Whitney Tilson, a key figure in the corporate reform movement, and I have continued an exchange about teaching, charters, and the movement he represents. He was among the founders of Democrats for Education Reform and Teach for America; he is also involved in Bridge International Academies, which opens low-cost, for-profit schools in poor countries. Another in this series will appear soon. He posted this on his blog this morning. You can read it there to see my remarks are in blue; when I copied and pasted to my site, all the blue disappeared, and I didn’t have time to recolor them. My comments are marked DR, his are WT. I am engaging in this dialogue so that his readers can learn what their critics say, not filtered but straight.
From: Whitney Tilson
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2016 9:00 AM
Subject: Round 2 of my discussion with Diane Ravitch, on who’s the status quo, charter schools, and testing
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STOP THE PRESSES AGAIN!!!
My new BFF, Diane Ravitch, and I have continued our conversation and it’s gotten even more interesting, as we’ve moved past the high-level principles we mostly agreed on in our first exchange of emails (sent a couple of weeks ago and posted on her blog here and my blog here) and started engaging on the many issues on which we disagree.
Our ongoing discussion covers many topics:
1) Whether reformers are now the status quo
2) Charter schools
3) Tests and how they should (and shouldn’t) be used
4) Who is the underdog in this battle
5) The tone of the debate and our shared desire to focus more on the issues and less on personal attacks
6) The details of the Vergara case – namely, a) the amount of time it takes teachers to earn tenure; b) how difficult it is for administrators to fire a tenured teacher; and c) whether layoffs should be done strictly by seniority
Because of its length, we’ve agreed to break it into two parts: Round 2 is below and will cover the first three topics. Tomorrow we’ll release Round 3, covering the remaining three.
My original email is in italics, Diane’s comments are in blue (beginning with “DR:”), and my responses are in black (beginning with “WT:”).
Enjoy!
Whitney
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Hi Diane,
I really enjoyed our first exchange of ideas. Thank you for engaging.
Since you had the last word, the onus is on me to respond – which, frankly, makes me feel overwhelmed because we’ve already touched on so many enormously complex and difficult issues that we could spend weeks discussing just one of them.
So, I’m going to approach this following the old maxim, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I’m not going to try to respond to everything, but rather just a few things and hopefully we can build from there.
So let’s talk about two things, one high-level and one nitty-gritty: 1) tone, language and motivations; and 2) the Vergara case.
Tone, Language and Motivations
Here’s another thing we can surely agree on: we (and our allies) have far too often let our rhetoric get away from us, leading us to make ad hominem attacks rather than sticking to the issues. Randi throws kids under the bus on behalf of her members, you’re motivated by a personal vendetta against Joel Klein, I’m part of the hedge fund cabal that wants to privatize public education for our own profit, reformers are anti-teacher, etc.
Can we just stop? Please?
Let’s agree to disagree without being disagreeable. It diminishes all of us. It blinds us to the many things we agree on. And it makes it much harder to reach compromises, which are usually necessary.
No doubt there are some folks on “your side” who, for example, are more focused on more jobs, higher pay, better benefits and job security, etc. for union members than on the best interests of kids, just as there are people on “my side” who wrongly bash teachers and are more focused on earning higher profits (like the online charter school operators) or busting unions than on the best interests of kids.
But it’s been my experience and observation over 27 years (I know, I know, that makes me a rookie!) that the vast majority of people engaged in this debate are motivated not by self-interest, but by a deep passion for ensuring that all children in this country get a good education that gives them a fair shot in life.
So let’s stop the rhetoric about “defenders of the status quo” and “throwing kids under the bus” (from my side) and “the billionaire boys club that demonizes teachers and wants to privatize public education for their own profit” (from your side).
DR: Whitney, I have to stop you here, to clear the record. I know that “your side” refers to anyone who believes in public education as a “defender of the status quo,” which is frankly absurd. The “status quo” is your side. You and your compatriots have controlled the U.S. Department of Education for the past eight years (at least). You got your favorite ideas imposed on the nation via Race to the Top. You were able, through Race to the Top, to get almost every state to agree to hand off public schools to charter operators, some of whom-frankly–are incompetent and fast-buck entrepreneurs–and to agree to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students. You got whatever you wanted through Arne Duncan’s close association with your reform movement. So, yes, there is a status quo, and it consists of high-stakes testing (which American children and teachers have endured for 15 years) and privatization via charter. The charter movement has promoted free markets, competition, and consumer choice, which opens the door to vouchers, which are now found in some form in nearly half the states. Add this all up, and you have a disruptive status quo that is highly demoralizing to teachers, destroys unions, and rattles the foundations of education without improving it.
WT: I agree that we reformers were able to get some of our agenda implemented under Obama and Duncan, but completely disagree that we have become the status quo. (By the way, I know you object to the term “reformers”, but I don’t know what else to call us; if I use your preferred term, “status quo’ers”, all of our readers will be confused.) I looked it up and it’s defined as “the existing state of affairs, particularly with regards to social or political issues.”
How can the status quo be anything except the existing K-12 public educational system, which is the 2nd largest area of government spending (exceeding our military, trailing only healthcare) and by far the largest employer in the country at 7.2 million jobs (plus add 3.8 million more if you count higher ed) (per this data from the U.S. Department of Labor)?
I also disagree with your characterization of our agenda, for a variety of reasons.
DR: The existing public school system is saddled with high-stakes testing because of “your side.” It is saddled with policies like test-based evaluation of teachers because of Race to the Top (“your side”). Thousands of teachers and principals have been fired and thousands of community public schools have been closed and replaced by privately managed charters because of the policies of “your side.” Your side is in charge. Your side makes the rules and the laws. Your side demonizes teachers and public education.
WT: Charter Schools
I think high-quality charters are an important piece of the puzzle in improving our educational system. This is a topic on which I know we will forever disagree and it’s a big, complex one, so let’s agree to return to it in more depth in a future discussion – but in the meantime, if you (and our readers) would like to read my response to your critique of charters, I published an open letter to you on 12/3/10 that is posted here. Though I wrote it more than five years ago, I think it’s still quite timely.
Briefly, you always refer to them as part of an effort to privatize public education, which drives me crazy (I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear) because charter schools are public schools! They receive public funds, are often situated in public school buildings, aren’t allowed to have admissions criteria (unlike many public schools like Stuyvesant) (yes, some charters cheat; so do many regular public schools), students have to take the same state tests, etc. They are simply public schools that aren’t overseen by the central bureaucracy – rather, by a board of directors made up of private citizens – and aren’t subject to the centrally negotiated union contract. This makes them different – but they’re still public schools, ultimately accountable, directly or indirectly, to elected officials the city or state in which they’re located.
As for charters opening the door to vouchers, I think, if anything, they’re a substitute. But regardless, I generally favor both – but the devil is in the details. I share your opposition to awful for-profit online charter operators like K12, but think we should expand high-quality charters that, as I noted in our last exchange, are willing to play by the same rules as regular public schools (e.g., take their fair share of the most disadvantaged students, backfill, etc.).
