April 2010 Archives

Dear Diane,

Where are the tea-partiers when I need them? Debate about revising ESEA is truly irrelevant—key changes have been put into place without anyone voting on anything! No single departmental decision has ever been made that so invades what was once considered wholly local powers than the Race to the Top. (Except, of course, going to war without authorization on occasion.)

I was reminded of this by a piece FairTest sent me: "Did Congress Authorize Race to the Top?" by Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst in Education Week. It deserves attention, but it's hard to know whether any education or political reporters will pick it up. Whether it's a constitutional law issue or just an abuse of power, I don't know. But what more precious freedom has been stolen away under the cover of "it's voluntary," "we didn't force it on you," etc.? It's true that as a teacher I reminded students that no one ever "has to" do anything; even with a gun pointed at our heads, we have a choice to make. Still, we know that holding a gun to our heads is really depriving us of a lot of leeway in exercising our freedom. What comes to mind are all those other jokes—but especially the one about the freedom to sleep under the bridge. (I've a terrible rote memory, and I can't remember the details.)

At a time of dire financial woes that are pounding away at our school systems, the Race to the Top policy—(I was about to say legislation!)—is a strong lure. Personally, it doesn't seem to me to be enough to lure me away from exercising my rights, but it is surely helpful to those who actually agree with it and are not so picky as to worry about who is dictating to whom.

It reminds me of anther ploy that I run into a lot in the print media. "Everyone agrees," "a consensus has developed"—sometimes followed by a quote from the head of the union as the sole dissenter. I don't recall there ever being a discussion, so where and when did this consensus form around getting rid of "traditional" public schooling that rests on local communities? When did we have a discussion about the larger moral issues that "seniority" represents in general, not just in schools? Or due process? Why do we presume guilt, not innocence, when someone is arbitrarily sent to the so-called "rubber room"? Or, who should decide what curriculum and pedagogy to adopt—or reject? Or, how we should judge schools or teachers...not to mention kids! Who decided that algebra would be a gateway skill to possessing a high school diploma (and thus entry to almost any job)? Who decided that private, for-profit managers should take over large portions of public education—including replacing entire former public school space? Who decided that the representatives of teachers don't represent them—but are just "labor bosses"? Who decided that Ivy League-educated students fresh out of college will be better teachers of our kids than experienced graduates of the non-elite universities?

These "agreements" at which "we all" have arrived are always dangerous. They creep up on us unaware. The heart of democracy, and thus of the citizenry it needs, rests on our being alert to such shenanigans. We ought to be teaching kids the subtle clues that a strong citizenry needs to respond to before it's too late to do so.

There has been no agreement—neither among experts nor lay people—about these large educational issues. The new "consensus" has, in fact, largely ignored the "expertise" that exists and is the product in great part of powerful "lay" people. Furthermore, the decisions at issue are not mere "technical" ones, but have a huge impact on society that could and should not be determined by expertise alone. Experts can and should inform our discussion, and everyone (including business leaders and corporate foundations) has a right to an opinion, but the decisions we are talking about are precisely the kind that democracy has "traditionally" assumed that the "lay" public should decide.

Yes, I feel that I'm repeating myself. That's in part because I've been increasingly overwhelmed by the feeling that I'm Alice in Wonderland. So I go over and over the same terrain looking for the flaws in my own thinking! But in my recent travels—as well as at that astoundingly well-attended symposium we held in New York City—I find that I'm not alone. Nor that it's only us educators and teachers with our narrow "self-interest" who are stunned by the speed with which this new phony consensus has appeared on the scene. Polls haven't been very helpful, for me, in figuring out how "alone" I am or am not. And, of course, when I travel my audiences tend to be selectively on my side. Poll questions that I've seen are hard to read—as they usually don't reflect the reality that I think we are facing. I'd love to see some "focus group" studies that deal with what the larger public makes of its new consensus.

The means and ends of school reforms are connected. The "way" we conduct schooling affects the way we conduct other matters of public life. Schools prepare us as much by "how they work" as what they require us to know. If we treat our older and more experienced teachers as dispensable (not worth two new, young, would-be teachers) we are saying a lot to our youngsters about what we value; if teachers are fired without due process, we are providing a very powerful curriculum to kids. When we say that a score on a particular test is the measure of the woman, and surely more "real" than what the adults who know you might say, we are engaging in an instructional act—influencing how young people value themselves and others.

