Dear Diane,

Someone calling himself "natturner" had a sharp reply to Jay Mathews' column on closing big high schools. Even though I was part of such an effort many years ago, and still brag about the results, I think natturner made a good rhetorical point in his comment on Mathews' blog:

"Mr. Mathews, I just can't figure out why you confine your sagacity to just America's public education system. Your philosophy seems relevant in so many bigger ways.

For instance, about a year ago the banking system collapsed, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it had failed. And rather than the U.S. taxpayer financing a banks turnaround to the tune of $700 billion, they should have, as you recommend for inner-city schools, been terminated! Terminating the banks, has a nice ring to it don't you think?"

The context, I like to believe, of our effort (pre-Klein/Bloomberg) was different, as were our allies in the work. But I'm uneasy about some of my earlier adventures as I see them turned into something that feels quite different. I wish we would learn from our history rather than rushing from fad to fad at the speed of light. Step One would be making transparent our purposes. Both for education writ large and for the reforms themselves. But I fear you are right, Diane. Many "reformers" have an agenda and will keep churning out "data" to prove their point. Thanks for the counter-data, once again. But meanwhile we have to counter their agenda with our own.

I like the late Ted Sizer's definition of the purpose of education: "to help young people use their minds well." He reminded us that this involved developing habits that weren't easy to sustain in face of the obstacles placed before us by so many powerful distracters right there inside our schools! That's what Horace's Compromise intended to demonstrate. Horace was compromised from doing his job by the regularities of the very school he worked in.

If this were the purpose of schools, argued Sizer, then we would need to "measure" our success in ways consistent with our goal. We should ask kids to "show us" their minds at work so that we can judge the claims made on their behalf. Seems simple enough. But then we get into trouble. Somebody (in fact several millions of such) thought Sarah Palin, and George Bush before her, were the kind of leaders they desired. That was a judgment which you and I might question, so how dare we leave ourselves open to such judgments when it comes to what constitutes a good education and a well-educated person? So we generally retreat and seek measurements that compare something, whatever, but not our exercise of intellectual judgment.

I know of no easy answer to this. At CPESS and Mission Hill we tried to construct a different "compromise"—by creating a process that over-weighted professional expertise, but included other voices. We also went to great lengths to make the work of the judges transparent, through an archive that contained both the student's work and a sampling of videos of the live process itself.

There is plenty of room for measurement error in this process. But is the rate of error any greater than it is using standardized tests? We concluded that it wasn't, and our view was reaffirmed by a panel of experts selected by N.Y. State Superintendent Mills to judge 35 public high schools that developed similar practices to replace tests and credit hours.

If we are educating young people in the art of exercising judgment, then maybe we have no choice but to measure them through a respectful process that honors judgment. In the process, most important of all, our students come to value what we honored.

I'm not naive enough to think we are about to take that path writ large. But, like you, Diane, I'm hoping that we will slow down a bit and reconsider the one we're presently pursuing. If Michele Obama weren't good at standardized testing, and if she sent her children to schools that do not define children in that way—why must "being realistic" (as she argues) mean that we must keep doing it to the kids we send to public institutions?

In Yong Zhao's new book, Catching up or Leading the Way, he tackles precisely this issue from the standpoint of China's long obsession with tests. He concludes the book by noting that he has hopefully shown "how the current reform efforts are the result of a history of flawed reasoning based on incomplete information, driven by unfounded fear, and influenced by politics." He includes a quote from Yogi Berra that sums it up well—"The future ain't what it used to be."

Fixing our schools through more deeply embedding an old outworn mechanism designed for a different age and purpose (sorting, ranking) will be a disaster, which we can still avert. I hope we don't conclude, as the Chinese have, that the roadblock is democracy itself, our ultimate form of accountability. Am I whistling in the dark, Diane?

Deb

P.S. How do Klein/Bloomberg explain why large high schools rated by their system of measurement as "A" or "B" be eliminated?

