June 30, 2009
Grading reports that grade states, which have schools that grade
It's now a PR cliche in education wonkery: grade states. Issue grades, and that's a hook for reporters to write stories about the reports, because the reporters at daily metros can say, "[Your state's name here] receives 'F' in think tank report on education." But beyond the PR value of grades, it's facile, which is why I'm surprised Education Sector gave into this particular venal sin in its report on states' higher-ed accountability policies. C'mon folks: can't you figure out a more substantive way of evaluating states? At the very least, this is so 1990s.
So I'm thinking about developing a report over the next year that grades think-tank reports that issue grades for states on some matter of education, where of course schools have teachers who grade students. Among the standards will be the following:
Clear standards for grades: a year before the report is issued, does the entity that issues the report publish grading standards or criteria?
A - Entity publishes grading standards with sufficient criterion specificity that an outside observer would not be surprised at the grade a state receives the next year. (Note: this is a low bar, not requiring agreement with grades.)
B - Entity publishes standards, but standards are too vague to provide benchmarks for policy progress.
C - Entity has previously published reports issuing grades to states, but changed the standards, or described the project and the areas where states would be grade, but no standards for those areas.
D - Entity has previously published the existence of the report project, but there is no previous publication of intent to grade states in this area of policy.
F - Report appears out of the blue with no publication of intent in this area.
Okay, folks: where does today's Education Sector report fit? How about Ed Week's annual Quality Counts phonebook? Fordham's reports that issue grades?
And, yes, if I'm serious about this, that implies I have to develop some more grading criteria. After all, it would be most interesting and ironic if I created a report that contained the mechanism by which the report itself could be torn apart. Hint, hint, ...
Find the typo! and other national-stage blogging
The National Journal unveiled its new education policy blog yesterday. My first response has an embarrassing writing goof; see if you can spot it!
No differences -> politics as usual?
While the DC vouchers debate swallowed more airtime, it's David Figlio's new study of Florida's voucher programs that will reveal the state of voucher politics. Several years ago, opponents of vouchers pointed out the lack of accountability for the programs, and in response supporters inserted a mandated study comparing achievement of students using vouchers to public-school students. Fortunately, they picked one of the best economists of education, who is careful and cautious and has done several studies of Florida's voucher programs in the past decade (including the best article on the topic, published in 2006).
Figlio's conclusion is roughly that given the data he had available, there is no evidence of differences in student achievement between those in the corporate tax-credit voucher programs and similar students in public schools. Further, the usually-cautious Figlio went out on a limb and said if additional data were available, he wouldn't expect the conclusions to change. This is not the only report I expect Figlio to produce on the corporate tax-credit voucher program, since the interesting questions for microeconomists are about how the shape of the market (the presence and size of a voucher program) changes its characteristics (esp. responses of public schools).
But until that report is produced, and probably after it, the no-difference finding here mirrors a bunch of other studies. At this point, it looks like there is no solid evidence that students using vouchers perform better as a result, and in Florida at least, it also looks like students don't perform worse, either. So the voucher debate will not be settled by evidence of effectiveness, and we default back to questions of values embedded in public policy and the way that experiences shape the policy-relevant questions.
Those who support vouchers are spinning the no-difference findings as "vouchers do the job for less money, and choice is a positive value." Those who oppose vouchers are spinning the findings as "vouchers are no panacea, and choice can exist within the public system." And as voucher-receiving schools accumulate in the state, the ordinary politics of constituents make it hard for legislators to oppose eliminating the program. It is the last item that makes Florida (where a number of Democrats have voucher schools in their districts) different from DC (where the governing authority, Congress, has only one voting representative with constituents who use the vouchers). In the end, I think we'll see voucher programs generally stay in the states where they currently exist (primarily from the constituency-experience dynamic) but not expand much (because of the lack of evidence of great effects and because charter-school expansion in cities is an easier political sell).
June 29, 2009
Prevent backtalk: turn on the television!
I knew it years ago, and in two studies released earlier this month and this week, I think both in peer reviewed journals, we have it confirmed: the best way to prevent teenagers from talking back to you is to turn on the television years earlier so that they don't develop the ability to talk back. So that spring day in 1996 when my wife and I decided to sell our television before moving to Tampa? A big mistake.
And there we were, deciding that we were advancing our children's interests. No, that wasn't it at all: they were 4 and 1 at the time, and we decided that since we didn't like their arguments over the television, we'd see how long we could go without one in the house.Answer: 13 years and counting. And no matter what arguments we have in our household, it's not about the channel the television's tuned to. Instead, it's about who gets the computer...
