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The False Proxy Trap

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2012 //
10

I confess I never heard about Seth Godin. Then I read these interesting reflections and concluded I have to learn more about him. He is an author and a high-tech entrepreneur. He wrote the following wise thoughts, which are a direct hit on our current obsession with test scores. The scores are a proxy for good education. Our policymakers are satisfied to get the scores, even if the students don’t get a good education.

Godin writes:

Avoiding the false proxy trap.

Sometimes, we can’t measure what we need to measure, so we invent a proxy, something that’s much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.

TV advertisers, for example, could never tell which viewers would be impacted by an ad, so instead, they measured how many people saw it. Or a model might not be able to measure beauty, but a bathroom scale is a handy stand in.

A business person might choose cash in the bank as a measure of his success, and a book publisher, unable to easily figure out if the right people are engaging with the book, might rely instead on a rank on a single bookseller list.

One last example: the non-profit organisation that uses money raised as a proxy for difference made.

You’ve already guessed the problem. Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of available tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead. {Why do I keep thinking 5×25?}

Gaming the system is never the goal. The goal is the goal.

Categories Testing

Unmasking Michelle Rhee’s Right-Wing Agenda

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2012 //
6

Daniel Denvir has been tracking the political activities of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst and learned that most of her support went to Republican candidates.

She pretends to be a Democrat but in state after state, she has given big money to candidates who support privatization and anti-teacher legislation..

Rhee “poured money into state-level campaigns nationwide, winning 86 of 105 races and flipping a net 33 seats to advocates of so-called “school reform,“ a movement that advocates expanding privately run public charter schools, weakening teachers unions, increasing the weight of high-stakes standardized tests and, in some cases, using taxpayer dollars to fund private tuition through vouchers as the keys to improving public education.

Rhee pretends to be bipartisan. But, as Denvir writes, “90 of the 105 candidates backed by StudentsFirst were Republicans, including Tea Party enthusiasts and staunch abortion opponents. And Rhee’s above-the-fray bona fides have come under heavy fire as progressives and teachers unions increasingly cast the school reform movement, which has become virtually synonymous with Rhee’s name, as politically conservative and corporate-funded.”

With Rhee’s money, very conservative Republicans gained a super-majority in the Tennessee legislature, virtually guaranteeing that her ex-husband State Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman will have a free hand pushing privatization of public education.

No one knows all the sources of Rhee’s Funding, but it would not be surprising to learn that she is a front for the rightwing, anti-government Koch brothers and others of their ilk.

She is surely a hero to ALEC.

Categories ALEC, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Michigan, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Tennessee, Testing

Michigan Is On Its Way to Ending Public Education

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2012 //
42

Governor Rick Snyder must hate public education. Certainly his advisors do.

He has some group of rightwing operatives who have pretentiously named themselves the “Oxford Foundation,” although they are not a foundation and they have nothing to do with Oxford University or Oxford Healthcare or Oxford anything.

This GOP group issues reports on how to disestablish any public responsibility for public education.

The only thing public will be the money. The providers will not be.

Here is the latest scheme from these advocates of privatization.

It is a voucher plan that allows students to take their public money to any private vendor.

It also allows charter schools to have selective enrollment–only those with high test scores, or only those who meet whatever criterion the school chooses–and to charge tuition.

The proposal says nothing about accountability–that, apparently, is only for public schools.

Are the people of Michigan ready to abandon public education?

Are they ready to accept Jeb Bush’s plan to make choosing a school akin to selecting a carton of milk?

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Michigan, On-Line Education, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

What Are You Going to Do to Change Obama’s Mind?

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2012 //
36

Joe Bower asks the right question: “What are you doing to  make Obama rethink his education policies?”

Obama will never stand for election again.

He is free to do what he wants.

Congress has given him a free hand.

He knows what is right for his daughters.

He chose a great school with experienced teachers, small classes, a full curriculum, a library, the arts, and NO standardized testing.

The teachers don’t get merit pay for higher student scores; they don’t get evaluated by their students’ scores.

Can we persuade him to see that what he wants for his children is what we want for all children?

What can you do?