And on and on.

Enough for now, Diane.

Deborah in Wonderland

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I am just back from travels that started in Boston, moved on to Chicago, then to Los Angeles and San Francisco. This week I will be in Dallas and Denver.

Wherever I go, I meet many teachers who say virtually the same thing: They have never been more demoralized in their professional lives. They feel that they are scapegoats for everything that is wrong in American education. Arne Duncan and Barack Obama, even more than Margaret Spellings and George W. Bush, are giving credibility to the idea that 100 percent of students should be proficient, that teachers are to blame when test scores are not 100 percent proficient, that teachers use students' poverty as just an excuse for their bad teaching, and that firing teachers is laudable and courageous. Teachers say that they worked hard to elect Obama, and they now feel betrayed by his negative attitudes about teachers. They say, "If only Obama or Duncan would spend a few days in my classroom..."

So, the big idea today is that the way to fix American education is to identify bad teachers and fire them. I agree that we should get rid of bad teachers (but only after a fair hearing, in which charges against them are substantiated). But I also believe that this issue is a red herring that distracts us from far more important issues.

Right now, I would say that Bush's No Child Left Behind and Obama's Race to the Top are more injurious to American education than bad teachers. There is a way to solve the problem of bad teachers. They can be denied tenure or fired, but no one knows how to stop the damage done by NCLB and the predictable damage that will be done by RTTT.

Right now, many states are hoping to qualify for RTTT billions by introducing laws to evaluate teachers by student test scores. Teachers know this is unfair because student performance depends on many factors beyond the teachers' control (like regular attendance and student motivation), as well as the fact that students are not randomly assigned to classes and teachers. However much NCLB promotes teaching to the test, think how much worse it will be when teachers' salaries are tied to test scores.

I received an email from Dr. Harry Frank, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who has written textbooks about testing and measurement. Dr. Frank wrote that the first principle for valid assessment is that "no assessment can be used at the same time for both counseling and for administrative decisions (retention, increment, tenure, promotion). ... All this does is promote cheating and teaching to the exam. ... This principle is so basic that it's often covered in the very first chapter of introductory texts on workplace performance evaluation." [The full text of Dr. Frank's email is posted on my Web site, www.dianeravitch.com, in a section called "comments."] I asked Dr. Frank to explain the word "counseling," and he said that this meant "feedback on performance for purposes of skills development," what we might think of as the diagnostic use of an assessment. Dr. Frank also added: "Assessments should be a counseling resource, not a source of extrinsic motivation, i.e., rewards and punishments for teachers, administrators, and school districts."

Put simply, tests and assessments should inform teachers about student progress and their own teaching, i.e., what can be learned from the test results. But it is inappropriate to use the same test results to hand out bonuses and punishments, promotions and tenure.

Thus, if any of our public officials is talking to testing experts, they are likely to discover that their plans to evaluate teachers by student test scores are technically invalid and will produce perverse (but predictable) effects that actually damage learning and are likely to undermine the teaching profession.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Last Saturday's event—"Remapping Progressive Education"—was great. Someone remarked as I went into the auditorium to start the first session that they felt they had died and gone to heaven—seeing all their old colleagues from so many years ago. But there were far more young colleagues. And that was unexpected. The major speakers were terrific (UFT's Mike Mulgrew, NYU's Pedro Noguera, The Daily News' Juan Gonzalez and City University of New York's Michelle Fine); all 45 a.m. and p.m. workshops seemed to have been a success. And the awards to former alternative high school chief Stephen Phillips and to Nancy Sizer, the widow of the late Ted Sizer, were such a pleasure to present: inscribed copies of a leather-bound book containing Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech.

Getting together with so many friends reminds me that disagreements are just as essential as agreement. Even my best and most compelling arguments don't convince other thoughtful and intelligent people—sometimes. It's one of the reasons why my default position is usually on the side of voluntarism, choice, and sometimes changing my mind! But there are those knotty conundrums when everyone can't have their choice—because one precludes another. Then we have decisions to make, and that's where democracy gets sticky. Sometimes it all works out, though—as it did on Saturday.

