Archives for the month of: February, 2015
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Audrey Beardsley: Can VAM Be Trusted?

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2015 //
17

Audrey Amrein Beardsley, a national authority on teacher evaluation, reviews here the latest scholarly research on value-added measurement” or VAM. This is the practice of evaluating teachers by changes in their students’ test scores. It was made into a national issue by Race to the Top, which required states to make VAM a significant part of teacher evaluation. In granting waivers to states from the Draconian sanctions of NCLB, Arne Duncan required states to adopt VAM.

The research keeps building against the usefulness of VAM. The latest study concludes that VAM is highly unreliable. Children are not randomly assigned, and teachers face widely varying challenges.

Beardsley writes:

“In a recent paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Education Finance and Policy, coauthors Cassandra Guarino (Indiana University – Bloomington), Mark Reckase (Michigan State University), and Jeffrey Wooldridge (Michigan State University) ask and then answer the following question: “Can Value-Added Measures of Teacher Performance Be Trusted?…

“From the abstract, authors “investigate whether commonly used value-added estimation strategies produce accurate estimates of teacher effects under a variety of scenarios. [They] estimate teacher effects [using] simulated student achievement data sets that mimic plausible types of student grouping and teacher assignment scenarios. [They] find that no one method accurately captures true teacher effects in all scenarios, and the potential for misclassifying teachers as high- or low-performing can be substantial.”

She adds:

“They found…

“No one [value-added] estimator performs well under all plausible circumstances, but some are more robust than others…[some] fare better than expected…[and] some of the most popular methods are neither the most robust nor ideal.” In other words, calculating value-added regardless of the sophistication of the statistical specifications and controls used is messy, and this messiness can seriously throw off the validity of the inferences to be drawn about teachers, even given the fanciest models and methodological approaches we currently have going (i.e., those models and model specifications being advanced via policy).

“[S]ubstantial proportions of teachers can be misclassified as ‘below average’ or ‘above average’ as well as in the bottom and top quintiles of the teacher quality distribution, even in [these] best-case scenarios.” This means that the misclassification errors were are seeing with real-world data, we are also seeing with simulated data. This leads us to more concern about whether VAMs will ever be able to get it right, or in this case, counter the effects of the nonrandom assignment of students to classrooms and teachers to the same.

“Researchers found that “even in the best scenarios and under the simplistic and idealized conditions imposed by [their] data-generating process, the potential for misclassifying above-average teachers as below average or for misidentifying the “worst” or “best” teachers remains nontrivial, particularly if teacher effects are relatively small. Applying the [most] commonly used [value-added approaches] results in misclassification rates that range from at least 7 percent to more than 60 percent, depending upon the estimator and scenario.” So even with a pretty perfect dataset, or a dataset much cleaner than those that come from actual children and their test scores in real schools, misclassification errors can impact teachers upwards of 60% of the time….

“In sum, researchers conclude that while certain VAMs hold more promise than others, they may not be capable of overcoming the many obstacles presented by the non-random assignment of students to teachers (and teachers to classrooms).

“In their own words, “it is clear that every estimator has an Achilles heel (or more than one area of potential weakness)” that can distort teacher-level output in highly consequential ways. Hence, “[t]he degree of error in [VAM] estimates…may make them less trustworthy for the specific purpose of evaluating individual teachers” than we might think.”

Categories Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

EduShyster: How Mass. Parents Opted Out

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2015 //
14

EduShyster tells a gripping tale of parents’ struggle to opt out from state testing in Salem, Massachusetts. She got her hands on emails that were obtained by the parents through the Freedom of Information Act. Local officials tried their best to convince the parents that their children could not possibly skip the tests.

Read the twists and turns as officials scramble to get their answers right. The good news is that the parents won. Their children don’t have to take the state tests or the many practice tests.

Categories Massachusetts, Opt Out, Testing

Daniel Katz: Is Your First-Grader College-Ready?

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2015 //
39

Daniel S. Katz read the New York Times’ article “Is Your First-Grader College-Ready,” and he was not sure at first whether it was a spoof or for real. Evidently, it was for real. He introduces us to the useful term “Poe’s Law.” Wikipedia describes it thus: “a literary adage which stipulates that without a clear indicator of an author’s intended sarcasm it becomes impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.”*

 

It takes close reading a la Common Core for Katz to figure out that the article was for real, not a parody. Yet it still reads like a parody.

