August 5, 2010
"Overcaffeinated value-added enthusiasts" and the public
I've developed a fondness for Rick Hess's phrasing. Whether or not I agree with him, I have to smile when he describes advocates of value-added or bust as "overcaffeinated value-added enthusiasts." This is in the context of the back-and-forth over value-added measures in the District of Columbia teacher filings (see blog entries by Aaron Pallas, Hess, Pallas, and Hess, from which I drew the overcaffeinated term). What we're seeing here is the beginnings of a public dialog over the technical details of value-added measures, whether in DC or here in Florida (see today's St. Pete Times story on two audit reports over Florida measures, plus articles from Jacksonville and Miami over continuing questions).
Or, rather, we're not seeing much of a dialog, more of a he said-she said dynamic. Pallas wrote from what was publicly available (which was as simplistic as what I read about Bill Sanders' techniques in newspapers in 1990s Tennessee), Hess criticized him for insufficient due diligence for an academic blogger, and we're now into round two on who owes whom what on transparency. Florida is slightly different in the actors: most of the critics this summer have been superintendents, worried about whether problems with the underlying test scores or value-added measures will end up shaming their elementary schools (and them) with lower ratings on the state's accountability system. But it's still he said-she said with the auditors saying they found no problems and the superintendents still having reservations.
What we're missing is clear reporting on the technical issues, but don't blame the reporters. In some cases, there is poor planning by state departments of education (or the DC schools, in this summer's news), so there's nothing clear and accurate and easy to communicate. In other cases, as in those jurisdictions using Bill Sanders' techniques, you've got a proprietary model that the public isn't allowed to inspect. And then there's the simple fact that there is no single holy grail of value-added measures and inherent error issues that tend to be underplayed because standard errors and measurement error are eyeglaze-inducing even if they're important. So the reporting is a far cry from the sensawunda reporting on scientists who uncovered BL's lowball estimates of the gusher's output: oh, wow, there are pools of oil under the surface? oh, wow, you can estimate flows from the speed of particles in a fluid? Nothing like that exists on value-added or growth measures.
Some part of the situation is inevitable when a technical apparatus becomes a tool of political discussion. I don't mean the partisan politicization of statistics (though that happens) but the fact that even mildly controversial bills do not pass in many legislative bodies unless there is a certain amount of pathos in the debate, and the exaggeration of debate tends to drown out the caveats for anything. There are plenty of very careful statisticians out there who can tell you the issues with value-added or growth measures. They're not quoted in news stories, because no editor is going to let "mixed-model BLUE algorithms tend to swallow dependent-variable variance before you get to the effect measures" appear in a newspaper. So there's a mismatch between the technical issues and the level of discussion. You shouldn't need someone with the skills of Robert Krulwich to report on technical measures affecting public policy, but that's where we are.
That feeds into the dichotomous debate that is dominated by the "let the measures work" and the "it's imperfect, so toss it out" arguments. As I wrote a year ago,
The difficulty in looking coldly at messy and mediocre data generally revolves around the human tendency to prefer impressions of confidence and certainty over uncertainty, even when a rational examination and background knowledge should lead one to recognize the problems in trusting a set of data. One side of that coin is an emphasis on point estimates and firmly-drawn classification lines. The other side is to decide that one should entirely ignore messy and mediocre data because of the flaws. Neither is an appropriate response to the problem.
When the rubber meets the road, you're sometimes going to get the firmly-drawn classification lines in Florida that lead people to nitpick technical details (I wonder how many of the superintendents griping this summer have bonuses tied to school grades), and you're going to get nebulous debates when systems such as IMPACT are not accompanied by technical transparency. This just doesn't work for me, and it shouldn't for you, either.
July 30, 2010
"Pushback" week
It's almost as if Nick Anderson and Ruth Marcus worked at the same paper, because "pushback" appears to be the talking point of the week on education policy. Yesterday, Anderson reports, President Obama "pushed back" against some civil-rights groups' criticism of Race to the Top, and Marcus applauded him when the president "took the opportunity to push back." Oh, wait: they do work for the same paper. Well, at least we know that at the Post, some colleagues talk with each other, unlike the one who fired Dave Weigel last month and the other who hired him this month. Then again, the fools at the Post, Inc., appear to be management and bull-male columnists, not rank-and-file reporters.
There are four major stories that dominated national education news in the past week, at least as far as I was paying attention:
- The drama surrounding the civil-rights group report and non-presser and the two major education speeches this week by Duncan and Obama.
- Continuing problems in trying to attach state aid to federal bills (after the emergency war appropriations, there's the inability to break the small business aid bill, which had jobs money attached).
- Michelle Rhee's plans to fire several hundred teachers based on the IMPACT evaluation system.
- The New York state testing cut-score embarrassment.
Pushback was used in the Post's coverage of the first story, but I think you can say it's a theme for the week. House and Senate members are now in almost open warfare over education jobs riders to bills (possibly extending to the FMAP aid to states on Medicaid, stuck in Congress since early this year). There is debate over how many teachers Rhee is firing and how bad a system IMPACT is. And Joel Klein is twisting himself in knots trying to explain how the mistakes in proficiency rates that he used to puff up his record really isn't a problem and, uh, Lady Gaga shows how good the New York City schools are. I'm half-expecting him to talk about New York's smog swampy beauty, the East River though, doesn't it split the Park Slope from the Palisades? Someone get Bill Shatner to read Joel Klein's ratiocinations!
Some things behind the headlines that seem obvious to this historian:
- Part of the loose (and fragile) coalition criticizing the Obama administration's turnaround policy stems from unions concerned about due process for employers and community-based organizations worried about the closure of public facilities in poor neighborhoods and the role of public employment in providing a leg up to the middle class. That's not new, and it's complicated. The civil-rights group interest in public employees can be salutary (my understanding is that Black teachers were a solid core of local NAACP chapters in the mid-20th century) but sometimes at cross-purposes with other interests: I heard informally from some observers that part of the pushback against the decentralization of Chicago schools in the late 1980s was the role of the central school bureaucracy in providing a leg up into the middle class, and the reduction of the central bureaucracy threatened those positions. Today, the invisible risk is the position of minority teachers' aides and other non-certified employees. My guess is that they've been disproportionately affected by school-system layoffs that try to hold onto classroom teachers.
- I still don't have a clue how much test scores played a role in the firing of DC teachers, and my guess is that you don't, either. IMPACT included test scores, but you'd have to look at the details of individual employees to know whether an individual firing is a case where all the indicators (including the required five observations) pointed in the direction of an incompetent teacher or whether test scores trumped supervisory judgment for any. Normally employers have broad discretion in evaluation systems, but the failure to bargain IMPACT may put the DCPS in some jeopardy of an unfair labor practice finding. (That depends on both the structure of DC collective-bargaining law and the details of what happened with IMPACT and WTU's requests for bargaining.) Double jeopardy for Michelle Rhee: the inclusion of the pseudoscientific "learning styles" in the IMPACT observation system. My guess is that the AFT (the national affiliate for the Washington Teachers Union) can quickly get their hands on well-known psychologists to rip that to shreds for any teachers where the tipping factor was a supervisor's judgment that they didn't cater to student "learning styles."
- Joel Klein's dancing around the cut-score fiasco in New York illustrates once again that the performative setting of cut scores is often a result of the tension between bravado and "reform testosterone," on the one hand, and politically acceptable failure and the political need to game the system, on the other. We'd like to think that cut-score setting is arbitrary in the sense of arbitration, but it's too often arbitrary in the sense of caprice and politics. Two years ago, Jennifer Jennings and I wrote a commentary for Teachers College Record ($$ required) about the dangers of trusting threshold-based proficiency percentages as opposed to central tendencies such as means and medians, with New York City as the object lesson. She's too mature for this, but I have no such reticence with the last week's revelations: nyah nyah nyah, we told you so. And from those of us who warned years ago about the fragility of growth/value-added statistics? same message.
Bottom line here for administrators: test-based measures should only be used as a case to fire teachers or administrators where they strongly point in the same direction as observation-based evaluation instruments that are developed with some common sense, with unions and excising crap such as learning styles.
July 26, 2010
"Opportunity to learn" revived?
As Ed Week's Michele McNeil is reporting, a coalition of civil rights groups has issued a white paper today through a (new?) organization, the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign. Last night, Diane Ravitch was tweeting her reading of the paper as a gentle but firm rebuke of the Obama administration's approach to accountability. To some extent, I think she's right: the 17-page report briefly referred to the inappropriateness of judging schools and teachers primarily by test scores, but that was a brief reference.
For the longer and more committed passage criticizing policy prejudices towards school closures, I read the argument differently, because of the other arguments in the paper in favor of more money for early childhood education, wraparound care programs, and NCLB's public-school choice provisions and against budget cuts. And then there's the name that's a throwback to early-90s arguments in favor of opportunity to learn standards. To me, that all looks like a straightforward community-civil-rights approach more than an argument against high-stakes testing. In that context, the argument against school closure is an argument against withdrawing resources from a community institution that may be one of the few public facilities in a poor neighborhood.
That also fits with how the coalition's paper addresses Race to the Top: don't withhold resources or programs from poor children. Instead, combine formula grants with conditions. Notably, the paper states that a limited competition is acceptable, suggesting that the constituent organizations would not directly oppose Race to the Top as long as its structure does not permanently replace formula grants in ESEA. I know what others are going to say in response: we have plenty of conditions on federal funding, but the federal government almost never penalizes states for falling down on the job.
To a great extent, the politics of and posturing around education reform are all depressing to me: education reform policies are dwarfed by the state of the country's economy right now. In fact, that's a crucial part of the argument of the Broader, Bolder Approach. So you should maybe focus your efforts on the national economy right now? Or if not the national economy, maybe focusing on states, where the real action is going to happen over the next few years?
I think the coalition is moving about 15 months too late, if the key movers intended to shape federal policy. It's very likely that there won't be more RTTT, there won't be ESEA reauthorization, and there won't be a heck of a lot of things that should be happening from the perspectives of a variety of people on different sides of this debate. I wish I had been been wrong a month ago, but it looks more and more that I was right in predicting that David Obey's gambit last month was a stupid gamble instead. I was wrong in guessing that Obey would be frustrating George Miller, but I think I'm right on the general picture. To be clear, it's far from the biggest SNAFU of the Congressional session: that's the too-small size of the stimulus in early 2009 and the failure of the White House to nominate (or recess-appoint) enough Fed governors. But I'm still depressed, and puzzled by the strategic choices.
(One final puzzle is the group's website. The contact information is for the Schott Foundation in Massachusetts, which is consistent with the few blog entries (written by Michael Holzman) and the press-kit stuff. But there are no staff members or individuals listed on the website, just organizations. The whois entry for otlcampaign.org shows that the domain name has existed since sometime in 2009, but it's registered through a proxy, and the Internet Archive has no history of the website (blocked at the site). This is all perfectly legal, but it's odd.)
July 24, 2010
Firings in DC
Andy Rotherham is correct that the termination notices in the DC public schools this week included about a third of the total who had not met licensure standards, and a greater number were rated in the highest classification in the annual evaluations. Nonetheless, what is newsworthy about the terminations is the public nature of outright firing of a chunk of teachers for nonperformance. It wasn't the firing of a third of the district teachers, but significantly less than 10%. Let's assume a similar number of those given notice of "underperformance" this year either quit or are fired next year. That would be the firing of around 13-16% of the teachers for nonperformance in two years. It's noticeable.
By itself, the number is neither good nor bad, though many will argue the point either way without additional information. I say we wait. First, we wait for the Washington Teachers Union to sort through the information to see if any teachers were fired without the five classroom observations required for the evaluations. The grievance mechanism that exists in the union contract is on procedural grounds, and here we'll see how careful Rhee's bureaucrats have been. Then, we wait to see if there are any examples of firings that don't meet a basic smell test--anyone who had won teaching awards and plaudits but were given low ratings for reasons of favoritism or obviously inappropriate application of student test scores. Either procedural errors or plausible miscarriages of justice are reasonable grounds on which the union will fight for members and has an ethical obligation.
Nor is that willingness to fight for individual members inconsistent with a union's willingness to try different methods of evaluation. My chapter can and does file grievances when we think an individual's procedural rights were violated in the tenure review process. That says nothing about the standards of review. It says that we'll fight for the integrity of the review process.
July 23, 2010
A more realistic view of standards
This week I've been spending most of each day in a workshop on the Spanish Civil War for area history teachers. In it, teachers learn about the war in general and also the involvement of American volunteers for both medical services and fighting on the Republican side (what's now known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigades). We've given them a number of books and other resources. They've had a chance to hear from and ask questions of an author of several books on the war and the aftermath (Peter Carroll), read both books and a wide sampling of primary sources, and yesterday they visited Ybor City's Centro Asturiano and listened to some older Tampa residents who had both direct and vicarious experiences of the war (such as that of Aida Gonzalez). Today they worked on developing specific lessons or assignments based on what they've been learning, such as DBQ exercises for Advanced Placement classes.
For those who have run or participated in such summer workshops, this is probably familiar (with the exception of hearing from eyewitnesses or participants, in the case of workshops on the Civil War, ancient civilizations, and the like). We've had some wonderful classroom teachers as participants in the two years I've been involved, and they tell us they appreciate both the chance to learn about a subject in depth and our treatment of them as adults. I just get to tag along, except for the bit about standards. And since there's an ongoing discussion of whether the common core standards in math and reading adopted by a majority of states mean much, maybe a practical discussion might help.
I'm not a "social studies methods" specialist, but when we were planning last summer's workshop, I knew what was missing: a connection for teachers between what they were learning in the week and the new state social studies standards in high school. I think this is all that justified my presence in the workshop because when I write, "we were planning," I am using "we" in the social convention form, not in the "I earned a significant chunk of the plaudits" form. Most of the credit for this goes to Peter Carroll, the USF history chair Fraser Ottanelli, and a former area teacher who is an adjunct at USF, Robert Alicea. I see the beautiful plans (okay, they were somewhat fuzzy until things fell into place in a practical schedule) and think, "Ah! They're missing the help-the-teachers-with-bureaucracy part. I can do that." And occasionally chime in to expand discussion.
Keep in mind that the participants in the workshop were already high school history teachers, the vast majority with experience in AP classes or in an International Baccalaureate program. We don't need to tell them how to plan a year, and we'd have been a fifth wheel had we done so. Especially in AP courses (and most especially for the drink-from-the-firehose AP world history course), teachers have to manage the coverage issue very carefully, and in many cases teachers explicitly used the materials for 1-3 days last year. (One teacher regularly has after-school enrichment opportunities, where he walked students through the James Lardner papers as an extended exercise in primary sources that tell a story.) So why hand out standards lists?
Last year, there were two reasons for me to sort through the new standards, identify which ones were related to the Spanish Civil War, and then sort those by some obvious themes (the narrative within Spanish history, world context, American involvement, art and popular media use, and historical skills). First, the state had approved the standards in 2008, but there had been almost no professional development, and this was an opportunity to show teachers what they were written like in a context when it has some use and it's not just a verbiage dump on teachers. (Teachers will know what I mean by that.) Second and most immediately, I reorganized the benchmarks so that they would help teachers generate ideas for lessons, assignments, or other ways to use the materials. In reality, I suspect I didn't need to do that much, since the primary sources and talking with eyewitnesses to history are far better inspiration than standards. Third, showing teachers how to tie a specific lesson to official state standards lets them justify doing what they think is professionally appropriate. In a large high school, an assistant principal for curriculum isn't going to push anything like a pacing calendar on teachers in most subjects, but some of them will ask what standards are met by a lesson, assignment, unit plan, etc. Giving teachers standards gives them something to put at the top of their plans as an official stamp of approval on lessons. (Well, it does if the standards make sense: the benchmarks mentioning Franco, the lead-up to World War 2, the Spanish-American War,* or the social movements coming out of the Great Depression are going to make more sense here than a benchmark on early federal history.)
This year we have some middle-school teachers, something I didn't know until Monday. So I felt horribly guilty when I realized my organized handout for high-school teachers was useless for them, except as an illustration of what high school teachers would expect from students. On top of that, the middle-school curriculum is up in the air with a legislative mandate to teach civics in seventh grade. That doesn't change anything about the middle-school standards, because civics is always going to be somewhere in social-studies standards (and is prominent in the middle-school benchmarks). But it does mean that many districts don't yet know how they're going to organize the middle-school curriculum into specific courses, though the standards provide some clear direction and emphasis on history and civics (ancient civilizations in sixth grade, U.S. history through 1877 in eighth grade, and now obviously civics in seventh grade). So teachers who had been focusing quite a bit on geography? They'll have to retool, and for now a great deal of their own initiative may seem like a waste if they'll be moving in different directions in a year or two. Yes, I've gone through the middle-school standards this week and identified a few dozen with clear connections to the Spanish Civil War, ironically more in social sciences than in history because of the topics selection for middle-grades standards. (Example: map use. Military maps in the war, historical maps as secondary sources, socially generated maps such as the map of mass grave sites and other war-related sites in Spain.) But the dynamics of "the curriculum is up in the air" are still prominent.
This is a commonplace about life on the ground with curriculum. The abstract talk about standards and alignment ignores the multiple layers that shape the taught curriculum, from idiosyncratic course expectations (e.g., the more deterministic nature of AP classes) to legislative mandates, textbook choices, the item specifications on state assessments, and the program du jour of the district that gobbles up curriculum either directly (Hillsborough county bought into the Springboard program several years ago, a decision that diverts a day or three each quarter for its mandates, if within the curriculum) or by absorbing time (by adding a tangential curricular module such as anti-drug education and forcing administrators to stuff it in some class). Curriculum mandates and pressures metastasize.
As a result of these multiple mandates and pressures, I am less persuaded than others either by the argument in favor of a common core curriculum or the philosophical or political arguments against a common core curriculum. First, the idea that something is truly a "core" that will only take up a small part of the year is pure bunkum; given the other structures of school, anything called a "core" will inevitably become "pretty close to all." And even then, there will be much slop between the formal expectation and what happens in a classroom and also what's assessed. Yet I am also unpersuaded by the argument that teachers should not have a structured curriculum, or that somehow a set of curriculum standards is evil. As I've written before, the first round of state curriculum standards was generally awful, but I don't think you could have expected them to be good, so that doesn't tell you what standards might look like, and there are now some reasonable examples of the right balance between generality and specificity. (My historical cynicism is out in force this morning.) Yes, standards advocates make a weak argument with the international comparison rationale (the claim that our chief international competitors have national standards, so we must, too), but that's not the central argument for curriculum structure. The most important arguments for some curriculum structure are (a) requiring teachers to design curriculum from scratch is cruel and unusual punishment; and (b) there are some overlapping content areas that most students would find fairly practical to get under their belt.
Why do I believe that requiring teachers to design curriculum from scratch is abusive? I'm a Ph.D., with more specialized expertise than the bulk of the American population, and I would find it extraordinarily challenging to design all of my classes from scratch every semester. I don't; and I would view it as an exploitation of junior faculty to ask a new assistant professor at a research university to prepare an entire curriculum from scratch at the same time she or he has to gin up a research program. There's one college I know that talks about creating new courses on a regular basis, Evergreen State College, but even there the courses (or "programs," as they're called at Evergreen) regularly reappear so a faculty member isn't completely designing things from scratch. And most of the faculty there are veteran teachers, and the programs are commonly cotaught by at least two faculty. For K-12? Let's just say we're putting in a whole week so teachers can design a single lesson or assignment each (and then share the fruits of the work). It is one thing to point out that many veteran teachers can design a class; it is another thing entirely to suggest that all teachers have to.
In addition, there is a legitimate argument that some overlapping content is important for students. It is an easier argument to suggest common material for a field such as math or U.S. history than in areas such as world history or English literature, which is why I'm using the term overlapping. But the point still exists that high school students are meeting some common expectations when they can correctly manipulate an algebraic expression, explain how evolution complicates medical treatment, and talk intelligently about the historical struggles of Americans to get the country to fulfill its ideals. (And for those who are wondering why I think algebra is a sensible expectation, it's less important for someone to be able to solve word problems about westbound trains from Chicago than understanding what Paul Krugman means by lower bounds for effective interest-rate policy.)
As I stated above, I'm a bit cynical about structural school reform, and I do not believe there is One True Way of constructing standards. To take U.S. history as an example, generally most state standards (and the effort by Crabtree and Nash) use a fairly common approach to periodization and important questions, and one that starts from the centrality of the nation-state. One could imagine equally legitimate approaches that focus on international context, and you can find such syllabi for college classes. But you have to construct a course around something, preferably something coherent, and the most common approach is not evil just by its being common. The practical question is how much of an overlap we truly need, understanding that every time we say X needs to be a common part of the curriculum, we're squeezing out something else.
* The U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War eliminated the bulk of the remaining Spanish empire, leaving a social and structural problem for the Spanish army at the beginning of the 20th century, stuffed as it was with a high proportion of officers and a much shrunken set of territories to control.
July 16, 2010
Gates in Tampa ... no, my daughter's school!
Two chances in one week to provide personal perspective on Gates' philanthropy. Along with a few thousand other AFT delegates, I saw Gates's speech last Saturday. Today's comment comes via the Business Week article on the Gates Foundation's education program. The article is one of the better journalistic portraits of the foundation, including historical perspective by Maris Vinovskis and some technical perspectives from Howard Wainer and Daniel Koretz. And then in the second half, the article quotes some teachers such as JoAnn Parrino and Kathy Jones. I expected the article to quote either Hillsborough superintendent MaryEllen Elia or Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association president Jean Clements, and then suddenly the focus was on some teachers at Chamberlain High School, where my daughter graduated in the spring. Yes, she had both Parrino and Jones, as well as a few others mentioned indirectly in the article as Daniel Golden followed Hillsborough's Gates project staff into a teacher meeting at the high school.
Both teach AP social studies courses, Parrino with human geography (taken by ninth graders in Chamberlain) and economics (I forget whether it's micro or macro). Jones teachers the world and European history classes. Both have their student admirers within the school. In the article, Parrino is quoted in favor of random classroom visits, and Jones on a different topic, whether there is such a thing as a year-over-year growth measure when the class is a one-year class such as a topical social studies class. And the music teachers apparently scoffed at the notion that their competence can be measured by student performance on an end-of-semester music theory class. Most of the teachers I've met at the school are reasonably thoughtful at the least, and the article begins to touch on their perspectives and skepticism.
What is notable is that none of the discussion Golden reports is the type of "we can't be expected to do great things with poor kids" excuse that's the common straw-man argument by advocates of high stakes testing. Jones is right to be skeptical that there is any competent value-added measure for history, and the band and chorus teachers are absolutely correct that a music-theory class is an awful measure of their competence. Want to know what a Florida band or orchestra or chorus director pushes their students to perform in? Music Performance Assessments, or MPAs. These are juried festivals of school groups, and teachers in Hillsborough take them very seriously. To use music-theory paper exams instead of MPAs is a pedagogical crime. Do you think the Hillsborough High School band director should be judged by how well my son and his fellow sax players know a Napoleonic 6th, or how well they can blend in a performance of "Take the A Train"?
At some point, advocates of using student outcomes as part of teacher evaluation need to get some sense about implementation. Hillsborough is clunking along right now, and it'll need to adjust things on that part of the evaluation system. The rigid "everyone has to be evaluated in the same way even if it makes no sense" system is not viable in the long term. But it's what the mantra of "50% must be on student outcomes" will lead to unless Charlie Barone and others come out in favor of common sense in the use of student outcomes, and that includes telling their friends when they're wrong in a formulaic approach.
July 14, 2010
Fat tails and audit trails in Florida test scores
I'm starting the day behind on a bunch of things, thanks to a week at the AFT convention in Seattle and the beauteous handling of bad weather by Delta. I arrived in Tampa about 23 hours after leaving Seattle, and let's leave it at that.
So I'm a bit behind on the background behind the evolving controversy over test scores in Florida. NCS Pearson was way, way late on releasing scores, and part of the reason was what Florida DOE officials called glitches in the demographic files Pearson had on students, or how test scores are tied to students and then teachers.
I have a sneaking suspicion that's also behind the controversy that's developing, as first the urban and then a bunch of other system superintendents complained that the proportion of elementary students not making adequate progress year-to-year just didn't fit with any sense of reality (on the low side). Head to the St Pete Times for the published stories and blog entries, including new complaints that the organization auditing Pearson's work is a subcontractor of Pearson, but here's the reason why I suspect the demographic files are a good starting point: Florida's "growth" measure is not the mean or median growth year-over-year on some vertical scale, nor is it a regression-based measure of deviation from some version of expected growth. Instead, it is a jerry-built dichotomous variable of whether an individual student made a particular growth benchmark in a year: yes/no.
It's been a few years since I looked at the details of this "growth" definition, but there's some inherent sensitivity in any measure based on thresholds to variability around the relevant threshold. In the case of Florida's growth measure, the vulnerability is going to be less around the construction of a particular scale at a point in an individual test because the measure depends on a student's prior-year score. So a psychometric vulnerability is going to be two sources: the general characteristics of tests in two years, and the added variability that you get from comparing scores in two years (there's measurement error in both scores, and the measurement error when you compare the scores is going to be greater than the measurement error in either base year or following year).
Since the two-year-variability issue has been a fact of life for this measure for a number of years, I would be surprised if that were the issue. So then the question is whether this year's fourth- or fifth-grade reading test scores have unusual distributions that would cause interesting problems at the thresholds for "making gains" for students who were low-performing in the prior year. A particularly fat tail at the low end might cause that, but that's speculation, and I suspect an obviously fat-tailed distribution would have been picked up by the main auditor, Buros.
But you can have a non-psychometric wrench in the works, because Florida's dichotomous variable is highly sensitive to one other matter: the correct matching of student test scores from year to year. If the student data files were messed up, and student scores from 2009 were matched to the incorrect student scores from 2010, you'd have all sorts of problems with growth. I strongly suspect that's what tipped off problems with the data files earlier in the spring. If the failures were general, you'd have a skewed distribution of the dichotomous growth variable as the lowest-performing students from 2009 would be the most likely to be matched (incorrectly) to higher scores in 2010 and vice versa, so the first clue would be markedly high growth indicators for 2009's low-performing students and markedly low growth indicators for 2009's high-performing students.
But that's not what school districts are reporting: they're reporting unusually low growth proportions for low-performing students from 2009. I can think of a few different ways you'd have that after Pearson tried to correct any obvious problems it saw earlier, but that's speculation. What needs to happen is an examination of the physical artifacts from this year for a sample of schools: the booklets, the student demographic sheets, and the score sheets. We're talking about more than a million students tested, but we can start with a sample of schools that the urban-system superintendents are worried about and track the data from beginning to end with a small enough set to see exactly what happened to the satisfaction of local school officials, policymakers, and the general public.
And if Pearson destroyed all physical artifacts so you can't trace the path of data? Cue "expensive lawyer" music...
July 12, 2010
Gates speech at AFT
Originally written Saturday, July 10: I've figured out how to hang this electronic device onto the back of the chair in front of me while my old PDA foldable keyboard is synced and sitting on my lap, so I can write this blog entry in the middle of the AFT session. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka gave a spirited speech before lunch, and then the floor approved a resolution on teacher evaluation without amendment.
This afternoon, we started with resolutions on community support and career/technical education (CTE) programs. For the most part, the resolutions this afternoon were neither going to be the controversial resolutions nor the controversial part of the afternoon session, which was Bill Gates' appearance at the convention. Very popular was a resolution urging public meetings for the national commission on fiscal responsibility and reform and giving AFT an official position in favor of progressive effective tax policy instead of Social Security benefits cuts that are regressive. As I've written before, a number of people simultaneously want policies that would end in significant layoffs of teachers over 50 and also significantly reduce pension benefits and contributions to public-employee pensions. Evidently, there is some group of self-defined reformers who are in fear that somewhere, someone is enjoying a retirement free from fear of destitution.
The Gates appearance started at 4:15. From what a colleague told me later, he helicoptered over from his island estate. Randi Weingarten at first started speaking from the sheet announcing Innovation Fund awardees and then turned to introducing Gates. She took care to quote from Gates's annual letter at points where he specified opposition to solitary use of test scores to evaluate teachers and supported evaluation as a tool to help most teachers. With a smattering of boos, Weingarten smiled and said, "I thought you guys were leaving," referring to the threats of a boycott by the small dissenting caucus By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). The majority of delegates roared. Later, there were about 25 delegates out of several thousand present who walked out as Gates stood at the podium. So much for the huge boycott of Gates's speech...
Gates started by publicly congratulating AFT for the approval of the resolution on teacher evaluation/development and on steps taken thus far, including the AFT locals who are working with the Gates Foundation on specific programs. He mixed in some misleading statements about "declining" graduation rates (as opposed to stagnation) with some fair statements and a clear statement that teachers must be included in reform. He spent a few moments discussing the failed small-schools initiative. The greatest applause lines came when Gates criticized the existing record of poor administrators' evaluations and when he acknowledged that people who have never taught in a classroom do not understand how difficult teaching can be.
The BAMN protesters then had pretty awful timing, coming back towards the hall shouting protests ... just as Gates said some teachers have challenges with students who are bored or engage in disruptive behavior. The hall erupted in laughter at the irony.
Gates's weakest argument was the individual teacher equivalent of effective-schools rhetoric: see what teachers do when students demonstrate great achievement. It's a high-risk claim, to assert that the development of a teacher evaluation system can also document which a priori behaviors are best. What may be easier is the collection of videos of different teachers, with a broad enough sample that some will turn out to be great teachers. Gates also highlighted two project districts in AFT: Hillsborough, Florida, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As is common with description of risky projects in early days, the rhetoric was a bit breathless, and I could hear a few oohs and boos in the audience when he mentioned merit pay, Race to the Top, and tying tenure to student achievement.
Gates ended with the obligatory reference to Al Shanker and the need for teacher voice in reform. "Don't give it back, take the risk, and keep it up." "No other union is doing what you are to make this [reform] happen."
Additional thoughts a few days later: Gates got some personal mileage by appearing at AFT. He spoke with a few reporters afterwards, and his appearance generated some newspaper stories at the St. Pete Times and Washington Post that were more about the Gates Foundation than the AFT convention. At AFT, I don't think delegates had their minds changed much by Gates, since they were likely to be aware of what he's done and where he agrees and disagrees with them.
Gates's rhetoric is compartmentalized. In a good part of what he said, teachers were at the center of what he describes as reform, including teacher evaluation. But then the sore-thumb statement popped out about tying due-process protections to student test scores, unmediated by professional judgment. It's as if there's a switch inside his head, where he can talk either about test scores or about better evaluation of teacher practice. Reform rhetoric as a quantum effect? I don't know. But it's poor strategizing and a poor contribution to discussion. One of the wealthiest men in the world should be able to be more sophisticated.
June 30, 2010
Ooh-datorians
Lovely: another faux trend story from the New York Times, this time about the honoring of multiple valedictorians, and then the easily-anticipated "standards must be dropping!" outcry from those who worry about these things. I remember that my school district started honoring multiple straight-A students in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and weighted AP classes began precisely to address this and make fine distinctions among a bunch of students who worked hard. As the person who was the official valedictorian of my high school class the first year of weighted grades in the school, I can truthfully state that a bunch of my fellow students generally worked harder than I did in high school, and that while I was reasonably proud of a consistent academic record, "valedictorian" has never been a part of my identity, nor has it appeared on any vitae I've written. Valedictorian honors are transitory by their nature: they become public the day they become largely irrelevant except as a mark of the irretrievable past. (The parallel in adult life: as Judith Martin writes, you really don't want your wedding to be the best day of your life, or it's all downhill from there.) To be honest, the most accurate and predictive honor I received as a high school student was the appellation on senior superlatives (the list of "most" and "best" and "most likely to" that many high school classes vote on): doesn't dress to impress.
Okay, okay, there may be some relevance to the term for those who think that academic competitions are important marks of social values, so maybe we should coin a new term for the group of graduating seniors who have passed a threshold for impressive and consistent academic accomplishments. I nominate the term Ooh-datorian, as in "Ooh... the tenth-ranked student in this class worked harder and did more than the valedictorian in my high school class." And that's true for my daughter's graduating class. I know about half of the top ten students in her class by GPA because, well, my daughter hung out with the dangerous type of crowd that gets together over winter break to study calculus. If I remember correctly, the tenth-ranked student in her class was her friend who borrowed a copy of Calculus Made Easy because she was feeling uneasy (and I don't think she need have), the third-ranked student is her friend of many years who is the hardest-working high school student I've ever met, and so on. (There are plenty of graduating students at her high school whose grades were not as high but also impressed me in many ways, and if they are at all representative of this cohort of teenagers, I feel quite good about the next generation.)
In general, I think academic honors should be proportional to the relevance of the work to one's life. Honor people's academic work in one phase of schooling, but honor lots of things of similar importance, and keep it all in perspective. I am proud to know my daughter's friends partly because they work hard in academics but more because they work hard in more than one sphere of life, and I'd trust several of them with my life.
Yes, Virginia, there is a need for more science education
Today may be a lost day for me work-wise, thanks to a number of circumstances, including a raging thunderstorm overhead that threatens the power where I am. But I don't think I'm going to blame higher ed policy in Florida for all of that. I have a similar reaction to The Real Science Gap, which is an articulate explanation of the dissenting position on STEM education (hat tip). Beryl Lieff Benderly walks us through arguments about overcredentialing/overproduction of Ph.D.s, the abuse of H-1B visas, the STEM report equivalents of the old 1980s Mellon report on pending faculty shortages, the abusive treatment of graduate assistants and postdocs in many universities, the typical stereotypes about clueless faculty advisers, and so forth. She quotes Richard Freeman (who has been specializing in credentialing since the 1970s), and a number of current and former engineering students chimed in with comments echoing the article. And on one level, it is true that the usual cry for more doctorates is often based on misleading claims about national economic needs.
Nonetheless, there are a number of weaknesses in the article, generally of the okay, so STEM isn't immune from the troubles of the world, so what else is new? variety:
- A significant part of the underemployment problem with graduates in general is the sum of broader economic woes of the world. That's as true for recent undergraduates as doctoral students. There are serious problems about the impoverishment of an entire cohort finishing formal schooling between 2008 and 2012, and I'm not going to pretend to have a great solution except that it has to address more than STEM graduate students.
- Some of the policy issues can be addressed by institutional policies--for example, by universities' treating graduate students and postdocs better and by universities' agreeing to bargain with new grad-student unions. And that's more important for humanities students than in the sciences, which tend to have higher stipends.
- Similarly, the "overproduction" of doctorates requires all disciplines to help students figure out career options that don't rely on tenure-track positions. In 1930, the two fields with the highest number of doctorates earned each year were fields where few doctoral students would have expected university jobs: chemistry and education. We need a little explicit "let's list and prepare for at least three options" planning. I'm not on the bleeding edge at all in this argument; some historians have been making this argument inside AHA for years, even if it's not as broad a practice as it needs to be. And I strongly suspect that STEM faculty advisers are among the most likely to have grad students head into industry. One physics doctoral student I know at USF was recently promised a job by Jabil Circuits, a local firm. Go, Jason, and go, Jason's major professor! One of my college classmates who was a physics grad student at Penn when I was a history doctorate student ended up in industry, spending some time on DNA computing and now working for a textile firm. Maybe the people I know are extreme outliers, but the idea of STEM doctorates having industry jobs doesn't strike me as either new or unknown.
- If the "we need to double our output for economic competitiveness" argument is overblown, the arguments described by Benderly ignore the non-human-capital value of formal education. I am not sure that the type of (non-Clay Shirky-definition) educational surplus I've described before always justifies a huge social investment in postgraduate work, but it's not a horrid thing for society if an occasional chemistry doctorate ends up working in a computer company, and it's definitely a social good if she or he winds up teaching high school chemistry and inspires later generations. (Cue FSU physics professor Paul Cottle here on the need for better starting salaries for high school science teachers...)
And, speaking of high school, I'm in favor of policies that expand general science education. Yes, the "we need much larger programs for our economic future" argument is exaggerated and overpromises. Yes, the Benderly article is a good, thoughtful dissent. Maybe one of those alternate careers needs to be teaching...
I've got a bad feeling about this, Obey
So Rep. Obey (Wisconsin) is proposing to pay for a $10B boost to school districts in part by stripping hundreds of millions of dollars from RTTT and TIF? According to Ed Week reporters, the total offset from this move would be about 8% of the total cost, less than $1B, so I don't really buy Obey's argument that jobs come before reform programs. This looks much closer to opportunism than either addressing GOP objections on fiscal grounds or making the GOP back down sufficiently to get a bill through without offsets.
I'm not thrilled with some aspects of the offset targets, but there's something in this game of legislative chicken that doesn't smell right. I understand the principle of legislative sausage, and this is one move in a much larger policy and politics game. Nonetheless, there are a number of reasons why this filing of an amendment may be close to a thumb in the eyes of a number of federal players:
- Burning bridges with states. This throws a few tons of egg yolk onto the face of state officials who cajoled school districts into working with them on RTTT proposals. They understand politics, but this is a particularly pointed move a few weeks after the second round of applications were due.
- Burning bridges with the Senate. Yeah, I know, members of the House have little love for the Senate right now, but if I were in the House and saw HELP (education) committee members criticizing the Duncan four-option turnaround approach, the last thing I'd do is discourage Tom Harkin (HELP committee chair) from criticizing grant structures.
- Burning bridges with others in the majority leadership. I wonder if Obey's office let George Miller know about this in advance, or if it was a surprise. If it was a surprise, it positions Obey as a problem child in his last half-year in the House. His state desperately needs all sorts of help from the rest of the country; this isn't going to help his leverage.
