Rhee-ality check

You know a report titled "Rhee-ality check: the Failure of Students First" is going to be interesting, and indeed it is, opening with

Since its launch two years ago, StudentsFirst has made bold predictions about the organization’s impact on education policy, and what it will accomplish across the country.

This is the first report of its kind to examine whether this education advocacy group founded by Michelle Rhee has made progress toward its key goals. Gathered here for the first time is a body of evidence, data, and analysis showing that Students First has given its donors and supporters a poor return on their investment.

StudentsFirst has failed to live up to expectations in four main areas: fundraising, leadership, electoral politics, and grassroots organizing. These failures are described in detail below. A national education advocacy group with such a track record of ineffectiveness is not what Rhee’s investors signed up for.

Here's the full report

Rhee-ality check: the Failure of Students First

This report seems to fit in with a previous post, "THE END OF MICHELLE RHEE?", given how ineffective the organization she has created truly is.

RNC Convention Day 1 - Ugly

Tuesday, August 29 was the first day of the RNC convention. As part of their proceedings, they released their education platform, which takes a sideswipe at educators

Parents are responsible for the education of their children. We do not believe in a one size fits all approach to education and support providing broad education choices to parents and children at the State and local level. Maintaining American preeminence requires a world-class system of education, with high standards, in which all students can reach their potential. Today’s education reform movement calls for accountability at every stage of schooling. It affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations. It recognizes the wisdom of State and local control of our schools, and it wisely sees consumer rights in education – choice – as the most important driving force for renewing our schools.

Education is much more than schooling. It is the whole range of activities by which families and communities transmit to a younger generation, not just knowledge and skills, but ethical and behavioral norms and traditions. It is the handing over of a personal and cultural identity. That is why education choice has expanded so vigorously. It is also why American education has, for the last several decades, been the focus of constant controversy, as centralizing forces outside the family and community have sought to remake education in order to remake America. They have not succeeded, but they have done immense damage.

Privatization and "choice" also take prominent position in the platform, as Ed Week notes

•Doesn't see more money as the solution for improving education. That tracks with the budget proposed by the presumptive veep nominee, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, which calls for big cuts in domestic discretionary spending, the category that includes education.

•Pushes what does works in the GOP view instead of more funding: accountability on the part of administrators, parents and teachers; higher academic standards; programs that support the development of character and financial literacy; and periodic testing in math, science, reading, history, and geography.

•Calls for rigorous academic standards, but doesn't actually mention the words "Common Core State Standards Initiative." Instead, it "affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations."

The biggest news from day 1 of the RNC Convention had little to do with education at all. According to widespread media reports, an attendee at the Republican National Convention threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said “This is how we feed animals”.

This shocking and ugly event followed on from an earlier event that was similarly ugly

Zoraida Fonalledas, the chairwoman of the Committee on Permanent Organization—took her turn at the main-stage lectern. As she began speaking in her accented English, some in the crowd started shouting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
[...]
RNC chairman Reince Priebus quickly stepped up and asked for order and respect for the speaker, suggesting that, yeah, what we had just seen might well have been an ugly outburst of nativism

The video of the event is here.

Later in the evening Ann Romney spoke, and so did Governor Christie - both appearing to speak at cross purposes.

Ann Romney at the Republican National Convention tonight:

Tonight I want to talk to you about love. I want to talk to you about the deep and abiding love I have for a man I met at a dance many years ago. And the profound love I have, and I know we share, for this country. I want to talk to you about that love so deep only a mother can fathom it — the love we have for our children and our children's children.

Chris Christie, 20 minutes later:

But I have learned over time that it applies just as much to leadership. In fact, I think that advice applies to America today more than ever. I believe we have become paralyzed by our desire to be loved.

While Ohio Governor John Kasich didn't speak of love, he did espousethe economic recovery in Ohio. He failed to mention however, the repeal of SB5 and his own budget that has caused a school funding crisis and local tax hikes.

So that was an eventful day 1. Probably a day the GOP would like to have back.

The Stability Of Ohio’s School Value-Added Ratings

The Albert Shanker Institute has an important analysis of Ohio's school report card data, and finds a large amount of instability in the results. This should cause some pause, especially as we move towards using teacher level value add data for high stakes decisions. To say it will be critical to have reliable, trustworthy, and stable data when making hiring/firing and salary decisions is an obvious understatement. If there are serious and genuine questions about building level data stability, then the rush to go further ought to at least have some brakes applied.

On the other hand, there’s a degree to which instability is to be expected and even welcomed (see here and here). For one thing, school performance can exhibit “real” improvement (or degradation). In addition, nobody expects perfect precision, and part of the year-to-year instability might simply be due to small, completely “tolerable” amounts of random error

Some people might look at these results, in which most schools got different ratings between years, and be very skeptical of Ohio’s value-added measures. Others will have faith in them. It’s important to bear in mind that measuring school “quality” is far from an exact science, and all attempts to do so – using test scores or other metrics – will necessarily entail imprecision, both within and between years. It is good practice to always keep this in mind, and to interpret the results with caution.

So I can’t say definitively whether the two-year instability in ratings among Ohio’s public schools is “high” or “low” by any absolute standard. But I can say that the data suggest that schools really shouldn’t be judged to any significant extent based on just one or two years of value-added ratings.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening in Ohio. Starting this year, all schools that come in “above expectations” in any given year are automatically bumped up a full “report card grade,” while schools that receive a “below expectations” ratings for two consecutive years are knocked down a grade (there are six possible grades). In both cases, the rules were changed (effective this year) such that fewer years were required to trigger the bumps – previously, it took two consecutive years “above expectations” to get a higher report card grade, and three consecutive years “below expectations” to lose a grade (see the state’s guide to ratings). These final grades can carry serious consequences, including closure, if they remain persistently low.

As I’ve said before, value-added and other growth models can be useful tools, if used properly. This is especially true of school-level value-added, since the samples are larger, and issues such as non-random assignment are less severe due to pooling of data for an entire school. However, given the rather high instability of ratings between years, and the fact that accuracy improves with additional years of data, the prudent move, if any, would be to require that more years of ratings be required to affect report card grades, not fewer. The state is once again moving in the wrong direction.

Check out the entire article here.