Archives for the year of: 2015
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Matt Bruenig: America’s Exceptional Child Poverty

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2015 //
41

When I was writing “Reign of Error,” I researched the proportion of children who live in poverty and learned from what seemed to be the best source (UNICEF) that the United States has the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation. Actually, UNICEF in another report says we have the second highest child poverty, second to Romania. However, I have been to Romania, and it does not belong in the same ranking with the United States, Norway, Finland, Sweden, France, the U.K., and other Western European nations. Unlike them, Romania is and has long been a very, very poor country.

Another survey by the Southern Education Fund recently found that 51% of American children live in “low-income” homes. In 40 of the 50 states, low income students comprised no less than 40 percent of all public schoolchildren. In 21 states, children eligible for free or reduced-price lunches were a majority of the students in 2013.

Recently I have noticed that apologists for America’s yawning income inequality say either that child poverty doesn’t matter (“great” teachers can overcome it) and/or that we don’t really have so many poor children. Some have even said that poverty is just an “excuse for bad teachers.”

Here is an addition to that discussion by Matt Bruenig in Demos. In this post, he ranks the advanced nations and shows that the U.S. does have an exceptional child poverty rate. It shouldn’t be necessary to explain why poverty matters. Children who are poor tend not to get medical care when they need it; tend not to have educated parents; tend to have more school absences, because of illness; tend to experience periods of homelessness. As compared to children who grow up in secure, middle-class homes, children in poverty carry many burdens not of their making. Western Europe tries to reduce poverty and to make health care and child care accessible and free.

Given the well-known correlation between poverty and low test scores, it seems reasonable to believe that the most effective way to improve school performance would be to reduce poverty.

How could we do that? Bob Herbert’s book Losing the Way suggests the answer: rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. This would create millions of jobs and improve the lives of millions of families. Or better yet, read this article in the New York Times about our collapsing bridges, tunnels, dams, and highways.

We spent 2 trillion on the wars in the Middle East in the past decade. How about spending the next 2 trillion to rebuild our country?

Categories Education Reform, Poverty

Chris Lubienski Testifies on the Meager Effects of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2015 //
11

Chris Lubienski is a Professor of Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois. He was invited to testify before a U.S. Senate committee on the subject of vouchers. The committee was considering the reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (aka vouchers). Please be aware that vouchers have never been endorsed by voters; wherever they exist, they were enacted by legislatures. Voters in Florida decisively rejected vouchers in 2012, as did voters in Utah in 2007.

Lubienski’s written testimony is here.

The video of the hearings is long. If you want to watch, it is here.

Lubienski reviews voucher research in an impartial manner. Overall, he finds that voucher schools do not produce higher test scores.

If you choose not to watch the hearings or read his testimony, here are his conclusions:

The academic impacts of vouchers on student achievement are generally lacking, and sporadic and inconsistent, at best. Even focusing only on the studies highlighted by the pro-voucher Friedman Foundation, most found no effect for the clear majority of overall and subgroup analyses. However, for both achievement and attainment, the problem is that findings of impact that do exist reflect no underlying causal logic. In the exceptional cases where researchers report an impact, they appear to have an effect for one group in one grade in one subject, but not with that same group in a different subject, or year, or in a different city — or even if examined in a different study, even by the same researchers. Indeed, the equity premise for vouchers — that private schools offer students a better educational opportunity — may be misguided, since nationally representative evidence indicates that private schools are no more effective (and often less so) than public schools 14(Braun, Jenkins, & Grigg, 2006; Lubienski & Lubienski, 2014; Reardon, Cheadle, & Robinson, 2009). So there are reasons for caution in hearing claims about the impact of vouchers. Said another way, there are better arguments for vouchers than their academic impacts.
At the same time, while we have evidence on the academic benefits (or lack thereof) of vouchers, policymakers and researchers may also need to attend to the question of potential social costs. Research points to concerns about social segregation from choice programs that may further hinder educational opportunity for disadvantaged students, relative to their more advantaged peers, even though disadvantaged students are often the intended beneficiaries of voucher policies. As the OECD noted:

“School competition can involve costs and benefits that may not be equally distributed across students. Some of the intended benefits of competition… are not necessarily related to student achievement, and must be weighed against the possible cost in equity and social inclusion. (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2014)”

Weighing the potential costs and benefits of education policies is a contentious and difficult exercise, with serious implications for individuals, schools, families, and communities. While there is an obvious appeal to interventions that may appear to be a panacea for the deep-seated problems facing urban schools, the best evidence in this case indicates that this approach is not particularly effective, and should be treated by policy makers with a reasonable degree of caution.