- Undermining the credibility of unions. An AFT staff member quickly explained to reporters today the AFT position that they hadn't known what offsets would be used and that they preferred the original $23B bill without offsets. It really doesn't matter whether Obey had any contact with state or national affiliate officers from NEA or AFT; this is a notable distraction that no union leader needs right before the NEA Representative Assembly begins and the week before the AFT convention.
This is Obey's last year in the House, and I know there's a temptation for him to think there's little accountability for pulling stuff like this. Well, he may not have to pay for it, but others will have to. Own goal, anyone?
Accessibility and the e-reader
A brief note about the federal government's warning on college distribute of e-readers and students with disabilities: the concern is warranted, and it's much better for the warning to come now than to come after colleges and universities spend millions of dollars (or require students to spend millions of dollars) without the due diligence needed. Every time I use a piece of technology in teaching, I worry about accessibility for students with visual or hearing impairments. A few years ago, I spent considerable time preparing Flash-based presentations for the first part of an online course, to discover that a student with hearing impairments then had to contact my university's disability-service office for transcriptions, and I decided to switch to written "lectures" for the rest of the semester. I think the communication was better for all students, not just him.
Sometimes you learn through experience, but as Ben Franklin said as Poor Richard, fools will learn in no other school. There are now thousands upon thousands of sites built upon technology with limited accessibility, notably Flash. So, for example, Sandra Day O'Connor has spent untold hours helping develop several solid online games to teach civics, which you can find at icivics.org. But they're Flash-based. That limits accessibility. Yes, I know Flash has developed accessibility tools, but at least one of the games requires quick responses, and ... well, it's a great concept, and I hope that there's a paper version of it available for teachers who decide their students need a paper version to slow things down and make that game more accessible.
The safest technology wrapper for texts or other course materials is a plain-text file, which people can put into all sorts of programs to help them. Following that is a standards-compliant website. There are now tools to make websites touch-accessible for mobile phones, and focusing on websites will probably be a much wiser use of resources for most education technology outfits than creating Android or iPhone/iPad apps.
There is a possibility, as noted in the article, that this is a way for federal officials to use universities to push the publishing industry into allowing accessibility tools in all e-reader devices and programs. If so, it's no more an abuse of leverage than the use of colleges and universities to advertise e-readers (which is part of the role of these early-adopter "give an iPad to a frosh" programs).
June 24, 2010
Botched credit hours and blotted copybooks
A week ago, Ed Sector's Forrest Hinton asked six questions about higher-education accountability. Below are the questions, my quick responses, and some discussion about the fallout from this month's hearings on accreditation and for-profit institutions:
Q. As the monolithic traditional university begins to break down and diversify, should we continue to trust providers of higher education and accreditation agencies to provide meaningful accountability?
A. What "monolithic traditional university"? There's never been such a creature in history; there has always been tremendous diversity of institutions. For the performative culture of accountability, see this morning's IHE column by Cliff Adelman.
Q. Is there a sound method of measuring student learning outcomes in higher education that won't turn college courses into workshops where students learn simple facts, algorithms, and skills?
A. Yes, but whether it's politically robust is a different question, and I think you have to give up on the singular form. The Utah Tuning project report placed on the Ed Sector blog page is both promising in terms of the faculty engagement in the project and also curious in the very different levels of detail in the expectations laid out for the two disciplines in the project (history and physics). See below for the short-term landscape in more detail.
Q. Now that the federal government is providing a lot of higher education's revenue through student loans, how much responsibility does the government have to ensure quality and monitor costs?
A. The federal government has been subsidizing college loans for decades, and since the early 1980s the bulk of federal aid has been in the form of loan subsidies rather than direct grants. What has changed in the past few decades is the cost-shifting from states to students and their families. So maybe the federal government feels more inclined towards wanting something for the dollars because the cost-shifting also shifts somewhat more support onto the federal government, but lower state support hasn't been accompanied by lower demands for accountability.
Q. Is there a trade-off between innovation and regulating quality in higher education? If so, what is the appropriate way to balance these competing forces?
A. This question is ambiguously phrased, and I am interpreting as a question about for-profit schools. (The last question is about credit hours, which covers distance education given this month's politics.) As we learned from the shadow banking sector and the financial crisis of 2008, regulators are frequently way behind creative people who want to make a buck, especially if something has been deregulated because people think history has ended (e.g., the repeal of Glass-Steagall). Right now, for-profit companies of all types peddle degrees or the mirage of a college education with widely varying claims of success, and they have become remarkably adept at vacuuming up federal funds. Some administrators in different institutions tell me that's not only in terms of college loans but also G.I. Bill funds, though I don't have independent confirmation of that claim. To the extent that taxpayers and students are on the hook for loans, that practice has to have some scrutiny. In the early 1990s, the screening mechanism was default rates. Today, I think another measure is needed, but I'm not sure what that might be, maybe federal subsidy per graduate (with some calculation of the effective subsidy for loans).
Q. If higher education's traditional accountability structures are unable to provide adequate oversight, can we make use of other ways of ensuring quality instead, like through informed consumer demand?
A. Again, what "traditional accountability structures"? Name one that has existed for at least five years in any state and that has remained stable. With all of Adelman's caveats, maybe it's something we should try.
Q. When measuring course credit hours, how do we allow innovative new approaches in education to meet the standards implied from traditional rules on seat time, lab experiences, etc.?
A. This is obviously the hot topic du jour, since regional accreditors have looked the other way while some for-profits essentially bought accreditation by absorbing a few nonprofits and since at least one regional accreditor also paid little attention when a for-profit passed off a tuition-generating mechanism as real education. So let's explore this a bit more...
The difficulty with a Wild West of education is that you don't know what a course means. When an unaccredited institution is taking students' money but it's not telling the world it's anything but what it is, and if the students aren't lying about what the diploma means, it's just an experience someone pays for. Are you paying for classes in aerobic yoga weightlifting? That sounds like something taught by the Macho Yoga Instructor my mother once had years ago, but if it's your money and just your experience, that's fine with me. It's different once public funds are involved and once credentials have an exchange value in the labor market, and even more complicated if you're a student having taken courses at two colleges and wanting those courses to transfer into a third to help you get a degree.
Given the background to this morning's hearing in DC, there are clearly bad actors (or bad actors), and the temptation might be to have a rigid definition of what a credit hour is for course purposes, either for federal student-loan purposes or for transfer purposes. For the moment let's skip the question of entirely-online class and talk about about courses that blend some class time with other experiences such as online discussions, tutorials, etc. What counts as a credit hour: the time you spend in class, the time you spend actively working on assignments, the time you vaguely think about the course? What about people who read at different speeds: does the slower reader sign up for and pay for more hours for a course than the faster reader?
The reality is that the credit hour is an institutional convention that is malleable to help everyone account for student progress through programs as well as for tuition purposes. A good example of the malleability is in performing-arts programs. No matter how long a performance music major practices for it, my guess is that a college symphony orchestra class will always be one or two credit hours, no more, because that is the way to address the conflict between wanting students to be in performance classes every semester and also graduate without having to pay more than an engineering student: you require performance and studio classes every semester, but the total of all classes (including theory, music history/ethnomusicology, electives) doesn't add up to more than 15 hours in a semester.
One feasible way to address the credit-hour issue is to have disciplinary conventions for classes that need cursory vs. more extensive inspection, something that factors in both the nature of the discipline and the credit-hour load. A performance class that's one or two credit hours? Let's definitely not worry much about that. Undergraduate U.S. history class carrying three credit hours that blends one hour of lecture, one hour face-to-face discussion, and one hour of online activity? That's a conventional discipline and credit-hour load, with a slight bit of innovation: a little more scrutiny. Vague class in an unorthodox or vocational program that's 9 hours? Let's worry a lot more about that.
In terms of the giant leap that some are going to suggest: should we have institutional-level assessment for every class that can hold colleges and universities accountable? That is more likely to work for limited courses that everyone (or almost everyone) takes in the first two years than for the broad range of classes students take in their majors. Regional accreditors are now pushing institutions to develop such institution-wide assessment for general education programs, and while I am concerned about some of the consequences of that, it is at least plausible to have common assessments in composition, first-year calculus, and so forth. But something for the Celtic Civilization course my wife took with linguist Nancy Dorian? Good luck! (For those who are curious, it was a culture class, not a language class. I signed up for it initially but had to drop it, much to my regret.)
Some observers have argued that the likely fallout from the for-profit hearings will touch far more than the for-profits, and that's right for several reasons. One is that high-tuition institutions that are either for-profit or non-profit will be involved in a disproportionate amount of subsidized loans than low-tuition institutions simply because of tuition, so they will invite scrutiny. Second is that the questions about online classes in for-profit institutions are very close to the questions that you can ask about non-profit private and public institutions' online classes. Third is an institutionalized consequence an administrator and I were discussing this week: the hearings, any changes in law, and any changes in regulations will affect regional accreditors, who in turn will push additional mechanisms down on all of the institutions they oversee. I suspect that from a paperwork-burden perspective, accreditors will have to slice up the oversight mechanisms in some way to avoid peeking into every single course. It may not be my suggested slice, but if they don't perform some triage, oversight is just unworkable.
Finally, I think I misspelled Barmak Nassirian's name in a comment on IHE in the last week, but we all need to learn how to spell his name correctly since we're going to be reading a lot of what he writes and says in his capacity as associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). During the life of the Spellings Commission, Nassirian was the go-to person for many higher-ed reporters, and I suspect we'll be hearing a lot from him in the next half-year or so.
The value of college IV
In comments over the past few weeks, Glen McGhee has been doing a lot of work making the argument for a credentialist lens for higher education. And two weeks ago, Jose Vilson's Memorial Day blog entry raised the perennial question of what we're supposed to be educating our children for. So let me address the obvious questions that I haven't answered in the set of blog entries on the value of college. Roughly speaking, my argument is that in the absence of great social upheaval, social institutions tend to have an inertial relationship with the rest of society, and that the school-adult income relationship is an example of that inertial relationship. That's not to say it's just or predetermined or hermetic or even stationary. Rather, it's a statement of the importance of institutional structures once they're set up. Schools can maintain inequalities, they can help students change the world, and all sorts of mixes in between. In other words, formal schooling is a tool up for grabs.
We should not be surprised that without some sort of pressure otherwise, schools would tend to maintain social inequality. That's not because schools are particularly nefarious but because as Charles Tilly argued, humans tend to hoard opportunity for those close to them. So the more advantaged parents, families, and social groups in a particular society would use any childrearing practice as a vehicle for maintaining advantage, and without countervailing pressures, they'd have more options to do so than less-advantaged parents, families, and social groups. The same was true when work occupied more of the lives of children between 10 and 15 than schooling, so why should we expect anything different when formal schooling became more prominent as part of childrearing?
Except that things did not stay the same. As many have noted before me (including Karl Kaestle, Martin Carnoy, Hank Levin, Ira Katznelson, Margaret Weir, and others), the early nineteenth-century North witnessed dramatic expansion of school structures and, almost as importantly, a different way of talking about schooling. Horace Mann was not the first prominent advocate of education as a right; local Workingmen's parties were by the late 1820s, and over a few decades the advocacy of multiple parties expanded the education-citizenship link from a "schooling promotes citizenship" to "schooling comes along with citizenship." The story is long and messy in the nineteenth century, but among other things, that broadened connection was at the root of the mid-century lawsuit against racial segregation in Boston schools (that's mid-19th century), the relationship between compulsory education and compulsory attendance, the power of the state vis-a-vis parents, and so forth.
No one should pretend that Workingmen's parties said "education is a right" and all shouted "Hallelujah!" Far from it; the meaning of education as a part of citizenship was and remains contested. The notion of education became part of a citizenship bundle (what Europeans would call social citizenship, or the American version of it), and as Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick point out, it's a mixed legacy. On the one hand, it provides a lever by which millions have been able to acquire better lives. On the other hand, it has also become the lever on which we rely too much, expecting one institution to solve so many social problems.
Those who wish to use education to address inequality need to think about the multigenerational long term. Part but only part of inequality can be addressed directly in a human-capital sense. Far more has to be addressed by equipping large chunks of the population to change society in other ways, and education is an indirect lever there. W.E.B. Du Bois understood the long game, and despite his young-adult romanticism with social-science research in the Progressive Era, he was persistently thinking about the long game for an entire population. His debate with Booker T. Washington was largely about teacher education: Washington publicly argued that primary-teachers for (and most community leaders among) African Americans in the South had to accommodate racism, with advanced academic training a luxury. Du Bois argued that the new colleges for African Americans (the core of what we call HBCUs today) would inevitably train a disproportionate number of teachers and had to support academic ambitions over multiple generations. His Talented Tenth argument was not about elitism but teachers for mass education.
In part the argument in favor of expanding college experience is not that it will pay off immediately for every student who attends college but that it will pay off for the society and for college students' children and grandchildren. On an email list some years ago, I expressed skepticism when one list member argued that formal schooling was essential for social activism. There were plenty in the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement who had no more than an eighth-grade education and put their bodies on the line because they knew what was right. But it helped tremendously that some key roles were filled by African Americans and others who had a college education, a law degree, and so forth. Segregationists had some very well-educated, savvy people working on their side, and it was important to have equally well-educated, savvy people working on the side of civil rights.
That work shifted schooling in a better direction. Not perfect, but significantly better. The structures of formal schooling, including credentials, student aid, legal nondiscrimination requirements, etc., have left formal schooling moving in a different direction from 100 years ago, but the accumulated changes themselves have imparted a certain momentum to the relationship between schools and society. The role of schooling right now still is weighted towards wealthier families, but there are significantly more opportunities for poor children to improve their lives through schooling than 50 or 100 years ago. That doesn't leave schooling as a cure-all, nor does it excuse us from working towards improving the lives of people in other areas, but it gives me some optimism that we can change the way that schools provide differential opportunities, if we push hard enough and cleverly enough.
That leaves me in a somewhat odd mood towards expanding college, pushing an instrumental formal experience in hopes that all the stuff that isn't planned does even more than what is.
June 23, 2010
Collegiate Lying Assessment?
I should be asleep, but it's summer, we've released our teenage son from stricter bedtimes, and he is practicing sax. Most of the tasks on my plate require a little more concentration than I can muster after midnight, so I will write instead about lying, or whether we can tell much about someone's skills when we put them deliberately in a decontextualized situation where either the situation is a known lie or where the individual in question can get ahead by lying.
What put that into my head was the description of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) published by creators of the test. The CLA is one of the three supposed assessments of college learning that comprise options in a part of the Voluntary System of Accountability, and apart from the controversies over generic assessments of college graduate learning and the mediocre statistical properties of the supposed value-added measures of non-longitudinal samples, it's important to look at the details of the assessments themselves.
On its face, the CLA looks like a plausible assessment of reasoning skills in a written context. As described by its creators, the CLA sometimes consists of a performance task keyed to a simulated case with attended (fictional) documents, and sometimes it is a prompt to critique a specific argument. The samples provided were both from public policy--specifically, crime. Thus far, it looks something a cross between high school debate and the AP history "document based questions." I've constructed some assignments around fictional cases as a way to fine-tune what students have to confront and how it ties in to the issues they need to address. And it is common enough for essay prompts to quote someone's opinion in the topic at hand and ask for a critical assessment. As I said, it's plausible on its face.
But a funny thing happens once you remove either type of task from the subject in which it's embedded: those who are rating student responses do not have the substantive expertise to check student assertions. If someone responds to a simulated case in my class with statements about education research that are clear misunderstandings of course material, they're not going to get an A. Same with a response to a "please evaluate this statement" prompt. With the CLA, however, there is no such check unless the human rater happens to have substantive expertise aligned with the prompt (in the samples, criminology, sociology, or government). And even there, the scoring guidelines appear to ignore the veracity of student statements. It is entirely about whether someone can construct or criticize an argument in response to prompts.
In this particular case (with a prompt about crime policy), suppose a student lied about criminology research--made up four names and said that they were famous criminologists who had conducted research in effective deterrents. How should such a response be scored? I think I know the answer, because K-12 students in Florida are sometimes encouraged to make up details for the state's writing exam. As far as I am aware, such fabrication is rewarded as success in providing "artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative" (William Gilbert, The Mikado). If you know something to the contrary about the CLA, please point me to it in comments, but nothing I've read thus far is particularly reassuring on this point.
Maybe that's what we should be doing in college, producing Sophists who can turn a nice phrase and fake their way through school, through job interviews, through a daily three-hour radio political talk show, or through professional reports about things like bridge safety and oil-drilling backup systems.
Or maybe we should acknowledge that if it's to have any value, a general-education program has to have some substance, and assessments of its success need to be rooted in the areas it putatively requires some learning in. Not writing and reasoning in general but writing and reasoning about the stuff that's in the gen-ed curriculum.
Designed to reward age discrimination?
The French government is proposing to raise the age when retirees can draw down full pensions, which sounds remarkably like the 1980s reform of Social Security, including the bump of two years, except that France is going from 60 to 62 and we're already at 67... and a logical compromise for extending the solvency of Social Security indefinitely would combine lifting the cap on income taxed by Social Security and another hike in the full-benefits age from 67 to 69 or 70.
But there's a problem, as Matthew Yglesias points out: the growing population of long-term unemployed in this recession are tending to be (or at least disproportionately are) older workers who will have a much harder time finding work than young adults with a college degree.
... which lands us in the lap of teacher layoff discussions and state pension plans. Many of the arguments against basing layoffs on seniority are focused on the presumed incompetence of some unidentified segment of older teachers. Sometimes that's thinly-disguised age discrimination, sometimes it's not. But let's suppose there isn't even the thinnest veneer of age discrimination. What would happen to someone in their late 50s who is fired or laid off by a school system? Sometimes older teachers have careers after they retire, but I suspect a good portion don't, and I don't think it's smart public policy to ignore labor-market discrimination. State or local pension plans with health benefits can provide a buffer against the labor market because a teacher who is eligible for a pension at 55 or 60 can probably make ends meet until Social Security kicks in, especially with at least a part-time job.
Then again, some of those who would love to destroy tenure also would love to remove public obligations to pension plans. So I have one question for the proponents of the combination: what do you expect someone to do if they're 57 and fired or laid off and the pension and retiree health benefits they expected suddenly evaporate? I can understand if an individual employer says, "That's not my problem," but it's lazy wonkery to propose a set of policies that make people highly vulnerable to age discrimination and then walk away.
June 22, 2010
I read Giroux recently and winced...
... and then wrote an essay on another blog on how to save teacher education. Or not if your mileage varies from mine, but at least you get to read me swear.
June 19, 2010
What uses of test scores will pass legal muster in teacher evaluations?
Legal considerations on the use of test score derived stats in teacher evaluation: Scott Bauries started an interesting discussion June 2 of value-added measures and teacher evaluations from a legal perspective. It's very important to read the comment thread, as he's challenged on his conclusions by Bruce Baker and Preston Green, especially with regard to disparate-impact claims. Bauries claims that employers need to defend the procedural due process but are probably safer on the substance, regardless of the problems with value-added measures.
Reading the main entry and discussion, I lean strongly towards' Bauries' conclusion, with one important caveat (below). My impression of the 2000 G. I. Forum v. Texas Education Agency case on the disparate impact of high-stakes graduation tests, which the state won, was that the plaintiffs were not prepared for the last burden-switching test on disparate impact. My rough impression of disparate-impact claims of illegal discrimination based on the Civil Rights Act: it's a series of penalty kicks/shots in soccer/hockey or maybe the games with alternating possession in overtime. I'm not a lawyer, and this is primarily based on my understanding of Title VI rather than Title VII law, but to the probably-inapt analogy: First, the plaintiffs try to demonstrate that a mechanism such as a test affected a property interest of the plaintiffs and had a disparate impact on one of the protected classes. If the plaintiffs succeed, the defendant tries to demonstrate that the mechanism meets an important interest, was properly constructed and applied, and members of the affected class had a fair chance at succeeding in the mechanism.
So far, we're describing lots of situations that have evolved in the past 25-30 years, especially with high stakes testing. Debra P. v. Turlington established the basic federal expectations in terms of student tests, and as a number of states created a new round of graduation tests in the 1990s, they relied on Debra P. v. Turlington as a guide to meeting the basic questions and getting to the final round all tied up. And this sort of makes sense if you think about the maturity of various mechanisms: you can argue that there is a rational state interest in a certain outcome (an adequate measure of achievement in the case of graduation requirements), and then satisfying the "fair chance at succeeding" is often a question of satisfying a set of criteria rather than perfection and that's often a reflection of the organization's experience and capacity.
The final test is whether there is a better option: could the defendant have feasibly chosen an alternative mechanism that satisfies the same interest with less impact. I've never read all of the materials in the G.I. Forum case, but the following is a key passage in Judge Prado's ruling:
The Plaintiffs were able to show that the policies are debated and debatable among learned people. The Plaintiffs demonstrated that the policies have had an initial and substantial adverse impact on minority students. The Plaintiffs demonstrated that the policies are not perfect. However, the Plaintiffs failed to prove that the policies are unconstitutional, that the adverse impact is avoidable or more significant than the concomitant positive impact, or that other approaches would meet the State's articulated legitimate goals. In the absence of such proof, the State must be allowed to design an educational system that it believes best meets the need of its citizens. (emphasis added)
In the end, the plaintiffs' lawyers in the Texas case were unable to provide a clear alternative to high-stakes testing that they could demonstrate was both feasible (i.e., wouldn't cost an arm and a leg) and would have a lower disparate impact. I'm not too worried about the state interest, since you can usually construct alternative mechanisms that have facial validity and that have roughly the same "noise" as whatever you're arguing against. And the not-an-arm-and-a-leg criteria is tougher to meet if you're arguing for portfolios, since it increases the cost... but it starts from a relatively low base of cost per-pupil. Ultimately, though, it is hard to argue that a prospective alternative would result in a lower disparate impact if it is only prospective and thus you have no evidence whether the protected class you're worrying about would be helped by the alternative.
So in the discussion over at EdJurist, Bauries's clinching argument is really that for all their flaws, value-added measures are going to look reasonable to a judge in that they try to adjust for incoming achievement of students and plaintiffs will have to put forward an alternative with concrete evidence that the alternative does a demonstrably better job at treating teachers fairly. The catch-22: without a working model of alternatives with that record, plaintiffs are going to be sunk on disparate-impact claims.
Bruce Baker has followed up on Bauries with a set of tongue-in-cheek impossible criteria to make the use of value-added measures reasonably fair. I understand the temptation, but he's onto one thing: ultimately, local K-12 unions will have to figure out how to respond. This will include whether they have separate evaluation procedures for the 20% of teachers for whom value-added measures are even possible, how to mix the data, and so forth.
And now for the caveat: a good part of the legal consequences of using student test scores for personnel decisions will depend on how stupid local administrators are in the first jurisdictions to use them, and the first that are challenged. I can imagine districts where administrators are careful to fire experienced teachers only where there is a record of several years of low statistical measures of student achievement and only where that is consistent with low marks in other areas, such as administrator and peer observations. I can also imagine districts where administrators purge teachers based on a single year's worth of data and with no checks of consistency with other sources of information. If the legal tests are in jurisdictions with the first set of practices, they're far more likely to pass muster than if the first cases are for terminations that don't meet a basic smell test of rationality.
June 14, 2010
Isn't Florida guaranteed a republican form of government?
The first draft of the new Florida Educator Accomplished Practices was released last month for public comment on a form that allows almost little substantive feedback. The accomplished practices are supposed to serve as the minimum elements of educator preparation programs, and I understand the balance between micromanagement and platitudes is hard to strike.
The draft is brief and reduces several of the current list's main items into subsidiary bullet points under seven main items in the draft revision. Ethics, critical thinking, and role of the teacher completely drop off the revision's first draft, and the first draft reduces diversity and cognitive research to bullet points. One item that worries me is the downgrading of cognitive research into subsidiary elements of main expectations. Given the prevalence of educational fads, teachers and administrators need to have a solid grounding in educational psychology.
As an historian, what worries me about the draft in addition is that you could transplant it to China or many another undemocratic country, and most of it would fit reasonably well. That shouldn't be the case: teachers in Florida should know that they're obligations are tied to the relationship between teaching and citizenship. So I've proposed an additional accomplished practice I've termed democracy and citizenship and covers issues such as ethics, nondiscriminatory treatment of students and families, and pushing civil debate. We'll see if the task force agrees with me in any way on this.
The currency of higher education in America
I winced reading today's Inside Higher Ed column by Arthur Levine and hoped for a second that someone was impersonating him. I checked it against my Higher Education Commentary Bingo Card:
| bubble | industrial society | dinosaur | unchanging | decrepit |
| distracted | digital native | dumbest generation | swirling | millennial generation |
| seat-time | anytime/anyplace |
Free (by Chris Anderson) |
mobile or ubiquitous learning | individualized |
| helicopter parents | passive/active dichotomy | seamless | outcomes | pampered |
| reengineering | students as consumers | incentivized | P-20 | accountability |
Looks like the piece hit every item in the second column.
Levine is consolidating a set of stereotypes about higher education that is only tenuously connected with real colleges and universities. The column is written as if almost every student is an 18- to 22-year-old with an iPad and an iPhone, a BitTorrent user, and a habitual plagiarist. For any who is tempted to describe college students in this way, please look at the real students in most colleges; a substantial fraction may fit this stereotype, but it's still only a fraction. And whatever flaws today's college students have, I suspect our predecessors saw them in spades 50 years ago. I would plead the same with the column's implication that college and university structures and curricula have not evolved over the past century; look at the proportion of courses taught online or by adjuncts and tell me again how universities don't change and don't see students as consumers. Even the one item I'd otherwise be willing to give a pass on--"All education is essentially remedial, teaching students what they do not know"--implies that education is the same as knowledge. Ouch.
The painful part of reading this morning's column is not only the blithe acceptance of stereotypes but the failure to see that higher education cannot avoid having some unit of currency. Like many other pieces I have read recently, this morning's column calls for a move away from the student credit hour. With the millions of transfer students in the country, colleges and universities need some currency system to treat them fairly and process the request to bring some of their work from other institutions into the new institution. That is unavoidable, unless you want students to start from scratch at every institution. But let's imagine a world where colleges and universities no longer count seat time. So the student credit hour would be replaced by what, precisely? Some propose a list of competencies, but that's still a countable currency (if in tests/assessments passed rather than courses), and then you'd have to create competency assessments for every conceivable course in the world that a transfer student might have taken somewhere else. Does anyone really believe that's a more viable structure than credit hours/courses?
June 13, 2010
The teacher jobs bill is still needed and sensible
Rick Hess's blog continues to be interesting and well-written, and while he is out of the country, he's recruited as substitute bloggers two of the new generation of political scientists focusing on education, Patrick McGuinn and Paul Manna. They have been a welcome addition to the field, and I look forward to what they have to say in Hess's space.
Hess continues to talk about the $23 billion education jobs package as fiscal profligacy, and I gather that he agrees with those arguing that additional short-term stimulus spending would be a significant contributor to long-term national debt, in addition to delaying a (presumably deserved) day of reckoning for local school districts. I've made the argument before that the colonic model of school reform (and public-sector reform more generally) is an attractive hypothesis but one without an empirical basis put forward by its proponents (including Hess). Yeah, I know, Rahm Emmanuel talked about not letting a crisis go to waste, but we in education tend to declare too many crises for that to work too well.
I suspect I simply disagree with Hess on short-term debt and long-term national debt. I am persuaded by a number of economists that the far greater threat in the long run is posed by either health-care costs (Medicare and Medicaid) or by the shortage in revenue caused by the recession. In addition, I am also convinced that inflation and interest rates are too low for us to have too many options right now. Like Paul Krugman, I think the initial stimulus was far too small, and I see the mini-packages rolling through Congress in the past half-year or so as a necessary supplement.
In that context, saving teachers' jobs is a plausible component of additional macroeconomic stimulus, and those arguing about whether it should require elimination of last-in-first-out layoff priorities are playing chicken with a Mack Truck: damn it, get the package through, or the only useful function you'll have in the fall will be the proper orientation of your index finger.
From a macroeconomic standpoint, I suspect the question is what would provide the greatest bang for the buck, keeping people employed or spending the money on any other function. I suspect that you could find a group of people who have a bigger stimulus impact than teachers and other school-system employees: the majority of civil servants are probably paid at least a little less than the median teacher, and more of their income might be recycled into the economy. That's an empirical question, though I suspect that differences between the stimulus effect of keeping on "relatively low-paid professionals, clericals, and service staff" vs. "even lower-paid professionals, clericals, and service staff" are going to be swamped by any differences between "keeping public employees working" and other ways to spend money.
It's important to keep in mind that Hess is far from the only conservative downplaying the budget woes of schools. About half a year ago, Arthur Peng and Jim Guthrie penned an article for Education Next about how everyone was constantly crying wolf over public-school funding. There is a significant truth in the article along with several important flaws. What Peng and Guthrie have correct is the history over 60 years of generally buffering public-school funding in crises, if you look at national-level data. That is because we associated schooling with citizenship in both legal and political ways, and that helps insulate schools from the effects of economic downturns. (They also mention a number of other mechanisms.) There are some important weaknesses in their article:
- The past is not prologue: I'd love for treatment of public schools in minor downturns be perfectly predictive of what happens as we (very slowly) leave the worst worldwide economic crisis since the 1930s. Peng and Guthrie imply that the behavior will continue automatically, and I am unconvinced.
- Per-pupil revenues do not address infrastructure/capacity: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two recessions in quick succession hit districts while many were also struggling with a decline in student enrollment with the back of the Baby Boom. Looking at per-pupil revenues obscures the fact that a number of districts engaged in repeated years of RIFfing teachers (RIF = "reduction in force," the term commonly used at the time), with small reductions in per-pupil revenues magnified greatly by enrollment declines. We're again on the downslide of a baby boom (if the baby boom echo), and regions with enrollment declines will face greater budget woes as a result of compounding events.
- The nation is not the district: even in prior recessions, there have been school districts and states where school funding suffered far more than what you may assume from the charts in Peng and Guthrie's article, and demographic unevenness compounded that lumpiness. Enrollment declines were not felt in the budgets of Sunbelt state schools in the early 1980s, but they were prominent in the Northeast and Midwest.
- Law is not reality: Peng and Guthrie state that education is treated budget-wise in the way that constitutions are written (i.e., children and education first, sometimes explicitly so). I wish! In reality, while education funding shifted towards the state level in the 1970s, states have also greatly expanded funding of health care and prison systems. I suspect that Blago will shortly be enrolling in a graduate program at Statesville U., if you know what I mean, but apart from the education of juveniles in state custody, that's not really the type of spending we should think of as schooling. (Yes, I know Statesville is a maximum-security facility, but Joliet closed in 2002.)
Bottom line: I wish I could share Peng and Guthrie's view of schooling as largely buffered from recessions, and I wish that I could fear long-term debt from a stimulus more than I fear lingering high unemployment, the way that Hess does. But as long as inflation and interest rates are close to zero and unemployment lingers in the 9-10% territory, we'll need fiscal stimulus, and supporting teacher jobs is a logical way to do it.
June 11, 2010
Remedial/development education, required reading
If you're interested in community-college remedial/developmental programs and you haven't yet, go read an excellent feature by Bill Maxwell that appeared last Sunday in the St. Petersburg Times Perspective section. Because it's in the paper's opinion section, Maxwell is free to add his judgment, but for the most part this is just a good feature, detailed and thought-provoking. It deserves more attention than it's gotten thus far in the week.
Why is a college education like a tulip bulb?
Dean Dad has one plausible response to the latest installation of the "college is the next asset bubble to burst" argument, and every time I come across it I grind my teeth, think of ravens and writing desks, and go on. At least Glenn Reynolds is neither an economist nor an historian, or I'd accuse him of professional incompetence. Hint to all who might think he's right: a college degree is not an excludable good that is the type normally resellable on a speculative basis. But at least I have material for this Out of Left Field Friday entry...
Some part of the argument regularly floated on this topic is an anticipatory taste of Schadenfreude: "I just can't wait for the bastards to get their due," with higher education standing in for all bastards here. As many people before me have pointed out, Schadenfreude isn't a wise basis for public policy, and desire for it tends to blind one to analytical details. Most students are not in the type of tuition-dependent institution that Dean Dad rightly points out is the only part of higher ed vulnerable to a "oh, we can't spend as much as we'd like" change in behavior. Millions still want a college education, and if they can't afford private tuition or out-of-state tuition somewhere else, they'll pop for a four-year university degree or start at community colleges.
At some level, the dissatisfaction with higher education leads to grumbling and sometimes structural changes in public higher ed (e.g., calls for accountability, today more about attainment than cognitive outcomes). Concerns about family costs have led to the changes in student loan policy. Grumbling has not yet led to changes in tax laws that would move the needle on athletic departments or large endowments. And given the labor-market queueing advantage of those with college degrees, you're not going to see people leaving colleges in droves, or at least not "college" in the abstract.
In other words, this doesn't look like an asset bubble to me in any way I'm familair with.
Of side deals, soup and sandwich, and prayers
A few days ago, the St. Petersburg Times uploaded all of the second-round RTTT local MOUs in Florida they had been able to acquire to one of the relevant blog entries, so I can talk about the elements that are common among them. First, a mea culpa: when reading the Broward document on Safari, the browser only showed the paragraph discussing impasse, and I wrote a blog entry based on that assumption. After seeing several of the MOUs, I checked the file format, realized it was not a PDF, and put it into a different app. So my erroneous description of Broward's and Hernando's MOUs as dramatically different is my fault. There are some interesting variations (as I explain below, Hardee should not be included in the broader list), but I'll stick with the commonalities.
I'm going to start with the local MOU signed in January by stakeholders in Hillsborough and other MOUs signed in a handful of other counties where locals of the Florida Education Association signed onto the first state application to Race to the Top. The Times blog entry at the time could be read to suggest that the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association (HCTA) wheedled the school board into the language. I suspect the reality is that HCTA asked FEA's bargaining support team to give them something that would allow HCTA to sign on and still secure them (or try to secure HCTA) against impasse proceedings and being locked into an experiment after the money ran out.
So what did the January MOU in Hillsborough include?
- The parties agreed to negotiate in good faith to allow them to participate in the state's RTTT program.
- The parties agreed that they would not take discretionary bargaining subjects to impasse even if that impeded participation in RTTT (and if the state rejected whatever was bargained, Hillsborough would not participate).
- Any contract modifications agreed to as part of bargaining with RTTT would cease either with the end of the grant or the end of the contract. (In Florida law, public-employee collective bargaining agreements can last no longer than three years.)
- The school district committed itself to finding non-general-fund sources of money "to continue implementation" if RTTT funding was insufficient.
Again, the effect of this agreement was to guard HCTA from being exposed to impasse proceedings and a default permanent commitment to contract provisions for a program that might not be fully funded after RTTT moneys ran out. The first protection was incorporated into the state-level MOU for the second RTTT application. It is not entirely clear that the state-level MOU addresses the second issue directly, though it does state that the MOU (and the commitments) end with the end of the grant, if the state receives the award. (I'll get a little more into the weeds on the doctrine of status quo below.) In any case, the new state-level MOU was sufficient for the vast majority of counties and local unions this time around, and FEA's leadership encouraged locals to participate (hedging that around a bit in public language).
The existence of local MOUs the second time around is an indication that the reassurances were not enough for at least 10 counties and their locals to sign on without a local MOU. (Stakeholders in the rural county of Hardee signed an MOU that essentially duplicated the state MOU: they'd attempt to bargain to meet RTTT requirements, but they wouldn't declare impasse. So I am not including Hardee in the group of other counties whose MOUs put a termination date on contract modifications.) Three of those counties have large populations: Duval (Jacksonville), Lee (Ft. Myers), and Broward (Ft. Lauderdale). The others are much smaller.
So what parts of the local MOUs match up to the MOU signed in Hillsborough in January? I'm going to match up some of the language of the Broward MOU (why? Broward's the largest system in the set, and I can copy and paste language from its MOU) against corresponding elements in the January Hillsborough MOU and see what remains:
- Good faith bargaining: The parties will use best efforts to develop a negotiated, mutually agreed upon implementation plan in the areas identified by the parties as part of the Plan (from item 2 of the Broward MOU).
- No impasse: Any items relating to the RTTT Application or Plan that are unsuccessfully negotiated between the parties specifically for the purpose of applying for or receiving the RTTT grant award will not be subject to the impasse procedures set forth in Chapter 447. The impasse procedure is herewith deemed waived by the parties as to negotiations which are for the specific purpose of applying for or receiving the RTTT grant award (item 4).... Should there fail to be a fully ratified MOU by the bargaining-unit and non-imposed agreements after good faith negotiations for RTTT, the parties are released from any obligation to continue participation in the Race to the Top Grant (item 8).
- Termination date for contract modifications: In the event that negotiations for RTTT result in modification to the existing CBA, such modifications will expire upon either the expiration of the RTTT grant or upon the expiration of the funding of the grant whichever occurs first (item 5).
Those pieces parallel three of the four elements of the January MOU in Hillsborough (and I've put the Broward MOU text in the same order as the list above). That doesn't mean that they don't have policy implications, but it's not as if this language came out of nowhere; the provisions clearly came from the January MOUs. (Discussion of policy below.) What's new?
