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Peter Greene Reviews Mike Barber’s Book on Failed Implementation

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2015 //
23

You probably know who Peter Greene is: a prolific high school teacher in Pennsylvania who specializes in skewering fools.

But do you know who Mike Barber is? He is actually Sir Michael Barber of Pearson. He wrote a book called Deliverology, which provides the theoretical construct for corporate reform. It argues for setting targets (test scores) and incentivizing people to reach them.

In this post, Peter Greene reviews Mike Barber’s latest book , which he wrote with two co-authors. The goal of the book is to explain why ordinary people have failed to do reform right. The problem is implementation.

Peter writes:

“Their new book has the more-than-a-mouthful title Deliverology in Practice: How Education Leaders Are Improving Student Outcomes, and it sets out to answer the Big Question:

“Why, with all the policy changes in education over the past five years, has progress in raising student achievement and reducing inequalities been so slow?

“In other words– since we’ve had full-on reformsterism running for five years, why can’t they yet point to any clear successes? They said this stuff was going to make the world of education awesome. Why isn’t it happening?

“Now, you or I might think the answer to that question could be “Because the reformy ideas are actually bad ideas” or “The premises of the reforms are flawed” or “The people who said this stuff would work turn out to be just plain wrong.” But no– that’s not where Barber et al are headed at all. Instead, they turn back to what has long been a popular excuse explanation for the authors of failed education reforms.

“Implementation.

“Well, my idea is genius. You’re just doing it wrong!” is the cry of many a failed geniuses in many fields of human endeavor, and education reformsters have been no exception.”

Yes, Communism was a great idea but it was badly implemented. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was a great idea, badly implemented. All those millions of people who died? Collateral damage.

Peter writes:

“The implementation fallacy has created all sorts of complicated messes, but the fallacy itself is simply expressed:

“There is no good way to implement a bad idea.

“Barber, described in this article as “a monkish former teacher,” has been a champion of bad ideas. He has a fetish for data that is positively Newtonian. If we just learn all the data and plug it into the right equations, we will know everything, which makes Michael Barber a visionary for the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for Barber, in this century, we’re well past the work of Einstein and the chaoticians and the folks who have poked around in quantum mechanics, and from those folks we learn things like what really is or isn’t a solid immutable quality of the universe and how complex systems (like those involving humans) experience wide shifts based on small variables and how it’s impossible to collect data without changing the activity from which the data is being collected.

“Barber’s belief in standardization and data collection are in direct conflict with the nature of human beings and the physical universe as we currently understand it. Other than that, they’re just as great as they were 200 years ago. But Barber is a True Believer, which is how he can say things like this:

“Those who don’t want a given target will argue that it will have perverse or unintended consequences,” Sir Michael says, “most of which will never occur.”

“Yup. Barber fully understands how the world works, and if programs don’t perform properly, it’s because people are failing to implement correctly.”

You have to read it all. It is Peter Greene at his best.

Categories Corporate Reform, Privatization, Standardized Testing

Ohio Common Core Test Results: An Innovation

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2015 //
18

Ohio has withdrawn from the federally funded PARCC test, but the results came in from last spring’s tests. A little more than one-third “met expectations.” Put another way, nearly two-thirds “failed.”

Under the old state tests, 75-80% were proficient. Ohio softened the blow of high failure rate by creating a new category called “Approached Expectations.” This reduced the proportion of “failures.”

“That will have, for example, students that “Met Expectations” on PARCC rated as “Accelerated” by Ohio. And students will be labeled as “Proficient” by Ohio, even if they still just “Approached Expectations” of the 12 PARCC states.

“That means that many more kids will labeled as “Proficient” than the PARCC states would consider as meeting expectations.

“Jim Wright, ODE’s director of assessment, told the board this morning that shouldn’t be a concern.

“Educators across the country have warned that scores and ratings would drop with the new tests. The proposed ratings will bring a drop, just not the “cliff” that people warned about, Wright said.”

