Archives for the month of: March, 2014
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Peter Greene: Connecting the Dots Between CCSS and Big Data

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
52

Peter Greene, in a serious vein, explains that the Common Core standards are integrally connected to the collection of data.

They can’t be changed or revised–contrary to the nationally and internationally recognized protocol for setting standards–because their purpose is to tag every student and collect data on their performance.

They cannot be decoupled from testing because the testing is the means by which every student is tagged and his/her data are collected for Pearson and the big data storage warehouse monitored by amazon or the U.S. government.

He writes:

We know from our friends at Knewton what the Grand Design is– a system in which student progress is mapped down to the atomic level. Atomic level (a term that Knewton loves deeply) means test by test, assignment by assignment, sentence by sentence, item by item. We want to enter every single thing a student does into the Big Data Bank.

But that will only work if we’re all using the same set of tags.

We’ve been saying that CCSS are limited because the standards were written around what can be tested. That’s not exactly correct. The standards have been written around what can be tracked.

The standards aren’t just about defining what should be taught. They’re about cataloging what students have done.

Remember when Facebook introduced emoticons. This was not a public service. Facebook wanted to up its data gathering capabilities by tracking the emotional states of users. But if users just defined their own emotions, the data would be too noisy, too hard to crunch. But if the user had to pick from the facebook standard set of user emotions– then facebook would have manageable data.

Ditto for CCSS. If we all just taught to our own local standards, the data noise would be too great. The Data Overlords need us all to be standardized, to be using the same set of tags. That is also why no deviation can be allowed. Okay, we’ll let you have 15% over and above the standards. The system can probably tolerate that much noise. But under no circumstances can you change the standards– because that would be changing the national student data tagging system, and THAT we can’t tolerate.

This is why the “aligning” process inevitably involves all that marking of standards onto everything we do. It’s not instructional. It’s not even about accountability.

It’s about having us sit and tag every instructional thing we do so that student results can be entered and tracked in the Big Data Bank.

And that is why CCSS can never, ever be decoupled from anything. Why would facebook keep a face tagging system and then forbid users to upload photos?

The Test does not exist to prove that we’re following the standards. The standards exist to let us tag the results from the Test. And ultimately, not just the Test, but everything that’s done in a classroom. Standards-ready material is material that has already been bagged and tagged for Data Overlord use.

The end-game is data-tracking, not standards. And that helps to explain why CCSS was written without consultation with educators; without participation by early childhood educators or those knowledgeable about students with disabilities; why there is no appeals process, no means of revision, why they were written so hurriedly in 2009 and pushed into 45 states and D.C. by Race to the Top.

Categories Common Core, Data and Data Mining, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Knewton, Pearson, and Big Data: Here They Come!

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
22

Big data will open the way to the future of education, says
the CEO of Knewton.

 

The company is piloting its products at Arizona
State University. Whatever we used to call education will cease to
exist. Big data will change everything.

 

“The so-called Big Data movement, which has been largely co-opted by the for-profit
education industry, will serve as “a portal to fundamental change
in how education research happens, how learning is measured, and
the way various credentials are measured and integrated into hiring
markets,” says Mitchell Stevens, an associate professor of
education at Stanford University. “Who is at the table making
decisions about these things,” he says, “is also up for grabs.”

 

Want to know the future? Watch Knewton: “Big Data stands to play an
increasingly prominent role in the way college will work in the
future. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University
has been demonstrating the effectiveness of autonomous teaching
software for years. Major educational publishers such as Pearson,
McGraw-Hill, Wiley & Sons and Cengage Learning have long
been transposing their textbook content on to dynamic online
platforms that are equipped to collect data from students that are
interacting with it. Huge infrastructural software vendors such as
Blackboard and Ellucian have invested in analytics tools that aim
to predict student success based on data logged by their client
universities’ enterprise software systems. And the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation has marshaled its outsize influence in
higher education to promote the use of data to measure and improve
student learning outcomes, both online and in traditional
classrooms. “But of all the players looking to ride the data wave
into higher education, Knewton stands out.”