- Recognition that RTTT may require impact bargaining as well as mandatory subjects of bargaining: If an RTTT grant is awarded, any items in the Plan that impact wages, hours or terms and conditions of employment or that may modify the current CBA are subject to bargaining in accordance with Chapter 447 (item 3).... Portions of the RTTT Application and Plan implicate mandatory subjects of bargaining under the Florida Constitution and Chapter 447. The parties acknowledge that limited issues such as performance pay, salary schedules, and teacher placement can best and most effectively be addressed at the local level (item 7).
- Agreement to the state MOU does not commit the parties to specific contract changes: [A local stakeholder's signature on the state MOU] does not constitute agreement to modify the existing CBA or to negotiate additional language consistent with all elements of the FLDOE Preliminary Scope of Work (item 1).... The signature of the Union President on the FLDOE MOU does not constitute an agreement to (a) reopen or otherwise modify the CBA, unless and until a subsequent negotiated time specific waiver or other agreement has been mutually agreed upon by the BTU and SBBC or (b) limit or waive its rights and protections under the Florida Constitution, the Florida Public Employees' Relations Act and other applicable laws (item 2).
- Contract modifications for RTTT do not become the default contract language that extends beyond the end of a contract while negotiations continue: If bargaining according to this MOU results in any modification to the current CBA in order to comply with RTTT requirements, then such modification(s) will not operate as the status quo and shall have no precedent setting value, face or effect, unless to the extent agreed to be the parties therein (item 6).
The first topic is mundane and would probably be accepted as a statement of reality by most involved in Florida public labor negotiations. The second category protects parties (primarily unions) from the argument that a signature on the state MOU was the same act as signing a labor contract or a binding commitment on any specific element of a contract (from the first numbered paragraph of the MOU). More interesting is the language from the second numbered paragraph that refers to "a subsequent negotiated time specific waiver or other agreement" that results from bargaining. Any part of a collective bargaining agreement that includes a time-limited waiver of union rights (or agreement on a contract provision that is discretionary under Florida law) would satisfy that language. I am not a lawyer, but this may duplicate established protections that unions can assert at the table.
What appears to be truly new in comparison with the January Hillsborough MOU and also a potential substantive difference from anything else is the language clearly stating that contract modifications specifically for RTTT do not become the status quo that continues after the end of one contract if bargaining continues on a successor agreement. Here we're truly getting into the weeds on Florida labor law: A public-employee labor contract continues to operate after the last date if there isn't agreement on a successor, and the terms and conditions of employment continue as if the agreement had been extended. There is some controversy about whether and which waivers of rights by either party continue as the status quo, but the status-quo doctrine changes the nature of bargaining, as a deadline that might otherwise be facing one party at the end of a contract just does not exist, and that provision continues. If I understand correctly, the public-interest rationale for the status-quo doctrine is that maintaining the terms and conditions of employment during a contractual interregnum is easier to administer, and since the parties agreed to those terms and conditions at some point in the past, one can assume that the contract provisions are not contrary to the public interest. But it does theoretically remove bargaining leverage from a party who conceded a term that would otherwise cease at the end of the contract.
Given the language elsewhere in the Broward MOU (and others) that the RTTT-related contract modifications cease as of the end of the contract or RTTT funds, I'm trying to figure out what the additional language on status quo adds. Is this the legal equivalent of putting on long johns on a winter day in Philadelphia just in case the temperature drops another 40 degrees F.? It roughly parallels the same issue--"we're not locking ourselves into the experimental contract language we may agree to"--with different language.
The two questions that have been raised have been of process (transparency in the state's application: will federal reviewers see everything that's relevant?) and the substantive question of commitment to contractual changes after the grant money runs out.
I don't think the transparency issue is affected by the language about impasse, since I'm persuaded that the local MOUs' language effectively duplicates the state MOU language on the issue without adding anything substantive. And the state has the authority to include or exclude specific counties based on information state officials have; remember that this is an application by the state for money, not an application by individual school districts. So we're down to one issue: does 10 local unions' unwillingness to be locked into specific contractual language in advance of the grant directly contradict the application's claims of stakeholder buy-in?
Well, that's not quite it, either, because I don't think the other locals want to be locked in either, but they didn't sign local MOUs with language on the issue. So it's really whether the application reviewers have the information they need to decide if the state as a whole has sufficient stakeholder buy-in to earn the relevant points in that part of the evaluation. Suppose for an instance that we should wipe out those ten counties from buy-in based on signing the local MOUs; would Florida lose any points? Perhaps a few.
So a man walks to the corner deli to get lunch and orders a soup and sandwich. He pays and waits at the pickup counter. When the short-order cook rings the bell and puts the tray on the counter with the order, the customer asks the cook, "Did you pray while putting together my meal?"
The cook squints a bit. "Did I pray?"
"Yes. Did you pray for me while putting together my meal?"
The cook thinks. The customer's a stranger, there are seven billion people in the world, and she's busy making lunches. Should she pray for all the strangers in the world or make sure she doesn't cut her fingers off? But the customer's always right, the boss says. "Sure, I prayed."
"What'd you pray for me?"
"I prayed for you to give me a good tip."
Now for the big picture on transparency: you can't read minds. At most what we know is that officials in these ten counties are more suspicious of the state MOU than FEA President Andy Ford and other members of the governor's task force. Do you think that local officials in other states are equally suspicious? Is there a way for a state to suss that out? Officials in every state have assumed that a signature on an MOU is a legal commitment, and the same has been true in Florida. There could be all sorts of local agreements of the nudge nudge, wink wink variety in multiple states, and that's true of every grant program where the state is the applicant and locals participate. If someone wants Florida to be penalized because state officials were unaware of local suspicions and we now know about it because the local stakeholders put those suspicions in writing, do we need to set up mechanisms to find any agreements that are unwritten?
There may be one other issue in the grant application development playing into this: the state asked local stakeholders to sign the MOU before the state application was finished, and there is a section of the state MOU that allows local districts to back out if they discover after having signed the MOU that they don't have the capacity to follow through. (That's shortly after the zipper clause that lets the state exclude local districts.) A few national stakeholders have pointed out that RTTT required states to buy into the common core standards before they were finalized, and the development of the Florida RTTT application had a parallel problem of asking local stakeholders to sign on before knowing all of the details of the state plan. Given the escape clause in the MOU, that shouldn't have fed into discussions about any local MOU, but I wouldn't be surprised if that upped the suspicion level.
The policy question remains the same: what happens after RTTT funding runs out? There are (at least) two ways to look at this, if you're a supporter of the RTTT program. One is to see the state application as a way to lock in certain policies that can't be undone. The January MOU in Hillsborough and the ten MOUs that the Times has uncovered would greatly irritate anyone with that view, because it's evidence that local unions and possibly school boards are going to want to backtrack just as soon as the legal commitments for RTTT evaporate. But there's a second way to look at RTTT: they force states and local districts to experiment in certain ways and have certain experiences. If you think that the experiences with different policy structures are going to change the conversation and loosen up opposition to a bunch of things, you're going to trust that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Or you have to think that at some level, you can't force local districts to behave in a certain way forever and stakeholders have to agree with you at some point.
I think the first way of viewing RTTT is incompatible with its being a voluntary grant program. If you want to force certain behavior, you can't hide it behind a temporary pot of money, and people are going to seethe and figure out ways to undo it if you try. If you want to be top-down, you have to be top-down and open about it, and limit it to things you are reasonably certain you can control. If you want to encourage experimentation, you need to acknowledge that some of the experiments will absolutely fail and let local districts escape from those failed experiments.
One other matter I haven't been able to resolve: I vaguely remember some of the news coverage this month reporting that both the first and second Florida applications for Race to the Top mentioned at least a few of the local MOUs, but I couldn't find any reference to the local MOUs in either (at least by searching within the PDF files). For the record, can anyone tell me whether my memory is going, or if I just missed everything?
June 9, 2010
Get your performance-pay evaluation report bingo cards here
So another few evaluation reports have been released with little evidence of student achievement flowing from performance-pay systems. This is going to sound like a broken record from me, but I don't make too much out of one or two studies in policy research. These studies on systems in Chicago and New York confirm something any historian (or anyone who's read education historians) could have predicted: even if there is some benefit from changing a pay system, it's a darned hard thing to try. This is one of the reasons why I dislike the boutique, closed evaluation tradition in education research: every evaluation collects data, walls it off, and then presents (only) conclusions to the public. When there are millions of dollars being spent through the Teacher Incentive Fund in addition to privately-funded efforts (or any program with an interesting but untested theory of action), there have to be data archives so that other researchers (those not on the original evaluation team) can conduct secondary analyses.
But having put forward these caveats, I'm going to guess that most studies of performance pay are going to show negligible effects on test scores. This may be my inner cynic (okay, not very inner), but the long-term questions on performance-pay policies revolve less around whether it is consistent with the theory of action proponents have but focus instead on whether the politics demand something regardless of effects and what is workable from a variety of standpoints.
June 8, 2010
The value of college III
Part of the value of a good college education is that much of it is surplus. In the same way that the early nineteenth-century education of women could have been perceived as superfluous, a good deal of what students learn could be seen as not directly or immediately useful in their lives. To some economists, this may smack of inefficiency: why should we educate anyone beyond what we can see as an immediate payback on the job or in life? To others, this gets absorbed in a metastatic notion of human capital, where everything good in life is redefined as investment. (Read the new introduction in the 1993 edition of Gary Becker's Human Capital if you doubt me: not only are schooling and standalone job training considered human capital, so is love from one's parents.) Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz refer generically to education as critical to handling changing technology on the job, which makes a certain amount of sense as long as you're not operating a picture-based point-of-sale register (technology can deskill jobs as well as require greater skills). Goldin, Katz, and Uwe Reinhardt are definitely well-meaning, and I'd want them all at my back in an unlit economics-department hallway. But at some level, the economic justification of surplus education is troublesome because it is a black box (how the extra education works exactly isn't modeled); the slop between formal schooling and economic utility (which I've termed surplus) is a fundamental problem for how economists approach education.
An inefficient education as useful play
So let's turn from economics to anthropology for some help. In 1973, American Anthropologist published Stephen Miller's "Ends, Means, and Galumphing," which explored the social and evolutionary purposes of play. It's reasonably well-cited for a social-science article, but more importantly it's widely cited in areas as diverse as educational and social psychology (where you might expect it to be cited) and... well, it's cited in "Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments" (1996, in the Journal of Marketing). In other words, it's got legs. Miller argues that one can define play within multiple species as activity that is deliberately inefficient and where the individuals involved gain pleasure from facing challenges that stem directly from the inefficiency, whether we're talking formal inefficiencies such as the rules of baseball and chess or informal make-believe... or activities one might find in college such as analyzing a real or fictional company's operations, writing a history paper, spending ten or more hours talking about a single play of Shakespeare, and so forth.
More importantly, Miller argues that play has some advantage for a species in that it turns specific skills into general problem-solving capacity. In play, one uses skills repeatedly and in a range of combinations. (One could argue a little differently about some videogames I know, but I'm describing his argument, not making my own, and the point would still be important even if you removed videogames that require nothing but exactly-repetitive behavior.) Play looks remarkably inefficient in one way, but it has important adaptive value in another.
So too with much of formal education. I could make the same faculty-psychology arguments on behalf of studying history that many people do: not only does it provide specific knowledge of certain times and places, it also prepares you for any career that requires the presentation of linear arguments with specific time- and place-bound evidence. (Legal brief, anyone?) It teaches you about human foibles and prepares you for situations where you have to suspend antipathy towards individuals to identify potential motives and key interests. David Brooks makes all of those arguments in his column today.
But that type of argument has always struck me as beside the point, not because history majors do not have practice in those skills but because any faculty-psychology argument is easily turned into a nebulous "this will help you learn critical thinking" claim, which my time-and-place-specific training makes me skeptical of. Yes, majoring in history will help you in a lot of fields more than not going to college at all, but it's hard to argue that a history major is better suited to a professional biochem lab's gruntwork than a math or physics major, even if the gruntwork has occasional public presentations attached to it requiring linear arguments with detailed evidence (see above on that refrain).
(Margaret Soltan argues a different point today, asserting that the value of the humanities is in the embodiment of human frailty, not its rational analysis. She writes, "For [William Arrowsmith], a prolonged encounter with the humanistic tradition amounts to a more and more sensate anguish at the recognition of our own chaos." I'm not going to argue with her or Arrowsmith, since I'm sure many a student in a Milton seminar has probably had crises of faith, and I had the odd experience of The Painted Bird as a soothing read at the end of my first semester in college. I'm just making a different point that can stretch beyond the humanities.)
An honest explanation of the value of college acknowledges that when college accomplishes what it can, a good part of that achievement is teaching students how to play with ideas in thoughtful ways and follow up that play in a reasonable, rigorous manner. This is neither a comprehensive nor exclusive way of thinking about college: formal schooling doesn't guarantee this result, and there are plenty of wise people in this world who can play with ideas without having finished secondary school, let alone college. But you're far more likely to get adults who can play with ideas in a productive sense if some critical mass of them have attended formal schooling where that was one of the outcomes.
I think Stanley Fish and gaming-for-learning enthusiasts are some of the more extreme proponents of this view, though they may not like being put in the same bin. At some times eloquently and inarticulately at other times, Fish argues (or just implies, as in yesterday's piece) that playing with ideas is the purest and highest aim of college and university life. That's a good part of the reason why he is allergic to some other conceptions of teaching (such as passionate engagement in the world). Those who have pushed for the insertion of game design in teaching likewise see value in gaming in and of itself, and they have the well-intentioned goal of spreading that joy to students through the use of gaming in teaching.
I do not think the promotion of intellectual play is the sole purpose of higher education, which is why I do not agree with Fish on his save the world on your own time refrain, which would place a wall between classes and any concern with what happens off a campus. Nor do I think that constructing game-like structures inside classes is the only way to promote intellectual play, which is why I have only experimented in a tiny way (and not that well) with game-like structures inside classes. Instead, what a good college (and many a good high school course) provides is the foundation, tools, and time and space for students to play with ideas.
This play needs to be rooted in specifics: some critical mass of specific knowledge in an area, which includes stuff we might call factual information and also knowledge about important questions that have been and continue to be asked in the discipline or field. In most (but not all) colleges and for most (but not all) students in those colleges, that foundation and set of tools require some breadth and some depth. You can't be a great student of history without knowing a sufficient amount about some critical mass of places and time, or without knowing a sufficient amount about some critical mass of other fields that bring other questions to bear on the ideas you're playing with.
And then you need the opportunities and encouragement to play with ideas in important ways. Sometimes these come in structured assignments that look playful, sometimes in serious assignments that engage students in the flow that positive psychologists write about, and sometimes the opportunity comes in extracurricular activities. Again, none of this necessarily requires formal schooling, but the playful autodidact must discipline herself or himself, and a formal school can provide structures to encourage this type of engagement. The institutional nature of a school can often grate on those within its walls, but it can also provide helpful structures. From an historical standpoint, the amazing feature of non-mandatory secondary and postsecondary education is not that one-quarter of teenagers leave high school and two-thirds of young adults do not complete a B.A. but that so many finish when there is no law requiring it. Normative expectations play an important role, and that is as true for shaping behavior within a school as standing outside it pushing students towards school.
Costs
Justifying public subsidies
Okay, some of you must be thinking, I'll follow this argument about the play of ideas as far as formal schooling doesn't cost much. But why should taxpayers subsidize this, and why should someone incur more than $100,000 in debt to learn how to play with ideas? Taxpayers should subsidize surplus education because it's worked for society in the past, which may seem highly unsatisfying but is true with one caveat (below). More pragmatically, the obviously-useful parts of higher education easily justify the subsidy, and what appear to be "frills" are comparatively cheap: try to tell a provost that the English department or history department is a money-waster, and she or he will laugh in your face with good reason: humanities faculty are generally the cheapest dates in any place, in part because of their low salaries and in part because even at the ritziest research universities they don't require several hundred thousand dollars in start-up money each. Doubt me? Go ask your local university the annual maintenance costs per student of a intro-chem lab and an intro-languages lab.
Costs to students: the car rule-of-thumb
Student debt is a different issue. I don't think someone should incur more than $100,000 in debt for an undergraduate education. However, that issue is complicated by stories about new college graduates with mountains of debt that come from enrollment in private schooling, either non-profit colleges and universities or for-profit programs. We need to watch the debt issue, but the streams of student debt origins are concentrated away from public colleges and universities (i.e., not what the solid majority of students face). There are plenty of public colleges and universities where the average debt for graduates carrying debt is under $20,000, and that's a reasonable debt to incur for the part of a college education with likely immediate payoffs in the job market (assuming that there's a job market in the next few years). In addition, the creation of income-based repayment plans is a buffer against college debt peonage if debt begins in the federal loan programs that are captured by income-based repayment. Again, that's easy when you're talking about public colleges and universities. Fortunately, a very large majority of high school seniors and their families are skeptical of mountains of debt, which is why (for example) two of my daughter's closest friends are going to the University of Florida next year rather than Rensselaer, Rutgers, or Georgia Tech (some of the other places one or the other was accepted, where they would have paid out-of-state or private tuition).
(As I've noted, private loans and gigantic debt coming from attendance at private institutions comprise a different matter, in addition to credit card debt. Part of the role of Pell grants, the new GI Bill, and federal loans is to encourage families to take on both subsidized and unsubsidized loans. That may sound remarkably like the type of public-private partnership that's become common in economic development, except that here, families and students incur substantial risk. Private non-profits and for-profits are in the same boat here, receiving a federal subsidy that's often bundled in with additional unsubsidized loans that families and students carry forward, something NYU is struggling to respond to, at least. And all university administrators who approve privacy-invading deals with credit-card companies should rot in Purgatory for a very, very long time.)
There is another way in which student debt is taken out of context: for full-time students and a number of part-time students, a significant part of the cost of college is the opportunity cost of not being in the labor market (or giving up some job opportunities, for part-time students). That can end up in debt if students borrow to pay for living expenses while going to school, and in any case, it reduces income and the accumulation of job experience. For a few years, that's more than balanced by expected greater earnings. The opportunity cost of not gaining job experience becomes a larger issue for someone who is out of the job market for an extended period, as happens with longer graduate programs (such as programs that have an average time-to-degree of nine years for students who finish, and that would be on top of the time spent in an undergraduate program).
A few rules of thumb, to summarize on debt and opportunity costs of attending college: if the direct debt incurred by going to college is on the order of magnitude of an economy or low-priced midsize car, it's justified by the anticipated concrete returns, so the chance to play with ideas isn't a giant financial risk. Don't go into debt on the order of a house note unless the degree leads directly to a lucrative career (e.g., medicine or law, and even there I have some questions). And if you're going to spend more than ten years out of the labor market as part of getting an education, definitely get that economy-car-sized education.
The assessment dilemma
Let me return now to the issue of public subsidies in part for what might look like surplus education. Part of the justification for public subsidy (concerned with value) is taken care of by the parts of college you can identify concretely as human capital, specific bits of skills and knowledge with clear social benefits. Part of the justification for subsidy (concerned with cost) is taken care of by the fact that the more expensive parts of college and university academic programs are concentrated where you see more clearly identified returns (the "humanities are cheap dates" principle). (Athletic programs and student affairs are different subjects.)
That might be enough from the perspective of some faculty (and Stanley Fish and David Brooks, at least this week), but the push for accountability in learning outcomes in higher education can easily be turned into the type of mechanism that squeezes out opportunities and structures for playing with ideas. For the foreseeable future, there will be key actors in several states who would be willing to impose reductive standardized testing on colleges and universities. That is the alternative to the current set of assessment mechanisms embedded in regional accreditation. So let's look at assessment and accreditation with regard to playing with ideas.
The black hole of accreditation-centered assessment
Assessment in the context of regional accreditation is best thought of as meta-assessment, where accreditors hold colleges and universities responsible for having a curriculum and assessing how well students learn it. That putatively gives institutions the freedom to create a structure consistent with a unique mission as long as there is assessment of student learning. In reality, this type of meta-game can be difficult to navigate, and the default behavior leans heavily towards mimesis: many colleges and universities hire consultants familiar with a particular regional accreditor, and they tend to suggest whatever structure has enabled similar institutions to pass muster. In addition, because consultants (or former consultants) are sometimes brought in-house to handle the logistics, they focus on the parts of the process that are most easily managed and cause the least hiccups internally... and that often turns into a small universe of reductive measures available commercially, especially for general-education goals. (Want to assess writing? Let's try the ABCXYZ. Want to assess problem-solving? Let's try the ABCXYZ. Want to assess critical thinking? Let's try the ABCXYZ. Yes, of course we can create our own in-house assessment, but we'd also have to justify its use to our accreditor, and it's just easier to use the ABCXYZ; why don't we at least try that as we're developing our own...) There's a reason why the Voluntary System of Accountability specified one of three cognitive measures: it piggybacked on existing trends in accreditation and institutional inertia.
My general concern is that the mechanisms of assessment through regional accreditation can become the black hole of faculty time, absorbing everything around it and making it difficult to plan a structure for more engaged projects or the type of activity I have described as intellectual play. In addition to what else I could say about that narrow range of measures, the long-term problem with institutional meta-gaming is that the rules of the game can change, sometimes with nasty consequences for faculty time. Every time that an accrediting body changes the rules by which institutions have to set rules for students (i.e., the curriculum), faculty have to rework their lives and often entire programs of studies to accommodate the changes. Every time my state reworks licensing requirements for college-based teacher education, or changes the rules for state review, faculty in my college have their time stolen by the logistics of meeting the rules. (Please don't ask a Florida dean of education to describe the double-standard between the rules for college-based teacher education and alt-cert unless you have a few hours.) One of the consequences is an overburden on both faculty and student time. Let me stop talking about faculty time and focus instead on student time: Look at a few random programs of study for baccalaureate programs in nursing or education. Count the number of elective courses. Compare with a program of studies in any social-science or humanities major. Then pick your jaw up off the floor.
On the one hand, the licensure requirements make a certain amount of sense from the perspective of professional training: you want teachers, social workers, and nurses to have the tools to do the job. On the other hand, an undergraduate education that is devoid of anything but instrumentalist technical courses is job-training and nothing else. And especially for teachers, that is inconsistent with one central purpose of college and dangerous for what we'd like them to do on the job. And the Holmes Group's proposal to shift all teacher training to the masters is unrealistic for working-class students if you apply the car-cost limit to student debt for future teachers. I am not sure there is a good way out of this problem for elementary teacher education, and it is on the extreme end of the "no room for thought" problem we face with accreditation-based assessment.
Outside elementary teacher education, there are a few escapes, but none are palatable. Ignoring assessment requirements of accreditors is either fatally brave or foolish, so what's left? Assessing intellectual play. You can stop groaning now. Yes, attempts to assess "creativity" make you tear your hair out, and the thought of assessing intellectual play makes you want to punch me out for the oxymoron or the threat of one of these projects unmoored from substance and rigor. But from an institutional standpoint for a faculty member in one of those regions with an accreditor that threatens micromanagement, you can either tilt at windmills or see what the power might be used for. I've got a limited appetite for windmill-tilting, and I've got enough blunted spears in my garage for a lifetime, thank you very much. This may sound like squaring the circle or getting out from within the horizon of a black hole, but the ability to assess intellectual play would allow faculty to justify all sorts of projects within an existing accreditation framework.
Defining and assessing a challenge
First, a reminder of Miller's notion of galumphing, or play: pleasurable activity that is deliberately inefficient and encourages the combination of existing skills to accomplish the self-defined or agreed-upon goals over and around the obstacles presented by the constructed inefficiencies. The tricky part of assessing such activity is not focusing on the issue of pleasure but instead on the meta-rules that characterize the nature of the activity. For this purpose, it's best to think about a circumscribed type of intellectual play: a challenge that is at least partially well-defined, based in considerable part on what others have done (i.e., not entirely reinventing the wheel), and that requires putting together at least a few skills. Then the assessment of the student activity has two levels: the level of the meta-game, where you assess how well the student defines the challenge, shows where and how the project relies on other work or is new, and how well the student used multiple skills; and the level of the project itself, where disciplinary conventions come into play...
And for history, at least, the disciplinary conventions match fairly well with the first level: having an appropriate historical topic, using the historiography in a sensible way, and handling a range of evidence and argument structures. The guts of most undergraduate history papers are in that last catch-all category: "handling a range of evidence and argument structures." There are a number of more idiosyncratic and less comparable assessment frames (such as student reflection on engagement), and this short essay is about the larger picture, not a detailed (let alone a tested!) framework for assessing intellectual play. And this sketch is about a narrowly-defined type of challenge, with lots left out. But it's a way to think a bit about the issue... or play with the idea of assessing playing with ideas.
Tools to explore
A few words about some recent developments to watch in this vein. The Lumina Foundation's Tuning project could have begun within a regional accreditation context, but it's geared instead towards a proof of concept that a faculty-driven definition of outcomes and assessments can simultaneously honor disciplinary conventions and also satisfy external constituencies (thus the term "tuning" to get everyone singing in the same key: I've got to ask Cliff Adelman sometime whether it's harmonic or tempered tuning). If I remember correctly, the first discipline-specific reports should have been available on the foundation website sometime this spring, but it's not there now (just a cutesy cartoonish presentation of the idea along with Cliff Adelman's concept paper and other materials from 2009). At a first glance, it looks like an application of the accountability framework of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (i.e., the liberal-arts office in One Dupont Circle). But without sample exemplar projects, it's hard to judge at the moment.
Then there's the movement for undergraduate research. When my daughter and I were visiting colleges over the past few years, it's clear that every institution devoted resources specifically to undergraduate research, whether they were public or private. Then again, these were generally small colleges where undergraduates were the only research assistants that faculty would be getting. On the third hand, undergraduate research is a type of operation that both liberal-arts colleges and universities are trying to develop and promote, albeit with different understandings of student engagement. I think my alma mater (a small liberal-arts college) now requires seniors to engage in a major thesis-like project. At my current university, that's expected only of Honors College students, and the resources of the Undergraduate Research office are available to all in theory and would be totally swamped if every student asked to be involved. Again, neither the development of Tuning and undergraduate research are models in any practical sense of the word, but they're something to watch and, if nothing else, they provide a few rocks on which to stand and survey the landscape of playing with ideas.
June 4, 2010
More on so-called "side deals"
Andy Rotherham has responded to my blog entry early this morning. Let me skip for now the question of why he was the sole person quoted in the article and address the local MOUs in Florida on Race to the Top. Rotherham wrote in part, "If these agreements have no bearing on the state's application or implementation then why go through the laborious exercise of crafting them[?]" I wasn't in the room for any of these, but having observed Florida schools for almost 15 years, I can imagine a number of reasons, including distrust by some party in a county in the judgment of FEA President Andy Ford and other participants in the task force about the clause excluding non-mandatory subjects of bargaining from impasse. I said as much in my prior post. I'm not a labor lawyer, and neither is Andy Rotherham, but I do know something about the dynamics within FEA, where there is often a healthy internal debate. The argument that local MOUs are an inherent evasion of the grant is something that requires examination of the actual language at issue.
Now, to my comment about Rotherham's being used as the sole source for Wednesday's story in the St. Petersburg Times. Why did it seem curious to me? Partly it's a matter of sensitivity to these issues on a number of fronts. For more than a year, Rick Hess has been pointing out the potential for all sorts of perception problems with a competitive process that's the result of (enormous) discretionary authority. In April, Liam Goldrick noted that the New Teacher Project was simultaneously advising several states on RTTT and then commenting on the process (something he thought was unwise from an organizational standpoint).
So when I read a story with a single source commenting on the issue, where the source may have had business interests at stake and where the disclosure of that in the story was vague, and then the term "some say" with only that source as documentation, it looked odd. It was a good journalist quoting someone who is open about disclosure in every direct piece of writing of his I've read. And it wasn't the larger point. But I don't remember anyone correcting the impression earlier in the spring that TNTP had been a disinterested observer. But I could also have thought of a number of reasons why there weren't more people quoted or more disclosure about Wetherbell (Rotherham's firm): maybe Matus got the information late in the day and couldn't reach more than Rotherham; maybe the material was in the submitted story and an editor chopped out additional disclosure; maybe Rotherham didn't have access to the text of the local MOUs or didn't have a copy of the state MOU and was relying on Matus's over-the-phone description of "hey, this looks like it could be different, especially in Hernando." But on the other hand (I think we're on my fourth hand here), the failure to correct the stuff on TNTP is a lapse for education journalism more generally, and it has to stop. So I decided to note what I had observed, call it minor compared with the other issues, and go on. If it looks like I'm being hard on the Times, it's because this local newspaper is one of the top papers in the country on education, and I think I can expect great reporting. But this is a minor error, I meant the observation as such, and I explicitly said so. If I were going to point out that the alleged transparency problem with Florida's application is a distraction until better researched, maybe I need to be consistent and explicitly say my concerns along parallel lines were less important, nu?
My central point was that absent some more solid analysis of what the local MOUs actually meant and whether they conflicted with the application packet, the larger issues were not about procedure but the sustainability of whatever happened with RTTT, assuming it was beneficial. Here's what I wrote this morning:
It's a legitimate question to ask what the right balance is in collective bargaining on the scope of bargaining, on the relative power of the parties, and on state law that can essentially dictate terms and conditions of employment outside bargaining.... It's also a legitimate question to ask about the commitment of parties to reform after the money runs out.... Those issues are still out there, and they're out there whether or not a particular state has an MOU like Florida's.
And here's what Andy Rotherham wrote:
[T]here are two big outstanding questions on RTT that we won't know the answers to for several years: First, how durable will the policy changes be? Will states relax things when the money is gone and/or will "loser" states undo the reforms they put in place in an effort to win? Prize theory is built on the idea that the progress generated in an effort to win is built upon. That idea has not been fully tested yet in the public/political sphere.
Surprise: we agree on the importance of that question! No, it's not really a surprise. It's just that a lot of electrons have lost their lives this week in what thus far looks like a nonstory.
Correcting the facts on so-called RTTT "side deals"
In Wednesday's paper, St. Petersburg Times reporter Ron Matus relied on the sloppy language "some say" to spin a mountain out of a molehill about county-specific MOUs between school boards and local FEA affiliates. In the article as well as two blog entries Wednesday and Thursday, Matus stated that there were a number of counties with local memoranda of understanding (or MOUs) and quoted one individual who said that the existence of what Matus called "side deals" might be a problem for Florida's application. Matus stated that his source Andy Rotherham had helped other states with RTTT applications, but the article did not state whether that was in the context of consultancy contracts (i.e., whether Rotherham's new organization had its reputation and business at stake in competition with Florida's RTTT application).
The omission of any mention of Rotherham's business concern is minor compared with the failure of the Times to look at the content of the side deals and see whether they modified the obligations of local parties vis-a-vis the state Memorandum of Understanding that most districts and unions signed across Florida. Since Ed Week has gotten into the story, albeit without quoting Rotherham, it's important to look at the facts.
First, the issue of impasse. Language from the state MOU (part of the RTTT application):
Only the elements of this MOU which are contained in existing law are subject to the provisions of section 447.403, Florida Statutes. (p. 3)
Explanation: F.S. 447.403 is the part of Florida's public-employee collective-bargaining law that covers impasse. In other words, if there's a part of the MOU that is not already a term and condition of employment under Florida law, it's not susceptible to the impasse procedure. That point is clarified in the attachment the Times education blog noted was part of many counties' documentation.
The Broward side agreement in its entirety:
Any items relating to the RTTT Application or Plan that are unsuccessfully negotiated between the parties specifically for the purpose of applying for or receiving the RTTT grant award will not be subject to the impasse procedures set forth in Chapter 447.
Can someone explain to me why this is any different from the state MOU? But there's a second issue that Ed Week's Michele McNeil discussed: "these side deals also say that any changes successfully negotiated because of Race to the Top will expire once the funding does," and refers to the Hernando County MOU. But on p. 4 of the state MOU, Part IV explicitly states that the state MOU expires "upon the expiration of the grant project period, or upon mutual agreement of the parties, whichever occurs first."
The question one might logically ask is why some counties and locals felt they needed extra language. The FEA had a long weekend discussion with state leaders and local leaders about the state RTTT application this time around, and from news coverage it looks like FEA President Andy Ford was strongly encouraging locals to sign on. The reason why was pretty clear: he had had a seat at the table in the task force Charlie Crist set up in the week after Crist vetoed SB 6. When you've had a hand in crafting changes, you've got a stake in success. In addition, the additional language had taken care of one of the legal concerns of FEA bargaining-support staff, because the MOU from the first application in Florida looked like it might give school boards the ability to impose contracts on matters beyond what is currently in state bargaining law. Unlike in many northern states, Florida school boards have the authority to impose contract terms under impasse for a the duration of a fiscal year, but only on mandatory terms and conditions of employment as defined in Florida law.
In January, FEA had cautioned locals not to sign the MOU, and it crafted language for the few locals who wanted to sign (including one large county, Hillsborough). The language FEA crafted for the locals in the first RTTT round? It specifically exempted issues from impasse when the issues were not already in state law. (I don't have the exact wording in front of me, but I am sure an intrepid reporter could ask the Hillsborough press rep for it.) In that case, it's clear that the local MOUs created legal conditions different from what would have been the case with a signed state MOU and no local MOU. So when similar language appeared in the state language, why did some local teachers unions sign essentially redundant local MOUs? Let's just say a generous level of suspicion about the process.
The greatest problem with this coverage of the county-specific MOUs is that it's a distraction from serious issues of reform implementation with RTTT. The issues Matus and McNeil have raised in the context of local MOUs exist with the state MOU. But instead of focusing on the substance, the reporters are focusing on the process issue. It's a legitimate question to ask what the right balance is in collective bargaining on the scope of bargaining, on the relative power of the parties, and on state law that can essentially dictate terms and conditions of employment outside bargaining. In a state like New York, bargaining authority leans more towards unions than in Florida, and likewise state law. Northern states are the ones to have seniority-preference laws that trump the bargaining process, and Florida has had several statutes trying to mandate all sorts of things unions would be very unlikely to agree to in local collective bargaining.
It's also a legitimate question to ask about the commitment of parties to reform after the money runs out. That is one of the critical questions with the DC teachers contract: what happens if/when the billionaires pull out? The billionaires' support of DC along with RTTT present a theory of action all about inertia: if we can just budge districts away from current practices, we'll accomplish long-term structural changes. In contrast, Denver's ProComp was in the context of a permanent funding stream and a political deal with voters: give us the money permanently, and there is a permanent change in compensation practices.
Those issues are still out there, and they're out there whether or not a particular state has an MOU like Florida's. I understand why this reporting on process exists, especially in a rush to print news, but am disappointed that two good reporters have perseverated on an apparent process issue without checking the details of their assumptions (i.e., whether the local so-called "side deals" are substantively different from the state MOU).
Disclosure: I am a former member of the FEA governing board. (I have not corresponded with elected FEA leaders about the reporting on this story, but I want to be open about my former position within my state affiliate.)
Update (9 am EDT): After I posted this earlier in the morning, Valerie Strauss published an entry on the topic in the Washington Post blog she writes, largely repeating what the Times had said. I also corresponded in the last hour with one reporter interested in the story, and one of the empirical questions is whether the local MOUs in Florida are more like Broward (short and redundant) or more like Hernando (which was much longer and with elements McNeil discussed in her blog entry yesterday afternoon). There's also a broader question about state administrative authority. Suppose a superintendent of a district in any state receiving RTTT funds decides she or he isn't going to follow one of the requirements. She or he just didn't put it in writing. Does the state's obligation to eliminate participation and cut off funding for that district change? As I said earlier this morning, the broader and more interesting questions are not really about local MOUs.
June 2, 2010
Quips on Race to the Top and Common Standards
From late morning until a few minutes ago, I've spent the day under a cloud of variously-intensive headache pain. I'm free of it but also exhausted, so in the zeitgeist of evidence-free punditry about RTTT and Common Standards, here are some thoughts:
- If my memory and reading are correct, none of the national press outside Florida noted the collaboration involving the Florida Education Association in the state's RTTT2 application until... there was a chance to criticize the FEA. Have national ed reporters been captured this spring by a particular narrative frame on unions? For Lesli Maxwell and others: if you describe everything unions do vis-a-vis RTTT as explicitly or implicitly obstructionist, how can you can distinguish the good actors from the bad? (Disclosure: I'm a former member of the FEA governance board and a VP of a higher-ed local affiliated with FEA.)
- There is a point to criticism by Rick Hess and others that RTTT required state buy-in to the Common Standards in math and reading one day before they were finalized, effectively creating a cheap zipper clause in the application. At least it's not requiring states to buy in to Texas-approved textbooks. Texas's Board of Education would not have liked the idea of Lincoln's second inaugural as one of the English/Language Arts required texts without balancing Lincoln with Jefferson Davis.
- And speaking of copouts, at least give credit to Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell for harkening to Virginia's own curriculum standards as an excuse for not putting in a RTTT2 application. He can think on his feet faster than some other governors I know, or his own attorney general. At least until a sharp reporter asks the governor to repeat a single line in the Standards of Learning he's so proud of.
- Notice that since Sarah Palin's resignation as governor, Alaska has returned to its status as one of the states you put in a map inset or use to miniaturize Texas? Texas and Alaska are the only two states that outright refused to participate in the Common Standards project. They also have mutually exclusive cuisine: you can't get moose or wolves in Texas, and you can't find armadillos or liberals in Alaska.
After hearing some of these, a family member said, "Between that and your sinus headache, please don't breathe on me." More serious thoughts as soon as I can find them.
Update: mea culpa on misidentifying the Ed Week reporter who wrote about Florida yesterday. The attribution should have been and now is Lesli Maxwell.
