Bridging Differences

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 | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

What a lovely tribute to Ted Sizer! I did not know Ted nearly as well as you did, but I admired him very much. He was very much the gentleman, and truly a gentle man. I had many disagreements with Jerry Bracey over the years; he was not gentle at all. Nonetheless, it is sad that these two men will no longer be among us, as they were both completely independent, a quality that is in short supply these days.

Which brings us back to the Obama agenda for education. Most educators are dubious about this agenda, but unwilling to speak up. The profession encourages timidity, I am sorry to say, because no one is supposed to speak out unless their supervisor approves, and the superintendents these days are looking at that big pile of cash in D.C. and hankering for a piece of it. So no one speaks up.

But that's why we are here, so let's have at it.

As you know, one of the big-ticket items on the Obama agenda is a proposal to evaluate teachers by looking at changes in their students' test scores. As I explain in my forthcoming book, this idea comes out of studies by various economists who say that credentials and experience count for nothing, and that if we value improvements in student performance, we should judge teachers by their students' scores. If the scores go up, the teacher is "effective," and if they don't go up, the teacher is a loser.

This approach has become wildly popular among the chattering classes. They think it is akin to a business that makes a profit (a winner) and one that loses money (a loser). They do not know of the studies by economists demonstrating that this particular measure of effectiveness is highly unstable. A teacher may have a class that gets higher scores one year, but not the next; or lower scores one year, but not the next. And then there is the fundamental problem, as all psychometricians warn us, that tests should be used for the purpose for which they were intended, and not for other purposes. In other words, a test of fifth grade reading tests whether students in the fifth grade are able to read material appropriate for children their age. It cannot then be used to determine whether their teacher was good or bad.

Writers who know nothing about education love the idea, however. For example, The New York Times published an editorial on Oct. 29 about the new teachers' contract in New Haven, Conn., which will allow test scores to count when evaluating teachers. The Times was happy about that, but disappointed that the contract did not spell out a precise formula "in which the student achievement component carries the preponderance of the weight." Instead, the details will be determined, to the Times' chagrin, by a committee that includes teachers and administrators.

By coincidence, the Century Foundation published an issue brief by Gordon MacInnes on the same day titled "Eight Reasons Not to Tie Teacher Pay to Standardized Test Results." Among the reasons are these: "Even reliable standardized tests are valid only when they are used for their intended purposes"; students are not randomly assigned to schools or to classes; state data systems are in their infancy, and it is far too soon to produce reliable and accurate longitudinal data; the assumption behind such plans is that teachers are holding back on their efforts because they are not paid enough (when it is far likelier that teachers, schools, and legislators "simply don't know how to improve educational prospects for poor children"); such an approach will inhibit collaboration among teachers; and most teachers don't teach a subject or grade that is subject to regular testing.

I have been trying to figure out how a school would function if the advocates of tying test scores to teacher evaluation prevail. At least three years of data would be needed, though five years would be better. At the end of the three-to-five years, the teachers who did not get gains would be fired and replaced by teachers who have no track record at all. Every year, a new group of teachers who had not produced gains would be fired, and another untested group of teachers would take their place. Most teachers, as MacInnes points out, would be exempt because they don't teach reading or math. But for the unfortunate minority who do teach the tested subjects, there would be an annual game of musical chairs. There would be constant churn, with untried teachers thrown into the trenches. Some might make it (though it will take three years or more to be sure), but many will be ousted.

Does any other profession work this way?

Correct me if I am wrong, Deborah, but I don't think this describes what any of the high-performing nations in the world do.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (45) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Well, I certainly agree with you that all kids should have the quality of education now available only for students in the best schools. Given how much our nation spends on education, this should not be a pipe dream, but we know that it is not happening and has not happened in the past.

We both recall that John Dewey wrote that what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child is what the community should want for all its children. That's a good starting point. What does the best and wisest parent want for his or her own child?

Certainly, that parent would want a school with small classes, which guarantees that her child would get personal attention. Class size is a pretty good indicator of what most people mean by quality. If you visit the most elite private schools, you can bet that they don't have 32 students in a class. On the Web sites of such schools, one learns that classes are typically 12 to 15 students to a teacher. Such luxury is unheard of in most public schools, with the possible exception of schools in tony suburbs. Many of those who pronounce that class size doesn't matter send their own children to schools with small classes.

Another indicator of quality is the presence of the arts. The best and wisest parent would not want his child to go to a school with no teachers of music, art, dance, or other arts. Yet we know that in most of our public schools today, the arts have been sacrificed to make more time for test-prepping.

One more point: That wise parent would demand schools that were physically attractive and well-maintained. He or she would not tolerate the neglect, deterioration, and obsolescence that we see so often in our schools. There are lots of other things that our mythical best-and-wisest parent would insist upon, but these three points, I think, are indisputable, and a good starting point.

Are these the priorities of President Obama's Race to the Top Fund? Absolutely not! The president's Department of Education will dispense nearly $5 billion, not to reduce class sizes, not to expand access to the arts, and not to improve the beauty and functionality of our public schools, but to incentivize the workforce with merit pay; to increase the privatization of struggling schools; and to compel teachers to teach to admittedly poor tests by tying teacher pay to students' test scores.

Let's get back to the new federal education agenda. Seeing how little has changed from Bush to Obama in education policy, I want my share of that $5 billion back. (That may become my weekly mantra!).

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (71) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

We've got to stop agreeing so much! I can't wait to read your new book so I can go into "attack mode" again. I always wonder, however, whether our disagreements are "fundamental" or based on our very different entries into the world of schooling. I think it's a bit of both. Your view that progressive education ideas became dominant at any time defied what I witnessed in schools I subbed in, sent my kids to, etc. (Even as it may well have swept the elite schools of education.) Your belief that there can be a curriculum that all could follow seems puzzling to me given what I also know about the kind of teachers and teaching you sought for your own kids, and even your reaction to CPESS. I just don't believe that if you were a classroom teacher you'd agree to follow someone's curriculum if you didn't agree with it. I'd rather impose a pedagogy than a curriculum, and you the other way around. But I suspect we both have in our head versions of each other's ideas that are not quite what the other means. We'll see.