Categories Accountability, District of Columbia, Education Reform

Wendy Lecker: Connecticut Should NOT Use the SAT for 11th Graders

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2015 //
11

Civil rights attorney Wendy Lecker warns the state of Connecticut that it is wrong to require students in 11th grade to take the SAT  and to use it to evaluate teachers (in Hartford) and schools. Even the College Board says this is not a valid use of the SAT. The SAT is supposed to test college readiness, not whether students have learned what they were taught.

Lecker writes about a new study from the University of California that demonstrates the limitations of the SAT:

The study examined 1.1 million students from 1994-2011. It found that one-third of the variance of SAT scores could be explained by parental education, socio-economic status or status as a member of an underrepresented minority. By contrast, socio-economic factors accounted for only 7 percent of the variance in high school GPAs.
Even more stunning is that while in 1994, parental education was the strongest predictor of SAT scores, in the last four years of the study, status as a member of an underrepresented minority overtook both parental education and socio-economic status as the strongest predictor of SAT scores.

And while there is a racial gap in high school GPAs, that gap is not nearly as huge as the racial SAT gap. The study found, in ranking University of California applicants, Latinos and African-Americans comprised 60 percent of the lowest decile in SATs, but they comprised only 39 percent of the lowest decile in GPA. And while they comprised 12 percent of the top decile in GPA, they comprised only 5 percent of the top in SAT. Ranking by SAT score produces more severe racial/ethnic stratification than GPA.

The study also confirmed what three other large scale studies found: that the SAT is a poor predictor of college success.

The evidence showed that high school GPA is an accurate predictor of college completion, while the SAT is very weak.
This finding was especially true for students of color. When controlling for parental education and socio-economic status, the predictive power of the GPA increased — while the SAT’s predictive power got even weaker.

The SAT cannot determine whether a student is ready for college success. The SAT never professed to determine whether someone is “career-ready,” whatever that means.

But, as the study shows, the SAT has an adverse effect on racial minorities.So, while the SAT may be able to identify the demographic makeup of a school — and there are easier and cheaper ways to find that out — it cannot tell us a thing about the quality of the education that school provides.

If all the SAT will do is rank schools by race, why is Connecticut using it?

Categories Connecticut, Testing

WSJ Accuses Hillary of Turning Against Charters for Union Gold

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2015 //
49

This is ironic. While many readers of the blog question Hillary Clinton’s sincerity in her recent criticism of charters (all of which was true), the Wall Street Journal accuses her of selling out to Randi Weingarten. The editorial offers Eva Moskowitz’s charters as an example of charter excellence, even though they typify what Hillary was describing. I seem to recall that the owner of the WSJ, Rupert Murdoch, is a generous contributer to the Success Academy network.
Anyone who sells out would certainly find far more money on Wall Street than in the coffers of the AFT and the NEA.
The editorial says:
“Hillary Clinton has moved to the left of President Obama on trade, energy, immigration, student loans, health care and entitlements. But even we’re surprised by her latest move, which is to turn against charter schools as an engine of education opportunity.
“Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation,” Mrs. Clinton said last weekend in South Carolina. She also acknowledged that “for many years now” she has “supported the idea of charter schools,” though “not as a substitute for the public schools.”
“Well, as Mrs. Clinton used to appreciate, charter schools are public schools—albeit freed from bureaucracy and union work rules. In her 1996 memoir, “It Takes a Village,” she wrote that “I favor promoting choice among public schools, much as the President’s Charter Schools Initiative encourages.” In 2007 she told a teachers-union conference in New York that “I actually do believe in charter schools.”
“Why the sudden change? Her press assistant explained to Politico that “Hillary Clinton looks at the evidence. That’s what she did here.” Sorry, that quote is from Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.6 million-member American Federation of Teachers that endorsed Mrs. Clinton in July, 16 months before Election Day. The National Education Association followed. Unions loathe charter competition, and Mrs. Clinton is returning the favor of these early endorsements.
“If Mrs. Clinton had looked at the evidence, she’d have seen a different story about charters and “the hardest-to-teach kids.” Charters don’t exclude difficult students. Like other public schools, they aren’t allowed to discriminate. Nearly every state requires a random lottery to choose students if there are more applicants than openings. The reason some charters turn away students is that they lack the resources to accommodate every desperate family trapped in a teachers-union compound.
“Charters serve some of the most troubled students, including a higher percentage in poverty than all public schools, according to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. In urban centers in particular, charters serve mostly minority students and include more who are learning English than do public schools as a whole.
“Mrs. Clinton knows these basic facts, so she may be tapping into the recent political melodrama over New York City’s Success Academy charter schools. Founder Eva Moskowitz runs tight ships, and students who misbehave can expect the once typical response called discipline. Ms. Weingarten has been running a political and media campaign against Success Academy, though its attrition levels are lower than district averages in the Big Apple. If you want to see public schools that really don’t tolerate disruptive students, go to your average rich suburban school.”