Categories Obama, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

The Boston Globe’s Mad Love Crush on Charters

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2012 //
4

EduShyster has done it again.

This time she nails the Boston Globe.

This is the Boston Globe’s dream as expressed by its lead education writer:

“There’s a lot at stake in the takeover of the Gavin by UP Academy. If it succeeds at raising student achievement with an identical student population, then the main complaint of charter school critics will lose its resonance. If relatively inexperienced teachers can do what veterans can’t — namely turn around a school where only one out of four students performs at grade level — then the public cry for longer school days, merit pay, and stricter teacher evaluations will grow louder.”

How great would that be? If the test scores go up at Gavin, now taken over by UP Academy, every inner-city school could have teachers with high expectations but no professional training. All that is needed is a four-year degree, preferably from an Ivy League college or university. Every teacher could be judged by the rise or fall of student test scores. All unions would be abolished. No tenure, no seniority, just test scores. That solves all problems, right?

EduShyster explains the secret of UP’s success.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Humor, Privatization, Race to the Top, Students, Teach for America TFA, Testing, Unions

Should Computers Grade Essays?

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2012 //
17

Todd Farley is the scourge of standardized testing. His book, “Making the Grades,” is a shocking exposé of the industry. Todd spent nearly 15 years scoring tests, and he knows the tricks of the trade.

In this article, he skewers the latest testing craze: machine-scoring of essays.

Having demonstrated the fallibility of humans who score essays, Farley is no more impressed by computer scoring. As he puts it:

“…the study’s major finding states only that “the results demonstrated that overall, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items.” A paragraph on p. 21 reiterates the same thing: “By and large, the scoring engines did a good [job] of replicating the mean scores for all of the data sets.” In other words, all this hoopla about a study Tom Vander Ark calls “groundbreaking” is based on a final conclusion saying only that automated essay scoring engines are able to spew out a number that “by and large” might be “similar” to what a bored, over-worked, under-paid, possibly-underqualified, temporarily-employed human scorer skimming through an essay every two minutes might also spew out. I ask you, has there ever been a lower bar?”

Farley quotes the promoters of automated scoring, who say that the machines are faster, cheaper and more consistent than humans. Also, they make money.

He concludes: “Maybe a technology that purports to be able to assess a piece of writing without having so much as the teensiest inkling as to what has been said is good enough for your country, your city, your school, or your child. I’ll tell you what though: Ain’t good enough for mine.”

One of the responses to Farley’s post came from Tom Vander Ark, who is a tech entrepreneur and a target of Farley’s post.

Vander Ark wrote: “The purpose of the study was to demonstrate that online essay scoring was as accurate as expert human graders and that proved to be the case across a diverse set of performance tasks. The reason that was important is that without online scoring, states would rely solely on inexpensive multiple choice tests. It is silly to suggest that scoring engines need to ‘understand,’ they just need to score at least as well as a trained expert grader and our study did just that.”

A reader of this blog saw this exchange on Huffington Post and sent me this comment:

“Diane–we use an automated essay scorer at my school, and I have seen coherent, well-thought out writing receive scores below proficient, while incoherent, illogical writing (with more and longer words, and a few other tricks that automated scorers like) receive high scores. The students who suffer the most are the highest level students, the verbally gifted writers who write with the goal of actually being understood, “silly” as that may be.”

“In fact, all standardized testing penalizes the brightest students–those who think outside the box. Standardized testing is the box.”

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit, Testing

Pedro Noguera’s Good Agenda Going Forward

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2012 //
11

Pedro Noguera, my colleague at New York University, took my place as blogging partner with Deborah Meier at “Bridging Differences.”

In his latest column, Pedro says that it is not enough to recognize that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have failed. It is necessary to shape a new agenda.

Pedro offers these three elements to a new agenda.

1. “The federal government should call for the creation of a comprehensive support systems around schools in low-income communities to address issues such as safety, health, nutrition, and counseling. This should include the expansion of preschool and after-school programs and extended learning opportunities during the summer.” Since the federal government is unlikely to fund what is needed, states and localities should develop public-private partnerships to make it happen.

