Archives for the month of: July, 2014
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How Statistics Can Be Manipulated Any Which Way

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2014 //
43

Mr. Anonymous, an education policy analyst who is working towards his doctorate, wrote the following cautionary story about the use and misuse of statistics for political purposes. He requires anonymity for the usual reasons, mostly fear of retaliation for speaking up.

He writes:

The Common Core and Departments of Education: Lies, Darn Lies, Statistics and Education Statistics

Numbers have taken center stage in the discussion of education policy in the United States. Test score metrics have become a particularly critical set of numbers. They are seen as objective measuring devices, comparable across years, that provide a reliable evaluation of how students, teachers, schools, districts, and the United States as whole are doing. But are they really objective?
The push for implementation of Common Core exams has caught the attention of the public. In New York State, as in many other states across the nation, questions have been raised about the motivations of those pushing for the roll-out of these exams and their use in high-stakes evaluations. As we will see below such concerns are definitely legitimate given the history of the New York State Department of Education and the Board of Regents in setting cut-scores and changing exams in ways that serve political and other ends.

Let’s start with Biology, a standard course that almost every high school freshman takes. Remember dissecting that frog? In 2001 the New York State Department of Education changed the Biology Regents to a re-named “Living Environment.” A rather remarkable aspect of the change was the dramatic lowering of the passing score. In the Biology exam a student needed at least 59 points (out of a total of 85 possible points) to earn a passing grade of 65. On the new Living Environment Regents students need only 40 points (out of a total of 85 possible points) to earn a passing grade of 65. In some years (e.g. 2004) a student needed only 38 out of 85 points to earn a passing grade of 65.

The story repeats itself in mathematics. Until 2002 the New York State Department of Education required students to take a “Sequential Mathematics I” exam. That test had a total point value of 100 points. The conversion was simple enough, each point was equal to one point and a student needed 65 points to pass. Then, in 2002, the math exam was switched to a “Mathematics A” exam.

On this test students needed to score 35 out of a possible 84 points to earn a 65 and pass. Earning 42% of the possible points led to a 65. Then, in 2008, the math exam was switched again, this time to an “Integrated Algebra” exam. On this test students needed to earn 30 out of a possible 87 points to earn a 65 and pass. Earning 34% of the possible points now led to a 65.
The United States and Global History exams underwent similar changes at the turn of the millennium. Before the changes students were required to write 3 essays accounting for 45% of their final score. After the changes students were required to write only two essays accounting for only 35% of their final score. On one of the essays students are provided with extensive information they can use in their writing.

A couple of years later the exact same process occurred with the English Regents. In 2011 the New York State Department of Education changed the exam from a two part six hour test with two essays to a single part three hour test with only one essay. Again the cut scores were dramatically lowered. The scales on these two exams are very different making comparison difficult. One way to measure the change is to look at the grade a student would receive if s/he got exactly half the multiple choice questions correct and earned exactly half of the possible points on the essay(s). On the old English exam that student would have received a grade of 43. On the new English exam a grade of 50.

A year ago the New York State Department of Education changed things yet again. But this time they did not change the exam. They just changed the cut scores. From 2011 until 2013 out of 286 possible point combinations on the exam an average of 74 resulted in a passing grade. Then, in June of 2013, the number of point combinations leading to a passing grade was dramatically lowered by 23%. Since then an average of 63 point combinations out of 286 leads to a passing grade.

It is disturbing that this change occurred at the very moment when the test results would first be used to evaluate teachers. The research base shows that such value-added metrics are unreliable. For example a RAND report concluded “the research base is currently insufficient for us to recommend the use of VAM for high-stakes decisions.” A report out of Brown University concluded “the promise that value-added systems can provide such a precise, meaningful, and comprehensive picture is not supported by the data.” Nonetheless New York State passed laws requiring school districts to use test scores in teacher evaluations. Why, at the same time, did the Department of Education quietly change the cut scores on the English Regents? Is it an attempt to ensure that more teachers are rated ineffective? This would allow certain interest groups to declare the law a success and claim that “bad teachers” are now being identified and should be fired. Is it an attempt to create evidence that there is an epidemic of failing students in New York State? This would allow certain interest groups to proclaim that the crisis can only be solved if the new Common Core Standards are implemented without delay.

