Terry Marselle has written a research-based review of the Common Core standards. The title is: “Why the Common Core is Psychologically and Cognitively Unsound.” His book is available on amazon for FREE on Kindle from June 1-5.
Archives for category: Research
Linda McNeil of Rice University has started a new blog that you should read regularly. Linda is a respected scholar of high-stakes testing and its inequitable effects. Read this paper, for example, “Avoidable Losses,” which she co-authored.
She writes:
“I want to personally invite you to visit my new blog, Educating All Our Children. This project is my response to the need I perceive for a place to bring people together around the issues of public schooling, equity and high-stakes testing. I am reaching out to you, a group that feels as passionate about equality in our schools as I do. Many of you have already shown me much support in conceptualizing this blog, for which I am very grateful.
“I have a tag line for my blog: Bringing together research, analysis, advocacy and community on behalf of the public’s schools. I’m writing in part to ask you to help me with this goal by sending me important links, leads, new stories and information that I can use to advance the movement. I would also ask that you forward, share and circulate my posts with people who share our interests. I’m not on Facebook (yet), but you can add me on Blogger and Google+ and subscribe by email to my blog.
“Thanks again for all your support over the years, and I look forward to your participation in my new venture. I hope you will visit regularly and comment often.”
Here is a sample of one of her recent posts.
Grover “Russ” Whitehurst was ousted from his job as head of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Whitehurst had previously been research director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the George W. Bush administration. He was, of course, a big supporter of testing and choice. He even created an annual ranking of the districts with the most school choice. He gave Brookings, once known as a liberal think tank, a rightwing gloss.
In 2012, Whitehurst fired me as a Senior Fellow at Brookings, an unpaid position. I had been at Brookings since 1993. From 1993-95, I was in residence and wrote a book there on national standards. I had originally been offered the Brown Chair at Brookings but turned it down because I wanted to return to Néw York City.
Whitehurst said he was removing me from my unpaid position because I was “inactive.” At the time, my book “Death and Life of the Great American School System” was ranked as the #1 social policy book on amazon. Inactive? Hardly.
The day I was terminated, I posted on the Néw York Review of Books blog a piece that was highly critical of Mitt Romney. Whitehurst was a Romney adviser. A few hours later, I received an email from Whitehurst saying I was no longer a Senior Fellow due to my inactivity. He later said there was no connection between my anti-Romney post and his decision to drop me from a post I had held for many years, without any notice or conversation.
It will be interesting to see who replaces Whitehurst, whether liberal, conservative, neoliberal, neoconservative.
Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute of the American Federation of Teachers is neither pro-TFA nor anti-TFA.
Here he reviews the latest study of TFA by Mathematica.
It has been widely reported that the study found little or no difference between the test scores of the students taught by TFA and by regular teachers. TFA saw that as a victory, since it presumably showed that no training or experience was needed to achieve the same results. Others saw it as a repudiation of TFA’s oft-repeated claims that their recruits were superior to career teachers.
Di Carlo parses the results and reaches this conclusion:
Now, on the one hand, it’s absolutely fair to use the results of this and previous TFA evaluations to suggest that we may have something to learn from TFA training and recruitment (e.g., Dobbie 2011). Like all new teachers, TFA recruits struggle at first, but they do seem to perform as well as or better than other teachers, many of whom have had considerably more experience and formal training.
On the other hand, as I’ve discussed before, there is also, perhaps, an implication here regarding the “type” of person we are trying to recruit into teaching. Consider that TFA recruits are the very epitome of the hard-charging, high-achieving young folks that many advocates are desperate to attract to the profession. To be clear, it is a great thing any time talented, ambitous, service-oriented young people choose teaching, and I personally think TFA deserves credit for bringing them in. Yet, no matter how you cut it, they are, at best, only modestly more effective (in raising math and reading test scores) than non-TFA teachers.