2) “The federal government must support a new approach to assessment that focuses on concrete evidence of academic performance—writing, reading, mathematical problem-solving—and moves away from using standardized tests to measure and rank students, teachers, and schools.”.

3) “The federal government needs to call upon the states and school districts to undertake careful evaluations of struggling schools to determine why they are failing to meet the needs of the students they serve before prescribing what should be changed. Instead of simply closing troubled schools such a strategy would require a greater focus on enrollment patterns (i.e. have we concentrated too many “high-needs” students in a school?) and ensuring that schools have the capacity to meet the needs of the students they serve rather than merely judging them under the current accountability systems.”

I heartily agree with Pedro’s diagnosis. If children are not healthy, if they are hungry, their ability to learn is negatively affected. The value of preschool and after-school programs is well-established. In state after state, these programs are being cut, while testing is expanded. I would go even further, as I do in my book, and say that class-size reduction must be part of the new vision, especially where the children with the greatest needs are enrolled.

The problem here is that we can’t get federal or state policymakers to change course unless they recognize that the present course–the strategy of high-stakes testing, accountability, choice, and school closings–has failed. I note that Pedro does not mention the Common Core standards, which has now become the linchpin of federal school reform.

Going forward, I think, requires that we persuade President Obama that Race to the Top is not working and must be replaced by a new vision. Pedro has well described the outlines of that vision.

But we can’t assume that the President will change course until he recognizes that four more years of the Bush NCLB strategy won’t help our children or improve their education. Twelve years is enough. It’s time to think anew.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, US Education

Good News from Florida

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2012 //
7

I should have reported this sooner, but other election returns distracted me.

Jeb Bush’s latest privatization scheme suffered a major setback at the hands of Florida voters.

He and his allies pushed Amendment 8 to allow public funds to flow to religious schools. As usual with “reform” measures, this one had a misleading name. It was about “religious freedom,” but voters recognized it was a voucher scheme and they rejected it overwhelmingly.

Other bad news for the Bush machine: Tony Bennett, the head of Bush’s Chiefs for Change, was whipped.

Tony Luna pushed Bush’s expensive but profitable (for tech companies) ideas about mandatory laptops for every student and mandatory online courses, as well as merit pay and union-demolition. Happily, the Luna laws were crushed and repealed by Idaho voters.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Chiefs for Change, Florida, For-Profit, Idaho, Indiana, Privatization, Religion, Testing, Vouchers

Sirota Exposes the Big Lie Technique

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2012 //
6

David Sirota, an author and talk-show host, here analyzes the election results and says they exposed the Big Lie of the corporate reform movement.

The public is not hankering to privatize their public schools.

The corporate leaders and rightwing establishment dropped millions of dollars to push their agenda of privatization, teacher-bashing and anti-unionism. They lost some major contests.

I will be posting more about some important local races they lost.

We have to do two things to beat them: get the word out to the public about who they are and what they want (read Sirota).

Two: never lose hope.

Those who fight to defend the commons against corporate raiders are on the right side of history.

Nothing they demand is right for children, nor does it improve education.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit, Idaho, Indiana, Merit pay, Parents, Privatization, Stand for Children, Students, Technology, Computers, Testing, Unions, US Education, Vouchers

Burris Dismantles Teacher-Bashing Myths

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2012 //
6

Carol Burris demolishes myths about teacher evaluation that were contained in a recent opinion piece in Phi Delta Kappan.

Frankly, it is pretty shocking to see that the editor of this journal for educators believes that standardized testing should have any role in evaluating teachers. We are already seeing a renewed emphasis on teaching to the test and more narrowing of the curriculum as teachers’ careers hinge on student scores.

It’s also shocking to see this editor agree that teachers should have no due process rights. When that happens, we can bid farewell to academic freedom and expect to see many districts where evolution is no longer taught.

The editorial criticized here just parrots the uninformed claims of the corporate reformers. Nothing proposed here will improve education. It’s guaranteed however to demoralize teachers.

Burris once again demonstrates the candor, intelligence and integrity that placed her on the honor roll as a hero of public education.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Honor Roll, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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