John Thompson, historian and teacher, lives in Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma press is focusing on the state’s low level of college readiness as measured by the ACT test, 16 percent, in comparison to the national rate of 27 percent. The state known for dramatic cuts in education funding is ranked 19th in the nation with an average composite score of 19.3. But it is missing the big picture.
The average ACT composite for my old school, Centennial, is 14.8, which is above average for the high-poverty neighborhood schools in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Even when we were ranked last in the state, our ACT scores were significantly higher. Since I retired, Centennial received a $5 million School Improvement Grant. I believe that its ACT decline is just one example of evidence explaining how and why tens of billions of dollars of corporate school reform drove meaningful learning out of many inner city schools.
https://oklahomawatch.org/2018/10/11/act-scores-for-public-and-private-high-schools/
The important question is what caused the national decline. Retired PBS education reporter John Merrow argues these ACT-takers “have had 12 or 13 years of test-centric education, and the kids coming up behind them have also endured what the ‘school reformers’ designed.” He also asks, “How much more evidence do we need of the folly of ‘No Child Left Behind’ and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s ‘Race to the Top’ before we take back our schools?”
As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap…..
Since reformers sought to improve low-performing schools, it is significant that Merrow cites the ACT report on recent outcomes:
A higher percentage of students this year than in recent years fell to the bottom of the preparedness scale, showing little or no readiness for college coursework. Thirty-five percent of 2018 graduates met none of the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, up from 31% in 2014 and from 33% last year.
Click to access National-CCCR-2018.pdf
All types of researchers are contributing to the autopsies being performed on data-driven, competition-driven reform. And many of us are especially intrigued by the analyses of corporate school reformers on why test-driven accountability, the expansion of charter schools, and the quest to “build a better teacher” failed. The latest, by the Gates Foundation’s Tom Kane, is very illustrative. Kane acknowledges that media coverage has declared his “teacher quality” effort a failure, but he mostly blamed educators.
Kane is typical of many reformers who say the big mistake was rapidly scaling up their teacher evaluation and test-driven accountability models. Kane forgets, however, that he, Bill Gates, other venture philanthropists, and Arne Duncan were the ones who imposed the rapid scaling up of their untested hypotheses.
This leads to my hypothesis about the Tulsa Public Schools, which is led by corporate reformer Deborah Gist and a team of Broad Academy-trained administrators. It may offer a case study in the causes of the reform debacle. The TPS has the nation’s 7th lowest rate of student performance growth from 3rd to 8th grade.
https://nondoc.com/2017/12/14/student-growth-tulsa/
Tulsa has a lot of advantages due to the Kaiser Foundation’s science-based early education efforts, and it used to have better student outcomes than the OKCPS. Tulsa has received millions of dollars in funding for it value-added teacher evaluations, “personalized” learning, and other corporate reforms. The cornerstone of their approach was the termination and “counseling out” of experienced educators, and demanding compliance to their new model.
Of course, no single piece of data can prove that Tulsa’s experiments failed for any single reason, but a new database created by ProPublica and Chalkbeat provides valuable new information. Their research shows that many of the biggest experiments, costing hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars and that were once proclaimed as successes, actually increased the achievement gap. Despite false claims to the contrary, many districts that committed to corporate reforms, and often claimed that they improved student performance, actually practiced mass suspensions of poor, black students. And there seems to be an unmistakable correlation between their commitment to teacher quality experiments and the increase of inexperienced teachers.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/10/16/chalkbeat-propublica-collaboration-education-inequity-data-miseducation/
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/newark/2018/10/16/in-newark-reporting-lapses-hide-thousands-of-student-suspensions-from-public-view/
So, how much of the decline in Oklahoma ACT scores is attributable to the top-down reforms funded by the federal government, Bill Gates, and other edu-philanthropists?
It doesn’t rise to the level of “proof,” but it is noteworthy that black TPS students are 2.2 years behind their white peers. That is .5 a year worse than the OKCPS gap. (And only 18 percent of TPS students took those college readiness tests, in contrast to the OKCPS where 29 percent took the ACT or SAT.)
https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation/district/4030240
Nearly a quarter of OKCPS teachers are categorized as inexperienced. The same percentage applies to Centennial, and whenever I visit my old school I hear more concerns about the ways that teacher turnover undermines school improvement.
Nearly 1/3rd of Tulsa teachers are inexperienced.
As more data arrives, we will be able to evaluate whether the multi-million Tulsa/Gates Foundation teacher quality initiative drove down the quality of teaching and learning. But this much is obvious. It is easier for competition-driven reformers to suspend poor students than it is for them to increase student learning.
And the “exiting” of large numbers of veteran educators was seen as a feature, as opposed to a flaw in their model. Now we know it is much easier to drive teachers out of the profession than it is to social-engineer better teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know why anyone would want to be a teacher these days. The pay stinks. The working conditions are lousy and teachers now have to do things inside their classrooms that they know is destructive to children.
I’m really glad I’m retired. It was getting rough towards the end of my career but the current conditions are unbearable.
It’s better than building bombs.
LCT: It’s also much better than being a soldier who has to kill people OR the operator of a drone that does long distance killings. I have a thing about drones. The Chinese have built them and I’m sure other countries that hate us will soon build them, if not already in their possession. There is no safe way to kill people. We cannot kill our way to peace.