Advocates of the Common Core are either ignorant of or deliberately ignore this history. A decade ago New York State Department of Education decided that the high school graduation rate was too low. They therefore changed exams and cut scores to make them easier. The graduation rate went up. Now it seems that some powerful interests have decided that it is too easy to graduate. So they want the exams made harder and the passing cut scores raised. It is evident from the history reviewed above that playing with cut scores is not the way to improve education. After all that just leaves us in the very place we are in today. Yet we seem to be condemned to repeat this cycle all over again. We seem to be enamored of easy solutions. Make exams harder (or easier). Raise cut scores (or lower them). What we do not seem to be willing to do as a nation is roll up our sleeves and do the really, really hard work of ensuring that every student receives a quality education.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Paul Horton Chastises the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2014 //
17

The Chronicle of Higher Education regularly publishes laudatory articles about the Common Core standards. Paul Horton wrote a letter to the editor. Here it is:

 

http://chronicle.com/blogs/letters/common-core-standards-are-the-tip-of-a-corporate-iceberg/

 

Common Core Standards Are the Tip of a Corporate Iceberg

 

To the Editor:

 

In response to recent several columns that embrace the Common Core Standards as a way to prepare students for college (“Use the Common Core. Use It Widely. Use It Well,” The Chronicle, June 10), I beg to differ.

 

There are several reasons why I am concerned about the Common Core Standards, along with virtually all teachers and professors I know:

 

1. They are the product of a push by private foundations acting in the interest of multinational corporations to colonize public education in the United States and in other areas projected be developed as core production and assembly areas in the emerging global economy. A recent Washington Post article using a well-placed source within the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation essentially confirmed what many critics have suspected: that Bill Gates effectively controls the Department of Education in the United States through his former employees who serve in leadership positions within the Department of Education. Our education secretary also does a lot of listening to Michael Barber of Pearson Education. Although Mr. Gates and Sir Michael, as well as other reformers, are doubtless well intentioned, they view the colonization of K-12 education in this country and elsewhere as a “win-win.” In their view, the quality of education will improve with greater accountability, and they will make billions creating and delivering accountability for students, teachers, and education schools. To implement their plan, they are willing to jettison all ideas of collective responsibility for public education in a classic privatization pincer move: Chicago School of Economics ideas of “free choice” and “free markets” are used to legitimate privatization through virtual control of the editorial boards of major papers—the Murdoch chain, the Tribune chain, The Washington Post (now run by a neoliberal libertarian), and The New York Times—as well as center-liberal media like PBS and NPR. Money is funneled into NPR and PBS by organizations that support privatizing school reform in the name of “support for education programing.” A Gates-funded Washington consulting firm, GMMB, works 24/7 to sell the Common Core Standards and all other elements of the Race to the Top mandates that call for more charter schools, a standardized-testing regime, and value-added assessments of teachers based on this testing regime. Likewise representatives of the Washington-based Fordham Institute work together with GMMB to send weekly talking points to major editorial boards and education reporters to ensure that representatives from an “independent foundation” are relentlessly quoted. Not surprisingly, the Fordham Institute is hardly independent, and is heavily subsidized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Michael Bloomberg, and the Broad Foundation, and many more funders of privatizing education. While GMMB attempts to control the discourse in the country’s major media outlets (Arne Duncan’s past press secretary is helping to coordinate this propaganda campaign within GMMB), McKinsey sells Microsoft and Pearson packages to fit the Race to the Top mandates. The Los Angeles Independent Schools boondoggle that packed Pearson Common Core Curriculum lessons within Microsoft tablets and software is the wave of the future. Districts are sold packages that they cannot afford to comply with federal mandates that are pushed by private multinational corporations. What I am attempting to describe is the tip of a corporate iceberg that amounts to corporate control of education policy with very little participation of classroom teachers, parents, or school boards. The idea that the Common Core Standards are the product of a democratic process is simply misrepresentation of fact—a big lie that GMMB, our education secretary, Bill Gates, Pearson Education, and the Fordham Institute propagate. What many rightfully be called corporate-education reform has bypassed the democratic process. For this reason alone, university faculty and administrators should not support the Common Core Curriculum and the Race to the Top.