DR: Charter schools are not public schools. They have private boards; they are not required to have open meetings. Their finances are opaque. They choose the students they want and push out those they don’t want. When hauled into court or before the NLRB, their defense is always the same: we are not public schools, we are not state actors, we are private corporations operating schools on a contract with government. I am convinced: they are not public schools, because they say so themselves. They are neither transparent nor accountable. They leave the neediest students to the public schools, even as they drain resources from the public schools. They weaken the public schools by cherrypicking the most motivated students, excluding the neediest students, and taking away the resources that public schools require to function well. Charter schools are harming the education of the great majority of students, who are enrolled in public schools. We had a dual school system before the Brown decision of 1954; we should not go back and recreate a new one.
It has to be a little disturbing to you to realize that your agenda for charters is shared by all the Republican governors, as well as a few Democrats like Obama, Cuomo, and Malloy. You are also allied with Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, Mike Pence, Paul LePage, Jeb Bush, and the Tea Party of North Carolina. Every Republican legislature loves charter schools, as it is an opportunity to resegregate the schools. The far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) loves charter schools and has model charter legislation which is shared with their members in every state, as well as model legislation to eliminate collective bargaining and standards for teachers.
WT: Testing
Regarding testing, we actually agree on more than I expected. I agree with your critique that we reformers haven’t implemented it very well – which has certainly helped the anti-testing crowd give us a political drubbing. I share your concerns about testing (from our last exchange a few days ago: “teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, cheating”) and agree that “they favor those who come to school with advantages,” “that most testing should be designed by the classroom teachers, not by outside testing corporations,” and that standardized tests shouldn’t be given “more than once a year.”
Where we disagree, I think, is how the tests should be used. You wrote that “standardized testing should be used only diagnostically” and that it “should not figure into…the teachers’ evaluation.”
Regarding the former, I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “only diagnostically,” but I believe that we need to use the results of standardized tests as one important measure – though not the only measure! – of how teachers, schools, districts, states, and our entire country are doing in achieving our goal of ensuring that every child gets a good education.
DR: Tests are diagnostic when they show what students know and don’t know, so instruction can be adjusted to help them do better. Today’s standardized tests have no diagnostic value. They rank students without giving any information about what they do and don’t know. Imagine going to a doctor with a sharp pain in your side. Your doctor says to you, “This is bad. You scored a 2 on a scale of 1 to 4. You are in the 30th percentile. Goodbye.” What you really want is a diagnosis. You want to know what is wrong and you want medicine that will stop the pain. Tests today are pointless and useless. All teachers learn is where their students rank, not what they need more help with.
WT: When tests show that half of black and Latino 4th graders are “below basic” readers (at least one year below grade level, often far more), this is critical information about this national disgrace. Of course it’s a separate discussion about what to do about this, which is rooted in how much of this problem is due to ineffective schools vs. other factors like poverty, but it’s critical to do the testing every year so, as a nation, we are regularly reminded of the problem, can take steps to address it, and track progress.
DR: We don’t need to test every student every year to know that kids need smaller classes and intensive help. Their teachers know that. No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year. Testing is a measure, not a treatment. If we keep pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into testing without changing conditions in the schools, we will get nowhere. Whatever we need to know about student performance can be learned from NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Performance), which tests American students every two years in reading and math and reports on state results and disaggregates scores by race, language, gender, disability, etc. The current onerous tests—lasting eight to ten hours for little children—are unnecessary.
WT: For similar reasons, it’s critical to know if the vast majority of children in a particular district, school or, yes, even classroom are, for example, reading or doing math far below grade level. I agree that it’s not necessarily a high school’s fault if, say, 90% of students are below grade level and the graduation rate is only 50% – that’s what tends to happen when students enter 9th grade three years below grade level – so the test results must be used carefully (and I know sometimes they’re not), but that’s not a reason to eliminate standardized testing or limit its uses. If there is no learning going on in an entire school – and there are, sadly, a lot of them – then we really need to know that!
DR: Be aware that 50% of students are always below grade level. That is the nature of grade level; it is a median. In any district where 80-90% are below grade level, you can be certain that there is a high concentration of poverty and racial segregation. Why assume that the teachers are bad? The root causes of low test scores are the same everywhere: poverty and segregation. What can be done to reduce those two harmful conditions?
WT: As for classroom-level data, we surely agree that it may not be a teacher’s fault if every child in her class is reading below grade level – they likely entered the class that way. But if they spend a year in a teacher’s classroom and still can’t read or do math (or whatever the subject is) better than they could at the beginning of the year, then something is wrong and we (broadly defined: the department head, principal, superintendent, parents, taxpayers, etc.) need to know that so corrective action can be taken – so, again, while it’s important to use data and test results correctly, we need the data!
DR: Your faith in standardized testing is greater than mine. I served on the NAEP governing board for seven years, and I saw questions that had two right answers or no right answers. Children have talents and skills that are not measured on these tests. We have been testing everything that moves for 15 years and we have very little to show for it. It is time to think differently. We should give more thought to how to help students and teachers and less money to measuring them. The nature of standardized tests is that they are normed on a bell curve. Half will always be below the median. If we gave drivers’ licenses that way, half the population would never get one.
WT: Now let’s turn to the issue of using standardized tests as part of teachers’ evaluations, a hugely complex and contentious issue.
I think standardized test results should be used as part (and only a small – less than 50% – part) of a teacher’s evaluation – while simultaneously acknowledging the validity of your many objections to this. Good testing should be able to measure, at least to some degree, what really matters: growth. The concept is simple: if students start the school year at a certain level, they should be at a higher level by the end of the year, so let’s measure that.
Now, before you go off on me for saying this, I’m well aware that, in practice, it’s not simple at all: tests are imperfect and results are inconsistent year to year; many subjects (like art) areas don’t lend themselves to measurement by tests; sometimes a class has more than one teacher during the year; some students move between classes; etc. I also agree that reformers could have done a better job of implementing the process of tying student test scores to teacher evaluations.
But I view these problems as good reasons why test results shouldn’t be weighted too heavily, should be based on growth/learning, not static scores, and need to be balanced by comprehensive reviews by peers and administrators – but not as reasons to completely reject using test results in teacher evaluations.
DR: Test scores should not count at all in evaluating a teacher’s performance. As three major scholarly organizations (the American Educational Research Association, the National Academy of Education, and the American Statistical Association) have said, test scores say more about who is in the class than about teacher quality. Those who teach students with disabilities, English language learners, and gifted students will not get big score increases, may see flat scores, and may still be good teachers. Those who teach in affluent suburbs may look like superstars, even though they are no better than those teaching in the inner city schools. Value-added measurement, as it is called, has not worked anywhere. It is invalid, unstable, and unreliable. A teacher may get a high score one year, and a low score the next year. A teacher may register gains in math, yet no gains in reading; does she get a bonus or will she be fired?