I wonder at times what it's like to grow up in a society in which there are people whose bonuses are in the millions—many, many millions. Or annual salaries that are beyond most of our imagination in those big numbers we don't quite fathom. Surely, they can't "spend" it? But it represents the power to buy and sell ideas, information, political offices, and on and on. It unbalances the playing field beyond my wildest nightmares. And to get those bonuses when you failed—with built-in contracts that provide enormous pensions and severance pay—regardless of performance! And this from a business world that proclaims, if teachers get a few-thousand-dollar bonuses, they'd better work harder or smarter? Yes, I suppose I'd be less insulted if they offered a million to the top 10 teachers—based on anything they liked! It would be less demeaning.

If I had wanted to make a lot of money, would I have chosen to be a teacher? And to remain for 40-plus years inside the classroom and schoolhouse? I recall that when I got the MacArthur, reporters asked me whether I would now leave and do something more important. I used the money instead to support a teacher-led reform organization in NYC. (I also took my family on a vacation.) But the award was mostly important because it gained me respect—suddenly I was an "expert." Earlier, I had been invited to panels as the "voice" from the classroom, and folks from the university and the business world were there as the experts.

I was, as reader Erin notes, not looking for ways to "tweak" the system or get a few points more on test scores (which were the rage when I began teaching, too); I wanted to figure out (for myself, I suppose) what it would take to create a different life trajectory for ordinary kids. I happened to live in communities where the schools mostly served children of color, so that's where I worked, too. But the issue is broader—because the vast majority of our citizens are—I believe—poorly educated given the responsibility they possess for writing our future destiny.

I discovered, lo and behold, that what worked for the mostly rich kids who attended the independent progressive school I had gone to worked for all kids—with tweaks. If Obama, Duncan, Klein et al would send their kids to schools with small class sizes, then so should other families do the same. If their teachers had a variety of professional perks, so should ours. If their teachers had the freedom to explore new topics, to create environments that responded to children's interests and the world around them—so should it be for others.

Of course, there are more traditional elite schools—but they, too, tend to be smaller schools with smaller class sizes and they teach a full range of human endeavor—the arts, music, sports, etc. Oh, how I envied that, given my inability to give my students both the "basics" and the "extras." I made compromises that seemed immoral to me—but choices I felt we had to accept given time, budgets, and mandates.

I spent last Saturday evening with students and families who came to CPE in 1974 and many years thereafter—we now educate at CPE the children of our children—and hope to be around for their children, too. The power of their ideas—not mine or our teachers alone—was what drove the school. And it helped make it a place that adults enjoyed and were inspired by—constantly in a state of "relearning."

It could be. And, alas, the charters are in many ways less free than we were within "the system"—and most don't use what freedom they possess to be labs for the rest of us. But two quite remarkable superintendents—Anthony Alvarado and Steve Phillips—between them created a K-12 "district" larger than most cities in which school people redesigned what "regular" schooling could be. CPE was "merely" one of many—and many survive, hanging on by a thread, but determined to persist in going against the grain.

Deborah

P.S. Did I tell you about a marvelous book by Garrett Delavan, The Teacher's Attention (Temple University)? Delevan makes the case for smaller schools and smaller classes, or as he calls it "relationship load reduction." Delavan is a high school teacher in Salt Lake City.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (68) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

It is a good idea to explore the separate elements of the federal education agenda, one by one. Merit pay, the first issue you raise, now stands high among the priorities of the Obama administration as it did for the Bush administration and as it has for the Republican Party and business leaders for many years.

The idea that teachers should be evaluated in large part by the test scores of their students has achieved a remarkable currency in the past year, because President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan have championed it. You worry that merit pay might be unfairly applied and that it would disrupt the collegial nature of schoolwork. You also worry that if teachers get a bonus when scores go up, students will see that their teachers are motivated by money, not the intrinsic satisfaction associated with professional success. And, as you point out, there is precious little evidence (you say NO evidence) that merit pay leads to better schools.

As most now define it, merit pay rewards teachers whose students get higher scores on state tests. Such teachers are likely to require their students to practice for days, weeks, even months for the all-important state tests. Such activities are likely to be repetitive, uncreative, and uninspiring. As Daniel Koretz wrote in his recent book, Measuring Up, this intensive test prep regime may produce higher scores by teaching students the format of the state test, even teaching them very similar questions; however, the students may be unable to perform as well on a different test of the same subject. Such activities, Koretz says, tend to corrupt the measure and reduce its validity.

When I was researching merit pay, I discovered that David K. Cohen and Richard J. Murnane wrote an article in The Public Interest in 1985 called "The Merits of Merit Pay." They pointed out that many urban districts adopted some sort of merit pay in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, times of Republican ascendancy in Washington when educators were trying to adapt business methods to the work of the schools. The idea tended to wane because "schools found it difficult to devise defensible criteria of meritorious teaching." Since consensus was lacking on what constituted good teaching and how to measure it, there was no agreement on how to create a sustainable program.

Back in those olden times, schools lacked the computerized data banks that now make it possible to link the test scores of individual students to their teachers. So our technology has reduced "good teaching" to test score gains.

If our sole concern is to see higher scores, then we might be able to induce teachers to produce them if the rewards are big enough. But will our schools be better? Will our students be better prepared as citizens? Will they have greater interest in science and the arts? Will they have the motivation to learn and explore and create without the whip of a test over their heads? Will they be educated to think for themselves or to produce programmed responses?

My guess is that we will see quite a lot of experimentation with compensation plans. The most successful are likely to pay teachers more for doing more—running after-school programs, mentoring young teachers, performing valuable services in the school—not just for getting higher scores. Some test-score information is bound to be part of the equation; but (in my view) it should not be the dominant part.

I do not see merit pay as a cure-all or even as a significant reform. It may be a distraction from the serious issues that confront our students and our schools. Like you, I, too, am fearful of the heavy-handed application of technology and accountability. I, too, worry that the new technocrats will squeeze the life out of teaching and learning. If this is what our nation is buying for nearly $5 billion in stimulus funding, I want my money back.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

The elephant in the room is No Child Left Behind. This, as you know, is the latest manifestation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which was passed specifically to help educate disadvantaged children. NCLB was passed by Congress in the fall of 2001 and signed into law in January 2002. At the time, it had the overwhelming support of both parties.