If we agreed all the time on most things, we'd never need democracy. But if I want schools that encourage disagreement, it follows that I, too, must compromise. E.g. If I want schools to include the same mix of kids that make up our body politic, then that imposes on someone else's ideal of public education. If, as Juan Gonzalez argued, schools are the backbone of communities, then neighborhood schools need to be preserved! Ditto for tracking by ability. Can we outlaw schools for "the gifted" to preserve heterogeneity? Can everyone have what is best for themselves while still having the best for the common good?

I also constantly am amazed at how difficult it is to agree on what constitutes good evidence, in part for the same reasons. Richard Rothstein just sent me a study published by the Economic Policy Institute about the naming of Tennessee and Delaware as winners of millions ($500 million for Tennessee and $100 million for Delaware) in federal Race to the Top funding. When we use very precise numbers we think the answers must be objective. But the authors (Rothstein and William Peterson) point to the range of subjective judgments involved in awarding these two states 444.2 and 454.6 out of 500 points, respectively. Yes, they have a check list, but like good grading systems everywhere (from the Olympics to college courses), someone decides how much weight to give different criteria, and scorers decide how many points each proposal merits. Pennsylvania would have rated higher had they abandoned their decision to focus on early-childhood education, for example. Based on what research was that the wrong decision? The authors break down the measuring process very carefully and in the process expose the false claims behind many objective instruments. Including multiple-choice tests, as well as the kind I prefer. But then the purpose of education for democracy is all about making judgments, which are always open to dispute.

There's no getting around our being judgmental human beings. Nor should there be.

But there can be some agreed-upon "essential questions"—such as those Ted Sizer tried to help us base our teaching upon. Tony Judt's piece in the latest New York Review of Books entitled "Ill Fares the Land" (also the title of his latest book) poses such fundamental questions for all of us. How did it come to be that the USA ranks by far the worst (off the charts) when it comes to income equality, as well as on health? How come the USA, once the leader when it came to social mobility, now ranks near the bottom, and has fallen steadily since 1980? And on and on. "How," he asks, should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?" He suggests that we start by telling our children "it wasn't always thus." It's not in our genes or our history. An age of insecurity does not bode well, he says, for a renewal of democratic spirit. Economic, physical, and political insecurity breed selfishness. Schools have a role to play here by creating for their communities a proxy society—a community that cares for one and all and that practices the habits of democracy, not consumerism. If Judt is right, school reform needs to address its impact on such "essential questions." Judt tackles the issue from the political Left, but I think much the same could be argued from any political persuasion that holds itself accountable to preserving and nourishing democracy. Warts and all. "Smartness" of the kind we seem lately to revere—the kind that gets you into the Ivy League—is not the purpose of the public's support for public education. Imagine if our standards were set, not on Harvard, but on our concern for the common good?

I'm off today to Missouri to speak to a gathering of parents from around the nation (Parents for Public Schools). I'm exhausted from last weekend, but eager for this trip, too. Especially as Missouri is my mother's home state; and it was my mother who convinced my brother and me not to attend an Ivy League school! So we both went to college in Ohio—which we, born-and-bred New Yorkers, thought of as the "far West."

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

As I write this, I am concluding a week of book-touring, and what a week it has been!

I started in Chicago, where I spoke at DePaul University, the University of Illinois, Catalyst, and the National School Boards Association. At NSBA, I was in a concurrent session, but well over 1,000 people showed up, and security guards closed the doors when there were no more chairs.

I flew to California and spoke at UCLA, Stanford, and Berkeley.

At UCLA, the audience included a large contingent of young teachers from Fremont High School, which is bring "transformed" or "turned around." They asked me to help save their school, TO GIVE THEIR plea to Los Angeles Superintendent Ramon Cortines, which I did.

At Stanford, the first question came from a teacher in Salinas who teaches the children of migrant workers; she burst into tears as she said that "they" are about to close HER school where the teachers are working hard to instruct a transient and high-needs enrollment.

