Turmoil swirling around Common Core education standards

Via the Washington Post

As public schools across the country transition to the new Common Core standards, which bring wholesale change to the way math and reading are taught in 45 states and the District, criticism of the approach is emerging from groups as divergent as the tea party and the teachers union.

The standards, written by a group of states and embraced by the Obama administration, set common goals for reading, writing and math skills that students should develop from kindergarten through high school graduation. Although classroom curriculum is left to the states, the standards emphasize critical thinking and problem solving and encourage thinking deeply about fewer topics.

But as the common core shifts from theory to reality, critics are emerging. State lawmakers are concerned about the cost, which the Fordham Institute estimated could run as high as $12 billion nationally. Progressives fret over new exams, saying that the proliferation of standardized tests is damaging public education. Teachers worry that they haven’t had enough training and lack the resources to competently teach to the new standards. And conservatives say the new standards mean a loss of local control over education and amount to a national curriculum. They’ve begun calling it “Obamacore.”

On Tuesday, the head of the American Federation of Teachers and a strong supporter of the Common Core standards will warn that the new approach is being poorly implemented and requires a “mid-course correction” or the effort will fall apart.

“The Common Core is in trouble,” said Randi Weingarten, the union president who is slated to speak Tuesday in New York about the issue. “There is a serious backlash in lots of different ways, on the right and on the left.”

Weingarten is concerned that states are rushing out tests based on the new standards without preparing teachers and designing new curricula.

“This is a wake-up call for everyone else in the country,” she said, pointing to New York, which just administered new tests based on the Common Core standards. Teachers, parents and students complained that the tests were poorly designed, covered material that had not been taught and frustrated children to the point of tears.

After the evaluations binge, the hangover

You don't have to search far, or wide, to find articles, papers, and studies critical of corporate education reformers push for rigid test based teacher evaluations of the kind currently being deployed in Ohio. Our document archive is full of them. But it is unusual to read a paper published by a right wing think tank with a reputation for being anti-teacher, that raises many of the same points teachers themselves have been raising about the headlong rush to implement corporate education reform principles in the area of teacher evaluations.

But that's exactly what the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have just done wit ha paper titled "The Hangover: Thinking about the Unintended Consequences of the Nation’s Teacher Evaluation Binge". The paper opens with a warning that the recent pushes might have been too much, too soon, and gone too far

Yet the recent evaluation binge is not without risks.

By nature, education policymaking tends to lurch from inattention to overreach. When a political moment appears, policymakers and advocates rush to take advantage as quickly as they can, knowing that opportunities for real change are fleeting. This is understandable, and arguably necessary, given the nature of America’s political system. But headlong rushes inevitably produce unintended consequences—something akin to a policy hangover as ideas move from conception to implementation.

Welcome to teacher evaluation’s morning after.

the Paper discusses a number of problematic area that will be familiar to JTF readers

Flexibility versus control: There is a temptation to prescribe and legislate details of evaluations to ensure rigor and prevent evaluations from being watered down in implementation. But overly prescriptive policies may also limit school autonomy and stifle innovation that could lead to the development of better evaluations.

Evaluation in an evolving system: Poorly designed evaluation requirements could pose an obstacle to blended learning and other innovative models in which it is difficult or impossible to attribute student learning gains in a particular subject to a particular teacher.

Purposes of evaluations: New evaluation systems have been sold as a way both to identify and dismiss underperforming teachers and to provide all teachers with useful feedback to help them improve their performance. But there are strong tensions between these purposes that create trade-offs in evaluation system design.

Evaluating teachers as professionals: Advocates argue that holding teachers responsible for their performance will bring teaching more in line with norms in other fields, but most professional fields rely on a combination of data and managerial judgment when making evaluation and personnel decisions, and subsequently hold managers accountable for those decisions, rather than trying to eliminate subjective judgments as some new teacher evaluation systems seek to do.

Take one look at this evaluation framework that has been inspired by the Ohio legislature and one can see how prescriptive Ohio's teacher evaluation has become.

Ohio has also fallen into many of the traps this paper highlights. The failure to consider team worked teaching, a lack of focus and funding for professional development, and a lack of resources for administrators to provide adequate feedback, to name just a handful.

AEI offer some useful recommendations, some of which might be too late to implement in Ohio

Recognizing these tensions and trade-offs, this paper offers several policy recommendations:

• Be clear about the problems new evaluation systems are intended to solve.
• Do not mistake processes and systems as substitutes for cultural change.
• Look at the entire education ecosystem, including broader labor-market impacts, pre- and in-service preparation, standards and assessments, charter schools, and growth of early childhood education and innovative school models.
• Focus on improvement, not just deselection.
• Encourage and respect innovation.
• Think carefully about waivers versus umbrellas.
• Do not expect legislation to do regulation’s job.
• Create innovation zones for pilots—and fund them.

One might find it gratifying to read reasoned words of caution regarding corporate education reforms from some of the very people responsible for pushing them in the first place, and we can only hope we see more of it. But, it is hard not to suspect that this is the slow dawning of realization that is being drawn from the very real evidence of on-going struggles and failures in corporate education reform policies now being seen across the state and the country.

The Hangover: Thinking about the Unintended Consequences of the Nation’s Teacher Evaluation Binge

Republicans oppose critical thinking

The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform opposes the teaching of critical thinking skills. We had to read that twice too.

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

They appear to oppose critical thinking being taught so that it doesn't undermine propaganda being instilled in them, to wit...

Early Childhood Development – We believe that parents are best suited to train their children in their early development and oppose mandatory pre-school and Kindergarten. We urge Congress to repeal government sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development.

Early childhood education is crucial to the future success of students, to ppose pre-school and kindergarten is extreme to say the least.

Is Texas an anomoly, or leading the way in rightward education thinking?

you decide, their platform document is below, with the education pieces starting on page 11

2012Platform Final

Simple thinking, bad reporting

Providing a broad based education for K-12 is a very complex endeavor. It's that complexity which makes it difficult to distill what policies work and what don't, when so many variables affect student outcomes.

However, a cottage industry is being developed to reduce the entire topic of public education to a letter grade or a single number. It's as though these architects of simplicity have read Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and determined that maybe because the answer to "the earth, universe and everything" is 42, it's should be even easier to grade a school as a simple C, or a teacher to a 1.07.

The problem of course is that much like Douglas Adams' novel, this thinking is also science fiction. To distill complexities down to such simple terms, means making highly subjective decisions and ignoring, or worse, being oblivious to, multiple variables.

A few cases in point. Ohio is about to deploy a new school rating system, based upon subjective measures, and ignoring a host of other factors.

As an educator and parent I could rail for days about the lack of actual meaning behind any letter grade, whether an A or an F, and this is a decision that even Rick Santorum would call anachronistic. If your child brings home a ‘C’ on his report card, what does that mean? Does than mean he’s working his ass off and completing all of his homework but struggling with expressing his knowledge on written tests? Or does it mean that he’s uninterested in completing homework that isn’t challenging him while attaining perfect scores on assessments? Or does it just mean that he is earning consistent C’s on every single assignment whether in-class, homework, quizzes, or tests? Perhaps it’s some combination of the above, so what does that tell you or your son about what he needs to do to improve?

See how clear those letter grades are?

Separating the effects of economic factors from school performance doesn't appear to have been one of the major efforts undertaken, even though we have known for a long time that a students socioeconomic status, and that of the school district is the leading predictor of performance, by far.

Another recent example has been the use of teacher level value add scores by New York's print media

The article is a pretty remarkable display of both poor journalism and poor research. The reporters not only attempted to do something they couldn’t do, but they did it badly to boot. It’s unfortunate to have to waste one’s time addressing this kind of thing, but, no matter your opinion on charter schools, it’s a good example of how not to use the data that the Daily News and other newspapers released to the public.
[...]
However, we can’t take the performance categories – or the Daily News’ “analysis” of them – at face value. Their approach has one virtue – it’s easy to understand, and easy to do. But it has countless downsides, one of them being that it absolutely cannot prove – or even really suggest – what they’re saying it proves. I don’t know if the city’s charter teachers have higher value-added scores. It’s an interesting question (by my standards, at least), but the Daily News doesn’t address it meaningfully.

Though far from the only one, the reporters’ biggest problem was right in front of them. The article itself notes that only about half (32) of the city’s charter schools chose to participate in the rating program (it was voluntary for charters). This is actually the total number of participating schools in 2008, 2009 and 2010, most of which rotated in and out of the program each year. It’s apparently lost on these reporters that only a minority of charters participating means that the charter teachers in the TDR data do not necessarily reflect the population overall. This issue by itself renders their assertions invalid and irresponsible.

Simple thinking, and bad education reporting is a major impediment to real education reform that will improve the quality of our schools.

Why is it that a politician, such as Mayor Frank Jackson, can put forward plans to eliminate teacher seniority, and it not be pointed out that teaching experience matters, and that if his goal is to improve the quality of Cleveland's public schools, his chosen policy preference is antithetical to that?

Research suggests that students learn more from experienced teachers (those with at least five years of experience) than they do from less experienced teachers (NCES 2000d; Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 1998; Murnane and Phillips 1981.) These studies point primarily to the difference between teachers with fewer than five years of experience (new teachers) and teachers with five or more years of experience.

If that wasn't simple enough, of course there are even more complex answers to this question.

But these overall findings ignore the fact that the experience/achievement relationship differs a great deal by context. For instance, the returns to experience appear to vary by where teachers work. The relationship is more consistent among elementary school teachers (especially compared with those in high schools). The effect of experience on teacher productivity may also be mediated by the quality of their peers in the same school – i.e., that novice teachers with more effective peers in the same school do better.

Similarly, there is evidence that experience matters less – or less consistently – in poorer schools (also see here). There are several plausible explanations for this discrepancy, such as the possibility that teachers in poorer schools burn out more rapidly, or that there are difficulties in teaching lower-income children that are harder to adjust to.

The experience factor not only varies by where you teach, but also by what you teach. Math teachers seem to improve more quickly (and consistently) than reading teachers, while newer evidence suggests that the same is true for teachers who remain in the same grade for multiple years.

Finally, it bears mentioning the obvious point that the effect of teacher experience might be totally different if we were able to look at outcomes other than test scores. The idea that experience doesn’t matter after five or so years incorrectly implies that test scores are the only relevant outcome. Nobody believes that is the case. (And, for what it’s worth, teachers with whom I’ve spoken find the idea that they stop improving after four or five years laughable.)

Instead the debate over the Mayor's plan has not revolved around whether it has any basis in supportable fact, but instead around simplistic stories of the politics involved.

There are enough bad actors in the corporate school reform movement willing to put aside hard truths and solid facts in favor of their desire to profit from public education, but that should be no excuse for others to not challenge simplistic thinking and unsupported asertions which can be equally as damaging to the goal of delivering a quality education to all students.