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:59 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

The legislators who passed the Elementary and Secondary Act in 1965 repeatedly assured their colleagues and the American public that the federal government would never interfere with state and local control of schools. The purpose of the law was clear: To provide additional funding to the nation's neediest students.

Of course, that vow did not preclude federal intervention to abolish racial segregation, because segregation was one of the sources of inequity and there was a Supreme Court decision requiring an end to state-sponsored segregation.

Now, we see that the original promise has not only been forgotten, but broken. Today we see the Obama administration using federal dollars to bribe states to pursue remedies that are highly contested and whose results are uncertain. They do this in the name of "reform," but today anyone with a plan—good or bad—calls himself or herself—a "reformer." Calling something a "reform" does not mean that it will improve education.

Here is some news. I went to the NAEP Web site and used a function called NAEP Data Explorer (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/). This made it possible to compare charter schools and regular public schools on the NAEP 2009 math assessments, which were released a few weeks ago. No one else has done this, so our blog will be the first place in which these results appear.

As you know, charter schools have been assessed by NAEP since 2003. They have never outperformed regular public schools, and their defenders say it is because they enroll more disadvantaged students. Fair enough.

Click to enlarge

But over time, we have heard, charter schools will close the achievement gap. This is not happening, at least not yet. In fourth grade, students in charter schools were six points behind their peers in regular public schools in 2003; now the gap is eight points. In eighth grade, the gap favoring public schools was 10 points in 2005; now it is seven points.

Click to enlarge

In cities, the gap favoring public schools in 4th grade was six points in 2003; now it is nine points. Also in cities, the gap favoring public schools in 8th grade was three points; now it is eight points.

Click to enlarge

Overall, public schools continue to outperform charter schools. The public schools' performance is significantly better overall and in cities, and among students who are not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (the federal measure of poverty in school data). Among other groups—those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, whites, blacks, and Hispanics—the test scores of public schools and charter schools are not significantly different.

Don't get me wrong. I am not opposed to charter schools on principle. My beef with charter schools is that most skim the most motivated students out of the poorest communities, and many have disproportionately small numbers of children who need special education or who are English-language learners. The typical charter, operating in this way, increases the burden on the regular public schools, while privileging the lucky few. Continuing on this path will further disable public education in the cities and hand over the most successful students to private entrepreneurs.

My own view, which you will see in my new book, is that charters should educate the children who are most at risk, rather than drawing away the most motivated. That would make them collaborators, rather than competitors, with the regular public schools.

Partisans of the current approach to charters point to the recent study by Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby as proof of the superiority of the charter sector. Hoxby claimed that the charters in New York City were so remarkable that students who completed grades K-8 in a charter would almost close the gap between Harlem and Scarsdale (the most disadvantaged and the most advantaged communities). Editorials in many newspapers hailed this study as the last word proving the superiority of the competitive market model.

What the editorialists did not realize was that the study had not been peer reviewed. The first peer review was released last week, by Stanford professor Sean Reardon. He found statistical flaws in the Hoxby study, but, to my eyes, of greater importance was his point that the Hoxby study rests on extrapolations of data. In other words, the study does not represent the real accomplishments of real students, but rather statistical projections. There may or may not actually be a cohort of actual students who attended a New York City charter school from grades K-8 and in fact almost closed the gap. Unless someone is able to call a meeting and produce the 12, 25, 200, or 2,000 students in this miraculous cohort, we should suspend judgment on the miraculous findings. (As you know, I have never believed in miracles, especially in education.)

No doubt we will hear more about this in the future, as Hoxby (a brilliant economist) responds, and other peers weigh in with additional reviews of her study.

The Obama administration is using its unprecedented billions to advance a strategy of deregulation and deprofessionalization. This strategy will push American schools into untested waters, with thousands of untried leaders, and with results that are far from certain. This is not a reform strategy, but a risky strategy. My own view is that the federal government should not mandate or bribe states and districts to take actions unless there is a clear Constitutional imperative or an undisputed research basis. Neither exists in this case.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 1:12 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

The bad news does seem to overwhelm the good news of late.