 

2. As a teacher at a school that prepares students for colleges and universities, I know that the Common Core Standards will not be the best preparation for the next level. I have taught in large public high schools and at one of the best independent schools in the country. I have seen education from many different angles. I was a teacher in Texas in 1985 when the standardized testing regime that we now associate with Race to the Top and the Common Core Standards was first instituted. This regime failed in Texas and it has failed everywhere it has been tried. Whatever one may think of the Common Core Standards on paper, because they are tied to a standardized testing regime, they will fail. The literature on this issue is voluminous, but our current educational-policy makers simply ignore it. Teaching to standardized tests narrows the curriculum and results in teaching to the test. Administrators will encourage drill-and-kill exercises to increase test scores and will be forced to allocate precious resources and time to preparing for standardized tests. Here in Chicago, principals are letting go of essential school staff—counselors, librarians, art teachers, and others—to pay for tutoring and the computers that will be used to assess students. As a graduate student at the University of Texas in the mid 1980s, I taught a section in a remedial reading and writing program for freshmen who did not read and write at a college entry level. We made our courses as interesting as possible by assigning the nonfiction of Larry McMurtry and Robert Graves. But what I discovered when I talked to my students was that kids did not write enough in high school for two interrelated reasons: Their classes were huge, and they were assessed by multiple-choice tests because their teachers had difficulty grading class sets of 35-40 papers as a portion of five class loads of 165-180 students. Consider that the assessments administered to measure the Common Core Standards will be either multiple-choice questions or algorithm-scored short essays that require regurgitation. To adequately prepare students for college, they need to be challenged with books and documents, contextual understanding and textual understanding. The Common Core Standards emphasize the textual understanding of documents and the diminution of creative writing and contextual analysis beyond a given document or passage. While intratextual analysis certainly has its place in any classroom, the Common Core comes close to reinstituting the dragon that many professors in the humanities have worked hard to slay—“the New Criticism.” The Common Core Standards and assessments seek to bring the dead dragon back to life! Most of the Humanities professors I know here at the University of Chicago and elsewhere think this is laughable. The reaction typically is, “this is stunningly ignorant, but I want to write, not refight these ridiculous battles.” The Common Core Standards seek to teach literacy, but in doing so, they neglect developing essential tools of critical and contextual analysis that are predictive of college success, the development of the ability to produce a complex essay or research paper (a paper that goes beyond what an algorithm can assess), and the development of ideas about social or civic responsibility that run counter to the core value of neoliberalism: “get what you can for yourself, nothing else matters.” This notion simply does not jibe with what I am hearing when I am visiting colleges with my rising high school senior son where the emphasis is all about service. What I have heard at every college visit is that admissions officers have determined that standardized testing does not predict college success. The challenges that a student takes on and is able to overcome and the rigor of the courses that a student takes are much better predictors of college readiness. Because the Common Core Standards, curricula, and assessments focus on literacy, multiple choice tests, and essays that regurgitate key words, they do not adequately prepare students by developing analytical abilities every college professor I know wants to see. The Common Core Standards prepare students in areas that experience issues with literacy for work at the community-college level. Applying this one set of standards to all American students represents a national policy error of catastrophic proportions.

 

3. The Common Core Standards must be viewed as a part of a larger effort to de-skill teacher K-20 teaching. Many within the professoriate are very skeptical about MOOCs. Believe it or not, MOOCs, the Common Core Standards, and Race to the Top are a part of the same floating ice-block. I just spoke to a friend of mine who is a professor at Columbia. He tells me that the professoriate is splitting between the one percent—typically, law, medical, and business professors who make money outside of the academy—and the lowly humanities professors who don’t bring in the big value-added bucks. But the number of non-tenure-track and non-benefitted professors has grown exponentially during the last twenty years. As state legislatures begin to demand value added measure for university professors and the new federal plan to encourage “reform” in higher education kicks off, the professoriate is beginning to hear the same sorts of messages that K-12 teachers have heard for twenty years. When the chancellors of major universities begin to send messages embracing the Common Core Standards like those recently published in The Chronicle, my guess is that the same foundations that are pushing for K-12 reforms are beginning to push for undergraduate education reforms. The Gates Foundation has sponsored a lot of research and dozens of named professorships, and when the Gates Foundation wants a heavily funded university on board with Common Core, it can make itself heard very easily. After all, the Gates Foundation seems to have a great deal to say about who is admitted to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences recently. While the big foundations that have the potential to add a great deal of value to major public and private institutions put the word out that some grants might not be granted to institutions that do not support the Common Core and state and federal pushes for college and university reform, they sooth our system chancellors with the siren song of plenty of money for research in exchange for public support of the whole program that will ultimately reduce the cost of labor on campus. Once courses are MOOC-ed and the rights sold, courses can be traded, bought and sold on markets. Once the scripted Common Core lessons are mandated, taught, and assessed, the value of teaching declines as teachers become as interchangeable and as cheap as computer tablets. Whatever can be digitalized, can be cheapened. University faculties, graduate students, and teachers need to understand that they must stand together because administrative and union leadership is already bought or is presently under a great deal of pressure.

