Peter Greene read a new publication from the U.S. Department of Education that is chock-full of useless and redundant information.
He sums it up:
Okay, listen carefully boys and girls, because this is some pretty heavy-duty stuff. Here’s the process for implementing evidence-based interventions:
1) Figure out what problem needs to be solved
2) Pick a solution that looks like it would work
3) Get ready to implement the solution
4) Implement the solution
5) Check to see if it worked
Oh, and there’s a graphic– five balls in a circle with arrows pointing from one to the next. I think I speak for Americans everywhere when I say thank God there are federal bureaucrats out there willing to provide us with this kind of hard-hitting guidance, because God knows, we would all be out here spinning our wheel randomly. Granted, I’ve translated the Department’s guidance into what I like to call “Plain English,” but I am absolutely stumped as I try to imagine who was sitting in DC thinking that this needed to be published. Was someone sitting in the Department saying, “You know, I bet people don’t understand that they should pick out solutions that will fit the problem. They’re probably picking some other solution. Probably a bunch of school districts out there thinking they need a new math series to get their reading scores up. We’d better address this. Oh, and add a graphic.” , listen carefully boys and girls, because this is some pretty heavy-duty stuff. Here’s the process for implementing evidence-based interventions:
1) Figure out what problem needs to be solved
2) Pick a solution that looks like it would work
3) Get ready to implement the solution
4) Implement the solution
5) Check to see if it worked
Oh, and there’s a graphic– five balls in a circle with arrows pointing from one to the next. I think I speak for Americans everywhere when I say thank God there are federal bureaucrats out there willing to provide us with this kind of hard-hitting guidance, because God knows, we would all be out here spinning our wheel randomly. Granted, I’ve translated the Department’s guidance into what I like to call “Plain English,” but I am absolutely stumped as I try to imagine who was sitting in DC thinking that this needed to be published. Was someone sitting in the Department saying, “You know, I bet people don’t understand that they should pick out solutions that will fit the problem. They’re probably picking some other solution. Probably a bunch of school districts out there thinking they need a new math series to get their reading scores up. We’d better address this. Oh, and add a graphic.”
Someone was paid to write this. Really.
Considering that this came from a federal agency that has been trumpeting the success of Race to the Top, you may rightly assume that the department has no idea what evidence based interventions are. What was the evidence for closing schools as a “reform”? What was the evidence that firing entire staffs and calling it a “turnaround” was evidence-based (it hasn’t worked in Chicago)? What was the evidence for evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students (answer: none)?
The ED needs to find out more about what constitutes “evidence.” It is not what you feel like doing, or a hunch, or a whim, or something Bill Gates told you to do.
It means that the approach was tried out and the results were reviewed to see what effects were produced. And then this was repeated again and again, to be sure that the relationship between cause and effect are genuine.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Wow….
Peter Greene always knows how to get to the heart of the issue while being witty and entertaining. The huge irony of this publication is that the federal government is clueless about what evidence is. All they know are scores, and they are not necessarily the right evidence. “Reform” is full of bravado, bias, hubris and lies. They continue to leap without looking. Sadly, they are taking young people that will not get a chance to have access to a comprehensive K-12 education again with them. They want to blow up the baby with the bath water as they grasp blindly at straws, hype, spin and lots of commercial products.
As I reflect on my own career, I was involved in numerous curriculum projects. My district had a very responsible way of making change. We had a curriculum cycle: study, design, pilot, evaluate. A program was adopted, tweaked or dropped after careful research and review. This was a evolutionary, not revolutionary process. “Reform” is reckless and irresponsible, and it has no regard for the rights of students to get an authentic education. The main goal of “reform” is destruction of democratic public education.
Retired teacher,
I wish my district had an evolutionary like yours rather than top down style of curricular management. About 15 years ago, I was invited to participate in a series of curricular design meetings with lead teachers, principals, and the Local District 7 superintendent and assistants. We wound up making a graphic just like the one Peter Greene described: five balls in a circle with arrows pointing from one to the next. And the superintendent’s stated reason for the meetings? So that she could try to sell the five ball graphic to other districts and make some money for herself. Sound familiar, USDoE?