For starters, when talking about education, we need a new vocabulary. The term "achievement" has become synonymous not with the intellectual tasks of schooling, the "using one's mind well" as Ted Sizer put it, but with whatever is measured by multiple- choice tests. The more answers right the better—of course—but otherwise there's little of intellectual quality being measured.

If it's "using one's mind well" that should be at stake, then one might imagine we need tests that rest on demonstrations of how students use their minds! That should be at the heart of any "high-stakes" assessment. And if we could get over our aversion to sampling, even standardized tests could in fact also help us gain understanding of quite complex matters.

One of our readers suggested that David Leonhardt's essay on health care in last weekend's New York Times Magazine was evidence on behalf of measurement. Indeed, what you and I are—I think—arguing against is measuring the wrong things, in the wrong ways, and in the process corrupting the ends we have in mind.

The story of the work of Dr. Brent James, as Leonhardt describes it, is not a refutation, but a support for good assessment. It is a call for assessments that start from the bottom up. And, while the health field has one enormous advantage—little disagreement about what constitutes improved health, except at the two ends of life—it's not easy to gather the right data. With educational assessment, we are stuck with the fact that different "schools of thought" actually exist about means and ends. For example, in my own field and yours, the way we examine the past too often betrays our "deterministic" view of human history. The "causes" of World War I are taught as set knowledge, suggesting that another history couldn't have happened. This mindset undermines democracy and civic participation. Wouldn't it be grand if students were asked "how otherwise" the story of WWI could have played out? And, why not? One of the "habits of mind" that was central to the schools I founded was precisely that: "Supposing that, what if?". But this is a controversial viewpoint—should federal policy settle this difference in outlook?

It takes deep knowledge to struggle through the historical data with such ends in mind, but it is precisely the kind of mindset that history in a democracy needs. Or, so I would argue. It is the mindset that enlivens the debate over the history being written in our own lives. And there is no age too young to start such "imaginary" thinking, based on sound factual knowledge. In fact, playfulness is not just the task of early childhood, but the task of every citizen who cares about the future. Schools rarely do much to keep such "playfulness" alive, but democracy depends upon it.

I've just returned from New Orleans, and a wonderful three days of both celebrating the ideas of Ted Sizer and considering where next to take them. Between sessions I went from my luxury hotel in the French Quarter out to the lower Ninth Ward—that part of New Orleans that still looks like the disaster just happened. We were visiting a school in the Ninth Ward that reopened thanks to the strong will of the principal, her staff, and the school community. But the difficulties in New Orleans made me wonder if anyone is responsible for that old-fashioned idea: the common good.

President Obama's message throughout the campaign was a reiteration of the concept of the "common good," at a time when we were experiencing the impact of a society built around "the more I get, the better." But I agree with you, Diane. What we're hearing now is rather different than what we expected. Neither Education Secretary Arne Duncan's failure in Chicago, nor the mayor's in N.Y.C., nor Michele Rhee's in Washington, D.C., are on the table; it's as though we can sweep that inconvenient evidence under the rug by a constant repetition of good PR.

Producing schools that do right by all children AND by the nation is, in fact, more complex than rocket science. It means, for example, concerning ourselves with the children in that other ward across the levees, not just our own. Democracy works most easily when our personal short-term interests and the interests of the least advantaged match. But democracy can't depend on that.

If Iraq and Afghanistan are about the struggle for democracy, than why can't we see our schools as just as important in this struggle? What we spend in a week or month in Iraq/Afghanistan would allow us to lower class sizes nationwide to match what the most powerful citizens demand for their own children.