I watched a program on TV recently in which the US had been invaded by Russia and Cuba. It gave the feeling of what happens when a country is invaded. Imagine the fear that people feel when they see US drones overhead and have no idea of where the bomb will land.
Children in these countries are being prevented from learning, if schools even are functioning. There is constant fear and nobody can learn under those situations.
…………………………………..
NPR: A school in Raqqa, Syria, helps children traumatized by the war. But U.S. funding will run out in four months
The facility, along with 10 others like it, is designed to ease the kids back into something resembling a normal life. Some of the students are missing limbs. A number of orphans attend the school.
With President Trump cutting aid a few months back, a State Department official says money from the U.S. government will dry up at the end of January.
Time to read ALAS BABYLON again? That one so clearly described nuclear war in the late 50s, sold millions of copies, and yet here we are…
Exactly as I feel!
I am very pleased that Chalkbeat and Pro Publica have united to assemble equity data on states and school districts. The usual test score data reveals very little about individual students, and usually tells more about the socio-economic level of the community. The equity data with an opportunity index provides information about how well a community or school is treating different types of students. I hope in the future they look at how special education and ELLs are treated in various districts and states. Likewise, the suspension data of black students is very revealing.
I would feel better about Chalkbeat if it was not funded by the Waltons.
Retired Teacher. The title of the data dump from Pro publica and Chalkbeat is Miseducation.”
I think you need to take a careful look at the data points in the three sources of data used for this report. I have started this process and have a long way to go, but just looking at the USDE’s Civil Rights Data Collection (2015-2016) from every public school, one of three data sources, it is clear that the CRDE information is more than a simple data-gathering exercise imposed on states.
Who, for example, has required that all states secure much more detailed information on math, and specific levels and topics in math than for any other subject? There is much less granular information for the sciences, social studies/history. Everything else is put into a vague category of interest: “other academic courses.”
On what basis did these data analysts decide that a high school with a gazillion AP courses is inherently better for the education of ALL students than one with five or six AP courses? Did the College Board lobby for that idea?
Look at the federal data. It will show that many of the indicators do require information disaggregated by sex, race (a few by color), Learning English Language, and at least one classification of special education students, in some cases three categories for special education.
Based on my preliminary look at this rating scheme and one of three sources of data combined for this report, I find the titled “Miseducation” what…misleading?
The report might have called out the policy makers who have played a major role in creating the inequities–and for perpetuating the idea that gap closing is both possible and desireable.
Are teachers to be held responsible for “opportunity gaps?”
The Civil Rights Data Collection allows data searches that focus on “charter” schools as well as from “public” schools but the major categories in the report such as “opportunity gap” does not make it clear that charters may be part of the problem if there is an “opportunity gap.”
In any case the very title of this report seems to have been selected in order to demean workers in public schools while letting policy makers off the hooks for making that work harder and less attractive to many.
The Kane article is hard to read (as each para provides fresh objectionable statements) but I found it enlightening, a peek into how a Gates-style ed-reformer thinks. His entire approach is that of a data-researcher analyzing where the models went wrong, how to improve implementation.
The goal was to improve delivery of education to a poor, and poorly-resourced area. But: (1) the premise is that poor ed-delivery is entirely the consequence of low-caliber teaching, (1.a) the unquestioned ‘evidence’ of low-caliber teaching is low student test scores, and (2) the remedy sought is accurate measurement of teaching caliber, so as to weed out those deemed low-caliber. And the only additional resource pumped into this low-resourced ed system is money to support the measuring/ data-gathering ‘remedy.’
Meanwhile I’m reading along w/this [I think] larger picture in mind: it’s hard enough to attract teachers to a difficult job [teaching poor kids] that pays considerably less than in wealthier areas. Many will weed themselves out in their first 5 yrs due to those factors alone. Now, subject all the teachers in that system to the time-consuming and nerve-wracking process of data-gathering whose end result will be to counsel out/ fire those among them found wanting. Unsurprisingly, results of the project included many veterans leaving for greener pastures; the schools now have a significantly higher proportion of beginners. [ & Kane actually proposes an ‘improvement’: focus the evaluation just on newbies 😀 ]
Good conclusion: “Now we know it is much easier to drive teachers out of the profession than it is to social-engineer better teachers.”
Data gathering itself is a problem. One piece of data that predicts good success is students who will practice and read on their own time. Teachers who spend time documenting such behavior are stealing time from their two most important jobs.
Teachers are required by a higher sense of morality to consider the subject they are teaching and read about ideas that are floating around about how to teach and what should be taught. At least some of their day should be spent revising ideas about what is going to go on in class (planning is the word, I think). Assuming that we are constrained to twentyfour hour days, and assuming that teachers raise children and contribute disproportionately to societal organizations, we are running out of time. Data review is already out of the question.
Yup.
I don’t have to gather data for others, as a PreK/K “special”. I have this other chore that has nothing to do w/teaching & planning (which I love almost equally). It’s sales, essentially; the little agency that finds me work wants cheery, polished para lesson summaries w/links & pix for each school’s parents, every week. But at least it has some value/ purpose. (Some parents actually read it & practice the links w/their kids!). At my age (pushing 70), if I had to gather useless data for someone’s entirely unrelated agenda, well… I wouldn’t still be doing this.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.