I think you should know that 70% of teachers do not teach tested subjects. Only 30% teach reading or math in elementary and middle school. How do we evaluate the majority? They are evaluated based on the test scores of students they don’t know and subjects they don’t teach. That’s neither fair nor rational. So it may sound simple to say that teachers should be evaluated on whether scores go up or down, but it doesn’t work for the 70% who don’t teach tested subjects and it doesn’t work for the 30% who do because they are not teaching randomly assigned and comparable students. I urge you (and your readers) to read this article by a teacher who quit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-bowers/7-reasons-you-might-not-want_b_9832490.html.
WT: It would be like evaluating basketball players without looking at points scored per game. Of course this one statistic needs to be placed in a broader context (how many shots the player takes; rebounds; assists; steals; defensive prowess; whether someone has a good attitude and enhances (or diminishes) team cohesion, etc.) – but you gotta look at it!
DR: The purpose of playing basketball is to score points and win games. The purpose of education is not to get high scores but to develop good citizens who can think and act wisely, work with other people respectfully, love learning and continue learning when school is finished. What matters most can’t be measured on a standardized test.
WT: In summary, I really fear that the anti-testing backlash will put us on the path back toward the bad old days when school systems could give poor and minority students the worst schools – and even good schools could put such students into the low-expectations classrooms with the least effective teachers – without anyone being the wiser.
DR: After fifteen years of high-stakes testing, the conditions you fear are still in place. Poor and minority students are still in the schools with the lowest test scores. The achievement gap remains stubbornly large. Testing hasn’t helped the neediest children, because their needs are not addressed by standardized tests. We keep learning the same things every year, but doing nothing to change the causes. The anti-testing backlash, led by angry parents, will continue and grow. They don’t want their children to be labeled failures in third grade. They don’t want them to spend most of their time preparing to take tests. They don’t want them sitting for tests that take longer than the law school exams. And they don’t want their teachers fired if their students don’t get high scores. Why must this be inflicted only on public schools? If private schools were required to take these unnecessary and pointless tests, the rebellion would be joined by their parents too.
Why is this guy involved with education. He is completely uninformed. He relies on folk wisdom and stereotypes to inform his opinion. It’s obvious because Dr. Ravitch is never countered with facts. Just vague tropes of, “measurement is good”. I can’t believe he never addresses Dr. Ravitch’s points. She had an excellent response to the public vs. private charter debate. He completely ignored her response and changed subjects. Why can’t he just admit he is much less informed instead of pretending this is a difference of opinion. It’s not. There is research and facts. There are right answers. He is wrong. Why can’t he admit it?
And the basketball analogy is absurd. If a player gets bad stats, the player is blamed. The coach is only called into question if the team suffers. He is also on a team with all kinds of specialty coaches, physical therapists, state of the art resources, etc. Not to mention the player is motivated by millions to work hard. You could also consider “making the team” the same as selective enrollment. And, oh yeah, he is adult too.
“It would be like evaluating basketball players without looking at points scored per game. Of course this one statistic needs to be placed in a broader context (how many shots the player takes; rebounds; assists; steals; defensive prowess; whether someone has a good attitude and enhances (or diminishes) team cohesion, etc.) – but you gotta look at it!”
Whitney accidentally revealed his real agenda. He is evaluating the PLAYERS to decide who is good and who isn’t. That’s what the reform movement is really about — sorting the good basketball players from the bad ones and privatizing the profits from fielding a winning team!
Notice Whitney did not mention that COACHES were evaluated by the statistics of their players. Because then he might have to address what we see in big time college basketball:
Coaches recruit the BEST players and cut the worst in order to win. Why? Because they are richly rewarded by winning and fired if they lose. And the NCAA does about the same “oversight” as the charter school oversight agencies. If your “program” is rich and successful, the means by which you got there are overlooked and you are considered a winner, with all the riches that involves.
And when you are caught in a lie — as long as you are “successful”, who cares? Coach K blatantly claiming that he didn’t criticize another team’s player and calling that player a liar? Who cares! He wins! He can call anyone he wants a liar as long as he wins.
“Why is this guy…?” The better question is, if financial sector people score well on tests, why don’t they contribute to American productivity, instead of dragging down GDP. The nation would be better asking the opinions of hamburger flippers, they are at least not total takers, they contribute to GDP.
Daniel,
I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think Diane and Whitney Tilson are having a back and forth debate in real time. Diane seems to be responding to points that were written by Tilson before hand.
I agree with you though, the arguments he puts forth are surprisingly uniformed. His notions about standardized tests (and every thing else) show an alarming lack of awareness of just how damaging they are to school culture.
Diane’s responses, on the other hand, have all the weight and substance of one who knows of what she speaks.
Jonathan, you are correct about the format. Whitney sent me a list of statements and questions. I responded where I thought I could clarify issues. If I can get him to stop concentrating on teachers as THE problem, that would be an accomplishment. Mostly people like us don’t communicate. I think it is a good idea or I wouldn’t do it. The biggest surprise for me was learning how thin-skinned the billionaires are.
“DR: We don’t need to test every student every year to know that kids need smaller classes and intensive help. Their teachers know that.”
The argument about testing was over at this point. When he says
“WT: For similar reasons, it’s critical to know if the vast majority of children in a particular district, school or, yes, even classroom are, for example, reading or doing math far below grade level.”
he is incorrectly assuming, tests will inform about the issues he mentions—which Diane already pointed out before.
He just failed a test in elementary logic. Since he does this repeatedly during the conversation, we can safely give him the failing grade. 🙂
@Daniel, I completely agree that facts and research matter. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why people generally believe that they can maintain strong opinions about education–without actually reading the research and considering experts’ knowledge.
To put it in more concrete terms, if I have an injury, I might have an opinion about its cause or a remedy to address it. I am not a medical doctor or biomedical researcher. Therefore, my opinion, hopefully, should be taken with a serious grain of salt when compared to the studied, hard-earned knowledge of expert doctors and scientists. I would hope that I would revise my opinion after consulting with those who have more specialized, considered knowledge. RIght?
But in education, everyone considers themselves an expert–despite the fact that most opinions about how teaching and learning happen are proven, popular myths, unsupported by cognitive, sociocultural, and learning sciences. I wish we could, culturally, somehow restore our collective faith and trust in people and institutions that have proven expertise in given areas. The zeitgeist is one of abject distrust, and I wonder what we could do to resist it and rebuild trust.
One myth that particularly vexes me, as a math education researcher and someone with decades of pure mathematics study under my belt, is the myth that math is a “testable” subject. Sure, a narrowly-framed, inauthentic type of mathematics is testable. But the type of mathematics that real mathematicians do, professionally, is much less easily tested. And true mathematics study is *not* transactional–i.e., follow this recipe given by the teacher, rinse, and repeat. So-called “growth” on standardized tests, does not measure increased depth of understanding; instead, it represents time devoted to memorization-without-context–the lowest form of cognitive activity, and generally unnecessary in today’s economy. (We need thinkers, not human calculators; we lose, every single time, in a contest with a computer or calculator.)
