Much Ado

The New York Post was shocked - shocked! - on their cover yesterday to discover that New York students were getting credit for putting the wrong answer on their state math tests. Those fiends at the DOE have done it again! Will there be no end to the dumbing down?

Amidst about 500 words of outrage over the policy - which was upgraded today to "controversial", apparently based on the fact that the New York Post wrote about it yesterday - it comes out that the reason kids are getting partial credit for those problems is that they show work demonstrating at least a partial understanding of the math principles involved.

I'm sorry, but that policy actually makes sense.

Look, ultimately it matters whether or not kids can solve math problems correctly. No argument from me on that point. But these tests are supposedly measuring student learning. If a child is able to demonstrate that they are learning - even if it's not as much as they should be - doesn't it make sense to account for that in our measurement?

The Post's "exclusive" yesterday is essentially an expose on giving credit for showing work, something that's been around at least since I was in school and probably before. It's certainly not a new policy on the New York state tests either.

Is the amount of credit being given for showing work too generous? Perhaps. I don't know. I do know that overheated Post rhetoric doesn't help.

That brings me to my last point of the morning. The more I read education reporting in the Post and other New York papers, the more troubled I am by the things I recognize to be misrepresentations or outright falsehoods. It makes me wonder what I would find if I knew more about, say, economics or world affairs. I mean, if we can't trust the papers to report accurately on education, how can we trust them to get right the big stories like this one?

Almost a Great Idea

Out in St. Paul, Minnesota, they've come up with a pretty good plan. Kind of. The plan is to send out a team of experienced teachers - they're calling them coaches in this program - to work with high-needs kids in schools across the city to improve their test scores. I'm 99% on board with this program.

I love the outside the box thinking of taking a team of senior teachers and sending them in to do intensive work with small groups of kids who most need it. This is the kind of targeted intervention that I think we should be doing all the time. I just wish that it was for some end other than a one-time boost in test scores.

If this were a regular program designed to operate continuously forever, I would be singing its praises from rooftops. But the sole focus on testing is an issue. Specifically it's on the goal of boosting test scores by 10 percentage points this year. I have issue with that.

Learning is about more than acing high stakes standardized tests. They have a powerful tool here to really make that clear to students and really make a difference. But they're only using the tool halfway. What a waste.

Change We Can Believe In

Not content with just reforming education through the Race to the Top fund, President Obama has come out swinging again on education. This time, he's talking about rewriting the No Child Left Behind law. At the risk of repeating what's already been on about 1,000 edublogs, way to go.

At this point, it's pretty clear that No Child Left Behind, though well intentioned, has some serious flaws. It's over-reliance on standardized tests is a huge example of that. So what does Obama do? He sets out to deemphasize standardized tests in determining which schools are succeeding and which are failing. If this really happens, it could lead to a huge shift away from the skill, drill, and kill methodology that's become pretty much a necessity in the NCLB era. Let's move away from the high stakes tests and toward a more complete measure of student and school performance.

Arne Duncan said, "We want accountability reforms that factor in student growth, progress in closing achievement gaps, proficiency towards college and career-ready standards, high school graduation and college enrollment rates."

Yes we do.

Who's the Boss?

It turns out that Houston has a bit of a controversy going on in terms of how they evaluate teachers. The school board there was set to vote on a plan to evaluate teachers based on the Texas high stakes testing results. Teachers who aren't doing well may even be fired. Naturally, this has got some people overjoyed and others less so. It does raise - for me anyway - one issue that I think is worth really delving into. (For the sake of argument, let's assume that standardized testing is a valid way to measure student learning. Obviously there are pros and cons to the approach, but let's put those aside for this post.)

The president of the teachers' union there is quoted as saying, "There are so many factors that influence scores — school climate and leadership, not to mention how students woke up feeling on test day." Let's throw into that hopper things like socioeconomic status, nutrition, health and dental care, and more. I think most everyone would agree that kids don't walk into classrooms as blank slates ready to take in whatever the teacher throws at them. Rather, there are all sorts of things both in and out of school that have an impact on student learning. We know that. So let's take it to the next step.

Who has ultimate responsibility for ensuring that kids are learning?