 

Read more:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/25/arizona-st-and-knewtons-grand-experiment-adaptive-learning#ixzz2wkgLQ1ZS
Inside Higher Ed

Categories Data and Data Mining, Higher Education, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology, Computers

Massachusetts Kindergarten Teacher: I Quit

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
48

I am really sorry to have to publish posts like this. I don’t want to see any teacher quit, especially the veteran teachers who are needed to help new teachers learn the ropes. And yet, there is a massive outflow of teaching talent from our public schools, caused by the soul-deadening testing regime that has throttled creativity and independent thought among teachers and students like. The spirit of standardization is alive in the land, and teachers feel they are under assault if they do not conform and comply. Some just can’t do it. I urge them to stay and fight, for the sake of the children, but for many teachers the conditions have become intolerable. I know that the modal year of teaching experience has dropped from 15 in 1988 to only one or two today; that is a frightening statistic. I have been in schools where no one had more than five or six years of experience. That is awful. Some education schools report a dramatic decline in enrollments. At some point, we must attribute the deliberate attacks on the teaching profession to the so-called reform movement that holds teachers “accountable” for everything wrong in the lives of children. Researchers state without question, even conservative researchers like Eric Hanushek, that the influence of family far exceeds that of the teacher, yet reformers have turned teachers into their targets while doing nothing to improve the lives of children or families.

This article was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog “The Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post. As Strauss writes, “Susan Sluyter is a veteran teacher of young children in the Cambridge Public Schools who has been connected to the district for nearly 20 years and teaching for more than 25 years. Last month she sent a resignation letter ( “with deep love and a broken heart”) explaining that she could no longer align her understanding of how young children learn best in safe, developmentally appropriate environments with the testing and data collection mandates imposed on teachers today.”

Read Sluyter’s entire letter. It begins like this:

When I first began teaching more than 25 years ago, hands-on exploration, investigation, joy and love of learning characterized the early childhood classroom.  I’d describe our current period as a time of testing, data collection, competition and punishment. One would be hard put these days to find joy present in classrooms.

I think it started with No Child Left Behind years ago.  Over the years I’ve seen this climate of data fascination seep into our schools and slowly change the ability for educators to teach creatively and respond to children’s social and emotional needs.  But this was happening in the upper grades mostly.  Then it came to kindergarten and PreK, beginning a number of years ago with a literacy initiative that would have had us spending the better part of each day teaching literacy skills through various prescribed techniques.  ”What about math, science, creative expression and play?” we asked.  The kindergarten teachers fought back and kept this push for an overload of literacy instruction at bay for a number of years.

Next came additional mandated assessments.  Four and five year olds are screened regularly each year for glaring gaps in their development that would warrant a closer look and securing additional supports (such as O.T, P.T, and Speech Therapy) quickly.   Teachers were already assessing each child three times a year to understand their individual literacy development and growth.  A few years ago, we were instructed to add periodic math assessments after each unit of study in math.  Then last year we were told to include an additional math assessment on all Kindergarten students (which takes teachers out of the classroom with individual child testing, and intrudes on classroom teaching time.)

Every year, the mandates grew more academic and less child-friendly. The demand for standards and assessments grew more insistent, more detailed, more onerous:

There is a national push, related to the push for increased academics in Early Childhood classrooms, to cut play out of the kindergarten classroom.  Many kindergartens across the country no longer have sand tables, block areas, drama areas and arts and crafts centers.  This is a deeply ill-informed movement, as all early childhood experts continuously report that 4, 5 and 6 year olds learn largely through play.  Play is essential to healthy development and deep foundational learning at the kindergarten level.  We kindergarten teachers in Cambridge have found ourselves fighting to keep play alive in the kindergarten classroom.