Instead, most people continue to defend, defend, defend ill-considered stances on topics about which they know very little. It’s personal to them, too. Critiquing ill-considered, afactual opinions is considered the ultimate personal insult in today’s society. Of course, these ill-considered stances are those that tend to align with folks’ overall world-view on how things work, and so we will need to do more uprooting of problematic world-views to address misconceptions that are layered on top.
As I frequently pointed out to my students, and am shocked I must point it out here, that student’s skills may improve but their scores may go down in comparison to others. Learning is not incremental but Exponential. Therefore, they must do more than learn, They must catch up and surpass students who are in the group ahead of them to shift the curve. They must become superior to the future average, forcing those with the highest scores down. Am I wrong? Doesn’t WT realize that high scoring students may have known almost everything on the test before the school year started? From my own experience, I know that from reading a wide variety of classical and popular literature from many time periods led to higher scores on tests. Deep vocabulary and ability to manage multiple levels of sentence structure are essential to test taking skill. Both are developed by high exposure to the language used in tests.
Whitney Tilson is like Sgt. Schultz.
He knows exactly who pays his salary, and if those people support a certain kind of prominent no-excuses charter school with extraordinary high suspension rates (over 20%) for low income minority 5 year old children, then by golly he is NOT going to say a word against it.
Look over here! Kids aren’t doing well in public schools! I support the charter schools that don’t want to educate those kids because they get darn good results by keeping them out!
But hey, those for-profit people running on-line charter schools are NOKD. I’m delighted to offer them a bit of criticism as long as none of my billionaire funders object.
And if other “non-profit” charters get their results by treating low-income kids like criminals, then Whitney Tilson will take their word that those kids are psychologically disturbed. After all, no one can “prove” that they aren’t!
I wonder if Mr. Tilson is sitting in his office shocked — shocked! — that any highly paid exec at Success Academy could have the ethics to leak documents. He probably never met anyone with real principles that weren’t checked at the door in exchange for the largesse of billionaire funders.
“No doubt there are some folks on “your side” who, for example, are more focused on more jobs, higher pay, better benefits and job security, etc. for union members than on the best interests of kids.”
Of for the love of pizza. You complain about “tone” and “insults” and then you come up with this?? Do you not understand how working conditions for teachers *are* learning conditions for students? You think teachers teach well when they can’t provide for their own families? When they’re worried about bad (unfair) evaluations and/or getting terminated? Why do you think we have unions in the first place? If management were known to treat employees fairly so that teachers could go on teaching in relative security, there wouldn’t be any unions – it’s not like union members like handing over a portion of their salary, y’know.
I haven’t made it any further than that yet, but if he’s going to be this disingenuous, he can forget about “tone”, he’s going to get “insulted”.
You can add to the litany of insults in the profession since our economic meltdown in 2008. Teachers do not get golden parachutes; many teachers can barely survive on their diminished wages. Most states have continued to cut school budgets while the number of students living in poverty has increased. This is not a recipe for success!. Testing as Diane stated is a form of measurement, not a program that will improve outcomes. http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/most-states-have-cut-school-funding-and-some-continue-cutting
Dienne: that jumped out at me too.
So a well-off guy that hangs out with other well-off folks can’t understand that when people work really hard at a really difficult & critical job they would like to be paid well, treated with respect, get good benefits, etc.?
While I much appreciate the efforts of the owner of this blog, it appears that Mr. Tilson is sincerely insincere.
Or at least sincerely ill-informed.
And it absolutely floors me when he writes “standardized test results should be used as part (and only a small – less than 50% – part) of a teacher’s evaluation”—he does realize that 50% is half, right? So if standardized test scores for a teacher’s eval were to count for “only” 45% then that’s “only a small…part”?
😱
I have other comments below.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Mr. Tilson may be pleasant and may be earnest.
But he is horribly misinformed — either by the company he keeps or by deliberately blocking valid information. VAM as a “small” component — no more than 50%! — is still absurd while the VAMs themselves remain incapable of isolating teacher input from all other variables. The bulk of the research and of the academic community is clear enough. Perhaps someday VAMs will have both the formulas and tests to work as advertised, but that day is not now.
Daniel,
I don’t believe VAM will ever work as advertised unless children are taught by robots. Actually, even when they are taught by computer,the outcomes still vary, possibly in the same ways as with human teachers, because the predominant influences on test scores are outside the classroom and the school.
I certainly won’t be holding my breath waiting for the perfect – or even very good – VAM system!
He isn’t in earnest.
If the reformers believed in VAM so much, they can institute VAM in every charter school in the USA and compare one charter school’s teachers against another. Every charter could immediately fire the teachers with low VAMs, just like Whitney wants them to do.
NOTHING is stopping them from doing this and showing us how well it works. Why is Whitney so desperate to convince public school parents that this is the way to go instead of SHOWING us. Start now. Instead of using those millions for PR, advertising, and rallies get one of the funders who can donate $35 million in one night to donate a measly $5 million to compare the VAM of teachers in every charter school. No unions or pesky public school parents to stop you. Make them public! I want to know what charter schools hire the teachers with the best VAMs, and Whitney should want that too.
We are calling your bluff. Show us your teacher rankings in all the charter schools in America. Show us how VAM works to weed out the terrible teachers in charter schools. If you don’t have the courage of your convictions, then please shut up already.
Can I add something?
DFER and ERN board members should send THEIR kids to those schools too.
I don’t even care if reformers’ kids attend those schools.
What I do care about is calling their bluff. Calling out their dishonesty.
Whitney Tilson claims to HONESTLY believe in VAM. He believes in it. So he should prove it by ranking every single charter school teacher according to their VAM, and making sure the public knows which charters are neglecting to fire their low performing teachers.
He is such a dishonest man and it astonishes me he gets away with it. I want to know why he is so desperate for public schools to embrace it before his beloved charter schools have shown us all how well it works.
Can you imagine the outcry if so-called low-performing charters like KIPP in NYC were bashed and told to fire all their teachers because they teach the “same kids” as Success Academy but just have such inept teaching that they fail miserable with most of them?
Right now, the low-performing charters have an unspoken agreement. You can average in our low attrition rates to hide the huge number of at-risk kids who disappear from high performing charter schools. But in exchange you can’t do a direct comparison and tell us we are failures. You will donate (a much smaller) amount of money to us. And you will promise never to bash our terrible test scores as long as they are slightly better than the very worst of the worst public schools.
Diane, please ask Whitney why charters are not ranked according to VAM teachers so folks like him can demonstrate for us how well it works. I want to see how many of their teachers are fired.