June 1, 2010
The value of college II
An offhand reference I made last week to Lisa Delpit is nagging at me this evening. It's the part of Other People's Children (1995) where she talks about the existence of codes of power (what others would call tacit knowledge) and how one of the jobs of good schools should be to lay those bare, damn the accusation of selling out to an instrumental view of schooling. Her argument is that middle-class parents and educators too often talk in a Romantic discourse about schooling, ignoring how advantaged parents teach a great deal about the codes of power explicitly and how unfair it is if you hide some of the secrets of power from poor children. When I began teaching at USF, Delpit's book had been published recently, and I used it for several years. It never failed to stimulate healthy debate, especially since the majority of my undergraduate students are usually of the temperament and philosophy Delpit was trying to discomfit.
While her argument was more about primary and secondary education, a great deal of it could apply to college, yeah, even to junior faculty. Earlier in the spring, SUNY Buffalo sociologist Lois Weis visited USF, thanks to the Alliance for Applied Research in Education and Anthropology (Kathy Borman's group in the anthropology department here), and one of her talks briefly referred to Delpit as a jumping-off point to a realistic discussion of what research-heavy universities are looking for in faculty. You think I was unrealistic in urging assistant professors to wait until they're tenured before sinking a lot of time into experimental forms of scholarship? Go listen to Weis; I saw at least one colleague looking to apply for promotion to full absorb every word, and I thought that was wise. Weis's talk was unabashedly instrumentalist: if there's a game to be played in academe, let's not pretend it doesn't exist, and let's make sure that the people we care about can play the game with a full understanding of the rules.
Beneath these arguments is a realistic assessment of how schools combine instrumentalism and the potential for change. Delpit doesn't worry too much that children of color will sell out; let's give them the skills to succeed, and while some may want to sell out, we'll probably learn a great deal about how many won't. Weis didn't talk about that much in the hour-long presentation, but given the type of work she does, I don't think she's on the side of getting a bunch of sociology grad students to join Wall Street. Being successful as academics mean they can make arguments for a better society in general.
One of my friends and longtime colleagues talks about the time John Hope Franklin visited USF many years ago and when asked about radical change in society, Franklin reportedly said, "Go to the library!" What he meant, or what my friend drew from what he meant, was that the textbooks reach the next generation, but to be in the textbooks, you've got to publish research that's read and influences those who write textbooks. And to publish research, you've got to go to the library. It's a conventional view of academic research coming from one of the great African American intellectuals of the 20th century, someone who grew up in Oklahoma, went to college in Nashville in the 1930s, was denied opportunities in WW2 because of race, helped Thurgood Marshall prepare cases in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and stood by his association with W.E.B. Du Bois in the middle of anti-Communist hysteria as he was ascending the academic ladder. Of course, you might say that it's easy to take that view if you're John Hope Franklin, but I suspect it was not easy to be John Hope Franklin, at least not before the 1970s.
The point of all this is that schools simultaneously serve as a vehicle for hoarding privilege and also for breaking it down. The first part is going to exist not because schools exist but because those who currently have privilege are going to use whatever institutions exist to maintain that privilege. So Romantic notions aside, you don't get a choice in that fact, in any society with formal schooling. The choice is whether we take the tools that currently exist and make those tools available to people broadly. When I first saw a link to the May 16 New York Times article on Vedder's and Murray's anti-access view on college, my thought was that Vedder and Murray were arguing that poor families should give up half the tools at their disposal for improving their lives. Are college degrees sometimes used as credentials without reference to what graduates learn? Sure, but you don't eliminate the use of credentials by refusing to gain one. Are college programs sometimes light on substance or disconnected from the job you might get within two or three years? Sure, but you get to keep what you learn for the rest of your life, not just the job you get in the next few years.
And is formal schooling sometimes mind-numbing, discouraging, depressing, oppressive, disillusioning, lock-sync, and whatever other term you want to call lit? Sure, and that's a consequence of a structured curriculum that also provides millions of children with access to the life of the mind. If you've got the resources and the background to teach your children at home.... hmmn, where might you have gotten it? ... sure, you can be a successful homeschooling parent. Of course, if you're a homeschooling parent, you might well use a prepackaged curriculum that makes your kid's education fairly close to the structured system that you just called mind-numbing, discouraging, depressing, ... well, you get it. There are many, many ways in which formal schooling can improve, and there many ways in which schools carry a political burden that is unreasonable. But that's no reason to avoid or fail to use the instrumental value of schooling as formal schooling. First let's graduate the next John Hope Franklin, and Franklin's readers, and we can also worry about the tortured, contradictory nature of higher education.
May 25, 2010
"...and thereby to secure a more arbitrary and unlimited authority"
Yesterday afternoon (at least afternoon in California, where the radio station operates), Sara Goldrick-Rab and Richard Vedder debated who should attend college on KPCC's Patt Morrison Show. I am disappointed but not too surprised that Vedder skipped over who he generally thinks are the types of people who don't benefit from college: other people's children. (Amy Slaton made a similar point in this morning's IHE column: "These two assertions [of the not-everyone-should-aspire-to-college crowd], the first based on very selective logic and the second baldly elitist, become particularly nasty in tandem, making the college aspirations of minority or poorer Americans seem positively uppity.") Let me step away for a day from the question of who should attend college today and see how that logic would have been applied in the past--discouraging formal schooling for those who would not necessarily finish a certain level and for whom there wasn't an economic payoff.
To put it bluntly, that logic would have prevented the coeducation of primary schooling in the nineteenth-century North. As David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot explain in Learning Together, the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a quiet revolution in formal education, from schooling being the domain of boys and men to coeducation in the first few years of schooling (which was generally what was available for most children in the North). There had been some colonial examples historians can identify of coeducation and women teachers outside dame schools, but they're the clear minority of experiences. When Benjamin Rush helped John Poor obtain a state charter for the Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia in the early 1790s, he was using his influence to break down existing barriers. Five years before, he had spoken at the new school, and the written report of his remarks starts with a justification for the school that (at least to me) looks to men as the audience, and only at the end does he start to speak to the students in the audience:
To you, therefore, YOUNG LADIES, an important problem is committed for solution; and that is, whether our present plan of education be a wise one and whether it be calculated to prepare you for the duties of social and domestic life.... I have sometimes been led to ascribe the invention of ridiculous and expensive fashions in female dress entirely to the gentlemen in order to divert the ladies from improving their mindsa nd thereby to secure a more arbitrary and unlimited authority over them. It will be in your power, LADIES, to correct the mistakes and practice of our sex upon these subjects by demonstrating that the female temper can only be governed by reason and that the cultivation of reason in women is alike friendly to the order of nature and to private as well as public happiness. (pp. 91-92)
To us more than 220 years later, this quaint and charming language obviously lacks the fire of Tom Paine and the righteousness of Mary Wollstonecraft, but for all its gentility it is an affirmation of common humanity and educability that Rush and his audience knew could not be taken for granted, even in Quaker-influenced Philadelphia. Tyack and Hansot struggle somewhat with the question of how coeducation could happen without significant public debate, and I struggle with it as well: how much to ascribe to the coeducational experience of dame schools, to early-national ideologies of Republican motherhood, to a practical "I want the girls out of my hair, too" attitude of rural Americans (who often sent children as young as two and three to tag along with older siblings), to the Second Great Awakening, or to the fact that rural apprenticeship was a system of sharing childrearing that included girls as well as boys (if the girls were often distributed to neighbors' houses to help with domestic responsibilities).
Whatever the causes, there are two undeniable facts about the coeducation of primary education in northern states: the expense was not easily justified by the legal or economic role of women at the time, and it had enormous benefits for the entire society for generations to come. I am sure Vedder and others would contest the first claim, but there are plenty of agrarian societies where the majority of work is or has been done by women who have little or no formal schooling. Why do you need to read and write if you're in the fields all day? Just go to a taro-harvester certificate program for a few weeks and get a job! Oh, wait: no community college currently offers a taro-harvester certificate.
More seriously, one could imagine a different history, closer to the history of the South, where coeducation happened much later, incompletely, or not at all. Primary education was an expense for communities, and coeducation was an added expense either for the community or for the parents who paid extra tuition (or private payments to schoolmasters on the side). We know that formal education was a considerable expense in part because even in Massachusetts, communities resisted the creation of high schools until late in the 19th century. The 1860 town vote of Beverly, Massachusetts, to abolish the high school was notable because it was a clear violation of state law (Beverly was one of the towns sued by the legislature earlier because they didn't have a high school) as well as because its public recording of individual votes has bee the subject of two books. Only a relative handful of students could continue to high school, and the majority of voters at that town meeting clearly thought the benefits of high school did not justify the expense. Yet by 1860, most towns in the north had coeducational primary schools, and thousands of parents had been willing to pay extra money (and had been willing to pay it for decades) to get their daughters some education, though the daughters would never be able to repay them in any concrete sense.
Yet despite the lack of immediate calculable returns, the coeducation of primary schooling in the North was one of the smartest social policies for the long term. The education of girls doubled the pool of potential teachers one generation later. Combined with lower fertility over the 19th century, the increased pool of potential teachers dramatically shifted the ratio of children to potential teachers in favor of children and education. Apart from arguments I could make about lower fertility's being a consequence of coeducation, the combination effectively provided a bootstrap for American mass education, making it easier for states to expand formal schooling generation by generation. Some parts of that bootstrap were not what we'd choose today, since it partly depended on restricted employment opportunities for educated women generally and educated men who were not white. But it would not have existed without primary education for girls and without the willingness of parents and communities to spend money that they could have easily not spent.
Part of the case against expanded educational opportunities is a show me what it'll do today argument. That's a narrow reading of the potential of people who don't currently attend college, a narrow reading of the purpose of education, and a narrow reading of the consequences of education. Yes, I think a lot more children from poor families can succeed in college than do currently. Yes, I want the people who pick up my garbage to read Shakespeare and pick out the lying statistician on a witness stand. And, yes, I am confident that there will be positive consequences for expanding college opportunities far into the future, consequences we cannot imagine today and that will dwarf the real costs of expanding those opportunities in the institutions where they will exist.
May 20, 2010
Texas and reality
Despite what I promised a few hours ago, this entry is not about coeducation, but current events in Texas are pushing my thoughts away from the value of college, at least for now. The rolling disaster that is the lame-duck-infested Texas Board of Education is both agonizing and fascinating, or one step above the formerly-creationist Kansas Board of Education (when the majority was in favor of teaching creation myth as part of science). Reading and listening to the more conservative board members leads me to conclude tentatively that while they will not say so explicitly, they really would like a curriculum that is based on a providential understanding of historical cause: America (and Texas) is blessed, and history shows how God has favored us, especially when we have been Godly.
That desire for providential history in public schools is wrong for two reasons. First, public schools in the United States should not be teaching religion as truth. (Teaching about religious beliefs and organizations as an important part of history is different. Teaching about religious beliefs as part of the cultural background for literature, myth, etc. is likewise different and perfectly acceptable.) The majority of the Texas board obviously disagrees with my interpretation of the First Amendment, but there's a second reason to avoid providential explanations of history: it is incompatible with the type of historical argumentation that is professionally acceptable to historians.
There are all sorts of historical explanations, metanarrative structures, and assumptions about human nature that professional historians would find plausible or at least acceptable to discuss as part of historical writings. But history as practiced today is about human nature and observable events, not providential explanations. That's as true of historians who have deeply-held religious views as it is for nonbelievers who write history. We just don't write deus ex machina history.
I know: we've been down this road before with debates over creationism and its close cousins: evolutionary biology is not a religion, and neither is standard history. But there's something that we can learn by thinking about history rather than science: the type of incommensurable perspectives that exist in the evolution/creationism divide is not there just because we're talking about fossils rather than human beings. That's close to the type of distinction that some refer to as mind-independent vs. mind-dependent phenomena. And I understand the appeal of that distinction.
But I have a different way of looking at the detritus of poststructuralism, and perhaps it's because I knew in writing Creating the Dropout that the bit about the construction of dropping out was sloppy in terms of handling the idea of social construction. I was focused on writing the story as detailed as was appropriate in an historical sense: when did "dropout" become the dominant term for adults who didn't have a high school diploma, what was the description that became associated with that, what did the choices at the time foreclose, etc. But as an historian who is generally more focused on the details than the meta-meta-level assumptions, I didn't do much more in talking about the construction of social problems than wave at Hilgartner and Bosk and go about my work. Did I mean that the stereotype associated with the term dropout was one of those paralinguistic structures that foreclosed alternatives, or that would spread and become an overturned irony over time? Was it part of a growing hegemony about the value of education? I apologize to anyone who was disappointed, but I was not up to the meta-para-hypertheoretical work that might have been involved. And no one really called me on that gap: reviewers generally acknowledged the story in the first few chapters and poked holes (some real and some virtual) in other pieces.
That doesn't mean that I am unread in relevant literature. I took my first-year proseminar with Lynn Hunt, and she walked us through Foucault, White, and a number of others who fall in the poststructuralist/deconstructionist canon (irony intended). But the question of whether language in the abstract performs the type of cultural work that some attribute to it paled in comparison with what people actually said about high school attrition in the 1950s, 1960s, and since. Given what Lynn's written since that year in criticizing the extreme forms of historiographical deconstruction, I think I may have made the right choice in how to spend my time, at least when it came to my first major research project.
But there is a larger question here of how to handle the fuzzy and malleable categorizations of (what we think of as) reality. Do we make choices about how to frame reality? Yes, of course, but in a relatively mundane sense of having to make some choice in how we investigate or describe the world. We can't avoid that choice, and for the moment I'll be agnostic on whether investigation is with scientific instruments or textual analysis (or something else), or whether communication is with language, mathematical symbols, or whatnot. Once the choice is made, that creates some structure about how we view reality, and it imposes at least a minimal cost on looking at things in a different way.
At this mundane forced-choice level, I'm essentially arguing that intellectual work is like the policy options for a country choosing whether you drive on the right or left side of the road. If you want most people to get anywhere on the road quickly and safely, you have to make a choice. We can debate whether the choice is political, economic, rational, irrational, etc., but a choice has to be made to get both quickly and safely, and there are consequences that flow from the choice, including signage, standard car equipment, and so forth. Note that this analogy doesn't touch issues such as correspondence with any underlying reality: It would be silly to claim that the choice of left or right has correspondence to Reality or Truth.
Instead, let me focus on the question of whether the choice at one time for the convention of driving on the left forecloses changing the convention, and what's required for such a change. At one level, the choice is mutually exclusive: a country cannot pick both rules and expect anything other than carnage when people drive faster than 5 mph. But at another level, the choice is resource-dependent: it's possible for England to change its rule so everyone drives on the right. It just would be a royal pain in the tuches.
So you can measure the rigidity of a convention in one sense by asking how expensive it would be to change it. Changing the side of a road for driving is expensive but possible. But you could imagine setting a rule that is impossible to change in the defined context. Unless you are driving on the Autobahn, most jurisdictions limit your speed to under the escape velocity of the planet. I don't think we could reverse that and require people to drive on the surface of this planet at greater than 7 miles per second.
Let's move away from driving conventions and back to how we talk about the universe. In both physical sciences and humanities, there are ways of classifying our fields that are nonexclusive and can be mixed; there are categories and ways of describing objects of interest that are exclusive but that can be switched from one to the other with some cost (i.e., exclusive but resource-dependent intellectual choices); and there are some choices that cannot be changed within that context (i.e., exclusive choices that you can't undo in the context you've created). Race, class, gender, disability, national origin, politics, language, etc., are all classification systems that can be mixed in the same context. No big deal there: we may choose to define categories of interest in different ways, but even if you call your categorization by the term class, and I call my different categorization class, we can just say they're different notions of class (or, as Ira Katznelson says in City Trenches, different layers of class). For the mathematically or notationally inclined, we could even index them as Class1, Class2, Class3, etc.
As I wrote at the top of this entry, I think there are exclusive choices that you can't undo in a specific context. If you're an academic historian, your arguments are going to eschew providential explanations of events. You can't undo that and still be in the field of history as I understand it. Regardless of whether the surface disagreements between me and some Texas education board members appear to be political or pedagogical or something else, I think the deep difference is that a number of them truly think public schooling should be teaching providential history or the "intelligent history design" equivalent (i.e., papered over). Again, that does not mean that historians or history teachers have to be agnostic or atheist, just that what they write or teach as historians isn't providential. (My high school history teacher Mr. Knowlton was one such person, a conservative evangelical who taught American history using primary sources and definitely non-providential arguments, though I know from conversations with him outside class that he clearly had providential beliefs outside his professional role.)
What I haven't talked about are examples in history (or other disciplines) of the exclusive but resource-dependent ways of categorizing reality. I'd be tempted to draw from physics (designing experiments to observe electrons as either particles or waves, but not both at the same time), but that's cheap. I will admit that it is late, I am tired, this entry is long as is, and maybe leaving this open-ended will draw interesting comments or enough suspense to keep you reading my blog. But please chime in on comments: am I all wet, on track, and can I be both at the same time without the universe exploding?
Update: The prayer at the start of today's meeting confirms my tentative conclusions about at least the member saying the prayer.
The value of college I
Over the past week, I had been collecting a number of references to recent online discussions of the value of education when the New York Times column by Jacques Steinberg highlighting the views of Richard Vedder and Charles Murray appeared. Claus von Zastrow (among others) has already pointed out that given the fact that the advocates of the "you don't need college" position are highly educated, this reads as an argument that other people's children shouldn't go to college. I sometimes have a bit of fun when Bill Gates talks about the importance of college--"do as I say, not as I do"--but Gates errs on the sides of generosity in terms of what he'd like others to accomplish. Not so Vedder or Murray.
I'm going back over Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology with a finer-toothed comb than when it first came out in 2008, and I'll probably write a number of posts on this topic. Generally, the literature on the value of higher education (or formal schooling more broadly) is not particularly nuanced. It's human capital and a boost to income! No, it's a queueing process! No, it's a confirmation of inherited intelligence! It's a floor wax! It's a dessert topping!
I'll start with an historical perspective, a warning about loose generalizations: let's stop talking about "higher education" in the abstract, as if it's the output of a utility. Colleges and universities are specific institutions, and the value that students receive from them are dependent on context. In the nineteenth century, a number of states and some cities created normal schools, or schools designed to train teachers. But as Chris Ogren and others have pointed out, in addition to the teacher-training function, public normal schools were often the nearest place where anyone could get something beyond rudimentary schooling, so they inevitably became general schools. When normal schools became teachers colleges, you saw the same phenomenon; Lyndon Johnson attended a teachers college because that was where he could go to college, period. To see the history of normal schools and teachers colleges entirely through the lens of teacher education would be historically inaccurate and narrow.
Or, to take another example, the history of vocational education is not just about narrow trade schooling and the denial of educational opportunity through tracking. That's a large part of it (e.g., ), but again, context is everything. Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir point out the disputes between labor and business in the structure of vocational education in Chicago. And both Kathryn Neckerman and Bill Graebner have pointed out that in many northern cities, vocational-technical high schools were one cut above comprehensive high schools, sufficiently so that working-class whites fought to keep African American students out of them. In my archival research for my dissertation and first book, I saw something similar in the Atlanta-area vo-tech school in the early 1960s, where administrators fought to prevent it from being what they perceived might be the dumping ground for area schools. Again, institutional context is important.
The reality is that higher education serves several "functions." Some of that could be considered human capital, but the only way to call all of the value human capital is to make the term meaningless. And plenty of higher (and other) education also helps advantaged families hoard those advantages, but it's far from a hermetic process and far less tilted towards the wealthy than plenty of other areas of life (housing, the labor market, tax codes, health-care access, etc.). And all of this type of analysis is predicated on the ability to identify predictable consequences of education. But that's not true, and the prime example is the coeducation of primary education in 19th century America. That's the topic for the next entry on the value of education.
May 14, 2010
The Thursday's-child research design
This morning's St. Petersburg Times is reporting on a working paper on the Florida class size initiative by Harvard researcher Matthew Chingos. This paper is now available on the PEPG website, and the Times asked me to read it and comment, and there are a few things I can say:
- It's stronger technically than a previous paper by Chingos and West that I commented on recently. As a former editor, I'd guess it's one thorough scrub away from being publishable at a reasonably selective journal.
- It's based on a clever concept, comparing districts and schools that had "far to go" on class size with districts and schools that were very close to the starting mandates and framing the comparison as one of "if you give districts and schools more money, do you get more bang from your buck by mandating that they use that money to lower class size?" That's not the question on the ballot this fall, but it's a reasonable slice given the difficulties of disentangling policy effects. And if you know the "Monday's Child" rhyme, you'll understand why I'm calling this a Thursday's-child research design.
- The paper focuses on grades 4-8, which is an important contribution to the literature because of the focus of much class-size research on primary grades. But that focus comes because grades 4-8 was the policy interval with the most variation in starting points among districts, and so the paper can't tell us about class-size effects at other grades.
- Chingos addressed a number of potential weaknesses in reasonable fashion. There are two weaknesses remaining that struck me on first reading the paper -- the failure to address student migration (both interstate and intrastate) and the failure to consider "contamination" of the design by student experiences with primary-grade class-size reduction. The first can be addressed by some alternate samples, or even identification of students who moved from "control" districts to Thursday's-child districts. But the second is tough to address: while the majority of districts didn't have far to go on grades 4-8 starting in 2004, most of the "control" (or not-far-to-go) districts for grades 4-8 were still "far to go" districts as far as primary grades were concerned, and for intermediate-grade students in the third and later years, their test scores would have reflected experiences with class-size reduction in primary grades.
- There are some interesting variations in tables and effects by specific grade.
As I told reporter Ron Matus yesterday, I'm sure this will be spun out of all proportion to the study because there's little solid research on Florida's class-size mandate, the stakes with the ballot measure to change the mandate are high, and the proponents of changing the mandate are evidently starting well behind the eight-ball with public opinion. So the temptation to exaggerate the findings is high. Jeff Henig would not be surprised.. and speaking of which, congrats to Henig for the AERA award for Spin Cycle! It's highly deserved.
May 2, 2010
The theater of basing a majority of evaluation on test scores
Now that SB 6 is dead, that a governor's task force on RTTT came to a compromise in a single day, and it looks like there is some direction for teacher evaluation in Florida that's acceptable to Florida's K-12 teachers unions, it's time to take stock of the rhetorical stance SB 6 supporters had that a "majority" of a teacher's evaluation had to depend on student test scores. I've seen this pop up in other states, so it's a common rhetorical stance. Let's get a few things off the table first: this is not based on any research, and the supporters have no clearer idea of what "majority of a teacher's evaluation" might mean than supporters of the "65% solution" had any clue what spending money in a classroom meant. For that matter, neither did I as a skeptic (about either proposal).
So the "majority on test scores" stance is political, then. That's fine as a minimal statement; almost all decisions about pay structures are political in a broad sense rather than based on research, and to some extent they're reactive. Teacher pay scales became standardized to protect bureaucratic structures from (and sometimes in response to) accusations of corruption, and the single salary schedule is a response historically to gross pay inequity.
I'll go further: I don't think there's a way to avoid political values embedded in pay structures. Once you involve public money and a service most people connect with citizenship (education), you've got politics, however well structured and justified by reference to neutral statements of organizational need. On that level, performance pay is justifiable from the sense of satisfying public perceptions about how teachers should be paid. That was explicit in Denver's ProComp plan: the voters approved higher taxes in return for a performance-pay structure.
The problem with the "majority based on test score" position is twofold. One is the obvious one: it's divisive, and many parents and other community members are offended by the idea. Here, Diane Ravitch spoke for millions when she criticized SB 6. But there's another problem: it obscures the evaluation process rather than clarifying it. By reference to an implied point-based system, it fails to focus on what matters in a teacher evaluation system in terms of either an algorithm or underlying concepts.
I've written a bit about point-based systems, and because the focus of my paper was elsewhere, I didn't have a chance to talk about the limit of point-based scoring systems: it matters not where you can earn points but where you might lose points. I learned this in high school when I was a debater: individual raters have an implied comfortable range for scores, and it's the range of scores that matters, not the total number of points available in different categories. If raters have different effective ceilings as well as ranges (i.e., it is impossible for people to earn perfect scores with some raters, while others commonly hand out full marks), then the raters with the largest ranges of scores exert more power over final results than raters who have a very narrow range.
Similarly, components of any point-based system will have differential impact on final results when they have broader ranges in practice regardless of the proportion of the scale that derives from individual components. Imagine a teacher evaluation system with 100 points. Suppose 60 points comes from student test scores, and the range is restricted for most teachers to between 52 and 60 points. On the other hand, suppose 30 points in this hypothetical evaluation comes from direct observation, and the range of scores is between 10 and 30 (and more than a handful of teachers may earn the low score). Which component has the greatest influence on final results? It's the 30-point direct-observation component in this thought experiment, because in this hypothetical example teachers can lose more than twice the number of points there than through student test scores.
But the "majority of evaluation" rhetoric does more than obscure the real power in point-based systems: it obscures the question of what teachers are responsible for. "Outcomes!" says the supporter. Right, I say: that doesn't say a darned thing about the types of outcomes that will make the difference in evaluation. In Florida, Louisiana, and other states where people have pushed a majority from test scores approach, the push has been to create a mandate and defer the implementation to a regulatory process. That's a nice illusionist's trick if you can get away with it, but the process of implementation always mediates absolutist mandates, and then the legislature is giving up what mediates the test scores.
There are three ways I can see that test scores' impact on evaluations would be mediated in any system (and yes, I'm including SB 6 here): ad hoc (i.e., caprice), by reference to student disadvantage (i.e., blame-shifting), or by reference to teacher behaviors in classrooms (i.e., standards of practice). Without any legislative guidance, ad hoc and capricious mediation is likely (probably by the temperament and philosophy of the administrator with the greatest authority over evaluation). More destructive than ad hoc mediation would be blame-shifting: a teacher would be held blameless if someone else/something else (poverty, language, presumed parental neglect, etc.) can be blamed instead. Bad, bad idea.
Of the three options that come to mind tonight, mediating test scores by professional standards of practice seems the most productive. But then that raises the central question: if the use of test scores is inevitably subject to mediation, and the best choice for that mediation is through professional standards of practice, why not base evaluation on professional standards of practice to begin with--for example, to let an evaluation that documents effective practice create the rebuttal presumption of effectiveness?
The answer here is two-fold: one is that there is no agreed-upon standards of practice for teaching more generally, other than by crude and obvious standards (don't beat your students) or by reference to effects (keep your students' attention). The other explanation is that even if there were agreed-upon standards of practice, the process would be sufficiently messy as to irritate the sensibilities of those who advocate the putatively cleaner "majority from test score" approach.
The result is that instead of getting a messy but constructive system based on developing standards of practice, any such system that putatively bases the majority of a teacher's evaluation on test score is going to get ad hoc or blame-shifting mediation through the back door.
Update: Linda Perlstein noticed the 50% rhetoric and should get credit for the pattern recognition. Consultants' advice? Hmmn... looks like an interlocking-directorate phenomenon (no conspiracy needed).
April 25, 2010
Veritas? Caveat!
There's a new paper by Harvard researchers Matthew Chingos and Martin West on what ex-Florida teachers make, and relationships between post-teaching income and during-teaching value-added measures that I'm sure some will tout as proof that SB 6 and any like performance-pay plans are desperately needed. Err, no. Fortunately, Chingos and West do not make that argument, but they also don't tell the reader how many student scores were excluded from their rules that would tend to eliminate special education service recipients, nor how they justified combining value-added measures across multiple grade levels... nor why they used a linear measure of age in both the labor-participation propensity measure and income when the labor-participation (and thus income) effects of age for reproductive-aged women are not going to be linear.
Then there's R2 for the key non-public-school labor market equation: .06 (see the last column in Tables 4-6 on pp. 39-41 of the MS). This is an underwhelming amount of variance the models explain.
Unfortunately, the breathless reporting of this study by Joanne Jacobs does not pay attention to these details.
April 22, 2010
Dorn reviews Ravitch
My review of Diane Ravitch's new book is now up at the Education Review website. I should have finished it a few weeks ago, but the fragmentation of my time this spring has interrupted all sorts of usually-short-term projects, such as book reviews.
If there is one benefit to the delay, it was my ability to watch the sales keep racking up while the book climbed several bestseller lists. At one level, I think, "I wish my book on the topic had sold a tenth as many copies!" But that's silly; I'm glad someone was able to meet the clear need for this book in a way that's been rewarded.
Bottom line of the review: read the book. In writing the review, I made the choice to skip much of the contemporary discussions around the book and focus on Ravitch's historical arguments. As usual (with Ravitch), she writes a highly appealing argument, and it's important to look at the claims dispassionately. I should say that I dearly wish she were correct in her claim that Lynne Cheney's attack on the voluntary national history standards in the 1990s was a primary cause of mediocre curriculum standards and our current policy obsession with high stakes testing. At the time (as a new scholar in the field) I was very upset with Cheney's distortions of the record, and at one level it is attractive to see her in the villain's role. But I think it's more complicated.
April 15, 2010
Misinterpretations of Crist's veto, and where to go next
I suspect that a number of observers will spin Charlie Crist's veto of Senate Bill 6 to the point where the representation doesn't come close to reality. By a quirk of timing, I was in Tallahassee today talking with legislators and staffers in the morning. In other words, I was at Ground Veto. Yep: I came, and Charlie caved. No, that would be a post hoc fallacy, even if his veto message used the same word (overreach) that I used to describe the bill. Wait: he used a hyphen (over-reach). Or maybe I don't own the term, and the idea had been floating around the state for the last few weeks, including in newspaper editorials, and it was one of the options available for a governor vetoing the bill. So I can't claim credit as being the person who killed the bill, though I was one of thousands who contacted Crist in the last week.
In the meantime people are spinning this as the Event that Destroyed Florida Education, or the Victory of the Union(s), or the Resuscitation of Crist's Senate Campaign. Maybe one or all of those labels is true, but I doubt more than one is. (To calculate the probabilities, we need to use quantum spin dynamics, a new field that melds political science with nuclear physics.) Whoa, friends, and maybe you should take a step back. Here are the reasons why Crist vetoed the bill:
- Thousands of Floridians from both major parties contacted Crist to urge a veto.
- His sisters who teach probably told him they hated the bill.
- The Republican legislators and former Governor Bush who were pushing the bill had largely sided against him in the primary against Marco Rubio.
- Crist prefers consensual processes.
Crist's veto kills this particular bill, in this form. It does not signal a victory of teachers unions over performance pay, and it does not mean that the Florida Education Association will oppose either performance pay or alternations in the process leading to due-process protections. In fact, if you're on Facebook and "friends" with Andy Ford (he's a nice guy, and the ironic quotation marks are about FB, not Andy), go ahead and see what anti-SB 6 groups he joined... and which he didn't. If you're a reporter, go ahead and talk with Commissioner Smith and ask him to repeat the first thing Ford said at discussions about Race to the Top.
Where do we go from here? It depends largely on whether the FEA executive cabinet will support Andy Ford in negotiating with other stakeholders and politicians, on what the administrator and school board associations push for, and whether the business groups or the Republican sponsors of SB 6 are willing to negotiate in good faith. Here are some obvious questions that don't correspond with any hypothesized litmus tests:
- Can the key parties agree that a performance-pay framework can exist?
- Can the parties agree that a performance-pay framework cannot force budget cuts to current operations?
- Can the parties agree on a performance-pay framework that addresses student outcomes on a "pass a smell test" basis but does not depend on blue-sky assumptions about assessment for students with disabilities, English language learners, and every subject in the curriculum?
- Can the parties agree that teachers should not automatically receive continuing-contract status (with due process protections) without a more serious evaluation than usually exists (i.e., by default after three years regardless of the scope of evaluation)?
- Can the parties agree on the scope of personnel contracts that can be negotiated at the local level?
- Can the parties agree on what due process protections are workable for experienced teachers who have demonstrated effectiveness in the classroom?
- Can the parties agree on what must be part of teacher evaluations and the range of options for those evaluations?
- Can the parties agree on what constitutes a proof of concept for their pet ideas?
Disclosure: I am a 14-year member of the United Faculty of Florida and thus a member of FEA. I am firmly convinced that if you are a Florida teacher and want a future with no performance pay, and if you somehow persuade your local and state leaders to agree with you, you will be at the policy table... as the meal. I am equally convinced that if you are Jeb Bush or one of his close friends and want a future with no job security for teachers beyond a single year, you will succeed... in turning a great number of people who would otherwise agree with you into political enemies. And if you think that there can either be a future in state education policy with no high-stakes tests or a future in state education policy where there is a quantified high-stakes test for every subject and grade level... well, I'm not legally licensed to give my opinion of that response.
In other words, many of the questions above have yes as an answer, but only if people who would otherwise hold extreme positions are willing to work on problems rather than positions.
April 14, 2010
Concern trolling about union democracy
Over at Jay Greene's blog, Greg Forster points out that the majority of weighted votes in the last United Federation of Teachers election were not from current classroom teachers. This is corruption! is the implication. Er, no. It's called following the legal bylaws of an organization. I haven't heard Forster call for the reweighting of general-election balloting so that all ages are represented in proportion to their actual population, nor have I heard his call for the abolition of the U.S. Senate, which gives small-population states such as Arkansas power far beyond their relative size, nor any concern from him that in some cities, a single voter controls all of the ballots for school board elections (some people call that mayoral control).
There are potential problems when retirees form the majority of a union's membership, but it's also a problem if retirees who depend on the fulfillment of their pensions have no voice whatsoever in the running of the primary organization defending their pension rights. The weighting in UFT is one of many plausible ways to address the dilemma. From someone who received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, one might expect an analysis based on the existing literature on power in different voting systems, and it is disappointing not to see any evidence of such a perspective in what is essentially catcalling.
How not to reform K-12 teacher tenure, and how to do it right
The blog management system here tells me that I started this entry on April 2, which tells you something about the intervening 12 days. We're on the edge of a potential governor's veto of Senate Bill 6 in Florida. As I've written before, SB 6 takes several issues and marches several bridges too far. Most of the concerns with the bill have been covered extensively in print media, and the protests have been covered in both print and broadcast media. I'm going to poke away at a few quirks below as an illustration of the type of problems that are both important and also ignored in the larger discussion and then discuss an example of an alternative policy that would accomplish the bill sponsors' goals more effectively than what the bill says.
Quirk the first: Senate Bill 6 could threaten Florida's eligibility for federal aid on the maintenance-of-effort (MOE) requirement for ESEA. The bill forces districts to sequester 5% of the state financial package of operating revenues for two years in a way that is explicitly not in the classroom. The federal government granted a waiver from MOE for stimulus funds, but there are still requirements, and though the ARRA funds disappear the day before the 5% sequestration rule exists, there are still MOE requirements in ESEA.
Quirk the second: Senate Bill 6 forces districts to spend money to develop end of course exams that Senate Bill 4 refused to schedule because ... er ... the state doesn't have money. If you've been following Paul Cottle's blog, you'll know he's not happy that the Senate removed a provision from SB 4 that would have set a date certain for EOC exams in chemistry and physics. The explanation given in the senate is that the creation of state-level EOC exams should wait until there's money. But ... a provision of SB 6 forces districts to spend money developing appropriate assessments in every single grade and subject for which there is not currently a test, such as ... high school chemistry and physics. By the same deadline that was removed in SB 4. So the state doesn't have money certain for a state assessment, but districts do? And 67 school districts will be more efficient in creating 67 different EOC exams than the state?
These issues don't touch on the larger questions about the constitutionality of SB 6, but they still boggle the mind a bit, since failure to pay attention to MOE requirements could threaten hundreds of millions of dollars for education Florida receives from the federal government.
Now, let me answer the obvious question in response to my argument that SB 6 overreaches, starting with the question of due process for experienced teachers. How else could a state address the question of job security and due process? Let's take the issue of probationary status (i.e., can be fired at any time), one-year contracts (where a teacher can be released without cause at the end of any year), and permanent status (where the burden shifts to the employer to show cause for termination). A number of states have taken different approaches, from extending the probationary period to requiring a certain number of strong evaluations before a teacher shifts from probationary to permanent status. One could also imagine a hybrid of a year or two of probationary status and then a shift to one-year contracts until a teacher has met certain benchmarks of effectiveness.
But why is it in the public interest for teachers to have some job security beyond a one-year contract (the maximum that would be allowed under SB 6)? Consider high school biology teachers first: Do you want biology teachers willing to talk about evolution in a district that is socially conservative and where the school board majority often is opposed to teaching evolution? Do you want teachers willing to give poor grades to students who don't do the work, including if the students are children of school board members (as the father of St. Pete Times columnist Robyn Blumner was able to do with job security)?
Due-process protections provide protection against capricious or malicious disciplinary and termination decisions. There is nothing in Florida law or union contracts that provide for "employment for life," which is what Senator John Thrasher claimed on a public radio program. Florida provides for a 90-day correction period for teachers found to be ineffective, after which a school board can fire the teacher. Neither Florida's collective bargaining agreements nor state law require months and months of legal proceedings to fire an ineffective experienced teacher.
But let's assume that there is something inside the black box of administrative decision-making that somehow doesn't work with the 90-day correction period for teachers with professional service contracts. There are a number of other options that's far removed from SB 6, including a rolling multi-year contract... say a three-year contract where a satisfactory rating in the first year of the contract means that a teacher has a fresh three-year contract in the following year... or an effective teacher is essentially always in the first year of a three-year contract.