So where do we go with this issue, Diane? We need policies that don't make it too easy for the most advantaged to do right for their kids at the expense of those least advantaged. That means, to begin with, defining achievement as something more, not less, ambitious than test scores. The rich can survive that, perhaps, but the nation can't.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 12:25 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I have been trying to ascertain what President Obama plans to do to reshape the federal role in education, and the outlines of his policy are becoming clear. So far, we have not heard much about what he will do to fix the No Child Left Behind approach, but the signs are not encouraging.

One point is clear: He prefers charter schools to regular public schools. After his election, he first visited a charter school, not a regular public school. The day after the 2009 election, he and Secretary Arne Duncan visited the Wright Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, which caps its class sizes at 20. That is a class size, by the way, that is out of reach in most urban public schools. The president seems eager to turn over as many public schools as possible to private management. I find it laughable that so many of his critics call him a socialist and a man of the left, when in education, he is quite obviously a force for privatization of public education.

The president is a strong supporter of performance pay. In his visit to the charter school in Madison, the president took the opportunity to remind the nation that teachers should be evaluated in relation to their students' test scores. The funny part of this was that he "went off script" to tell everyone that his daughter Malia came home from school with a 73 on a science test. Logic should have compelled the president to demand an immediate investigation of Malia's teacher, who had obviously failed in her responsibility to make Malia an A student. But, no, the president said that Malia, apparently upset by her low grade, had "started wanting it [the higher score] more than us," and on her next science test, she got a 95. The president did not seem to realize that his little family story had undermined his campaign to blame teachers if students did not score well. Malia got a low score initially because she didn't try hard enough, not because her teacher was ineffective.

Too bad that no one in the U.S. Department of Education briefed the president and the secretary on the latest merit pay evaluation. This one, produced by the National Center on Performance Incentives at the request of the Texas Education Agency, reviewed the results of the nation's largest merit pay program (PDF). Called the Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG) program, it handed out some $300 million over three years to teachers in 99 high-poverty schools. The plan relied on test scores, and the performance of individual teachers.

The good news: The teachers liked the extra pay; they collaborated to get extra pay. Teachers had positive attitudes about the program, whether they got the bonuses or not.

The bad news: The program had an "inconclusive" impact on student achievement, which the evaluation characterizes as "weakly positive, negative or negligible effect" on gains.

So, having seen little return from its sizable investment, Texas plans to expand the program, and of course, President Obama wants every state to pump federal dollars into pay-for-performance, even though we have yet to see any evidence that this is a sensible investment of scarce public funds.

Two things are becoming clear to me: One, people who have an agenda will pursue that agenda regardless of evidence. They will tell you that conditions weren't exactly right, that the bonus should have been larger, that the program should have been tweaked this way or that way. But the bottom line is that teachers got bonuses, and the impact on student achievement (using those same lousy measures that we complain about) was hard to quantify.

The other is that the Obama administration has an education plan that was written by corporate-style ideologues. They are determined to fasten a business plan on the schools and will not be deterred by arguments or evidence. If incentives and sanctions work in the business world, then by gum, they will work in education. If deregulation is what the corporate sector wants, then why not foist it on the schools as well.

So, the outline of the Obama education vision is emerging. It is a business plan, designed by people who know nothing about schools and care nothing about evidence.

The nation's public schools are in for a rough ride.

Diane

Posted by educationweekly at 4:38 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

The absurdities you describe are on the mark and ought to kill the idea of paying teachers based on their students' test scores. But we both know the idea won't die that easily. Even the most renowned of testing experts argue that we're nowhere near being able to produce tests that can do the job of pay-by-score that folks want. I do wonder at times what "they" think they are doing?

The trouble is that when I start down that path I see conspiracies everywhere—for example, that these schemes justify hiring inexperienced and low-paid teachers—who can do scripted test-prep as well as the next guy. It has the handy side effect of destroying solidarity which from a businessman's perspective (perhaps) is a good thing, and keeps teachers away from controversial subjects—and tightly aligned to the stuff being tested. It probably weakens unions. And finally, it paves the way for a marketplace system of schooling instead of a public one (which is then relabeled a bureaucratic monopolistic model). Of course, the latter can be true—and as you know I was an early champion of choice and increased school autonomy for just that reason—within the public sector.

