21 tough questions about school reform

Via the Washington Post, civil rights activist James Meredith, asks 21 tough questions about school reform

1.) Children’s Rights: Do you believe that every child in the United States has the right to an excellent public education delivered by the most qualified professional teachers; an education aggressively supported by the family and the community, and an education based on the best research and evidence?

2.) Parent Responsibilities: Would you support the idea of public schools strongly encouraging and helping parents to: be directly involved in their children’s education; support their children with healthy eating and daily physical activity; disconnect their children from TV and video games; and read books to and with them on a daily basis from birth through childhood?

3.) Educational Equity: Do you believe that America should strive to deliver educational equity of resources to all students of all backgrounds and income groups?

4.) Testing Reforms: Much of current education reform policy is built on the idea that the U.S. must catch up to nations that achieve high scores in the international PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) tests, like Finland, South Korea and Singapore. But since these nations rely on few if any of the reform strategies being promoted in the United States, like cyber-charters, frequent high-stakes standardized tests linked to teacher evaluation, teacher bonus pay, vouchers, and hiring teachers with no experience and no advanced degrees in education – - why would the U.S. implement these strategies without first field-testing them thoroughly?

5.) Teacher Qualifications: If a critical factor in the success of the highest-performing education nations like Finland, South Korea and Singapore, and of high-performing American private and parochial schools, is a highly professionalized, highly experienced and highly respected teacher force, why is the United States pursuing policies to de-professionalize the public school teacher force, including sending recent college graduates into our highest-needs, highest-poverty schools with five weeks of training, no education degree and no experience? What is the hard evidence that such policies improve student outcomes, versus teachers with at least 2 to 5 years of experience and advanced degrees in education?

6.) Evidence for Classroom Products: What rigorous, independent evidence supports the use of computer products to deliver academic benefit to K-8 students as support to, or replacements for, flesh-and-blood teachers? Specifically, what computer products have such evidence of improving student outcomes, when fully tested versus classrooms without such products, and versus classrooms without such products but with more experienced teachers?

7.) Taxpayer Spending on Products: Would you support requiring computer software and hardware companies to fund rigorous independent research to validate the delivery of academic benefit to K-8 students by their products, before billions of dollars of taxpayer money is spent on buying such products?

8.) Taxpayer Spending on Testing: According to one estimate, American taxpayers spend about $20,000,000,000 annually on standardized tests like multiple-choice “bubble tests” but many teachers and students are saying they are hijacking huge amounts of school time that should be used for authentic learning, and thereby seriously damaging our children’s education. What evidence is there that the money and time being spent on high-stakes standardized tests is improving student outcomes and delivering academic benefit to students?

9.) Dangers of Linking Standardized Testing to Teacher Evaluation: A number of experts assert that students standardized test data should not be linked to teacher pay or evaluation because the data can be highly unstable, volatile, misleading or invalid for such purposes and will incorrectly penalize teachers of both high-achieving and high-needs students; arguments presented, for example, on this fact sheet from the Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest.

What is your point of view on this – are these experts correct or incorrect?

10.) Advantages for Students: If the children and grandchildren of people like President Obama and American politicians and business leaders enjoy the benefits of private schools with highly experienced teachers, small class sizes, frequent diagnostic testing and assessments designed by their teachers, rich and full curricula including the arts and physical activity, regular recess, and a minimum of standardized “bubble” tests, should we strive to give the same advantages to all public school students? If not, why not?

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The Arbitrary Albatross: Standardized Testing and Teacher Evaluation

On Chicago's streets and Hollywood's silver screens, education reform has been cast as a false dilemma between students and teachers. Reputable actresses and liberal mayors have both fallen prey. At the center of this drama lie teacher evaluations. A linchpin of the debate, they weigh especially heavily around the necks of educators like me.

Think: Shaky Foundation

With the arrival of spring, testing season is now upon us: America's new national pastime. I believe student results from standardized tests should not be used to evaluate teachers because the data are imprecise and the effects are pernicious. Including such inaccurate measures is both unfair to teachers and detrimental to student learning.

As a large body of research suggests, standardized test data are imprecise for two main reasons. First, they do not account for individual and environmental factors affecting student performance, factors over which teachers have no control. (Think: commitment, social class, family.) Second, high-stakes, one-time tests increase the likelihood of random variation so that scores fluctuate in arbitrary ways not linked to teacher efficacy. (Think: sleep, allergies, the heartache of a recent breakup.)

High-stakes assessments are also ruinous to student learning. They encourage, at least, teaching to the test and, at most, outright cheating. This phenomenon is supported by Campbell's law, which states statistics are more likely to be corrupted when used in making decisions, which in turn corrupts the decision making process itself. (Think: presidential campaigns.)

