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Washington, D.C.: Who Should Control Access to Data About the Schools?

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
6

Thanks to Leonie Haimson, whose comment brought this excellent article by Rachel Cohen to my attention.

There is a political battle going on in D.C. about school data and who controls it.

Another article on the same subject was written by Ruth Wattenberg, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education, who argues that the Mayor must not be allowed to control the data.

Some City Council members have proposed an independent research collaborative, housed in the D.C. Auditor General’s Office, but the Mayor is opposed. She wants to maintain control.

Whoever has the data must be independent, nonpartisan, and trustworthy.

Cohen writes:

In the wake of a series of DC Public Schools scandals, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh came forward with an idea: an independent research collaborative that would conduct studies on the city’s public schools, including charters. This collaborative, outlined in draft legislation, would have an advisory board comprised of 16 education stakeholders who would drive the research agenda.

Cheh’s concept has precedent. Other cities, like Chicago, San Diego, and Houston, have similar research collaboratives, commonly referred to as “research practice partnerships” or RPPs. Local education advocates and Cheh’s colleagues on the Council have come out in strong support of her proposal.

But Cheh’s plan also has detractors, and many of them are the appointees of Mayor Muriel Bowser. At a six-hour public hearing held on July 13, several officials tapped by Bowser spoke out against this so-called “Education Research Collaborative.”

And at the same hearing, the public learned that the executive branch was exploring the launch of its own separate education research consortium with the Urban Institute, a national think tank located in D.C. The news sparked concerns that Bowser was seeking to undercut the Council’s push for independent oversight.

At the core of all this politicking: Who gets access to data about D.C.’s public schools, and how do they get to use it?

Cheh’s bill, introduced in April, has eight other co-sponsors, a Council supermajority which could override a potential veto from the mayor. The Council set aside $500,000 in its most recent budget for the auditor to “incubate” this pilot research consortium. (That funding becomes available in October, when fiscal year 2019 begins.) It would be launched initially in the Office of the DC Auditor, an agency outside of the executive branch. Supporters say that after a few years they would look for a new home—be it a local think tank, university, or its own independent agency.

The chair of the education committee, At-Large Councilmember David Grosso, has not yet taken a position on the bill, but in May he tried to steer the dedicated $500,000 to after-school programs instead. His effort failed 12-1.

The research collaborative was conceived of in response to the host of education scandals which emerged over the last year, including news that high school graduation rates were massively inflated and that the public schools chancellor knowingly violated a school choice policy he himself wrote. While local and national leaders have long looked to D.C.’s education reforms as a model for the nation, today many parents, community members, and even elected officials have voiced a lack of confidence in the gains reported by the school system, fearing information has become too politicized under mayoral control.

“I call the information that we get from our education agencies ‘PR,’” says At-Large Councilmember Robert White. “It can be very difficult to get hold of unbiased data….”

“Our hope is to get accurate, reliable, credible data, and then to use this data in a research partnership to understand whether the policies we are pursuing are really working,” says Cheh.

The Mayor’s office is fighting the proposal to house the agency in the Auditor’s office. She and her allies claim it would politicize the data and the research. Supporters of the proposal say that it would politicize the office if it is controlled by the Mayor.

The person in whom I have the greatest trust in D.C. is Mary Levy, who has been tracking D.C. data for many years and faithfully reporting what she finds without fear or favor. She opposes letting the mayor control the data.

Mary Levy, a longtime budget analyst for D.C. schools, is more blunt. “This idea is an infant in the cradle,” she tells City Paper. “And if you don’t put it in the auditor’s office it’s going to die in its cradle.”

If the agency controlling the data and research is not trustworthy, the money will be wasted and the residents of the city will remain in the dark.

It is bizarre that D.C., which claimed to be “data-driven” after the onset of the Michelle Rhee era and mayoral control in 2007, continues not to have reliable and accurate data more than a decade later.

Categories Data, District of Columbia

Washington, D.C.: Does Anyone Know if the Reports About Staff Turnover Are Accurate?

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
9

Valerie Jablow, D.C. parent, blogger, and activist, read two reports on teacher and principal attrition and retention. One of them was prepared by the highly respected D.C. civil rights attorney Mary Levy, who has been tracking data in D.C. for many years. Levy looked at both public schools and charter schools.