This reflects the fact that identifying good teachers based on pre-service characteristics is extraordinarily difficult, and the best teachers are very often not those who attended the most selective colleges or scored highly on their SATs. And yet so much of our education reform debate is about overhauling long-standing human resource policies largely to attract these high-flying young people. It follows, then, that perhaps we should be very careful not to fixate too much on an unsupported idea of the “type” of person we want to attract and what they are looking for, and instead pay a little more attention to investigating alternative observable characteristics that may prove more useful, and identifying employment conditions and work environments that maximize retention of effective teachers who are already in the classroom.
For me, the problem with all such studies is the assumption that the best (perhaps the only) way to identify the best teachers is by comparing changes in test scores. Great teachers supposedly get higher scores than mediocre teachers. I think that places far too much faith in standardized testing and in the assumption that education is solely measured by those tests. It makes the tests the arbiters of all things, even though most teachers do not teach tested subjects. Test-based findings are even more suspect when the children are very young.
Julian Vasquez Heilig, who recently moved from the University of Texas to California State University at Sacramento, is one of the nation’s leading authorities on Teach for America. He has studied their performance over time (see here and here), and he is not a fan. When Mathematica released its latest study of TFA, Heilig read it closely and analyzed the findings. TFA boasted that the study showed that its teachers were just as good as those who had studied education and intended to be career teachers. Some readers gleaned from this finding that “anyone can teach, no professional preparation needed,” that is, if they graduate from a highly selective college and are admitted to TFA.
Heilig digs deeper and has a different take on the study. The main finding, he says, is that Mathematica found no statistically significant differences in the groups of teachers they studied. However, he points out, the TFA teachers were overwhelmingly white, and few had any intention of staying in teaching as a career.
He notes that the test of “effectiveness” in pre-K-grade 2 is a five minute test:
Equally effective at what?…Mathematica utilized performance on the Woodcock Johnson III for the Pre-K-2 results— which takes 5 minutes to administer. Thus, the effectiveness of TFA teachers compared to Pre-K – 2nd grade teachers is based on a five minute administration to capture letter-word identification (Pre-K – 2) and applied problems for mathematics Pre-K – 2). Furthermore, one of the more egregious issues in the study is the aggregation of grades is that of the states that have Pre-K programs, more than half of states do not even require Pre-K teachers to have a bachelor’s degree. The report does not state that lack of a degree was an exclusion criteria and it is explicit that community preschools were included, so it appears than an aggregate that includes not only alternatively certified but also non-degreed teachers worked to TFA’s advantage. Should we really be impressed that TFA teachers outperformed a group that could have included non-degreed teachers? And they do it twice: with kindergarten and with grades K, 1, and 2.
What are the lessons of the study? Heilig writes:
So the [TFA] teachers were— on average— young, White, and from selective colleges. They had not studied early childhood in college and had very little teaching experience. They reported a similar amount of “pedagogy” (primarily the 60 hours from the five week Summer Institute), and more professional development (as we discussed above, they viewed it not very valuable). TFA teachers also reported less student teaching experience before they entered the classroom. They also were more likely to be working with a formal mentor (I mentioned David Greene’s point about the drain on mentors due to the constant carousel of Teach For America teachers in and out of schools here). As new teachers, they spent more time planning their own lessons, but were less likely to to help other teachers. Finally, TFA teachers were less satisfied “with many aspects of teaching” and less likely to “plan to spend the rest of the career as a classroom teacher….”
In conclusion, read at face value, here is the message Mathematica appears to promulgate with the report:
We do not need experienced (read: more expensive) teachers when non-experienced, less expensive teachers get the “same” —though not statistically significant— outcomes.
We do not need a more diverse workforce of teachers, again, because TFA teachers, who are overwhelmingly white, get the same outcomes.
Is TFA really in alignment with a vision for providing every student a high quality teacher? Or do they, Mathematica et al. just keep telling us that they are?
For myself, I have read many times that Teach for America invites young people to “make history” by serving for two years. And Wendy Kopp has frequently said that “One day,” all children in America will have an excellent teacher. I have a hard time understanding the logic of these claims. If the TFA teachers get the same results as current teachers, how is that “making history”? If most TFA recruits leave after two years, how does that lead to the conclusion that one day all children will have an excellent teacher? If TFA persuades policymakers that teachers can do a good enough job with no professional preparation, doesn’t that decimate the idea of teaching as a profession? If anyone can teach so long as they went to a selective college, how does that raise the standard for teachers? If our policymakers prefer churn, with teachers leaving every two or three years to find their real career, how is that good for students? How does TFA improve the profession? It doesn’t. It eliminates it.
For his fearlessness, for his willingness to stand up to those with money and power, for his willingness to present the evidence as he finds it without fear or favor, I place Julian Vasquez Heilig on the honor roll of this blog. He is an example to all researchers of the ethics of his profession. To be an outstanding researcher requires years of study, scholarship, discipline, dedication, and experience. Sort of like being a great teacher.
A new study by Mathematica Policy Research finds that young corps members in Teach for America get no better results than other teachers.
Normally, this would not be big news, since TFA teachers have only five weeks of training. But for years, TFA has boasted that their young people were far superior to other teachers who had gone through professional preparation programs. Now, TFA leaders are claiming to be satisfied that their five weeks of training allows them to do just as well as those who spent a year or more learning to teach. The implicit logic of their perspective is that teaching is not a profession and that no preparation is needed beyond five weeks of TFA training. However you slice it, the TFA message degrades the profession. No profession would be considered to be a profession if any bright young person could succeed with only a few weeks of preparation. One cannot even imagine doctors or lawyers or accountants boasting that they were successful with a five-week training program.
The Mathematica study may not end the debate about the value of TFA. Its biggest fans seem to be the Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and other foundations that want to support the proliferation of non-union charter schools with low costs and high teacher turnover. Walton gave $50 million to TFA; Broad collected $100 million from a group of foundations for TFA. And Arne Duncan gave TFA $50 million. TFA’s special contributions to American education, it appears, are to staff non-union charter schools and to demonstrate that teaching is not a profession.
The New York State Education Department released educator evaluation results on February 26, and once again, the overwhelming majority of teachers received effective or highly effective ratings. State officials were deeply disappointed by the overwhelmingly positive results. They seem to operate under the assumption that poor test results must be caused by “bad” teachers, and that their evaluation program should identify them so they may be fired.
The SED found that:
The final evaluation results show more than 95 percent of teachers statewide are rated effective (54 percent) or highly effective (42 percent); 4 percent are rated as developing; 1 percent are rated ineffective. Ninety-four percent of principals are rated effective (66 percent) or highly effective (28 percent).
The results were somewhat different in New York City, which used a plan imposed by then-State Commissioner John King:
New York City, whose evaluation plan was imposed by former Commissioner King when the New York City Department of Education could not reach agreement on the terms of the evaluation plan with the teachers union, showed greater differentiation than most districts in the State. Although New York City teachers and principals were evaluated on the same overall subcomponents as the rest of the State, the three subcomponents used different scoring ranges to determine the subcomponent rating categories (i.e., Highly Effective, Effective, Developing, Ineffective). Less than 10 percent of teachers in the city are rated Highly Effective, while 83 percent are rated Effective, 7 percent are Developing and 1 percent are Ineffective.
The leader of the state Board of Regents expressed disappointment at the high proportion of teachers found to be effective or highly effective:
“The ratings show there’s much more work to do to strengthen the evaluation system,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch said. “There’s a real contrast between how our students are performing and how their teachers and principals are evaluated. The goal of the APPR process is to identify exceptional teachers who can serve as mentors and role models, and identify struggling teachers to make sure they get the help they need to improve. The evaluation system we have now doesn’t do that. The ratings from districts don’t reflect the struggles our students face to achieve college and career readiness. State law must be changed to build an evaluation system that supports teaching and learning in classrooms across the State. Our students deserve no less.”
Chancellor Tisch, like Governor Cuomo, assumes that the proportion of students getting low scores should somehow be matched by a similar proportion of low-rated teachers. It would be useful if Chancellor Tisch and Governor Cuomo reviewed two basic documents: the American Statistical Association statement on the uses and misuses of value-added measurement (VAM) and the joint statement of the National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association. It is unfortunate that the Board of Regents and the Governor proceed without regard to research on the effects of out-of-school and in-school factors that affect test scores. Were they to familiarize themselves with the two documents cited, they might develop a very different action plan, one that helps both students and teachers.
Experts in early childhood education are calling for the abandonment of Common Core standards in kindergarten and their replacement by developmentally appropriate, research-based practice.
Defending the Early Years (DEY), in conjunction with the Alliance for Childhood, released a new report “Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose.”
Early childhood experts could find no solid research showing long-term educational gains for children who are taught to read in kindergarten, yet this is what the Common Core Standards require. The pressure of implementing the CC reading standard is leading many kindergarten teachers to resort to inappropriate drilling on specific skills and excessive testing. Teacher-led direct instruction in kindergarten has almost entirely replaced the active, play-based experiential learning that we know children need.
Defending the Early Years and Alliance for Childhood are calling for the withdrawal of the kindergarten standards from the Common Core so they can be rethought along developmental lines. You can read the full report and watch a video, along with calls to action on the DEY website:
Find the full report at: http://www.DEYproject.org .
The video: http://youtu.be/DVVln1WMz0g
If you want to tweet your support, use this hashtag:
#2much2soon
Here are some suggested tweets:
#EarlyEd experts @dey_project @4childhood conclude #CCSS Kinder reading requirement is #2much2soon http://youtu.be/DVVln1WMz0g
and
Why @dey_project @4childhood call for withdrawal of kinder standards from #CCSS http://youtu.be/DVVln1WMz0g
Bill Gates convened 1,000 people in Seattle, where he admitted that his big global health challenge has not produced significant gains in the Third World. Educators may recognize parallels to the Gates’ involvement in Common Core, where the foundation looked for a technological fix to complex human, social, and economic problems.
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“When he took the stage this fall to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his signature global health research initiative, Bill Gates used the word “naive” — four times — to describe himself and his charitable foundation.
It was a surprising admission coming from the world’s richest man.
“But the Microsoft co-founder seemed humbled that, despite an investment of $1 billion, none of the projects funded under the Gates Foundation’s “Grand Challenges” banner has yet made a significant contribution to saving lives and improving health in the developing world….
“Not only did he underestimate some of the scientific hurdles, Gates said. He and his team also failed to adequately consider what it would take to implement new technologies in countries where millions of people lack access to basic necessities such as clean water and medical care….
“Among his favorite projects is an effort to eliminate Dengue fever by infecting mosquitoes with bacteria that block disease transmission. Another is a spinoff biotech working on a probiotic to cure cholera.
“But critics say projects like those demonstrate the foundation’s continuing emphasis on technological fixes, rather than on the social and political roots of poverty and disease.
“The main harm is in the opportunity cost,” said Dr. David McCoy, a public-health expert at Queen Mary University, London. “It’s in looking constantly for new solutions, rather than tackling the barriers to existing solutions.”
“The toll of many diseases could be lowered simply by strengthening health systems in developing countries, he said. Instead, programs like Grand Challenges — heavily promoted by the Gates Foundation’s PR machine — divert the global community’s attention from such needs, McCoy argues.”
Reformers have framed their narrative around the myth of “the bad teacher, without whom all children would make A’s in every subject every year. With this false narrative, they have promoted lengthy, tme-wasting evaluations to find and fire these academic frauds.
The narrative itself is the fraud. Like every profession, there are good and bad practitioners. Some teachers are excellent in some settings, not in others. We count on qualified administrators–not algorithms–to evaluate their staffs.
But now comes another reason to doubt the reformers’ narrative. A new study shows that the quality of teachers has been increasing over the past 15 years.
The abstract says:
“The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, a number of federal, state, and local teacher accountability policies have been implemented toward improving teacher quality over the objections of some who argue the policies will decrease quality. In this article, we analyze 25 years of data on the academic ability of teachers in New York State and document that since 1999 the academic ability of both individuals certified and those entering teaching has steadily increased. These gains are widespread and have resulted in a substantial narrowing of the differences in teacher academic ability between high- and low-poverty schools and between White and minority teachers. We interpret these gains as evidence that the status of teaching is improving.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 