Last year we heard that all kindergarten teachers across the state of Massachusetts were to adopt one of a couple of in-depth comprehensive assessments to perform with each kindergarten child three times a year.  This requires much training and an enormous amount of a teacher’s time to carry out for each child.  Cambridge adopted the Work Sampling System, which is arguably a fine tool for assessment, but it requires a teacher to leave the classroom and focus on assessment even more, and is in addition to other assessments already being done.  The negative impact of this extensive and detailed assessment system is that teachers are forced to learn yet another new and complicated tool, and are required to spend significantly less time in the classroom during the three assessment periods, as they assess, document evidence to back up their observations, and report on each child.  And it distracts teachers yet again from their teaching focus, fracturing their concentration on teaching goals, projects, units of study, and the flow of their classroom curriculum.

Conditions for teaching kindergarten children grew increasingly oppressive. Finally, on February 12, Susan Sluyter submitted her resignation letter. She concluded it in this way:

I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same:  to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom.  I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity.  I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away.  I felt anger rise inside me.  I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly.  I did not feel I was leaving my job.  I felt then and feel now that my job left me.

It is with deep love and a broken heart that I write this letter.

The so-called reform movement is destroying the lives of teachers and hurting children. It must be stopped. Soon, our classrooms will be filled with temps who come to teach for a few years, knowing only one thing: test scores matter most. None of the reformers would do this to their own children. Why do we let them do it to Other People’s Children–and to ours? This madness must end.

 

 

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Your Child Is Now a Data Point. Thanks, Pearson and Arne!

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
28

If you have been wondering why data mining matters so much,
you will want to see this video.

Please note that the U.S. Department of
Education’s logo is on this video.

In it, an entrepreneur named Jose Ferreira, CEO of Knewton, shares his vision for a future in
which education of every individual child is completely determined
by data. Education today happens to be the most “data-mineable
industry in the world,” he says.

His firm and Pearson can map out whatever your child knows and doesn’t know, design lessons, and do
whatever is necessary to “teach” the concepts needed. There is
nothing about your child that they don’t know, and they will know
more about him or her next year than they do this year. If this is
the future, then teachers will be mere technicians, if they are
needed at all. What do you think?

Peter Greene saw the video and
thought it was scary. He wrote: “Knewton will generate this giant
data picture. Ferreira says presents this the same way you’d say,
“Once we get milk and bread at the store,” when I suspect it’s
really more on the order of “Once we cure cancer by using our
anti-gravity skateboards,” but never mind. Once the data maps are
up and running, Knewton will start operating like a giant
educational match.com, connecting Pat with a perfect educational
match so that Pat’s teacher in Iowa can use the technique that some
other teacher used with some other kid in Minnesota. Because
students are just data-generating widgets. “Ferreira is also
impressed that the data was able to tell him that some students in
a class are slow and struggling, while another student could take
the final on Day 14 and get an A, and for the five billionth time I
want to ask this Purveyor of Educational Revolution, “Just how
stupid do you think teachers are?? Do you think we are actually
incapable of figuring those sorts of things out on our
own?””

Categories Data and Data Mining, Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Teacher: I Am One of the the Worst Teachers in My State

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
21

This teacher thought she was doing a swell job. But then
the
ratings came out and she discovered she is the worst
teacher in the state! In the past, she has won many
awards, and she loves teaching. In addition: I initiated
and continue to run the chess and drama clubs with no
remuneration. I do get a small stipend for being the
academic games coordinator, running the Mathletes team and spelling
bee for the school, along with keeping the staff and students
informed of enrichment opportunities like academic
competitions. I organize the field trips for my grade
level and a trip for 4th and
5th graders to spend three days at an
oceanographic institute in the Florida Keys.

My own 5th grade
gifted students will end this year with a full understanding of
three Shakespearean plays, as class sets of these and other texts
were secured through my Donors Choose
requests. Saturday, I’ll be the designated
representative picking up free materials for my
school. I write the full year’s lesson plans over the
summer (then tweaking as I go).
She is the victim of the ceiling
effect. Her students got such high scores last year that they can’t
get higher scores this year.
She explains:
Last year, many of my students had had the
highest scores on the state tests possible the year prior—a 5 out
of 5. That’s how they get in to my class of gifted and
high achieving students. Except, last year, they
raised the bar so that the same
5th graders who scored 5s in
4th grade were much less likely to earn
5s in math and reading in
5th grade. Some still DID
score 5s in math AND reading, yet were still deemed not to have
made sufficient progress because they did not score as high within
the 5 category as they had the year before.