Add: What was the evidence that market-based competition would fix our lowest performing schools? None. Rather, supporting schools as they develop an internal culture of trust and accountability between staff, students and parents is what the research says produces positive results. External hammers have not and will not work as a reform. Allowing re-segregation in the schools by race, socio-economic status, or special needs will not address the issues for our most vulnerable children who are on a track to be ‘left behind’.
Our policymakers are abrogating their responsibility to educate all our children through free, public education. With urban schools, they have failed so they just want to turn these students over to endless experimentation and profiteering, although they have never truly tried to adequately fund urban schools. They don’t really want to invest in public schools when there is money to be made from deep pocketed campaign donors. Those donors can double their investments in seven years, or at least this is the claim. It just fine to exploit other people’s children when your own are safely ensconced in a posh private school.
Has anyone written about the connections between reform strategies and bankruptcy litigation? Specifically, words like receivership and turnaround come to mind.
No one who promoted the “skills gap” should be allowed to lecture anyone else on “evidence”:
“This “skills mismatch” theory is a favorite of corporate executives and the think tanks they fund. But it is based on scant evidence. Individual companies may be struggling to fill specific jobs, but the data shows little sign of an industrywide shortage of skilled workers. In fact, it’s not clear that companies are really trying hard to fill many of these jobs at all.”
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dont-blame-a-skills-gap-for-lack-of-hiring-in-manufacturing/
So you tell me.
Why did they all jump on a bandwagon that was so CLEARLY promoted by “corporate executives and the think tanks they fund”?
It wasn’t “data”! Evidence had nothing to do with it!
They ALL parroted it. The US Dept of Ed held a special forum on it. There is nothing to support the existence of this. They did it anyway.
Well, according to the the corporate executives and the think tanks they fund, poverty can be fixed by filling the skills gap with a rigorous 21st century college ready education. It’s not that there aren’t enough jobs for the poor, it’s that the poor can’t meet those jobs-o-plenty where they exist. So its the poor peoples own fault that they are poor, and, of course, the teachers who don’t teach them.
This is a comfortable narrative if your’e not born into poverty, and don’t have to navigate the complexities that poverty presents.
Life is filled with complexity, but what if you don’t have the heart or life experience to see into situations and understand at least to some degree the fuller implications of whats actually happening in peoples lives?
Well then, I guess you get a job with the department of education, or some well funded think tank.
Proof that 15 years of NCLB and 5 yrs of RTTT and CCLS have made us stupider than ever???
There is an entity called the Institute of Education Sciences that purports to offer reviews of empirical studies and to make judgments about “What Works.”
You can see the newly designed website of the What Works Clearinghouse here. This is supposed to be the go-to source for evidence-based whatever bearing on education. http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/
Almost everything you will find at the What Works Clearinghouse is about ELA or Math with only a few studies bearing on other subjects or broad concerns in education such as the influence of poverty on educational outcomes. In fact, the National Center for Education Statistics often provides more information of “use” in thinking about education than the IES.
IES likes “random assignment experimental studies” approximating a medical model for “interventions.” The IES reviewers may conditionally accept a quasi-experimental study or a study with “promising” if not conclusive results. I am personally skeptical of the value of seeking conclusive evidence for the efficacy of “educational interventions” as if evidence is proof of the value of doing x rather than y or z. Facts do not speak for themselves.
Then there is the little known IES practice of reviewing studies based only of the press attention they receive. Smart researchers learn how to promote their studies. They publish their work on line, do not seek peer reviews, gin up the publicity with their own publishing house (as in much think tank research) and/or use a PR service such as http://service.prweb.com/who-uses-it/industry/associations-non-profit/. IES may or may not jump into this publicity machine to offer a review. Publicity alone does not guarantee a positive IES review.