Diane, the next time would you ask him to tell us specifically how the ed reform movement has improved EXISTING public schools?
I’m not interested in the political spin from the Obama Administration on how high school grad rates are up because high school grad rates are supposed to go up- surely they weren’t intending to bring them down.
From the ground it looks to public school parents that ed reform means 1. less funding for public schools, and, 2. more mandates for public schools.
I’ve had 3 thru the same public school system and now have my 4th going thru and I am at a complete loss to show you how ANY of this has “improved” our public school.
We have less funding, more testing and narrowed offerings and that’s after 2 terms of Bush and 2 terms of Obama and John Kasich- ed reformers all. Can ed reform defend that? Why aren’t public schools doing better under their leadership?
Great point. If reform is doing such an amazing job. since he values testing so much, how does Mr. Tilson explain the drop in NAEP scores? Shouldn’t we all be reaping the benefits of “reform” by now?
WT misses or ignores some important key facts. The traditional public education system is not an industry like the auto industry or the status quo as he defines it, because it is divided up between 50 states and the U.S. territories in addition to being divide up into more than 15,000 community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit school districts that reflect the diverse cultural beliefs and demographics of the local communities. And PROFESSIONAL teachers are not vacuum cleaners that are turned on only when they are needed to clean. Those teachers often live in or close to the communities they teach in and reflect the same cultural values as the families of the children they teach.
I taught for thirty years in California’s traditional public schools, and it was not my experience that the teacher unions controlled curriculum and even the number of hours a teacher worked at his or her job.
Curriculum often comes down through the political process from Washington DC, state capitals, elected district school boards, etc and curriculum is often as diverse as the number of states, school districts and tradition schools in this country. Even in the same school district, individual schools teaching the same grades often are different because of site administration.
Compared to often micromanaged corporate America where the rules of how to work and operate are spelled out in great detail in contracts, traditional public schools are extremely diverse in the way they deliver education to our children. And each teacher often approaches how they teach depending on the students in each class they teach. For instance, in one class, the same teacher might teach the same lesson different than another class on the same subject and grade level based on the diverse make up of students in the class and the needs of those students as a dynamic, unique group.
Corporations often treat all their customers the same but in a classroom, most teachers work with students on an individual basis depending on that child’s learning strengths and weaknesses. That’s how I taught and I know for a fact that is how most PROFESSIONAL teachers also do it. Children are individuals and not a product for corporations to profit off of. Children are not a McDonald’s Big Mac rolling off of its corporate controlled food assembly line.
In addition, how have our traditional public schools failed when America is ranked #4 in the world compared to about 200 countries for the ratio of college graduates in a job market that has almost 3 college grads fore very job that required a colelge education.
The evidence strongly concludes that the traditional public schools ave been outperforming with steady improvement then under performing as the for-profit, autocratic and often fraudulent corporate public education reform movement alleges.
“…but I believe that we need to use the results of standardized tests as one important measure – though not the only measure! – of how teachers, schools, districts, states, and our entire country are doing in achieving our goal of ensuring that every child gets a good education.”
Is Mr. Tilson aware that even the testing companies themselves say (quietly and in very fine print) that their tests can’t be used for those purposes?
Bless you, Diane, it really is nauseating working through this – I’m impressed you have the stomach for it. Personally, I’d feel cleaner taking a bath in the Chicago sewer system than reading his disingenuous faux olive branch.
Dienne: while Mr. Tilson may object to your “tone” you are simply stating, soberly and without under- or over-statement, what the testing companies themselves admit—albeit in very small letters.
If he were truly interested in educating himself about just the topic of the reality of the uses, misuses, and abuses of standardized testing, then here are a few comments from a dozen years back that precede his very recent self-revelations:
1), “The biggest problem with the NCLB Act is that it mistakes measuring schools for fixing them.” [Linda Darling-Hammond, p. 9]
2), “1. How many schools will NCLB-required testing reveal to be troubled that were not previously identified as such? For the last year or so, I have challenged defenders of the law to name a single school anywhere in the country whose inadequacy was a secret until yet another wave of standardized test results was released. So far I have had no takers.” [Alfie Kohn, p. 86]
3), “School people are no fools. Tell them what they will be measured on and they will try to measure up. What this has meant for the curriculum and the school day is that test preparation crowds out much else that parents have taken for granted in their schools.” [George Wood, p. 42]
From MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND: HOW THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT IS DAMAGING OUR CHILDREN AND OUR SCHOOLS (2004, Deborah Meier and George Wood, eds.).
Of more recent vintage is Anthony Cody, THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH (2014), chapter 22, “Bill Gates and the Cult of Measurement: Efficiency Without Excellence,” last paragraph, p. 146:
“Measurement and standardization delivers efficiency without excellence. When this becomes the driving force in a marketized education system, it both fosters conformity and channels innovation towards commercially viable solutions for those unable to purchase the sort of personalized education the wealthy choose for their own children. Measurement in education will not serve the poor. It will merely make the schools attended by the poor more efficient in preserving their poverty.”
Both the above works are inexpensive slim paperbacks. Surely someone of Mr. Tilson’s considerable means could afford them?
😎
Remember Dienne, they have to wory about being co-defendants, Mr. Tilson can continue being a hedge fund oligarch. In court the testing companies are under oath not under delusion. Reality is not impressed with what one thinks should be true.
Here’s an example of the really super-productive dialogue in ed reform, coming from the Daddy of ed reform himself, Jeb Bush:
“In May 2013, he said the following in a keynote speech at the Mackinac Policy Conference in northern Michigan:
Our governance model includes over 13,000 government-run monopolies run by unions.”
Jeb’s talking about my son’s school there, run by an elected board and local people who also send their children to public schools. Apparently they’re all enemies of education.
They’d be surprised to find that out, since they work in the schools where their own children go to school and most of them went to public schools themselves.
This is the “centrist” wing of the “movement”, by the way. Jeb Bush is the “movement” standard-bearer for seriousness and civility and he’s supposedly “an agnostic”
Who are we kidding with this? He’s anti-public school. Why would I hire this person? Are public school parents expected to PAY people who say this stuff?
In the subject of education, Jeb Bush represents total privatization and replacement of teachers by computers. His funders are tech giants.
“WT: In summary, I really fear that the anti-testing backlash will put us on the path back toward the bad old days when school systems could give poor and minority students the worst schools”
Like that’s not already what’s happening with rephorm? Ay, ay, ay.
Anyway, it’s not worth my time to respond further to someone so out of touch (Whitney, of course, not Diane).
But, Diane, if you haven’t already read it, get yourself a copy of Thomas Frank’s LISTEN LIBERAL. It explains people like Tilson and why the Democrats now pander to people like him rather than listening to the people.
Whitney Tilson is clueless, he repeats the talking of the charter industry. He appears to enjoy the limelight of “conversing” with someone much better informed than he is.