As a teacher, if my livelihood is based on test results, then I will do everything possible to ensure high marks, including narrowing the curriculum and prepping fiercely for the test. The choice between an interesting project and a paycheck is no choice at all. These are amazing disincentives to student learning. Tying teachers' careers to standardized tests does not foster creative, passionate, skillful young adults. It does exactly the opposite.

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Backlash to Education Mandates Grows, Spreads

“It’s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts,” wrote John Tierny in The Atlantic recently. “I’m not an expert on revolutions,” he continued, “but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.”

Tierney pointed to a number of signs of the coming “revolution:”

• Teachers refusing to give standardized tests, parents opting their kids out of tests, and students boycotting tests.
• Legislators reconsidering testing and expressing concerns about corruption in the testing industry.
• Voucher and other “choice” proposals being strongly contested and voted down in states that had been friendly to them.

Tierney linked to a blog post by yours truly, “The Inconvenient Truth of Education Reform,” explaining how the movement known as “education reform” has committed severe harm to the populations it professes to serve while spreading corruption and enriching businesses and political figures.

Echoing Tierney, on the pages of Slate, The Nation, and elsewhere, David Kirp, education professor and author of a popular new book casting doubt on competitive driven, market-based school reform, declared that cheating scandals and parent rebellions over high stakes standardized testing were proof that much ballyhooed reform policies championed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are not “a proven – or even a promising – way to make schools better.”

Kirp declared that mounting evidence from school reform efforts in major U.S. metropolitan areas reveals “it’s a terrible time for advocates of market-driven reform in public education. For more than a decade, their strategy – which makes teachers’ careers turn on student gains in reading and math tests, and promotes competition through charter schools and vouchers – has been the dominant policy mantra. But now the cracks are showing.”

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Michelle Rhee and the unproven teacher evaluation

Via the LA Times

The debate -- and that’s putting it nicely -- over the use of standardized test scores in teacher evaluations has always confused me, because the answer seemed so simple. One of the things we ask of teachers -- but just one thing -- is to raise those scores. So they have some place in the evaluation. But how much? Easy. Get some good evidence and base the decisions on that, not on guessing. The quality of education is at stake, as well as people’s livelihoods.

Much to my surprise, at a meeting with the editorial board this week, Michelle Rhee agreed, more or less. As one of the more outspoken voices in the school-reform movement, Rhee is at least as polarizing as the topic of teacher evaluations, and her lobbying organization, Students First, takes the position that the standardized test scores of each teacher’s students should count for no less than 50% of that teacher’s rating on performance evaluations.

But asked where the evidence was to back up that or any other percentage figure, Rhee agreed quite openly that it’s lacking.

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Advertorials in standardized tests?

A strange story out of New York

At least a half-dozen companies got an unexpected boost in marketing their brands to New York’s children this week — with free product placement on the state’s English exams.

Teachers and students said yesterday’s multiple-choice section of the eighth-grade tests name-dropped at least a handful of companies or products — including Mug Root Beer, LEGO and that company’s smart robots, Mindstorms.

IBM, the comic book and TV show “Teen Titans” and FIFA — the international soccer federation — were also mentioned in the test booklets, some of them with what educators referred to as out-of-place trademark symbols.

“I’ve been giving this test for eight years and have never seen the test drop trademarked names in passages — let alone note the trademark at the bottom of the page,” said one teacher who administered the exam.

How long before corporate education boosters push for companies to pay for advertising within standardized tests?

10 reasons why VAM is harmful to students

[...]No one is asking how value-added assessments may affect the very students that this evaluation system is intended to help. By my count, there are at least ten separate ways in which value-added assessment either does not accurately measure the needs of a student or is actually harmful to a child’s education. Until these flaws are addressed, value-added assessment will be nothing more than a toy for politicians and headline writers, not a serious tool for improving learning.

1. The premise of value-added assessment is that standardized tests are an accurate and decisive measure of student learning. In fact, standardized testing is neither definitive nor especially reliable. City and state exams are snapshots, not in-depth diagnostic tools.

2. Value-added assessments will ultimately require all students to take standardized exams, whether or not such examinations are developmentally appropriate. Kindergarteners and first graders will be subjected to the same pressures of high-stakes testing as older children.

3. Value-added assessments will dramatically increase the number of standardized tests for each student. Children will need to take exams in subjects such art, music and physical education in order to evaluate the teachers of these subjects.

4. The most successful students will get less enrichment work and more test prep. It is actually more difficult to improve the scores of gifted students since they have already done so well on standardized exams.

5. Teachers will need to avoid necessary remediation in order to attain short-term gains in test scores. Most standardized English tests require students to demonstrate high-order thinking skills, yet a growing body of academic research indicates that many children—especially those growing up in poverty—require huge boosts of vocabulary to function well in school. Teachers may be forced to forego a vocabulary-rich curriculum that would have the most long-term benefits for their children. Instead, they will have to focus on the skills that might help students gain an extra point or two on this year’s tests.

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