The charter schools have also become I fear another name for vouchers. Operated by private chains with public funding, they offer a kind of distorted marketplace, controlled by test scores standing in for profits. Thus, they kill two birds with one stone: public education and human judgment.

A test of intellectual rigor always in part rests on judgment. Democracy is built on that shaky foundation of trusting our fallible judgments. The central purpose of K-12 schooling in a democracy is thus the training of human judgment. The young can only learn how-to in the company of adults who are doing it. The means and ends are one.

But where you and I may disagree re. the Obama agenda is on the question of nationwide "standards"—e.g. curriculum. I think we are in agreement that NAEP—the only existing national exam—should remain separate and untainted by high stakes. A better labeling/benchmark system—or even doing away with any labels—would be wiser still. We can then focus on in-depth analysis of a wide range of interesting data. Those who want a 50-state common core grade-by-grade curriculum won't be satisfied with sampled NAEP scores because they want to make state-by-state, school-by-school, student-by-student comparisons. They see the competition for test scores as healthy. So, where do you stand?

In that regard, I found the recent Brookings Institution research by Grover Whitehurst et al a helpful warning. He argues that "the creation of common standards will have little impact on our future in a system in which there are also aligned assessments, and aligned curriculum, educators, and accountability for students, and aligned professional development...." And on and on. "Faith," he concludes, is not enough, and a closer look at our most successful "competitors" internationally demonstrates that this is not the path they have taken.

I don't recall the exact data, but someone once noted that teachers make dozens (or hundreds?) of decisions a minute. More than almost any other field (e.g. doctors), partly because they are simultaneously educating 20 to 30 different kids every minute. That's why they need eyes in the back of their heads and a trained instinct about those peculiar silences, mutterings, etc., which only experience teaches us to notice. Kids are complex—and each one is different. The subject matter is hopefully difficult, too. Thus, as Ted Sizer reminded me, be sure and simplify everything else you can, or you'll find yourself simplifying the kids and the subject matter. We've done the opposite under the new "deform" agenda: as school people follow ever more complicated analysis of statistical data! Becoming themselves more like machines. Truly! I sometimes wonder how many hours it would take to accomplish five hours of school time. If we each were teaching one child—home-schooling, in short. Simplifying complex people and information consumes us. It's not all wasted time, but.....

Once in a while, I'd try to make a quick round of my classroom to assess who was catching on to what. The trouble was that I usually got so intrigued by the first child I sat next to that I didn't get to the second. I exaggerate, a little.

Finding the right metaphors and analogies that work for each child is in part an art that takes time to accumulate into wisdom. It takes wariness, too, and sometimes only a good observer can catch our mistakes. It's hard not to hear our own meaning rather than the one the kids are making. Besides, many kids know how to fool us by "looking" smart.

I found this as true in my relationships with adults when I was a principal or head teacher. Because once again we don't all respond to criticism or close questioning the same way and can open up or close down very quickly. Sometimes quite politely.

I wish I could convince the new reformers—those who truly want a better way—that we need to improve and deepen NAEP while school-by-school we develop better tools for assessing that are simultaneously better tools for teaching.

Our final exercises at CPE and Mission Hill and Urban Academy and Beacon and on and on are the culmination of years of teaching/assessing approaches. At culminating years, the staff pull together to show off more formally before real-live audiences, who are assigned the task of "judging." They are, as I say over and over, real "road tests"; what people encounter in the real world of college or the workplace, and they simultaneously respond to the skills and knowledge that we need as citizens who are not easy to fool—at least not often. They serve, in short, democracy first and foremost.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:51 AM | Permalink | 25 Comments | TrackBacks (0)