One conclusion: staff turnover is startlingly high, especially in schools with the most disadvantaged students.

Overall, our public school teacher turnover rates dwarf national averages and have socioeconomic implications, such that the more at risk students a school has, the higher its teacher turnover. The data examined by Levy from the last 3 years alone show that fully a quarter of our public school teachers leave each year—a much higher rate than other jurisdictions. The result is that over half a decade, most of our publicly funded schools will see the majority of their teachers leave.

Our DC public school principal turnover is high as well, averaging about 25% annually. Although that is closer to the national average for principal turnover, in DC it is (like teacher turnover) also correlated with socioeconomics, such that schools with the most at risk students often have the most principal turnover.

Levy had to hand-calculate some of the data because data-collection is slipshod:

For one, we have this data on teacher turnover in DCPS only because Levy herself has spent years comparing staff rosters for individual DCPS schools and budgets and reported what she found. Consider, for a moment, the painful irony of Levy being commissioned to do a report on teacher attrition in DCPS through a painstaking process of backing out data that the school system may already have in a better format–and, for all any of us knows, could provide in a much easier way.

For another, the charter school data on teacher turnover is suspect, as Levy discovered that a number of charter schools appeared to have confused teacher attrition with retention in their required annual reports.

Thus, whenever the reported teacher attrition rate in a charter school was higher than 50%, Levy painstakingly compared staff rosters from one year to the next in the same school. Roster comparisons were, however, inexact because different schools defined “teacher” in different ways, and the rosters themselves changed in form and format from year to year. (Not to mention that the attrition/retention confusion happened within LEAs–so each school had to be looked at separately.) Nonetheless, Levy recorded how many teachers appeared to stay and leave each year; used that to determine whether the reported high rate of attrition above 50% was accurate; and, if it was not accurate, flipped the percentage.

Imagine that! The schools reporting data often didn’t know the difference between retention and attrition! Are any of the data credible when the people responsible for reporting don’t inow the meaning of basic terminology?

D.C. public schools have been controlled by the mayor and by “reformers” including Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson (now looking for a new chancellor since Antwan Wilson left) since 2007, and there in no accurate data collection and analysis program.

Foundations including Gates, Walton, and Broad have poured tens of millions into DCPS, and there is no accurate collection and analysis program.

Whenever D.C. makes a claim about graduation rates, test scores, teacher and principal attrition and retention, they are probably just guessing. Or boasting. They really don’t know.

If you want to learn more, you can attend this meeting:

This Wednesday November 28, from 6 pm-8 pm, the DC State Board of Education (SBOE) and teacher advocacy group EmpowerEd will hold a joint forum on staff retention in DC’s publicly funded schools. The forum will be held at Walker-Jones Education Campus, 1125 New Jersey Ave. NW. RSVP here.

Categories Accountability, Data, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Principals, Teachers

NYC: No Charter Waiting Lists! Charters Hire Firm to Market Their Brands

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2018 //
13

Susan Edelman of the New York Post reports that the NYC DOE is under investigation by federal and state officials for giving personal information about students to a marketing firm hired by charter schools.

https://nypost.com/2018/11/04/department-of-education-probed-for-pitching-charters-to-public-school-kids/

Wait! What about the long waiting lists?!

She writes:

“The city Department of Education reduces its enrollment by giving student names and addresses to a private vendor that produces mass mailings to help charter schools woo families.

“The longtime marketing practice has now come under investigation by state and federal officials after a Manhattan mom complained it violates student privacy rights.

“Each year my family receives a large number of pamphlets and flyers from charter schools, promoting and marketing their schools and urging me to apply, ” Johanna Garcia wrote to state and US officials.

“While Garcia has three kids in public schools, flyers have targeted her daughter who qualified for a gifted and talented program, she wrote, but not two other children with special needs.

“The DOE says it gives only student names, grade levels and addresses to Vanguard Direct, a bulk-mailing company, and forbids the company to share the data with anyone else.

“Charter schools — which are privately run but get taxpayer funds based on enrollment — hire Vanguard to send out hundreds of thousands of marketing materials aimed at recruiting kids.