Since the law was implemented, beginning (I would assume) in the fall of 2002 or the fall of 2003, it has been the subject of much debate. President George W. Bush claimed it as his proudest legacy, and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings defended it fiercely.

Four months ago, I wrote an article in Education Week saying that it was time to kill NCLB and to write a different, better law. I argued that the law had failed: "It is dumbing down our children by focusing solely on reading and mathematics. By ignoring everything but basic skills, it is not preparing students to compete with their peers in the high-performing nations of Asia and Europe, nor is it preparing them for citizenship in our complex society. It has usurped state and local control of education. Washington has neither the knowledge nor the capacity to micromanage the nation's schools."

I added, for good measure: "No amount of tinkering can repair this poorly designed law. The time has come for fresh thinking about the best way for Washington to help improve the nation's schools."

President Obama promised during his campaign to bring "change" to the nation's direction and policies. Secretary Arne Duncan has acknowledged in his speeches that NCLB is "toxic" (at least to parents), that teachers complain bitterly about its emphasis on testing, and that "few subjects divide educators so intensely."

Yet in his recent speech about reauthorization of NCLB, he praised the law for "exposing achievement gaps" (as though no one was aware of those gaps before 2002!) and encouraging us to "improve education by looking at outcomes, rather than inputs" (an idea whose provenance dates to the Coleman Report in 1966!). He also credits NCLB with expanding the standards and accountability movement (forgive me while I gag).

To add to his embarrassment, he has been traveling the nation on a listening tour accompanied by former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich (not known for his interest in education reform) and the Reverend Al Sharpton (ditto).

Memo to Secretary Duncan: NCLB is the quintessence of the test-based accountability movement. It has nothing to do with standards. It contains no standards whatsoever. It encourages states to lower their standards by mandating that all children must be "proficient" by 2014, a goal that is beyond the reach of every district and every state unless they dumb down their standards.

Many states have indeed lowered their standards. New York started testing grades 3-8 in 2006, and in every subsequent year it has lowered the bar to reach proficiency in almost every grade. Illinois also lowered the bar for the same reason.

For Secretary Duncan to associate NCLB with higher standards—or any standards at all—is a cruel joke. As he has often said (one of his favorite phrases), we have been "lying to our children" and their parents when we tell them they are proficient, but they are not.

Now Secretary Duncan wants to get moving to reauthorize NCLB. Presumably, since the brand is toxic, he will want a new name. But the nation needs something very different from NCLB and renaming it will not cure its defects.

As I wrote last June, we are dumbing down our children and calling it reform. We are indeed lying to our children.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (59) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I am somewhat crazed and stressed-out today because my book is due to the publisher, with no more edits allowed. So, needless to say, I am focused on meeting that deadline. But since the book deals with the same issues that we discuss every week, it is not as if I have to turn my attention to a totally different subject. Readers of this blog know that I have often tried out ideas here and benefited by hearing their reactions.

One issue that we have discussed and should discuss more is the regulations embedded in the Race to the Top fund, that sum of $4.3 billion that the U.S. Department of Education is using to stimulate innovation and reform. It may be daring to say this, but I am weary of reform. I think that our schools have been overrun by too many reforms, to the point where it becomes difficult to say what effect any of them has had. Some of our schools are like archeological sites, with layer after layer of reform, one on top of the other. A teacher once said to me that she had "reform fatigue." I wonder if any other nation so regularly reorganizes, reshapes, and reforms its schools.

A few days ago, I came across a stunningly articulate response to the Race to the Top Fund, written by California Attorney General Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown is an interesting public official who has been governor of California and mayor of Oakland, among many other things.

I will quote a few lines, as I think Brown's letter is brilliant. He wrote, "The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a 'one size fits all' approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score...In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power social science [sic]."

He goes on to write, "You assume we know how to 'turn around all the struggling low performing schools,' when the real answer may lie outside of school. As Oakland mayor, I directly confronted conditions that hindered education, and that were deeply rooted in the social and economic conditions of the community or were embedded in the particular attitudes and situations of the parents. There is insufficient recognition in the draft regulations that inside and outside of school strategies must be interactive and merged."

There is growing evidence that Arne Duncan's "turnaround" strategies have not worked in Chicago. In fact, there is a paucity of evidence that anyone knows how to turn around a school without throwing out low-performing students and replacing them with better-performing students.

Brown is thinking about running for governor, a post that he held in the 1970s and 1980s. If I lived in California, I would sign up to work for him. We need his well-informed voice in the national debate about education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (65) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

"To the extent that we can teach students to seek evidence and rational explanations, we will reduce magical thinking and encourage the application of reason and intelligence." —Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences, Sept. 29

We agree! That's my "core."

We also agree that Arne Duncan's agenda lacks evidence or rational explanations. Why? Partially because he ignores his own privileged schooling as irrelevant for all of those millions of "others." He's creating a system, a big business. He forgets that business data doesn't always speak for itself. Witness our current crisis.

Well-educated or not, all of us fall back on "common sense" and "street smarts." It's not a bad idea. But our street smarts differ (and which ones are relevant is tricky). Evidence that seems out of synch with our own experiences should make us pause. We need open minds, but not naïve or vacuous ones. The idea of a good education for democracy requires the recognition that one may be wrong. But one can also be right. Such an education requires respect for the evidence of our daily experience, too. Thus, self-interest, our individual slant on life, plays a role under the best of circumstances.

Personal experience: as a teacher, I have not found a student's past test performance on commercial standardized tests to be useful evidence. Unless. Unless I'm able to go over them, item by item, with the students at my side explaining their own reasoning. Yes, tests always tell us something, but what they tell us is a very different question. It's hard to "reason" me out of this conviction, but I do learn from my colleagues. (For public information about the state of education we can do better with low-stakes sampling.)

What I'm most interested in is the highlighted sentence above: how my students tackle knowledge claims. How they wrestle with their own, their neighbors', and society's dilemmas—how they make judgments on matters central to their and our future—including where to get advice.