It’s like expecting the members of an Olympic
pole vaulting team to all individually earn gold medals every time
the Olympics come around, regardless of any other factors affecting
their lives, with the bar raised another five inches each go
around. In a state where 40% of students pass the
5th grade science test, 100% of my
students passed; but no one (at the state level) cares about
science scores.
Therefore, I suck.
How nutty is this? Why does the
U.S. Department of Education insist that states must adopt flawed
measures? Does anyone at the U.S. Department of Education consider
the consequences of their policies? Do they know anything about
research or evidence? Do they care how many people lives or
reputations they carelessly ruin with their dumb ideas?
Just wondering.
Categories Education Reform, Florida, Research, Teacher Evaluations, U.S. Department of Education

Yong Zhao Explains What Is Wrong with PISA

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
19

Yong Zhao posted the first of five blogs about the faulty claims of PISA, the international test that false reformers love to cite as evidence that our schools are failing and our kids don’t work hard enough. The five blog posts are drawn from Zhao’s much awaited new book. If you have not read his other books, order them now. Catching Up or Leading the Way and World Class Learners. You will enjoy them.

Zhao calls PISA “one of the most destructive forces in education today. It creates illusory models of excellence, romanticizes misery, glorifies educational authoritarianism, and most serious, directs the world’s attention to the past instead of pointing to the future. In the coming weeks, I will publish five blog posts detailing each of my “charges,” adapted from parts of my book “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education.”

In this post, Zhao demonstrates one of the misleading claims made by Andreas Schleicher, who runs PISA.

Zhao writes:

“Andreas Schleicher has on many occasions promoted the idea that Chinese students take responsibilities for their own learning, while in “many countries, students were quick to blame everyone but themselves.” France is his prime example: “More than three-quarters of the students in France … said the course material was simply too hard, two-thirds said the teacher did not get students interested in the material, and half said their teacher did not explain the concepts well or they were just unlucky.” Students in Shanghai felt just the opposite, believing that “they will succeed if they try hard and they trust their teachers to help them succeed.” Schleicher maintains that this difference in attitude contributed to the gap between Shanghai, ranked first, and France, ranked 25th.”

Zhao shows by citing PISA rankings that this claim by Schleicher does not withstand scrutiny. It is false.

He writes:

“What’s intriguing is that the countries whose students are least likely to blame their teachers all have a more authoritarian cultural tradition than the countries whose students are most likely to blame their teachers. On the first list, Singapore, Korea, Chinese Taipei, Shanghai-China, Japan, and Viet Nam share the Confucian cultural tradition. And although Japan and Korea are now considered full democracies, the rest of the countries on the list are not[3]. In contrast, the list of countries with the highest percentage of students blaming their teachers for their failures ranked much higher in the democracy index. Norway ranked first; Sweden ranked second, and Switzerland was number seven. With the single exception of Italy, all 10 countries where students were most likely to blame their teachers ranked above 30 on the Democracy Index (and Italy ranked 32nd).

“One conclusion to draw from this analysis: students in more authoritarian education systems are more likely to blame themselves and less likely to question the authority—the teacher—than students in more democratic educational systems. An authoritarian educational system demands obedience and does not tolerate questioning of authority. Just like authoritarian parents [2], authoritarian education systems have externally defined high expectations that are not necessarily accepted by students intrinsically but require mandatory conformity through rigid rules and sever punishment for noncompliance. More important, they work very hard to convince children to blame themselves for failing to meet the expectations. As a result, they produce students with low confidence and low self-esteem.

