Voucher advocates have been reeling by the convergence of recent studies showing that children who take vouchers lose ground academically.
A new study of vouchers in Louisiana conducted by pro-choice researchers from the University of Arkansas (Walton-funded researchers) has found that if students stay in the voucher program longer than one year, they eventually get the same test scores as students attending public schools. Also, those who enter with disabilities miraculously get better, even though these schools seldom have special education services.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They’re popping champagne corks in edreformland.
Backpack vouchers, here we come!
Still nothing out of DC this year for public schools. Oh, well. Maybe public schools will become fashionable again at some future date.
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Do the studies matter? They expanded vouchers in state after state with poor results and the Trump Administration redirected a billion dollars from public schools to private schools.
Now that they have a study with results they like they- what? Expand them faster? Redirect 2 billion dollars? If the negative studies didn’t inform or direct decisions the positive studies won’t either.
The answer to this question was always “more vouchers” and it didn’t matter a bit what the research said. Obviously.
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Can any study funded by the Waltons be considered unbiased? I think not! Independent researchers should go through the study to see if the methodology is fair and accurate.
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ON THE MONEY.
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US Department of Education campaigning for private school vouchers again:
“Today, the Supreme Court of the United States announced its ruling in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia vs. Comer, holding that the government may not deny a generally available benefit on account of religious identity. After the ruling, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos released the following statement:
“This decision marks a great day for the Constitution and sends a clear message that religious discrimination in any form cannot be tolerated in a society that values the First Amendment. We should all celebrate the fact that programs designed to help students will no longer be discriminated against by the government based solely on religious affiliation.”
Such a shame that none of these public employees can be bothered to advocate on behalf of public schools.
Try it yourself. Look at the USDOE website or DeVos’ speeches or statements and try to find one word advocating on behalf of any public school, anywhere. Yet they find time to promote private school vouchers daily.
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ONE WORD: NUTS!
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It’s standard practice in corporate America that if independent studies are not resulting in what the corporate leaders want to hear, they fund their own studies, publish their own magazines (that are not peer reviewed), etc. and then send out endless press releases to the media while probably threatening to cut advertising if the media don’t publish the press releases as news except for the media that is already owned by corporations and controlled by CEOs. Then they don’t have to issue veiled threats.
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This wasn’t peer reviewed, was it?
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It doesn’t matter. If you object such formalities, eventually they will take care of it. There is now enough profs doing the same kind of research: using private funds to do what the funder requests, but having their salaries paid for by the public. They will do as much “peer review” as you want.
The public stands by while their money is used to fund private research. Why?
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Who cares about such studies? They talk about progress in terms of test scores. But even in those terms, the study says
Students applying to lower grades demonstrated significant losses in math.
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I wonder how long it will take till the public say “Who gives a crap about what profs say?”
More and more profs are doing research using private funds since their university evaluates their work based on how much money they bring in, not by the actual scientific, artistic value of their activities.
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How about the following tactic: let’s start a grassroots movement for General Choice, which would demand that people should be able to do anything they want with the taxes they paid: use it for school, cars, groceries, house payment, travel. Why not? It’s their money, after all. They paid it, they should be able to use it any way they choose.
When the issue gets to the Supreme Court, it will either deny it (necessarily along with all other choice claims) or it will give it a go, in which case this country is doomed, and General Lofthouse will tell us what to do.
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Louisiana switched from its own state-developed test to PARCC in the third year of the study. In that year, Common Core was abruptly and fully implemented, despite a prior plan by LDOE to transition gradually from the prior state standards. The achievement levels were significantly redefined in that test transition as well. It was a troublesome year for teachers who had this dumped on them at the last moment. I would not jump to the conclusion reached below, but at least they noted the possibility of an impact.
From page ten of the study: “In the third year of our study, when we found no significant differences in the test score outcomes of the voucher and control group students, the state adopted a new test. The newness of the state test for both private and public school students may have produced a more valid gauge of the impact of the LSP on student achievement in the third year.”
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Herb, a very important caveat. It would affect both groups equally, but possibly disrupt the timeline.
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“In the third year of our study, when we found no significant differences in the test score outcomes of the voucher and control group students, the state adopted a new test.”
Well, considering one is starting with bovine excrement, i.e., test score outcomes, any conclusions drawn will be bovine excrement. To understand why those “test score outcomes” are COMPLETELY INVALID please read and understand Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted destruction of standards and testing in his 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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And then we should think about the fact that kids are admitted to college based on tests and then they are evaluated in college based on only tests.
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Attending college is distinctive from the compulsory attendance and/or the constitutionally mandated provision of K-12 education. Attending college is a choice an adult makes and therefore must accept what the post-secondary institution determines as good and proper. That does not mitigate the facts as outlined by Wilson of the various invalidities involved, just that since post-secondary education is not mandatory one can choose whether or not to attend. And that distinction makes all the difference in the world, not in regard to the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods but to how that invalid ranking and sorting plays out onto an individual that is not an adult.
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By choice or not, people are evaluated based on quantitative measures. Is this good? Personally, I think it’s a basic mistake.
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Yes, it is a “basic mistake” in that the attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, by definition, is a mistake. Those supposed “measures” are not a measurement at all. They may an assessment, an evaluation or a judging but they are not a measuring of anything. Why not?
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
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So many times, I find two basic things to be underlying truths to the stories posted here.
The democrat party must confront the unfairness of the forces attempting to destroy the universal availability of public education with the same level of intensity that they try to deal with the forces against universal availability of healthcare, or both will be lost. It will be a long struggle, and if the democrats do not undertake in ways that force the media to notice, then a party will be formed which does.
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