My point about Dante, Shakespeare, et al was based on someone else's list of what every educated person should have read (or be able to pretend to have read). There are many such lists floating around. My school had its abbreviated list, too. For kids who've been exposed in the normal course of life to virtually nothing on those lists, the assumption that they can all be "covered" and memorized without damage to our core agreement above is the crux of the dilemma. Doing them together is time-consuming! Since the habits of using evidence and reason can't wait until we pour all the facts into children's heads, a good education must engage in both together. "Even" 5-year-olds learn by reasoning about the world while trying it on for size.

Even great teachers of important subjects are not The Answer. I took an amazing physics course with David Hawkins in Colorado one summer. I drove away with a seemingly deep understanding of one or two basic principles...or so I thought. On the drive east, they slipped away after about 650 miles. But what didn't slip away was my fascination with physics. I actually think I had good science teachers in both high school and college. But they couldn't get through to a roomful of teenagers as "out of it" as most of us were—particularly when it came to modern "counter-intuitive" science.

I liked my high school history teachers, but most of my smart friends found them "bor-ring." And mathematics? I didn't come near to learning what I wish I had, either about its beauty or its practical value. Why, if beauty matters, do we teach five times as much math as all the arts put together—without catching its beauty or its usefulness?

Yes, we are amusing ourselves to death, but in part because we are not "amusing" ourselves in our classrooms. My dictionary suggests that amusement includes pleasure. There's no reason tough stuff can't be a pleasure to take apart. Poor science education, as you say, that tries to fill the bucket (brain) makes us more, not less, susceptible to magical thinking. Because in the hurry to "cover" a lot, we teach scientific laws as though they are merely the word of authority. I always kept the textbook at my side when looking in the microscope in bio labs to be sure I was seeing the "right thing." I threw out all the potted plants that my kindergarteners had dutifully planted the week before—in a controlled experiment—when I discovered Monday morning that the ones in the closet were doing fine and the ones on the window sill had all died! My favorite college physics teacher did the same with an experiment with marbles rolling down a ramp. At just the critical moment when the teaching of science should have come into play, we both were too afraid the "kids" would learn the wrong thing.

In the effort to cover it all, even the best-educated are often cheated. Especially when it comes to judgments about what's in the best interest of all of us. (Fortunately, they may be somewhat better off regarding their own self-interest.) To better level the playing field we cannot cover everything in ways consistent with your highlighted motto. That's one dilemma. Nor do I expect that the "experts" who are in a position politically to write such standards (the details) are likely to be the best of their kind. (And, god help us, surely not the testing companies that turn them into test items with one right answer! Which, for teachers, is the real curriculum.) That's a dilemma, too.

Meanwhile, we need every potential juror and voter alike to know how to reason well, to deal with uncertainty et al. We need 100 percent of them to have had a shot at using their minds well, day after day after day for 12 years; at working through ideas, arguments; and, piqued by unexpected phenomenon or claims. They all deserve wise expert guidance that can catch them when they slip, shift the subject when needed, ask uncomfortable questions and more. For that we need a very different kind of schooling—for all. It won't happen overnight, but it's worth moving toward. Back to "Alice in Wonderland." If we don't care where we're going—and the only measure is a standardized test score—the more difficult reforms won't be tried, until we fail once again with the latest fads. The vocabulary section generally tells the meat of the story. It's a measure not of the test-taker's intelligence, but the language of his community and peers.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's note: See author's "P.S." added since entry was first published.

I will have to delay a bit before I can get to the book you recommended. When I finished "Daniel Deronda," I immediately plunged into Robert Caro's wonderful biography of Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," which I am enjoying very much. It is fascinating from the start as a description of the life and times of a man who did so much to redesign New York City, who was celebrated and powerful, but in the end...was the subject of a very unflattering biography by a master historian. The book gives perspective to some of the events that you describe. In the end, people in public life are judged by their real accomplishments and their integrity, not by their wealth, their power, or their press releases. The latter fade, and eventually the record speaks for itself. This is one of the reasons that I love to write history and read history, as over time phony laurels disintegrate, and the applause that is generated by flacks disappears.

I would like to engage you in one of your favorite issues, which is the use and abuse of tests. Over the past few months, as I was finishing my book, I became aware of the startling extent to which the New York State Education Department has manipulated the state test results. So, while politicians crow about their "success" in raising test scores (as if they had anything to do with students' learning!), it turns out that the tests have been rigged in recent years to produce higher scores. The more I learned, the more I wondered if New York was on its way to becoming a national laughing-stock.

I wrote two articles about this. The first one appeared in the New York Post in August under the headline "Toughen the Tests." The article actually was NOT a call to toughen the tests, but a call to tell the truth. I wrote it to alert our new state education commissioner, David Steiner, who assumes his position on Oct. 1, to the scandalous manipulation of test scores by the agency he will lead.

The second article was published by the New York Daily News ("Bloomberg's Bogus Report Cards Destroy Real Progress"). There I discussed the Bloomberg administration's zany school report cards, which this year awarded an A to 84 percent of the city's elementary and middle schools, and a B to 13 percent more. In other words, 97 percent got an A or a B, including seven of the schools that the state says are "persistently dangerous." Only two of 1,058 schools scored an F. The administration thinks this is progress, but even its most ardent supporters on the editorial boards of the New York Post and the New York Daily News complained about rampant grade inflation.

Oh, by the way, the school that saw the biggest drop in its overall score was the Harlem Promise Academy Charter School, the school that David Brooks of The New York Times held up as a national model, claiming that it had closed the achievement gap. Our blog had quite a lively exchange of letters about that school last spring. Seems it dropped from an A to a B; in the present regime of inflated scores, a B in New York City today is nothing to brag about.

I wrote these articles to draw attention to the games that the state is playing with test scores. From 2006, when the state started testing grades 3-8, to the present, the proportion of points that a student needs to advance to a higher level has steadily fallen in many grades. One of our faithful readers, Diana Senechal, conducted an experiment for gothamschools.org, in which she took two of the middle school tests and answered the questions at random; she "earned" enough points to advance to level 2. The number of students who are level 1 (the lowest) has dropped precipitously in these past three years; some very low-performing schools have few or no students in that category, not because instruction has improved, but because the state dropped the bar. The public doesn't know this.