 

That The Chronicle could publish so many articles in support of the Common Core Standards and about the “IT Takeover” of higher education should serve as a wake-up call. The one percent in academe, those who are closely tied to foundations, think tanks, politicos, insurance companies, and multi-national corporations, are ready to sell the rest of you out. Next the professoriate will see attempts to standardize and digitalize your teaching and assessments. Then, when your digitalized evaluations fluctuate with the abilities of the students you teach, your wages will be garnished. College and university educators will no longer be permitted to scare students out of classes with impossibly demanding syllabai; they will be asked to put up and shut up as their workload increases and as your salaries and benefits (pensions anyone?) decline. The Common Core Standards as a part of the Race to the Top do for K-12 education what a new round of reforms propose to do for higher education. The reformers seek to reduce the costs of teaching to create a profit margin for potential investors and markets for big education vendors. This is the brave new world that all K-20 educators face. We must learn to stand together.

 

Paul Horton
History Instructor
University High School
University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
Chicago

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

New York: An Insider’s View of the Test Scores

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2014 //
33

This personal report about setting the cut scores for New York’s Common Core 11th grade ELA test was written by Dr. Maria Baldassarre Hopkins, Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Nazareth College. The cut score is the passing mark.

Professor Hopkins writes:

My name is Maria, and I am not a psychometrician.

There. I said it.

Apparently it took me a while to get it through my thick skull. I was reminded no fewer than three times at the cut score setting for the new Common Core aligned ELA Regents Exam that I am, indeed, not a psychometrician.

“Mary, are you a psychometrician?” I was asked when I made one of my frequent requests for more information.
My name ain’t Mary. And, no, I am not a psychometrician.

Last year I wrote critically of the cut score setting process for the 3-8 Common Core assessments. I was astonished when I was invited back for the 11th grade iteration after expressing blatant disapproval of NYSED/Pearson’s gamemaker role in the Hunger Games of academic achievement. You might wonder why I chose to go back. In addition to the camaraderie of some of New York’s finest educators and the Desmond’s delicious bread pudding, I prefer being at the table in the event that I might bring some modicum of sanity to an otherwise batty process.
Once again, I was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement which limits me from disclosing any secure test materials, including “all oral and written information … relating to the development, review, and/or scoring of a New York State assessment.” On the other hand, Commissioner King emphasized the importance of participants going out and talking about the cut score setting process, as well as encouraging our colleagues to participate in the future. While it may be my close reading skills at fault, I’m not entirely clear on where “secure test materials” end and “talking about the process” starts. I haven’t been dragged into court yet, so I think we’re good. Still, I will err on the side of caution here by not divulging any actual conversations or actual data to which I was privy. Read closely, friends.
Oh, I almost forgot–you should totally get on one these panels if have the chance.

Concern #1: Students are not PLDs
An important early step in the cut score setting process happened in February when educators from across the state were brought together to craft Performance Level Descriptors (PLDs) that would be instrumental in determining cut scores. PLDs are statements that say what a student at each level of proficiency should be capable of doing under each standard.
For example, imagine anchor standard 11 said the following: “Analyze the body language of a person trying to persuade you to resign from a task after you have asked too many questions.” PLDs would be statements that say what a student at each level (2-5) is capable of. A level 3 PLD might say: “Analyzes body language adequately and correctly;” a level 4 might say: “Thoroughly analyzes body language in a way that is both correct and lightly nuanced;” a level 2 might say: “Inconsistently analyzes body language and with some inaccuracy.” Do you get the picture? Essentially, each standard is broken up into 5 proficiency levels.
PLDs, along with Ordered Item Booklets (OIB) are the tools of the trade for cut score setters. An OIB is basically the test booklet from the June 3rd administration, but instead of questions ordered as they appeared on the actual exam, they are ordered from least to most difficult. The only factor accounted for in the ordering is the number of students who answered each question correctly. A lot of students got it right? Easy question. Not many students got it right? Hard question. Text complexity of passage, plausibility of multiple choice options, level of questioning—you know, the stuff that makes questions hard—are of little consequence.