“Major customers include charter chains Success Academy, Uncommon, KIPP, and Achievement First, said DOE spokesman Douglas Cohen. The DOE receives no payment from Vanguard, he said.

“In response to Garcia’s complaint, the New York state and US education departments said they are probing whether the marketing deal violates FERPA — a federal law which requires schools to get parent permission before releasing student information, except in limited cases.

“But Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, said the reasoning makes no sense: “School districts lose funding and space when students enroll in charters. Why would the DOE use its own employees for that purpose?”

“Garcia agreed. “Vanguard makes money. Charter schools make money. All on the backs of regular public-school students.”

“The practice began more than a decade ago under ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, when Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz said she needed the DOE data to market her charter schools. It has continued despite Mayor de Blasio’s less-friendly relationship with charters.

“Chancellor Richard Carranza told a town hall meeting in Harlem last week that DOE schools should better market themselves to stem the rise of charter schools, Patch.com reported.

“But charter schools say they rely on the mailings to fill seats.”

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, New York City, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Privatization

Ohio: State Plans to Take Over East Cleveland District Despite Inaccurate Data

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2018 //
14

This is an outrageous story.

The state of Ohio Plans to take over the East Cleveland school district despite the fact that the state’s data are wildly inaccurate.

CLEVELAND – After digging into the state Department of Education’s report cards for current and planned state takeovers, News 5 found there are some issues within the report cards of at least one district — East Cleveland.

“We found some inaccuracies within the report card,” said Tom Domzalski, East Cleveland School District’s director of research, data and assessments.

Domzalski said “without a doubt,” the district and students are performing better than the state’s report card reflects.

An example of one of the errors in the state report card was that it showed that only 90.9 percent of principals in East Cleveland have a college degree, but state law requires principals to have a bachelor’s and master’s degree. According to East Cleveland officials, all of their principals do.

So where did the state come up with the 90.9 percent? That’s unclear, but it’s not the only problem.

There are errors, inconsistencies and numbers from last year within the document reflecting East Cleveland School District’s 2018 failing grade.

“One times .15 percent is not .075 percent,” Domzalski said, pointing out errors in the math published on the first page. “…the math just isn’t correct.”

According to Domzalski, the inconsistencies don’t stop there.

“In terms of our prepared for success measure, we are showing that students are not taking college credit courses. That’s not true,” he said.

When the state was informed about multiple errors in the East Cleveland report card, the officials said it was too late, nothing could be done.

Is it political meanness or bureaucratic inertia that prevents the state from acknowledging and rectifying its errors?

Categories Accountability, Data, Education Reform, Ohio

Steven Singer: The Six Biggest Problems with Data-Driven Instruction

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2018 //
31

Steven Singer writes here about the mechanistic, anti-child implicationsand consequences of data-driven Instruction. He identifies six issues. I offer only the first of these problems. To learn about the other five, open the link.

He writes:

No teacher should ever be data-driven. Every teacher should be student-driven.

You should base your instruction around what’s best for your students – what motivates them, inspires them, gets them ready and interested in learning.

To be sure, you should be data-informed – you should know what their test scores are and that should factor into your lessons in one way or another – but test scores should not be the driving force behind your instruction, especially since standardized test scores are incredibly poor indicators of student knowledge.

No one really believes that the Be All and End All of student knowledge is children’s ability to choose the “correct” answer on a multiple-choice test. No one sits back in awe at Albert Einstein’s test scores – it’s what he was able to do with the knowledge he had. Indeed, his understanding of the universe could not be adequately captured in a simple choice between four possible answers.

As I see it, there are at least six major problems with this dependence on student data at the heart of the data-driven movement.

So without further ado, here is a sextet of major flaws in the theory of data-driven instruction:

The Data is Unscientific

When we talk about student data, we’re talking about statistics. We’re talking about a quantity computed from a sample or a random variable.

As such, it needs to be a measure of something specific, something clearly defined and agreed upon.

For instance, you could measure the brightness of a star or its position in space.

However, when dealing with student knowledge, we leave the hard sciences and enter the realm of psychology. The focus of study is not and cannot be as clearly defined. What, after all, are we measuring when we give a standardized test? What are the units we’re using to measure it?

