instead of paying teachers a bonus if their students get higher scores (which has consistently failed for nearly a century), offer them a bonus upfront, then take it away if the scores don’t go up. The theory is that the teachers won’t want to lose the money they were already paid.

Bruce Baker was less than impressed with this study. See here and here.

Suppose we took loss aversion seriously?

What if we said to teachers, raise test scores or we cut off a finger. Every year the scores don’t go up, we cut off another finger.

That would surely produce test score gains.

What if we said to economists, make accurate predictions about the economy or we confiscate your computer.

What if we said to lawyers, if you lose any cases, we take away your license.

You can see the possibilities.

We might get test scores gains by threatening to take away something that mattered, but wouldn’t that make teaching less attractive as a profession or even a job?

Categories Accountability, Merit pay, North Carolina

Are Children Products?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
10

I wrote a post last night called “When Competition Is Pointless.” The very idea that a federal education program would be called “Race to the Top” is indicative of a religious belief that competition will provide a better education, even if it can (by definition) NOT produce equality of educational opportunity. We might well wonder when our federal goal changed from equality of opportunity to a “race to the top.” Every race has winners and losers. Life has winners and losers. How did it become the job of the U.S. Department of Education to side with the “race,” rather than the effort to level the playing field for all?

This reader responded to my post about competition, expressing exasperation about our culture’s need to rank and rate and grade and find winners and losers:

 

“We used to teach children skills that would provide them with abilities to produce….to make products, to be productive. It now seems that we are teaching children to BE the product. All the testing and measuring and standardizing of the child seems to indicate that we see children as our produce….not as the next generation of producers. Its as if they are a crop to be consumed rather than a new generation of producers. Our mentality of competition shows in the popular programs of the day…Survivor, The Great American Race, American Idol, etc. The attitude that there can only be a select winner and there is only enough good stuff available for the top achiever is drowning us. The culture of competition is so much part of our lives we don’t even realize its taken over. Its most inappropriate in our schools at this time but it is a malaise throughout our culture. The attitude that there are only a few winners and all the rest are losers and you better know which you are at all times it going to take us down. Its like an ever growing barnacle that will sink us. Judging the value of everything (by rigid, narrow standards) has become our national pastime. Of course children are being abused by this practice. We can’t allow our leaders to continue this madness. Thank you for being a voice for the generation of children who are being cheated by this mentality.”

Categories Education Reform

What if the International Tests Are Wrong?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
21

The corporate reform assault on American public education rests in large part on the international test called PISA (Programme in International Student Assessment), where US students rank well behind other nations and have only middling performance. Of course, the critics who brandish these mediocre scores never admit that they are heavily influenced by the unusually high proportion of students living in poverty, and that American students in low-poverty schools score as well or better than the highest performing nations. To do so would be an admission that poverty matters, and they reject that idea.

But what if the PISA tests are fundamentally flawed? So argues testing experts in this article in the (UK) TES.

It turns out on examination that the results vary widely from one administration of the test to another. Students in different countries do not answer the same questions. And there are serious technical issues that experts debate.

The article asks:

“But what if there are “serious problems” with the Pisa data? What if the statistical techniques used to compile it are “utterly wrong” and based on a “profound conceptual error”? Suppose the whole idea of being able to accurately rank such diverse education systems is “meaningless”, “madness”?

“What if you learned that Pisa’s comparisons are not based on a common test, but on different students answering different questions? And what if switching these questions around leads to huge variations in the all- important Pisa rankings, with the UK finishing anywhere between 14th and 30th and Denmark between fifth and 37th? What if these rankings – that so many reputations and billions of pounds depend on, that have so much impact on students and teachers around the world – are in fact “useless”?

“This is the worrying reality of Pisa, according to several academics who are independently reaching some damning conclusions about the world’s favourite education league tables. As far as they are concerned, the emperor has no clothes.”

The article cites the concerns of many testing experts:

“Professor Svend Kreiner of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, has looked at the reading results for 2006 in detail and notes that another 40 per cent of participating students were tested on just 14 of the 28 reading questions used in the assessment. So only approximately 10 per cent of the students who took part in Pisa were tested on all 28 reading questions.

“This in itself is ridiculous,” Kreiner tells TES. “Most people don’t know that half of the students taking part in Pisa (2006) do not respond to any reading item at all. Despite that, Pisa assigns reading scores to these children.”