Over these past three years, the proportion of students who are allegedly "proficient" (level 3) leapt from 29 percent to 63 percent in Buffalo, from 30 percent to 58 percent in Syracuse, and from 57 percent to 82 percent in New York City. In 2006, a student had to earn 60 percent of the points on the state tests in math to be proficient; by 2009, the student needed to earn only 50 percent. The public does not know that the bar has been quietly lowered.

The reporters at the New York Daily News have diligently exposed the corruption of state testing by New York's education department. For reasons that I cannot fathom, the reporters at the New York Times have completely ignored the story and continue to refer to the state scores as though they have real meaning. Perhaps the Times will take notice later this year when the NAEP results come out and the public realizes that the claims of double-digit gains are phony. Unfortunately, what the Times does and does not report matters, as some people will believe nothing unless they read it there.**

In June, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago issued a report showing that the score gains in that city (which President Obama cited when he nominated Arne Duncan as secretary of education) were mostly a result of the state's decision to lower the cut scores on the state tests.

When states play games with cut scores and conversions from raw scores to scale scores, testing becomes a mighty scam. As Secretary Duncan said when he spoke at the National Press Club last May, we are lying to our children when we give them a false picture of their progress. When district officials know that the scores are manipulated, yet report their "gains" with a straight face, they become complicit in these lies. When public officials boast about score gains knowing that the scores are the result of game-playing, they too are complicit.

Have testing and accountability become a massive fraud against our children? Do they now serve adult interests while ignoring, indeed disregarding, the needs of children?

Diane

**P.S. The New York Times Faces Facts about State Tests: In my blog entry that was posted today (and written a few days ago), I complained that the New York Times had failed to acknowledge the dumbing-down of New York's tests. Yesterday, Sept. 14, the Times ran an article by Javier Hernandez on that very subject ("Botched Most Answers on New York State Math Test? You Still Pass"). The article pointed out that a student could pass the 7th grade math test by getting only 44 percent of the questions right, and that the passing mark had dropped so far that students could actually pass by random guessing.

Officials at the state Education Department told the Times, apparently with a straight face, that they dropped the passing mark because they made the test "harder." They did not explain why passing rates had soared if indeed the test was harder and comparable to previous years. Apparently the officials think that the rest of us are fools.

So the Times at last has weighed in, but has not yet given the full picture of the extent to which intensive test prep—using clone items—has corrupted the state tests, not only in math, but in ELA as well.

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I’m in the midst of reading a marvelous book by Danielle Allen called Talking to Strangers. I’d love to discuss it with others. Do read it so we can converse about it soon. Her concept of “political friendships” between strangers intrigues me.

Which relates to my unpleasant encounter between NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg that you refer to in your letter yesterday. The New York Post reported that the mayor’s aides claim: Bloomberg demanded that the Senate’s grant to NYU be redirected it to CUNY, because of … Deborah Meier! My critical stance toward the mayor’s educational policies (the story quoted me as regarding the absence of parent voices in school policy) seemed a sufficient explanation. Why the Senate capitulated, and why The New York Times didn’t report it, and why the mayor’s aides “leaked” this explanation to the media I do not know. What’s more interesting to me is that this public attempt to threaten NYU, by one of the most powerful and richest politicians in America, was apparently seen as uncontroversial. It’s clearly an abridgement of academic freedom, an abuse of his enormous power; and, perhaps above all, so petty. (In fact, I’m “merely” an unpaid—hopefully not un-honored—member of the NYU faculty.)

I’ve always loved NYC’s feistiness, a quality of mind that seems often missing in more laid-back sections of the country. But even New Yorkers can be cowed by the kind of power and intimidation that the Bloomberg oligarchy has exercised for so many years.

Which gets me back to Allen’s argument in favor of bending over backwards to encourage reasoned, thoughtful dialogue between political friends—arguments not crippled by fear of retaliation or retribution by the authority of the State. The habits of a democratic citizenry are precious, and schools are the only institution I know of that might be training grounds for such citizenship. They are both the potential lab and think tank for reasoned discourse—in a climate of friendship and mutual respect. The art of listening to each other requires careful nurturing.

And, of course, reasoning requires judgment—and both require knowledge (including experience).

Which leads me to E.D. Hirsch’s latest book (The Making of Americans). He and I even agree on many matters. But I’m intrigued by the unexamined assumptions we disagree about! He does not even acknowledge any risks inherent in a nationwide imposition of a single year-by-year curriculum. Local school boards, parent organizations, and teachers' unions can be a pain in the ass (and I speak as one who has been at both ends of each). But I see democracy resting on our reviving these institutions, not in abandoning them. The ease with which we seek to “overcome” unwelcome citizen voices by pushing power ever higher—or to more elite experts—has a long history. It’s not “unreasonable,” just dangerous. “It’s too important to get this right’” is a cry I’ve heard over and over as respected friends seek to circumvent democratic procedures. “We dare not let them vote on this” is not the defense of just fools or demagogues. Yes, democratically delegating some decisions to experts, as well as recognizing when decisions are best made in collaboration with other governmental units, are reasonable objections to placing authority in local democracies. But years of such rationales have led me to be hard-pressed to find places left where ordinary citizens experience decision-making processes. Surely not in many schools. Even hearing each other out is not something we often do in our schools, although we do grow accustomed to not talking back to the textbook, teacher, or principal—more out of boredom (or its uselessness) probably than courtesy. (How rarely do we confront any passionate convictions in our lives in school.)

We’re bad at imagining other ways of seeing the world—and probably always have been. But it is our unique human capacity. While I think that if we devoted the 13 years from K-12th grade to nurturing and training such capacity we’d get better at it, probably it will always be hard. It takes, as does science, mathematics, and the arts, hands-on-practice in a good old-fashioned “apprenticeship.”

Ah, too much rhetoric! There are some wonderful books out by practitioners that describe how we can organize schools that serve both the academic disciplines and democracy better than a “standardized one-size-fits-all” curriculum. Next week.