We find ourselves in the same sticky situation as those trying to measure intelligence. What is this thing we’re trying to quantify and how exactly do we go about quantifying it?

The result is intensely subjective. Sure we throw numbers up there to represent our assumptions, but – make no mistake – these are not the same numbers that measure distances on the globe or the density of an atomic nucleus.

These are approximations made up by human beings to justify deeply subjective assumptions about human nature.

It looks like statistics. It looks like math. But it is neither of these things.

We just get tricked by the numbers. We see them and mistake what we’re seeing for the hard sciences. We fall victim to the cult of numerology. That’s what data-driven instruction really is – the deepest type of mysticism passed off as science.

The idea that high stakes test scores are the best way to assess learning and that instruction should center around them is essentially a faith based initiative.

Before we can go any further, we must understand that.

Categories Corporate Reform, Data, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Jim Miller: Who Will Save Us from the Billionaire “Saviors”?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
26

Jim Miller, professor at the San Diego City College, has posed exactly the right question: Who will save us from “our billionaire saviors?” The question was inspired by Andrea Gabor’s excellent new book After the Education Wars, and by the possibility that billionaire Michael Bloomberg will run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.

In New York City, we remember him as a data-driven, test-loving, top-down Reformer, who hired non-educator Joel Klein to terrorize teachers and principals and introduce choice and charters. The result was a public relations success and an education failure. Much boasting, vast disruption, constant reorganization. Change for the sake of change. Bloomberg is one of the billionaires identified in the NPE report about the super-rich who fund anti-public education candidates in state and local elections.

Miller writes:

After failing to prop-up Antonio Villaraigosa’s flagging gubernatorial campaign last June, Michael Bloomberg apparently spent the summer pondering whether it would be wiser for him to personally save the United States rather than waste his time trying to rescue California by proxy. Last week the New York Times reported that Bloomberg was mulling a run for the Presidency as a Democrat because that represented the most viable path to victory. As the Times story observed, while Bloomberg has engaged in some good work on guns and the environment, many of his other positions might not be very likely to win over the liberal base of the Democratic Party…

As Andrea Gabor, (ironically) the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY, writes in her excellent new book After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, Bloomberg’s reign in New York hardly represented a golden era for education: “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia—never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined…”

The business reformers came to the education table with their truths: a belief in market competition and quantitative measures. They came with their prejudices—favoring ideas and expertise forged in corporate boardrooms over knowledge and experience gleaned in the messy trenches of inner-city classrooms. They came with distrust of an education culture that values social justice over more practical considerations like wealth and position. They came with the arrogance that elevated polished, but often mediocre (or worse), technocrats over scruffy but knowledgeable educators. And most of all, they came with their suspicion—even their hatred—of organized labor and their contempt for ordinary public school teachers.

What this has resulted in, according to Gabor, is that the corporate reformers “adopted all the wrong lessons from American business.” Rather than innovating by harnessing “the energy and the knowledge of ordinary employees,” who are the most “knowledgeable about problems—and solutions” because they know the process, the billionaire boys club has favored a punitive, hierarchical, undemocratic, one-size fits all approach that has hurt students more than it has helped them.

Wedded to a factory-style approach to education, corporate reformers “focused on a Taylorite effort to standardize teaching so that teachers can be easily substituted like widgets on an assembly line. This despite the fact that, on average, ‘unions have a positive effect on student achievement’ and the best charter schools are often the independent charters that give teachers voice, often via union contracts.” All of this reflects the fact, Gabor reminds us, that “the corporate education-reform movement has deeply undemocratic roots.”