All of these are options that address either the probationary period or the question of job security after a probationary period. It seems that SB 6 could lead to less honest evaluations by administrators than the options I have laid out, because administrators would want most of their teachers to feel secure in their jobs, especially in a school where jobs are hard to fill. This would undermine the claimed intent of SB 6's sponsors.
If Governor Crist vetoes SB 6, I will be relieved, and there will be a chance for a more inclusive discussion that solves existing problems rather than creates new ones.
April 4, 2010
Brief note on iPad: bye, Flash!
The iPad is definitely awkward in some respects. I am currently typing this entry on a software keyboard, which is a bit clunky in large part because I am a touch typist. But this will definitely take off, and the primary result is that all of the educational sites built on Flash are inaccessible. So-called standards-compliant web design will have its revenge! (This refers to XHMTL standards, not curriculum standards.)
April 2, 2010
Florida House budget wants public employees to delay retirement
This one's an odd cut-your-nose-to-spite-your-face maneuver: the budget that the Florida House passed yesterday cuts health subsidies to retirees because legislative leaders are desperate to balance the budget without raising taxes, but the House budget maintains complete state support of premiums for about 27,000 state employees, including state legislators. (Disclosure: I'm not among those who get premiums completely paid.)
Let's think this through a bit: suppose you're 65 and are thinking about retiring. Before this year, if you retired you'd be eligible to have a health-care subsidy. If the House budget provision on those items remain, you'd probably think twice about retiring, because by staying at work you're covered for what Medicare doesn't help with, and your salary pays the premium, but if you retire you don't have a health-care subsidy.
Now let's suppose you're also one of the 27,000 employees whose premiums come out of your employer. If you stay at work you don't pay for health care premiums. If you quit, you don't get any health-care subsidy.
This reverse the usual incentives that pensions set up to encourage retirement: you lose some income, but you gain some security. The health-care subsidy is not a significant amount of money over one's entire lifetime, but it's something that older public employees had been counting on, and the loss of the anticipated benefit might tip the balance for some to staying in their for a few extra years. Is this what Florida legislative leaders want? Have they asked anyone to estimate the long-term costs of delaying retirement for those who might change their mind based on the health-care subsidy?
April 1, 2010
Hilda Turner and why teachers are skeptical of John Thrasher's motives
In Tampa, there is a five-year-old elementary school named after the late Hilda Turner. The students attending Turner Elementary may not know why it's named after her, or who she was. Most legislators in the capitol probably don't know about her case against the all-white Hillsborough school board in the early 1940s and why the long history of politicized teacher evaluations give Florida teachers reasons to believe that Senator John Thrasher's bill is an attack on them.
But my friend and colleague Barbara Shircliffe knows, and she reminded me of the case today. She published a history of Tampa's desegregation case a few years ago (The Best of That World), and she's currently researching the history of teacher desegregation in the South. In the early 1940s, teachers across the South faced a split between what the federal courts had decreed and what the reality on the ground was. In 1940, Melvin Alston had won a lawsuit against the Norfolk, Virginia, schools for having separate salary schedules for white and black teachers, because the (federal 4th Circuit) court had ruled that unequal salaries were wrong. (In the decision linked above is the salary schedule that shows high school teachers were paid more than elementary teachers, men in high schools were paid more than women teaching in high school, and white teachers were paid more than black teachers.)
But most school systems didn't change anything until they were sued, and it took quite a spine for a teacher to take on her or his employer. Maybe the teaching shortage of WW2 made a difference. Certainly the fact that black soldiers were bleeding for their country played a role in growing militance (including the "Double V" campaign of the Pittsburgh Courier). Or maybe this sham of an evaluation for Hilda Turner in 1942 kicked her into action (Turner v. Board of Public Instruction, reference exhibit 3). The case quickly became messy and ugly, and I'm going to leave the story of that for my colleague's next book. But this wasn't isolated. Black teachers in Florida were treated unfairly and unequally for decades, often by their white colleagues. It probably wasn't until the mid- and late-1960s that teachers of all races in Florida started working together to address teaching conditions in the schools.
Nor were the types of spurious judgments in that evaluation uncommon. The fact that an annual evaluation was one of the lawsuit exhibits may be a legal quirk (since it was damning evidence of how the system treated black educators). But it also illustrates the controlling way that systems treated all teachers, and that continued for decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, they were subject to attacks by the state's anticommunist legislative committee, run by Horace Johns, which eventually turned to outing gay teachers. (If I remember correctly, current U.S. Rep. Bill Young was a member of that committee when he was a state legislator starting out in politics.) Teachers in general were attacked in 1968 for striking, but gay teachers were the target of another attack in the 1970s by Anita Bryant. In the following decade the state imposed a generic evaluation instrument (the Florida Performance Measurement System), designed before the recognition that there was subject-specific expertise in teaching. And all of that came before the Sunshine State Standards in the mid-1990s, Jeb Bush's A+ accountability program, vouchers, No Child Left Behind, the Bush Recession of 2008, and finally John Thrasher's bill. I can point to a number of events or policies that supported teachers, but the background has always been a recent history of blaming and judging teachers.
Because there has never been a sufficiently well-grounded system of teacher evaluation, the experience of teachers on the ground has been ineffective, useless evaluations... or worse. And what teachers see in Senator Thrasher's bill is the "worse" category. Combined with the elimination of tenure (a topic for another entry), the mandate of a formulaic approach to teacher evaluation is too much for many teachers to swallow. This is not the result of hyperbole on the part of the Florida Education Association. This is the result of Florida's history of education.
(For more on the local context of Turner's actions, see Doris Weatherford's history of women in Tampa, pp. 287-288.)
March 30, 2010
Race to the Top winners and losers
So officially, Delaware and Tennessee won (note, Andy Smarick: I spelled both states and your name correctly). But in the side competition (including brackets and sidebar bets), who won and lost?
Those who predicted political decision-making were wrong. I know Mike Petrilli has wondered if politics has intervened in the reviewing process (and thought the secrecy of reviewer identity was political suicide). When New York, Ohio, and Illinois are frozen out, it's hard to spin the choice of Delaware and Tennessee as political (though Petrilli takes a half-hearted stab at it). Addendum: Rick Hess takes a firmer stab at it, though I think you could take any possible RttT awardee list and fabricate a post hoc "this was all politics" explanation.
Those who predicted a "low bar" in getting money were wrong. In the end, when Arne Duncan said USDOE would give the money to a small number of states, he meant it.
Those who predicted "reforminess" as the secret criterion were wrong. All the cool kids were assuming Florida and Louisiana would win because, well, they're the fair-haired boys this year. Wrong! While stakeholder buy-in (or the lack thereof by Florida's unions) was part of the reason for Florida's four-place finish, there were other ways Florida's application lost points, and Michelle Rhee's application for DC fell at the bottom of the Tweet 16.
Here's who won in the side competition: the reviewers. At least at first reading, the reviewers' comments on Florida's application were serious in comparing the application to the scoring guidelines. I'm sure you can quibble with scores here and there, but I think any sane journal editor might be tempted to kill to have this quality of effort from manuscript referees.
Especially in Florida, there's a great deal of second-guessing and spinning after the announcement of results. I'm tempted to pitch in, but I'll decline, at least for today.
March 25, 2010
Florida House committee chair calls security?
Wow: Florida House PreK-12 policy committee chair Rep. Anitere Flores apparently threatened to call in security when a Democratic representative complained that his amendments were not being heard or voted on, and at the end of the committee a group of Capitol security guards stood at the front of the room, between the audience/witnesses and the committee members and staff. This apparently after several hours of mostly hostile testimony on the House equivalent of Senate Bill 6.
There's no claim in the Miami Herald blog report (linked above) that the audience was threatening any of the committee members, so I'm curious why the guards were there. spent a few minutes watching passionate, civil testimony earlier today over the streaming connection from Tallahassee. The Florida Education Association had declared this a Rally in Tally Day (or Virtual Rally in Tally Day) and asked all teachers in Florida to wear red to protest Senate Bill 6, attacks on retirement funds, and budget cuts. Over the video feed, I saw several members of the audience wearing red shirts, and my guess is that Rep. Flores has had little experience with running meetings when substantial audiences didn't like what her side of the meeting was doing.
I understand that last year, several thousand community members confronted Senator Mike Haridopolos in a town-hall meeting over expected budget cuts. I have no clue what the political consequences of Senate Bill 6 might be, but I have heard from a number of K-12 teachers that they see the bill (along with proposed changes to the state's retirement system) as a direct attack on them.
In better news, bipartisan bill passes Florida Senate reforming high school testing
In addition to Senate Bill 6, the Senate also passed an amended form of Senate Bill 4, which moves the state's high school testing program away from comprehensive exams in 10th and 11th grade and towards end-of-course (EOC) exams. Senators from both parties finally "get it" that the so-called comprehensive science exam was counterproductive, and a well-implemented EOC exam system is significantly better than the one-size-fits-none eleventh-grade test. But that doesn't mean the bill is perfect: FSU physics professor Paul Cottle has been diligent in explaining his concerns with dilatory clauses placed in the bill that eliminate any deadlines for physical-science exams.
It's important to keep in mind that only part of the purpose of these exams is to encourage students to go into STEM fields, though it's important to raise the floor of science courses students take in part to reduce inequalities in access to lab-based courses. The purpose of pushing all students to take more math and science courses is because they are going to be adults when they leave, citizens who vote on issues where they should be informed. I want elementary-school teachers to have stronger math and science backgrounds, and so should you. I'd like someone in charge of a venture fund or pension fund to be able to recognize fraudulent science claims without wasting other people's money. And when my oldest nephew finishes his graduate program in astrophysics, I want a ready source of groupies fanatics educated readers willing to pay oodles of money for listen to him to talk about microwave inferometers and the early universe.
Okay, maybe the last isn't a public purpose. But the rest is. We all benefit when high school students have a well-rounded academic education not only in "skills" such as reading and arithmetic but in history, literature, math, and science, and moving from the FCAT to EOC exams is the right step.
Florida Senate overreaches on changes to regulation of teaching
Yesterday, the Florida Senate voted for Senate Bill 6, which would dramatically change the structure of teacher evaluation, contracts, pay, and licensure in the state. A few amendments were approved on the floor of the senate, but only three appear substantive, and the largest changes happened in committee, in part to address concerns about constitutionality for the initial bill.
As the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss has, most observers have focused on the evaluation, pay, and contract issues, and that's because the intent of the bill is to elliminate any form of tenure, to reorient evaluation around student test scores, and to eliminate the ability of school boards to pay teachers in part based on experience. For a variety of reasons, legislation such as SB 6 is policy overreaching, and as it has in several other ways in the past decade, Florida has gone far beyond any other state in education policy. In part because it is so hostile towards the Florida Education Association, I suspect that some observers will praise the senate even if this turns out to be horrid policy. That way lies Thrasymachus, and it's not pretty.
SB 6 is overreaching. Instead of reducing the protections of tenure, it eliminates all meaningful due process related to job security. Instead of mandating that student outcome data be a part of teacher evaluation, it requires that test scores form the majority of any teacher evaluation system. Instead of moderating the influence of job experience on pay, it completely prohibits any such factor being used.
As a result of this overreaching, school boards are going to be motivated to work with teachers unions on workarounds for most of these issues. For each area where school boards and union locals agree the state has gone too far, they'll figure out another way to provide for some job security, to moderate the effect of test scores on evaluations, or to create a legally defensible proxy for experience in salary structures and call it performance-based pay. It took me about 10 minutes to come up with a few mechanisms for these issues, and I'm not nearly as clever as highly-motivated union officials and superintendents. But as a result, you're going to see highly variable treatment of teachers across the state, which I don't think is the intent of legislators.
There is only one area where the state has an undisputed right to regulate teaching, either in Florida or elsewhere, and that's in licensure. Regardless of what happens in collective bargaining at the local level, any state can decide who has the right to be licensed as a teacher, and at least at first, the part of SB 6 that is least amenable to mediating influences is in the requirement that teachers demonstrate effectiveness to have their professional certifications renewed. Does that mean that it will be tied closely to test scores? That's what I fear. While there's a substantial academic literature on the problems with using either test scores or growth measures, Daniel Willingham's video remains the clearest short explanation for a lay audience. But I'm sure there's going to be lots of testosterone-laced talk about getting tough on teachers, at least until the State Board of Education has to decide what proportion of experienced teachers it's going to non-renew licenses for... and wait for things like lawsuits and backlash from parents and districts.
I expect that I might find a few additional nuggets of unworkable details in the bill, but that's the big picture. If the Florida House passes SB 6 without substantial changes, there's going to be a great deal of turmoil in schools over the next few years, and until the questions raised by the bill are settled about local bargaining authority and the use of test scores in teacher evaluation, there's going to be a substantial cost of the bill in terms of instability.
March 23, 2010
The sugar-daddy amendment to SB 6
Note (March 25, 2010): This entry was written on March 23, before the Senate adopted the Thrasher/Crist amendment. For my thoughts about the version that passed the senate on March 24, see my entry describing it as overreaching
.Among the amendments to Florida Senate Bill 6 filed today is a short amendment sponsored by John Thrasher (Jacksonville) and Victor Crist (Tampa) to address a concern I raised Saturday (and I assume others have also raised): As originally filed and then approved by state senate committees, Senate Bill 6 would essentially punish the Hillsborough (Tampa) school system for having won a Gates Foundation grant because the carving out a portion of teacher evaluation for trained observers would reduce the amount accounted for by student outcomes below the statutory minimum in the bill.
So along comes the bill with a possible solution to this individual problem: a school district can apply to the State Board of Education for an exemption if it's constructed in various ways that match Hillsborough's situation... including the first requirement: "Any school district that received a grant of at least $75 million from a private foundation for the purpose of improving the effectiveness of teachers within the school district may seek an annual exemption..."
In other words, only Hillsborough need apply. If you've got a sugar daddy, you're eligible for the exemption. If you don't, even if you're a school system willing to invest your own money in a similar system meeting all the other requirements, you can kiss any exemption goodbye.
March 20, 2010
Would Florida SB 6 criminalize Gates grant to Hillsborough schools?
Note (March 25, 2010): This entry was written on March 20, about an earlier version of Senate Bill 6. Early this week, the bill was modified to allow Hillsborough to seek an exemption; the amendment was crafted so that no other district could apply, even if they replicated Hillsborough's efforts using local funding. For my thoughts about the version that passed the senate on March 24, see my entry describing it as overreaching.
In the past year, supporters of using student test scores to help evaluate teachers have expressed incredulity when some teachers union officials have been opposed to those moves in states such as California. "We're not even talking about having test scores dominate all evaluation!" has been the tone of such comments, "but student achievement should be one of the important factors."
Whether or not you agree with that position, it's intellectually defensible. This month, though, I suspect DFER members and Obama administration officials are going to do their best to avoid writing or speaking about Florida Senate Bill 6, which takes the approach that student test scores should be an absolute criterion for continuing professional licensure, and undefined "learning gains" should "comprise more than 50 percent of the determination of the classroom teacher's performance" (ll. 1197-1198 of the 3/19/10 version), no matter what subject the teacher is responsible for and whether anything like a value-added measure is technically feasible.
This majority-of-evaluation position is essentially what the state department of education wanted districts and locals to sign off on for Race to the Top, and Commissioner Smith's public support of Senate Bill 6's approach is inconsistent with his earlier claims in December and early January that the department would be flexible about how districts and unions could implement the RTTT MOU. As the head of the Florida superintendents association wrote in a letter to the commissioner, "you and your staff have emphasized flexibility in implementing these elements" (Bill Montford to Eric Smith, January 8, 2010).
In fact, Senate Bill 6 is less flexible than the text of the Memorandum of Understanding on the use of student outcome data for teacher evaluation. Here is the relevant MOU paragraph:
(D)(2)(ii)(1). Utilizes the Department-selected teacher-level student growth measure cited in (D)(2)(i) as the primary factor of the teacher and principal evaluation system. Primary is defined as greater than 50% of the evaluation. However, an LEA that completed renegotiation of its collective bargaining agreement between July 1, 2009, and December 1, 2009, for the purpose of determining a weight for student growth as the primary component of its teacher and principal evaluations, is eligible for this grant as long as the student growth component is at least 40% and is greater than any other single component of the evaluation.
The second sentence beginning with However appears to be framed specifically to allow Hillsborough County to participate; Hillsborough and its teachers union won one of the Gates Foundation multimillion-dollar grants in the fall, and one of the provisions of the grant is to construct teacher evaluation around three components: student data, an administrative review, and observations from a trained classroom instruction evaluator (the last part of the Gates initiative to develop such evaluation expertise). And in the January letter noted above, Montford wrote that all districts should be able to do what Hillsborough and its union had agreed to for the Gates grant.
So what happens if Senate Bill 6 passes? Well, there goes any value of the Gates award in Hillsborough; the arrangement in Hillsborough would violate the law because less than 50% of the teacher evaluation structure will use student outcomes. Is this really what DFER and the Obama administration wants? Teachers union and district take a risky step in a joint commitment; state punishes district.
Keep in mind that SB 6 is a moving target: on Thursday, a state senate committee changed the bill to eliminate constitutionally-dubious provisions in the original that would have forced local school districts to raise taxes if they didn't do what the bill rquired and that would tie half of teacher pay to test scores. And thus far there is no House companion. But the teacher-evaluation and licensure components of SB 6 are based on a fantasy of assessment data and state authority that is unrealistic and is a slap in the face of administrators and teachers who are working at the ground level to develop better teacher evaluation systems.
I can't expect Commissioner Smith to acknowledge openly that his public support of SB 6 is a political calculation that he has no choice if he wants to keep his job. His capitulation is sad, since I like Smith and he's done a considerable amount of work in the background to educate members of the state Board of Education and legislators. But those outside Florida are free to criticize overreaching on teacher evaluation proposals, and this is a chance for them to prove that they are not as absolutist as teacher union activists in California and other states claim. So, is anyone from DFER or the Obama administration willing to speak up against the excesses of SB 6?
March 19, 2010
ESEA reauthorization blueprint, the CliffNotes version
I have several meetings today, but I want to write down my thoughts on Duncan's ESEA reauthorization "blueprint" before I forget them. As I wrote over the weekend, Mike Petrilli is reading the substance of the blueprint correctly; the Obama administration is proposing that federal policy walk back a few steps from NCLB's absolutist mechanisms and disentangle the different issues involved in accountability. Petrilli is also correct in seeing a connection between the administration's ESEA reauthorization proposal and the promises by both Duncan and Russlyn Ali to be more aggressive in the department's Office of Civil Rights (OCR). That's essentially the implicit deal the administration is putting out for review by stakeholders: "We won't force states to label the majority of schools as failing, but we will require states to intervene in the worst 5% of schools in each state, and we will be aggressive in monitoring equity issues in other schools."
At least in theory, this fits with my argument in Accountability Frankenstein that schools have three different types of challenges: the challenge of truly mismanaged schools in crisis, the challenge of inequality, and the challenge of making sure the next generation is smarter and wiser than we are. I argued that NCLB tried to address all of those challenges with the same mechanisms, and it looks like the Obama administration is recognizing that they need different policy approaches: requiring states to identify 5% of schools in crisis, using OCR to address inequality, and pushing for common curriculum standards for the next-generation challenge.
That's not saying that the proposed mechanisms are going to work. I am less worried about using testing to screen for schools in crisis than others, but I agree with Diane Ravitch that educational euthanasia is a simplistic response. That doesn't mean that states should allow schools with deep problems to fester but that both states and the federal government need to be much more humble about their ability to "turn around" schools in crisis or even replace them with putatively brand-new schools. It's the proposed four-option turnaround mandate in the blueprint that bears the most resemblance to NCLB's cookie-cutter interventions, and that's a matter of deep concern for me.
Then there is the effective-teachers piece of the blueprint, which is less bureaucratic than NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" approach and the trigger for NEA's and AFT's critical responses to the blueprints (though I think Andy Rotherham is correct that the Obama administration's pushing of a health-care excise tax, abandonment of the Employee Free Choice Act, and passiveness with regard to NLRB appointments is definitely playing a role). The blueprint is very general with regard to its treatment of teacher effectiveness, and it could be consistent either with something like the Toledo peer-review system and Denver's ProComp, or with the problematic Senate Bill 6 in this year's Florida legislature.
The generally positive response to Duncan's presentations this week (especially from rural-state senator Tom Harkin) suggests that Duncan's hit a number of right notes, at least politically. That's not the same as effective policy, but it's a long way from a 40-something-page document and a law.
March 18, 2010
Constitutional questions on SB 6
Note (March 25, 2010): This entry was written on March 15, about a substantially different version of Senate Bill 6; the obvious constitutional problems were removed by an amendment late in the week. For my thoughts about the version that passed the senate on March 24, see my entry describing it as overreaching.
While the edublogule is chattering on about ESEA's reauthorization blueprint (which Cheryl Sattler and I agree is a misnomer), there's a battle royale in the Florida capital as former state House Speaker and new state Senator John Thrasher pushes S.B. 6, which seeks to take apart existing patterns of teacher certification, pay, and job security.
After reading news coverage of the issue over the first half of March, I think the bill may have some constitutionality problems. I am not a lawyer, but it strikes me that the type of strong-arm tactics that the bill has may run afoul of several provisions of Florida's constitution:
- Separation of powers: The bill delegates a task to the Florida Department of Education that may go beyond the agency's authority -- deciding whether a school district's teacher and administrative pay plan meets the statutory requirements (be performance-based with at least 50% of teacher pay based on test scores, and not use years of service or degrees in calculating pay). The consequence for failure to meet statutory obligations is the removal of 5% of the state's basic funding formula from a district a mandatory local referendum to replace that 5% with higher local property taxes. But with the exception of budgetary provisions tied to local tax rates (mentioned in the Florida constitution), I don't know where the state constitution gives an agency the effective power to direct tax rates at the local level.
- "Control" of local school board vs. "supervision" by Florida Board of Education. S.B. 6 would direct certain actions of local school boards in terms of half of teacher and administrator pay and limits to job security for teachers (in an attempt to eliminate tenure). The question here is whether that goes beyond the legislature's authority in limiting constitutionally-defined powers. In 1998, voters approved a number of amendments, including the replacement of an elected state board of education (comprised of the governor and other statewide elected officials) with an appointed board of education, and the current language in the state constitution says that the state board supervises the state education system. But it also says that local school boards control education at the local level. In previous cases, the Supreme Court has decided that the legislature can carve out pay provisions that are not covered by collective bargaining (distribution of bonuses related to the state's accountability policy), but those are generally at the margins of pay issues. Would S.B. 6 go too far in encroaching on the constitutional powers of school boards to control local systems?
- Right to collective bargaining. The Florida constitution grants public employees the right to collective bargaining, and in the 1970s it took a threat by the court to write the rules before the legislature finally wrote a collective-bargaining statute. Does S.B. 6 violate the collective-bargaining rights of Florida teachers? I suspect that the weakest provision of S.B. 6 in terms of the constitution is an attempt by S.B. 6 to determine half of teachers' base pay; that's far more than the marginal one-time payments that has previously been ruled to be outside collective bargaining. I don't know about the attempt to eliminate tenure. The legislature tried to do that a few decades ago, and the provisions were changed but due-process rights of experienced teachers were not eliminated.
I suspect that the strong-arm tactics of S.B. 6 (and the state senate's greasing of the bill's path to the floor) may give school boards an incentive to work with teachers' unions to figure out workarounds if it does pass, and before any legal challenges are resolved. A far less radical bill would be a smaller legal target and be less likely to stimulate backlash by school boards. Later this month or in April we'll see what the House response is to the senate's choice.
Addendum: Obviously, since I am not a lawyer, I am not professionally qualified to predict how any court might rule on that or know offhand what precedents might rule. On the other hand, I suspect it doesn't take a jurist to know that S.B. 6 is heading into unique territory, recognized by the long passages of the Senate staff's bill analysis (beginning on p. 16) devoted to two constitutional issues (one of them collective bargaining). This also says nothing about the merits of any part of S.B. 6 (and there's a lot in S.B. 6 that didn't catch my eye in terms of potential legal issues).
March 14, 2010
What the iPad will and will not be
Last time I wrote about electronic readers, it was before the announcement of the Messiah Tablet iPad. Well, it's Pi Day, and whether or not the circle has been squared, for the first time in my life I've given money to a Steve Jobs company for hardware. As I noted in January, I hate reading PDFs on my laptop, I can't read them comfortably on my Sony Reader, and I really need to read PDFs for my job or kill a lot of trees in the process. The iPad costs about the same as other devices that would do the job, and it'll be far more likely to just do its job. And that's the end of the story, at least as far as my purchase is concerned.
But since there is an enormous amount of myth and hype about tablets/larger readers from both technophiles and technophobes, maybe a little realism is in order. After watching the January 27 unveiling video (and tremendously enjoying the Doritos Canada parody--it shows you how far Lorne Michaels has fallen that something like this didn't appear on Saturday Night Live January 30), I've been thinking about what tablet-sized readers could do and what they cannot do.
First, some genres will do well with little additional effort or reworking of production systems. Comics are likely to be successful on at least one tablet/large reader, as is anything that is already produced for a large-ish page size. Some magazines will survive in this way, and I can easily imagine museums producing electronic catalogues. In general, image-intensive texts will benefit. All of this is easily encompassed within any ebook distribution system, but the more visually luscious books and magazines that will benefit from the iPad and other tablets are also resource-intensive to produce, either by artists or the publisher.
With some tinkering (and yelling and screaming), students will get what they repeatedly complain is lacking in ebooks: easy ways to highlight and annotate texts. The lack of annotation capacity in the EPUB ebook standard is a fixable problem, since EPUB uses xml. The ability to share annotations would be even better. I've written about my use of Diigo in teaching, but that's a workaround, and it's awkward every year that passes, with new versions of Diigo and new problems in sharing annotations.
Apart from annotations, it is not clear what interactive systems will work well on a large tablet that doesn't exist already on websites. There are some good tools for interactive exhibits, such as the Omeka package for museums (see its use in the Inventing Europe exhibit) or the WordPress Digress.It plug-in, which allows reader annotation of any paragraph. Omeka is interactive in a navigational sense. Digress.It is interactive with the content, but the paucity of comments on the Digress.It port of Ivan Illich's Deschooling suggests that it is largely theoretical.
Craig Mod's essay this month on the infinite canvas (a la Scott McCloud) is interesting, but I'm not sure how that might translate into reality. There's an interesting alpha-level website called the infinite canvas that is infinite in the horizontal dimension. Its showcase includes a cute short comic by Neil Gaiman and Jouni Koponen, The Day the Saucers Came, but the interaction consists of clicking on forward/back buttons with simple PowerPoint-style slide transitions.
And then there will be plenty of resource-intensive development efforts that create one-off apps, many of which will be interesting pedagogically and culturally but will be one-time-only projects. If I were interested in managing the creation of an interactive project, I'd probably create it on a website using tools that I know the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad could read -- that is, no Flash and no Java. I know there's an App Gold Rush on, but the non-Flash, non-Java, smartly-designed website is going to be useful no matter what's in people's hands or on their laps or desks.
In other words, the iPad has one very obvious tool that's more than an ebook reader (anything that is visually intense), and there will be an obvious extension for tablets and readers in general (annotations), but the rest is not yet clear.
Petrilli nails ESEA reauthorization proposal
After finishing the last entry, I realized I should write something about Friday's USDOE proposal on ESEA reauthorization. But procrastination is sometimes a serendipitous thing, thanks to the Fordham blog: Mike Petrilli's analysis is correct, at least on first approximation. A narrative framework is not statutory language, Duncan's proposal isn't George Miller's, and other Beelzebubs squatting in the filigree, but I had the same general reaction Petrilli did.
I'll write more about ESEA reauthorization later in the week.
Health care reform: how to save lives and money and maybe defuse debates about teaching
Another reason for the House to pass the Senate's health-care bill and both houses to pass a tweak through reconciliation: it would expand existing comparative-effectiveness studies. Currently, massive advertising by pharmaceutics is feeding Americans' existing tendency to ask for huge amounts of wasteful spending on imaging/testing, drugs, and surgery. While NPR has highlighted the cooptation of a research term (osteopenia) in the service of Merck drug sales, it's important to see drug advertising as taking advantage of a broader tendency to overtest and overtreat, not the sole cause. Some other examples: older men take protein-specific antigen (PSA) tests to detect prostate cancer though you'd have to test 1400 men and possibly treat and thus give more than 40 men a substantial risk of impotence and incontinence to save a single life (National Cancer Institute PSA fact sheet). And apparently every year 75,000 people have cement shot into their vertebrae though sham surgery gives close to the same results.
The "safe" and thus ineffective way of changing treatment is to give the advice, "ask your doctor." Yeah, right: practicing physicians who see patients 40-60 hours a week are always up on the latest studies published in obscure journals every week or two, and everyone knows that a doctor's advice is always followed. Consider three effective changes in health behavior prompted by research: smoking reductions, switching how parents put their babies to sleep (in terms of positioning), and a reduction in the proportion of older women taking hormone-replacement therapy.
For example, it took decades for research on the harmful effects of smoking to filter down to behavior. You want to know why my mother quit smoking before I was born? My older siblings told her that it was disgusting, and she became convinced that not only was it unhealthy, it also represented a character weakness. I'm happy that I wasn't exposed to smoking when growing up, and the beginnings of postwar research on smoking's harms was a part in that but not the whole cause. More recently, the Florida Truth campaign was reasonably successful in persuading teenagers that smoking was uncool. Unhealthy? That was going to change behavior on the margins at best. Another social-marketing campaign changed parental behavior on the sleeping position of infants. "Back to sleep" was based on solid research about the relative risks of sudden-infant death and hammered a simple, actionable message rather than talking endlessly about the research.
If there is a case for research's changing behavior directly, it may be the reduction in hormone-replacement therapy as a result of studies such as the Women's Health Initiative 2002 report on relative risks of using hormone replacement. Even here, I suspect that the drop in use was both from changing recommendations of doctors (the first link in this paragraph is to an article that suggests that the drop in HRT was primarily among those at risk of cardiovascular disease) and possibly also older women's thinking of themselves as savvy consumers--and that can work both in favor of and against cost-effective medical treatment. Fortunately, there is some evidence that the drop in HRT use is leading to a decline in breast cancer. This is a substantial victory for large-scale public-health research.
Why then focus policy on comparative-effectiveness studies rather than rely on the existing hodgepodge system? Insurance companies already try to limit treatment, and they often rely on existing research to justify their decisions. Well, I've got first-hand experience of why bureaucratic mechanisms based in private industry are no more rational than public bureaucracies; though I have a family history justifying early colonoscopies, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Florida spent several months denying claims. More importantly, the evolution of private decision-making about treatment has led to a lengthy cat-and-mouse game that has not changed the basic tendency of American medicine to overtest and overtreat those with coverage while we fail to cover those who need preventive care and treatment. Then there's the problem with hodgepodge anything: there needs to be balance between investigator-initiated studies and a systematic program of research.
More broadly, there are several benefits of comparative-effectiveness research. First, it provides a level of transparency that industry-generated decisionmaking never can. This is highly dependent on how resistant a comparative-effectiveness program is to corruption, but the private-insurance cat-and-mouse game is a structure guaranteed to lead to distrust and extra costs of operating a system of benefits. The Women's Health Initiative study publication is a case study of why comparative-effectiveness research is not only important in controlling costs but also in saving lives. The WHI study was large and credible, and the reports were published broadly in the general press. Second, the results of comparative-effectiveness research can be the foundations of more secure efforts to change behavior. We're always going to have bad medical-research reporting (quick: is there a research consensus on the effects of coffee drinking?), but it is going to be easier to write guidelines, communicate a message, and gain funding for publicity efforts if it is clear and credible. (Small aside: that's an obvious and appropriate role for foundations, not to fund marginal research but to fund public education efforts based on a solid research consensus.)
Third, a comparative-effectiveness research program can lead to professional standards of care that are less susceptible to manipulation based on context. Yes, doctors will sometimes grump about that. But Atul Gawande might have a few things to say about the value of checklists and the dangers of assuming professionals can just "wing it" when in an examination room. In doing so, health-care reform will move us one step away from thinking about professionals as a hero-artiste, and in turn that will move us in the right direction on talking about teaching.
So, to teaching: Having professional standards of care/practice based on research is a reasonable alternative to either laissez-faire approaches to teaching or assuming that the black box of incentives will magically improve results. That doesn't mean that it's easy. Larry Cuban's response to the story Elizabeth Green wrote for the New York Times is correct: the history of micro-teaching advice is long and not particularly successful. And I have no illusions that just because you say you're in favor of professional standards of care and practice means that there will suddenly be a body of rigorous research.
But anyone who believes in the hero-artiste model of teaching in the public schools needs both a political and ethical reality check. If you're paid by the public purse, you have an obligation to the public. Public school teachers need protection from corruption, unreasonable demands, and retaliation in response to whistleblowing. But that protection doesn't mean that an elementary school teacher should be able to teach what he or she wants, when he or she wants, how he or she wants. The practical and political tradeoff for some autonomy in the classroom is the adherence to recognized norms of professional behavior. That includes how teachers treat students, how they respond to a formal curriculum, and the instructional tactics used.
It's the latter that Green's article addressed. My guess is that teachers can argue either that they should be evaluated based on results or based on professional standards of care/practice tied to research, including research in the future. But you cannot argue that there should be no professional standards, or that a good chunk of them should not be tied to research. The "incentives" focus of much current accountability puts instruction in a black box. I think that's inappropriate public policy, but there has to be an alternative for at least political purposes. Changing the talk about doctors, checklists, and comparative-effectiveness research is a way to show that professionals do not have to be hero-artistes, and that's a healthy direction for the country.
March 12, 2010
Health care and financial-aid reform as a package
Wednesday's rumor has turned into Friday's semi-confirmation: Democratic leaders in Congress are looking very seriously at packaging together the changes to the Senate health-care bill with the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act (SAFRA) through budget reconciliation. SAFRA would end federal subsidies for bankers that initiate loans for college students and return an estimated $67 billion over many years to be used for better purposes, such as giving poor students Pell grants. Since taxpayers foot the bill for the banker subsidies that currently exist, students end up paying twice for their own loans, once in interest to servicers and a second time in taxes that go to banker subsidies. It's time to end the double taxation of students.
Politically, the packaging is a good move for multiple reasons. Matthew Yglesias argues that putting SAFRA in with the health-care bill changes will reassure House progressives that one of their priorities will get a vote in the Senate, and it might get SAFRA over the hump of the small number of Senate Democratic naysayers who are siding with lenders over students. Last night, Sara Goldrick-Rab explained the shame of the anti-student bank subsidies, and it sort of burns me that one of the Democrats signing the protect-the-poor-bankers letter to Harry Reid is Florida's Bill Nelson.
To be honest, I expect the package is more likely to attract support from the Nebraska Senator Nelson than Florida's Senator Nelson, because Ben Nelson (NE) now wants his embarrassing Cornhusker Deal for health-care off the table. But both Senator Nelsons are on the wrong side of the issue with SAFRA. I e-mailed Bill Nelson to that effect early this morning, but each time I've called his Washington office today, it's been busy and the voicemail is full. Time to call his local office on Monday...
March 11, 2010
A health-care mandate for education
Over the next week I'll be writing a few entries about health care. Today, it's the benefit of an individual mandate for college completion. The individual mandate is the package deal that goes with universal coverage, to get healthy people into the insured pool, and it's also important to help college students finish. Every year, USF and every public college and university loses students because they get sick or have a financial crisis because they or a family member get sick. Even if imperfectly enforced, an individual mandate would give colleges and universities the political ability to require proof of insurance upon enrollment, and that would safeguard both the individual investment of the student and her/his family and the public investment as she or he starts college.
Yes, there are alternatives, but they're all bad: Many colleges offer a very high-premium plan for students because the pool they can compose out of their students (or a fraction of their students) is tiny. Together with the option to stay on their parents' plans until 26, an individual mandate would give college students more choice by letting them enter the exchange markets instead of having one horrid option for health insurance in college. An individual mandate would make sure that our public investment in higher education is not wasted by a spurious event that no one can control.
(Obviously, someone in the White House reads my blog because they're emulating thought of the same idea as they echo my uninsured-death-every-24 21-minutes entry in their final push, highlighting key numbers on the issue: 625 Americans who lose health insurance every hour, 8 health special-interest lobbyists for every member of Congress, 8 Americans denied coverage every minute either by loss of insurance or other means, and $1115 paid every month on average for a family premium.)
Kristof and the public purpose of feel-good years
Charlie Barone is right: Nicholas Kristof's column yesterday comparing TFA and the Peace Corps shows the practical limits of TFA (as well as Kristof's ignorance about VISTA, but that's a different story). There's something important about consistently reminding reporters and other naive folks that TFA is not scalable. Regardless of what you think of it, there is a vast difference between the needs for a professional long-term teaching corps and matching up a few thousand new college graduates with positions that would be filled at best with long-term substitutes. There's nothing wrong with short-term backfilling (heck, that's what ARRA and other stimulus bills are for), but that's not a main solution for much.
Barone's point is not really about Kristof's central argument, which is more about how young Americans need to experience more of the world. Kristof is right about that, though maybe they should also see more of their own country? Nor is it about the side benefit of TFA participation in terms of giving a broader group of young adults experience in the public sector.