If the school board approves this measure, they are saying it's the teachers. The teachers' union is saying that the principal and outside factors (like parents) also have some responsibility. All of the arguments have some validity. However, if we accept all of them, then who do we blame when things go wrong or praise when they go right? Can we take children away from their parents if their test scores aren't improving?

If we go down that road, we get into accountability nihlism and that's not ultimately going to help us very much. So then where does the responsibility lie?

In the end, I think we have to answer the question by saying that it's the schools. We can and should do everything we can to improve the living conditions for children in underserved communities to help on that front. We can and should provide as much support for parents as possible to help them raise their children so that they'll be able to succeed in school and in life. We can and should do a whole host of things to help the kids who need it most. But in the end, it's the school's job to educate kids and the buck needs to stop there - fairly or unfairly.

Should we fire teachers because of poor student performance? Not as a first line of defense, but it should probably be an option. As long as our goal is to improve schools first, I think we'll see much less need to punish them.

What's the Value?

A quick lesson in economics:

Marx said that the value of something was equal to the labor put into making it. That's why profit should belong to the workers - they were the ones who instilled it with value. My grandfather always used to say that something is only worth what you can get for it. He wasn't a great economist, but as a banker he did have a certain level of valuable insight. By either measure, the value of a high school diploma is in real trouble if this story from the New York Times is accurate.

For those of you who are linkophobic, the story says that states tend to lower their standards when it becomes apparent that many students aren't going to pass state exit exams. I think I've mentioned before that the Times is sometimes a little slow in getting to these education stories, so you probably aren't shocked to be hearing this. But once it's in the paper of record, it's worth noting.

Let's assume the best case here and ignore the fact that the reason standards are being lowered is that no one wants to be in charge when a bunch of kids are denied diplomas who thought they would be getting them. Let's assume that the standards game is a way to ensure that more kids get diplomas because we know that those are valuable for job seeking and other endeavors.

There's that v-word again. What is the value of a diploma? If standards are being lowered and kids don't need to work as hard for it, then Marx would say that it wasn't as valuable. If employers know that kids with diplomas aren't necessarily ready for meaningful work, then diploma holders aren't going to get as much for having one. Whether you listen to Marx or my grandfather, the value of a diploma is goes down when standards go down.

The bottom line - and I don't think this is controversial - is that we need to make sure more kids are getting diplomas, but we need to do it by raising the kids to the level of the diplomas, not by lowering the diplomas to the level of the kids. In the end, we aren't really helping anyone by doing that.

Stimulus and Real Learning

Two quick thoughts for your Wednesday morning.

First, the next time someone tries telling me that the stimulus plan didn't work, I'm going to point out that 250,000 people employed in education wouldn't have jobs if it weren't for the stimulus. That's the number of education employees whose jobs were preserved by federal recovery aid, according to the Department of Education. Now, the wording leads me to believe that not all of them are teachers, but I think it would be fair to assume that a good percentage of that number are in the classrooms. The fact that so many districts are still in trouble and saying they may have to lay off teachers shows you how bad things are.

With all the focus on Wall Street and unemployment (both serious issues, to be sure), it's easy to look at the stimulus and say that it didn't work. But at the local level, the stimulus preserved so many jobs and programs that would otherwise have been cut. It's in the absence of massive negative changes that we see the positive effects of the stimulus. Say what you will about the price tag, but the stimulus saved local municipalities from going into a tailspin that would have proven nearly impossible to correct at any time in the near future.

Second, this is the kind of thing that more schools should be doing. I'm sure Robert Pondiscio at Core Knowledge Blog will be covering this better than I will, so check out his site. The gist, though, is that a Harlem charter school takes their kids on a "field study" to a farm each year to learn about the animals so that they have some background when farm animal questions come up on the state tests each year. Note that rather than just try to teach kids better strategies for faking their way through the test, the school is actually exposing their kids to new knowledge that they likely won't find in Harlem. That's what school is all about. And in the end, I'm sure it will pay off in their test scores. Too bad more people don't see things that way.

I'm going to be at an event where Arne Duncan is speaking tomorrow morning, so check back in on Friday for some original reporting from Teachable Moment.