Tilson refuses to accept responsibility for investing in failed concepts, and perpetuates the lie that charter schools are public schools. They are not. They are publicly subsidized private schools operating on the pretense of being the new champions of civil rights. He has no discernible moral center, otherwise he would not take pride in propagating KIPP and other segregated charter schools or in colonizing Africa and other nations with the for-profit chain of Bridge schools.
Tilson’s measurements for success, in light the top ten hedge fund guys taking home $10 bil. in a year, while dragging down GDP by an estimated 2%, would be interesting to hear.
The value in this “debate” is that it so effectively exposes the vast ignorance of Whitney Tilson and his sense of entitlement to be a “reformer” as a result of 27 years of observation! What qualifies him to a debate with DR? His wealth and social capital and consequential power? Certainly not his knowledge, experience, or wisdom.
Tilson, like all the so-called reformers, is being disingenuous when he bemoans the name-calling that he projects on to his opponents.
If these people had not spent years (yes, years) attacking and scapegoating teachers and their unions, then perhaps they’d receive a more temperate response.
If they had not spent years (yes, years) attacking our working conditions, professional autonomy, wages and pensions, perhaps we’d have less distrust and contempt for them.
If they had not spent years (yes, years) blaming us for the poverty that blights our students lives (and which the so-called reformers profit mightily from, poverty pimps that they are), perhaps we’d give their bad faith proposals more than the back of our hand.
But they have never treated teachers, students or parents with respect. Despite their insipid and duplicitous rhetoric, and their record of vicious failure is there for all to see.
He sounds like the Republicans who don’t like to get called out on their lies. Whitney Tilson says some of the most disingenuous things but if you actually point it out, he becomes offended and says you are being “mean”. It worked well for the right wing and cowed the Democrats into shutting up. Obviously Mr. Tilson and his buddies thought it would work on suburban parents, too. And people who cared about at-risk kids. And anyone who thinks that people who have to mislead the public are probably in it for themselves.
I want him to demand VAM for all charter schools and I want to see a ranking of how charter school teachers stack up against another. When he shows me how well it works, I might embrace it for public schools.
He sounds like a Republican because he is a right wing conservative in denial. Democrats are supposed to be progressive. That means you’re supposed to care about the oppressed, like the special needs children subjected to high stakes tests, the children of immigrants separated from their peers… DFERs are NOT Democrats — unless they’re running candidates for office in blue states.
And by the way, I cannot address all the insulting hypocrisy this bozo spews. He gives me a splitting headache.
We do not need standardized tests to tell us what we already know. Kids growing up in poorer areas do not perform as well. If Tilson thinks tests are going to correct this, he’s incredibly naïve. Ohio had the Supreme Court rule several times education funding was inequitable. The legislature just ignored them. If the judicial branch had no effect, 30 multiple choice questions don’t stand a chance. Besides, with the unfair teacher evaluation systems, no one wants to now teach in impoverished areas or take on challenging students. It is career suicide.
Instead of the basketball analogy for using tests to rank teachers, a better one would be the silliness of holding police accountable for crime rates or maybe firing all those bad doctors treating ailing patients. The tests are so far removed from the reality of the classroom, teachers see them as time wasters and just go through the motions. I don’t even read my state rankings. In the trash they go.
Tilson is amazingly out of touch with reality. I doubt he can honestly ever see the damage Reformers have caused.
Diane would undoubtedly have better luck convincing the Whitney who invented the cotton gin (who is long dead, of course)
What if an egomaniacal guy (college drop out), wanted to create a competitive game for himself? He saw among the richest 0.1%, two brothers (arrogant MIT grads), who were taking a bashing, as oligarch political spenders for privatization of common goods. To prove he’s the smartest guy in the room, he targets the most essential and entrenched common good- public education (the fact that it’s a profit bonanza for his firm, makes it ideal). To make the game challenging, he makes two rules. First, he has to end up with a PR image of altruism, besting the brothers. And second, the game/plot has to be documented, with accessibility to all, e.g. internet lists of funding and articles in philanthropic publications, again besting the furtiveness of the brothers’ schemes.
Two subset wins are, proving (1) the corruptibility of the “party of the people” and, (2) the gullibility of liberals.
Tilson et. al. are just “me to’s”, not even bit players, in the game.
“The Billionaire’s Burden” (based on
“The White Man’s Burden”, by Rudyard
Kipling”)
Take up the Billionaire’s burden,
Send forth the tests ye breed
Go bind your schools to test style,
To serve his market’s need;
The weight of heavy VAMness,
On captive folk and mild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half teacher and half child.
Take up the Billionaire’s burden,
In patience to abide,
To veil the scheme for teach-bots,
The prime intent to hide;
With coded speech of Orwell,
You really must take pains
To make a hefty profit,
And see the major gains.
Take up the Billionaire’s burden,
The public schools to fleece—
Fill full the days with testing
And Common Core disease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end that you have sought,
Destroy the Opt-out movement
Lest work be all for naught.
Take up the Billionaire’s burden,
A tawdry rule of Kings,
The toil of IT keeper,
The sale of software things.
The data ye shall enter,
On privacy to tread,
To make a “decent” living,
Until they all are dead.
Take up the Billionaire’s burden
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought he us from bondage,
From stupid blissful night?”
Take up the Billionaire’s burden,
Ye dare not stoop to less—
So fulminate ‘gainst Apple
To cloak your Siri-ness;
And strategize in whispers,
For all ye leave or do,
Or silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh Diane on you!
Take up the Billionaire’s burden,
Have done with childish ways—
The Kindergarten playing,
The test-less former days
Come now, to join Reform-hood,
The pride of Duncan years
Cold, edged with Gates-bought wisdom,
The plan of Billionaires!
I love it when you do the classics.
“Can we just stop? Please?”
Umm, NO, I can’t! This Show Me State rural resident tells it like I see it and many times in reference to Tilson’s side I see bullshit and horse manure and it needs to be called out for what it is.
I’d be happy to tone down my anger and fear, Tilson. Could you put down that gun you’re pointing at my head first?
I would stop giving this extreme, right-wing reactionary a platform. Aside from being profoundly ignorant, he is highly manipulative, and is using this opportunity to expose his vile agenda to a broader audience. Outside of his little circle of self-congratulatory billionaires, who really cares what some hedge fund manager thinks. On the other hand, Professor Ravitch is a highly regarded researcher and scholar, who is read by millions. Posting Tilson’s manifestos here only helps his cause, and given the resources he and his fellow privatizers have, is help he shouldn’t get.
Robert, I disagree. I like the clash of ideas. We see his perspective in the mainstream media every day. Time for the billionaires to read a different perspective.
With all due respect, I am with dianeravitch on this one.
This exchange does not extend Mr. Tilson’s reach: the heavyweights and leading enforcers of self-styled “education reform” have a near monopoly on the MSM and official sources of information.