 

He writes:

 

So what is almost satirical about some of the approaches described in the Times?

 

It is one thing to talk to first grade students about what they want to be when they grow up. For students who are growing up without many community models of post-secondary education, I can see potential in the middle school activities described that emphasize recognizing what would be needed to accomplish their ambitions. However, the early elementary discourse transforms from surprising to comical to frustrating in very short order. Six year-olds are not simply talking about what they want to be as grown ups; they are naming specific schools and filling out mock applications for the bulletin board. The first grade teacher is quoted discussing that it is not enough to ask children what they want to be: “We need to ask them, ‘How will you get there?’ Even if I am teaching preschool, the word ‘college’ has to be in there.” The approach is not simply being applied in districts with high concentrations of disadvantage; the article quotes a college planner from Westchester County, New York who compares college preparation to becoming an Olympic skater whose training begins in earnest at age 6.

 

As a mother and grandmother, I can recall many conversations with young children about what they want to be when they grow up. The answers ranged from “a cowboy.” to “a fireman,” to “a movie star,” to “a baseball player,” to “an astronaut.” Why in the world would six-year-old children fill out mock college applications? Isn’t there plenty of time in high school to think about college, which courses to take to be prepared, which colleges are a good fit for one’s interests, which colleges are affordable, etc.? There ought to be a law that little children are allowed to have a childhood before adult compulsions are forced on them. They should be playing with dolls and building sand castles and making things out of blocks and coloring in coloring books and molding things from clay or Play-Dough; they should dance and sing. Why can’t the grown-ups let them be children? They are NOT global competitors; they are children.

 

*According to Wikipedia, Poe’s Law is of recent vintage. The article says:

 

The statement called Poe’s law was formulated in 2005 by Nathan Poe on the website christianforums.com in a debate about creationism. The original sentence read:

 

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.[4]

 

The sentiments expressed by Poe date back much earlier – at least to 1983, when Jerry Schwarz, in a post on Usenet, wrote:

 

8. Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks.

 

Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, :-), has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that “I’m only kidding”. If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.[5]

 

Another precedent posted on Usenet dates to 2001. Following the well-known schema of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, Alan Morgan wrote:

 

“Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.”[6]

Categories Childhood, Higher Education

Laura H. Chapman: Why SLOs Are Even Worse Than VAM

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2015 //
26

Education has always been buried in jargon, and today’s reforms have made the pile of jargon steeper than before. The Common Core brings us “close reading” (reading with background or context). The demand for test-based evaluation of teachers brought us VAM (value-added-modeling or value-added-measurement), and also SLO (student learning objectives). In this comment on the blog, Laura Chapman says there is even less evidence for the validity of SLOs than for VAM.

 

Chapman writes:

 

I appreciate Audrey Amrein Beardsley’ great work on the VAM problem, now at the threshold of becoming a major component of evaluation for teacher education programs.

 

Even so, equal attention needs to be given to the use of SLOs for evaluating teacher education in so-called untested and non-tested subjects.

 

It has been estimated that about 65-69% of teachers have job assignments for which there are not state-wide tests. SLOs (and variants) are the proxy of choice for VAM. An SLO is a writing exercise for teachers required in at least 27 states SLOs must include pretest-posttest and/or baseline to post-test reports on student growth.

 

Four reports from USDE (2014) show that there is no empirical research to support the use of the SLO process (and associated district-devised tests and cut-off scores) for teacher evaluation.

 

The template for SLOs originated in Denver in 1999. It has been widely copied and promoted via publications from USDE’s “Reform Support Network,” which operates free of any need for evidence and few constraints other than marketing a deeply flawed product.

 

SLO templates in wide use have no peer reviewed evidence to support their use for teacher evaluation…not one reliability study, not one study addressing their validity for teacher evaluation.

 

SLO templates in Ohio and other states are designed to fit the teacher-student data link project (funded by Gates and USDE since 2005). This means that USDE’s proposed evaluations of specific teacher education programs ( e.g., art education at Ohio State University) will be aided by the use of extensive “teacher of record” data routinely gathered by schools and districts, including personnel files that typically require a teacher’s college transcripts, degree earned, certifications, scores on tests for any teacher license and so on.

 

There are technical questions galore, but a big chunk of the data of interest to the promotors of this latest extension of the Gates/USDE’s rating game are in place.