What this movement has brought us is not pretty. We have systematically devalued the “art” of teaching in favor of a dumbed-down, accountability regimen that prefers standardization and over-testing to empowering educators and students to think more creatively and independently. It has assailed teachers and attacked educational culture to such a degree that it should be no surprise that our society has become increasingly anti-intellectual and hostile to fact-based analysis. As Gabor observes of the Trump era:

[T]he election of this larger-than-life Chucky demagogue, with his multiple bankruptcies and divorces, his sexual predations and business malfeasance, his hate-filled speeches and tweets, also represented a failure of corporate-style education reform as it has taken shape over more than twenty years. Among an electorate that often favors “ordinary” people they can identify with, Trump, the consummate philistine—unread and uninterested, crude, unthinking, and disdainful of facts and any attempt at rational truth—holds up a dystopian mirror of the electorate…

It may not have been the intended outcome of those who simply wished to produce a more useful workforce, but it does show the profound limits of their debased instrumentalism. Hence Gabor again observes: “Corporate education reformers cannot be directly blamed for the ascendance of Trump. However, over two decades of an ed-reform apparatus that has emphasized the production of math and ELA test scores over civics and learning for learning’s sake has helped produce an electorate that is ignorant of constitutional democracy and thus more vulnerable to demagoguery.”

Gabor’s thorough study does more than just criticize the failures of corporate education reform. She outlines how multiple examples of innovative educational practices across the country have defied the technocratic dictates of the well-heeled and focused instead on “bottom-up” strategies that have relied heavily on “a participative, collaborative, deeply democratic approach to continuous improvement, drawing on diverse constituencies—including students, teachers, and local business leaders—in their effort.”

Thus, there are some insights to be found in approaches that rely on “local democracy” that can help do right for our children and the society at large. Following these examples, rather than the lead of self-important billionaires, is where we can find hope for a better education system and a more democratic society.

As for Bloomberg, maybe he should just go away and let the people lead. We’ve had too much “reform” from self-declared rich saviors and philanthrocapitalists already. In fact, it’s long past time that we save ourselves from them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Audrey Hill: The Hoax of the Great White Savior

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2018 //
14

Audrey Hill tells a fascinating story about Michael Johnston, the highly accomplished TFA alum from Colorado who was briefly a principal, then became a very influential state senator, and recently tried unsuccessfully to run for the Democratic nomination for governor. While Johnston was in the State Senate, he wrote a bill for evaluation of teachers, principals, and schools called SB 191 (2010), which tied evaluation firmly to test scores and was one of the most punitive in the nation. Standardized test scores count for 50% of overall evaluation. He pledged that his bill was historic and would produce “great teachers, great principals, and great schools.” Eight years later, it is clear that it had no effect other than to demoralize teachers (who are among the most underpaid in the nation. It did not produce great teachers, great principals, or great schools, yet Michael fought to keep it in place until he was term limited out of the legislature.

But that is not what Audrey Hill writes about in this post. She writes about the bald-faced whoppers that charter advocates tell.

She quotes Johnston telling a group of innocent young college graduates about the miracles he accomplished when he was a principal because he believed (!) She has a tape of his 21 minutes of self-praise.

She begins:

At a Teach for America fundraiser, DFER politician and then Colorado Senator, Mike Johnston, tells a story that will be brief because (he jokes) he doesn’t want to keep his audience from dessert. He launches into a narrative about a scrappy, young, founding principal who beat all the odds because he believed in truth and hope. Johnston’s story is peppered with the names of students and their stories. Over the course of 21:53 minutes, we meet Tasha, Flavio, Jermaine and Travis (the 44th kid). He weaves from story to story and then back to how he and others (mostly TFA alums) fight against a system that has been catering to “an old set of interests with a wrong set of priorities,” and he ends by telling an eager, young audience that they are the army who, through sheer force of will “…would hoist America onto its shoulders and carry it across the water…”

What Johnston is saying at that moment (without a shred of irony) is that what America needs most is to be saved by an army of over-privileged youth right out of selective college who will move, with all deliberate speed, into positions of influence and power and more privilege. To return to the 2010 ed reform documentary, they are the Supermen that America has been waiting for, and they will, through sheer force of will (and a rehabilitated mid 20th century vernacular), fix all the things. The message is classic trickle down theory:

More privilege for the over-privileged helps the underprivileged.<!–more–>

Despite all obstacles, 100% of his seniors graduated from high school!

What he didn’t say was that 40% of the class never made it to senior year (the dirty little secret).

There was an increase in the graduation rate, but what Hill notices is the 40% who disappeared and were forgotten.