I think the last is the lasting impact of TFA. I look more favorably on TFA than a lot of other education researchers, not because I think there's significant evidence of great results but because a backfilling role in urban systems is acceptable and because social movements need well-off and well-positioned allies, people who had formative experiences that led them to empathize with others. In Inventing the Feeble Mind, for example, James Trent documents how WW2 conscientious objectors' experiences in state institutions helped lay the groundwork for a postwar change in attitudes towards cognitive disabilities. That's not a pre-law internship, as some accuse TFA of becoming; regardless of naivete, two or three years represents a serious commitment for someone who's 22. I don't know where TFA alums are going to be, but few of them are like Michelle Rhee either in temperament or future careers. Somewhere in 10 years, a TFA alum far outside public education is going to make a difference in a different sphere of life because of those two or three years.
March 9, 2010
Florida v. Georgia -- in budget crises, not football
Today's revenue-estimating conference in Tallahassee is probably going to confirm prior state revenue estimates, which are slightly better for 2010-11 than 2009-10, but that's like saying two broken legs are better than two broken legs and a broken floating rib. The state revenues are still far below 2006, and there are three sources of pressure on the state budget: increased demand for Medicaid, the federal maintenance-of-effort requirement for education (even with the waiver for absolute maintenance), and declining property-tax collections that support K-12 school districts.
Last year we kept reminding ourselves that we weren't in California. And this year, Georgia's picture is worse. Plus a few other states I could mention. But that's cold comfort: Schadenfreude doesn't pay the bills.
Updated (5:45 pm): Yes, today's Florida state revenue estimates are almost identical to the last round.
March 8, 2010
Sour-grapes agreement
Michael Olneck and Peter Sacks turn petty in letters to the editor about Diane Ravitch that the New York Times printed today. Wow. I agree with Ravitch on a number of things and disagree with her on a number of things, some of which is in our area of expertise (history of education) and some of which falls outside the history of education. But I'm not sure why Sacks in particular is turning on the venom spigot. Well, actually, I do have some hypotheses about general hostility to her I've occasionally seen (as opposed to disagreement): she caricatured the field of history of education in a sloppy late-70s publication sponsored by the National Academy of Education, and along with Patricia Graham she was a woman to get high-status national recognition in the 1970s for her work in education policy at the national level, which heretofore had been a male bastion. (Graham was director of NIE from 1977 to 1979.) The first is a seriously flawed work, but that's several decades in the past, and in any case, a particular work should stand or fall on its own merits. I've never seen the second item discussed or even acknowledged.
There's a related issue here, which is Ravitch's position outside traditional faculty. As far as I'm aware, she's never had a tenure-track or tenured faculty position, and she's one of the few historians who can say that they published their dissertation commercially before receiving the Ph.D. (The Great School Wars was published in 1974; Ravitch received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1975). For the most part, her books are far more widely read than those of us who have full-time faculty positions, and I think she and Graham are the only historians of education to have held political appointments in the federal government. That's an interesting combination of insider and outsider positions.
When Meier and Ravitch started their joint blog/conversation three years ago, I briefly referred to this history in writing, "Regardless of various professional views of her scholarship, Ravitch is a recognized voice on education policy. There are plenty of people I correspond with who have fewer claims to expertise, so I can either have a snit-fit about that or deal, and at this point, having a snit-fit is darned close to sexism and uber-testosterone in education policy studies." I'm sorry Olneck and Sacks, and especially Sacks, have made a different choice.
For the record, Sacks is factually wrong when he states, "Dr. Ravitch fashioned herself into the Ayn Rand of educational policy and rose to fame as a result of a free-market ideology that came into fashion in George W. Bush's administration." Ravitch's appointment was during the first Bush administration, and whatever you might think of Ravitch's historical arguments in different books, she's a much better writer than Rand.
March 7, 2010
Historians' automaticity, part 1
Concerns with science and math education are nothing new, and although the rhetoric today focuses on saving the planet and the economy, the argument for urgent intensification of STEM education is remarkably similar in structure to the Cold War era debates in the 1940s through the early 1960s: our country is in crisis, we need science and technology to solve the crisis, and so we must reform education. A 1959 forum about science and math education at Woods Hole was summarized by Jerome Bruner in The Process of Education (1960), which essentially was an argument about education in the disciplines. (Bruner later was instrumental in creating Man: A Course of Study [MACOS], and fellow Woods Hole conference participant Jerrold Zacharias was a key mover in MIT's Physical Science Study Committee, whose materials were used by my high school physics teacher.)
For a number of reasons, MACOS flopped as a curriculum project, but the central question raised at the 1959 Woods Hole conference remains: what's necessary for students to be successful at learning disciplinary thinking? Several of my colleagues at USF (Will Tyson, Kathy Borman, and others) have been involved in NSF-funded work studying recruitment to and success in undergraduate STEM education, including preparatory math and science work in high school. In lower grades, the National Math Advisory Panel made some suggestions about curriculum in primary and intermediate elementary grades that would be prerequisite for success in algebra, including work with fractions. (Speaking of which, check out this very cool Java Spirograph simulation. Yes, it's connected to fractions... or rather the nature of reciprocal relationships between frequency and wavelength.)
And somewhere along here, along with debates about the purposes of various proposed curricula, we generally get debates about which is more important, procedural fluidity or conceptual understanding. My answer: yes. They are. You need both "content" and "process" (and we'll get to the problem with those terms shortly), and I am generally sympathetic to arguments that getting to the point of automaticity with core skills is a part of getting ahead in conceptual understanding and also needs to be matched by teaching of concepts. (See my entry a few years ago on how to explain the more recent and reasonable NCTM curriculum framework materials.)
But there is something about the term automaticity that itches inside my head, because it sort of gets the idea right but is not entirely persuasive... and the places where it is not persuasive are troubling in a subtle but very important way. Let me explain why I can fluidly pull out material from my memory that looks remarkably like the standard definition of automaticity and yet really isn't like that at all.
First, a digression: with apologies to Douglas Adams, the process of doing history is almost but not quite entirely unlike what Sam Wineburg describes in his research. Wineburg's writing is appealing to historians because it focuses on precisely the discipline-based processes that Bruner discussed 50 years ago in his book, and Wineburg's message is flattering: "academic historians, you have interesting ways of thinking, and here is what I see as a cognitive researcher and why high school history teachers need to pay much closer attention to what you do." And to be honest, there is some part of his work that has all sorts of interesting detail on the level of nuance and sophistication with which people try to commit history (such as the research on how people from different fields read primary sources about Abraham Lincoln and slavery). But Wineburg is enormously popular because his intended audience has a confirmation bias that leads them (us) to agree with someone who comes along and tells us we're special and intellectual. Wineburg weaves a story of historical thinking's exceptionalism... and there's the rub. As an historian, I'm supposed to be wary of anyone talking about American exceptionalism, and here comes this cognitive psychologist trying to seduce me with glorious tales of my discipline's exceptionalism, how difficult it is to be an historian, and so forth.
Pardon me, but I'll take the interesting cognitive questions without the side dish of (probably unintentional) pandering. A good bit of Wineburg's efforts have been to parse out how people read primary sources, and they generally focus on the level of ambiguity people read into primary sources: ambiguity about intent, background, effect, and so forth. And that's all fine and good except for two problems: Wineburg's work in this vein has generally been with adults, and they generally ignore the process participants use to put the primary source in context. The second is the part that troubles me most as a teacher, because the place where students in my undergrad history of education class first fall down is typically in putting a primary source in a broader context. It's not the most difficult task I put before students: usually the most difficult task in the semester is asking students to provide historical perspectives on a contemporary issue. But the difficulty of putting material in a broader context is a fundamental barrier to success in my class.
That sounds remarkably like students who are not yet at the level of history automaticity, whatever that might mean, and one would be tempted to refer to Checker Finn and Diane Ravitch's argument from the late 1980s, that American teenagers don't know enough history. But focusing on factual recall is begging the question: what does it mean to have sufficiently fluid mastery of history to put a primary document in context? Something about factual recall is helpful, but is that enough, and is that what successful students do?
It might be helpful to explain the type of task that is not hard for students: confronting people whose glib brutality stands out of the page. That characterizes the very first primary source I use in my undergrad history class (printed in Jim Fraser's education history primary-source collection), instructions from the London Virginia Council to the colony's governor in 1636. It reads in part,
And if you find it convenient, we think it reasonable you first remove... [Native American children] from their ... priests by a surprise of them all and detain their prisoners... [and] we pronounce it not cruelty nor breach of charity to deal more sharply with [the priests] and to proceed even to dash with these murderers of souls and sacrificers of gods' images to the devil...
With 17th century texts, the first challenge is simply to understand what the source says, and that's a bit of skill in language, but the students usually figure out this passage soon enough, and their eyes open a bit wider: the official supervisors of the colony sitting in England were telling the colonial governor to kidnap Native American children and beat (or kill) the elders. That type of detail sticks with students, because it engages their emotions and sense of what a society is supposed to be doing (as well as what colonists did). It's not that any student is exactly surprised that English colonists in Virginia were patronizing and occasionally brutal, but there is something that takes them aback in the casual way which which colonists and English elite discussed their goals.
I wish that all of history was that engaging, but that's just not true, and there is a good bit of background context that students need to pull out to put any primary source in context, and when you get to material whose explicit text is boring but is still important, students cannot rely on the immediately-engaging story to "get it." Instead, most primary sources require a student to identify at least one salient context that is not immediately apparent, and they need to be able to identify a relevant context (or more than one) without a huge amount of effort. If there is an "automaticity" to a professional historian's thinking, it is that: where does this primary source or other detail fit in a large scheme?
That larger scheme can start with "issues of the day," whatever the time and place. To be successful, you need to know what was happening at about the time of the primary source/event. You start with the year, go back and forth a few years, and think about possible connections. So when you look at the last of Horace Mann's annual reports on the state of education in Massachusetts (in 1848) and read the following passage, what pops out as contemporary and possibly relevant?
Now surely nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former. But, if education be equally diffused, it will draw property after it by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. Property and labor in different classes are essentially antagonistic; but property and labor in the same class are essentially fraternal.
That's from the middle of the 19th century in the U.S. So when I ask a class about the relevant context, some students look at servility and suggest slavery as an issue, point out that Mann was writing for an audience in the North, or ask whether Mann was anti-slavery. (No one in my classes has mentioned the compromise of 1850, but that would fit with this tentative reach for context.) Few of them would have heard of Eric Foner's book on free-labor ideology, but I can probe a bit: slavery's part of the picture, at least in rhetoric, but there's something else there. What were some of the concepts used in the North to discuss slavery? I wish that probe worked more frequently than it does, so I usually point out the "different classes" phrase and ask what else was happening in the U.S. in the 19th century. At least one student usually mentions industrialization. So what's Mann arguing, I follow up? More faces light up at that point.
Part of the problem here is that Mann's argument is too familiar, a little too close to a human-capital argument for students to realize how new this was. (Maris Vinovkis credits Mann with that early human-capital argument.) Part of it is also that students don't have a visceral sense of the simmering conflicts in Northern cities, even after hearing about the religious conflicts in Boston in 1836 or Philadelphia in 1844 (the latter so-called "Bible riot"). Because all of that was also related to social class, industrialization, and immigration, I can almost feel Mann's sense of urgency here in promoting mass education ("common schools") as a cure-all for social conflict. But most students usually can't. The prose is too prosaic and the context insufficiently emotional to engage students in the same way that happens in response to the "kidnap the kids and eliminate the elders" instructions from the 17th century.
There's an additional layer to this context, because 1848 is a signal year in European history: revolutions galore and the publication of the Communist Manifesto. To a literate, well-connected American, Europe was dissolving in chaos in 1847 and 1848. What could prevent the U.S. from doing the same? There is no evidence I am aware of that Mann was explicitly referring to European events, but it would have been in the air in the same way that natural disasters are "in the air" around the globe today after the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Even if he was not consciously constructing the passage above to respond to European events, it would have resonated more for someone concerned about social stability in 1848.
There is nothing special about what I do in class: I take a simple question of context to push students about the importance of something Horace Mann wrote. And there is nothing particularly hard about asking what else was happening at the time. But while it's an easy task for me, this task flummoxes a lot of students. That task of pulling relevant context out of one's memory is the closest thing I can think of for the historian's automaticity, and looking for contemporary events and issues is the most obvious (but not the only) way to cut the issue. One might want to call this type of context affinity in time. I can think of other affinities which I might explore in other entries, but the key thing here is that this task is extraordinarily difficult for students.
Why this is difficult is an interesting, substantive question beyond the usual "fact-process" dualism. You need a mastery of chronology to pull context out of your head, but to build that mastery you need a way to put the details into your head in a way that's not "one damned thing after another"--i.e., a mental scheme. And while I wish I could look inside my head to see what my internal schemes are, I suspect any attempt at reflection is going to fall far short. I suppose one metaphor might be a "thick" timeline of issues and events and trends inside my head, so that when someone says, "1848," I can think of a bunch of things (as described above). Or if someone tells you that the Little Rock crisis was in fall of 1957, you just might think of Sputnik and ask whether there might be a Cold War context to Eisenhower's decision to nationalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in the 101st Airborne.
In addition, you need to be able to filter out nonsalient issues. What else was going on in 1957? Let's see: the Ford Thunderbird that year was a particularly popular "muscle" car. And the Dodgers were planning to move away from Brooklyn. The Communist party won elections in the Indian state of Kerala. ABC started national broadcast distribution of American Bandstand. On the Road was published. You can find more details at the 1957 Wikipedia page, but going to an almanac-style "here's what happened" listing is an incredibly inefficient way to put something in context. But to be honest, I wish I had the problem of students who found too many potential contexts where I had to suggest filtering. Usually the problem is a lack of candidate hypotheses about context.
March 4, 2010
PolitiFact Erratum
The St. Pete Times's PolitiFact comes down today with the same ruling that I would on Governor Charlie Crist's statement that the high school graduation rate in the cohort just graduated last year is the "highest it's ever been." They rate the claim as Mostly True, and I agree.
And their reporting of my remarks when called by the reporter on the story is similarly Mostly True. (For the record, that's the way I'd rate most good reporting.) The ruling says in part, "Dorn says the state should not count students who received a diploma even after failing the FCAT three times." It is true that I pointed out that the number of students who receive an academic diploma using the SAT/ACT exemption path has ballooned in the last five years and corresponds very neatly to the rise in high school graduation over that time. However, I never said that the state should not count those graduates, and if I remember correctly reporter Lee Logan never asked me that directly in the phone interview.
On Tuesday evening, Logan e-mailed me, and after I replied with my cell phone, I pulled up the spreadsheet I'd downloaded from the FLDOE site in the fall. The state reported three different measures: the official Florida graduation rate it's used for a decade, the measure used for NCLB purposes, and a measure defined by the National Governors Association in 2005. The last addresses the concerns I and others raised 4-5 years ago about the exclusion of the dropout-to-GED path from the cohort base and the inclusion of GEDs with regular diplomas.
The SAT/ACT exemption is different. On the one hand, the idea of an SAT/ACT exemption flies in the face of the point of a graduation exam, since college admissions exams do not test what a student has learned from the high school curriculum. On the other hand, it's a political and practical safety valve since it gives students more opportunities to qualify for an academic diploma. I wish that the state had chosen other options because of the SAT/ACT-curriculum disconnect, but when faced with education policy problems legislators tend to reach for tests, some test, any test.
Trying to look at the NGA rate with/without the exemption category (WFT) is also trickier than with the GED data, since there could be a number of reasons why the use of that exemption has ballooned. Maybe there are now 9,000 high school students each year who are directed towards the SAT/ACT who really would not have graduated without the exemption, and if so the rise in the NGA represents students who would have been on the margin of receiving a standard diploma without that option. But maybe the rise is a consequence of more Florida districts paying for students to take the SAT, where students would have taken the FCAT but didn't because they had qualified through the SAT. From a student perspective, if you've failed to pass the diploma threshold in prior FCAT tries and suddenly you have an SAT score that qualifies, why take the FCAT again in your senior year? Or why try hard at it when you do take it?
Then there's the more important question: where should we be with high school graduation? If you agree that we should include the students who qualified with an SAT or ACT score rather than a curriculum-based test, about three quarters of Florida ninth graders are graduating within four years. Using the NGA rate, of the African American students entering ninth grade in the fall of 2005, about 65% of them had graduated with a standard academic diploma by the summer of 2009. Even if you are skeptical about the inherent value of a credential, high school diplomas do serve as credentials for the job market and colleges, and someone without that credential faces significant institutional barriers to doing well as an adult.
Update: The PolitiFact page has changed to reflect what I said more accurately. Thanks!
February 28, 2010
Larry Cuban has a blog
I have a bunch of reading to catch up on, more than I thought I did a few minutes ago: Larry Cuban has a blog! (Hat tip.)
February 26, 2010
More TFA in Miami-Dade: where's the money?
The Miami Herald is reporting today that Teach for America is going to send 350 recruits to the Miami-Dade school system, supported by a $6 million grant from the James L. Knight Foundation (hat tip). Thanks to the federal stimulus, the Miami school system avoided laying off hundreds of teachers this year, but it's not as if there are large numbers of paid positions that are going unfilled. So the TFA positions are going to supplement, thanks to the Knight Foundation? It might sound good, but do the math: about $17,000 in donations per TFA recruit. This just doesn't add up.
February 24, 2010
Title II proposal: TNTP, meet Florida's "Ippy-Dippy"
The New Teacher Project has a new advocacy brief out proposing changes in ESEA's Title II, which is supposed to focus on personnel development. Some of the observations and proposals make sense (let's stop paying money for 90-minute drive-by "professional development"). Some are essentially using Title II as a vehicle for pushing other agendas (teacher evaluation and differential pay), though only some of it fits easily within Title II (here, training administrators and peers to evaluate teachers makes sense in Title II).
And some ideas are proposed as brand-new but have been tried before, including the suggestion that professional development be tied explicitly to the needs of students that teachers have at the moment. That seems to me to be remarkably like the Florida mandate for an "Individual Professional Development Plan," or IPDP. I've heard the complaints of too many teachers about the IPDP, which is usually pronounced Ippy-Dippy: it's another few hours of paperwork to complete each year with no real individualization of professional development. In other words, in Florida it results too often in paper compliance only.
But I'm only an historian listening to teachers in one state. If you live outside Florida, does your state mandate anything like our "Ippy-Dippy" form? What happens outside the paperwork?
February 22, 2010
The cliff, layoffs, and another stimulus/state rescue
Andy Smarick's analysis is correct: Arne Duncan and Barack Obama are talking this week about pending teacher layoffs to lay the groundwork for more stimulus/state-budget-rescue discussions. I suspect I have one analytical and one policy disagreement with Smarck, though. First, it's not a "second stimulus," because we're moving into a period where there will be a lot of smaller spending packages, so this is going to be the fourth or maybe fifth stimulus proposal in this Congress. And this is going to be harder than an extension of unemployment benefits or anything else that costs under $25 billion, because states and local governments are still in horrid fiscal shape. I suspect Smarick would oppose another large federal rescue of state budgets, but I think it's absolutely necessary or we face another 1937. Teachers and other civil servants don't spend as much of their income immediately as those receiving unemployment benefits, but it's still a better emergency economic policy to keep most public employees at work than any tax cut except the publicly-invisible withholding reductions implemented last year. And as happened last year, there may be considerable inconsistency in the behavior of state-government politicians, many of whom may publicly be horrified about any additional federal spending but need it in reality. (The public conflation of TARP and ARRA doesn't help here.)
For anyone still arguing for budget cuts as public-policy colonic, all I can say is that I hope that you can still argue that point in a year or two without risking pitchforks from the public, if only because you didn't win the argument.
February 21, 2010
A closer look at HB 1009 (proposed expansion of Florida corporate tax-credit vouchers)
On Wednesday, I discussed my first reaction to news of Florida House Bill 1009, which I thought had some eye-popping proposals, and I posted Jon East's response. I've had a chance to look at the text of the bill, and there are some details hidden in there that are interesting.
- The reporting of test scores for schools with 30 voucher students isn't for 30 vouchers students in any year but for those with at least 30 students who continue from year to year. That dramatically shrinks the number of schools that would have scores reported, and they would only be reported for continuing students, in contrast with public schools that report status test scores (which are part of the Florida system of labeling schools) as well as Florida's jerry-built "learning gains" measure.
- The financial reporting requirements in the bill is only for schools taking vouchers worth a total of $250,000 per year. Let's assume that at some point FEFP funding per weighted student is $8000, and the 80% voucher is $6400. That would be about 39 students as the threshhold for the financial requirements. At the current voucher level the threshhold is 64 students. I suspect the financial reporting requirement would affect a tiny fraction of the schools accepting vouchers.
One other thought: if this bill passes, then the other large voucher program (for students with disabilities) will remain without any accountability for student outcomes. That's a huge question mark in terms not only of constitutionality but also state compliance with federal special education law. How are state assurances on providing a free appropriate public education affected when state general revenues flow through vouchers, either directly (as in the case of the disability-related voucher program) or indirectly (through the corporate tax-credit voucher program)?
Jon East responds on corporate tax-credit voucher expansion (HB 1009)
Jon East, a former reporter for the St. Petersburg Times and now Research and Communications Director at the corporate tax-credit voucher non-profit Step Up for Students, was unable to put the following long response in comments to my discussion of HB 1009, and when he e-mailed them to me, I agreed to post them here:
As always, my friend, you offer a provocative commentary and I appreciate your recognition that this bill adds two new mechanisms of accountability even if they don't go far enough for you. Please allow me to probe two different claims you made here, though, because I don't think they present the clearest picture.
First, the assertion that the bill "expands the dollar amount per voucher from the state beyond what the state gives local school districts" feels a little like it was intended to obfuscate. Any general assessment of cost should probably begin with the fact that this option is now and would continue to be the lowest-cost education option in Florida -- lower than traditional public schools, charter schools, McKay scholarships, even virtual instruction programs. That aside, the amount the state "gives local school districts" is controlled by a 1973 law that essentially puts all the money for the base funding formula, called the Florida Education Finance Program, into one pot. As we know, the state has been putting less money into the formula while increasing the amount of "required local effort" for property taxpayers. But the larger point is that the FEFP is intended to make funding more equitable, with the breakdown between state and local portions varying county by county according to the size of their property tax base. To then turn around and compare the state portion as though it is some isolated variable in school funding seems contrived. The bill would place the scholarship at a 20 percent discount on this FEFP formula, and the FEFP is only part of the overall revenue picture for schools. By way of comparison, the per-student FEFP in 2007-08 was $7,143. The total revenues per student, including state, local, federal and capital, that same year (this is the most recent one DOE has published) was $11,017. So back to your point: The bill would indeed increase the scholarship amount up to 80 percent of FEFP. But if it took effect all in one year instead of four and it took effect today, the scholarship would translate to $5,490 -- which is almost precisely half the total per-student spending in public schools.
Second, your concerns about the "elimination of the cap" take a little liberty with the wording of the bill and a little more license with the current marketplace. The bill absolutely eases the process of increasing the cap, but one fact worth noting is that this would still be the only major education option with any cap at all. There are no caps for charter schools, McKay scholarships, virtual schools. And the McKay scholarship, as one example, grew only about 3 percent last year. The controlling factor for any school option is ultimately the students. If students and families aren't interested then the program doesn't grow.
In e-mail correspondence, East made clear that when he was discussing the Florida Education Finance Program, he was combining the state, local, and federal sources, and that HB 1009 also was discussing a voucher of eventually 80% of the combined state and local (but not federal) funding. From one perspective East is correct: the legislature sets the amount of funding that comes in total from the state's general revenues, from state trust funds, and from "required local effort" property taxes at the local level, and then a complex formula determines what the required local effort is from each county. Counties have a certain amount of additional property taxes they can levy on a discretionary basis, but FEFP is a unitary mandate in the sense that the legislature determines the base funding for students, and that legislative mandate is met jointly by state revenue and local property taxes.
On the other hand, I think that legislative history will be cold comfort to local school board members and county commissioners who have seen the state shift school funding in the past decade away from state revenues and towards local property taxes. That use of FEFP to shift taxes allowed former Governor Jeb Bush and the Bush-era legislative leadership to claim that they were lowering taxes when a good part of that was a clever shell game. (This is not a particularly partisan flaw: the Democratically-controlled legislature played a similar game in proposing a state lottery in the late 1980s which legislators claimed would boost education funding without raising taxes.) Many school board members will see HB 1009 as a drain of state revenues that will contribute to the shifting of education funding away from the state and towards local property taxes. When the legislature created FEFP in the early 1970s, they quickly ramped up per-pupil state support of education, effectively shifting the revenues from local property taxes to the state's general revenue pot. HB 1009 looks like it will continue a reversal of that original intent.
February 17, 2010
Zombie idea: short-cut high schools
I guess I was wrong yesterday in labeling Utah State Senator Chris Buttars as obviously out of the mainstream in terms of practices. The New York Times reports today on something that slipped under my radar: two-year high school degree options based on an idiosyncratic constellation of what the article calls "board exams." Not too surprisingly, this is the brainchild of Marc Tucker, who's been peddling some type of policy proposal for changing the structure of high schools for more than twenty years as head of the National Center on Education and the Economy. I think this primarily shows that he's been more effective at lobbying than the higher-profile Partnership for 21st Century Skills, because it look like the various testing options essentially would require students to succeed at 12th-grade somewhat-more-intensive coursework, and my reasoning yesterday on three-year programs holds here (students likely to succeed at these tests are going to continue through four years). Given the original argument of NCEE for a much more vo-tech focus, I'm not sure what to make of this, except that it looks like it will have minimal impact on actual enrollments.
February 16, 2010
Heady, headwinds, or just headstrong?
Two education stories caught my eye this evening: the attempt by a Rhode Island superintendent to use state law on school interventions to trump collective bargaining and fire all teachers at one high school, and the trial balloon floated by a Utah state senator to end 12th grade in the state, or make it optional.
Utah State Senator Chris Buttars is just being headstrong, or maybe "grasping at straws" might be the better term, since the idea of skipping a year of a four-year program isn't attractive to many students even when it's possible. Florida created a three-year high school structure some years ago, and it's almost entirely unused, for obvious reasons: students who are doing well-enough in high school to finish in three years are also eligible to attend a number of colleges, and will be told by high school advisors, their parents, and others that they darned well are going to spend a fourth year in high school so they can attend a college of their choice. And in colleges, while many students could use AP credits to graduate in three years, that's not a common pattern. An old friend of mine was able to finish high school one year early in the 1970s and enter a UC campus, but she was an extreme outlier.
Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo is facing legal headwinds but is less obviously foolish than Buttars. Gallo is relying on a set of state options for addressing low-performing schools, and when teachers in the district would not agree to a longer workday without substantially increased pay, Gallo said she'd forgo bargaining a solution and use the option to fire all the teachers in the school instead (and let them reapply for their jobs). There are two general questions here on the legality of Gallo's move: is the state corrective-action structure outside the scope of bargaining for public employees in Rhode Island, and does her move constitute an unfair labor practice by construction (i.e., even if the state corrective-action structure is not bargainable, is her action retaliation in the context of the moment)? This is very far from my experience, but if this were in the state of Florida for most of the time we've had public-employee bargaining, I suspect the outcome of a similar legal battle would not be easily predictable.
The rule of thumb with economic crises is that people innovate through desperation rather than through careful planning. We're seeing that in the case of Utah. And nerves are generally raw throughout the country, so situations that might otherwise be resolvable often head into conflict when that might have been avoided in better times (I don't know if that would have been true in Central Falls).
Books are not going to disappear from libraries
Student views of libraries are apparently all over the map when asked by the New York Times whether libraries need books anymore... but I think that's always been the case. Libraries serve multiple constituencies, and if you had phrased the question differently in different eras and for different media -- for example, "do libraries still need to stock cassette books-on-tape?" -- you'd have very different responses. Yes, public libraries still carry and loan audiobooks, though they're no longer on cassette tapes.
Patrons like what they like, and librarians always have to figure out
the right mix. Fundamentally, "books or ebooks" is the wrong question from the standpoint of library administration. It's going to be a mix of books, periodicals, audiobooks, video material, computer access, reference services, public space use, and outreach for public libraries and a different mix (but still a mix) for academic libraries.
From a public standpoint, too, "books or ebooks" is the wrong question. Funding public access to information is one of the best investments in the future I can think of. Yes, I think of libraries as part of the "constellation" of educational institutions (to borrow from Larry Cremin), and no matter how I may cringe when certain ones are used by students, it's better to nourish more sources of information than to be stingy.
February 13, 2010
The message of opening access to AP courses: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!"
Someone reminded me that because I was crazy-busy in the fall, I didn't comment on one local controversy a few months ago, so this is a catch-up post of sorts, in part justified by the February 4 story in USA Today and Leslie Postal's story earlier this week in the Orlando Sentinel. The St. Pete Times editorial board published two pieces on December 15 and December 16 criticizing local schools in central Florida for having low and widely varying "passing rates" on Advanced Placement exam subjects. By "passing rate," the Times is using the common threshhold score, 3 out of 5, for earning college credit. Never mind for the moment that the reasons why students take AP courses are not necessarily about college credit, nor do all colleges set 3 as the threshhold. One can assume that the wide variations in proportions earning a 3, 4, or 5 reflect an underlying variation in achievement in the classes. The editorials argue that the achievement in AP courses is too low and that variations are a direct reflection of teacher quality. In the first editorial, the board wrote,
The passing rates on the AP exam are often pathetic. It is a scandalous situation that fails students, misleads parents and wastes public money.
In the second, the board wrote,
District superintendents and school principals should hold teachers accountable for dismal passing rates.
These are conclusions from a superficial analysis. I know of situations where it is obvious that low scores are probably reflections of teacher quality, but I know of several classrooms where either students are scoring well despite low teacher quality or where students are scoring low though they have a fabulous teacher.
For example, I know of one school with two teachers in a particular AP subject taught in 12th grade. Students of both teachers have approximately equal proportions earning a 3, 4, or 5. Yet I know from talking with students that one of the teachers is engaging, providing both materials and an environment more reflective of a college class than the other, where discussion is squelched and theoretical frameworks are presented as narrowly as one could imagine (and this is in a topic where college classes would commonly revolve around discussion). That's right: two teachers, one school, different assignments in the year (how did that happen??), very different reception by students, similar AP scores on the measure the Times published and the editorial board cares about. Most obvious explanation: credit goes to these students' prior teacher(s) in the subject for getting them ready for the AP class they take in 12th grade. Did that possibility appear to the editorial board? Apparently not.
More broadly, members of the editorial board of the Times (and a number of people around the country) have the exactly wrong approach to challenging classes in high school, as evidenced by another point in the December 15 editorial: "There is some merit to the argument that passing rates are low because too many unprepared students are being steered into AP classes." This statement, which I've generally heard from middle-class or wealthy parents, assumes either a zero-sum game for schools (for some parents, that their children aren't getting enough exclusivity in AP credentials for college admissions offices) or that students in AP classes are worse off being in the AP classes than not. The latter is speculation by the editorial board without a clear research consensus (see below for a longer discussion). The former is not acceptable to me as a basis for making policy decisions.
On a philosophical basis, I am disturbed by the assumption that we always need to withhold content based on prior achievement. Why does the fictional Ms. Frizzle tell students to "take chances, make mistakes, get messy!" in elementary school, but we have to shake in our boots at the possibility that we might be challenging older students? There are plenty of classes (e.g., U.S. history) where keeping students out makes little sense, and the Times is dead wrong in their approach on this issue.
The alternative to opening up opportunity: a situation such as at Berkeley High School, where the breakup of the school into mini-schools several years ago has segregated students, left a disproportionate number of white students in AP science classes, and led to a real zero-sum game of reduced science instruction as some parents and educators propose redirecting effort away from science labs to smaller class sizes elsewhere in the school. That becomes the dynamic when science labs for advanced courses are the arena for a privileged few instead of a more common expectation that teenagers should be encouraged to take challenging classes.
Addendum: Paul Cottle wrote a blog entry this morning on the same subject, and he refers to Kristin Klopfenstein's research, including an article she published last year with Kathleen Thomas (earlier version PDF). The research is mixed; for a different view with recent research, see a 2008 Northeastern Educational Research Association paper by Xinhui Xiong, K. D. Matterny, and E. J. Shaw. I don't think that schools should respond to the mixed research either by shutting down access to challenging material or by making the teaching of AP courses a higher-risk assignment for teachers than other assignments.
February 11, 2010
Additional thoughts on performance pay politics
An addendum to my entry earlier this morning: I think that there is a politically-robust rationale for performance-pay policies, but it's not at the level of incentives usually used as the justification. The more plausible rationale for performance-pay policies is at the level of public-sector accountability: most people with jobs do not expect identical salaries or salaries based on a formula, and small variations based on something other than seniority and educational credentials might boost the facial validity of public-sector HR practices.
Note that this is not an argument that business practices are always incentives based (or should be: witness AIG as a disaster stemming from short-term incentives) or even widely varying. In some cases--large law firms, for example--entry-level professionals receive step pay increases in their first few years akin to teachers' step increases. But if I were to ask the head of the Florida Council of 100, Susan Story, whether she'd stop advocating performance pay even if the research consensus in a few years were solidly against its doing anything for student achievement, my guess is that she'd still push for some form of performance pay.
The discourse around this is somewhat similar to other comparisons people make between their lives and public policy: when policies look like you're pushing the cart and someone else paid by public funds isn't, you're less likely to maintain support for it. A friend of mine visited a newspaper columnist some years ago to complain about an article the columnist had written regarding AFDC (the federal welfare program before 1996). Don't you understand the factual errors with all of the myths about welfare? my friend asked. Sure, said the columnist, but you don't understand why public attitudes have changed: as the majority of mothers now have to find their own child-care arrangements while they're working, they're going to be far less sympathetic towards women who aren't willing to work or perceived as not willing to work.
I don't agree with the columnist's thumbnail history of public attitudes towards federal welfare policies or on assumptions that women on welfare have not historically wanted to work. But there is a significant grain of truth there that when the majority of mothers work when their children are young, and they have to find and pay for child care and wrestle with the stress involved in that, those mothers are not going to want to see that they're pushing the cart and others aren't. For similar reasons, those who oppose any performance pay have an uphill road telling people who work in environments with non-step-like pay arrangements that somehow public schools should be arranged differently.
Why the Teacher Incentive Fund and Race to the Top are long-term dead ends for merit-pay advocates
The apparent push in the proposed 2011 Obama budget for an enlarged Teacher Incentive Fund on the heels of Race to the Top makes me think that merit-pay/performance-pay advocates may be spreading their political capital very thin on teacher evaluation. Most advocates of paying teachers in part based on test scores are also advocates of using test scores in part to evaluate teachers more broadly, especially dividing probationary teachers from teachers with a right to due process before dismissal. And they're trying to do both. Smart or stupid? I think it's counterproductive for several reasons:
- The research on benefits of individual-teacher performance pay is limited. Very limited and quite mixed. Putting all your chips on a huge expansion of experimental performance-pay schemes? You may not get what you want, and public evaluations may doom the politics. (Think Reading First, though the allegations of corruption set the stage in that case for death-by-evaluation.)
- Grant programs end. If the expansion of performance-pay programs relies on temporary revenue, then the program may well die along with the extra revenue. Denver's teachers union and district worked together on a long-term political deal: performance pay that teachers helped develop tied to a long-term boost in revenue. That's not the structure of RTTT, TIF, or the Gates Foundation grants.
- Real-life performance-pay bonus budgets are stingy. The best example of that reality is here in Florida, where the state budget for the school-based rewards for test scores has been no greater than $100/student (for a school) since the late 1990s, and while my undergraduate students sometimes enter my classes thinking that a huge amount of school budgets are based on test scores, in reality that's no more than about 1.5-2% of per-pupil expenditures in Florida (and that's for the schools that receive the money). When this money is distributed to staff (sometime it is, sometimes it isn't), it's in the form of bonuses, not additions to base salaries. The fiscal and political reality is that the only way to permanently boost base salaries substantially based on test scores is to give the money to a tiny fraction of teachers, and that's a recipe for political disaster (and legal problems).
The last point is one I am surprised opponents of performance pay have not raised sufficiently, and here's how I thought someone would have put it by now: Okay, so you want to pay teachers well if their students learn a great deal? Wonderful. So if students perform at a very high level, you're willing to raise taxes to reward teachers for that accomplishment? Liberal advocates of performance pay would probably answer yes if. I don't think fiscal conservatives who are performance-pay advocates have thought through the dilemma on that point very clearly; either the answer is that you're willing to raise taxes or that you have low expectations for schoolchildren.
Eventually, I suspect that advocates of performance pay will have to decide whether they want to put all of their political capital into pay schemes that are fragile or into hiring and retention issues. The proposed ballooning of TIF is a sign that no one in Washington is thinking about the political balance of these issues in the long run.
Disclosure: I'm a member of a higher ed union that has long had a contract with merit pay and considerable differences in pay by rank and discipline. K-12 is a very different world in this regard.
Note: I started this entry on Tuesday, and because I forgot to change the "publish date" (which Movable Type usually sets at the time you started an entry, not published it), it first appeared as if it were published Tuesday. My editing fault, not your faulty memory. Now, your forgetting to read all of my books and articles? That's a different story.
February 6, 2010
Another stupid article on "the dating scene" in college
Some of the clues that the latest article on the "dating scence" in colleges with 60% female enrollment was written by a reporter with an axe to grind and a preset angle at which to grind:
- The featured photograph from a university with 60% female enrollment (a) is of college seniors (or I hope they're seniors) in a bar, (b) is of an all-white group of students, (c) has six women and one man, (d) has no older students.
- Every photograph features white students.
- All the women interviewed for the story appear to be members of sororities.