IMHO, one of things it does is put the views of the two participants into the sort of juxtaposition where one can more accurately gauge the power and reach of their respective ideas and arguments. This greatly disfavors rheephorm words and deeds.
I applaud (without reservations) Mr. Tilson for entering into such a dialogue, but he is a very rare exception. For example, the few times that the owner of this blog was on MSM panels (at least since the start of this blog in April 2012) she would be outnumbered 2 or 3 or 4 to 1, with the moderator openly siding with the rheephorm-minded panelists and making sure she was there only to give the appearance of “fairness” and “balance.” And then there were the times that such luminaries of rheephorm as Michelle Rhee [Johnson] actually fled from such back-and-forth even when it was partly set up.
As I see it, there’s a very good and simple reason for this: there’s no advantage for the chief beneficiaries and promoters of corporate education reform in such open and direct conversations. All that can happen is that they can be shown to be, at best, naive and unwitting participants in the displacement/replacement/destruction of public schools and in the construction of a dual education system that actively favors the few and actively disadvantages the great majority.
Yes, the above reflects my own understanding of the issues. But as my comments elsewhere on this thread show, certain points on which I think Mr. Tilson is correct are borrowed—albeit unwittingly and very late and without acknowledgement—from others that predicted over a decade ago what the “strange fruit” of corporate education reform would bring forth.
To conclude: many of the best arguments against self-proclaimed “education reform” are those advanced by its most fervent promoters and backers. The problem is getting them to actually engage in a real, not rheeal, conversation.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: “Diane Ravitch’s blog A site to discuss better education for all.”
As Dienne reminds us elsewhere on this thread, there’s some [unseen] fine print: Keeping it real. Not rheeal.
Again, respectfully, that’s the way I see it.
😎
“By the way, I know you object to the term “reformers”. . .”
Whitney, I got just the term for you “edudeformers and privateers”. Use it as often as you wish. I don’t have it copyrighted.
“WT: Testing”
Translation:
“Time to change the subject as she just pulled my intellectual pants down around my ankles” “(and don’t tell anyone that I’m not wearing any intellectual underwear)”
“Regarding the former, I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “only diagnostically,” but I believe that we need to use the results of standardized tests as one important measure – though not the only measure! – of how teachers, schools, districts, states, and our entire country are doing in achieving our goal of ensuring that every child gets a good education.”
Ay ay ay ay ay. Tilson can’t figure out the difference between a diagnostic test and a high stakes standardized test??? Wow!!!
And obviously Tilson doesn’t know that it is unethical to use the results of a test for any other purposes than for which it was designed. 5th grade math test results are meant to determine a students capabilities in 5th grade math cannot logically nor ethically be used to assess the teacher’s abilities to impart that 5th grade math. Simple “Teaching Ethics 101”. But then again perhaps my expectations are too high for someone who has never been certified to teach nor has taught in a k-12 classroom and is spouting horse manure about the teaching and learning profession.
Stay with investing Boy Whitney! Leave education to us pros!
God do I need to continue reading his blather??
“WT: When tests show that half of black and Latino 4th graders are “below basic” readers (at least one year below grade level, often far more), this is critical information about this national disgrace.”
Well that statement maybe about half true and the intended meaning by Tilson of “national disgrace” is wrong. The correct interpretation of “this national disgrace” is the fact so many children come to school from impoverished homes. That impoverishment due to the economic system that Tilson has so greatly benefited from at the expense of those poor.
Okay, I’ll be fair to poor widdle Whitney and jump on Diane for this:
“Testing is a measure, not a treatment.”
NO!, No testing is a “measure”. It is an assessment, an evaluation, a judgement but there is no measuring of anything going on. (see upcoming book for a full explanation on the abuse of the English language by edudeformers and educators alike).
One of these days my pleadings to Diane about this mis-usage of the English language will hopefully sink in.
What took you so long, Duane? I was gritting my teeth every time testing was equated with measuring! This man is singularly uninformed for someone who prides himself on so many years of involvement with education policy. This format of Diane responding to his statements makes him appear rude as well as ignorant since the format is not designed for a back and forth. I am trying to be fair, but there is no evidence that he has done much more than reiterate talking points which he is unable to back up with hard facts. “Where’s the beef?”
Some more solace for Whitney:
Diane wrote:
“Whatever we need to know about student performance can be learned from NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Performance)”.
NO!, No we can’t. NAEP suffers all the errors, falsehoods and psychometric fudges identified by Noel Wilson in 1997 that proves the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of any results, or as he says the results are “vain and illusory”.
Vain (adj.) producing no result; useless, having no meaning or likelihood of fulfillment.
and
Illusory (adj.) based on illusion; not real.
(Definitions from google dictionary are are intended for Whitney’s benefit)
“Whatever we need to know about student performance can be learned from NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Performance)”.
I agree with Diane. If we disaggregate the data we see certain patterns that seem to repeat themselves with each administration. What conclusions we draw from the data is where the mistakes are made. As you say, Duane, we are not measuring anything, but we can try to make some predictions about what the data may mean and see if we can support those assumptions with other information that preferably includes a healthy dose of qualitative/observational data. Our assessments can be used to help make policy decisions and plan programs that address weaknesses we suspect. Unfortunately, testing has been seen as some sort of secret sauce that if we just do enough of it, will lead to a renaissance, in what I’m not sure.
The principle of crap in crap out or garbage in garbage out applies equally to the NAEP as all other educational standardized testing since any results from an error filled process are invalid.
So you agree with Diane to use garbage as the basis for those predictions? Sorry, 2o2T but it doesn’t cut it in my book (literally-ha ha).
I would like to know who in this and similar debates is ready to take responsibility for the result of education. Many teachers are ready to assign responsibility to the student: “if he does not pass he test he fails”. Others want to put the blame on poverty: ” of course they cannot learn, they are poor”. Still others want to blame the teachers and schools: “I fail to see how anyone can defend propping up a failing school with more money”.
Enough of all that. let us come to the table and have the real debate about
Sorry. The school wifi reacted to a thunderstorm and I lost my corrections. We need to have a debate about where we will put responsibility. Not blame. When parents and community share responsibility, schools are generally successful. Otherwise we have to develop another successful model. The wealthy farm their children out to schools that take the place of parents. These utopian experiments cost fantastic amounts and some do great work. Go figure. Who is going to finance that?
To continue his sports analogy, Whitney needs to pick up his jock because he just got schooled.
Even though the pre-arranged format is awkward, at some point Whitney needs to address Diane’s specific points or else loose all credibility. What about the fact that NAEP already shows a school’s relative health and thus eliminates the need for duplicate tests? What about the fact that PARCC and Smarter Balanced yield less specific information than teacher-designed tests?
NAEP doesn’t give scores for individual schools. It gives scores for all states and 20 urban districts
I honestly don’t think he understands that curved tests guarantee half of kids will be below grade level because “grade level” is a median…And that all standardized tests are curved. Of course there is a profit-driven contingency of reformers. And they are at the helm. But could a deep lack of understanding of the nature of the curve be what fuels support of reform by otherwise well intentioned people?