At Berkeley, a few hours before I spoke, I learned the great news that Governor Charlie Crist of Florida had vetoed the horrible law that would have made test scores the single largest determinant of teacher compensation. My cell phone (which is my traveling computer) immediately began to overflow with emails from Florida, expressing joy and relief.

Teachers, parents, and friends of public education understand that the Crist veto is not the end of the battle. The struggle is now engaged, as misinformed legislators seek to impose punitive measures on educators, thinking that such actions will help them win Race to the Top funding.

I tell my audiences that Race to the Top will turn out to be a poison pill for American education. It is based on the same "measure and punish" philosophy as No Child Left Behind.

The one bright aspect to the events in Florida is that teachers and parents there HAVE shown what can happen when people organize and take concerted political action. Despite the powerful, well-funded forces ready to destroy the teaching profession, the teachers and parents of Florida prevailed.

The friends of public education in Florida provided people a powerful lesson: united we stand, divided we fall. The education deformers have behind them the resources of hedge-fund managers and financial titans, but the friends of public education have something even more potent: they have people power.

Everywhere I go, the same questions come up: Who will step up and lead the vast and widespread opposition to current policies? Who will give voice to the disempowered teachers, parents, administrators, and school board members who know we are headed in the wrong direction?

Where is the political leader who will take this struggle to the next level?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I wish you were going to be with us this Saturday as we celebrate the work we have accomplished over the past half-century and figure out how to counter the latest onslaught. Our friend teacherken quotes Les Leopold's question in his recent blog.

"Why Are 25 Hedge Fund Managers Worth 658,000 teachers?"

"That money could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers...with benefits." The wealthy will have placed an estimated $2 trillion into hedge funds by the end of this year, while schools experience cutbacks everywhere. "That's about $6,500 for every man, woman and child in the U.S." To add insult to injury, they pay only a 15 percent tax rate on their "earnings" while an experienced teacher will be paying 28 percent-plus.

Meanwhile, our generous foundations are lock-step in support of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's agenda—it's all the fault of the teachers' unions, recalcitrant and/or stupid teachers, and their "low expectations." In contrast, I'd argue: schools are too big (and too important) to fail. They should be our first priority—before Iraq, before worrying about the morale of the Big Bankers, before spending money to bribe states to pay teachers according to their students' test scores, before giving more tests, looking for the one best curriculum, closing the bottom 10 percent, and replacing them with semi-private schools, etc. As I used to remind folks, there will always be a last car on a train (where most fatal accidents occur), and exactly 10 percent in the bottom 10 percent. The bottom will always be schools with kids whose families are overwhelmingly in the bottom 10 percent when it comes to the resources they can offer their children. Schools cannot be the only leveler.

Here's another by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship (truthout) entitled "The Unbearable Lightness of Reform."

"That wickedly satirical Ambrose Bierce described politics as 'the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.' ..... It seems like most efforts to reform a system that's gone awry—to clean house and make a fresh start—end up benefiting the very people who wrecked it in the first place."

When you are told it's a crisis, beware: "they" are about to offer you a bunch of "crap" as the solution. Test scores are a symptom, not the evidence, of what a good education is about. The higher the stakes, the more we confuse what it means to have a good education for what it might take to raise test scores. And then, as you noted Tuesday, we actually get neither!

Schools, you and I agree, are amazing places when they have extra resources, staff who are willing to be exploited into working longer and longer hours, weeks, months, and have a "stake" in their work. The stake? THEY think what they're doing can make a difference. There is no dumb system for teaching reading that hasn't, in someone's hands, produced near miracles. Ditto for every reform scheme. And more and more research based on test scores won't resolve this.

Even if conditions within the school are 100 percent perfect, the conditions kids and their families and communities face the other 4/5 of their waking hours (or even only 2/3 if we lengthen the school day and year) will statistically keep the gap pretty much the same. But it will still make a big difference for some kid or group of kids and a smaller one for many others on outcomes that affect us for those 60 years of life that follow high school. So I've never for a moment regretted my 40 years of working in public schools, most of them very good ones, and working alongside "ordinary teachers" who do extraordinary work when their voices are heard and acted upon. Schools can, as many business gurus used to say, be "learning" settings for every person connected to them—custodians, lunchroom workers, teachers, families, and...kids. Because thoughtful, caring, and hard-working adults joined together can't help but be a good influence. That's what I hope we remind ourselves this Saturday—that it is worthwhile doing, but that it requires us to speak out, and loudly.