For the purpose of cut score setting, PLDs become groups of “students.” As we move through the OIB attempting to place a bookmark on the last question a “Level 3” student should be able to answer correctly, we ask ourselves: “Based on the PLD description, should a student at this level be able to answer this question?” Yes? Move on in the book. No? Place your bookmark on the last “yes.”

The problem is that PLDs are not actually students. PLDs are arbitrary, almost meaningless statements that are made up very quickly by people who, for all intents and purposes, have little inclination what will be done with them after students take the exam. So we end up having hypothetical conversations like this one that inform where we place our bookmarks and, therefore, what the cut score becomes:
Jane at Table 1: Man, this question is super hard because–Broca’s Brain?!

Come on, how many 11th graders would actually understand the message here? I am going to say a Level 3 probably won’t get this right.

Dick at Table 2: No, this text is grade level appropriate. I just asked that state ed person in the corner and she said so. Our PLD says right here that a Level 3 student understands grade level texts. So, no, it should not be too hard. A Level 3 student should definitely get this question right.

Let me say this one more time, this time in response to imaginary Dick at Table 2: PLDs are not students. They are broad categories that can be interpreted differently by every single person that reads them. Even if, as a student, I fall squarely into the Level 3 category for my ability to understand a grade level text, that does not necessarily mean that I am able to distinguish between the very subtle nuances presented to me in the multiple choice options. It does not mean that there is a multiple choice option that approximates the (correct) answer I came up with on my own when I read the question. It does not mean that I have had the lived/linguistic experiences necessary in order to comprehend the nuances of the figurative language, even if I have a good sense of what the text, taken as a whole, is saying. For Dick, none of that matters. Because PLD. (View the test in its entirety here and assess the difficulty level for yourself).

PLDs do a good job making general statements about what a kid can kinda do in a vague sort of way. What they do not do is assuage the subjectivity of individual bookmarkers. They are also terrible at representing the complexity of actual students and attending to the myriad and layered complexities involved in answering each and every question on the assessment.

But take this with a grain of salt. I’m no psychometrician.

Concern #2: Setting Cut Scores on a Test that is Not Fully Operationalized
As it turns out, psychometricians aren’t big on anecdotal evidence. But here’s what I know, anecdotally speaking. Not all 11th graders in NYS took the new regents exam. Districts were given the choice of whether they would administer the test or not. Some districts chose to opt out all together while others administered both the new and the old tests. My concern was one about the representative nature of the sample upon which we were basing our cut score decisions. Based on the demographics of students who actually took this new test, would it be possible to draw a sample that was representative of all 11th graders in NYS? Were various demographic groups, including (but not limited to) Latino and Black students, students with disabilities and English learners accurately represented in the test data that would be informing the cut score setting process?

I had a difficult time imagining how that was possible. Perhaps it is because I am not a psychometrician, or maybe it was just pragmatics. Would school districts be willing to tender the expense of test proctors, graders, and substitute teachers, along with the loss of precious instructional time, on a test that they knew full well their students were not prepared for? My sense was that it would be mostly higher achieving students and wealthier districts choosing to give this test. If that is true—and I have been assured by NYSED staff that it is not—then the sample is skewed toward students who are expected, statistically speaking, to perform pretty well. All I could think during the cut score setting was that If our cut score was based on data skewed toward higher achieving students, everyone else will be at a grave disadvantage for years to come. They will be expected to perform to a bar set by predominately successful students. Unfortunately, though I asked, I was not permitted to see any data that reflected the demographics of students tested. I was assured, however, that the details of the sample would be provided in the cut score report.

On June 23rd, SED released their cut score report. In it, they break the sample down into several demographic categories and illustrate that the percentage of students in each category in the sample is similar to that in the population. Despite anything one can learn in Statistics 101, never do they give the number of test takers in the sample. The sample can be 10,000 students or it can be 100. These percentages actually tell us nothing about whether or not test results of the sample can be generalized to New York’s population of 11th graders.
While there is no way to tell from the data SED eventually provided, it is possible that the sample is not skewed. After an hour or more of asking for data about the sample, speaking with several SED folks who each gave me different answers about the sample and reasons that I would not be permitted to see any data (ranging from “it’s secure” to “we don’t have it” to questioning the legitimacy of my request due to my non-you-know-what status), everyone eventually got on the same page. By the end of our last day, the group was on message: the sample is representative.

