Jeannie Kaplan was a member of the Denver school board for many years. She is a knowledgeable critic of the steady drumbeat of “reform.” Despite a decade of corporate-style reform, she says, Denver has little to show for it.
But what Denver does have is an elaborate system of metrics. Kaplan explains here how the district has contorted itself to come up with the right balance between “proficiency” and “growth.” The formula gets tweaked from time to time, but the public still doesn’t understand what the metrics mean. Does anyone? Is there any other nation in the world that spends so much time and money trying to develop the right measure of a good school instead of investing in the policies and practices that have been proven by research, like reduced class sizes for struggling students, a full and rich curriculum for all students, strong programs in the arts, wraparound services (including medical care, school nurses, and social workers), and after-school and summer programs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, nice post. One suggestion: in your list of proven practices, please don’t forget to mention the power of school-site team building and collaboration for continuous improvement of instruction and the importance of creating the necessary support structures to facilitate those efforts.
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Continuous improvement of instruction????? What on earth does this mean in the context of education?
The team and collaboration is fine, but what about the opportunity for some independent thinking, not part of the game plan?
Continuous improvement is a concept from business and it needs to be thought about. In education it is too often interpreted to mean not an minute of time should be “wasted,” so you get time-on-task monitoring. It also means that you want to see a smooth trajectory of learning graphed from pre-test to-post-test.
If I seem to be over-reacting it is because this phrase is connected with the idea of creating a straight line and upward “trajectory” of scores on tests with “baseline data” as the start of this trajectory and the end point a target score (or range of scores) by the end of a year.
As a concept in education, continuous improvement too easily morphs into a version of the federal “Race to the Top” metaphor and fantasy.
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Since the monetizing and politicizing of education in America, self appointed “reformers” are not interested in research that will improve instruction and outcomes for all students. Under the influence of business, we are hung up on a numbers game, and the game can be played by any fool that has Excel. Numbers can be manipulated and twisted to suit an agenda. When money is scarce, it is absurd to waste resources playing this numbers game. More testing does not improve learning. Just think of what could be done to actually help students, if the money went to the students’ instruction. Any changes made to students’ instruction should be guided by research, not by agendas to blame teachers and destroy public education.
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Kaplan makes a good case that Denver’s expensive data obfuscate rather than illuminate; but I’m puzzled by her call for raising expectations for low-income schools. That’s a page from the Reformers’ playbook: “the soft bigotry of low-expectations”. Raising expectations is easy. The hard part is getting kids to attain those expectations, and I’m afraid no one really knows how to do this (oh, sure, there are many who claim to know). Most schools seem tp pursue this route: make the job manageable by narrowing the curriculum to the most “essential” elements” literacy drills and math and aim for success in these areas. But this approach hasn’t and cannot shrink the achievement gap. A new approach is needed. I am convinced that a broad liberal arts curriculum that builds world and word knowledge through study of thematic units is a big and essential part of the solution. Calling for “raised expectations” will not lead schools to adopt this empowering type of curriculum; it’s more likely to lead to doubling down on the old failed approaches. I wish powerful voices like Kaplan’s would start making the case for the curriculum reform we need.
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“Growth” is a euphemism for the differences in test scores between two points in time, and it had better be an increase.
Denver, of course, was sucked into the SLO and SGP rating system in 1999 by foundation funding (Broad and others) aimed at establishing pay for performance with a “growth measure”– gain in scores from baseline to a target– a key measure in determining compensation.
The Boston-based Community and Technical Assistance Center (CTAC) set up the Denver process, which has morphed a bit, but not much. The same people from CTAC are still selling this snake-oil, aided by marketing tools from USDE, and assistance from several USDE funded regional labs–in spite of the fact that that SLOs have no proven reliability or validity as a procedure for generating a “metric” for rating teachers. SGPs are calculations made in a follow-on process that yields a stack rating of teachers with a cut score set at the median for all teachers who have a job alike assignment and have used the same district or state tests (pretest and posttests) in their classes.
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“. . . but the public still doesn’t understand what the metrics mean. Does anyone??
How can they??? Especially when those “metrics” are COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL, INVALID AND UNETHICAL TO USE AS THEY ARE BEING USED.
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