Could the “our schools are failing” narrative look logical to those who might otherwise oppose reform based simply on not understanding that it isn’t POSSIBLE for all students to be at or above grade level based on the tools used to “measure” it?
Frustrated Mom,
I think our exchange reveals that reformsters are uninformed about basic facts about education. Like the fact that grade level is a median. That the fact that the standardized tests are normed on a bell curve and the bell curve never closes
Not quite FM.
The bell curve is just the start. Reformsters can set the vertical pass-fail line (cut score) anywhere they want. How else do you think that Pearson produced a nearly identical 3 year failure rate in NYS at close to 70%. Its not luck and its not magic. Its called giving the customer what they paid for.
Yes, in Bloomberg’s early term, the powers that be wanted to show improvement and the cut score was lower. Then the powers that be realized that in order to give charter schools public support, they needed to show failure. Thus the cut score went higher.
Then the powers that be wanted to convince suburban parents — college educated whose kids were much cheaper to teach — to run away from public schools and embrace the privatization movement. So they decided to make the tests ambiguous to ensure that many of their kids would be deemed failures. Instead, what was deemed a failure was the value of the test!
Thus those same people can’t backtrack fast enough. They don’t have any ethics but their money definitely makes them smug.
^^^I want to add something. The ONLY reason the faux “reformers” can get away with a state test cut score that shows so many students are “failures” is because private school students don’t take this test. Can you imagine if every child at schools like Trinity and Collegiate and Horace Mann was forced to take the NY State tests? When some number of them were found to be “below standards”, how quickly would that cut score be changed?
About as quickly as those schools suddenly decided that their kids were too good for the AP exams (wouldn’t want to find out that the bottom half of the class couldn’t pass one) or the SATs were re-designed so that they could convince them that their score still puts them in a mythical 99%.
Every time a reformer criticizes the opt out movement, I want someone to ask why their billionaire funders keep sending their own kids to schools that opt out of taking the exact same tests — which any private school could administer if they didn’t find them so worthless. When it comes to their own kids, they have every excuse in the book for why there is no need for their own kids to be tested except by a specially designed test that makes sure 100% of them are above average.
The Columbia Teachers College paper (Wohlstetter), funded by the Waltons/John Arnold, lists three criteria for the success or failure of charter schools. The 3rd and, final characteristic is “quality”.
The first two are “political support” and “policy environment”. Tilson wouldn’t be talking about “quality”, if his opponents hadn’t gained traction in the political area.
Congratulations to all of the parents, students, public school advocates, etc., for their
success against hedge fund and Silicon Valley barbarians, who scheme to take the taxpayers’ money, that is intended for kids.
Speaking of testoitis infecting the world: I just saw this on FB (my main source of wisdom college readiness information)
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21698679-europes-top-performing-school-system-rethinks-its-approach-helsinking
I wish I didn’t read past the opening paragraph.
THERE are no cars in the car park at Hiidenkivi Comprehensive School; most pupils walk or cycle to school. Inside they sit at tables of four in groups of mixed abilities. They have a say in what they learn and where: many work slouched against a wall in the corridor. Tests are rare. Lunch is free. The youngest pupils go home by noon with little or no homework.
It was tweeted by Sahlberg himself
Hello to y’all from Helsinki airport!
Gates’ money make its way to Finland?
I agree with most of all the comments. I appreciate Mr. Tilson for making the effort to engage in dialogue even if awkward as the format is. What we really need to do is figure out how to change people’s minds who believe as Mr. Tilson does. Pointing out how clueless etc he is doesn’t help. What is one step, one idea, one concept that we can get him and others like him to change, rethink? In other words how are we going to win this war if we don’t engage in the debate with those who think differently from us?
While I agree with your sentiments, “engaging in debate” with many reformers is like trying to engage in debate with Donald Trump. One side tries to offer facts, and the other side doesn’t have any interest in facts.
The few reformers that might be possible to debate are the ones who have pronounced that there is noting wrong with charter schools being for the strivers and kicking out the non-strivers who can’t make the grade. At least they are acknowledging facts and don’t mind acknowledging the failure of the privatization movement to educate many at-risk kids and their subsequent abandonment of feeling any obligation to try.
Other people – and Tilson seems to be among them — aren’t really interested in debate and they are far too lazy to read seriously about the issue. They have their talking points and they most want to please the billionaires who underwrite their lifestyle. They don’t want to know too much because if they address the facts, they may say something that displeases the people whose respect that are so desperate to gain. They are like fawning toadies and it’s actually pretty embarrassing to watch them. I can just imagine someone like Whitney Tilson running into some of the billionaires he is so proud to know: “didn’t I do good with Diane Ravitch?” like a puppy begging his master to throw him a bone. He seems to have enough money not to have to be such a toadie — I wish he’d grow up already.
“What we really need to do is figure out how to change people’s minds who believe as Mr. Tilson does. ”
They have to change this “My position is …”, “I believe ….”, “In basketball …” subjective, irrelevant talk to objective talk “10 years of research involving 10K teachers and 1 million kids show …”, “Other countries, relying on a hundred year experience…”.
Education is not business, not politics, not sport, not religion. What works in those has no relevance in teaching and learning.
In education, sweeping change—especially fast change—is not good, not justified; in fact, cannot be justified.
I teach English in Massachusetts. English is a tested subject, but it is only tested in the 10th grade (in high school, of course students are tested before they reach high school). I teach 9th and 11th grade so none of my students are tested when I teach them, so there are no test results that can be linked directly back to me. There are nine teachers in my department (we are a small school in an academically struggling community) and only two of them teach 10th grade. That means that of the nine teachers, 22% can be linked directly to the test. These teachers can get students past the test ten or more years running, but as soon as they do not get every student through they are under the gun. This is hardly fair. I would expect this is true in most districts. So Diane Ravitch points out only 30% of teachers teach subjects that are tested, what percentage of that 30% of teachers can actually be connected directly to a test. I suppose that is what things like VAM are supposed to take into account, but there isn’t agreement as to their reliability or on the “values” being measured. Perhaps those who assign the value determine who will be successful and unsuccessful and what values are indeed “valuable” and that is a good part of the heart of the debate.
I agree that we all need to be able to talk to each other. It troubles me that it is so difficult for us to talk to each other. I have seen people on this site make some pretty caustic remarks to others with whom they agree on most or many things. I think at the heart of the debate may be difference of opinion as to what constitutes a fact and as a result we talk at cross purposes, nobody makes sense to anyone outside their point of view. As a result there will not likely be much agreement, but I think it is important to understand that just because others disagree does not necessarily make them unreasonable, though it is up to them to demonstrate their reasonableness. G. K. Chesterton once said “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.” I think it is important to listen, even though it may drive us crazy from time to time.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.