 

I have written about the use of SLOs as a proxy for VAM in an unpublished paper titled The Marketing of Student Learning Objectives (SLOs): 1999-2014. A pdf with references can be obtained by request at chapmanLH@aol.com

Categories Education Reform

Susan Ochshorn: How Race to the Top Harms Little Children

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2015 //
6

Susan Ochshorn, founder of ECE Policy Works, surveys the harmful impact of Race to the Top on early childhood education.

It was bad enough that No Child Left Behind turned into a Frankenstein:

“…narrowing curriculum, inspiring fear, trembling, and depression in the U.S. teaching corps, not to mention test anxiety among a growing — and ever younger — population of students.

“Today, kindergarteners, their fine-motor skills still wobbly, are darkening the circles of multiple-choice tests. Time for blocks and play is diminished. First and second graders are prepping for exams, exploration and skill-building sidetracked. Assessment in early childhood is hardly a recent concern, notes Kyle Snow, Director of the Center for Applied Research at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, in a paper on kindergarten readiness and other large-scale assessment systems. He cites Samuel Meisels, former head of the Erikson Institute, a Chicago-based graduate school of education, whose vociferous criticism of standardized testing goes back decades. He’s the father of work-sampling, the early childhood equivalent of portfolio assessment — collections of essays, lab reports, research projects, and other student work, with nary a bubble in sight. Snow also warned of the “great need for additional research and development of assessments appropriate for young children.”

But the train has already left the station — sans Thomas the Tank Engine. As states have applied for Early Learning Challenge grants, as part of the Race to the Top initiative, assessments of children’s kindergarten readiness are par for the course. Teachers are also administering standardized tests in the early elementary grades — the better, some argue, to meet the demands of increased accountability.”

Ochshorn describes the growing movement among parents to opt their children out of inappropriate testing. At one school, Castlebridge in Néw York City, most parents boycotted the bubble tests for the K-2 grades. The children love to learn through play. They love school.

Ochshorn writes:

“Isn’t that the point? And isn’t that worth preserving? It’s time to turn the tables, and assess the damage of Race to the Top. If we delay, we risk turning out the light for another generation of students.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Race to the Top, Testing

New Jersey: Resistance to PARCC Grows

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2015 //
46

CBS News reported on the growing backlash against PARCC testing in Néw Jersey, where many object to the test and plan to refuse it.

The State Commissioner of Education David Hespe dismissed concerns about a high failure rate (which other states have experienced), saying that students needed to be challenged because life isn’t easy.

It is also the case that life is not a multiple-choice test.

Categories Common Core, New Jersey, Testing

Katie Osgood: Why Atlanta Loves Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2015 //
13

Katie Osgood, Chicago teacher if children with high needs, left this comment:

“Here is the link to the Atlanta BoE members:

“http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/Page/40514 The four TFAers are Courtney English (I-AL7), Jason Esteves (AL-9), Matt Westmoreland (D-3) and Eshe’ Collins (D-6). I encourage everyone to click into their bios to see the organizations they’ve been in involved with, their youth, and the corporate choice of language. For example, Jason Esteves’ bio says, “Jason is a practicing attorney at the Atlanta law firm of McKenna Long & Aldridge, LLP, where he brings businesses, nonprofits and individuals together to solve problems and get results. Jason has also served on the boards of KIPP South Fulton Academy…” He did his TFA stint and then straight to law school. Or Courtney English which reads, “Courtney D. English, was elected to the Atlanta Board of Education in 2009 at 24 years old; and was at that time, the youngest person to bke elected citywide in any capacity in the city of Atlanta’s history.” He did TFA for two years and went straight into the politics of school. Then there is Eshe’ Collins who chose to include “As a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at A.D. Williams Elementary School, 92 percent of her students met or exceeded expectations on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test for both grade levels.” Citing test scores in a bio shows a deep edreform bias, something we know TFA focuses on heavily. And Matt Westmoreland, well he is a white boy from Princeton, need I say more?

“This atrocity is exactly what TFA’s end game is. An all charter district would be a wind fall for TFA and its corporate partners. Their youth and isolation within the edreform machine has clearly had a strong and damaging influence on their beliefs. Expect TFA to keep pushing people like this onto school boards and political office through their political branch, LEE. This is why TFA cannot be allowed to exist.”

I don’t think TFA is going to go out of business. But it is important to know their goals and strategies.

