complex

Real consequences of ‘school choice’

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For years, policy initiatives stemming from right-wing belief tanks have been wrapped in the rhetoric of positive outcomes that are, in fact, the complete opposite of what the measures are really intended to do.

A bill called Clear Skies that called for more pollution. Another called Healthy Forests offered incentives for cutting down valuable trees. No Child Left Behind, perhaps the crowning glory of duplicity, worsened the education of disadvantaged children it was purported to magically improve.

But without a doubt the most enduring of these wolf-wrapped-in-sheep’s-clothing ideas is the promise of “school choice” that’s been promoted to parents since the presidencies of Nixon and Reagan.

Sold as a way to “empower” parents to improve the education attainment of their children, school choice initiatives take on many forms, including vouchers, “scholarships,” and tax credits. But the most radical form of school choice is the so-called “parent trigger.”

The parent trigger has been relentlessly marketed to parents and policy makers as an “empowerment” that enables parents to conduct a petition campaign in their community to fire their school’s staff and change its governance. This has all the rhetoric of democratic activism – a majority of the parents deciding “what’s best” for the education of their children. But what are the results?

So far, the trigger has only been carried out to its fullest extent in one school: Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, California. A new video “Parent Triggers: Another Reform Misfires,” (see below) released by the Education Opportunity Network, recently looked at the results of the parent trigger in Adelanto and found that rather then uniting parents in doing what’s best for children, the parent trigger brought deception, division and disruption to the community.

Thus, parent trigger bills join the ranks of other school choice schemes that are proliferating across the country. And rather than giving parents more control of the trajectory of their children, these policies are leaving more parents overwhelmed and powerless.

So what should parents expect when the parent trigger or any other school choice scheme comes to town?

In New Orleans – perhaps America’s choiciest school district, where 70 percent of students attend charter schools – most of the schools remain the lowest performing in one of the lowest performing states, and parent activists have come to the conclusion that choice means “a choice to apply” while still remaining “trapped” in the same lousy schools.

A recent article in The Washington Post told the story of how the District of Columbia’s complex school choice landscape has led some parents to hire an educational consultant to navigate the public school system — and this is being seen by some as the wave of the future in districts around the country. More than 40 percent of the District’s 80,000 students attend charter schools. Even when parents do choose traditional public schools for their children, “more than half do not attend their assigned neighborhood school.”

“It’s just totally overwhelming,” one parent was quoted as saying in the Post story.

And the results? D.C. schools have among the lowest high school graduation rates in the country and the largest achievement gap of any urban school district.

According to this New York Times story, parents in New York City face a similar, if not more daunting, “school choice maze” that leaves thousands of children “shut out” of any real choice at all. Parents trying to navigate the complex system end up “feeling inadequate, frustrated and angry.”

Not to worry, school choice advocates reassure us. We’re told, as in this article at greatschools.org, to rejoice in the fact that while “it used to be that when it was time to find a school for the kids, most Americans looked no further than the neighborhood school.” Now we have a wonderful “open” system where our precious little darlings get to “compete” against the precious little darlings of our friends and neighbors.

Just make sure you’re one of the “smart parents” who knows how to “work the system.”

How could choice possibly lead to fewer options for parents?

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Teacher Town Hall Recap

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Here's the video for the MSNBC Teacher Town Hall that occured over this weekend, in case you missed it

Part one:

Part two:

Here's a good recap of the event from the perspective of the pernicious effect billionaires like the Gates are having on public education discussions.

Mrs. Gates begins by acknowledging that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score - or at least that this is often said. She then asserts that the half billion dollars they have spent on research in this area have uncovered a number of things that can be measured that allow us to predict which teachers will have the highest test scores. A great teacher is defined over and over again as one who made sure students "learned the material at the end of the year."

If you look closely at how she describes peer observations, the method at work is even clearer. Teachers tend to support peer observation, because it can be a valuable basis for collaboration, which yields many benefits to us beyond possible test score gains. But what does Melinda Gates say about it? It can be worthwhile, BUT: only the models of peer observation that have been proven to raise test scores should be used. And presumably we can count on the Gates Foundation to provide us with that information.

In spite of all the billions they have spent, it appears that the Gates Foundation is laboring under the same logical fallacy that doomed No Child Left Behind. In a way which employs circular reasoning, they have defined great teaching as that which results in the most gains on end of year tests, and then spent millions of dollars identifying indicators of teaching that will yield the best scores.