However, modest improvements don’t sell privatization, unfair labor practice and fast track careerism… all goals in the private interest that are sold alongside the goals of the public interest. Ed Reform makes serving a private interest virtually indistinguishable from serving the public one. It becomes easiest for a rising star to make the pragmatic, commonplace choice to accept whatever half truth or lie of omission keeps the train running. So, 40% of juniors have got to go. But, this article is not about Johnston. It is about other stakeholders: the 45th kids, the families that love them, and the teachers that teach them. And, it asks one question about removing a large share of a junior class…

Celebrating the personal success of students going off to college does not require celebrating the fake success of a business model. Students going off to college deserve all the accolades, but their interests are not served by the disappearance of 40% of their peers at the end of 11th grade. The only interests that are served by a school’s 100% Forever Mission Accomplished party are the private ones… the career of the rising star, the reputation of a school network, the agenda of the wealthy donors that fund them.

What Audrey Hill has discovered is that reform is not about the kids. It is about the heroes of their story, the privileged elite who make up stories about saving them. The saviors are the heroes! They can fudge the data as much as they want, and a credulous media won’t care. Their funders won’t care either.

As a result, a disposing school can remove as many students as they wish to fulfill their 100% Forever claim. They can hold onto non-disruptive kids and use their per pupil dollars for years and still not return a high school diploma. They can create a culture of winners (who gets to stay) and losers (who’s got to go). They can use fake data to suggest that superior performance is a result of at-will employment, ending due process, high class size with exceptional teachers, blended learning, daily test prep, low community agency, mayor controlled school systems, two hour bus rides to school, high but unpublished attrition rates. They can dump any educator, any child, any parent who displeases them and effectively dampen protest and oversight. They can maintain a parasitical relationship to living public schools and return only those students who they do not prefer. They can pursue instability with no concern for the people they are supposed to serve.

All of these are the bad policies of more privileged people on the backs of less privileged people… the kids that are removed or taught in test prep factories, the teachers that labor every day under a cloud of undeserved censure, the schools that are shamed by fake data, and the users and benefactors of public education itself. The mission is not only NOT accomplished, it is subverted and harnessed to an entirely different mission serving the oldest set of interests and the wrong set of priorities.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Data, Teach for America

William Mathis: Everything Important Cannot Be Measured

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2018 //
38

The following was written by William Mathis, vice-chair of the Vermont State Board of Education and Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center in Boulder, CO.

Education Reforms: Everything Important Cannot be Measured

We’re now in our seventieth year of national crisis. “Society is in peril of imminent collapse unless we do something about education,” is the mantra. It would seem that if we had an “imminent” crisis a lifetime ago, something bad would have happened by now. While doomsayers can go back to the Mayan calendar, we can start with the 1950s with Admiral Rickover attacking the “myth of American educational superiority” and unfavorably comparing the United States to other nations. He proclaimed education as “our first line of defense.” This was followed by the “Nation at Risk” report in 1983 which proclaimed that our schools were besieged, “by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” Unfavorable test score comparisons and military metaphors remain popular with the reformers. These prognostications failed to come true.

Perhaps, the reformers got it wrong.

Attributed to Einstein, “Everything that can be measured is not important and everything important cannot be measured.” In focusing on what is easily measured, rather than what is important, we fail to grasp the real problem. To be sure, tests measure reading and math reasonably well and we need to keep tests for that purpose. But that’s only one part of education. Schools also teach children to get along with others, prepare young people for citizenship, encourage creativity, teach job and human skills, integrate communities, teach tolerance and co-operation, and generally prepare students to be contributing members of society. These things are not so easily measured.

Even if we limit ourselves to test scores, as a society, we misread them. That is, the low scores are strongly affected by circumstances outside the schools. Children coming from violent, economically challenged and drug addicted homes, as a group, are not going to do as well as their more fortunate classmates. As the family income gap between children has widened, the achievement gap has also widened.

A Stanford professor compared all the school districts in the nation using six different measures of socio-economic well-being and found that a stunning 70% of test scores could be predicted by these six factors. When the PARCC tests, which are used to test “college and career readiness” were compared with freshman grade point average, the tests only predicted between one and 16% of the GPA. What this means is that the tests do a better job of measuring socio-economic status than measuring schools.