Categories Atlanta, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Teach for America

Atlanta Planning to Become an All-Charter District

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2015 //
38

Atlanta is impressed by the elimination of public education in New Orleans. The school board is planning to become an all-charter district.

 

Apparently, no one told the school board that the Recovery School District in New Orleans is one of the lowest-rated districts in the state. As Mercedes Schneider recently showed, the ACT scores for the state of Louisiana had New Orleans ranked 66th of 70 districts in the state. Most of the charter schools are graded C, D or F by the state, which makes their students eligible for a voucher.

 

 

Categories Atlanta, Charter Schools, New Orleans

A MUST-READ: Stephanie Simon in Politico: A Blockbuster Report on Pearson’s Money Machine

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2015 //
27

Stephanie Simon reports in Politico.com on a major investigation of Pearson and its extraordinary ability to profit from its activities, whether or not they are successful.

 

She writes:

 

A POLITICO investigation has found that Pearson stands to make tens of millions in taxpayer dollars and cuts in student tuition from deals arranged without competitive bids in states from Florida to Texas. The review also found Pearson’s contracts set forth specific performance targets — but don’t penalize the company when it fails to meet those standards. And in the higher ed realm, the contracts give Pearson extensive access to personal student data, with few constraints on how it is used.
POLITICO examined hundreds of pages of contracts, business plans and email exchanges, as well as tax filings, lobbying reports and marketing materials, in the first comprehensive look at Pearson’s business practices in the United States.
The investigation found that public officials often commit to buying from Pearson because it’s familiar, even when there’s little proof its products and services are effective.
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for instance, declined to seek competitive bids for a new student data system on the grounds that it would be “in the best interest of the public” to simply hire Pearson, which had done similar work for the state in the past. The data system was such a disaster, the department had to pay Pearson millions extra to fix it.
Administrators at the University of Florida also skipped competitive bids on a huge project to build an online college from scratch. They were in a hurry. And they knew Pearson’s team from a previous collaboration. That project hadn’t been terribly successful, but no matter: UF dug up the old contract and rewrote it to give Pearson the new job — a job projected to be worth $186 million over the next decade.
And two public colleges in Texas not only gave Pearson a no-bid contract to build online classes, they agreed to pay the company to support 40,000 enrollments, no matter how many students actually signed up.
Pearson has aggressive lobbyists, top-notch marketing and a highly skilled sales team. Until the New York attorney general cracked down in late 2013, Pearson’s charitable foundation made a practice of treating school officials from across the nation to trips abroad, to conferences where the only education company represented was Pearson.
The story of Pearson’s rise is very much a story about America’s obsession with education reform over the past few decades.
Ever since a federal commission published “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 — warning that public education was being eroded by “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people” — American schools have been enveloped in a sense of crisis. Politicians have raced to tout one fix after the next: new tests, new standards, new classroom technology, new partnerships with the private sector.
K-12 superintendents and college administrators alike struggle to boost enrollment, raise graduation rates, improve academic outcomes — and to do it all while cutting costs.
In this atmosphere of crisis, Pearson promises solutions. It sells the latest and greatest, and it’s no fly-by-night startup; it calls itself the world’s leading learning company. Public officials have seized it as a lifeline.
“Pearson has been the most creative and the most aggressive at [taking over] all those things we used to take as part of the public sector’s responsibility,” said Michael Apple, a professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

And that is only a sampling of the contents of this explosive report. Read it to find out where your taxpayer dollars are going.

 

As an added bonus, Simon also wrote about how Pearson used its foundation to bolster its profits.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026.html#ixzz3RLxhh6ub

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Pearson, Privatization

Anthony Cody: How to Convince Parents to Love the Tests

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2015 //
17

Someone gave Anthony Cody a copy of a secret training document created by public relations consultants to corporate reformers. The document is only six pages; it is printed in bright colors. Its purpose is to show reformers how to answer complaints about testing.

Is there too much testing? Agree, yes , there is too much testing but the new Common Core tests will solve that problem.

Whatever the complaint, answer by saying the new tests are better, the new tests are different, the new tests solve that problem. No more teaching to the test. Why ? Because the new tests are better, the new tests are different, the new tests solve that problem. Teachers want more time for creative teaching? No problem. Because the new tests are better, the new tests are different, the new tests solve that problem.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Parents, Teachers, Testing
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