Categories Charter Schools, Democrats, Education Reform, Funding

Marla Kilfoyle: Why I Don’t Trust #TeachStrong

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2015 //
29

Marla Kilfoyle is executive director of the BadAss Teachers Association (BATs) and a 29-year veteran of teaching.

In this post, she says that the #TeachStrong campaign is yet another effort to blame teachers instead of supporting them.

The groups aligned with #TeachStrong are recipients of Gates funding; she looks only at the last year of funding. Some of these groups have received many millions from Gates in the past.

She has her own ideas about how to improve teaching:

Here would be my humble, “teacher of 29 years in public education”, suggestion for a 5 point plan to challenge TeachStrong to do something that could actually help children and teachers.
1. Rehire the 7,000 teachers who were fired in Chicago over the last two years.
2. Return the over 7,000 teachers who lost their jobs in New Orleans after Katrina and use them to help rebuild the public school system.
2. Start to assist in the rebuilding of the Detroit Public School system and promote the return of its exiled elected school board.
3. Promote and create PUBLIC SCHOOLS with wrap around services in every community of need in America. End school closings and use teachers to set policies for schools that struggle.
4. Begin a campaign that promotes the hiring of teachers of color and an end to pushing out our veteran teachers.
5. Begin a campaign that includes all government agencies to eradicate child poverty, gentrification of neighborhoods around America, and address issues of systemic racism that not only exist in education policy but also in our communities.

I dare you to try that 5 point plan.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teachers and Teaching

AERA Issues Warning Against Use of VAM

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2015 //
20

The American Educational Research Association issued a warning against the use of value added measures for high-stakes decisions regarding educators and teacher preparation programs. The cardinal rule of assessment is that tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were created. A measure of fourth grade reading measures the student, not the teacher, the principal, or the school.

 

 

AERA Issues Statement on the Use of Value-Added Models in Evaluation of Educators and Educator Preparation Programs
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 11—In a statement released today, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) advises those using or considering use of value-added models (VAM) about the scientific and technical limitations of these measures for evaluating educators and programs that prepare teachers. The statement, approved by AERA Council, cautions against the use of VAM for high-stakes decisions regarding educators.

 

In recent years, many states and districts have attempted to use VAM to determine the contributions of educators, or the programs in which they were trained, to student learning outcomes, as captured by standardized student tests. The AERA statement speaks to the formidable statistical and methodological issues involved in isolating either the effects of educators or teacher preparation programs from a complex set of factors that shape student performance.

 

“This statement draws on the leading testing, statistical, and methodological expertise in the field of education research and related sciences, and on the highest standards that guide education research and its applications in policy and practice,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine.

 

The statement addresses the challenges facing the validity of inferences from VAM, as well as specifies eight technical requirements that must be met for the use of VAM to be accurate, reliable, and valid. It cautions that these requirements cannot be met in most evaluative contexts.

 

The statement notes that, while VAM may be superior to some other models of measuring teacher impacts on student learning outcomes, “it does not mean that they are ready for use in educator or program evaluation. There are potentially serious negative consequences in the context of evaluation that can result from the use of VAM based on incomplete or flawed data, as well as from the misinterpretation or misuse of the VAM results.”

 

The statement also notes that there are promising alternatives to VAM currently in use in the United States that merit attention, including the use of teacher observation data and peer assistance and review models that provide formative and summative assessments of teaching and honor teachers’ due process rights.