I have always advised new principals to focus on the adults who must be focused on the kids. Create a powerful "learning setting" for all the school's diverse constituents. You feel this when you walk into a school, into the main office, the classrooms, and hallways. Also lunchrooms and recess! And, at the end of the day, the kids leave such schools just as enthusiastically exhausted as the teachers. In most schools, the kids leave with unused energies as they contemplate their freedom (and most teachers follow soon after—exhausted). Teachers (like kids) don't burn out unless they are used like appliances. Which is what happens also to the enthusiasm that 5-year-olds come to school with; they, too, can burn out.

We've got to stop this, Diane. We have to find ways, without much in the way of "Big Money," to get a different story told and then acted upon. We need to "remap" the future.

Deb

P.S. Your book will have good company this Saturday at Julia Richman. So keep traveling the land on behalf of its essential message, and we'll forgive you for not being with us.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

In my book I argue that No Child Left Behind was a failed strategy. We both know the reasons why. It narrowed the curriculum; it introduced a culture of testing and test prepping into the nation's schools; it represented an unprecedented extension of federal control into the nation's schools; it required teaching to what are admittedly inadequate tests; it demanded an unrealistic goal of 100 percent proficiency for all children in all groups; it encouraged states to inflate their scores; it promoted cheating and gaming the system; and it harmed public education because no state was able to reach the law's utopian goal.

I further argued, based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data from 2003 onward, that NCLB did not even produce significantly higher test scores. The gains in math and in 4th grade reading were significant, but not as large as the gains recorded prior to implementation of NCLB. If so much time and money was invested in these subjects, why did the rate of improvement slow down?

Now the NAEP reading scores for 2009 are out, and the news for NCLB is bad. Reading scores in 4th grade were unchanged since 2007 and up by 1 point in 8th grade. The report says in large type that the 1-point increase from 2007 to 2009 is significant, but the graph shows that student scores for this grade are exactly the same as they were in 1998. The scale score in 1998 was 264. The scale score in 2009 was 264. These are the NCLB babies. This is the generation that has been tested every year since 3rd grade. Their scores are no higher today than their counterparts in 1998.

Looking more closely at 8th grade reading scores, we can take some solace in knowing that the scores of white students are up 1 point since 2003, when NCLB testing began; that black scores are up 3 points; that Hispanic score are up 4 points; and that Asian students are up 4 points. But these are not the gains we should have expected from the nation's multi-billion-dollar investment in testing and test prep, not what we were promised or expected. From 1994 to 1998—only four years, not the six from 2003-2009—black students' scores jumped by 7 points, but we have not seen that rate of improvement since NCLB became the law of the land.

At the state level, the results are underwhelming: Seven states saw gains since 2003 (Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania), as did the District of Columbia. Three states saw a significant decline since 2003 (Iowa, Mississippi, and West Virginia). The other 40 states saw no change at all in the scores of their 8th grade students. Texas (remember the "Texas miracle"?) has seen no change in its NAEP scores for 8th grade since 1998. Tennessee, which has been using value-added assessment for many years, has seen no significant improvement since 1998.

I know your dislike of tests. NAEP is the only test to which I give any credence because it is a no-stakes test. No one can prepare for it, and no one knows which students will take it. No teacher gets paid more or less depending on NAEP scores. No student ever sees his or her scores.

When will our elected officials wake up and realize how little has been gained from our nation's heavy investment in a strategy of "measure and punish"? And more important, how much has been lost?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Here's an essential question: When trying to get at the truth of things, what role do data play? Most of the time our "habits" take over before we can exercise any form of reflective judgment (which is why John Dewey focused on "habits of mind" as the goal of good schools). Habits are slow growing so slowing things down could help. It takes a "leisure class" to rule well. Leisure has a democratic purpose because "data" rarely speak for themselves. That's true whether the data are numbers or observations. Sometimes, highly structured and standardized "observations"—standardized tests—work. Sometimes, highly structured debates or formal proofs work—with the rules of the game and the judges chosen by those viewed as most expert or representative. Often, we decide on the sheer logic of the argument, calling upon the data life itself has brought us.