Where's the Middle Ground and Outrage?

Do you ever get the feeling that we're missing the middle ground when we have educational debates? I do sometimes. It seems like two camps stake out diametrically opposed positions and miss the fact that there's probably a significant amount of common ground in between.

Take promotional requirements for example. In Memphis, the city schools have banned flunking (and then retaining) students in pre-kindergarten through third grade. (If you really read the article it's not quite as touchy feely as it sounds.) Then, in New York City, the Mayor (with his recently renewed control of the schools) is looking to end - unspeak alert! - social promotion in fourth and sixth grade.

It seems like there should be a middle ground here between never retaining a child and always retaining children if they don't meet standardized test score cut offs. What about looking at each child on a case by case basis and determining what's best for that child? Sometimes it may be retention. Other times it may be promotion with heavy interventions and extra help. This all or nothing, black and white stuff just wears a little thin.

Of course, if a child can't pass the standardized tests in New York, maybe they do deserve to be retained. As reported by Gotham Schools last week, the scoring of the ELA test is done in such a way that a student who knew nothing and guessed randomly would likely (57%) pass the test with a level two.

Have I mentioned before that "accountability" definitely falls into that unspeak buzzword bin?

Let's just stop a moment and consider this information, though, because I think it's really stunning. We're basing a whole system - promotional criteria, curriculum, data systems, school report cards, mayoral campaigns, etc - around test scores that are supposed to measure what students know and how much they're learning. But the tests may be beaten by a student who randomly guesses all their answers! I know I've been out of town for the last two weeks, so maybe I missed it, but shouldn't there be outrage about this?

Oy. It's good to be back.

Unspeak Bonanza

Well, it's Friday and the Daily News has come through with an educational unspeak bonanza. Unspeak, you may recall, is the art of making an argument without actually making an argument. It's about picking language that seeks to preclude any disagreement (think "support the middle class," whatever that means). Education is chock full of unspeak and the Daily News tapped into the motherlode this week.

In the article, "test experts" say that the tests being given to city kids are getting easier, which means more kids are passing and moving on to the next grade. In other words, standards are being dumbed down to undermine accountability and that's leading to social promotion. Holy unspeak!

Frankly, I don't habe the background or the data in front of me to agree or disagree with the claims. DOE says that the tests have gotten harder so they're requiring fewer correct answers to show proficiency. Critics say that it's a game to make the schools look better and reflect more favorably on the Mayor (juking the stats, as they'd say in The Wire).

That said, it sure does look bad. According to the story, on this year's test kids needed to answer 28% of questions correctly to be judged proficient. When you remember that these are multiple choice tests with four possible answers (and thus someone who guesses randomly on every question should figure on answering 25% of the questions correctly) that seems pretty low. A slilghtly lucky kid could simply guess his way to proficiency.

I guess the real question here is whether standardized testing is really the best way to assess standards. Unspeak though they may be, I agree that there needs to be some baseline of what kids should learn in school. I just doubt the bubble filling and all the drama and juking that comes with it is really the best way.

Educational Malpractice?

Over at Teacher Magazine, they're in the midst of a pretty serious debate about whether or not test prep constitutes educational malpractice. The arguments probably aren't anything you haven't heard before. They argue that test prep limits the curriculum and removes the possibilities for innovative, student-centered curriculum. Again, this is hardly a groundbreaking argument.

First, it depends on whether you're teaching kids to succeed on the test or game the test. In all honesty, the test prep that I'm familiar with is a little of both. You cover the content and skills that are going to be tested (like how to identify a main idea), but you also teach little tricks about how to eliminate answers from a multiple choice format. Both of these lessons are useful on a test, but only one is useful when the test is done.

The real answer, of course, is that the value of teaching to the test depends entirely on the value of the test itself. If your end goal is an assessment that fully gauges student learning and achievement across a broad range of ideas and abilities, then by all means, teach to the test.

However, if you're looking at another field of endless bubble answers, gearing every element of your curriculum toward that product is probably not going to benefit your students much after they finish with the bubbles (if it even helps them there).