Deb

P.S. The health debate is instructive—reminding us of how difficult it is to engage in serious debate when the stakes are high. But the solution is not to invent a behind-the-scenes, pretend consensus where none exist, as Duncan et al seem to be doing with regard to so-called educational “reform.” For more on meaningful school reform, I highly recommend that readers seek out an excellent opinion piece by Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves that appeared recently in The Boston Globe. Among other things, they write: "Why not choose the bolder paths not yet taken in our educational system’s much-hailed “race to the top’’ and join those schools at the top of the world already?"

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: Bridging Differences returns today from its summer hiatus. The blog will resume its regular Tuesday-Thursday publishing schedule next week.

Dear Deborah,

School is open, and it is time to talk! What a busy summer for all of us who care about education.

I had a good summer, finished editing my new book, and got it off to the publisher. I also managed to finish George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, my main summer reading. It took 140 pages before I became fully engaged, but then the plot and the characters grabbed me.

The big education events of the summer were huge. Starting locally, the New York legislature renewed Mayor Bloomberg's one-man control of the New York City public schools. No surprise there. What was surprising and really shocking was a debate about whether to create a $1.6 million parent training center, a tiny bone tossed to critics of the mayor's high-handed rule. The legislators wanted to place the new center at New York University. Then the New York Post ran a scare headline warning that someone who had criticized the mayor's education reforms—Deborah Meier—would run the parent training center. This was laughable, since you are an adjunct and would have had nothing to do with the program. Nonetheless, the terrified legislators promptly shifted the appropriation (a grain of sand in our city's $21 billion education budget) to City University of New York, where the mayor can keep it under his thumb and where it will be harmlessly divided into five separate centers.

Nationally, the most important event was the release of the federal government’s regulations for the “Race to the Top.” Those regulations made clear that the Obama administration has fully aligned itself with the edu-entrepreneurs who favor market-based reforms. As I predicted on this blog, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are now the spear carriers for the GOP's education policies of choice and accountability. An odd development, don’t you think? The Department of Education dangles nearly $5 billion before the states, but only if they agree to remove the caps on charter schools and any restrictions on using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by the people in power. Under normal circumstances, the Department of Education would need congressional hearings and authorization to launch a program so sweeping and so sharply defined. Instead, they are using the "stimulus" money to impose their preferences, with no hearings and no congressional authorization.

Is any charter school better than any public school? As we learned from the Stanford CREDO study of charters a few months ago, only 17 percent of charter schools are superior to comparable public schools; the rest were either no better or worse. Yet the Obama administration wants to open up the nation’s public schools—especially in urban districts—to massive privatization.

And with the encouragement of Secretary Duncan (and the support of the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation), privatization is taking root. Just last week, the Los Angeles board of education voted to turn over nearly one third of its schools to private management; this despite the fact that in the same week it was reported that the Green Dot takeover of Locke High School produced no gains. At Locke, 2 percent of the students met state standards in math; after a year of massive publicity about the Green Dot miracle at Locke, the scores came out, and 2 percent of the students met state standards in math. The excuses came thick and fast: the dropout rate was down, more students came to school, but…the scores were flat.

There is also no research that justifies the Obama administration’s belief that tying teacher evaluations to student scores will improve schools. I commend to our readers the response to the RTTT regulations by Professor Helen Ladd, an economist who has studied teacher evaluation for many years, as well as the one by Paul Barton, who has studied education issues for many years. What both of these responses clearly demonstrate is that there is no research basis for the priorities favored by Secretary Duncan.

This will be an interesting year. But also a very dangerous year for American public education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (89) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: After this week, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch begin their annual summer break. Their blog will return in September.

Dear Diane,

I’m still amazed at how fast the new educational establishment plans to “revolutionize” our schools. I acknowledge that your support for national testing and curriculum is a bit out of line with the train that’s long since left the station, and I suspect you will end up as dismayed as I am. So, too, will many Americans who have not in any way been consulted by their governors or their president. One look at who’s in charge gives me the creeps—SAT and ACT. Unbelievable! Hardly.

I quote IBM’s Louis Gerstner in a conversation with John Bussey of The Wall Street Journal and Joel Klein : “What I’m going to suggest (to Obama) is that he convene the 50 governors and the first thing they do is abolish the 16,000 school districts we have in the United States." Why? Because “sixteen thousand school districts are what we’re trying to cram this reform through.” With only one—how much easier. (Note: When I was born, there were 200,000 school boards.)

Getting “around” the Constitution is hardly a new practice and, after all, I’ve supported it at times. But even in the case of gun control, I think I’m closer to the Founding Fathers' idea than the NRA is. And I’m glad we didn’t try to squeeze African-Americans et al into the Constitution by legalese. Instead, “we” wrote an amendment. On local control of schools, I’m certain I am on the side of the Constitution, and I think it’s more critical, not less, in today’s world and that no such amendment would survive the American people.

I’ve become more conservative: not in where I hope to go, but in the means for getting there. Rapid changes on a large scale are dangerous—and while sometimes necessary we need to be persuaded. That slows things down a bit I know. It’s one of democracy’s intentional “drawbacks.”

If we were capable of coming up with a list of just one book or idea in each of the disciplines for a “common core” I’d buy it. But that would be a utopian wish—and probably dangerous, too! Maybe I wouldn’t buy it.

The problem with the old “new math” of the '60s was not the mathematics, but the attempt to leap ahead without either persuading or educating those who we expected to carry it out (teachers) or support it (parents).

Possibly we will raise slightly the intellectual content of what kids are presented with a national curriculum. With certainty, we will lower the chances of having an inspiring year with an inspired teacher. It’s a trade-off that seems unnecessary if we took advantage of our schools as places for everyone to learn—for teachers, students, parents, and the community. If we started with where all of these parties “are” and encouraged them—with resources—to dig deeper and more richly, with greater attention to the love of learning, we could have both. In a generation of two.

I liked your list, Diane. I think we could connect each of our lists to the future health of democracy, and by extension not only to a stronger economy, but a real understanding of what an economy is. Schools and the economy have moved lock-step into shoddy conceptions of what a strong mind and economy can be measured by and then substituted the measure for the object itself.

Books to read. There are many good books on education to read. And yes, “Middlemarch” can even help us think about schooling! That’s what I discovered about education—everything feeds it.