But there are other habits we fall back on: our values, purposes, beliefs, preferences, inclinations. These are the things that make us hard to predict—and essentially human. Note: what I've left out from the above is one such purpose: "self-interest"—or, as they say, "follow the money."

One thing we know about teachers—they have an underdeveloped inner drive for money—which made them harder for unions to organize. But over time they developed a high compensatory drive for "self-esteem," as it is sometimes called, and money, of course, can also be a stand-in for that. They were once recruited from a captive audience (women) and settled for neither esteem nor money. Just praise for being dedicated. Fortunately, since the rise of teachers' unions, they've become more decently paid in some states. Taken together, this may be one reason that money for test score results won't make a big difference. But, of course, what I most worry about is that it will make a difference—not only because of the money, but because of its effect on their status within the school and community. And, above all, with the parents of their students.

But I worry also about what is driving the current crop of reformers. I know one could argue that it is love of country—their concern over our economic conditions. But it's hard for me to imagine that something that would not show up for at least a decade or longer would be driving so many entrepreneurs into the school business. I also happen to doubt that our test score rankings have anything to do with our past, present, or future economic woes. It might just be self-esteem—are they embarrassed at the low rankings and blush for their beloved land? But I notice that they never boast about our accomplishments. I can't recall anyone heralding our standing on reading tests, that Massachusetts has for decades or more led the world, nor seem alarmed at our low ranking on infant healthcare, poverty, crime, et al.

The recurrent cry of crisis must serve some purpose. The "Sputnik" crisis increased money for the STEM subjects—to compete with the then-Soviet Union. What actually did it produce? The Soviet Union fell on its own, and not from the lack of high test scores in math. What should that data have shown us about crying "wolf" too often? Nothing.

It's clear what publishers like McGraw-Hill have their eye on. And all the other publishers of standardized tests, and prep organizations, and prep courses, and a whole industry of coaches, consultants, guaranteed-or-your-money-back new teaching schemes and materials. Money.

What mayor could resist getting his hands on all the money that goes into schooling and the contracts that flow from it and the political power and the ...? This is why we once took mayoral control away from mayors! The un-bid contracts the NYC mayor now controls outweigh all the petty corruption and misspending of which the 32 NYC local districts were accused.

But what about the new people of wealth who are getting their sense of satisfaction by starting new schools for the poor? Is it money, ideology, or just the search for a meaningful hobby? Perhaps it's just hard to discount the importance of what you do well—making money. Perhaps they are proving a point: that in the end the marketplace is wiser than political processes—especially when armed with objective score data.

They are all for democracy. But... Deep in our hearts many, not just hedge-funders, believe that democracy is a luxury too important to be in the hands of ordinary miseducated adults, parents, or teachers. After the revolution, some suggest, democracy can be restored. But the changes needed require draconian, long-term power. Some oldsters will recognize this as a version of the ideology that many Communists held in the 1930s, breaking eggs to make an omelet.

I think our belief in democracy is shallow. It rests on a bunch of naïve lessons we were taught as children about electing the class president or choosing our favorite color. We sort of knew as kids this wasn't the real thing. Lots of our fellow citizens still wonder.

Still, if we don't "get it," I believe we still like the idea. Even Tea Partiers.

Until we take democracy seriously, we'll keep having manufactured crises, while the real ones go unattended. Read my Web site because the piece on this topic I originally intended for this space will be there soon (www.deborahmeier.com).

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Today I am going to cheat. Well, not really cheat, but just deal with the fact that I am hard pressed to find time to do much more than breathe and sleep (I do not include "eat" because I have been skipping meals, and I should not include "sleep" because I don't do much of that either.) I have been lecturing, writing, and traveling nonstop. I am getting, on average, about 100 emails daily from readers of my book, mainly teachers who either say "thank you" or "help." My book appears at #16 on The New York Times best-seller list for next Sunday.