“People may also be unaware that the variation in questions isn’t merely between students within the same country. There is also between-country variation.

“For example, eight of the 28 reading questions used in Pisa 2006 were deleted from the final analysis in some countries. The OECD says that this was because they were considered to be “dodgy” and “had poor psychometric properties in a particular country”. However, in other countries the data from these questions did contribute to their Pisa scores.

“In short, the test questions used vary between students and between countries participating in exactly the same Pisa assessment.”

Professor Kreiner says the methodology renders the results “meaningless.”

“The Rasch model is at the heart of some of the strongest criticisms being made of Pisa. It is also the black box within Pisa’s black box: exactly how the model works is something that few people fully understand.

“But Kreiner does. He was a student of Georg Rasch, the Danish statistician who gave his name to the model, and has personally worked with it for 40 years. “I know that model well,” Kreiner tells TES. “I know exactly what goes on there.” And that is why he is worried about Pisa.

“He says that for the Rasch model to work for Pisa, all the questions used in the study would have to function in exactly the same way – be equally difficult – in all participating countries. According to Kreiner, if the questions have “different degrees of difficulty in different countries” – if, in technical terms, there is differential item functioning (DIF) – Rasch should not be used.

“That was the first thing that I looked for, and I found extremely strong evidence of DIF,” he says. “That means that (Pisa) comparisons between countries are meaningless.”

Please, someone, anyone, send this article to Secretary Arne Duncan; to President Obama; to Bill Gates; and to all the other “reformers” who want to destroy public education based on flawed and meaningless international test scores.

Categories International, Testing

Tennessee State Board Changes Licensing Rules on a Conference Call

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
11

As if to demonstrate their utter contempt for teachers, the Tennessee State Board of Education changed the licensure rules on a telephone conference call that was open to the public.

The vote was 6-3. Some board members said the change should be delayed because the changes were not well understood by the board.

Not all the board members agreed with voting to adopt a plan that had elements that concerned them, even with the delayed implementation.

Dr. Jean Anne Rogers of Murfreesboro suggested voting the proposal down and studying the issues “piece by piece” rather than implementing something that board members did not fully understand.

“I just have such serious concerns with a couple of the issues,” she said.

A dog was heard barking in the background of the call, although maybe it was a teacher howling in despair about the board’s unending attacks on teachers.

As a result of the changes approved by telephone meeting, teachers’ licenses will be tied to student test scores.

This is a strategy that has not produced better education anywhere but is guaranteed to produce teaching to the test and a narrowing of the curriculum.

It is not clear what will happen to the licenses of teachers and other staff who do not teach tested subjects.

Perhaps Tennessee will invest tens of millions to test everything.

We know who benefits. Not teachers or students. Testing corporations.

The changes in licensing rules was warmly endorsed by the Wall Street hedge fund managers’ group Democrats for Education Reform. Their members take home millions of dollars in income every year, but they don’t see why teachers need to earn more than $40,000 a year unless they raise test scores. Teachers in Tennessee earn less than the secretaries of most board members of DFER.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Democrats for Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

A Hero Educator Who Heads a Private School in Manhattan

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
24

What does it take to be a hero educator? It takes brains, courage, integrity, and a deep understanding of education and children.

Steve Nelson, headmaster of the Calhoun School in Manhattan, is a hero educator because he has all these qualities. He wrote a brilliant article about why the Common Core won’t work.

He knows that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, now heads the College Board. He knows that Coleman wants to align the SAT to the Common Core, so no one can escape his handiwork, not even students in prestigious private schools.

Here is a sample of Nelson’s article.

“Actual children, as opposed to the abstraction of children as seen in policy debate, are not “standard.” Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of child development knows that children learn in different ways and different times. Some children “read” (meaning a very limited ability to recognize symbols) at age 3 or 4. I have known many students who did not read well until 8, 9 or, rarely, later. The potential (or ultimate achievement levels) of these children does not correlate with the date of reading onset.

“It is rather like walking. Children who walk at 9 months do not become better runners than children who walk at 15 months. “Standardizing” the expectation of reading, and setting curricula and tests around this expectation, is like expecting a child to walk on her first birthday. If she doesn’t, shall we get our national knickers in a knot, develop a set of walking tests, prescribe walking remediation, and, perhaps inadvertently, make her feel desperately inadequate? In the current climate, Pearson is ready to design walking curriculum and its companion tests. The Gates and Broad Foundations will create complementary instructional videos.”