Assuming that test prep is here to stay (for at least as long as we have high stakes tests), we have to be extra vigilant about what kinds of tests we're giving. That's why it was so troubling to read (via Gotham Schools) that there's a proposal being floated to scrap the writing portion of next year's English test in New York. The reason, of course, has nothing to do with what's best for learning students, but rather what makes the test easier to grade. Seriously. I mean, it's bad enough that music, art, science, and history don't appear on the tests. But writing? Now that would constitute educational malpractice.

The Elusive Balance

Phillip K. Howard's new book Life Without Laywers focuses on the various ways that our over-regulated society is messing up. It's kind of a downer read. His chapter on schools (titled "Bureaucracy Can't Teach") holds to pretty much the same theme. He argues that we've regulated and systematized the schools to the point where forms and paperwork, not teachers and principals, are where the power and authority lies. Obviously this is bad. Fortunately, he has a solution.

1. Free the teachers (and every other adult). Let teachers focus on teaching their students rather than worry about what systems and procedures they're supposed to be following every second of the day.
2. Don't tolerate disorder. Disruptions limit learning and need to be dealt with effectively and immediately.
3. Judge schools by their cultures. Effective schools have effective school cultures. Ineffective schools either operate without a set culture or have in place a culture that doesn't bolster student learning.

Of course, none of this is new thinking. Complaints about bureaucracy and meddling from afar is pretty much par for the course. The question that goes largely unaddressed is how to balance our obsession with accountability (which seemingly can only be ensured through standardized testing) with our desire to let great teachers have the freedom to teach as they see fit. So far, that balance has remained elusive. More than that, we often don't even try to find it as we look for more ways to hold schools, teachers, and students "accountable." In our rush to test and measure how good our schools are, we're forgetting what actually makes schools great.

Practice Makes Perfect

Out in L.A. (as reported by Gotham Schools) they've discovered that practice makes perfect. The research out there is showing that the more periodic assessments students take, the better their test scores will be. Let's take a second and really look at this.

First, if we really believe that tests measure student learning and that more tests help kids do better on tests, then shouldn't we stop teaching and just give two or three periodic assessments each day?

Obviously, I'm being facetious here, but isn't that kind of the logical conclusion of the study? Or rather, given that it's being used to justify using increasingly scarce education funding to continue the testing battery, isn't that how it's being used?

I don't think that there's much question that doing test prep helps kids on tests. Just like doing more reading helps kids read and practicing the piano makes them better piano players. The more you practice on a specific skill, the better you get at it. That strikes me as self-evidently true. That's also what makes it kind of frustrating to see all this attention poured into testing and practice testing and practicing for the practice testing. All of this is time that could have been spent actually reading or doing math (not to mention things like art or music).

If practice makes perfect, shouldn't we practice the things that actually matter?

The Trouble With Standards

I've written before about the advantages of national standards as a way to limit the race to the bottom effect that's become apparent through the No Child Left Behind Act. The idea is that if we're going to say that all states are responsible for meeting certain criteria, we should say what criteria those states are required to meet. If we're going to insist on high stakes standardized testing then I still think this makes a certain amount of sense. However, lately I've been thinking about some of the problems associated with that approach.

First of all, we've all heard talk about how standards limit the curriculum; especially when they're tied to high stakes tests. When we set standards for what must be taught we are excluding other topics that now won't be taught. This limiting effect is grounds for major pause as we consider the prospect of national standards. What's often not considered is that the curriculum could also be expanded, but in negative ways.

Let's look at Texas for a moment. Over the last week, the state board of education there was considering whether or not to include in their state science standards the "weaknesses of evolution." This pretty much translates into wanting to require that the state teach creationism as a valid (it's not) alternative to evolution. On the surface, this doesn't seem to have much national significance. If the folks in Texas want to do it, let 'em. However, Texas is one of the country's largest markets for textbooks (along with California and New York). Thus, textbook authors try to write their books to meet those standards. Since they tend to write only one version of the books that are then distributed nationwide, the Texas standards often act as a kind of de facto set of national standards. And look at where that almost got us.

