I am enjoying the online debate between Rick Hess and Peter Cunningham. Rick is located at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in D.C., Peter runs a blog funded by Walton and Broad and served as Arne Duncan’s Assistant Secretary for Communications in Obama’s first term.
In this post, they debate whether Uncle Sam should tell schools how to improve.
Peter, of course, echoes the Obama administration’s position that this is a proper federal role.
He writes:
With thousands of schools defying every effort to improve after decades of reform, can we really just throw up our hands and quit? Even with the flexibility and financial incentives associated with SIG—multiple models and up to $6M over three years—most states and districts choose the least aggressive and least impactful interventions, presumably to avoid a messy fight over staffing.
Children have only one chance for an education. When states and districts allow chronically struggling schools to continue indefinitely, the federal government has a moral obligation and an economic incentive to step in. When it comes to protecting kids at risk, the buck still stops in Washington.
Rick argues cogently that the feds should not tell schools how to improve because Uncle Sam (Congress and the U.S. Department of Education) doesn’t know how to improve any school.
Rick writes:
Here’s the problem: there’s no recipe for identifying which schools need to be “turned around” or for helping those schools improve. This means that identifying those schools, figuring out how to help them, and then actually doing so are complicated tasks that require a lot of judgment, discretion, and good sense.
Unfortunately, these are not the strengths of the federal government. This is simply because federal officials a] don’t run schools or systems, b] have to write policies that apply to 100,000 schools across 50 states, and c] aren’t accountable for what happens in schools and systems. These three factors mean that federal “school improvement” efforts amount to efforts to write rules and directions that can apply everywhere, including many places where the formulas may not make sense. The result is a whole lot of grudging compliance, a fair bit of aimless activity, and not a whole lot of smart problem-solving.
The results are evident in efforts like the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grant program. There, we’ve spent $6 billion and a third of the schools receiving SIG funds have seen their test results get worse. Of course, it’s hard to find really reliable numbers on all this because the Department of Education hasn’t been forthcoming with the data (and has had to retract flawed data). One can make a case for Andy Smarick’s claim that SIG is “the greatest failure in the U.S. Department of Education’s 30-plus year history.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sorry, I cannot agree this is a debate. It is a verbal thugfest, a variant of FOX news, with both participants favoring market-based education.
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I’m not sure you can call it market based. It appears monopoly based. Pearson publishes the text books and the test.
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The greatest failure of the DOE lies in its very existence. The DOE is probably Ronald Reagan’s greatest failure. Sadly Ronald Reagan’s failure to dismantle the DOE has given birth to the greatest disaster in education history – Arne Duncan.
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Like!
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The D.O.E. stands for “Do it Or Else!”
Created by Carter, given a stay of execution by Reagan, weaponized by Obama under Duncan.
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Totally agree with Laura H. Chapman.
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I can only speak for testing results in my state, school, and classroom.
It appears that Rick Hess has missed a valid point to his argument, at least in Texas schools. Regardless of federal grant money, how it was spent, or programs implimented to help struggling students, when the testing standards are changed to “becomes more rigorous” during the 6 years of data being examined, one cannot come to any statistically valid conclusions.
Case in point. In 2009 the small rural district where I teach, the Elementary Science Department (2 other teachers and myself) was allotted a portion of the Federal grant money to update our lab equipment and instructional materials. During the last few years of the TAKS test, my students scores were 90% passing. The final year of TAKS my students scores were 91% passing, and of that 91%, 50% were commended. To earn commended performance a student had to score 95% on the test.
A new “more rigorous” test, STAAR, was implemented in 2013. Since this new test, I am struggling to have my students reach 50% passing. The only variable has been the test. Where is the validity?
… I suppose there are no statiticians in the Department of Education…
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“. . . one cannot come to any statistically valid conclusions. . . Where is the validity?”
Amy, you answered your question, perhaps inadvertently beforehand.
To fully understand why educational standards and standardized testing educational malpractices are COMPLETELY INVALID read and comprehend what Noel Wilson has to say about those practices and how any results are “vain and illusory”.
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
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I don’t have much faith in either the federal government or the states to make sage decisions about education in the current climate. All decisions seem to lead to some type of a punitive vice grip designed to scapegoat teachers with the ultimate goal of destroying public education. If conservatives and neoliberals continue to promote the proliferation of charters schools while starving public schools, public education will reach a tipping point. Both the federal government along with various state governors continue the war on public schools. Consider the case of Cuomo in New York. He chose to do nothing to address funding inequities and segregation in the state during his first term. Instead, he decided to attack the “monopoly of public education.” The problem is no one wants to work within the system of public schools to address creative solutions to problems to make public education better. All the regulations I see are partial to charter school expansion. Few politicians want to regulate them, hold them accountable or change the subtractive formula to public schools. What has any branch of government done to curb the amount of waste and fraud among charter schools? The only people that uncover problems are a few independent bloggers.
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This is exactly my point in the above post. “The Student Success Act” is another means to move money out of public schools. The governments, state or federal, keep tinkering with the formula, making decisions behind closed doors without democratic input until public schools meet their demise. It seems there are no laws that protect public schools.
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