Categories Common Core, Ohio, Standardized Testing

California Charter School Test Scores Plummet

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2015 //
16

The test scores for most charter schools, like most public schools, declined sharply on the new Smarter Balanced tests of the Common Core.

Rocketship charters, in particular, did poorly.

The typical response of charter leaders was not to complain that the tests are biased and unreliable (which they are), but to say, showing grit, “We will have to up our game.” I suppose that means they weren’t trying hard enough until they got the scores.

Will the sobering news burst the charter bubble? Of course not. Too much money riding on their proliferation.

Categories California, Charter Schools, Common Core, Standardized Testing

Bernie Horn: The Common Core “Results” Are Not Actually Test Scores: MUST READ!

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2015 //
32

This is a terrific article about the Common Core test results. It explains in layman’s language how the test scores are calculated and converted to scale scores.

When you read the “results” in the newspaper or get the results for your child or your class, you need to understand that the “scores” are not really scores:

The only things that have been released are percentages of students who supposedly meet “proficiency” levels. Those are not test scores—certainly not what parents would understand as scores. They are entirely subjective measurements.

Here’s why. When a child takes a standardized test, his or her results are turned into a “raw score,” that is, the actual number of questions answered correctly, or when an answer is worth more than one point, the actual number of points the child received. That is the only real objective “score,” and yet, Common Core raw scores have not been released.

Raw scores are adjusted—in an ideal world to account for the difficulty of questions from year to year—and converted to “scale scores.” A good way to understand those is to think of the SAT. When we say a college applicant scored a 600 on the math portion of the SAT test, we do not mean he or she got 600 answers right, we mean the raw scores were run through a formula that created a scale score—and that formula may change depending on which version of the SAT was taken. Standardized test administrators rarely publicize scale scores and the Common Core administrators have not.

Then the test administrators decide on “cut scores,” that is, the numerical levels of scale scores where a student is declared to be basic, proficient or advanced

The cut scores are the passing marks. They are arbitrary and subjective decisions made by fallible human beings. They can raise the passing mark to create large numbers of “failures,” or they can lower the passing mark to create a “success” story, to celebrate their wonderful policies. In some cases, the cut score is set high, so many students “fail.” The next year, or year after, the cut scores are lowered, and HOORAY! Our Wise Leadership Has Created Success!

As Horn writes:

Now, when a news story says that proficiency percentages were “higher than expected,” you should know what was “expected.” The Common Core consortiums gave the strong impression that they would align their levels of “proficiency” with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) nationwide standardized test. (That is, by the way, an absurdly high standard. Diane Ravitch explains that on the NAEP, “Proficient is akin to a solid A.”)

Score setting is a subjective decision, implemented by adjusting the scale and/or cut scores. If proficiency percentages are “higher than expected,” it simply means the consortium deliberately set the scores for proficiency to make results look better than the NAEP’s. And that is all it means.

It is no different from what many states did to standardized test results in anticipation of the Common Core exams. New York intentionally lowered and subsequently increased statewide results on its standardized tests. Florida lowered passing scores on its assessment so fewer children and schools would be declared failures. The District of Columbia lowered cut scores so more students would appear to have done well. Other states did the same.

The bottom line is this: The 2015 Common Core tests simply did not and cannot measure if students did better or worse. The “Smarter Balanced” consortium (with its corporate partner McGraw-Hill), the only one to release results so far, decided to make them look better than the NAEP, but worse than prior standardized tests. The PARCC consortium (with corporate partner Pearson) is now likely to do the same. It’s fair to say the results are rigged, or as the Washington Post more gently has put it, “proficiency rates…are as much a product of policymakers’ decisions as they are of student performance.”

You MUST MUST MUST MUST open the link to the cut scores announced by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which Horn helpfully supplies. Scroll down to pp. 5-6. You will see that the cut scores predict that most students will “fail” in every grade. Only the top two levels are considered “passing,” that is, proficiency and advanced. In third grade math, 61% are predicted to “fail.” In fifth grade math, 67% are predicted to “fail.” In eighth grade math, 68% are predicted to “fail.”