The most deceptive strategy is how they then try to pretend that these indicators are "multiple measures" of good teaching. In fact, these are simply indicators of teaching practices associated with higher test scores. In spite of Mrs. Gates' feint at the opening of her response, everything she describes, all these things that supposedly go beyond test scores - peer observations, student perceptions - are only deemed valid insofar as they are correlated with higher test scores.

Melinda Gates begins with the question "How do we know a teacher's making a difference in a student's life?" That is an excellent and complex question. However, when we look at her answer, we find she commits the logical fallacy known as "begging the question." One begs the question when one assumes something is true, when that is actually a part of what must be proven.

The question she begs is "what defines great teaching?" This is not answered by finding teaching methods associated with higher test scores. This question remains hanging over the entire school reform enterprise. Until we answer that question, we are devising complex mechanisms to elevate test scores assuming this will improve students' lives, when this is manifestly unproven. In fact, I would argue that many of the strategies used to boost scores are actually harmful to our students.

This episode should remind us of the crucial need to teach critical thinking in our schools - and apply such thinking to the dilemmas we face.

For more on the Gates Foundation you can read our 3 part series, "THE GATES FOUNDATION EXPOSED" Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Linking Student Data to Teachers a Complex Task, Experts Say

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As more and more states push legislation tying teacher evaluations to student achievement – a policy incentivized by the federal Race to the Top program – many are scrambling to put data systems in place that can accurately connect teachers to their students. But in a world of student mobility, teacher re-assignments, co-teaching, and multiple service providers, determining the roster of students to attribute to a teacher is more complicated than it may sound.
[...]
Jane West, vice president of policy, programs, and professional issues for the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, stressed that while there's a need to track the performance of teacher-education graduates, "we have a long way to go" before the data can be considered reliable.

Teachers who leave the state, teach out-of-field, or move to private schools are nearly impossible to track, she said. And teachers in non-tested subjects and grades are out of the mix as well. Last year, the University of Central Florida was only able to get student-achievement data for 12 percent of its graduating class, yet that information was reported publicly. "What's the threshold?" West asked. "Where's the check to ensure that's a valid and reliable measure? It needs to be more than 12 percent."

In all, the Data Quality Campaign’s conference was tightly managed and left little opportunity for audience participation, offering attendees a controlled (though still controversial) takeaway: that improved student achievement hinges on improving the teacher-student data link.

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Value add limitations debated in HB153

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As the budget bill, HB153, moves through the sausage making factory, hearings and testimony have taken place on the provisions to use Value Add measurements as a component of teacher evaluation and pay. We have previously discussed the limitations of this approach, and now those limitations have been expressed to legislators.

Michele Winship from the Ohio Education Association expressed concern at the proposal, because value-added data can only be calculated for 75% to 80% of teachers, those that teach reading and math in grades 4-8. A fact that even the education Czar, Mr. Sommers has acknowledged.

How would the group of teachers who are left out of this scheme be compensated? This is to say nothing of the wholly inadequate level of funding being made available for incentives, as was pointed out by Greg Mild recently.

Gongwer reports

Matthew Cohen, executive director for policy and accountability at the Department of Education, said the state's Race to the Top proposal is already working to develop some of what the budget bill's proposal would employ. Whereas value-added data currently is reported on school building and district levels, funding through the grant will facilitate the development of teacher-level data.
[...]
The effort, however, is meant to produce a report teachers can use to affect their instruction. It is not proposed as a way to evaluate or compensate educators, Mr. Cohen said.

The RTTT proposal also includes an expansion component that would allow schools to voluntarily join a pilot project to explore ways to apply value added to other grades and subjects, he said.

To allow all teachers to be compensated and given bonuses based on student performance, assessments would have to be crafted for all grades in all subjects. Mr. Asbury said he does not think the state has any such measure readily available.

"Teaching is a complex art. I think the assessment of teaching is equally complex," he said. "I think there's potential, but value added is not a silver bullet like anything else."

Ms. Phillips pointed to the relative newness of the field itself. "I wouldn't want the data to be used in a way that's not appropriate or fair or effective, but beyond that is this issue of whether we have any reliable measures."

Ms. Winship said research indicates that the value-added measure is unreliable because indicators can fluctuate from one year to the next.

"A teacher who has high value-added ratings one year could have low value-added ratings the next year," she said. "The bottom line is that the tests on which these data are based were never developed to measure teacher effectiveness."

The report goes on to discuss the significant burden this massive expansion of measurement and evaluation would have on administrators - much as we pointed out a number of weeks ago.

While there is no guarantee that legislators will listen to facts and solid reason, the case has at least been made.

The state budget is no place for complex policy such as teacher evaluation. Such radical changes deserve more careful consideration and broader consultation before being implemented.