Serious side: The article released this week is more about the relationship between adult caregiver and child than about television, and it highlights the importance of one-to-one interactions at early ages. I suspect this will be followed by other analyses from the same data set.
June 28, 2009
The purpose of seminars/discussion
I'm at THATcamp this weekend and having a great deal of fun. (Check the Twitter archive for tweets with the #thatcamp tag...) But there is a lot of serious stuff here, and I was hoping that it would confirm or undermine the way I'm currently thinking about the problems of teaching online. The demography of the group doesn't quite give me enough of that reality check, since I'm in the minority as an experienced teacher; the majority of attendees are graduate students, staff members at one of the digital humanities centers in the country, or library/museum staff, but it still was a first shot at this.
No disconfirmation in the relevant session, but it's honed the way I'm thinking about the purposes of a seminar or discussion. What many great humanities discussions share is the entree into and development of skills in a specific discourse and in "academicizing" more generally (to borrow a term from Stanley Fish). In memorable humanities discussions, teachers model analysis and establish an environment within which students can learn and practice close reading, the identification of key issues in a disciplinary or interdisciplinary context, the articulation of critical perspectives, and engagement in a dicursive community.
Several characteristics of face-to-face classes contribute to that: the ability of a teacher to take any issue and analyze it extemporaneously, the ability to annotate material for everyone present (if verbally), the probing of assertions with either questions or counterarguments, and the capacity to revise arguments on the spot.
There are online tools for some of this, if without the immediacy. Diigo is a great social annotation tool; while it's not the type of immediacy that happens in close readings in class, I have some anecdotal evidence that it can be powerful for students. Teachers could take issues that pop up in discussion boards and expand upon them by modeling analysis and should probably be careful to construct prompts that set the stage for that. And I've been thinking about requiring weekly recorded fishbowl sessions with small numbers of students in my fall online class, as a way to generate some immediacy in the engagement.
In other words, no great insights, but the honing itself is important. And it required a bunch of people who are very comfortable online getting together face-to-face to bat around some ideas. There was an ironic moment in the session related to that fact: One staff member from the Center for History and New Media left the room just before the session to address some technical issues. I started moderating, and we generated a list of functions for seminars and discussions in general. She returned to the room, and as she started to talk a few minutes later, she said, "I'm sorry if this was mentioned before... I wasn't here at the beginning of the session."
June 26, 2009
How to steer CYA-oriented bureaucracies, or why NCLB supporters need to think about libel law
Someone at USDOE sent me an invitation to listen to the June 14 phone conference where Arne Duncan explained how disappointed he was in Tennessee, Indiana, and other states with charter caps, let alone states such as Maine with no charter law, and how that disappointment might be reflected in the distribution (or lack of distribution) of "Race to the Top" funds (applications available in October, due in December, with the first round of funding out in February 2010). There are a few details that reporters didn't ask about (Duncan's somewhat surprising statement that a good state charter law would set some barriers for entry rather than establish a "Wild West of charter schools," and the way that small charter schools and charter schools with grade configurations outside state testing programs can stay off the radar for accountability purposes), but I was not surprised that two Tennessee reporters were called on for questions.
But apart from the selection of reporters for questions, the phone presser and other DOE moves made me think about the various uses of power in education-policy federalism. In limited ways, explicit mandates can be effective, if there is a sustained willingness within the USDOE (and esp. OCR) to make painful examples of the nastier school systems that try to evade those mandates. Offering technical assistance is another method, and despite the massive conflict-of-interest problems in Reading First, I agree with one of the researchers in the field who thinks that Reading First did improve primary-grade reading instruction, on balance. (Thumbnail version: hourslong scripts, ugh; explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and some other fluency components, obviously necessary.)
The right kind of infection
The Powell et al. article on cultural complexity 90,00 years ago, published in the June 5 issue of Science, has some interesting consequences for education policy, though it's an archaeology article. The argument the authors make is that one needs a certain population density before one can find surviving signs of cultural complexity (archaeological evidence of more sophisticated used of symbolism and technology). Sub-Saharan Africa had both those population densities and archaeological evidence from 90,000 years ago, as did Eurasia 45,000 years ago.
Powell et al. are arguing that the development of the earliest human cultural skills may have depended on nothing other than density. This is an appealing story: get enough humans living in proximity, and whatever culture is developed will be maintained while the various subpopulations (clans, etc.) interact and teach each other, keeping the ideas floating around the population in a way that would not happen in a sparse population with little interaction between subgroups.