But, even if this is true, it doesn’t actually improve the situation. Students across the board were underprepared for the exam having had only one year of Common Core-aligned instruction. Because this is a test they were not actually prepared to take, difficulty levels were inflated (remember: they are based only on the number of students who answered each item correctly) causing the cut score to be set relatively low. As years progress and as students have more experience with the Common Core, they will inevitably perform better. All of this cut score nonsense will be long since forgotten, and we will all sing the praises of Commissioner King for increasing graduation rates through his tireless pursuit of high standards. Of course, this type of score manipulation is not new. In 2013, chances o f 11th graders’ success on the Regents were diminished by 20% thanks alone to score conversion charts. Now that I think about it, that event set the stage really nicely for the necessity of speedy reform.

Regardless of the sample, this was a test students were not actually prepared to take. Cut scores should have never been set for the next who-knows-how-many-years based on a pilot run. Period.

Even a psychometrician should know that.

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Anthony Cody: Can We Motivate Students When They Face Bleak Futures?

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2014 //
75

Anthony Cody is confused by the contradictions of the corporate reform movement. “On the one hand, we have a seemingly utopian project with bold pronouncements about the boundless capacity of all students – even those with serious learning disabilities – to succeed on ever more difficult tests. On the other hand, we have tests that are apparently intentionally designed to fail in the realm of two thirds of our students.”

Cody considers the views of Bill Gates, who has finally admitted that student motivation plays a role in whether students learn.

Cody points out that student motivation is affected by their sense of their own future. Yet as Gates himself admits:

“Well, technology in general will make capital more attractive than labor over time. Software substitution, you know, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses… It’s progressing. And that’s going to force us to rethink how these tax structures work in order to maximize employment, you know, given that, you know, capitalism in general, over time, will create more inequality and technology, over time, will reduce demand for jobs particularly at the lower end of the skill set. And so, you know, we have to adjust, and these things are coming fast. Twenty years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower, and I don’t think people have that in their mental model.”

So if there are fewer jobs, a shrinking middle class, and fewer opportunities for social mobility, students face a bleak future. How can they be motivated in an economy where their prospects are dim?

Cody writes:

“Gates is suggesting we increase taxes on consumption by the wealthy, and use those revenues to provide a sort of subsistence level payment to the poor. He opposes an increase in the minimum wage because it might raise employer costs, which they would then try to cut by laying people off.

“Gates is unconcerned about income inequality as an issue. He defines poverty as abject starvation and homelessness, and hopes employers can be convinced to keep on employees because they do not cost very much.

“The motivation of 50 million K12 students in the US is directly related to the degree to which their education leads to a brighter future. We have a big disconnect here when the future does not, in fact, offer much chance at access to college or productive employment. And as Wilkinson and Pickett established in their book The Spirit Level, the level of inequality societies tolerate has a dramatic effect on the mental state and wellbeing of its citizens…..

“As I wrote earlier in the week, there seems to be an attempt to use ever more difficult Common Core aligned tests to certify as many as two thirds of our students as unworthy of such opportunities.

“This brings to mind a dystopian future where an underclass of Common Core test rejects is allowed to subsist with the bare minimum payments required to keep starvation at bay, while a shrinking cadre of insecure workers maintain the machinery that keep the lights on and the crops harvested.

“The fundamental problem of the current economy is that we have not figured out a means by which the top 1% can be persuaded to share the prodigious profits that have flowed from technological advances…

“I cannot reconcile how this future of growing inequality and a shrinking workforce intersects with the grand utopian vision of the Common Core. So then I go back and have to question the validity of the promises made for the Common Core, since the economic projections Gates is making here seem sound….

“These economic problems will not be addressed by Common Core, by charter schools or any other educational reforms. They will not even be addressed in a significant way by what we might praise as authentic education reforms, such as smaller class sizes or more time for teacher collaboration – though these are worthwhile and humane things.
Imperfect as they have been, public schools have been an institution under mostly democratic control, funded by taxpayers, governed by elected school boards, and run by career educators. Market-driven education reform is bringing the cruelty of commerce into what was part of the public sphere, attempting to use test scores to open and close schools like shoe stores, and pay teachers on test score commissions as if we were salesmen.

“The rhetoric of the corporate reform project draws on the modern movement for civil rights, and even Bill Gates asserts that his goal is to fight inequity. But elites have rarely, if ever, designed solutions that diminish their privilege, and this is no exception. It appears that corporate education reform has devised a means to affix blame for inequity on classroom teachers, even as technological advances make it possible to transfer even more wealth into its sponsors’ bank accounts, with fewer people being paid for the work that remains necessary. The promise that the Common Core will prepare everyone for the American dream is made a lie by the intentionally engineered failure rates on Common Core aligned tests.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Economy, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Students

Edushyster Visits the National Charter School Conference

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2014 //
10

EduShyster (aka Jennifer Berkshire) girded up her loins and attended the riotously happy National Charter Schools Conference.