The ELA predicted failure rates are slightly better, but even there, the majority of students are expected to “fail” because the cut score was so high.

If they chose different cut scores, the proportion passing or failing would be different, higher or lower.

This is not unique to the Common Core tests. This is the way all standardized testing is graded.

You can see how easy it is for political figures to manipulate the passing rates to their advantage.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Standardized Testing

California: Common Core Tests WIDEN the Achievement Gaps

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
74

Howard Blume reports today that the achievement gaps among children of different groups widened on the Smarter Balanced Assessment tests whose results were just reported.

The tests are “harder,” “more rigorous,” and so the students who already had low scores have even lower scores.

This is akin to raising the bar in a track event from 4 feet to 6 feet. Those who couldn’t clear the 4 foot bar will certainly not clear the higher bar.

If anyone remembers, we were told repeatedly that the Common Core would close achievement gaps between whites/Asians and Blacks/Hispanics, and between upper income/low income students.

It hasn’t, and it won’t.

The tests were designed to fail a majority of students of every group. Here are the cut scores for the SBAC tests. The developers predicted mass failures last fall.

Let’s just say that the Common Core and the tests aligned to them are a disaster for American education. Kids don’t necessarily try harder when they fail again and again. They may give up.

Many people suspect that the purpose of all this manufactured failure is to make parents eager for charter schools and vouchers. They may be right.

Blume writes:

“This is going to show the real achievement gap,” said Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “We are asking more out of our kids and I think that’s a good thing.”

At the same time, he added, “there’s no question that when we raised the bar for students that we’re going to have to support our lower-achieving students even more so than we are now.”

Although scores declined for all students, blacks and Latinos saw significantly greater drops than whites and Asians, widening the already large gap that was evident in results from earlier years, according to a Times analysis.

Under the previous test, last given to public school students two years ago, the gap separating Asian and black students was 35 percentage points in English. The gap increased to 44 percentage points under the new test. Asian students’ results dropped the least on the new tests, which widened the gap between them and those who are white, black or Latino, the analysis showed.

White students also maintained higher relative scores than their black and Latino peers.

A similar pattern occurred with students from low-income families. Their scores in math, for example, declined at a steeper rate (51%) than those of students from more affluent backgrounds (16%). In the last decade, all ethnic groups made significant academic gains compared to where their scores started. But the gap separating the scores of blacks and Latinos from whites and Asians changed little….

In that subject, 69% of Asian students achieved the state targets compared to 49% of whites, 21% of Latinos and 16% of blacks.

Although even Asian students have room to improve, their relative performance stood out. In math, the percentage of Asians who met state targets declined 12%. White students went down 21%, Latinos 50%, black students 54%. More than half the students who took the test were Latino.

The future of California, Lucia said, will depend on students of color graduating from schools with the skills they need to succeed in college and careers.

A top-performing school district was San Marino Unified, which is located in a mostly high-income area and enrolls 56% Asian students; 84% of students met state learning goals in both English and math.

L.A. Unified, which enrolls a majority of low-income, minority students, fared much worse overall. Achievement gaps widened less in L.A. Unified than in the state as a whole but that’s largely because its white and Asian students declined more, according to the analysis.

In L.A. Unified, 67% of Asian students met state targets in English, compared to 61% of white students, 27% of Latinos and 24% of black students.

Categories California, Common Core, Standardized Testing

Paul Horton: Common Core=Corporate Control

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
18

Paul Horton, history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, got exasperated about the steady stream of articles endorsing the Common Core in the Chronicle of Higher Education. So he wrote a letter warning the professoriate not to buy the corporate-funded CC propaganda. The letter should have been published as an opinion piece.

An excerpt:

“1. They are the product of a push by private foundations acting in the interest of multinational corporations to colonize public education in the United States and in other areas projected be developed as core production and assembly areas in the emerging global economy. A recent Washington Post article using a well-placed source within the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation essentially confirmed what many critics have suspected: that Bill Gates effectively controls the Department of Education in the United States through his former employees who serve in leadership positions within the Department of Education.