And he also writes:

“If policy makers and test writers had even rudimentary knowledge of rich individual differences, they would know that any standard test is unfair and, ultimately, useless. Just as children learn in very different ways, they express mastery in many different ways. The Common Core tests (and I’ve suffered the experience of wading through the many samples provided in the media) assume that all its takers process information in the same way, have the identical mix of cognitive and sensory abilities, and can, therefore, “compete” on level ground. This is nonsensical and damaging. Some of the most brilliant people I know would grind to a suffocating halt after trying to parse the arcane nonsense in a small handful of these questions. Even the math questions assume a homogeneous ability to understand the questions and a precisely common capacity for reasoning and concluding.

“I could go on: Stress inhibits learning, so we design stressful expectations; dopamine (from pleasurable activities) enhances learning, so we remove joy from schools; homework has very limited usefulness with negative returns after an hour or so (for elementary age kids), so we demand more hours of work; the importance of exercise in brain development is inarguable, so we eliminate recess and gym; the arts are central to human understanding, but we don’t have time.

“I have been accused of complaining but not offering solutions, so here’s a solution: Properly fund schools and allow good teachers to select the materials and pedagogy that serve the actual students in their care. The rest will take care of itself.

“And we can take the billions we’re wasting on NCLB, RTTT, Common Core and other nonsense and spend it to improve the lives of the shameful number of children who live in poverty in the “richest nation on Earth.”

Steve Nelson, welcome to the honor roll as a hero of American education.

Please someone, anyone: send this article to Bill Keller and Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

Categories Arts Education, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Students, Testing

Philadelphia: Shame on Governor Corbett!

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
15

The public schools of Philadelphia are being slowly, surely strangled by Governor Tom Corbett and the Legislature of Pennsylvania.

Or, maybe, not so slowly.

The state has a constitutional responsibility to maintain a public school system in every district but the state leaders don’t believe in what the state constitution says.

Let it not be forgotten that the state has been in charge of the public schools of Philadelphia since 2001. Along the way, Paul Vallas was superintendent and tried the nation’s most sweeping privatization plan; it failed.

And now the governor has decided to let the district die.

Aaron Kase, writing in Salon, asks:

Want to see a public school system in its death throes? Look no further than Philadelphia. There, the school district is facing end times, with teachers, parents and students staring into the abyss created by a state intent on destroying public education.

On Thursday the city of Philadelphia announced that it would be borrowing $50 million to give the district, just so it can open schools as planned on Sept. 9, after Superintendent William Hite threatened to keep the doors closed without a cash infusion. The schools may open without counselors, administrative staff, noon aids, nurses, librarians or even pens and paper, but hey, kids will have a place to go and sit.

The $50 million fix is just the latest band-aid for a district that is beginning to resemble a rotting bike tube, covered in old patches applied to keep it functioning just a little while longer. At some point, the entire system fails.

Things have gotten so bad that at least one school has asked parents to chip in $613 per student just so they can open with adequate services, which, if it becomes the norm, effectively defeats the purpose of equitable public education, and is entirely unreasonable to expect from the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

The needs of children are secondary, however, to a right-wing governor in Tom Corbett who remains fixated on breaking the district in order to crush the teachers union and divert money to unproven experiments like vouchers and privately run charters. If the city’s children are left uneducated and impoverished among the smoldering wreckage of a broken school system, so be it.

To be clear, the schools are in crisis because the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania refuses to fund them adequately. The state Constitution mandates that the Legislature “provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education,” but that language appears to be considered some kind of sick joke at the state capital in Harrisburg.

What is happening is outrageous.

Where is President Obama? Why hasn’t he spoken out?

Where is Secretary Arne Duncan?

Why is the federal government standing by in silence as the children of one of the nation’s premier cities are deprived of the education they need?

Oh, wait, they will get the Common Core!