- One of the interviewees is a former student who happens to be hanging out in a bar near campus. (So why is he representative? Why didn't the reporter step a few minutes away from a bar?)
- The focus is entirely at a flagship public university.
- There are no older students interviewed for the story.
Since the primary world of colleges is at the regional state university and community-college level, maybe we should skip the flagship campuses and look at the statistics of an institution such as Miami-Dade College. MDC has more than 150,000 students enrolled, and while 60% of them are women, only about 35% are right out of high school (under 21). About two-thirds are attending MDC on a part-time basis, and while MDC is now a four-year institution, I don't think there are any dorms, so every one of those students are commuters and live somewhere in the Miami area. In other words, the dating scene for straight, gay, or bisexual students is where they live as well as on campus. That's the reality for the majority of college students in the United States, not the preppy picture that the New York Times reporter and photographer portrayed.
But if you want to look at residential colleges and universities, maybe a little reality should intrude: the average age at civil marriage for women in the United States has moved back up to the mid-20s, where it has been historically for well over a century, with the exception of the immediate postwar years. College students' meeting and marrying in college is common enough but not dominant.
And the history of colleges is not one filled with demographic "balance" in some hypothetical way. For many years, the ranks of elite residential institutions were filled with single-sex colleges and universities with single-sex undergraduate colleges, and the students in those colleges and universities had to go off-campus for a hetereosexual dating scene. And in the first decade after World War II, the GI Bill pushed enrollment in public universities in the other direction, towards majority male enrollment. If you can find more than a decade or two when the dominant demographic profiles of residential colleges, community colleges, and public universities were all fairly evenly split by gender, I'd be surprised. My guess is that maybe a decade or two will fit with the peak of the Baby Boom through the mid-1980s... when people worried about the social consequences of the sexual revolution. As one of Gilda Radner's characters would say, if it's not one thing, it's another... so let's stop obsessing with the on-campus dating opportunities of college students.
February 1, 2010
Sloppy journo skewered; readers await fix
Reporting is a hard job. These days, reporters are being asked to cover more subjects in less time with an even smaller news hole for newspapers that are losing money, laying off colleagues, and may be out of business within a matter of months. Even in good times, reporters knew that errors were going to be read by thousands of subscribers and that even if they worked twice as many hours in a day (usually impossible), they'd never catch all factual goofs or grammatical mistakes, or never quote enough interviewees to satisfy all readers. Great beat reporters are inherently improv artists.
Having said that, I know it should not be too much of a surprise that even reporters with solid reputations such as Ed Week's Debra Viadero sometimes get caught taking shortcuts. Thus far, no response from Viadero, but it's another part of journalism (and a reflection of the craft) to print corrections publicly. So let's wait and see how Ed Week acknowledges error.
Grading the "Grades" reports
I'm back from Toronto today--had a great time talking with Canadian faculty, had my head chewed off in a thoroughly polite, Canadian way for one bone-headed error I made in discussion, survived subzero temperatures for a few mornings, and completely failed to enter the Hockey Hall of Fame building--and back in Florida the temperatures are a bit lower-than-average for this time of year but discussion of the Ed Week Quality Counts "grades" given Florida is apparently heating up. So maybe I need to revisit my idea from last summer of grading the grading reports. Last June, I pointed out that professional grading practices generally provide scoring criteria in advance, so that those who are being evaluated will have a chance to... you know... meet the standards. Let me list all of the facets on which I think one can grade such "grade reports" of states and the like:
- Purpose. Is there a clear public rationale for issuing such a report? How broad or narrow is the public purpose?
- Scoring criteria. Described in June.
- Description of sources and analysis. How systematic is the collection of source material (as opposed to anecdotal or convenience sampling)? Is there a clear chain described from collection of data to the application of labels? Is there a discussion of relevant caveats/alternatives?
- Robustness of sources. Are the sources publicly verifiable or replicable? Are they subject to gaming, falsifiability, or manipulation?
- Relevance of sources. Is the material relevant to the criteria, and does the "grade report" use the most relevant obtainable information? Is the source information analyzed appropriately to warrant the application of the grade labels?
- Sponsorship. Are funding sources and potential related interests stated clearly? Is there a separation between the real or likely perceived material interests of sponsors, on the one hand, and editorial control of the project?
It strikes me on impression that different types of periodic "grading" exercises have different types of weaknesses. An advocacy organization whose reports rely on anecdotal evidence and give higher grades to states that are more extreme towards its position might receive lower grades on description of sources and analyses and sponsorship than in other categories. A news organization that makes millions of dollars by selling a volume ranking colleges and universities using reputational surveys of institution heads and data on institutional wealth is likely to receive low grades on public purpose, robustness of sources, and relevance of sources. A news organization that ranks states on categories that change every year using no apparent criteria that also change every year is likely to receive its lowest grades in the area of scoring criteria and description of sources and analyses.
As a faculty member who has assigned thousands of grades to students, where the grades affect student progress towards degrees and financial-aid eligibility, I know from experience that the process of grading is imperfect and in my field depends on judgment rather than objective cut-and-dried methods. That's why I state criteria as early as I can, display model work from prior semesters if possible (with the permission of their creators), answer questions about assignments, look at drafts, structure revision opportunities into a number of courses, and always let students correct me when they document that I have recorded individual assignment grades incorrectly. I know from student complaints about grading in general that they hate being judged on criteria they feel the evaluator keeps secret, or that is designed to make the evaluator look good, or that serves some other purpose that isn't for the general purposes grading is accepted by at least some to serve. In other words, if you're going to assign grades, especially if the clear intent is to shame certain entities into changing, you need to take at least a few minutes of care to address common-sense ethical expectations. I'd have far more patience with these publicity-seeking exercises if there were more care evident in the process.
January 27, 2010
Why the "college hunt" genre is unrepresentative, and the shame of the College Board Profile
This morning's blog entry by Valerie Strauss is typical of the genre: a perspective on what it's like to apply to a number of selective colleges and universities and hunt for financial aid. And it's all wrong, both from a policy perspective and (I'd argue) even a hypercompetitive parents' perspective.
Policy perspective: the colleges most students attend are not very selective. Even for the ones that don't accept all applicants, most accept the majority of applicants (including most public universities). And even in the world of "very" selective institutions, you might be surprised. Sure, both Harvard and Stanford will reject more than 90% of their applicants this year, but most of the "very" selective private liberal arts colleges accept 25% or more of applicants... and we're at the peak of the baby boom echo, so it's only going to head up from here. (Math problem: If you're a high school senior and apply to colleges where you have a 50% probability of being accepted, and the decisions of each college are random and independent, how many do you need to apply to to have at least a 98% chance of being accepted into at least one?)
So the problem is generally not getting accepted into one college but being able to pay for it and being able to take all the classes you need and succeed at them. My daughter is applying to a few places where the tuition/board combination is high enough where some institutional aid would be very nice, and last night we completed the FAFSA, which is one half of the financial-aid paperwork for one of her desirable colleges. (I'll have more to say about the other half later.) The administration's promise on a simplified FAFSA has been fulfilled, at least from my experience: you don't need a CPA to fill it out, especially for families who are eligible for Pell grants and state assistance. The administration's proposal for a 10% cap on income you owe on college loans would be another step, and a definite improvement on the new income-based repayment option. Given the gap between Pell grants and tuition at a number of public universities, pushing on income-based repayment may be more valuable in the long run than expanding Pell grants.
Where Strauss is correct from a public perspective is the gap between the time high school counselors can spend shepherding students through the admissions process and the reality of the need. I'm thinking here primarily of high school students who would be first-generation college students. There aren't too many guidelines for a ninth-grader to keep in mind, but they're probably not repeated often enough: get your act together now to make sure your first semester grades are at least a mix of Cs and Bs, and they need to head up from there; read more than what's required; go as far in math as you can; take SATs or ACTs in your junior year; tell your parents to put their financial information in one place starting early fall of senior year; expand your college possibilities in one dimension from what you're being told by those around you. I suppose there are others that high school counselors use, but for the barebones, students whose parents never attended college can get into a fine public university following this.
If there's something that worries me apart from the high school curriculum and funding for poor students, it's the narrow way most high school students think about where and how to look for colleges, and the way that adults encourage that narrowness in part from their experiences or perceptions or because of tacit knowledge. There are sometimes circumstances that restrict students--those who need state assistance will be staying in-state, and often first-generation college students (especially young women) live at home while attending classes at a public university, at least for a year or two. (I know of one very large community college where faculty get the benefit of teaching incredibly talented first-generation students because their parents wouldn't let the students move away for a few years.) High school students can be creative in working with family preferences--Orlando high school students often prefer the University of South Florida (here in the Tampa area) and Tampa area students often prefer the University of Central Florida (Orlando) as a "far enough away from home so I'm not visited by my mom twice a week, but close enough to drive home on weekends" solution. But that's like chain migration: if you hear about an option from someone you know, you can use it.
What about the options you don't personally know? I've had some conversations with teenagers and parents in the past year or two where presumptions have become stereotypes and blinders. One parent completely dismissed a nationally-known public liberal-arts college because she knew some students with learning disabilities who saw that as a friendly place to attend... so it must not be good enough (i.e., prestigious). A student who is one of the most hard-working teenagers I have ever known and interested in engineering schools didn't know the difference between tuition-dependent private schools and those with endowments and substantial institutional aid. She was thinking very hopefully on an engineering school within driving distance that is tuition-dependent and where there was no way that she could get aid (and thus attend). She hadn't thought of CalTech at all, though it's well off and where she might get a boost because of the dominance of men in their undergraduate enrollment. Another student who moved to the U.S. four years ago was disappointed in her board scores and thought colleges wouldn't want her. She's another incredibly hard-working student, one who admissions officers would drool over in reality. For the students in these cases, I'm not worried because it didn't take much to persuade them or their parents to think a bit more broadly (and optimistically). For the millions of talented high school students I can't persuade personally to think a little more broadly about colleges, I worry about the mental shortcuts we take when looking for colleges. It's an understandable but sad statement about our country when some of the most effective recruitment of college students is done through Saturday television broadcasts in the fall.
Private perspective: As I wrote above, the FAFSA is one of the pieces for institutional aid for a college my daughter is keenly interested in. The other is the College Board Profile. Last night, I printed out their 19-page worksheet and filled in answers for the several-hundred questions about parental income and assets so my daughter can enter the data this afternoon. I'll just say this to the admissions officers for the private institutions using the College Board Profile: you've just demonstrated to me why your efforts at recruiting a diverse population of students is often a facade. When your chosen tool (which you don't have to pay for) is several orders of magnitude more difficult to complete than the old, more complicated FAFSA, it's clear that you don't have a clue about how to get poor students to apply for financial aid. And College Board? Shame on you for requiring poor families to pay for the privilege of having one more barrier to receiving financial aid.
My daughter will do fine, and unlike other college seniors, she hasn't panicked. Several years ago, when it was clear she was interested in Type X college, her mother and I talked about the financial feasibility of that. (I'm a public-university professor in a relatively low-paid field. Well-off? Definitely with respect to human history! Able to send my daughter to Type X college on my and my wife's income alone? .... uh, what type of cat food tastes good?) We figured we could expand her horizons, but given that her spine is stiffer than mine, I expected it would be in one direction. Let's see: ask her to consider Type Y college? Not going to happen. Z? Not a chance. Type X-public? Hmmn... that worked. In the fall of her sophomore year, I told her that if she could find a Type X college that would let her visit classes, either public or private, I'd take her. And she found such a place, so we went. As a result, we spread out college visits over a few years, not a few weeks. That first college is still on her "very interested" list, and overall she liked (and applied to) roughly half of the places we visited, most of which were Type X colleges. Her interests have changed a bit, but she'll do fine in any of the places she's applying to, and it's her life, not mine. Yes, she's been accepted to at least one. As I stated above, if you've worked hard in high school and you're not set on getting into the One True Place for You, you'll get in somewhere you can learn a great deal in.
January 24, 2010
Florida legislative session education preview
Former Miami Herald reporter and current free-lancer Gary Fineout has a solid legislative session preview on education policy in this morning's Sarasota Herald-Tribune (hat tip). I may disagree with his predictions on the margins, but on the whole I think he's on the money in identifying the obvious issues. Fineout was starting his analysis from the Florida Chamber of Commerce report released a few weeks ago, which had a combination of noncontroversial suggestions as well as a few ideological throwaways (such as the resurrection of the failing-schools voucher program). Fineout is probably correct that budget woes will kill or maim any suggestion with a large price tag (though I would love the suggested large boost to higher education). So let's divide the policy ideas into the noncontroversial and the controversial and then the elephant in the room.
Noncontroversial: end of course (EOC) exams, especially since Rep. John Legg said his bill would have non-biology science EOC exams as non-high-stakes tests. I've been watching that issue in semi-despair for several months after the U.S. Department of Education confirmed the Florida DOE's view that Race to the Top grants could not be used for assessment development. Legg's promise is a good compromise, if it happens as he stated.
Noncontroversial: continuing to use federal stimulus dollars to boost local district budgets. The decline of property-tax collections is the giant sword hanging over schools this year, and the balance of state-local K-12 funding is one of the giant budget issues this year along with Medicaid and the lack of any trust funds to raid for 2010-11.
Controversial: modifying the constitutional class-size mandate. There
might be a compromise here involving statutory changes to the
implementing laws. Legislative leaders might have to choose between spending political capital on this issue and on the next two.
Controversial: legislative attempts to end K-12 teacher tenure. The legislature has mandated the end of tenure before, sort of like the way the legislature has mandated merit pay before (next issue below). If the legislature overplays its hand, an extreme bill might turn out to be a short-term nightmare for teachers and a long-term Pyrrhic victory for tenure critics. I can think of at least two ways that FEA can fight more extreme laws in the long term with reasonable chances of winning.
Controversial: merit pay, or rather legislatively-mandated mechanisms. This would be the fourth or fifth go-round on this issue in the past decade in terms of state mandates. Someday there will be a set of legislative leaders who want to work a deal with the FEA on performance pay at a time when FEA leadership is interested in a deal; until then, the heads will continue to butt. (For Mike Antonucci and other union critics, you need to work harder to understand how a teachers union in a state with weak collective bargaining laws can successfully resist state-level mandates when the political branches are often actively hostile to the state affiliate; your usual explanations flounder in Florida.)
The elephant in the room: money. Legislative leaders seem disinclined at the moment to do anything that could be called raising taxes. While state revenue collection appears to be on a slight upward trend, that is more than counterbalanced by a decline in tax collection at the county level and increasing demands for Medicaid. Last year's budget politics was set by two contexts: growing legislative disillusionment with Charlie Crist and the chaotic aftermath of Ray Sansom's speakership on the House budget committee. This year, Crist is a lame duck who is viewed in the legislature as somewhere between a powerful fool and an opportunistic sell-out, and that's within his own party. Speaker Larry Cretul has reset his caucus's leadership according to his own preferences, which now include one rather than two budget chairs. And Senate President Jeff Atwater may be inclined to burnish his conservative fiscal credentials for his political future. As a result, Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander will have several quanta less influence and will probably be picking one or two battles on large issues. I have no idea whether this presages a slow-moving train wreck on the budget or opportunities for quick-thinkers in April. But a budget wreck on the scale of Pennsylvania (if not California) is possible.
January 16, 2010
Weingarten, teacher evaluation, and the long haul
I started this entry Tuesday, before the Haiti earthquake, thinking about long-term policy changes. There are a number of students and staff at USF, as well as Tampa-area residents, who are worried about relatives or who are now in mourning. Sometimes the long term pauses while you take care of immediate needs. Well, it doesn't really pause, but most people have a limit on how many things they can focus on at one time. We can multitask, but not hypertask.
As I hope most of us have become aware, our woes are often small in comparison with world events. I've had a few bumps in the road this month, one quite literal: the driver of the gray van behind me Monday morning didn't stop when I did for a yellow light. Thankfully, crumple zones, air bags, seat belts, headrests, and other bits of technology did their job, and two uniformed officers of the Tampa police guided traffic around the immobile vehicles until the wrecker could take them away. My laptop, sitting in the trunk at the time, appears unhurt. I'm unhurt; or, rather, if you tell me I need to see a doctor about my head, I'll tell you to stand in line, and the previous suggestions have not been after an accident. Surviving rear-enders without a scratch makes me grateful for government regulation, for technology, and for people such as the two witnesses who helped steer traffic until the police arrived. After news of the earthquake, I think I can handle the small bumps in life. Look around you and you realize you can and often should suck it up.
One thing I haven't been able to do this week is look closely at the Randi Weingarten speech or much reaction to it. There's been a semi-understandable "hey, she's given a Good Speech before; where are our flying cars?" reaction. But for those who are jaded by a speech, I'd agree a little more if I didn't see so much immediate score-keeping kept about who won on which issue in which city. You either care about and focus on long-term structural changes, or you don't. We're in the middle of an era in which many policymakers believe that a few derived measures from tests are good enough for high-stakes decisions and extending that to personnel decisions. There are going to be districts that make disastrous decisions on how to use student outcome data, in different directions, and districts where both the structure and the practice is uses information appropriately (and yes, does use the information). For the short term, I care a great deal about the disasters. For the long term, I know they'll exist and hope there's enough nudging of things in the right direction. For that long term, Weingarten's speech is right and consistent with AFT national support of local bargaining.
For those who keep scorecards, the battle over the Detroit collective bargaining agreement is important for counting coup. To those who think about the human impact of change, you have to worry about the attempted (and possibly successful) coup inside the Detroit Federation of Teachers. (To those who thought the new Detroit contract was too little, too late, I told you so on the internal union politics.) For those who focus on the long term, Detroit is a blip either way, losing students consistently over the years and one district out of hundreds in Michigan. Quick question: how many so-called "suburban" school districts have more students than Detroit's?
If there is a big picture on teacher personnel issues, there are several issues to pay attention to:
- Teacher preparation and professional development evaluation. I think Louisiana's approach to evaluating preparatory programs is about at the right scale: uses test data cautiously, and I think appropriately at the program rather than graduate (i.e., teacher) level. Florida is starting something that it claims is similar, but it's on a jerry-built measure (or, rather, Gerry-built measure since I know the person who is at least partly responsible for the measures of growth used here), and because it's incautiously done, I suspect it'll take several years to straighten out the kinds. I am relatively optimistic here.
- Teacher preparation and professional development structures/curriculum. Here, Arne Duncan, Arthur Levine, NCATE, and TFA/other alt.-entry routes are going to push things in one productive and one disastrous direction. The productive direction may be more time earlier in classrooms with appropriate (scaffolded) support. The unproductive direction is the denigration of psychology and other disciplinary knowledge as "theory." Incidentally, that denigration has been a common pattern within schools and colleges of education for the past 30 years--the same people who are being criticized for their ineffectiveness. My college of education is a sample of 1, but it's the educational psychologists on my floor who are the ones most adamant in the college that there is no research support for learning styles (and Michelle Rhee's district that requires teachers to use something it calls learning styles). And as far as sociologists and historians of education controlling teacher education programs? Ha! Please point to one. If there is pushing of social theory inside programs, my firm prediction (which can be empirically tested!) is that there is either no relationship between respect of disciplinary-based faculty and puffery in the teacher-ed curriculum or a negative relationship. I am cynical here.
- Teacher preparation and English language learners. There are major problems here. Unfortunately, teaching teachers about the history of immigration is both necessary and insufficient, but the social history (or a watered-down version of it repeated ad nauseam) tends to be the focus of many professional development structures that attempt to address ELL problems. Linguistic psychology takes a back seat, and there is too little research on both methods and appropriate assessment. I am in despair right now on this area.
- It's the baby-boom echo, stupid. All the cries about teacher shortages with the retirement of baby boomers is ignoring the baby-boom echo, the peak of which is right now passing through college. In a few short years, they'll be the bulge of early workforce participants, and you won't need a high proportion of them to be teachers to fill the empty seats. Oh, yeah, and there are the people in their late 30s and early 40s who can also do so. Apart from spot needs by geography and specialization (esp. science and special education teachers), I don't think that there is going to be a significant teacher shortage. I am optimistic.
- The mix of evaluation sources. I've written about this before: we have no clue as a society how to mix different sources of evaluating teachers together when each source is incomplete and sometimes severely flawed. For ideological reasons, there are advocates of different varieties of sticking one's head in the sand, either ignoring student outcomes or treating them as infinitely-accurate and -valid measures. The major Gates initiative here might be an oasis or buffer of experimentation in the RTTT era. I am cynical but hope to see something of value, eventually, maybe, filtered through a lot of political spin.
- Incentives vs. protocols. As John Thompson has pointed out, Atul Gawande's advocacy of protocols (checklists) is an uphill battle in some areas of health care.We see similar resistance in education, sometimes for good reasons (there are some awful protocols in education) and sometimes for bad reasons (see Lisa Delpit's discussion in Other People's Children on the disingenuous criticism of DISTAR for alleged abuse of power relationships). But few have pointed out that there is a conflict between the advocacy of incentives, which assumes that teachers can deliberately choose to act in a way that increases test scores, and the pushing of protocols, which assumes that no matter how well-trained and professional, teachers could use reminders to act in a way that increases student achievement.
January 9, 2010
Spot temperature:Climate::Test score:____________
I fully expect that within a week (if not yet already) some climate-change skeptic will use the cold wave currently freezing much of the country as an argument that climate changing really isn't happening. And every time there's a vicious cold snap in winter or a cooler-than-average summer we get the argument. And some reporter and editor decides to devote part of the ever-shrinking news hole to bad coverage of the issue, while a relative handful of reporters use the question as an opportunity to educate readers about the difference between weather and climate.
Today, I'm sitting in central Florida with more layers on than I usually need in early January. It's colder weather than usual. But we're in a warming climate, because in the long run of decades (or centuries) the current cold wave is just noise, and the trend is towards a warmer atmosphere. "Just noise," you may be thinking through chattering teeth, "tell my heating bill that it's just noise." The current cold wave is nasty for individuals today (and a few days more), but it's temporary.
The variability of weather makes sense to most people because we have enough experience to distinguish between spot temperatures and broader patterns. We know that temperatures have daily and seasonal cycles. But the cyclical nature of weather does not give us enough background to grasp climate change. For that, you need data. A lot of data. A lot of data from a lot of places and times, of different sorts, with a number of experts sifting through it.
And even then you get climate-change conspiracy theorists, including someone who's evidently a hacker.
You can probably guess the logical analogue here: we do not have anywhere near the same density of data on student achievement that we have on climate, and yet we draw bold conclusions about the underlying achievement from a relative paucity of noisy data. As I wrote in August, we need to learn how to make decisions with noisy data. But in terms of broad trends in achievement, it is a bad habit of Americans to equate the latest test scores with long trends.
And that doesn't even touch the question of whether test scores are like temperature readings. Ah, but they are, if you're talking about your and my outside thermometers: placed at different heights, in different conditions (sheltered, out in the open, shade v. sun), different ages of the thermometers (and thus consistency of the readings across the years). I am sure that background thermometers in these varied conditions are highly correlated in the sense that when it's colder, they're all colder, and when it's warmer, they're all warmer, and so the correlations across time are likely to be very high. But I wouldn't use them in any scientific research.
Stay warm, and have whatever hot beverage you like!
January 1, 2010
Wannabe education reformers in the U.S. need to use English
Confession: I do not have a professional editor review these blog entries before they become publicly available. As a result, there is the odd grammatical error that I notice only after publication.
And yet, I do not abuse the English language deliberately. In contrast, one of the least attractive stylistic tendencies of wannabe reformers, reformists, reformistas, or whatever term you wish to use, is the blatant word abuse, and unfortunately we see that in Tom Vander Ark's blog entry December 26, which had impact and leverage (ab)used as transitive verbs. They are not quite as chalkboard-scraping as incent (which I have heard and read from Arne Duncan and Mike Petrilli), because they do exist as nouns (and impact does not hurt my inner ear when used as an intransitive verb). But good grief, friends: do not add business jargon monoxide to the conversation, or you have no ... hmmn... leverage with which to criticize others for the same sin.
December 31, 2009
Education stories of 2009 (U.S.)
The end of the year is the traditional time for journalists and laypeople to look back and identify major issues in a year. As Phil Graham (or maybe Ben Bradlee) said, journalism is a first rough draft of history, and you know what a first rough draft looks like. Nonetheless, as an historian I'll take a stab at what I think will be seen in retrospect as key developments in education in the U.S. They may even have been key issues this year!
- The Great Recession and students' lives. More children are homeless, hungry, or displaced in some way because the adults in their family have lost jobs or their homes. We won't know the exact extent of the effects on children's lives for a few years, but the news stories of the recession's effects on children are first indicators of a quantum leap in child poverty. And there is also an effect on the lives of college students, though the effects are more complicated. People are returning to school at a rapid clip, but because financial resources are lower, there is also a greater demand for financial aid at college.
- The Great Recession and the education stimulus packages (plural). In late 2008 it became obvious that for several years Florida had been leading the country again... in declining state and local revenues. Around the country in early 2009, school-system budgets for 2009-10 looked like they were going to collapse, resulting in catastrophic layoffs that would affect not only schools but the whole economy. Federal spending kept hundreds of school systems afloat and is a good part of what saved the economy from a much worse decline in aggregate demand. The early-2009 stimulus package (aka ARRA) is the major part of the story but not all of it. If you didn't hear about the mid-December shifting of $23 billion from TARP into an account school systems could use to save jobs, you missed a substantial increase in the stimulus that should be considered part of December's second stimulus, along with an extension of unemployment benefits and federal subsidies for COBRA payments.
- College financial aid reform. The Obama administration is combining administrative changes to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) with a push to eliminate the federally-subsidized private lending program and shift resources into direct lending. While it is not politically possible (and probably not legally possible) in many states to require that all students complete the FAFSA, it is possible to make it much easier to complete, encouraging more students with real financial need to take advantage of financial aid.
- The growing role of community colleges... and erstwhile or soon-to-be-erstwhile community colleges.The July plan to give $12 billion to community colleges is a relatively small part of the overall policy emphasis of the administration on community colleges, from the appointment of a community-college president as the chief administrator of higher education policies to the greater scrutiny of proprietary training institutions (where do you think students who would otherwise go to proprietary job-training programs will be headed instead?). Ironically, two of the largest states are headed in a different direction, with Florida's community-college system disintegrating or morphing into a "state college" sort-of-system, and some voices in California voicing a similar idea with new caps on Cal State enrollments. (DC is headed in the other direction, with UDC splitting into two- and four-year institutions.)
- Race to the Top. Some of you may wonder why this isn't #1, but I'll defend my judgment that it's important but whether you like RTTT or not, it's not nearly as important a change as the issues I've put above this. But don't fret if you disagree: see #8.
- Common core standards effort. The halting, awkward, adolescent-like steps towards creating at least some vague national-level standards developed, and while Alaska and Texas may not be involved, and other states may opt out later, this is the curriculum equivalent of the 1989 Charlottesville summit, in that it is a national rather than a federal effort. (See Maris Vinovskis's recent book for that story.)
- City school control battles. From the renewal of mayoral control in NYC (and Bloomberg's relection) to an emergency manager in Detroit and the apparent devolution of Los Angeles Unified, governance is once again front and center in urban school politics. Well, maybe it never left as an issue, which is a cynical historian's perspective. But if you think I'm cynical, wait until Diane Ravitch's new book comes out in a few months. No, I haven't read the manuscript. But you don't have to before you can take a good guess at what Ravitch will say about New York City. (Recent developments in Detroit and Los Angeles came after she must have submitted her manuscript.)
- Teacher evaluation in local bargaining. Collective bargaining agreements put the AFT in the center of teacher evaluation debates through its support of new arrangements in New Haven, St. Louis, and even Detroit. And both teacher evaluations and collective bargaining more generally are at the heart of disagreements between the Minnesota and Florida teachers union state affiliates, on the one hand, and state departments that would like teacher union signoffs on RTTT applications, on the other. Disclosure: I am a member of the Florida Education Association and was on the governance board for a two-year term that ended this past summer. I haven't had time to learn much more than what's available publicly on the Florida disagreement, but I'll give you one idea in the back of my mind that's also in yesterday's Ed Week story (requires subscription) by Stephen Sawchuk: both affiliates are merged (i.e., in both the NEA and AFT).
- Sexting as a news topic. This is the latest object of our perennial concern about youth behavior, made highly visible with the suicides this year by Jesse Logan and Hope Witsell. The main difference between teens' sending racy photos of themselves by cell and other foolish teenage behavior is that cell-phone technology enables a social chain-reaction from an MMSed photo that other (and more fundamentally stupid/dangerous) behavior does not. Not that any of these is a good choice, but if you knew that your teenager was either going to get addicted to a drug, become pregnant/impregnate someone, or send or receive a sext message, which would be the least inherently dangerous behavior? Fortunately, Mike Petrilli is correct about the state of American teenagers: the trends on seriously dangerous adolescent behavior is headed in the right direction... not that any reporters covering the sexting issue noted that fact.
- Textbook affordability. Arnold Schwartznegger's midyear ramblings about ebooks aside, there has been movement in several areas to address the rent-seeking behavior of both textbook publishers and college bookstores. This includes public and private ventures to create online textbooks with inexpensive print-on-demand options and textbook rentals, and Florida is probably not going to be the last state where public colleges and universities need to list textbooks for all courses at least a few weeks before a term starts, to allow competition. There are some logistical problems with the last, such as with brand-new courses or new sections opened up to serve demand, but some tweaking will probably result in an institutionalized arrangement allowing students to search for books they can find anywhere.
So what have I missed? Any errors in judgment on the ordering? What do you think the issues for 2010 will be? Time to kibitz!
December 21, 2009
I agree with Paul Cottle: set a date for science
In response to Florida Commissioner Eric Smith's weekend op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat (responding to the December 13 op-ed by FSU physics professor Paul Cottle), Cottle says, roughly, okay, maybe not this year, but set a firm date for setting up EOC exams in all central science areas. I'll go further: Florida needs to set a firm date for increasing the lab-based courses required for a standard diploma, including chemistry, physics, and an earth/space science as well as biology. Even if it's for the class of 2015 or 2016, we need a deadline.
There are several reasons to do so:
- The challenges of this century require a citizenry that has a much better understanding of science. I don't care if you don't work in a field related to science; if you vote, I want you to understand some basics of science. So do my children. So should you.
- Minimum requirements can reduce the inequalities of course enrollments. Gender differences in high school math and science enrollments shrank dramatically between the early 1980s and this decade. Part of the change was the fact that many states, especially larger states such as California and Texas, increased their core-academic graduation requirements. Right now, there are dramatic inequalities in who takes advanced science courses. My 17-year-old daughter and most of her friends who are seniors are taking a second year of some science (in her case, physics), partly because of their interests but also because her school offers those courses. Set the requirements higher, and school districts will have to figure out how to make more seats available in science classes.
- Minimum requirements set the floor for what the next generation of elementary teachers knows. About a century ago, W.E.B. DuBois argued that African American activists had to care about the academic training of future teachers, and he is still right, and his point is correct for teachers of all students. Except that while DuBois talked about the "Talented Tenth" in the early 20th century because he knew that teaching was the most attractive profession for college-educated African Americans, we can't assume that any more. We no longer have a world where teaching is the best professional opportunity for women or for all members of marginalized cultures and races. That's a tremendous advance for the basic fairness of our society, and that means that the realistic pool of teachers is comprised of all adults with baccalaureate degrees. So we need to think about the pool of elementary teachers coming from the Talented Third or the Talented Half (which is a statement of relative attainment, not inherent ability). Want to attract new teachers from elite colleges? Go right ahead, but that still won't get you more than a fraction of the likely set of teachers in the future. Want to increase the content expertise of teachers? Great, but for the most part those requirements will focus on subject specialists in secondary schools, not elementary-school teachers. The majority of elementary-school teachers will still come from public university graduates, and many of them will have had their second-to-last lab science course in high school. (In many universities, students can satisfy the general-education requirements in science with one class.) The central question here is how much lab science do you think elementary-school teachers should have experienced?
- Technological breakthroughs 10-25 years from today will be crafted by the hands of those in high school now and in the near future. The real work of science and engineering research stands on the shoulders of senior researchers in any field and also relatively new graduates from college (whether grad students at a university or new employees in the private sector). Much of bench sciences these days is a team enterprise, not the work of a brilliant faculty member working alone. While this is not as persuasive an argument for me as the ones above, because only a limited number of high school graduates become members of such laboratories, it's a good thing to have a larger pool of people who are qualified to think about this work.
So I agree with Paul Cottle: the state legislature should look at its dance card and put down science for the near future. It doesn't have to be the first dance coming up, but it should be listed there somewhere.
December 13, 2009
Turnaround or abandonment in NYC?
The extent of school closings in New York City is becoming evident, and after JD2718's posts on the subject over the past half-week, UFT's Leo Casey provides an overview and alleges an ulterior motive (to create available space for other purposes, not to improve education).
I'm far from NYC and can't speak from close knowledge of the city schools, and I'm still grading student work so I have no time to read extensively. But this is an important story and rolling conflict, and there are a few predictions I'll hazard:
- At least one conservative will commit rampant inconsistency by simultaneously (or nearly simultaneously) weeping over the demise of the DC voucher program and applaud Klein for his bold moves, repeating the double standard on the issue I have described before.
- A small handful of schools may be preserved through fairly heroic efforts, but most of the closures will stand.
- There will be no effective way to hold Tweed responsible for consistency and rationality in its school opening/closing decisions.
In truth, many administrators engage in maneuvers that appear as arbitrary as Klein's closures do, but rarely is it on such a scale or so visible beyond the locality.
December 9, 2009
Online grandiosity failed, so get back to work
So U21 Global looks like it's failing, after the dumping of U of I Global and the morphing of Western Governors from the "we're going to conquer the world through online enrollments" stage into the "we'll settle for 10,000 students based on a Netflix model of tuition with half of our students in teacher ed" stage.
This is not the death of online education, which exists at virtually every institution of some size. Nor is it the death of scaled-up online education, since there are several outfits, notably the K-12 Florida Virtual School, which appear to have done just fine at a large size. So what's made the difference between the thriving programs and the dying programs?
- Thriving programs serve specific purposes. Florida Virtual School is not trying to conquer the world. It addresses a few specific needs, notably providing catchup classes, a few basic requirements that many students would like to "get out of the way" to take other classes they prefer face-to-face, and some opportunities unavailable in smaller districts. The fact that thousands of students in Florida find those valuable is related to the size of Florida, not a lack of specific planning on the part of the Florida Virtual School's administration.
- Thriving programs have stable (and nurtured) feeder relationships. An online program within a university can develop constituencies much more easily than Vague Global Program, and the Florida Virtual School has cultivated or taken advantage of a number of ways that students find out about its strengths (as far as I can tell, from other students and from counselors).
- Thriving programs have staff and teachers in a relationship modeled on bricks-and-mortar schooling. Florida Virtual School has made a point of explaining its acceptability in part because it has a dedicated staff and faculty "just like" the local public school down the street. As far as I can tell, thriving online programs within universities tend to treat faculty teaching online like other faculty, largely because they are faculty in regular departments and because the hiring patterns for full-time faculty normatively follow departmental patterns. How many ads in the Chronicle have job positions in an "online" department as opposed to a position in anthropology, economics, marketing, etc.?
What appears to have died is online grandiosity, and that's a good thing.
December 7, 2009
"The gap is gone"
If Aaron Pallas's report is correct, and Roland Fryer did tell Anderson Cooper bluntly in reference to the Harlem Children's Zone and Promise Academy, "The gap is gone," Fryer committed an understandable but all too common sin of education reformers across the centuries: overpromising. I've been in the room as one or more program directors and the like have promised the sky, the moon, and a few thousand stars to stakeholders and potential funders. Every time it's happened I've winced, because I've seen the storyline play out many times before: do something good, overpromise, and then see the program never be able to fulfill the more grandiose claims.
To me as an education historian, this is not an issue of whether we're adjusting for social class and other variables. Nor is it whether Geoffrey Canada is a good person (go read Paul Tough's book if you doubt that). Or whether Canada himself is overpromising: "it's worth about an hour of celebration" is his comment about the test score reports. It's about a persistent dynamic in education reform of being so desperate for something that works that you see more than is there.
I don't get that sense from Canada, who strikes me as driven and gritty and tied to what is happening to the kids in the area he's working. I'm worried about the talk around Canada and the HCZ, of taking Fryer and Dobbie's recent paper on the Promise Academy (which strikes me as fine work, but just one paper) and seeing that one paper as definitive. I've read Paul Tough's work (assigned it to my summer class), and I want HCZ to do everything Canada wants it to.
But I also want someone to look at it judiciously. And here's the irony: while it's common for a program head to be enthusiastic and a professional evaluator to be jaundiced, what is clear in the 60 minutes segment (and everything else I've read about Canada) is that the roles are reversed here. Canada's driven enough to be skeptical, to have changed school and program leaders when he doesn't see the progress he wants. Fryer? Well, check the CBS video of the segment between minute 10 and minute 11 (while watching the whole 14-minute segment). He said "the gap is gone" as baldly as Aaron Pallas claimed.
Yes, you're hearing me wince.
December 5, 2009
Are central Florida schools flouting Florida law limiting test-prep?
I have heard from teachers and students in three area districts (Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Hernando counties) that secondary teachers in some subjects are being ordered to spend the first 10 minutes of class suspending the curriculum and teaching material from another class. In the case of two counties (Pinellas and Hernando), I have heard stories that math teachers are being asked to teach 10 minutes of reading--not include word problems in math, which is certainly appropriate, but teach reading (a subject very few of them would have certification in). In one county (Hillsborough), I have heard a report from a student that a high-school anatomy teacher has been asked to spend 10 minutes reviewing other science subjects (and the emphasis appears to be in chemistry), probably to prepare students for the 11th grade FCAT science comprehension exam.