“On the PISA survey of students’ self-concept in math, students in Japan, Chinese Taipei, Korea, Viet Nam, Macao-China, Hong Kong-China, and Shanghai-China had the lowest self-concepts in the world, despite their high PISA math scores[4]. A high proportion of students in these educational systems worried that they “will get poor grades in mathematics.” More than 70% of students in Korea, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Viet Nam, Shanghai-China, and Hong Kong-China—in contrast to less than 50% in Austria, United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands—“agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they worry about getting poor grades in math[5].”

And he concludes:

“In other words, what Schleicher has been praising as Shanghai’s secret to educational excellence is simply the outcome of an authoritarian education.

“As discussed previously, Chinese education has been notoriously authoritarian for thousands of years. In an authoritarian system, the ruler and the ruling class (previously the emperors; today, the government) have much to gain when people believe it is their own effort, and nothing more, that makes them successful. No difference in innate abilities or social circumstances matters as long as they work hard. If they cannot succeed, they only have themselves to blame. This is an excellent and convenient way for the authorities to deny any responsibility for social equity and justice, and to avoid accommodating differently talented people. It is a great ploy that helped the emperors convince people to accept the inequalities they were born into and obey the rules. It was also designed to give people a sense of hope, no matter how slim, that they can change their own fate by being indoctrinated through the exams.”

Our policymakers wish our students and teachers would think, act, study, and behave like their counterparts in Singapore and Korea. But first they will have to change America’s irreverent, anti-authoritarian culture. Good luck with that!

Comedy Central, are you listening?

Categories International, Testing

Sahlberg: The Only Standardized Test that Finnish Students Take

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
69

Finnish students almost never take a standardized test. They take tests written by their teachers.

There is one test, however, that students take at the end of high school. It is the same for all students but the quality of the questions is far more complex and interesting than the questions found on the SAT or the ACT.

Here Pasi Sahlberg explains the kinds of questions that Finnish students are expected to answer.

The structure of the exams sounds amazingly like the old essay-style “College Board examinations” that were offered from 1901-1941, when they were replaced by the SAT for the sake of efficiency and speed (the decision to make the switch was made on Pearl Harbor Day). The Finnish exams are written and scored by teachers and scholars, not computers.

There are no bias and sensitivity guidelines to screen out controversial topics. Indeed, the tests include controversial topics.

Here is a typical question:

“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted that a socialist revolution would first happen in countries like Great Britain. What made Marx and Engels claim that and why did a socialist revolution happen in Russia?”

Students don’t pick a box. It is not a multiple-choice question. Students have to know what they are writing about. No guessing. No SAT, no ACT, no Pearson. .

Categories International, Testing

Peter Greene Shows How to Measure Grit

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
55

There has been much discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the importance of “grit.” Some of this started with the publication of Paul Tough’s book “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiousity, and the Hidden Power of Character,” which argued that those characteristics are crucial to succeeding in adverse circumstances and that they can be taught. It continued with the award of a MacArthur to Angela Duckworth, who studies grit, and in recent days it heated up when Lauren Anderson insisted that the whole idea of “grit” was to shift responsibility to children for their terrible life circumstances instead of talking about structural inequality in society.

 

Now, I confess, there is a part of me that finds this all passing strange. Having grown up in a different era, I recall that in school we were regularly bombarded with stories about heroism, about the people who showed grace under fire, about the soldiers who threw themselves on a live grenade to save their buddies, about the importance of character. History was told as a tale of people with grit and character. And, of course, all the movies from Hollywood were morality tales of grit and character. The good guys–the ones with grit–always won, or at least had a heroic death. So, the sudden interest in grit and character seems a bit weird. Like, what else is new?