Our education secretary also does a lot of listening to Michael Barber of Pearson Education. Although Mr. Gates and Sir Michael, as well as other reformers, are doubtless well intentioned, they view the colonization of K-12 education in this country and elsewhere as a “win-win.” In their view, the quality of education will improve with greater accountability, and they will make billions creating and delivering accountability for students, teachers, and education schools.

To implement their plan, they are willing to jettison all ideas of collective responsibility for public education in a classic privatization pincer move: Chicago School of Economics ideas of “free choice” and “free markets” are used to legitimate privatization through virtual control of the editorial boards of major papers—the Murdoch chain, the Tribune chain, The Washington Post (now run by a neoliberal libertarian), and The New York Times—as well as center-liberal media like PBS and NPR. Money is funneled into NPR and PBS by organizations that support privatizing school reform in the name of “support for education programing.”

A Gates-funded Washington consulting firm, GMMB, works 24/7 to sell the Common Core Standards and all other elements of the Race to the Top mandates that call for more charter schools, a standardized-testing regime, and value-added assessments of teachers based on this testing regime. Likewise representatives of the Washington-based Fordham Institute work together with GMMB to send weekly talking points to major editorial boards and education reporters to ensure that representatives from an “independent foundation” are relentlessly quoted.

Not surprisingly, the Fordham Institute is hardly independent, and is heavily subsidized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Michael Bloomberg, and the Broad Foundation, and many more funders of privatizing education. While GMMB attempts to control the discourse in the country’s major media outlets (Arne Duncan’s past press secretary is helping to coordinate this propaganda campaign within GMMB), McKinsey sells Microsoft and Pearson packages to fit the Race to the Top mandates.

The Los Angeles Independent Schools boondoggle that packed Pearson Common Core Curriculum lessons within Microsoft tablets and software is the wave of the future. Districts are sold packages that they cannot afford to comply with federal mandates that are pushed by private multinational corporations. What I am attempting to describe is the tip of a corporate iceberg that amounts to corporate control of education policy with very little participation of classroom teachers, parents, or school boards.

The idea that the Common Core Standards are the product of a democratic process is simply misrepresentation of fact—a big lie that GMMB, our education secretary, Bill Gates, Pearson Education, and the Fordham Institute propagate. What many rightfully be called corporate-education reform has bypassed the democratic process. For this reason alone, university faculty and administrators should not support the Common Core Curriculum and the Race to the Top.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reform, Higher Education, Standardized Testing

Perdido Street School Blogger: Students Are Returning to School Without Test Scores

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
42

Talk about a messed-up, incomprehensible system!

Many students across the nation have returned to school or will return this week, without their Common Core test scores!

Didn’t the cheerleaders for the tests say that students needed to know, parents needed to know, teachers needed to know what those scores are? Didn’t they say that no one would know how students are doing compared to students in other districts and states without those scores? I don’t happen to know any parents who actually care how their child compares to another child across the nation, but someone does. Maybe someone in the U.S. Department of Education.

Blogger Perdido Street School points out that things go slowly because the benchmarks are set after the tests are given.

Just as with the New York Common Core tests, the benchmarks aren’t set until long after the students take their tests.

With the old New York State Regents exams, the benchmark scores were set before students took their tests and were posted right after the test ended.

That seems like a fair and honest way to do things – set the passing mark before students take the test.

But in the Era of Common Core, when educrats and reformers wanted to rig the tests for 70% failure rates, all of these Common Core tests, including the high school tests, are benchmarked long after students take their tests and the results are in.

Rigged?

You betcha!

If not, why not set the benchmarks before, the way they used to with the Regents exams?