This pattern has been solidly and consistently confirmed by a mountain of research since the famous Coleman report in 1966. It pointed to family and social problems rather than schools. So what did we do? We collected more data. We now have “data dash-boards.” Countless ads on the web tout this lucrative market and proclaim how people can “drill down,” create interactive charts and visuals to provide “deep learning.” They display all manner of things such as differences by ethnic group, technical education, graduation rate and a myriad of exotic esoterica. By all means, we need to continue to collect this important data. The problem is that we already know what the dash-board tells us. What it doesn’t tell us is the nature of the real problems and how to correct them. First, we must look to those things outside the school that affect school performance. Second, in addition to hard data, we must use on-the-ground observations to see whether we provide legitimate opportunities to all children, whether the school is warm and inviting, and whether the curriculum is up to date and well-delivered.
By concentrating only on the easily measurable, we squeeze the life out of schools. We devalue, deemphasize and defund things that lead to a better life, better schools and a better civilization.
Finally, it misses the most essential point. Parents want their children to grow and lead productive, happy lives and contribute to society. They want their children to practice civic virtue and have loving relationships. But these things are not easily measured by a test. “Everything that can be measured is not important and everything important cannot be measured.”

William J. Mathis is Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center and Vice-chair of the Vermont State Board of Education. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of organizations with which he is affiliated.

[i] https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html
[ii] Haran, W. J. (may 1982). “Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, USN: A Decade of Educational Criticism, 1955-64.” Loyola Dissertation. Retrieved July 3, 2018 from https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3077&context=luc_diss
[iii] https://ww w.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/12/whats-the-purpose-of-education-in-the-21st-century/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.cead22f07401
[iv] Reardon, S. F. (July 2011). “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and possible Explanations. Retrieved July 3, 2018 from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58b70e09db29d6424bcc74fc/t/59263d05c534a59e6984a5fd/1495678214676/reardon+whither+opportunity+-+chapter+5.pdf
[v] Reardon, S. F. (April 2016). School District Socioeconomic Status, Race and Academic Achievement. https://cepa.stanford.edu/…/school-district-socioeconomic-status-race-and-academic-achievement
[vi] http s://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/05/27/alice-in-parccland-does-validity-study-really-prove-the-common-core-test-is-valid/?utm_term=.12cf542ae0cf
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Categories Accountability, Data, Education Reform, Research

Larry Cuban: Today’s Reformers and the Revival of Taylorism and the Cult of Efficiency

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
8

Larry Cuban wrote an insightful post about the Reformers’ revival of the ideology of social efficiency that was popular a century ago.

He writes:

“The current incarnation of “Taylorism” and focus on student outcomes can be seen in the standards, testing, and accountability movement launched over three decades ago in the wake of A Nation at Risk report. The application of business practices and lingo under the umbrella of scientifically acquired evidence reappeared anew albeit with different labels.

“Since the 1980s, reforms that called for uniform curriculum standards and increased testing while holding districts and schools responsible for student outcomes aimed to harness education to a stronger economy. With the increased power of computers to gather and analyze data, new techniques to prod schools to teach more, better, faster, and cheaper appeared (see here, here, and here) *

“The frequent gathering and parsing of test data, school-by-school, district-by-district, state-by-state, and nationally became a major enterprise. The lure of increased productivity and efficiency through evidence-based decision-making in light of huge (and available) data-sets has led to increasing use of algorithms to grade performance of individual schools, evaluating teacher performance, and customizing online lessons for each student (see here and here).

“States and districts now evaluate the performance of schools based on test scores, growth in achievement, graduation rates, and other measures and then assign rankings by issuing a grade to each school ranging from an A to a F, awarding one to five stars, or similar systems. Such grades signal parents which schools are high-performing and attractive to enroll their children and which schools are to be avoided—an efficient way of sorting out schools especially since parental choice in public schools has expanded.

“Determining which teachers are productive, i.e., “effective,” using students’ test scores has occurred in many states and big city districts. Such outcome measures should not shock anyone familiar with the spreading influence of the business model (e.g., earning profits, market share, and return on investment) upon schooling.

