Gary Rubinstein watched a panel discussion on the reform movement’s three allegedly successful turnaround districts. He reports on the discussion here. The discussion was sponsored by the Fordham Institute, which is in the forefront of the privatization movement. This is an impressive debunking of “reformer” boasts. It is especially important because so many in the media take those false claims at face value, and several states say they intend to copy one of these failed models.
Rubinstein points out that none of these highly touted examples of “reform” success are successful. New Orleans is a swamp of conflicting data, but the bottom line is that it continues to be one of the lowest performing districts in one of the lowest performing states in the nation. The Tennessee “Achievement School District” is based on a bold and wholly unrealistic pledge by Chris Barbic that he could take the lowest performing schools in the state and lift them into the state’s highest 25% in only five years. That has not happened, and it may never happen. The third speaker is from Michigan’s woeful Education Achievement Authority, which has produced numerous scandals but not much academic progress for the students.
Rubinstein uses his keen mathematical intelligence to dissect each of the reformers’ claims. In the case of the Achievement School District, he points to the slippery use of data (a common trait among all the “reform” projects):
In a very revealing moment, Barbic explains that he’s the one who came up with the bottom 5% to top 25% in five years. He could have just said bottom 5% to bottom 10% and he wouldn’t be taking such heat now, but having such an ambitious goal had a positive side effect since “It created a momentum and an urgency that we needed to create to get this off the ground” and allowed them to recruit ‘partners’ and leaders and teachers. In other words, it was a lie, but it was a worthwhile one since it tricked people into giving us their money.
Barbic makes some bizarre claims about the success so far of the ASD like that the bottom 5% ‘priority schools’ are growing ‘four times faster than the rest of the state.’ To put this in context, the rest of the state of Tennessee has had flat math scores and declining reading scores. So if the state went up, on average, of .25%, then ‘four times’ that is just 1%.
Rubinstein notes:
Watching these three turnaround gurus quote misleading statistics, give vague abstract answers, and really offer nothing in terms of concrete ideas from what they’ve learned in trying (unsuccessfully) to turnaround their respective districts, made me think that rather than call these ASDs, it would be more accurate to call them BSDs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From the article:
“Then the panel gets underway and three times I hear a new catch-phrase three times[sic]. In terms of accountability, schools that are not measuring up and teachers who are not getting the test scores they should will “lose the privilege of educating kids.” Such a nice way to say ‘get shut down’ or ‘get fired.’”
So now they are going to make our profession a ‘privilege’ instead of a job that one studies for, earns a degree in, attempts and receives certification in, and then applies for teaching jobs and gets hired to teach. BS.
This harkens back to the days when schools were run by unmarried women in poverty, religious brothers and sisters with vows of poverty, and men with families who lived in poverty because of the low wages for teachers.
Deep at the heart of this reform movement is a deep hatred of women, teachers, unions, independent thinkers, the middle class, people of color, the poor, and anything that threatens the old status quo of powerful, rich, racist old white men controlling everything. It is part and parcel of the culture wars and will be fought under that context. They are losing their grip and are squeezing ever tighter.
The ship is about to sink but they cling and insist that all is fine. I am beginning to understand that there is no way they can achieve a lasting victory here with this pathetic war against teacher, students, schools, and hippies.
I may be very old or dead when their final defeat is achieved but it will come.
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Well, he must be mistaken because I’m told they are “agnostics” just striding around with clipboards examining data.
You mean to tell me they show a preference for their privatized model over public schools? That they aren’t pure and unsullied by ideology or animus toward public schools and/ or labor unions? Nah. Such ordinary human failings would never apply to The. Best and the Brightest.
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You know what might be an interesting discussion?
Instead of the ritual smearing of public schools we could have a panel on the failures of ed reform. They have a 2 decade long record. That might go towards convincing the public this is about “data” rather than ideology and political capture.
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Great idea. It could be posted on youtube for free.
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Duane Swacker
July 6, 2015 at 10:25 am
From the article:
“I actually don’t have a problem with the idea of taking the schools that have low test scores, whatever the reason for those might be, and for creating a district where those schools get extra resources to help overcome whatever obstacles have been holding them back.”
Rubenstein should have a problem using ‘low test scores’ as any sort of ‘metric’ as those test scores are nothing more than MENTAL MATHTURBATION*, COMPLETELY INVALID as proven by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
And:
“I’d want to see the extra resources going toward wrap-around services and smaller class sizes and extra curricular activities and things like that.”