 

The statement concludes: “The value of high-quality, research-based evidence cannot be over-emphasized. Ultimately, only rigorously supported inferences about the quality and effectiveness of teachers, educational leaders, and preparation programs can contribute to improved student learning.” Thus, the statement also calls for substantial investment in research on VAM and on alternative methods and models of educator and educator preparation program evaluation.

 

Related AERA Resource:
Special Issue of Educational Researcher (March 2015)—
Value Added Meets the Schools: The Effects of Using Test-Based Teacher Evaluation on the Work of Teachers and Leaders

Categories Accountability, Research, VAM (value-added modeling)

A Note to Marc Tucker: Why I Disagree with Your Analysis of NAEP Scores

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2015 //
22

Dear Marc,

I read your latest post about NAEP scores in which you say you are taking a long view. You dismiss the disappointing results of the 2015 NAEP, which showed almost no gains and some declines. You choose instead to look at the Long-Term Trend NAEP, which has been asking identical questions since 1973. You point out that 17-year-old scores are flat since the early 1970s, which persuades you that we are in big trouble.

For readers, let me explain that there are two different versions of NAEP. The one that was recently reported is called “Main NAEP.” Its curriculum framework is updated every seven to 10 years, and the content changes. Main NAEP is offered in every state every other year, in reading and mathematics. It also periodically tests other subjects, such as history, civics, and science. It gives data for individual states for students in fourth and eighth grades, enabling anyone to compare performance from state to state. It also reports on achievement gaps among students who are white and black, white and Hispanic.

Then there is the “Long-Term Trend” NAEP. It is offered every four years. The reading LTT started in 1971, the math in 1973. Unlike Main NAEP, the content almost never changes, although items that are obsolete are deleted (the one deleted item I recall from my time on the governing board of NAEP was about S&H Green Stamps). It breaks out scores by race and gender.

Marc, you note the impressive progress made by students at ages 9 and 13, especially black and Hispanic students. But you then go on to say that at the current rate of improvement, 80% of students would not reach “proficient” for many decades, perhaps more than a century. I have to disagree with you here, because setting NAEP proficient as a goal is as unrealistic as the NCLB mandate that 100% of American students would be proficient by 2014. NAEP proficient is a very high standard; it represents a very high level of achievement. NAEP started measuring state performance in 1992, and 23 years later, Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where as many as 50% of students have reached NAEP proficient. Why set an impossible goal?

It is true that the scores for 17-year-old students have barely moved, but not for the reasons you cite. It is not that students get dumb as they reach senior year, but that they don’t give a hoot about a test that means nothing to them. When I was on the NAEP governing board, we devoted an entire meeting to discussing the problem of motivation for students at age 17 or senior year. Seniors doodled or made patterns on the answer sheets. They didn’t care what their score was because they knew the test didn’t matter. It didn’t affect their grades; it didn’t affect their college prospects. They would never find out how they did. For them, it was a meaningless exercise. The board considered ways to motivate them. Suppose we offered a pizza party to encourage students to care? Suppose we offered cash prizes? We could not agree on a solution to the problem of motivating high school seniors to take seriously a test that didn’t count.

And that is why I am not surprised or alarmed by the test scores of 17-year-old students on a test that they know doesn’t matter to them.

Categories NAEP, Testing

Arizona: No Way to Improve Education Without Paying for It

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2015 //
8

John Pedicone, who retired in 2013 as superintendent of schools in Tucson, explains to readers that education can’t improve if legislators and taxpayers are not willing to pay decent salaries to teachers and invest in the resources that schools need.

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene Takes a Closer Look at #TeachStrong

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2015 //
15

Peter Greene goes through the #TeachStrong proposals, one at a time.

 

He agrees with the first one.

 

For the other eight, it is just more of the old familiar reformster effort to remake teaching without any practical knowledge.

 

Why should there be the same entry standard for a high school teacher of physics and a teacher of first grade and a teacher of physical education?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Walton/Walmart Foundation 💜 TFA

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2015 //
22

THE union-hating Walton Family Foundation granted another $50 million to Teach for America, one of the nation’s most successful businesses. This will allow TFA to meet the needs of the charter industry, as TFA recruits are willing to work long hours and leave after 2-3 years.

93% of charters are nonunion.

Categories Teach for America, Walton Foundation
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