There is a huge marketing arm for pretend research operated by the US Department of Education. Lucrative subcontracts are available for agile and savvy researchers. Almost all of the claims for evidence-based policy made under the regime of Arne Duncan were not in fact, based on peer-reviewed publications. They were based on reports from think tanks or reports written from scratch by contractors. For a brief tour of some of these see http://findit.ed.gov/search?utf8=✓&affiliate=ed.gov&query=Reform+Support+Network
One of the most chilling examples of the effort to “market” the terrible policies of Race to the Top has the title: Engaging Educators, A Reform Support Network Guide for States and Districts. Overview of the Guide: Toward a New Grammar and Framework for Educator Engagement. This publication includes over two dozen strategies to “sell” teachers on the odious RTT policy of pay-for-performance, including the use of teacher SWAT teams and paid “voice groups” to forestall criticism with in a school or district (see p.9 ). The references in this publication clearly show the influence of programs funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on the policy and publicity machine housed at USDE. https://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/implementation-support-unit/tech-assist/engaging-educators.pdf
The Reform Support Network documents are mostly about predetermined policy/practice decisions. They are free of any evidence. They are thick on ideology. They also reflect a profound distrust in the intellect and good judgment of teachers who have been subjected to endless and often really vacuous “professional development” sessions from hired hands who are clueless about the actual complexities of teaching.
For independent reviews of think tank reports, many with recommendations purporting to be evidence-based, get yourself on the mailing list for reviews from the National Education Policy Center http://nepc.colorado.edu/
What I think is really scary is… Yes. I believe someone in the bureaucracy at the US Department of Education apparently thinks they’ve discovered something new that all us hicks outside of DC need to know.
It’s reflects two natural results of bureaucracy…
The attempt to make the mundane into “something big”.
Complete cluelessness about the people served by that bureaucracy.
I just finished reading a book about Alan Greenspan. They called him “the wizard” in DC. None of them had any idea what he was mumbling, but they followed him slavishly thru 4 Presidents. They gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. The financial collapse he essentially created had already started.
They seem to have a horrible herd mentality that leads to disaster after disaster. I’m middle aged and I’ve now witnessed them run off a cliff together 4 times over 30 years. HUGE disasters. Epic. Doesn’t matter. They’ll do it again.
But give Alan Greenspan credit; when he finished, he faced the music and said,
‘I was wrong.’
Will Arme Duncan and John King ever admit they were wrong? No, they’ll just keep blaming teachers for not implementing their horrible directives with enough Grit and Rigor.
It’s nothing but a bureaucratization of the PDSA Cycle…
https://www.deming.org/theman/theories/pdsacycle
Exactly, so not exactly a new concept. Nothing wrong with it though and frequently we are better at the PD than the SA.
Wow… reading this made me feel like I just went to a PD (yup as in “professional” development) only it only took 5 minutes to read the list (or less). Sadly, the “genius” bureaucrat who put this together is probably making a salary of 3 teachers combined!
Me too.
One of our September PD sessions was spent reviewing points we’d made at a PD last spring regarding small group instruction and it’s implementation/challenges. Each groups’ assignment was to choose 2 of 6 points that were most important in each subcategory. We wrote them on chart paper and “shared out” our decisions.
A PD session that examined our findings in a previous PD.
It’s like being told to explain how we walk. And we get a “Developing” if we leave out the part where you curl your toes.
For anyone who’s a teacher, I’m preaching to the choir on this one. If, however, you’re a concerned parent/citizen, please understand that I don’t say this lightly:
Important decisions on educational policy, standards, and curriculum throughout the entire USA are being made by amateurs. This is a typical (though glaring because it’s our federal agency) example of the tripe they put out to legitimize their worth within their positions. What you’re seeing here is happening at the state and local level, as well.
There is little to no input from experienced educators because we’re seen as the “problem” with education. “Dinosaurs”. (Maybe the fact that we’re one of the last remaining strong unions in our nation may have something to do with it, too?).
The saddest part about this is that, after over a decade and a half of “reform” propaganda, this has become the norm. Teachers are now reviled and the public has put it’s faith in the hands of the billionaires who started the ball rolling in the first place.
It’s really unrelenting. Ohio released their state report card last week and the response has been predictable.
Blaring headlines on the failure of students and teachers. No context. No “nuance”. Just numbers.
Meanwhile every ed reform political professional mouthes soothing slogans about how kids are “more than a score”.
We’re told every time that if our kids sit for these tests the scores will be used to ‘inform instruction’ and every time every political hack with an agenda uses the scores to attack public schools.
They betray these kids again and again and again. They basically get them in there under false pretenses.
I would have more respect for people who told them “we’ve decided to measure you guys on a 1-4 scale so sit there. shut up, and produce some data”. I resent the hand-wringing and false “concern”.