For example, I recently read an odd book that tells the story of the author’s encounter with a shelter for adolescents in Russia. Written by journalist Bob Belenky, “Tales of Priut Almus” delighted me. Exactly why? I’m still trying to figure it out.

I’d still recommend James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” for examining our current situation and Evans Clinchy’s “Reforming American Education: From the Bottom to the Top”—which has an introduction by me (“Supposing That..”) which I still agree with. I recommend my “In Schools We Trust” for a chapter on changing the odds, as an approach to school reform writ large—to those who keep carping that my ideas depend too much on exceptionalism.

Like your rediscovering “Middlemarch,” I rediscovered a collection of essays by physicist David Hawkins in a book entitled “The Informed Vision.” Ken Jones, formerly with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also edited a useful book, “Democratic School Accountability,” that is only three years old, but totally out of synch with the “latest” Gates Foundation wisdom. Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues Jacqueline Ancess and Beverly Falk’s “Authentic Assessment in Action” has a lot to show us, including a chapter on the old Central Park East Secondary School that I often refer to. Just this week, friends in NYC—including you, Diane—collaborated in producing a book called “NYC Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein: What Parents, Teachers, and Policymakers Need to Know.”

There are many more, depending on one’s taste. I particularly love accounts by teachers—like Julie Diamond’s “Welcome to the Aquarium.” I re-read Mike Rose’s “Lives on the Boundary” yearly. Ditto for oldies, like John Holt’s “How Children Fail.” Or anything by Frank Smith—including his most recent—“Unspeakable Acts, Unnatural Practices.” An oldie—“Horace’s Compromise” by Ted Sizer—should be read by policymakers every few years, alongside Richard Rothstein’s classic—“The Way We Were?”. Diane, there’s another history of education often forgotten even by the best historians and well-captured in “Roots of Open Education in America,” edited by Ruth Dropkin and Arthur Tobier—with a last chapter by my hero Vito Perrone.

(And as soon as I send this off, I’ll feel terrible about having left off mentioning x and y—like Seymour Sarason! Maxine Green!—and Linda Nathan’s not-yet-available book.)

Have a joyful summer—living the alternate life we didn’t live from September through June. Which is why I reject the idea of a longer school year. What kids need are fascinating alternate life experiences for two summer months. We owe them that, as we owe it to ourselves.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I don’t even trust myself to write standards (of the sort that can be specs for tests) for one school, one district, one state—much less the whole nation! I’m bound to have a better idea a week later.

And, given those who are considered the experts these days on matters of schooling, I cringe at the very idea.

I think it would be fair to argue that an institution that is funded by public monies must defend itself on the grounds that it serves, first and foremost, a public purpose—one which by its nature is held in common by all citizens, voters, and their offspring.

Here’s my suggestion. They must serve to prepare future voters to be knowledgeable and skilled citizens by the time they reach voting age—smart enough to preserve, protect, and improve the democracy of which they now are full members. We need a national “bar mitzvah” ceremony that seriously stops and takes stock of how well it has used children’s time (12-13 years of involuntary schooling) and the public’s money.

There is no reason the young can’t be offered “more,” or that we will all agree on precisely what “habits of mind” a voter needs to decide on matters of enormous complexity! But I’d have to connect the dots if I wanted to make it mandatory, not just accessible. There’s a difference, for example, between preparing future citizens to understand “the economy,” and preparing them for a specific job in it.

We cannot abandon democracy just because we are a long way from where we need to be, not to mention a long way from ever having discussed what it is, much less what it takes to nourish it. But that’s the direction—first and foremost—I want us to head in. That’s the argument I want us to engage in—school by school, community by community, state by state. Hopefully, we will come up with interesting and different answers. Meanwhile, we can also consider how we could go about assessing it down the road.

Here’s a shocking idea along such lines: It’s not mathematicians who need to decide how much and what kind of math we need! We need citizens with many different forms of expertise to weigh in on the kind/level of mathematical problems 18-year-olds should be able to make sense of. Then mathematicians can help us lay out ways to get there. If calculus is more important than statistics, let’s hear the argument.

If we give up on democracy every time it seems inefficient or even absurd (as Churchill put it), there would be no trace of it left on earth.

Yes, NAEP can, as you suggest, Diane, help us in the process by assessing K-12 students in a wide range of ways—and perhaps samples of other citizens of varying occupations—about what they know, make sense of and can demonstrate. To do that well we have to change the way we think of assessment. Instead of using a technology built on ranking, let’s use NAEP’s sampling as a way to provide better understanding of the problems. Having some portions that can be repeated for decades for comparison purposes is wise, but it should not be the be-all-and-end-all. And, as with all tests, we need to consider the ways it can be abused—the dangers—ahead of time. We need information as a tool for informing the public debate, not for enforcing solutions.

Yes, Diane, the Broader, Bolder proposal is a huge step in the right direction.

It’s not only in schooling policy that we face a dangerous fork in the road. Our disrespect for genuine expertise (the absence of any school people in the current policy debates) is mirrored in every field (even in the appointment of a financier to head GM!). So, too, the range of expertise. We confuse the role of citizen vs. expert, but even more dangerously we confuse the role of both in our capitulation to fiscally powerful private interest groups. This goes for policy discourse in many fields—not just education, but health, energy, and on and on.

The emperor wears no clothes—more charters, teachers paid for test results, and a national test are solutions that distract us. Not one of these is backed by “evidence”—even if we agreed that test scores were the purpose of education.

Next week, let’s imagine we could mandate a dozen or fewer books that rarely get read by anyone but teachers and educators but deserve a wider public audience?

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

If you recall, I took some heat from readers when I said some while back that the Obama administration was adopting the same policies as the Bush administration and that Arne Duncan sounds amazingly like Margaret Spellings on issues like accountability and choice.

I just read a fascinating description of "Obama's Bipartisan Triumphs" by Matt Miller, who is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, one of those Beltway think tanks that sets the tone for federal policy. CAP is especially important because its director John Podesta ran the Obama transition.