So many people, especially teachers, feel powerless in the face of an onslaught against their professionalism. Last week, I wrote about the awful legislation in Florida, which will strip teachers of tenure and judge them by student test scores. Teachers in that state asked me to come to Tallahassee and testify, but I couldn't be there because I was lecturing in Boston on the day of the hearing. So, I wrote a letter to the legislature, and I am going to post it here.

To: The Honorable Members of the Florida Legislature

From: Diane Ravitch

Dear Members,

I wish that I could be in Tallahassee to address you personally but prior commitments make it impossible to do so.

I am a historian of American education at New York University. I served as Assistant Secretary of Research and Improvement in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. I was a founding member of the Koret Task Force of the Hoover Institution. I was also a founding trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. I have been studying and writing about American education for 40 years.

I write to oppose SB 6/HB 7189.

I understand that this bill would prohibit districts from paying teachers in relation to their experience and education, but would base teachers' salaries mainly on student gains on standardized tests. I further understand that it is the law's intent to develop new tests for every subject area, paid for by reducing operating expenses by 5 percent in the schools.

I strongly believe that this bill will have very negative consequences for the children of the state of Florida. I believe that it will dumb down their education. I believe that it will cause many of your best teachers to leave the profession or the state because this legislation is so profoundly disrespectful towards the education profession.

I urge you not to pass this bill.

My new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, demonstrates that pay-for-scores schemes don't work. The main reason they don't work is that the measures were not intended for that purpose. Standardized tests are intended to evaluate whether students have learned what they were taught. They are not designed to assess teacher effectiveness or teacher quality. The more that teachers focus on these measures, the more they rob children of time for instruction and for the activities that engage children in their education and promote comprehension.

Teachers are not solely the cause of student progress. If students fail to make progress in their studies, there are many reasons for their failure. The causes of academic success or failure include the students' own effort; the students' regular attendance or lack thereof; the family's support or lack thereof; the family's poverty and its effects on the student's health and well-being; the school's resources; the district's oversight or lack thereof; and the quality of the test itself, which may be subject to random variation. It makes no sense to hold the teacher alone accountable when student performance is affected by so many different influences.

Should the teacher get a bad evaluation if students have a poor attendance record? Should the teacher be harshly judged if her students don't speak English or move frequently from school to school? Should the teacher get an F if the student has poor eyesight or suffers from other undiagnosed health problems? Should the teacher be considered a failure if the student's family offers no support for his learning?

Since the 1920s, American schools have experimented with merit pay plans. None has ever demonstrated success. Teachers will bend their efforts to raise test scores, but achievement nonetheless lags. The reason for this is that teaching-to-the-test does not yield good education. The students may learn test-taking skills, but they don't learn how to generalize what they have learned to new situations. Thus, even when state reading scores go up, in response to intensive coaching, national test scores remain flat. As the national tests become more demanding—in 8th grade—the scores don't rise at all.

Our nation has now had eight consecutive years of rising reading scores at the state level, yet the national scores for 8th grade students have not budged from 1998-2009. The reason for the discrepancy is that students are learning test-taking skills, but they are unable to understand complex materials or to demonstrate their progress on a test that is not the state test.

Test scores do not identify the most effective teachers. A teacher who produces big score gains one year may produce none the next year, depending on which students happen to be in his or her class.

The legislation now under consideration will not improve education in Florida. It will harm kids and their teachers.

I urge you to stop and reflect. The research on teacher effectiveness does not support the policies of SB 6/HB 7189. Please defeat this legislation.

Yours truly,

Diane Ravitch

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

If only everyone stopped using the word "achievement" as a synonym for scores on tests. It's a sleight of hand that justifies so much that's gone wrong. We've meanwhile discounted the work of real live children as "soft" data.

Having "normal" temperature may be an indicator of health, but when we think it's the definition of health, beware. We wouldn't be so stupid, would we? A high score on a multiple-choice driving test means something different than a road test driving a car. So we prefer the latter if we value safety. Do we value intellectual achievement less?