Categories Common Core, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, Standardized Testing

Jeff Bryant: Here Is One True Progressive in Congress Who Understands the Hoax of “Reform”

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2015 //
8

Jeff Bryant laments that so many elected officials, who call themselves progressive, have fallen for “education reform” in its most punitive form. For example, even Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders voted for the Murphy Amendment when the Senate was shaping its bill to revise NCLB. The amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, would have kept the federal government in charge of defining what is a “failing school” and prescribing how states should intervene. Thankfully, the amendment was voted down, but most Democratic senators, including Warren and Sanders, voted for it. A group of civil rights organizations lobbied to retain annual high-stakes testing, even though these tests label minority children as failures and subject them to relentless test prep, robbing them of a full education. Fortunately other civil rights leaders, such as the Rev. William Barber of North Carolina, have spoken out against high-stakes testing, as have grassroots leaders of civil rights groups.

Bryant asks:

What’s going on here? Why are progressive leaders in the Democratic Party out of touch with progressive education? Is education somehow so different from issues like finance and macroeconomics that it doesn’t belong in the same populist tent with breaking up Wall Street banks and raising the minimum wage?

To gain insight into these questions, Bryant interviewed Rep. Mark Takano of California. Takano is unusual for many reasons as a member of Congress. For one, he is an experienced educator, which is a rarity in that legislative body. He knows what he is talking about. He has been in the trenches. He was a classroom teacher for nearly 24 years before he was elected to Congress. He knows the real effects of federal policies. Other members of Congress focus on other issues, and few have any real understanding about the consequences of the policies they enact. Takano does. He knows about education.

You will enjoy reading the interview and learn from it.

Takano says, for example:

I saw education before No Child Left Behind. I also experienced education during No Child Left Behind up until I got elected to Congress. Basically, test and punish did not work. Because of No Child Left Behind, I suddenly had to follow a syllabus and a pacing guide dictated by the district office. There was less trust of the teacher, and that’s a mild way of putting it. We began being treated like we were a transmitter of someone else’s idea of what is good education. Effective education doesn’t work that way. Effective education is building relationships with students. It’s about teachers strategizing on how to engage students. You can’t do the canned lesson or scripted content.

I dare say no one else in Congress understands as much about the realities of the classroom as Mark Takano. Let us hope he is re-elected again and again and gains seniority on the House Education Committee.

We can all be grateful to know that there is a teacher in Congress. There should be many more.

Categories Accountability, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

Who Set the Passing Marks for the Common Core Tests? A Design for Failure.

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2015 //
26

The passing marks (cut scores) on the Smarter Balanced Assessment were set last November. They were set in such a way that most students were certain to “fail.” The SBAC predicted that most students would fail. The executive director, Joe Wilhoit, quoted in the article below, predicted that “over time, the performance of students will improve.” Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. It is a dirty trick to play on students. The cut scores are close to the “proficient” achievement level in NAEP. In twenty-three years of testing the states, Massachusetts is the only state in the nation in which 50% of students reached the proficient level. That indicates that it will be many years–if ever–until half of the students are able to reach these absurdly high cut scores. If they are used for promotion and graduation in the future, most students will not be promoted and will not graduate.

Catherine Gewertz of Education Week wrote:

In a move likely to cause political and academic stress in many states, a consortium that is designing assessments for the Common Core State Standards released data Monday projecting that more than half of students will fall short of the marks that connote grade-level skills on its tests of English/language arts and mathematics.

 
The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test has four achievement categories. Students must score at Level 3 or higher to be considered proficient in the skills and knowledge for their grades. According to cut scores approved Friday night by the 22-state consortium, 41 percent of 11th graders will show proficiency in English/language arts, and 33 percent will do so in math. In elementary and middle school, 38 percent to 44 percent will meet the proficiency mark in English/language arts, and 32 percent to 39 percent will do so in math.

 
Level 4, the highest level of the 11th grade Smarter Balanced test, is meant to indicate readiness for entry-level, credit-bearing courses in college, and comes with an exemption from remedial coursework at many universities. Eleven percent of students would qualify for those exemptions.
The establishment of cut scores, known in the measurement field as “standard-setting,” marks one of the biggest milestones in the four-year-long project to design tests for the common standards. It is also the most flammable, since a central tenet of the initiative has been to ratchet up academic expectations to ensure that students are ready for college or good jobs. States that adopted the common core have anticipated tougher tests, but the new cut scores convert that abstract concern into something more concrete.

 

Smarter Balanced is one of two main state consortia that are using $360 million in federal funds to develop common-core tests. The other group, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, is waiting until next summer—after the tests are administered—to decide on its cut scores. Smarter Balanced officials emphasized that the figures released Monday are estimates, and that states would have “a much clearer picture” of student performance after the operational test is given in the spring.

Categories Common Core, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Roxana Marachi: An Open Letter to the California State Board of Education

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2015 //
17

Roxana Marachi, a professor at San Jose State University in California, wrote an open letter to the State Board of Education. She warned them that the results of the Smarter Balanced Assessments, which will be released today, are not valid or reliable or fair. “False data are false data. Period. And to compare future results with current 2015 scores as “baseline” would be just as fraudulent as it would be to promote the 2015 scores as somehow valid.”

Students who are English learners will be harmed significantly by these tests, since SBAC itself predicted a failure rate of 90%, she writes.

These tests violate the most basic principles of the the American Psychological Association:

“We know from decades of research that beliefs matter in student learning and motivation. Without an understanding that the scores are meaningless, students will be likely to internalize failing labels with corresponding beliefs about their academic potential. And unless otherwise informed, families will be likely to believe what the State Department of Education communicates about their children’s readiness for college and career based on an assessment that fails to meet basic standards for testing and accountability.

“Jonathan Pelto has written extensively about SmarterBalanced testing in Connecticut:

“Considering that many of the world’s greatest scientists, authors, actors, teachers and leaders were once English Language Learners one would think the public education system in the United States would be designed to promote and support opportunities for those who need extra help learning the English Language. Moreover you would think education policymakers would be working to find ways to take advantage of the opportunities that having a multilingual population present.”

Marachi writes:

“This seems an ethical dilemma for educational leaders. If they are to be honest with students and families and communicate truthfully that the test scores are meaningless, they would have to acknowledge that the public has been misled (whether knowingly or not) by those promoting the assessments. Acknowledging the current situation would also include accepting the fact that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted (and are slated to continue to be wasted) should the assessments continue to fail meeting basic standards for testing and accountability.

“Yet, what appears to be the case is that the invalid tests are being falsely promoted as accurate measures of “college and career readiness.” The LA Times just published a piece entitled, “‘Don’t Panic’ Officials Say as California Braces for Lower Student Test Results.” It appears state officials are fully aware of the potential harm and motivational fallout yet “Don’t Panic” is the best message being offered as a remedy rather than full disclosure about the lack of validity of the tests.”

Marachi quotes Dr. Doug McRae, a testing expert, who said:

“Including current scores in student academic records without evidence of validity, reliability, and fairness of the assessments would be “immoral, unethical, unprofessional, and to say the least, totally irresponsible.”

Marachi closes with a Million-dollar Challenge, which should be addressed to every state board member in the nation, as well as to Secretary Arne Duncan, who funded these tests, as well as to David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards.

“In closing and in the spirit of critical thinking, I respectfully request that the State Board of Education take on the following challenge. The ultimate endorsement of confidence in your release of SBAC scores would be for each Board Member to publicly take the 11th Grade SBAC Math/ELA tests and to publish your scores at the next State Board of Education meeting. If the assessments are confirmed to be functional and can be verified as accurately, securely, and fairly assessing skills necessary for “college and career readiness”, then every State Board Trustee (all of whom are assumed to be college-educated and career-successful) should receive scores that exceed passing performance. At the very least, this process should allow you the opportunity to fully endorse the assessment product that has been bought and administered to children.

“If this request is declined or somehow otherwise considered unfair, then why would you demand the same of youth entrusted to your care?”

Categories California, Common Core, English Language Learners, Injustice, Standardized Testing, Students
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