There she found that it was all about the numbers–growth, test scores, dollars:

“The numbers that are adding up, of course, refer to the growing number of charter schools, their students, and their scores (their scores!), not to mention the swelling ranks of advocates, politicians, actors, TV news personalities, pollsters and [insert unlikely charter supporter here] that have leaped aboard the charter express, now headed direct to achievementville. But what of the lesser numbers—the ones that are, well, less than prime—and hence, don’t quite add up? Was there anyone who would speak for them?”

Well, no. No one talked about the charter schools that folded. Or the Detroit Free Press exposé of $1 billion for charterrs that got no better results and had no accountability. Bet there was no mention of the UNO charter scandal in Chicago, and no talk of the nation’s biggest charter chain, the Gulen schools, somehow affiliated with an imam who heads a powerful political movement in Turkey.

What was not mentioned may be more important than what was celebrated. A growing movement to siphon money away from public schools to pay for schools where administrators get exorbitant salaries, teachers get low wages and turn over at a high rate, and kids are excluded if they have disabilities or don’t speak English, and the common good is forgotten.

Categories Charter Schools, Nevada

Hartford Courant: Pelto Is No Spoiler

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2014 //
11

It is funny to see the big-money corporate types behind Governor Dan Malloy criticizing Jonathan Pelto as a “spoiler.” These are the same people who love school choice. They just don’t like voter choice.

The Hartford Courant says quite rightly that Pelto is playing by the rules.

This is democracy, Governor Malloy and friends.

Jon Pelto is standing up for teachers and parents and everyone else who is not in the 1%.

Good for him!

Categories Connecticut

Carol Burris: How “Reformers” Inflate College Remediation Rates

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2014 //
44

In the television series called “The Wire,” there is an episode dedicated to “juking the stats.” Since it is a program about the police, criminals, and the drug trade, “juking the stats” means that the officials were able to manipulate crime data to show that crime was up–requiring more police–or down–showing their success in slowing a crime wave. Now we know that the corporate education reform movement has become expert at “juking the stats” to make public schools look bad so that the “reformers” can privatize them.

 

Many years ago, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle wrote a book called The Manufactured Crisis, describing how certain think tanks and government officials were manipulating data to make it appear to the public that the schools were in crisis. A gullible media, loving sensational stories about the “failure” of our schools, reported the “reformer” claims without bothering to check facts.

 

The corporate reformers of our day thrive on their own manufactured crisis. They seize upon any factoid to make schools and teachers look bad. They ignore the compelling facts that our schools are underfunded and overwhelmed with the problems of children in poverty. The corporate reformers’ solution to the problems they identify: More testing, more privatization. They think that students get smarter if they are tested more often, so more tests. They assume that privately managed schools must be superior to public schools, despite clear evidence that they do not produce better results and–unregulated and unsupervised–many are vulnerable to corruption, nepotism, self-dealing, and fraud.

 

In this article, Carol Burris shows how the college remediation rate has been shamelessly inflated by corporate reformers intent on advancing their agenda of privatization. Chief among those who have overstated the remediation rate is Secretary of Education Duncan, who said in Massachusetts that the college remediation rate was 40% when it was about half that number. As she demonstrates, one “reform” think tank announces the “crisis” of a 40% college remediation rate, and others soon repeat it until it becomes conventional wisdom. But it is not true. Like almost all the data trotted out by the reform crowd, it is inflated to promote their political agenda of privatization. Or they use their doctored stats to promote the Common Core, even though there is no evidence whatever that Common Core will make every student “college and career ready.” The campaign for Common Core increasingly looks like an advertising gambit that promises that your clothes will be cleaner than ever, your teeth will be whiter than ever, your weight will drop in a matter of days, if only you use this product.

 

When will the reformers target the root causes of low academic performance: poverty, segregation, and inequitable allocation of resources? Ever.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Higher Education, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Will Obama Ban TFA?

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2014 //
77

Joy Resmovits reports that the Onama administration plans to enforce a provision of NCLB that requires states to put experienced and highly qualified teachers in schools serving high numbers of poor and minority students.

Will this create a crisis for Teach for America, whose corps members have no experience?