 

What is new is the idea that we might have classes in grit. When I hear “grit,” I think “grits.” I like grits. Or I think about sandpaper. Or the grit that gets into the gears so they don’t work. But let’s be serious. When I was in D.C. a few weeks ago, someone told me he had gone to a high-level meeting between the White House and the U.S. Department of Education to determine whether there was a metric for “grit.” He asked me–this at a public meeting at the AFT headquarters, where I was discussing my latest book–what I thought about the idea of measuring grit. It was the end of a long day, I was tired, and I didn’t choose my words carefully. I said, “It makes me want to throw up.” I mean, really, will we ever have people at the Department of Education who know or care about education, you know, like the arts and philosophy and history and civics and loving what you read and what you do, not just measuring stuff?

 

I am happy to say that Peter Greene, who is both a high school teacher and a part-time columnist for his local newspaper in Pennsylvania, has developed a way to measure grit. Yes, he has invented the Institute of Grittology, where “we’re committed to helping monetize the work of our research partners, The Research Institute for the Study of Obvious Conclusions (“Working hard to recycle conventional wisdom as proprietary programing”).”

 

Yes, there are ways to measure grit, Greene says, and the good news is that it can be done with multiple-choice questions. Read on.

Categories Humor

Anthony Cody on the Common Core: Are They “Standards”?

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
35

Anthony Cody read my post this morning about why the Common Core standards fail to meet the most minimal procedural requirements for standard-setting–the requirements laid out in detail by the American National Standards Institute–and concludes that Common Core cannot be considered standards. They were written in secret. There was no transparency or openness in the process.

 

Another reader asked me, “so who is this ANSI?” As I explained in my original post, ANSI was established over 90 years ago by engineers and other professionals to begin the process of developing national standards and is now the accepted authority in many fields, including government agencies.

 

ANSI has no power to control or direct standard-setting. It is the organization that lays out the due process requirements for setting standards that have credibility and legitimacy. The Common Core effort violated almost all of these procedural requirements.

 

Anthony Cody documents the secretiveness of the process. That secretiveness and lack of transparency bother me, but I am equally disturbed that the Common Core does not have any means of appeal or revision. As the ANSI process explains, every set of genuine standards must have a process by which aggrieved parties may make their case and be heard, and by which those in charge may hear their grievances and make adjustments when necessary. In the case of the Common Core, there is no such process, nor is there anyone  or any organization to appeal to. We are expected to believe that the standards were written in stone and may never be changed.

 

So, I agree with Anthony. The absence of due process, the absence of transparency, the absence of participation by knowledgeable parties, the absence of educators with classroom experience and experience with young children and children with disabilities, the absence of any possibility for revision, invalidates the Common Core.

 

If you want to use them, go right ahead and use them. Consider them GUIDELINES. They are not standards.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

Comment: The Common Core “Standards” Are Not Standards

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
15

I cross-posted my article about “The Fatal Flaw of the Common Core Standards” at Huffington Post and on Valerie Strauss’ The Answer Sheet, to reach the broadest possible audience.

This comment appears on Huffington Post:

  • 3
749 Fans·Jonah and Ahab had different perspectives
Thank you Diane Ravitch for bringing up a point which has never been mentioned previously.I’ve worked in international standards organizations representing various corporate and government interests in both the ITU-T and ISO and the points you raise are spot on. The Common Core “Standards” can be no such thing as they don’t even represent ‘defacto’ standards, let alone mutually agreed upon by all stake holders involved.Beyond their poor content, i.e. standards in math setting requirements 2 years behind the rest of the world, the fact that there is no process to amend them speaks worlds as to their lack of being a “standard”.

Standards are revised, updated and sometimes even redacted as new and better standards become available but with Common Core, they are essentially carved in stone as there is no provisions allowing for or supporting their change.

24 MAR 9:28 AM
You might wonder why I did not send that very important article about the Common Core to the New York Times. It is because the New York Times rejected my last submission with no explanation and continues to post editorials and articles endorsing the Common Core.  I have decided not to waste my time trying to please the editors of the New York Times’ Op-ed page. They accept what they want, and they don’t accept what I write. The last time I published there was in 2011. I don’t expect ever to publish there again, so I use the power of social media to bypass their editorial screen.
Categories Common Core, Education Reform
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