It turns out that the Texas board backed down, but this has to reason for pause. We often talk about national standards as some sort of platonic form that is the perfect model for what learning should be across the country. But there is no guarantee that this would be the case. Any set of standards would be created by us mere mortals and would reflect the pedagogical (phonics vs. whole language), social (evolution vs. creationism), and political battles of our time. And the stakes would be really high. I don't know that I'm totally dead set against national standards now. But I'm certainly not as for them as I was a few weeks ago.

More Phony Accountability

In case you were having even a moment of doubt, let me assure you that accountability is the educational mantra of the moment. In an editorial last Friday, the New York Times praised a program in Louisiana for gauging teacher and teacher training program effectiveness. The Times writes:

"The most striking innovation is an evaluation system that judges teacher-preparation programs based on how much their graduates improve student performances in important areas, including reading, math and science. Once the evaluation system is in place throughout the state, officials would be able to determine which programs are turning out first-class teachers and which ones still need work."

What's not mentioned is that the way that the state will be judging improvement in student performance is through standardized testing. Let's ignore for a moment that (as Eduwonkette has posted) the standardized tests given across the country can't really be used for measuring student progress from year to year. What really concerns me is how abstracted these accountability measures are becoming from real learning.

Consider this. What the Louisiana program is really measuring is which teacher-preparation programs best teacher teachers to teach to the test. That's what it comes down to. A college of education would be judged by the results twice removed from its actual program. In addition, a well-regarded school like Bank Street College of Education in New York would probably get panned in such a system because of it's progressive, test de-emphasizing approach.

Now, there may be a debate to be had over whether Bank Street is better or worse than a more traditional schooling approach. But let's actually have that debate. Let's not just assume the debate is over and now it's time to start measuring the results.

Testing Mania

If you're interested in getting the mental gears turning, check out this piece by John Goodlad in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It goes on a little bit long, but it's worth reading as it kind of gives the history of how we came to our current educational state under No Child Left Behind.

My favorite part in the article comes pretty early when Goodland writes, "I did not see any point in trying to fix what was not broken but should be terminated. ... Our proclivity for testing has been around a long time and probably will continue to be. The challenge is to choose wisely what and how we test."

The point I'm taking from that is not that NCLB is not working the way it's supposed to, it's that the program is working, but that it's just a bad idea. Hear, hear.

NCLB was not what brought us to our testing mania. Goodland pretty convincingly lays out that we were on a long road toward that end. NCLB is the culmination of that mania. It's the official enshrinement of the "accountability" movement at a national level.

I'm not against accountability. I am against the obsession of casting a single test score as the sole basis for our educational system. As Diane Ravitch writes in a pretty great posting on her blog, "By making test scores the sole gauge of progress, one can expect to see cheating and test prepping, and other quasi-legitimate and outright illegitimate ways of reaching the only goal that matters. When teachers, principals, and students are given rewards and punishments for only one measure, that measure may well rise, but at a cost."

That cost is becoming more and more clear as our testing mania continues.

Testing Symbols

New York has done it again. For yet another year, English and math test scores have risen. This time, officials and newspaper writers are using words like "skyrocket" to describe the test results. Mayor Bloomberg and the Department of Education are claiming that all the recent reforms have made the difference and that the schools in New York are drastically improving. That may be the case, but I'm not satisfied. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the scores are going up. But I can't help but be a little suspicious about what it all means.

First, as Eduwonkette posted on her blog (which should be read regularly), "Is there any reason to believe that teachers suddenly became several times more successful in improving ELA and Math skills?" It's a fair question. Assuming that the scores are valid (as opposed to an easier test) and achievement has gone up across the state, what makes the difference? Has there been a dramatic increase in teacher quality? Have the kids just gotten smarter? What happened from last year to this year?

Ultimately, we'll never know simply because there are too many variables to consider. Of course, that didn't stop the state DOE from chiming in that funding has been increased, that curriculums have been set and embraced, and that the system is responding to the realities of testing.

It's this last point that chills me as it should anyone who has seen the tests given to kids and been present to witness the culture that it breeds. Do we really want a system that responds so well to the testing culture?