Since this administration believes that teachers can be judged by student test scores, watch for policies attempting to reassign teachers from affluent suburbs to inner-city and rural schools. Watch for the next step, when those highly qualified teachers are reclassified as “bad” teachers if they can’t raise scores.

Will the Obama administration ever figure out that test scores reflect socioeconomic conditions more than teachers? They might look at research or even the recent report of the American Statistical Association, which attributed 1-14% of score variation to teachers.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching

Jason France: The Data Crises in Louisiana

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2014 //
3

Jason France (aka blogger Crazy Crawfish) writes here about the warping and destruction of data held by the Louisiana Department of Education.

He writes:

“There is a data crisis at LDOE. Almost all of the data collection systems are failing. The data, statistics and reports being generated are garbage. Data is being ferried back and forth between the department and school districts using Excel worksheets and through e-mail correspondence. This leaves many students at high risk to data theft and privacy violations. Because the systems impacted are numerous and core to much of the reporting and analysis performed by the Department, it is impossible for LDOE to claim they are reporting accurate or reliable numbers for dropouts, graduates, TOPS scholarship awards, school performance scores, test scores, student counts and breakdowns for MFP funding, program counts. . . the list goes on and on. The situation is really serious and probably just about hopeless at this point.

“I will explain how this situation developed and give specific examples of systems, impacted and correspondence I’ve received from school districts trying to work with the department.

“This crisis was created intentionally by John White and his second in command that he brought with him from New York, Kunjan Narechania. White did not really care what the data said, because he had already determined the outcome for many of his programs. (I don’t think he was also not planning to be here longer than 2 years when all the cut-backs and destruction he’d wrought really started to impact daily operations.) White undertook a slash and burn campaign on the department’s data and analysis folks and immediately implemented policies that guaranteed data would deteriorate immediately. White abandoned a 4 million dollar warehouse named LEDRS we were just finishing. . . as he arrived on the scene, but not before using it to transmit almost all of the data contained in the Warehouse to CREDO to produce reform friendly propaganda masquerading as true data analysis.”

Read on for a remarkable story.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Louisiana

Linda Darling-Hammond: How to Close the Achievement Gap

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2014 //
75

Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University offers common-sense ideas about closing the achievement gap. She says that testing is less important than teaching. No surprise there.

She reviews an OECD study about teachers. What it shows is that teachers in the U.S. work longer hours under more difficult conditions than teachers in many other nations.

“Now we have international evidence about something that has a greater effect on learning than testing: Teaching. The results of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), released last week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), offer a stunning picture of the challenges experienced by American teachers, while providing provocative insights into what we might do to foster better teaching — and learning — in the United States.

“In short, the survey shows that American teachers today work harder under much more challenging conditions than teachers elsewhere in the industrialized world. They also receive less useful feedback, less helpful professional development, and have less time to collaborate to improve their work. Not surprisingly, two-thirds feel their profession is not valued by society — an indicator that OECD finds is ultimately related to student achievement….

“Nearly two-thirds of U.S. middle-school teachers work in schools where more than 30 percent of students are economically disadvantaged. This is by far the highest rate in the world, and more than triple the average TALIS rate. The next countries in line after the United States are Malaysia and Chile. Ignored by our current education policies are the facts that one in four American children lives below the poverty line and a growing number are homeless, without regular access to food or health care, and stressed by violence and drug abuse around them. Educators now spend a great deal of their time trying to help children and families in their care manage these issues, while they also seek to close skill gaps and promote learning.

“Along with these challenges, U.S. teachers must cope with larger class sizes (27 versus the TALIS average of 24). They also spend many more hours than teachers in any other country directly instructing children each week (27 versus the TALIS average of 19). And they work more hours in total each week than their global counterparts (45 versus the TALIS average of 38), with much less time in their schedules for planning, collaboration, and professional development. This schedule — a leftover of factory-model school designs of the early 1900s — makes it harder for our teachers to find time to work with their colleagues on creating great curriculum and learning new methods, to mark papers, to work individually with students, and to reach out to parents.”

She offers specific proposals for supporting teachers.

She concludes:

“We cannot make major headway in raising student performance and closing the achievement gap until we make progress in closing the teaching gap. That means supporting children equitably outside as well as inside the classroom, creating a profession that is rewarding and well-supported, and designing schools that offer the conditions for both the student and teacher learning that will move American education forward.”

Categories Poverty, Students, Teachers and Teaching
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