“Policymakers’ concerns over inefficiency in sorting effective from ineffective teachers (most districts graded 90-plus percent of teachers satisfactory) led to an embrace of an economic model of providing incentives to increase organizational productivity and efficiency.

“Within classrooms, both effectiveness and efficiency have come to the fore in customizing lessons for individual students. Earlier efforts to introduce “teaching machines” in the 1920s and later in the 1950s testify to the history of educators seeking ways to tailor teaching and learning to fit individual students. With the spread of faster and cheaper technologies since the 1990s, new classroom models of integrating devices and online programs took hold in many schools. The growth of huge data-sets of information on student performance in math, reading, and other school subjects also segued into a Niagara of software spilling over schools in the past two decades. The rationale for extensive buying and distributing of new devices and software has been to make teaching and student learning faster, better, and individualized.”

This mode of thinking, mandated and imposed as federal policy, threatens to extinguish childhood and the joy of learning.

What works in an automated warehouse is not what should be applied to a schoolroom.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Reform, Testing

Economists with Common Sense about Education

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2018 //
46

 

Many of us on this blog criticize economists because it often seems that the only thing they value is scores on standardized tests. If they can’t measure a thing without precision, it doesn’t matter. They think they can measure teacher quality by student test scores, they can measure schools by test scores, they can measure students with test scores. As Daniel Koretz showed in his book The Testing Charade: Pretending to Improve Schools, the tests are misused and abused to make these judgments. They aren’t good enough to label students, teachers, or schools, and their misuse distorts the measures (Campbell’s Law).

Now a group of scholars seeks to rescue schools from the iron grip of standardized testing. (Among the authors is my favorite economist of education, Helen Ladd of Duke University.) They argue that test scores are not the only things that matter in education. They say that schools should be informed by evidence, not driven by it. 

Decisions should be driven by what we value, what our goals are, not simply by test scores.

They write:

Although evidence clearly contributes to thoughtful policy-making, evidence cannot and should not drive policy decisions. When we make decisions, or policies, we are driven by a desire to achieve a set of goals. The role of data is to provide evidence on how our choices are likely to affect the realization of our goals. Evidence informs decisions so that, if the evidence is good and we interpret it well, the results of our decisions align better with what we value.

A challenge for many decision makers is to think clearly about the values they are seeking to realize. In education, decision makers are often motivated by the desire to improve student outcomes and increase educational equity. Yet both “student outcomes” and “equity” are vague terms. Which student outcomes, or combination of outcomes, are most valuable? Do we care about students’ understanding of trigonometry or their ability to run fast? Do we want to work towards all students having more equal cognitive skills or to increasing the skills of the least well off? Without more precise understandings of which outcomes we care about and which distributions of those outcomes are fair, decision makers lack orientation. Their decisions may end up relying on data about outcomes that happen to be available rather than about outcomes that align with their goals.

In a new book, Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making (University of Chicago Press, 2018), we seek to spell out a set of educational values and distributive principles and to illustrate how they, along with a small number of non-education values, can be combined with the relevant evidence to improve education decision making. Two of us (Ladd and Loeb) are social scientists who bring a familiarity with the use of evidence, and two (Brighouse and Swift) are philosophers who operate in the realm of values.

This group of scholars is thinking differently. For example:

While educational goods and their distribution are central to education policy decisions, other values come into play as well. While it may at first seem like these additional values are too numerous and ill-defined to specify, in fact, only a small set of values—we identify five of them—typically come into play in education decision making. Think again of the possibility that equalizing educational goods would require extensive intervention in the family. Respect for parents’ interests limits the pursuit of distributive goals. Think of another independent value – what we term childhood goods. Childhood goods are the experiences that students have in childhood that contribute to their flourishing even if they do not build their capacities. These goods may include purposeless play, as well as the joys of learning or laughing. We may be unwilling to undertake an educational approach that develops students’ educational goods if it, in turn, makes the students miserable in the process. The other independent values—respect for the democratic process, freedom of residence and occupation, and other goods (e.g. heath care or housing)—may also put a brake on what should be done to pursue educational goods and their valuable distribution.

 

 

Categories Data, Economics, Research, Testing
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