Categories Philadelphia, Poverty, Privatization, Support for public schools

Holding Kevin Huffman Accountable

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
15

EduShyster here describes Kevin
Huffman’s relentless campaign to demoralize Tennessee
teachers and make Tenessee the worst state to be a teacher. She
suggests that the time is soon coming when Huffman will be held
accountable. Not by the state board, which rubber stamps his bad
ideas even when they aren’t informed of the details. No, he will
face the accountability of angry parents, teachers, and other
citizens who have grown tired of his destructive tactics. That day
will come, rest assured. Even his membership in Jeb Bush’s Chiefs
for Change won’t save him from the wrath of
Tennessee’s Angry Moms</a, who created their own Facebook
page.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Chiefs for Change, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee, Testing

A Passionate Plea from a Veteran Teacher in Tennessee

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
11

This is a great letter from a teacher to the state board of education on Tennessee:

“Dr. Nixon,

Speaking from 32 years of experience in education–both public and private–I beg you, implore you–yes, perhaps even grovel to you–to do your best to put to rest the issue of tying license renewal to student test scores. As I have never contacted the State Board of Education since I moved to Tennessee in 1988, I hope you will give me the courtesy of three minutes to hear me out.

“I have no problem with Common Core. I have no problem with the TEAM evaluation tool. I have no problem with eliminating poor teachers. I do, however, have a problem with the too rapid implementation of these initiatives. Common Core implementation should take three to five years. (I read the manual.) Tennessee has attempted to do it in 18 months. TEAM is an excellent tool when used for the purpose that it was developed, the growth of teachers, but not when it is used as a stick to turn observations into Whack-a-Mole to see how many rubrics a teacher can hit in order to get a score to keep a job.

This final move to tie the ability to continue in one’s profession to a growth outcome based on a matrix that no one can adequately explain smacks of yet another attempt to paint teachers as the problem with education. In the dark of the confessional, both you and I know that this is egregiously untrue. The demoralizing effect this potential act can have on our teachers is one growth measure I feel I can adequately explain. In recent weeks I have listened to gifted teachers—yes, GIFTED teachers–who are talking of exiting the profession early. To quote one teacher, “I’m just so tired. If they would just leave me alone and let me teach the kids, I can do that.” This is a math teacher, an area Tennessee certainly cannot afford to drive away.

“I am not sure when it became a badge of shame to be a “professional educator.” Based on what we have seen in education in Tennessee in the last three years, I seriously look for the eradication of of colleges of education at our universities. We could certainly save money as a state, and if the present leadership in the Department of Education is any indication, a teaching degree is not necessary to teach; anyone can do it. Following this train of thought, I’ve been to a doctor’s office. I know what happens in a doctor’s office. I think I’ll practice medicine for a couple of years when I retire. Maybe I’ll even teach in a medical school and train doctors.

“As a former English teacher, a Tennessee citizen, a voter, a taxpayer, and one who is passionate about seeing children have opportunities to improve their lives through education, I pray fervently that you and the entire Board will bring this runaway train to a screeching halt and vote down this measure.

“Sincerely,

“[A Tennessee educator]”

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

When Competition Is Pointless

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
103

The other day, I was involved in an extended online discussion about proficiency and accountability with about 50 people, mostly inside the Beltway. These are big names, people who make decisions that control your child’s life in school. I got more and more exasperated as the various think tank experts waxed on about how and why parents NEED to know how their child compares to children of the same age in other states and other nations. I couldn’t restrain myself. I let fly that I never wanted to know this as a mother and I don’t want to know it about my grandchildren now. What I want to know is whether they are growing up to be healthy, to be thoughtful, to care about others, to shoulder responsibility, to think for themselves, to be good people. The last thing that interests me is whether their test scores are better or worse than children elsewhere.

This reader left a similar comment. Let’s keep speaking up for decency and character, not pointless competition on tests of dubious value. Let’s all think for ourselves.

This reader wrote:

“Here’s my take on school: I don’t care how my kid compares, I care that he grows up to be a decent happy person. It doesn’t matter if he can compete with China, it matters that he’s not a miserable wretch like most of us who grew up in this ugly system.

“Seriously, we have a our priorities all wrong. It’s not about being the best, it’s not about “success”, it’s about having a life full of love and a modicum of joy. Everyone is so busy trying to be a winner that we’re all losing.”

Categories Testing

Please Help the Brilliant Paul Krugman Understand the Problems with Common Core

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
60

Paul Krugman posted this commentary about the Common Core standards. Clearly he has never read them and has no idea about the legitimate concerns that teachers and principals have. Instead, he echoes the claim by Times’ writer Bill Keller that the opponents are nearly all rightwing extremists. I just left a short comment, which has not been moderated and approved yet. I expressed my concern about the lack of field testing and the now evident increases in achievement gaps. Raising the bar does not help kids clear it; it just increases the numbers who can’t clear it. You should add yours.

Categories Common Core
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