In 2008, the Florida legislature added a section to the existing law on assessment (F.S. 1008.22(4), if you're curious), specifying limits to what schools can do to prepare for tests, specifically
STATEWIDE ASSESSMENT PREPARATION; PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES.--Beginning with the 2008-2009 school year, a district school board shall prohibit each public school from suspending a regular program of curricula for purposes of administering practice tests or engaging in other test-preparation activities for a statewide assessment.
There are a number of exceptions to this prohibition--school districts can distribute sample test books, teach test-taking skills in limited quantities, etc.--but the spirit is clear: schools are not supposed to be engaging in test-prep that is a substitute for instruction. And taking time away from math class to teach reading, or away from anatomy to teach chemistry, looks like it's clearly prohibited.
It's also counterproductive from an administrative standpoint: if you wanted to add reading instruction, why would you ask a math teacher to do it? I should be clear: these are unconfirmed reports rather than documented examples. But if these reports are true, this clearly looks to be an end-run around ordinary curriculum policies requiring a certain amount of instruction in the classes to get more instruction or more test-prep in for high-stakes subjects.
There is one additional legal problem with this practice: there are both state and federal policies about teacher qualifications. I bet it's illegal in a number of respects to assign math teachers to teach reading and then report that everyone instructing in a subject is properly certified.
I have contacted the three districts in question to ask where the policies required by the law are. If you are aware of any specific examples (and I would need the school, date, class, period, and witness for sufficient documentation), please contact me by e-mail (sherman dottish-thingie dorn at-symbol-stuff gmail.com).
November 12, 2009
Race to the Top: review, revise, redux
I am in California this weekend for the Social Science History Association annual meeting, where we get to talk about Maris Vinovskis's book on the last quarter century of school reform, and since one of my copanelists Saturday morning is Jennifer Jennings, I finally get to meet the sociologist-formerly-known-as-Eduwonkette in person, face to face. Because several family members live in Costa Mesa, I also get to enjoy Kean Coffee about 20 miles south of the conference hotel/cruise ship (when the heck did the SSHA officers decide to book the Queen Mary??!).
While the focus of the book panel will be ... well, Maris's book, I'm sure we'll be talking about Obama education policy at some point, including Race to the Top. I was rushing around last night not getting enough done, so I didn't have a chance to do more than casually skim the stuff that's now available on the revised final guidelines. A few initial thoughts:
- Bottom line? No idea. I traveled west and had coffee (see above), so I don't have a bad case of jet lag, but I've been on planes for 7 hours today.
- I very much like the competitive priority on STEM fields. That uses a standard device for focusing grant-writers' minds in USDOE competitions (the bonus points for meeting a competitive priority). (Disclosure: it looks like my state's department of education is following the push a bunch of us have been making about using Race to the Top funds for end of course exams, especially in science.)
- From the list of changes made, it looks like there have been a lot of political calculations made on what changes had to be made to keep stakeholders in the game and what had to stay the same to satisfy policy goals.
- Duncan is not anal retentive enough to make the points add up to a "nice round number." I have a suspicion this is deliberate, and if so I think I know the reason why.
- People who focus on the total potential range of points for each section are missing an important feature of point distributions in scoring systems: it's the actual range and not the potential range that matters on rankings. If the potential range is 58 points from top to bottom on one component but the scoring leaves a real-life range of 10 points, it doesn't matter that the total number of points is 58. It could have been anything from 10 to 58. So what matters is how the reviewing panel looks at everything.
If we have time, I'll try to persuade Jennings to put on her Eduwonkette cape and save the state where I grew up. But I think California's problems are beyond what even a brilliant sociologist can solve. At least I get to see family members, which is worth the jet lag I'll be fighting in the next week.
Methodoxology
My graduate students are reading Jeff Henig right now, and it appears that few editorial boards or other advocates have taken his argument in Spin Cycle seriously, at least from reactions to the latest sets of charter-school reports issued by think tanks. Ritualistic incantations at the publication of the Brand New Latest Report Showing That Your Deepest Beliefs Are True should be tempered by the possibility that Sean Reardon might soon write a Think Tank Report focusing on the study's methods. Hoxby is a respected economist, and the key point of Reardon's report should be to remind us that one study does not a literature make. As Henig argued, individual studies are drops on the mill's paddles and are very rarely the whole stream. Or as Colorado's Kevin Welner said in response to Reardon's review of the 2009 Hoxby report, even the most enthusiastic reader of a study on one city might wish to "explore the causes rather than to jump to broad conclusions." I will hereby jump to the broad conclusion that this is wise advice.
November 10, 2009
Incentives for high school curriculum change
Leslie Maxwell writes a short and solid blog entry (and maybe a story later this week) about the politics of college admissions at San Diego State University. Specifically, SDSU's move to eliminate a preferential admissions policy for high school students from San Diego has sparked a debate about perceived obligations to serve the local community. I am of multiple minds here about the consequences of excluding potential students who are unlikely to move to go to college outside their home county, but I don't know if the potential SDSU students outside the county are more or less advantaged on the whole, and what would happen with college completion.
On the other hand, I think see where the dynamics are heading... towards setting up one of the local districts (Sweetwater Union's school district) as a model because of its existing compact with SDSU. I recall Peter Sacks reporting on a certain high school teacher in Oceanside, and I'm curious how he'd see this. Calling Peter Sacks...
November 6, 2009
Issues in electronic grade reports
This morning's article in USA Today on electronic grade reports is a reminder of a few important facts in evaluating technology use in schools:
- Ease of use (in jargon, "usability") is critical to adoption. The systems that existed a few years ago were (and many still are) clunky and hard to use for both teachers and parents. New systems are becoming easier for parents to use, creating different accounts for students and parents (so students are aware of what parents can access but not interfere with that access), e-mailing notices of new grade uploads, and so forth. Larry Cuban's dicta about hybridization still hold true for anything living on a server.
- The digital divide is especially important to pay attention to when private records are involved. Many poor parents and children use public libraries for internet access. With libraries' reducing hours, and with the public nature of computer-use rooms in libraries, parents without at-home internet access face significant barriers to accessing information that is online. That doesn't mean that districts should not build on-line systems, but there needs to be careful thought about how parents might access the information when they do not have private internet access, in the same way that there is a need to plan for parents with disabilities, parents who do not speak English, etc.
- Districts should begin to figure out how to bring data together for parents. I'm not talking about a giant data warehouse--that becomes cumbersome (as well as security-fraught) if anyone can have access to databases--but a slim addition to the type of stuff that is showing up in the online grade report systems. I've proposed that for high school students there could be something akin to a look-at-everything-your-student-is-doing "dashboard" (if you'll forgive that term). Grades, extracurricular activities, jobs, etc. That will take some careful thought, but maybe an economic crunch is the right time to do it, when districts will think about the tradeoff in use v. design/maintenance costs.
My children's high schools are both using Edline this year, which is a dramatic improvement from attempts at online assignment and grade access a few years ago. There are still significant issues: some teachers find the interface hard, the school district took several weeks before realizing that maybe it might want to send the private authorization codes to parents in the mail rather than entrust them to students, and the school district still has not yet addressed the divorced-parents issue with regard to access (at least from the report of one co-custodial parent frustrated that the other parent has the authorization code and sole access but isn't using it). This is still significant improvement from my perspective.
Now, if only the school district will get new online systems for high school counselors to schedule classes, for special educators to work on IEPs, and teachers to sign up for professional development. At least in Hillsborough, those are legacies from when the district incompetently tried the low-bid strategy with vendors who didn't demonstrate capacity to fulfill the contracts, and so everyone is stuck with systems that still (expletive verb) (colorful adverbial expression).
November 4, 2009
Election results -- eh.
Andy Rotherham has a tempting interpretation of election results (and their effect on federal education politics), but I'm guessing he's just suffering from living in Virginia this morning. Normally, it's a very nice state, but I've seen some pretty-well-expected "darned my state is going down the tubes" messages from Va. acquaintances over the past 12 hours.
The more fundamental questions for any domestic initiative are whether health-insurance reform passes this year and what happens with employment in the next 4-5 months. My best guess is that health-insurance reform will pass and employment will start to nudge up but not by leaps and bounds. The result is that the potential for "oh my gosh I have to protect my seat" paranoia by majority Congresscritters will abate as a result of a health-insurance law but that pressure on the employment front will keep members of Congress nervous (regardless of party).
And, in any case, since the action in education politics is usually at the state level, that's where the import of yesterday's elections lies:
- The death of two more TABOR referenda means that education funding is imperiled only by a horrid economy and state revenues. Yippee?
- An unpopular Democratic governor in NJ is replaced by a Republican governor who may well enter office nearly as unpopular, facing a legislature that tends to protect wealthy communities at the expense of poor communities when it comes to education.
- A popular Democratic governor in VA is replaced by a conservative Republican governor who promised to focus on education (among other service-oriented campaign promises), with a legislature dominated by Republicans.
- In the sick state of New York, a billionaire buys a third term and a probable minor scandal about his elbows as well. In the meantime, an ineffectual governor will increasingly be overshadowed by state-level politics over education.
- The sick state of California loses its often-running lieutenant governor to Congress.
November 1, 2009
Ready-made dissertation topic on local school politics
Anyone looking for a dissertation topic on school policy or politics can now rest easy: read the Palm Beach Post's description of a local reform effort that blew up in the face of a superintendent. You've got everything in there from the data-driven mantra to parental backlash to odd bedfellows with the teachers union and coalition politics. I have been watching the story unfold for a few months and suspecting that there's been a lot more beyond the headlines. I want to read the book on this, so get cracking, somebody!
October 30, 2009
Do Times reporters know the difference between percentages and raw numbers?
I suspect the following is an unfortunate placement by the reporter on a story about record high percentages of young adults in college (with an emphasis on percentages):
"What's behind this," Mr. [Richard] Fry added, "is that we have the biggest pool of young adults we've ever had who've finished high school."
I suspect that this is in reference to the growth of enrollment in two-year colleges, not total college-going. That distinction was not clear in the article.
October 29, 2009
Channeling Jerry Bracey on "proficiency": it's political, not scientific
One of the late Jerry Bracey's hobbyhorses was the pretense that the NAEP achievement level labels were scientific, as he argued in 1999: "The standards have generally been the object of scorn and derision from the psychometric community." He was fond of quoting the 1999 report on NAEP proficiency levels, esp. from p. 162: " Standards-based reporting is intended to be useful in communicating student results, but the current process for setting NAEP achievement levels is fundamentally flawed." So when NCES issues a report comparing the implied theta-values of cut-scores for proficiency on state assessments to the theta-values of cut scores for proficiency on NAEP and both Ed Week and the Christian Science Monitor report on the paper with a straight face, we're obviously seeing one place where Bracey's voice is already missing.
I think Jerry perseverated on this issue, to the detriment of a sensible argument about political judgments. The larger point which is inescapable is that cut scores are set arbitrarily, and there is no way to avoid that fact. Those who support setting achievement levels hope and pray that they're arbitrary in the sense of arbitration and careful judgment, not by being capricious. But they are arbitrary, and even moreso the labels assigned them. What we know is that someone who scores at a "proficient" level on NAEP is scoring higher than someone in the "basic" band. That's all we know from those labels: ordinality. Moses did not come down from Mount Sinai with NAEP scores carved in tablets.
So what do we do with the inherently political nature of those labels? As I have argued in Accountability Frankenstein, the caution with which we use the judgments on cut scores should depend on the stakes of their use. If they're used to target resources, that's one thing (resources are going to be targeted in some manner), but the more that someone's job depends on them, the more wary we should be of how we set thresholds.
Today, however, NAEP labels and cut-scores are serving a purely performative act, to stigmatize states for their political response to NCLB. I hereby propose that we have the following new labels for NAEP achievement levels:
I think that's in the spirit of the day's report...
Correction: I assumed that NCES was using detailed data from the state assessments to estimate IRT parameters. Silly me. They were using distributional data for linkage. Oops... for me for forgetting the methods from the last such report. I'll let the measurement folks argue about the methods used here.
October 25, 2009
Ted Sizer's push
It had instant credibility to the vast majority of readers who all probably shifted uncomfortably while reading certain passages, recognizing themselves. And the terms that came out of that project...
Classroom treaties.Tell me if you don't remember an entire class wheedling a teacher or two to change an assignment, to lower expectations a smidgen, and also reduce the teacher's workload.
The anonymity of the high school student. Tell me if you don't remember the bright classmate hiding in the back of the class, never called on, never pushed to think hard, never affected personally by a teacher.
The shopping-mall high school. That was the title of one of the other books that came out of the same project, and while it had a bit more of an edge, it had the same subtext: we can expect more.
Exhibitions. Most people call them portfolios, but he wanted them to be exhibitions in a more public sense, to get adolescents to be proud of their work, even if they were works in progress themselves (as are we all).
I know that I'm going to read laudatory eulogies of Ted Sizer in the next month, and I hope they don't forget his strategic choices in the 1980s, as he put together the project that became Horace's Compromise, The Shopping Mall High School, and The Last Little Citadel. I suspect that while his own books will be emphasized, along with his Essential Schools project, there was a subtle and clever point about his focus on the plurality experience in suburban high schools after World War 2: "I'm talking about you. Not Other People who don't have your advantages. You. Your children. How we're not expecting what we can from teenagers in your life."
His underlying ethic was one of pushing teenagers in healthy directions. It's close to Deborah Meier's point about a small high school: adults are supposed to be "in your face" in the right ways, so adolescents don't disappear into the woodwork. It's a structure to encourage pushing without having to be pushy. "I love you and expect more from you." "No, you can't get away with that." "I know you can do more." It's not without choices, by any means, but the choices have consequences and need to be deliberate, not the first thought off the top of a teenager's head. "That's interesting. How else could you do that?" "How did that affect the people in your lives? What else did you think about doing?" It's about pushing teenagers into thoughtful independence. "Here's the end goal. How would you get there? What would be your first step?"
I'm at the History of Education Society meeting this week, and there are so many here who knew or worked with Ted Sizer, including Bob Hampel (who wrote The Last Little Citadel). Many of the historians of ed who knew Sizer closely have retired, and many of us (including me) are young enough and unlucky enough that we never met him. But we know both his scholarly contributions (the first serious historical work on the high school) and his contribution to serious reform discussions over the past quarter-century.
In lieu of sending flowers, don't let an adolescent get away with sloppy thinking this week. Push.
October 22, 2009
Duncan's talk at Teachers College: first impressions
Some quick impressions of the text of Arne Duncan's speech at Teachers College today:
Historical quibble: Duncan said he was speaking at a place where "giants like John Dewey played such a formative role." No, he didn't, or at least not at Teachers College. When Dewey moved from Chicago to Columbia, he moved from education to philosophy, which is south of 120th Street. At Teachers College at the time, Edward Thorndike was far more influential. And after Dewey left Chicago, Charles Judd ruled the roost there. Correction to the quibble: In comments, Aaron Pallas points out that Duncan's speech was sponsored by Teachers College but held in a lecture hall south of 120th St. (i.e., on the Columbia side of the Academic Gorge of the Upper West Side). I stand corrected. Or I blog corrected.
Right: Duncan is correct that teacher education in the U.S. is currently inadequate. Duncan is correct that colleges of education do not teach everything that teachers need, and the reports he hears (about the inadequacy of preparation for classroom management and use of student performance information to improve instruction) is consistent with plenty of other information.
Wrong: Duncan wrongly implies that teacher education can easily fill the holes that teachers see from the classroom. Many years ago, I remember seeing the surveys for one absolutely solid program that taught about behavior management and using student performance data in a rigorous manner, and the primary complaints of alumni/ae was ... that the program didn't prepare them adequately in classroom management. On some things there is no substitute for experience, I suspect.
Right: Duncan argues that teacher education programs (and states) have not looked sufficiently to what happens with their graduates and the students of their graduates. He points in contrast to Louisiana's longitudinal analysis of teacher preparation programs, and he is right to do so. In contrast with all sorts of self-aggrandizing projects, George Noell has built a team whose reporting is relatively careful with methods and conclusions.
Wrong: Duncan baldly claims that he knows what good teacher education looks like. Dear Secretary Duncan: don't you remember the other part of the speech where you said that we don't look sufficiently at outcomes? Either we need to look at data carefully to figure out what works and what doesn't, or we know everything right now. I suspect that we know plenty of stuff that does not work, but that doesn't say much about the inevitable tradeoffs--whether it's more important to put resources into giving teachers detailed assessment classes or putting principal and specialist candidates through those classes, whether it's more important to make teacher-ed students spend their entire last year in schools (as happens with one of the programs Duncan praises), or make them spend more time learning content. By highlighting and praising a few current fads in teacher education, Duncan is falling into the same pattern he criticizes schools of education for.
Right: Duncan did not try to point fingers in politically-convenient directions. He did not try to claim that all teacher-ed programs are alike in content or structure. In contrast to Arthur Levine's semi-ahistorical report, Duncan did not claim that a major problem somehow lies with those of us on the margins of teacher education (as if all colleges of education are run by philosophers and historians). He correctly pointed to the institutional environment within which teacher-education programs operate:
It is far too simple to blame colleges of education for the slow pace of reform. In fact, universities, states, and the federal government have all impeded reform in a variety of ways.
Minor quibble here: One could legitimately claim that colleges of education have been on the forefront of reform plenty of times in the past century, sometimes but not always on the side of improving education. See my note above about Dewey, Thorndike, and Judd. And Diane Ravitch is correct about Teachers College in one very important way: William Bagley was on the right side in the early 20th century, against the conventional-wisdom of the day about reform.
But the reasons why elite schools of education headed in the wrong direction at the time fits with Duncan's institutional context: for universities, the easiest money in the early 20th century was in collecting school administrators and administrator wannabes into graduate programs, at the beginning of a trend that no one who reads Duncan's speech text should be surprised about: for decades, education and chemistry regularly vied for the highest number of doctorates granted in the country.
I teach at a college of education, one of the larger ones in the country. At first blush, Duncan's criticism strikes me on the whole as reasonable, and far more reasonable than the more venomous attacks I've seen before. I would love to trade the double standards and incredible micromanagement of programs we currently experience in our state (and I could tell tales of some of the idiocies we experienced in our last joint state-NCATE review--and this comes from one of the faculty members who had relatively little time sucked away for this) for a requirement to pay attention to what happens to our graduates and their students after they leave us.
October 21, 2009
A gadfly remembered: Jerry Bracey
An e-mail from Kevin Welner yesterday announced Jerry Bracey's death Monday night. I only met him a handful of times in the past 20 years of his persistent, indefatigable efforts to poke holes in every public report or news story he saw as an effort to demonize public schooling. His Huffington Post column from September 25 is representative of both the topics that he addressed year in and year out and the disdain he felt towards those who he thought libeled and slandered public-school students and educators.
According to one online biography, he was an early-childhood psychologist at the Educational Testing Service and Indiana University before becoming a testing director for the state of Virginia in the late 1970s and then taking a similar position in a small school Colorado district in the mid-80s. At about the same time he moved to Colorado, he began writing columns on education research for Kappan magazine, and in 1991 he wrote a long article excoriating critics of public schools, primarily the authors of the 1983 A Nation at Risk report and anyone who repeated the claims in that report.
He has spent the last 18 years writing detailed critiques of whatever target happened to catch his eye. I first met him when he visited the University of Delaware in 1992-93 as he was beginning his second career as a mythbuster. My impression at the time was that he was smart, detail-oriented, and tilting at a windmill. I think my judgment at the time has been borne out by his writings since then. For more than a decade, the Kappan magazine published his annual "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education," which usually praised a handful of individuals and dished out acidic criticism to those Bracey thought were fools or worse. For a few years, Kappan published his "Rotten Apple" awards with Bracey's annual report and then thought better of it once the first lawsuit threat appeared (when Bracey handed Willard Daggett the "No, you're not a ham, ham can be cured" Rotten Apple Award in 2000). Thereafter, every year at about the same time as his rotten-appleless report appeared in Kappan, Bracey would e-mail his annual Rotten Apple nominations to the world (or at least a long list of recipients), eventually publishing them and the annual report manuscripts online. Bracey was the Pauline Kael of education research.
Bracey was a true gadfly, a semi-retired professional who did his best to discomfit those who he thought were abusing their positions. He held no White House post, no political appointments in the U.S. Department of Education, no leadership spot in a well-funded think tank.
It is often the case that gadflies are ill-appreciated during their lifetimes, and often they pick the wrong windmills, or they tilt at windmills when they could be digging out the foundation instead. But Bracey was always there to respond to what he thought was poor reporting and sloppy thinking. There is probably no national reporter on the education beat in the past 20 years who didn't hear at one point or another from Jerry Bracey about Simpson's paradox or why NAEP's achievement levels were more political than scientific. Debra Viadero's blog entry today is very much in the vein I've read from reporters on occasion over the years: "He was, to put it bluntly, a thorn in our side. Once in a while, though, he had a point and I was awed by his tireless persistence and his willingness to heap criticism on government leaders from both sides of the political aisle, from Margaret Spellings to Arne Duncan."
October 17, 2009
An historian reads the business section (with apologies to John Allen Paulos)
I do not generally comment on economic matters, but I think historians of education can say something productive about the current myths plodding around the internet about the stimulus and the non-bank sector of the banking industry. First, some of the current discourse:
- Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida, is unimpressed with stimulus dollars being spent in Florida, arguing that to do much good, the money should have come in and been spent much faster.
- John Quiggen is upset over at Crooked Timber over Goldman Sachs's profiting from risky ventures, or maybe upset that they're getting significant leverage over financial firms that have taken federal recapitalization and sat on the money, or repaid it to avoid additional regulation. I am not exactly sure how close Quiggen is to Krugman's being upset that we're not moving fast enough to regulate the unregulated (non-bank) part of banking.
These appear to be fairly standard concerns with economists. And I sort of understand that, except for a few perspectives from the history of stodgy institutions (schools):
- Sometimes moving slowly is what's needed for longer-term needs. As other economists have pointed out, White House economist-in-chief Christine Romer's broader concern has consistently been with the general output gap over several years. In contrast with a mild recession where the output gap really is short-term, we're going to have problems with output for more than 8-12 months. So spending over more than 8-12 months is not a bad idea. This is about saving the entire country's economy, not just Florida or any single state.
- Lots of institutionalized changes are hidden, and that's as true for the stimulus as it often is with education. For political purposes, the White House is now starting to highlight the jobs created and to a lesser extent the jobs saved by the stimulus. To my mind, it's the thousands of public-service jobs saved that are evidence of effective policy, but that's hidden because people have kept jobs (and it's hard to see non-change as a success). Similarly, part of the stimulus is the reduction in federal income-tax withholding. If I understand things correctly, that's more effective than a tax rebate precisely because it's not that visible, and people of low and moderate means are likely to take that extra money every paycheck and spend it on things they desperately need to pay for... and that keeps demand up. (Giving people a tax rebate may be perfectly justifiable public policy for other purposes, but I'm not convinced that it's effective for stimulus.)
- Instead of hoping that we can fix those buggers so they can't game the system anymore (a common dream in accountability policy), maybe we should assume that the attempt to game the system is as much of a permanent feature of financial institutions as it is in schools. And maybe we should take a long-term perspective that we always assume there will be attempts to game the system and a need to adjust public policy on a cyclical basis to respond to such gaming. As many have pointed out, even if the bank-in-name side of banking has recovered and started to lend again (and I think it has), there is a huge hole where the non-banking side used to leverage itself out the wazoo to give out subprime loans, liars' loans, and the like. Yes, there needs to be better regulation of the finance industry, but we should assume it is always incomplete and never done. An example of where the evolution of financial regulation worked is in so-called peer-to-peer lending, where propser.com and lendingclub.com popped up in the wake of Kiva's charity microlending on a social platform. The difference between charity social-networked lending and social-network lending with interest is disclosure and risk. In Kiva, you're not expecting interest, and you know that your money loses value every day it's out there in a loan. But that's not a problem since your goal isn't making money. In 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled (properly, I think) that the Prosper and LendingClub operations were essentially securities and needed to be run as such. And both sites have now been approved and reopened as SEC-approved securities operations. This is where regulation works well to keep things transparent. This doesn't mean that P2P lending serves the functional role of putting money to its most productive uses, but I don't think subprime lending did, either, and at least the risks exist and are stated up front, while individuals have the power to make both wise and foolish investment decisions.
And now, I'll crawl back into my HistoryCave, waiting for the next Little Red Schoolhouse silhouette to show up on the underside of my metropolis's clouds to signal another emergency requiring an Historian of Education.
October 14, 2009
Don't exercise: you'll destroy the world
If you had asked me this morning what I expected from the latest round of NAEP math scores and what was going on in DCPS, I would have told you to expect NAEP math scores to increase at a snail's pace with loads of arguments about what that meant, that Michelle Rhee seemed to have decided at long last that working out a deal with Randi Weingarten was more important than a charismatic image, and that maybe we should focus on long-term issues more than evanescent news stories.
After I exercised midday ... and got dizzy and fainted slighty (I'm fine, don't worry, it's only a flesh wound) ... only one of those statements turned out to be true. Fortunately, it's the most important one. I wouldn't make too much of the NAEP trends from a single cycle, nor of the apparent resurgence of the image of Michelle Rhee the Warrior/Tyrant (depending on your POV).
But I've got to say I'm a little worried here. I partially lose consciousness, and a little bit of the universe's fabric frays. I've learned my lesson: I'll never exercise again, to keep the world and reality safe.
For those who are curious: probably a combination of too-little a/c in the gym and my body trying to fight off a virus. My daughter had a fever last night, and while I don't have a fever, I've been exhausted for the last 3-4 evenings. And the most embarrassing detail? It all happened at the leg-press machine. I mean, if you've ever looked at me, you'd say, "If that guy ever faints while working out, it'll be on upper-body work. No real biceps, and don't even try to identify triceps on the man. But the thighs and below? Not a problem." Apparently the large muscles in my body had a larger appetite for blood and oxygen than was healthy.
The comparability fly in the Ouchi/principal-autonomy ointment
Yesterday from a "stakeholders" meeting (I think at the USDOE), Charlie Barone tweets,
Richard Laine of Wallace Foundation: forthcoming Rand study will show [principal] autonomy in hiring a key factor in student achievement.
I've been expecting something like this for a while, not because I'm connected to a RAND insider (I'm not) but because this is the obvious new version of decentralization form that would marry the 1980s-90s site-based management fad with new managerial fads in education.
To some extent I am attracted to Bill Ouchi's argument about principal autonomy leading to lower total student load. Ouchi's claims about total student load is essentially one of Ted Sizer's central arguments from Horace's Compromise, that the number of students a teacher sees is a key factor in the ability to push student achievement. But... and here's a fairly important but... Ouchi's work is tantalizing rather than definitive (because it has not be replicated substantially in terms of total student load), and the temptation to manage large urban districts as "portfolios" with quasi-independent school-level management may push a single form of decentralization at the cost of comparability in expenses and access to great teachers.
What the heck do I mean by that? In a sentence, we may not want principals to have complete autonomy in a task where they have relatively weak skills: knowing which novice teachers are going to be great teachers.
Everyone and her or his grandmother is focusing on the problem of
where senior teachers work. This is an intellectual sleight of hand if
you simultaneously argue that teachers with seniority are taking
advantage of contracts with seniority privileges on transfer to avoid
schools who need them and also insinuate that experience means nothing.
Let me get this straight: we need to prevent experienced teachers from
exploiting labor-market choice to move to schools with more comfortable
teaching situations because... they're not inherently any better than
teachers with only a few years of experience? This is an inconsistency
ripe for Jon Stewart-like treatment.
More important than the intellectual sleight of hand is the way that this argument ignores an opportunity for a simple but politically sensitive intervention we could make that could simultaneously improve the lives of poor children and new teachers: create regional new-teacher clearinghouses and matching services. Here's the thought experiment: Far from decentralizing, I think it would be a healthy system for schools to require new teachers go into a large regional market where vacancies for relatively new teachers (e.g., those with fewer than three years of experience) would be balanced with a matching process akin to matching of med-school graduates to residencies. This would require collective bargaining and regional agreements between districts (or changes to statute), but here's the idea:
Brand-new teacher's perspective: A new teacher registers with the regional teaching market clearinghouse, with all of the stuff you'd want applicants to provide. The clearinghouse is directly tied to vacancies in the region, and that would probably include multiple districts in most parts of the country. The clearinghouse matches teachers to jobs for the first year. The teachers and administrators are told, explicitly, "This is a one-year arrangement. In the second year, the teacher is headed to a new school, and the administrator provides an evaluation knowing that the teacher is not coming back to that school until at least two years down the road." And that's what happens. At the end of the first year, the clearinghouse matches jobs to teachers who want to continue teaching and whom the first-year administrators recommend continue. Same with the end of the second year. And the clearinghouse's job is to make sure that by the end of a new teacher's third year, that teacher has worked in multiple settings, with different characteristics of students (at least within the range of the region), in areas of the teacher's documented expertise (i.e., no out-of-field matches).
At the end
of Year 3? Open market in the spring, in most places, and
administrators wanting to hire on the open market must hire teachers
with at least three years' experience -- in other words, teachers for
whom there is a record of evaluations from different administrators and
for whom there is a record of performance for students in different
settings (within the range of the region's student population). Schools
are allowed to hire teachers who worked in their schools before... if
the now-third-year teacher wants to work there again.
Benefit
to teachers: first-year teachers stuck with horrible administrators (or
generally toxic environments) know that they'll be moving on if they
survive. They'll get experience with multiple settings where they'll be
able to demonstrate their chops. At the end of their third year,
they'll have some variation in experience with administration to be
able to judge people better when applying in an open-market situation.
Disadvantage to teachers: if you happen to get lucky and get a great
job in Year One, you have to move on.... and let another new teacher
get the benefit of that experience.
Benefit to
administrators: because new teachers are forced to move on after a
year, honest evaluations are less likely to result in social
backlashes. When you hire on the open market, you'll know you'll have
evaluations and (where this is gathered) other performance data that is
from school settings with a range of student populations. Disadvantage:
you don't get to hire absolutely new teachers; you get whom you get,
and if you were great spotters of talent, or you think you're better
than the average principal at spotting good talent, you'll be upset.
(Personally, I think I would prefer this as an administrator: if you've read Moneyball, you know the sabremetricians' rule of thumb: you can predict a baseball player's professional performance from college experience, but someone straight out of high school is just a raw bet without college experience. Why would you want the authority to make hires in a situation where you're almost guaranteed to be a worse judge of talent/skill than any other personnel situation? Then again, I'm sure many principals think of themselves like the [very poorly-predicting] old scouts of baseball, making seat-of-the-pants judgments.)
Advantages
for systems: See advantages for administrators above. In addition, you
have lower risk with variation in administrators' skills in talent
judgment, while principals would still have the autonomy to pick more
experienced teachers, after they pick up enough of a record for
administrators to see who has more talent. You could also get
development of evaluation skills in a regional context without
diseconomies of scale. If clearinghouses have to track teachers, they
could also be tasked with additional evaluation responsibilities across
a region. Advantage for relatively poor systems: you know that
wealthier districts will not be able to be as much of a magnet for new
teachers, because of regional rotation, and you could push
administrators to do what is necessary to convince teachers that they
want to return to your district after their initial three-year rotation
is done. Disadvantages: there would need to be legal agreements to
cover this, and there would be some logistical challenges in
identifying vacancies (and making sure those vacancies are reported
accurately and promptly) as well as the operation of a clearinghouse.
School districts would have to delegate hiring authority for some of
their jobs to a regional body, and if school systems really thought
that they were hot stuff in terms of talent scouting, that might be
hard to swallow. (See above and Moneyball on the egos of baseball scouts and possibly school administrators.) Disadvantage for wealthy districts: poof
goes your advantage in recruiting brand-new and relatively-new
teachers, because they'll spend some time in your districts but also
some time in poorer districts.
Now, the payoff in terms of debates about comparability: a regional new-teacher clearinghouse/matching process would instantly equalize a significant part of the teaching staff across a region, because of rotation among jobs and districts. Yes, there would still be an advantage of wealthier districts in attracting teachers with three or more years of experience, but poorer districts would know that they at least have a shot of persuading new teachers that they can make a good career inside a district... if the relatively new teachers have an experience that is supportive.
Remember that this is a thought experiment: I don't know of any places with regional new-teacher clearinghouses/matching services, and I dreamed it up out of whole cloth (plus some inspiration from what happens with med-school students). But I think it points out a structural problem with giving principals entire autonomy: with complete autonomy, there is no balancing out of regional needs. Equality of opportunity would depend entirely on the skills of individual principals, and while principals are extraordinarily important, that's putting a heck of a lot of eggs in a single basket. If you care about making sure that a broad range of students have access to great teachers, there are serious dangers in the Ouchi principal-autonomy approach.Why you don't always need a statewide charter authorizer
I don't understand the obsession some people have with multiple charter-school authorizers. In Florida, it has always been the county school board since the charter-school law was first approved in the mid-90s. A few years ago in Florida, the legislature decided for some reason that not enough proposals were being approved and created (and spent gobs of money) on a commission that would be an uber-authorizer. To me, it looked like a giant loophole for low-quality applications and politics. Fortunately, the state court system struck down the law as an infringement on the constitutional authority of school boards.
While there may be an apparent conflict of interest between an elected board and charter-school authorizer, in fact there has not been. And there is a need for people with at least some experience looking at schools to vet the proposals. In Manatee County, for example, staff are going to recommend that the school board reject 8 applicants to open charter schools, and at least from a Bradenton Herald article, the rejections would come for some fairly good reasons. There is no charter cap in Florida, and a number of school boards have no problems approving well-planned charter schools. In addition (and this is fairly important), we have a public-records and open-meeting statute that is rigorous, and the administrative rules in place in Florida make it difficult for a public agency to be arbitrary without being held accountable on appeal.
Disclosure: I have been associated with two organizations that have started charter schools... and then stopped running them. In one case (my university), it was planned in my first year and I would not have had the chance to participate in planning. The USF charter school was essentially turned over to the county public schools (and became a local public school within the system) some months ago. In the other (a non-profit organization), I expressed my concerns about organizational capacity from the inside, the charter school started operations, and I was no longer a member at the time that the school closed.
October 12, 2009
News item: Boy Scout suspended for being prepared
The suspension of Zacharie Christie is the latest tomfoolery in zero-sense discipline policies, because the tyke decided to bring his Boy Scout cutlery to school. Next: Fox News special on the Evil Spork. And this brings to mind a parody of medieval-fandom-society "weapons at the door" policies:
A Bard was next whose goodly Voice has entertained us all
but he, too, was prevented from entering the Hall
and told he could not carry deadly weapons on the floor
he left his Voice and Harp among the weapons at the door
-- Joe Bethancourt, "Weapons at the Door" (1974)
October 10, 2009
One Blog Schoolhouse: the PDF
Should've been done a few months ago, but if you want to read the entire text of One Blog Schoolhouse, it's now available as a nonprinting PDF. (I recommend that you click the "PDF" link in brackets, since I don't know if scribd will convert a nonprinting PDF.) The entire thing. Absolutely free to read.
October 8, 2009
First, find me a box of cereal that squirms and drips snot in winter
Congratulations to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who knows a critical rule of politics: declare victory whenever you can, no matter whether you were right. I am quite serious about his political acumen: his push of a system that assigned letter grades to schools was ingenious politics. And Bush deserves credit for supporting a research technical assistance center in Florida as well as funding for reading coaches. But Jeb Bush's comments to the Jeb Bush Celebration Conference this week had an interesting quip:
Frankly, if Walmart can track a box of cereal from the manufacturer to the check-out line, schools should be able to track the academic growth of a student from the time they step in the classroom until they graduate.
I am firmly in favor of using longitudinal data, but this comment is cheerleading and not serious discussion. There are significant challenges in the creation, maintenance, and use of longitudinal data systems, and Walmart-style tracking logistics don't touch the greater ones.
October 6, 2009
Dozens of Veblens, a handful of Heckmans, not one Keynes
Skimming the Ryan Lizza portrait of Larry Summers, reading Paul Krugman's focus on the size of the stimulus, and listening to Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics while driving around Tampa this week makes it clear to me that outside the bubble that is Fox News and talk radio, Krugman, Romer, and a number of other liberal economists are at heart technocrats: when they looked at the Great Recession, they saw an output gap that government could and should fill. This isn't socialism; this is Keynes. (As Krugman notes in passing in Return, Keynes was someone who believed in capitalism, in contrast to plenty of others who thought differently in the 1930s.) When you think there's a technical fix, you're not a revolutionary. And Krugman definitely thinks there's a technical fix to be had here.
Despite whatever else one might say about the dominance of economic policies by anti-empirical rationalists, freshwater Austrians, and other odd critters, Gertrude Stein's quip doesn't have a foothold: there is a there there somewhere. But we are far from there in education. There are a number of erudite, smart commentators on education, and while I try to learn from all of them, there is no Keynes. There are a number of technical savants in different corners of education, the education equivalents of James Heckman (and, heck, Heckman's helped out with small heaps of his talent focused on education), but there is no Keynes. And there are people who would like to or pretend to be systemic analysts like Keynes, but there is no Keynes.
In part as a result, when people debate education policy, it quickly slides into attacks on politics and posturing and whatnot. Now, of c