Oh, yeah, the obligatory “What should be done solution.” No doubt that we all would like that for all students who need them. The “educational problem” in the USA is a “societal problem” in that this country has far too many students who live in degraded home environments, the folks in which have little hope to ever overcome those conditions which are extended into the schools by the people in charge.
And:
“In the RSD, we learn, charters have 5 years to get from an ‘F’ to a ‘D’ and then five more years to get from a ‘D’ to an ‘C’. Even though I don’t know about the scientific validity of these letter grades, that does sound like a reasonable rate of expected progress.”
THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC VALIDITY TO THOSE LETTER GRADES.
That ‘discussion’ was an exercise in pure educational mental mathturbation* nothing more and it certainly couldn’t have been anything less.
*Thanks to SDP!
Forgot to include my Cliff Notes version of Wilson’s work:
“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. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
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.
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The earlier TFA indoctrination is hard to shake.
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you are awesome…
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A while back on this blog there was a vigorous discussion about how those for a better education for all needed to come up with short snappy comebacks to the empty but shiny clichés/selling points of the self-styled “education reform.”
At the time I applauded the effort but cautioned that genuine teaching and learning—and authentic discussions about them—do not lend themselves to such rheephorm misleads/decoys/distractors [borrowing from standardized testing terminology] as “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and “100% charter graduation rate” and “if you’re going to teach to the test, make sure it’s a test worth teaching to.”
Click on the link provided above and read the posting by Gary Rubinstein slowly and carefully. Reread if necessary. Then do the same to a posting from yesterday on this blog entitled “Bob Shepherd: The Hard Work of Teaching.”
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2015/07/05/bob-shepherd-the-hard-work-of-teaching/
Most respectfully, we can’t match—and shouldn’t feel bad about not matching— all the verbal vacuities of the beneficiaries and enforcers of corporate education reform. Productive, deep, meaningful and practical dialogues about learning and teaching and public education don’t reduce themselves to tasty little sound bites full of proven toxic failures and devoid of real substance.
What passes for heady intellectual discourse, worldly wisdom and enlightenment, and the fruits of practical experience amongst the self-proclaimed leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time”?
Again, read the posting by Gary R accessed by the link provided by the owner of this blog. Read the musings of rheephormista “thought leaders.” Inhale deeply the aromas of mental magic that produce the “right corps member mindset.” [Google Gary R’s blog for the last.]
And for the rheephorm-minded that need sweetly succinct zingers: if you must join “rheephorm” and “thinking” together in the same term—
There’s no there there. The emperor has no clothes.
Satisfied?
😎
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“…the bottom 5% ‘priority schools’ are growing ‘four times faster than the rest of the state.’ To put this in context, the rest of the state of Tennessee has had flat math scores and declining reading scores. So if the state went up, on average, of .25%, then ‘four times’ that is just 1%”
Reformese at its best. The spin in Denver from DPS superintendent Boasberg is always about DPS versus the state. Which is mostly meaningless because Colorado too showed proficiency losses of 1% In each of the three subjects while DPS slogged along with 0%, 1% and 2% changes. And these numbers include the “fabulous” charter school scores. For data driven reform, the data is only used when it can be either spun, ignored, or manipulated. But when will the people say enough?
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Agree: and if a public school had accomplished this, it would have been spun as ” they have only improved 1%”.
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and if the “growth” of the rest of the state was flat (zero), four times that would also be zero.
and if the “growth” of the rest of the state was actually negative, four times that would also be (even greater) negative growth.
Fun with math.
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What will it take for the truth to spread and win out? In Denver we have board elections in November. Students for Education Reform are already canvassing and handing out lit in the one remaining non-reformer controlled district. Ugh!
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And if the state scores were flat and your district went any amount at all, you could claim infinitely faster growth.
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The notion that anyone from Detroit’s EAA would have the chutzpah to tout Detroit as a success story tells you all you need to know about these “reform gurus.” Since taking over the city’s schools, the state-run EAA has seen debt skyrockets, financials candles multiply, and student achievement plummet. The kids and teachers in Detroit deserve to have a locally controlled school district again. The state has proved they should not be in the business of running schools. What kind of “data” do these “experts” need to finally understand how much damage they’ve done to a generation of Detroit’s children?
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