Miller writes: "In Republicans' eyes, Obama sinned by not fighting to renew the Washington, D.C., voucher program that provided a lifeline to a few thousand desperate families. But the rest of his school agenda hits every Republican erogenous zone. The president is pushing charter schools, higher standards, differential teacher pay, alternative teacher certification, and even tenure reform in ways far beyond anything any president has attempted before. What's more, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan's savvy management of the administration's union ties, Obama has a chance to make more Nixon-to-China progress on ideas conservatives have long urged than has ever been possible."

Miller confirms what I earlier spotted: The Obama agenda is the Republican agenda with a smile and $100 billion in stimulus dollars to encourage districts and states to adopt conservative reforms. I recall back in the 1980s and 1990s, during the Reagan and Bush years, when Republicans wanted choice and accountability, and Democrats fought back with their own ideas. Now Democrats, with an overwhelming edge in Congress, have Republican ideas.

What happened?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (50) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Over time we have developed a very solid and smart community of readers who like to argue with us and with each other. That is as it should be. And of course we need to bridge differences—or disagree—with them, too, as we do with each other.

So the subject today is merit pay. This is an important topic because it has become clear that President Obama has decided to hang his hat on this idea. It has not yet been explained just what he means by merit pay. Does he mean that teachers should be paid more for teaching in what is euphemistically called “hard-to-staff” schools? Or paid more for teaching in areas where there are shortages, like certain kinds of special education or subjects such as math and science? Or paid more for mentoring other teachers? Or paid more for teaching longer days?

I would call such compensation “performance pay,” rather than “merit pay,” because teachers are paid more for doing more.

But I have a feeling that what the Obama administration has in mind is paying teachers more based on their students’ “value-added” test scores. So if their students see increases in their scores, they will get “merit pay” to reward their supposedly superior teaching.

I believe that this is the direction the administration is heading and that it is the purpose of the millions that will be spent on data warehouses in every state. And it is why Secretary Duncan has told the governors that they will get their stimulus money only if they collect and report data to the U.S. This was an odd request because some of the data he asked for is already available, such as the gap between state and NAEP scores (previously published in Education Week, for example, and no secret).

There are several reasons why it is a bad idea to pay teachers extra for raising student test scores:

• First, it will create an incentive for teachers to teach only what is on the tests of reading and math. This will narrow the curriculum to only the subjects tested.
• Second, it will encourage not only teaching to the test, but gaming the system (by such mechanisms as excluding low-performing students) and outright cheating.
• Third, it ignores a wealth of studies that show that student test scores are subject to statistical errors, measurement errors, and random errors, and that the “noise” in these scores is multiplied when used to make high-stakes personnel decisions.
• Fourth, it ignores the fact that most teachers in a school are not eligible for “merit” bonuses, only those who teach reading and math and only those for whom scores can be obtained in a previous year.
• It ignores the fact that many factors play a role in student test scores, including student ability, student motivation, family support (or lack thereof), the weather, distractions on testing day, etc.
• It ignores the fact that tests must be given at the beginning and the end of the year, not mid-year as is now the practice in many states. Otherwise, which teacher gets "credit," and a bonus for score gains, the one who taught the student in the spring of the previous year or the one who taught her in the fall?

I believe that our readers are right when they predict that merit pay of the stupidest kind is coming. I predict that it will do nothing to improve our schools. A few weeks ago, the conservative Manhattan Institute released a study showing that merit pay had no impact on test scores in 200 schools in New York City that are trying it. In fact, scores went down in larger schools that offered bonuses. This little experiment in schoolwide bonuses is costing taxpayers $20 million a year.

Now it is possible that scores may go up in later years; this is only the first year, after all. But what is most interesting is the subdued release of this study. When the Manhattan Institute releases a study, it often holds a press conference to announce the results. This study, however, had no fanfare; its study was quietly posted on MI's Web site; no press conference, no press release. Somehow I suspect that the study would have been released with bells and whistles if the scores had flown upward.

Here is my prediction: Merit pay of the kind I have described will not make education better, even if scores go up next year or the year after. Instead, it will make education worse, not only because some of the "gains" will be based on cheating and gaming the system, but because they will be obtained by scanting attention to history, geography, civics, the arts, science, literature, foreign languages, and all the other studies that are needed to develop smarter individuals, better citizens, and people who are prepared for the knowledge-based economy of the 21st Century. Nor will it identify better teachers; instead, it will reward those who use their time for low-level test preparation.

Is it possible to have an education system that mis-educates students while raising their test scores? Yes, I think it is. We may soon prove it.

Diane

Posted by educationweekly at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (56) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I want to go back and discuss President Obama’s big speech on education. At the time I heard it, I was surprised by some of his statistics about how terrible things are, but I didn’t have time (or inclination) to do the fact-checking on my own. I was too busy working on my book, trying to finish a chapter on a different topic.

Just the other day, a friend sent me an item that was posted on FactCheck.org, which is published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. A group of diligent researchers at FactCheck.org did exactly what needed to be done. They went through every single statement in the speech about the condition of American education and posted the results on March 18. I highly recommend it.

FactCheck notes the irony: President Bush left office boasting of the great improvement in U.S. education performance as a result of No Child Left Behind. Then comes President Obama, painting a dismal portrait of a nation whose education system is locked in steep educational decline.

Three specific assertions capture the essence of FactCheck’s findings:

1. President Obama said that the high school dropout rate had tripled over the past three decades. In fact, says FactCheck, “it has actually declined by a third.”
2. The President said that our 8th graders had “fallen to ninth place” in the world, but FactCheck says that “U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.”
3. He said that we should have a national goal of “having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” by 2020, but it turns out that we are within reach of that goal already. Says FactCheck, “The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.” Perhaps we will reach President Obama’s not-so-ambitious goal in a year or two, not by 2020!

So, I ask you, Deborah, what gives? Why is the President fear-mongering about the schools? Heaven knows, it is an old and well-established tradition to claim that things are worse than ever as a way to demand drastic changes. In my graduate school days, I recall discovering a “crisis in education” in almost every decade of the 20th Century.

Maybe that is the accepted way to prepare the public for big changes, but it ought at least to be based on credible data (which the President’s staff and speechwriters certainly could have easily obtained from the U.S. Department of Education). Clearly the President wants the American people to believe that things are so awful that a radical transformation is needed. What do you think he wants to do that requires this groundwork?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (51) | TrackBacks (0)