What's been lost in New York - and indeed, across the country - is the understanding that testing and accountability are means, not ends. Seeing test scores rise is good, but is not an end in itself. Or at least it shouldn't be. So little of life consists of taking multiple choice tests that I have to worry about an education system that focuses almost exclusively on teaching kids how to succeed at taking multiple choice tests. As anyone who's taught a test prep unit knows, good scores reflect testing savvy almost as much as they reflect actual reading or math ability.

So now we know that kids in New York are getting better at being tested on their reading. But are they reading for pleasure and information? Are they applying the lessons of literature to the world around them? There's no test for that, nor should there be. But in the end, that's the goal that we should be striving for.

As I've written before, I worry that symbolic action will take the place of real action. In this case, the symbol is the improved test scores. Whether or not children are better educated or better prepared for life remains to be seen. I hope that as a system we can keep working toward that goal rather than see victory in a symbol and call it a day.

No Accounting

One thing I always find fascinating in political debates is the debate over terms. The abortion debate is a great example. It seems like half the battle is what to call each side. On the one hand, you have pro-life (which logically would be opposed by anti-life or pro-death). On the other side, you have pro-choice. Both sides are taking "pro" positions that don't really relate to the other one. You have life positioned against choice when most logical readings of those words would indicate that they are not mutually exclusive.

The environmental movement has also made a smart linguistic choice lately by shifting the focus from "conservation" to "sustainability." Conservation sounds static and limiting. In contrast, you can sustain a way of life, you can sustain growth, you can sustain the planet. A subtle shift, sure, but an important one.

Sometimes the words that get chosen are so powerful in themselves that it's next to impossible to argue against them, even if they are misused or apply to something that isn't all that desirable. In education, a great example is the recent focus on accountability.

Just saying the word you realize how impossible it is to argue against it. No one is going to argue for the right of teachers or administrators to be unaccountable. The very notion sounds so aloof and undemocratic. That's why every critique of NCLB starts, "I'm all in favor of teacher accountability, but ..." The very terms of the debate (such as it is) have skewed things entirely toward one side. The irony is that I'm not convinced how accountable the current systems in place actually make teachers and administrators.

Last week I posted my outline for a plan on how to improve education. It got generally good feedback (thank you) from readers, but the lack of testing and "accountability" in the plan was remarked on a few times. Where was the testing?

Frankly, I don't think that statewide high stakes testing does much to ensure accountability at all. Ahead of time it's unclear what the tests are going to be measuring. Afterwards it's not clear what contributed to success or failure. This, paired with the punitive response to test scores, make the accountability experiment a farce of itself.

Imagine that you work at a Starbucks. There are others in the area, but demand is such that your particular branch is open and filled most days. One day, a representative from corporate headquarters comes and gives you an evaluation. You knew the evaluation was coming, but all you know is that you're going to be evaluated on how good a Starbucks employee you are. Fine. You go about your day as usual. The representative thank you and leaves. You carry on as usual. Months later, you get your evaluation in the mail. Turns out you failed. No word on why, just that you did. Not only that, but a lot of other employees at your branch failed as well. Again, it's unclear what rubric you're being judged on. You don't get a raise and won't until you show on your evaluation that you can be a good employee. Not only that, but you're told that you'd darn well better improve before the next evaluation. However, in the meantime, Starbucks corporate headquarters will be trying to get some of your regular customers to go to other Starbucks locations. Your store is going to stay open because there's too much demand to be accommodated by the other stores, but you're going to be undermined as you stay open. So now you've got to improve in the amorphous area of being a good Starbucks employee as the system tilts against you. This way, the people at Starbucks headquarters say, you're accountable for your service.

Does this make sense? Is this accountability?

Obviously Starbucks doesn't do things that way. They run a successful business. They understand that accountability has to actually mean something.

Setting high expectatons, clearly stating standards, and offering meaningful feedback in a timely manner will all help (both the hypothetical Starbucks and the very real education system). But ultimately, high stakes tests are not the answer to creating better schools.

As I've witnessed it, the biggest difference between schools in the Bronx and schools on the Upper East Side is the level of parent involvement. And that goes back way before No Child Left Behind. The parents are there and that is what makes the school accountable. And that's also what makes the school successful. We need to start looking less at making schools "accountable" through high stakes testing and spend more time developing involved parents and communities so that the schools actually have someone to whom they can be held accountable.