Standardized multiple choice tests can probably measure some things somewhat accurately if designed to simply inform us how many of a particular list of terms, names, places, dates we can identify correctly. That's the driver's written test. For this we don't need complex psychometric tools--but short-answer tests. Perhaps, Diane, this is what Hirsch has in mind?

On the ones we now use each question has one right answer and four wrong ones. Therefore the particular wording of the questions, and all five possible answers make a big difference. No matter how many real teachers or academic experts were involved in setting the "standard" or the benchmark, only the test-makers design the wording, test them out on a sampled population, revise, and decide the rules that tell us if they "work." The rules are designed to differentiate on a statistically sound and "credible" basis. (Which may explain why Jay Rosner of Princeton Review found that those questions in the pool from which pre-tested items are selected on which African-Americans answered right more often than whites were rarely if ever used) .

Even after all this fiddling test-makers know that there is substantial built-in error for individuals and small groups (like a single classroom). They know that scores will vary between different forms of the same test by chance. The chance of happening to have studied or not studied a particular set of items covering one subfield vs. another, or having accidentally filled in the wrong box, misread a word, or just had a run of good/bad luck. On normed tests ("the gold-standard" in testing) grade-level means the mid-point and chance error can make a difference of plus or minus 6-months. (These are similar to the problems we have with much public polling; we can't tell whether people oppose health reform because it is too "socialistic" or the opposite.)

Short-answer tests could be more reliable but are harder to score "objectively." Essays, as many scorers have warned us, are even messier. Yes, we could do better on the latter if we were willing to invest substantially more in them, and trusted professional judgment rather than artificial formulas: the number of words in a sentence, use of paragraphing, proper opening and closing paragraphs, et al. The same is true for reading "levels"--the opening sentence in "Pride and Prejudice", "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man ...", is composed of words on a 5th grade level, but only a sophisticated reader of literature may recognize it as satire.

We school teachers then invent formulas to help students score well, e.g., selecting "the main idea" or the "best title" for a short reading passage. (Although, no actual publishing house would ever use the "right" titles.) In consequence we agree to direct students to the learning of "test-like" tricks--the higher the stakes the more we conform.

As a teacher, I was intrigued by the outliers--scores that seemed surprisingly high or low for particular students. I could learn something useful by going over the test with such students. But I couldn't catch an outlier if I didn't already know the students.

When my 3rd grade son's teacher told me he needed a remedial reading class, I knew she needed a remedial teaching class. She had never once read with him. He was a sophisticated fluent reader, who had his own odd theories about how best to answer tests.

Teachers should have higher expectations? Probably, but when we focus on testing we offer lower expectations, above all to the least advantaged kids. That's what I discovered in my two years of subbing in Chicago K-8 schools nearly 50 years ago, pre-Reform. Their very lively intelligence was not tapped beyond first grade. Teachers were programmed way back then--with a few exceptions in every school who closed their doors and ignored the lesson plans. No, it's only secretly rebellious teachers who have ever done right by our least advantaged kids. That's why, Diane, I disagree with your title ("the main idea"). It was never a "great system" for most of those who bravely stepped into their first grade classroom. Teachers were never respected.

It's what all our new fancy Reforms aren't tackling. How can we use schools as places where teachers, parents, and kids engage in serious intellectual challenges, respectful of their own histories and inclinations, buttressed by the vast knowledge and know-how of many others, past and present? Plus, the confidence, perseverance and curiosity to push beyond their boundaries. That's what drives some kids to spend hours throwing basket after basket, others to practice the clarinet long after their parents might like them to stop, and on and on. Even David Brooks agrees--social trust is at the crux. ("The Sandra Bullock Trade,"The New York Times, March 30, 2010.)

It's do-able. Yes, I actually know that from experience at the schools I've worked at. We had much more to learn ourselves from our failures too. But we can keep improving only if we want schools to be lively places where adults--like students--learn from their experience, exercising individual and collective judgment. Schools can become powerful learning sites for young and old alike--encouraging boundless curiosity about many things and expertise at some.

Note, of course, that such a description hardly fits the generic goal: "college or work ready". Ugh.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend