ESSA and the Selling of CBE

During the stitching together in 2015 of the federal Frankenstein known as ESSA, the corporate unions, along with their support groups (NPE and FairTest) and activist arms (BATs and SOS), were working to get annual testing in all grades reduced to one time each in elementary, middle, and high school.  The corporate foundations said no, and that was that.  

In order for testing accountability to continue its stranglehold on schools in terms of the taught content and teaching methods used, and in order for comparative testing among schools can continue as the effective battering ram for public school charter conversion for the ever-present bottom five percent of schools, testing had to remain a permanent fixture of school.

Having just witnessed the testing opt by parents and students that spread like wildfire in many states, the corporate foundations scurrying in 2015 for another testing accountability system that might be opt-out proof.  CorpEd didn't have to look far for a tried and failed system to present itself in the form of competency-based learning (self-paced) via individual computer screens (personalized). 

You may remember that Microsoft and Apple had been trying for years to get computers imposed in every classroom.  With another opportunity looming with ESSA, if Common Core textbooks could be moved into digital format and if testing could be made into a daily exercise, several birds could be killed with the same virtual stone: 1) the opt out movement would fall, for how can you opt out of tests if tests are given every day, 2) the resistance to computerization would fall, for computers would necessary for content and assessment, 3) teacher influence could be made even more negligible, as the pacing of instruction and even the lessons offered could be determined by digital analytics, 4) the compiling of longitudinal data on individuals and groups could finally become a valuable resource for corporations of all kinds, whether selling sneakers or degrees or jobs. 

Research for the past fifty years has never demonstrated superiority of online methods for simple or complex learning tasks, and the research has consistently shown that those individuals with economic and academic disadvantage are further disadvantaged by online environments. 

Not to worry, for every student will now succeed, black or white, disabled or able, rich or poor, and will have such personalized, deep, and whole learning experiences that special education will be a thing of the past, since all children in the new millennium will be special, indeed.  Praise the Lord. 

This capitalist camp meeting sermon had to be sold, and for AFT and NEA to sell it to teachers and parents for Gates and the other oligarchs, ESSA had to offer the possibility of potentially authentic assessments like portfolios.  And, thus, the ESSA messaging by Fairtest/NEA and NPE/AFT was focused on the unquestioned acceptance of accountality, but this time around it would be based on "multiple measures" that would allow attempts to standardize assessments that cannot be standardized and to establish quantitative reliability and validity for measures that are entirely qualitative.

Similar experiments with portfolio assessments were tried in Kentucky and Vermont in the early 1990s, and teachers were worked into the dirt trying to standardize the unique and to rigidify the fluid.  Failure was assured.  This will happen again in New Hampshire, I predict, and what will be left standing are the daily and weekly standardized assessments that were intended to replace the annual standardized testing to begin with. 

Nevertheless, FairTest and the rest are playing their parts in pumping the continued futile acceptance of the dead concept of "accountability," this time around by measures that will never satisfy the accountabilists.  Rather than challenging the notion that schools can be accountable even as politicians, businessmen, and policymakers refuse to be accountable, NEA, AFT, NPE, and FairTest have accepted the unacceptable once again.  In doing so this time around, children's mental and physical health have been put on the bargaining table, along with the privacy rights of parents and teachers. 

The good news is that parents have the power to stop it, and teachers can be their allies if they stop taking their marching orders from the enemy.

California charter school industry bill attempts to eliminate only source of public oversight

“…charter schools have used their public characteristics to qualify for public funding under state constitutional law, while highlighting their private characteristics to exempt themselves from other laws that apply to public schools.”—Professors Preston C. Green and Joseph Oluwole

School privatization promoting Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC) EdSource has long been a source of both political cover, and highly biased "journalism" on behalf of the lucrative charter school industry. Their pay-to-advocate paradigm is evidenced by a donor list that is replete with the usual suspects of ideologically charged (read reactionary) billionaires and foundations. On March 30, 2016 they posted a puff piece on behalf of the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) regarding AB 2806, a bill that would further block oversight of charter schools, and impede any investigations into charter school wrongdoing. Trade association CCSA, essentially a U.S. Chamber of Commerce for the lucrative charter school industry in California, has increasingly used its seemingly endless source of lobbying funds to push the bill.

My comments are reproduced here:

The lengths these revenue hungry charter school executives will go to avoid any and all oversight is astonishing. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM) are the only organs of public oversight that come close to the de minimis scrutiny these privately managed schools should be subject to. As a legal scholar whose research into the various misrepresentation and malfeasance perpetrated by the charter sector, I depend on access to information gathered by the OIG/OIM. I would find impossible to discover facts that would otherwise remain undisclosed by the secretive charter industry without these bodies. I am not alone in this regard. The United States Census Bureau is on record for not being able to report information on charter schools because of their private nature (US Census Bureau. (2011). "Public Education Finances: 2009 (GO9-ASPEF)". Washington, DC: US Government Printing O ce. Print. vi).

It is in the public interest that charter schools be subject to a modicum of oversight. One would think that it would be public policy that any organization that takes public money should be subject to public scrutiny. AB 2806 would severely hamper the OIG's already minimal ability to investigate an industry that essentially runs with no other public oversight or control. The charter industry's attempts to eliminate this one mechanism for holding them accountable is unconscionable, but not unexpected.

The irony of well-heeled charter school executives like Caprice Young decrying the OIG should not go unnoticed. In defense of her beleaguered Magnolia charter chain, Young has written several Op-Eds. In them she discusses a 2015 audit of the schools claiming it was "financially solvent", but omits that scores of previous audits found the chain insolvent. For instance, the 2014 audit revealed them "operating on a $1.7 million deficit" and that there multiple instances of "missing, misused funds" (SPRC, 2014). This misrepresentation by omission alone impeaches Young's credibility beyond any reasonable standard. Moreover, it demonstrates why public agencies like the OIG and OIG are so critical. AB 2806 is further evidence of the lucrative charter school industry's revenue-first agenda, and their ongoing efforts to avoid any oversight is another example of how they harm both their own students, and the students in our public schools.

Defeat AB 2806 & Empower the LAUSD Inspector General's Office

Bernie Shows His Ignorance about "Accountability"

When Bernie Sanders was asked recently about why he always votes for corporate education reform, he said the short answer was "accountability."  

Apparently, he knows nothing about the racist underpinnings of "accountability."  That, or his bold statements on equality and equity and non-racist practices mean nothing.  

In case it is the former, I include below a clip from our book, The Mismeasure of Education, which may help his understanding of how "accountability" has been an instrument of racism.

“Sound and Cheap”

There is the fact that some skills are clearly more measurable than others, and that some most

highly prized intellectual characteristics (creativity, ingenuity, motivation) are hard to measure at all.  –Alice Rivlin (1973)

        

         By the end of the 1960s, a backlash was taking hold in both the South and the North to compensatory education programs [as ESEA] and desegregation efforts. Analysis of the Coleman Report (Mosteller & Moynihan, 1972) zeroed in on the negative effects of families on test scores and the limited effects of additional resources to raise achievement in poor schools. On the national political stage, Richard Nixon used race as a wedge issue in 1968 and exploited resistance to the War on Poverty to peel off support among disaffected Southern Democrats angered by Democratic alignment with the Civil Rights Movement.  By late 1969, Nixon had a name for the new permanent voting bloc he hoped to build for Republicans based on “the Southern Strategy,” and in a speech (Nixon, 1969) on Vietnam in November of that year, he appealed to a new constituency he labeled the “Silent Majority” by declaring their rightful role in maintaining social order for the entire history of America,

. . . the policy of this Nation has been made under our Constitution by those leaders in the Congress and the White House elected by all of the people. If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society.

In 1970 the new champion of the Silent Majority was ready to challenge the compensatory education programs that had become the vehicle for delivering Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in schools.  In a “Special Message to Congress on Education Reform” (Nixon, 1970) on March 3, Nixon began with “American education is in urgent need of reform,” and directly came to the reasons why:

         We must stop letting wishes color our judgments about the educational effectiveness of many special compensatory programs, when--despite some dramatic and encouraging exceptions--there is growing evidence that most of them are not yet measurably improving the success of poor children in school . . . . Years of educational research, culminating in the Equal Educational Opportunity Survey of 1966 have, however, demonstrated that this direct, uncomplicated relationship does not exist. 

         The President’s speech called for a new focus on school outputs rather than inputs, along with the creation of a new National Institute of Education to  “lead in the development of educational output.”  In initiating “a new concept: accountability,” Nixon called for new “dependable measures” even at the local level: “School administrators and school teachers alike are responsible for their performance, and it is in their interest as well as in the interest of their pupils that they be held accountable.”

A year later Nixon appointed Sidney Marland, Jr. to operationalize his new accountability concept within the Office of Education, and Marland proved eager to apply “management by objective” strategies toward creating a “science of evaluation” that sounded strikingly similar to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management principles” from sixty years earlier:

Once large objectives have been hammered out, each must be broken into specific and carefully defined sub-objectives.  Accountability is implicit from day to day and from month to month as all echelons in the Office of Education focus their energies on the objective and its sub-objectives and perform the various tasks which lead to their completion (Marland, 1972, as cited in Martin, Overholt, & Urban, 1976, pp. 70-71).

Though Marland’s further speculations on the future of accountability would be off in terms of timing, he could not have been more of a visionary in regards to the eventual outcome:

Indeed, within our time—perhaps within the next ten years—there could well be a nationwide accounting process or institution which would act like a certified public accountant in business, objectively assessing the success and failure of our schools and reporting the findings to the public. . . . [on] how productively are our teachers being used . . . (p. 71). 

We may see, then, the die as cast in the first years of the Nixon Era for another generation of “objectively assessing” schools in ways that would continue to cast doubt on the effectiveness and efficiency of compensatory programs for the poor, while turning concerns for raising student achievement into an obsessive fixation on test scores for a shrinking number of subjects.

Accountabilism

         Haney and Reczak (1994) found that the federal education clearinghouse and database, ERIC, began using “educational accountability” as a descriptor in 1970, when nine documents using the term were collected and made accessible by ERIC.  

The graph above represents our recent search of all ERIC publications, including documents, journal articles, and books, from 1966 when ERIC was established through 2011. The second steepest increase in publication activity occurred from 1971 to 1972, when the number of found items increased from 142 to 440.  That sharp increase cannot match, however, the rise in the number of found items between 2008 and 2009, when the number shot up from 1,591 to 1,934.  In 2010, the number of items reached 2,200.  It took thirty years, in fact, for the number of citations per year to reach a thousand, and it has taken only thirteen years for the number of ERIC entries per year to go to over 2,200.  Note, however, the sharpest one-year decline ever in the number of citations for 2010-2011, when the number plummeted by over 400 entries.

          “Accountability” means “the ability to deliver on promises” (Lessinger cited in Glass, 1972), and “an accountable relationship between seller and buyer involves three elements: 1) disclosure concerning the product or service being sold, 2) product or performances testing, 3) redress in the event of false disclosure or poor performance” (p. 636).  Accountability has not always meant the same thing to all people in the many different situations for which the term has been applied, but the field of education in particular has developed more unique misuses of the term than could be expected, even of a sub-discipline that borrows liberally and regularly terms and concepts from more respected disciplines for which such facile transfer remains entirely inappropriate. Forty years ago, Glass noted that

The term [accountability] drips with excess meaning. In recent months it has been applied variously to 1) the statement of instructional objectives, 2) performance contracting, 3) voucher systems, 4) economic input-output analysis, 5) accreditation, 6) community participation, and so forth. How can a word that means so much mean anything at all?” (p. 636).

If the narrowing of focus over time can be counted as a virtue, then the last four decades have brought Goodness to the field of educational accountability,  as the term’s unmistakable usage in schools has come to be associated with the repeated performance testing of products for which the clerks (teachers) and even the customers (children and parents) are held liable, in this case for a product line for which the manufacturers (policy elites and the education industry) reap the rewards while accepting none of the responsibility for quality.

If 1970 signaled the beginning of the new era when “accountability” that would bleed into almost every thread of the schooling fabric, then 1990 marks the beginning of a second generation of an accountability and standards movement. Before we go there to examine what happened to exhort accountability reformers at the end of the 1980s, we must first look briefly at what happened at the beginning of the decade.   A thirty-year fitful history of attempts to establish a more equitable public education system ended with a whimper during Ronald Reagan’s first term as President.  The shift came as no surprise, however, for Reagan had clearly signaled during early campaign swings throughout the South that he was a believer in “states’ right,” and if elected, he would work to “restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there”  (The Neshoba Democrat, Nov. 15, 2007).  Education policy was at the top of Reagan’s restoration list, and he was unambiguous that, if elected, federal attempts to steer education policy toward compensatory efforts would be seriously curtailed.  In Meridian, Mississippi on August 3, 1980, Reagan warmed up the Neshoba County Fair crowd with one liners aimed at Ted Kennedy, who at the time was mounting a challenge to President Jimmy Carter’s incumbency: “They're having quite a fight in that conventions that's coming up. Teddy Kennedy-I know why he's so interested in poverty: He never had any when he was a kid.”  With wife Nancy sitting near him on stage in a rocking chair, Reagan did not waste time getting to the message that the crowd came to hear:

I believe that there are programs like . . . education and others, that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [applause drowns out end of statement].  I believe in state's rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.

         By 1983, Reagan had honed his message to clearly suggest that civil rights enforcement had been the culprit for what was described as a growing crisis in education, which the Administration’s alarmist document, A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), declared as a national emergency.  In a speech to build support for the reform agenda laid out in ANAR, the President implied that civil rights enforcement was responsible for the downturn in test scores:

The schools were charged by the federal courts with leading in the correcting of long-standing injustices in our society. Racial segregation. Sex discrimination. Lack of support for the handicapped. Perhaps there was just too much to do in too little time (Mondale & Patton, 2001, p. 186).

         What Reagan’s provocative remarks fail to acknowledge is that, between 1964 and 1980, the United States had gone from what Gary Orfield describes as an apartheid system of schooling in nineteen states to a largely integrated single system that included most racial groups, students with disabilities, and English language learners. And even with the influx of children whose educational opportunities had been sharply curtailed or denied previously, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed trends in average scale scores in reading, math, and science either unchanged or slightly improving for 9 and 13 year olds from its inception in 1971 to 1983, when Reagan’s Commission on Excellence declared in ANAR the nation’s schools were in crisis, based on falling test scores.  The drop in SAT and ACT scores, which had coincided with the end of apartheid schooling, was largely attributable to changing characteristics of test takers that, in fact, had bottomed out and started moving back up four years before Reagan came to Washington (Stedman & Kaestle, 1985).  Even the NAEP averages for 17 year-olds, which had declined slightly in math and science, had bottomed out and started back up again prior to 1983, when ANAR offered this alarming assessment that went viral even before the internet:

If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might very well have viewed it as an act of war.  As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unilateral educational disarmament (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 5).

         As historian James Anderson (Mondale & Patton, 2001) points out, the significant strides by “groups that had lagged way behind and had not had access to good public education . . . was lost because of concern over the economy, which we blamed on the schools” (p. 186).  In effect, policy elites pronounced an educational catastrophe that called for stronger accountability measures, school choice in the form of private school vouchers, and more the introduction of “market-driven” reforms (Berliner & Biddle, 1995) that disguised the effects of myopic economic policies and an insular arrogance by the U. S. auto industry, which failed to retool or adjust in the face of foreign competition.  Too, the mythical school meltdown reported in ANAR created a policy space for new initiatives aimed to challenge the “the public school monopoly” (Everhart, 1982) and the social policy advances emanating from past federal actions such as the Civil Rights Act, ESEA, Title IX, the Bilingual Education Act, and IDEA.  If there had been a meltdown in student test scores, it would have ended before the Reagan Revolution could ever came to Washington, intent as it was upon trading in the goals of equality and equity for the efficiency-seeking and less expensive ones of higher standards and more test based accountability.

         Even though NAEP and SAT test scores were on the way back up to pre-desegregation levels before Republicans swept into office in 1980, Reagan’s criticism of public schools escalated during his two terms.  By 1988 when George H. W. Bush was elected as President, congressional Democrats had been successfully cowed by Reagan’s aggressive attacks that were eagerly parroted by the mass media, which was eager to repeat Reagan’s popular rhetorical flourishes, such as this one (Reagan, 1983) delivered to promote ANAR in 1983:

You’ve [the Commission] found that our educational system is in the grip of a crisis caused by low standards, lack of purpose, ineffective use of resources, and a failure to challenge students to push performance to the boundaries of individual ability -- and that is to strive for excellence….So, we'll continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

Tested to Destruction

A clip from The Guardian:

With the demise of the "big society", the coalition's claims to be anything more than an unimaginative deficit-cutter are in tatters – except in education, where it has been extraordinarily radical. Last year saw, among other things, plans to impose performance-related pay on teachers, the development of the EBacc exam, and the introduction of£9,000 university tuition fees.

What lies behind this hyperactivity? Critics accuse the government of softening up the sector for privatisation. But the education secretary, Michael Gove, and the universities minister, David Willetts, insist that ensuring accountability for taxpayers' money and driving up academic standards are their goals. Gove's own fogeyish style completes the picture of the old-fashioned, no-nonsense grammar school headmaster. But the government is not simply stuck in 1950s "3Rism", nor is it planning wholesale privatisation (yet). Rather, it is still stubbornly pursuing a discredited 1980s ideology of quasi-markets, even though 30 years of experience shows that far from improving quality, it is destroying it.

At the root of the reforms is a doctrine that, though unfamiliar to most outside thinktanks, still dominates policy circles: "new public management". According to this view, the best way to ensure high standards and accountability in public services is to force them to mimic the market. Old centralised systems were inflexible and captured by selfish "producer interests" – teachers and academics; schools and universities therefore have to be made more "competitive", by taking power from professionals and giving it to "entrepreneurial" managers who will be more responsive to "consumers' demands, be they parents, students, or taxpayers".

The problem, of course, is that education and research are not straightforward consumer services. Unlike a haircut, their quality is not simply an issue of personal taste, and the consequences for the individual and broader society will not grow out in six weeks. The new public managers accept this up to a point, and their solution is to insist on rule by league table. Children's tests, student satisfaction surveys and a five- to six-yearly exam of the nation's academics (the "research excellence framework" – REF) seek to capture the quality of education or research, and turn it into numbers. These are then published and managers strive to move up the tables, theoretically by improving quality. . . .

Rothstein Considers the First Teacher Strike Against Corporate Education Reform's Notion of Accountability

From Economic Policy Institute by Richard Rothstein:

Teacher accountability and the Chicago teachers strike

Posted September 14, 2012 at 9:56 am by RICHARD ROTHSTEIN

It was bound to happen, whether in Chicago or elsewhere. What is surprising about the Chicago teachers’ strike is that something like this did not happen sooner.

The strike represents the first open rebellion of teachers nationwide over efforts to evaluate, punish and reward them based on their students’ scores on standardized tests of low-level basic skills in math and reading. Teachers’ discontent has been simmering now for a decade, but it took a well-organized union to give that discontent practical expression. For those who have doubts about why teachers need unions, the Chicago strike is an important lesson.

Nobody can say how widespread discontent might be. Reformers can certainly point to teachers who say that the pressure of standardized testing has been useful, has forced them to pay attention to students they previously ignored, and could rid their schools of lazy and incompetent teachers.

But I frequently get letters from teachers, and speak with teachers across the country who claim to have been successful educators and who are now demoralized by the transformation of teaching from a craft employing skill and empathy into routinized drill instruction using scripted curriculum. They are also demoralized by the weeks and weeks of the school year now devoted to gamesmanship—test preparation designed not to teach literacy or mathematics but only to make it seem that students can perform in an artificial setting better than they actually do.

I suspect, but cannot prove that the latter group of teachers is more numerous and that teachers in the discontented group are more likely to be seasoned, experienced, and successful. I suspect that teachers in the group supportive of standardized testing are more likely to be young, frequently hired outside the usual teacher training stream, and conditioned to think of education as little more than test preparation.

The research evidence is weighty in support of the discontented view; two years ago, EPI assembled a group of prominent testing experts and education policy experts to assess the research evidence on the use of test scores to evaluate teachers. It concluded that holding teachers accountable for growth in the test scores (called “value-added”) of their students is more harmful than helpful to children’s educations. Placing serious consequences for teachers on the results of their students’ tests creates rational incentives for teachers and schools to narrow the curriculum to tested subjects, and to tested areas within those subjects. Students lose instruction in history, the sciences, the arts, music, and physical education, and teachers focus less on development of children’s non-cognitive behaviors—cooperative activities, character, social skills—that areamong the most important aims of a solid education.

Recently, however, some have made claims to the contrary that there are great benefits to holding teachers accountable for standardized test scores. One study, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, administered a higher quality test of reasoning and critical thinking skills to students who had also taken their state’s high stakes standardized test of basic skills. The Gates researchers found that teachers whose students had high value-added scores on the standardized basic skills test also tended to have high value-added scores on the test of reasoning (i.e., teachers’ value-added on the two tests were positively correlated). This was a potentially important finding because it suggested that narrowing the curriculum as a consequence of high stakes testing is not something about which we should be concerned. If we know that teachers who are effective at teaching basic skills are also effective at developing reasoning skills, then we can hold teachers accountable only for basic skills and be confident that their students are getting both.

But although the teacher results were correlated, they were only weakly correlated. True, more teachers who had high value-added scores on a basic skills test also had high value-added scores on a test of reasoning, but it wasn’t many more. If you fired teachers who did poorly at teaching basic skills you would get rid of many teachers who did poorly at developing reasoning skills, but you would also get rid of many teachers who did well at developing reasoning skills. The first group (those who did poorly) would be larger than the second group (those who did well), but not much larger.

The second highly publicized study, done by a group of Harvard researchers, concluded that teachers whose students had high value-added test scores were also those whose students had better long term adult outcomes—better earnings, for example. This was a potentially important finding because it suggested that these tests had not become ends in themselves, but rather that success for students on these tests made the students more likely to be successful as adults, and if you put pressure on teachers to increase their students’ test scores you would also be putting pressure on these teachers to improve their students’ adult success. And that would be a good thing.

The flaw here is that the researchers were unable to compare the long term results of high value-added teachers with results of teachers who excelled in other ways that might, conceivably, have even larger impacts on long term outcomes. For example, the researchers could not say whether teachers who are more effective at developing their students’ cooperative behavior, or reasoning skills  (and we know from the Gates study that only sometimes are these the same teachers who are more effective at teaching basic skills) might have students who have even better adult outcomes—like earnings. If this were the case (and we have no reason to believe it one way or the other), then getting teachers to shift their attention from teaching reasoning or cooperative behavior to standardized test preparation might be lowering their students’ future earnings, not raising them.

In short, the two recent studies most heavily promoted by supporters of the Chicago district’s plan to evaluate teachers in part by their students’ test scores do not confirm that the district’s position is wise. It may be, but it also may do great harm.

The Chicago district, and other promoters of teacher evaluation based in large part on student test scores, have become aware of these problems. And so they now emphasize that they support evaluating teachers by “multiple measures”—not only their students’ test scores but by the performance by students of assigned tasks under the supervision of experts, by observation of teachers by their principals, and sometimes (for high school students, for example) by student reports of teacher effectiveness.

This is a fine balanced approach in theory, but is very difficult to implement in practice. For example, when the Gates Foundation study also showed a correlation between a teacher’s value-added test scores and a rated observation by instructional experts, it conducted this experiment by providing the experts with videotapes of teachers conducting instruction. The experts watching (and evaluating) the videotapes did not know the value-added scores of the teachers on the tapes, so the two measures (value-added scores and expert observation) were independent. But according to the Chicago district proposal, the observations will be conducted by principals, who will know the value-added scores of teachers they are observing. How principals will be influenced by this knowledge cannot be known—will they tend to give high ratings to teachers with high value-added scores in order not to call attention to possible flaws in their observational skills, will they tend to offset value-added conclusions in order to save favored teachers who have low value-added, or will they tend to sink unfavored teachers with high value-added? One thing of which we can be certain: Armed with knowledge of teacher value-added scores, it will be much harder for principals to observe and evaluate teachers objectively. In times past, when student test scores did not have high stakes for schools or teachers, principals with knowledge of test results could use this knowledge constructively to guide their observations; principals would visit classrooms where test scores were poor to see if they could determine something being done poorly, or visit classrooms where test scores were good to see if they could learn what was being done right. With high stakes now attached to the test, such constructive evaluation is less likely.

With a rush to implement test-based accountability before these systems have been tested experimentally, or even thought-through carefully, the Chicago district proposal is in some respects silly. What about teachers who don’t teach math or reading and so who don’t have standardized value-added scores? Or those who have not had students for a full year, or who have not been teaching the same subject for sufficient time to have value-added scores? The district proposes to evaluate these using their school-wide average value-added scores. Perhaps, with this proposal, the district is acknowledging that a teacher’s impact on a student is not only the result of her own efforts, but of the school’s entire teacher corps, working collaboratively. But if so, then individual teacher evaluation-by-test-score makes no sense (even if individual teacher data happen to be available), and student growth data should be used only to evaluate schools as a whole.

The impact of teachers’ practice on each other is apparent. Should, for example, a fifth grade teacher’s value-added score be adjusted if her students had come from a class the year before with a fourth grade teacher whose value-added score was unusually high or low? With similar students, a fifth grade teacher will have an easier (or perhaps harder) time if her students had a more effective teacher in the fourth grade. It could be easier if students had a more effective teacher the previous year, because the skills students learn in one year can give them an advantage in learning in subsequent years. Or a teacher’s job could be harder if students had a more effective teacher the previous year, because students who learn more in one year will have less room to grow in the next year. Nobody, no educational theorist or practical policy maker has an answer to this problem, and the Chicago proposal ignores this obvious source of distortion.

News reports suggest that the Chicago strike may be settled soon. The district’s latest proposal is that value-added test score data could ultimately make up 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, with student growth on some yet-to-be-defined “performance” tasks—writing an essay, for example—comprising another 15 percent. This is far better than what some districts around the country are attempting to do, with standardized test score data making up half of a teacher’s evaluation. The union will likely agree to something close to the district proposal, with an appeals process that is stronger than what the district has thus far proposed.

Although the Chicago teacher evaluation system will not be the worst in the country, it will still rely on methods that are not yet ready for prime time. Whether the Chicago strike slows down the rush in other places to implement a terribly flawed system, or the settlement encourages other places to try it, remains to be seen.

Guest Post: The Education Sector Attempts to Head Off a Common Core Trainwreck

By John Thompson

The Education Sector's new report, Getting to 2014 (and Beyond): The Choices and the Challenges Ahead, could have been entitled "Whistling Past the Graveyard." The report starts with the standard proclamation that "new accountability systems will reflect the expectation that tremendous progress in students outcomes across the country could occur through the unprecedented efforts unleashed by Common Core." Yeah, and perhaps a train wreck could be avoided if accountability hawks repudiate their tactics of the last generation, while dealing with the nine issues described by the Ed Sector. So, let's take a look at what would have to happen to avoid one disaster when value-added meets Common Core.

I have been pestering policy types for a scenario where value-added evaluations could co-exist with the transition to Common Core Assessments. I have usually been met with a sputter, sentence fragments, and an admission that we will have to choose between one policy or another. Rarely do these reformers get past the most obvious roadblock. Many or most states will soon replicate the experience of Tennessee where proficiency on eighth-grade math fell from 90% to 26% in two years when standards were raised. Needless to say, the panic and the retribution that these drops will prompt will not be conducive to rational decision-making.

The transition from bubble-in accountability to its opposite, the assessment of college readiness skills, will require teachers and principals to buy into a mixed message. During the next two years, educators will receive training for what Craig Jerald calls a "massively difficult, change in instructional practices." In the meantime, they will have to teach to, and be subject to termination by, primitive standardized tests of basic skills. That might be hypothetically possible if, to borrow from Michael Cohen, accountability is transformed into "something meaningful," if everyone recognizes that Common Core could produce "tremendous progress in student outcomes," and if we all rally toward this vision.

To his credit, Bill Tucker is, to my knowledge, the first "reformer" to articulate a scenario where value-added evaluations do not need to be abandoned in order to implement Common Core. Tucker maintains a brave front, but I suspect that he, like Jerald, does not really believe that such a two front war is possible.

Tucker cites testing expert Drew Gitomer who explains that we can't assume that the "patterns of growth from one test to a dramatically different test the next year" will be comparable. "If the new standards and tests meet their expectations and really are measuring different learning outcomes," Tucker notes, "'then a whole lot more needs to be understood before we simply apply value-added models to these data.'" The most likely outcome, I would add, is that it will prove much harder to raise Common Core scores in high-poverty schools.

Tucker then crafts a metaphor that nails the dilemma:

If today's value-added measures are like calculating a sprinter's improvement in the 100-meter dash across different tracks, then in spring 2015, we'll be attempting the equivalent of calculating value-added across not only different tracks, but also racing events. And while we may be able to infer a number of things about a 100-meter sprinter's improvement by her performance the following year in the halfmile, calculating a precise measure will be extremely difficult, at best.

If we accept Tucker's professed assumption that data-driven evaluation systems must remain in effect, then he presents the only plausible roadmap. Reformers would have to make a "bold statement" about the importance of Common Core and announce a "hiatus" in test-driven evaluations. I can't believe that Tucker really thinks it would be possible to stop value-added evaluation for only one year, but he keeps a brave face in calling for that brief lapse in test-driven accountability.

For the hiatus to remain a hiatus, and not the abandoning of value-added evaluations for multiple year, or forever, all the stars would have to align perfectly. Fields trials would have to remain on schedule and produce reliable results. Statistical models that have been developed over two decades for one type of test would have to prove reliable for a completely different test, as risky innovations are fast tracked. Even when using seven years of data, and using the latest in a series of experimental models, the Los Angeles VAM was only 27% accurate in placing teachers' performance in the correct evaluation category. But, educators under pressure to completely transform the way that they do their jobs, especially in the poorest schools, would then have to submit to high stakes evaluations using one year of real-world data.

Value-added models (VAMs) using old-fashioned test scores have yet to control for concentrations of special education students, English Language Learners, and other peer effects, or for large percentages of top students who already score highly. I am most concerned that value-added will produce an exodus of the top teachers from low-performing schools where it is more difficult to raise test scores. For that reason, Tucker's article should be read in context with the other great piece, by Robert Balfanz. Balfanz asks how the 15% of high schools with the greatest problems with chronic absenteeism and the highest dropout rates could continue to improve graduation rates while biting off the completely different challenge of Common Core. Balfanz writes, "if we continue to concentrate the neediest students in a subset of schools that are not designed for success, we will neither be able to raise performance levels nor graduation rates for these students." Balfanz then recommends three more promising approaches, using completely different strategies, to help the poorest schools.

But Balfanz's astute recommendations are the topic for another post. The point in regard to Getting to 2014 (and Beyond) is that educators already have far too much on their plates, and that is even more true in high-poverty schools. In a rational world, value-added evaluations would be the first thing we would take off teachers' and principals' plates.

Tucker and the rest of the Education Sector contributors focus on "a new expectation of accountability systems" with the assumption that they are the only way "to continuously improve their ability to drive students toward college and career readiness." If we really want to improve our poorest schools, we need to listen to Balfanz and others while not assuming that their research-based policies can only be implemented when shoe-horned into the failed ideology of "accountability."

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.

National Resolution on High Stakes Testing

This Resolution calls on federal and state policymakers to reduce standardized test mandates and, instead, base school accountability on multiple forms of measurement.

To end the abuse and misuse of high stakes testing Sign on to this Resolution:

WHEREAS, our nation's future well-being relies on a high-quality public education system that prepares all students for college, careers, citizenship and lifelong learning, and strengthens the nation's social and economic well-being; and

WHEREAS, our nation's school systems have been spending growing amounts of time, money and energy on high-stakes standardized testing, in which student performance on standardized tests is used to make major decisions affecting individual students, educators and schools; and

WHEREAS, the over-reliance on high-stakes standardized testing in state and federal accountability systems is undermining educational quality and equity in U.S. public schools by hampering educators' efforts to focus on the broad range of learning experiences that promote the innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, communication, critical thinking and deep subject-matter knowledge that will allow students to thrive in a democracy and an increasingly global society and economy; and

WHEREAS, it is widely recognized that standardized testing is an inadequate and often unreliable measure of both student learning and educator effectiveness; and

WHEREAS, the over-emphasis on standardized testing has caused considerable collateral damage in too many schools, including narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, reducing love of learning, pushing students out of school, driving excellent teachers out of the profession, and undermining school climate; and

WHEREAS, high-stakes standardized testing has negative effects for students from all backgrounds, and especially for low-income students, English language learners, children of color, and those with disabilities; and

WHEREAS, the culture and structure of the systems in which students learn must change in order to foster engaging school experiences that promote joy in learning, depth of thought and breadth of knowledge for students; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that [your organization name] calls on the governor, state legislature and state education boards and administrators to reexamine public school accountability systems in this state, and to develop a system based on multiple forms of assessment which does not require extensive standardized testing, more accurately reflects the broad range of student learning, and is used to support students and improve schools; and

RESOLVED, that [your organization name] calls on the U.S. Congress and Administration to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as the "No Child Left Behind Act," reduce the testing mandates, promote multiple forms of evidence of student learning and school quality in accountability, and not mandate any fixed role for the use of student test scores in evaluating educators.

Wild Dreams about Anonymous and Testing

Last night I was re-reading a terrific little book from 1976 by Don Martin, George Overholt, and Wayne Urban: Accountability in American Education: A Critique.  The book brings so many elements of the current edu-mess into focus, while giving a long view of history.  What is evident in re-reading this book is that the threats to democracy that the authors feared in 1976 from the encroaching accountability juggernaut have become much scarier and much more real since then.  Some would say inevitable.

The book reminds us of some of the history behind the stealing of the language of learning by social control behaviorists and the takeover of the knowledge definition by epistemological thugs who define what knowledge is and how it is measured. These moves have had crushing effects on humane pedagogy and schooling, while strengthening and centralizing the administration of schools far beyond what are now the minor functionaries of principals, boards of education, and even superintendents. 

The Texas Tribune story below, in fact, that includes the recent epiphany by the current Texas State Superintendent, indicates clearly that he is one of many who sees the writing on the wall, and it wasn't written by him.  His years of loyalty to the accountability cause have simply worked to make his job insignificant or disposable as power is moved to the ultimate corporate level, which in the end in not national but international--corporate socialism without boundaries--a fascism beyond nation states.

The three main criticisms of education accountability in Accountability. . . are now evident on a steroidal level:

• Based on abstracted, or radical empiricism.  Not only has the distinction disappeared between knowledge and its poor proxy of a test score, but observable experience has been reduced down to a test score measurement that now is even used to predict future earning in adulthood by examining what adults earn who had high test scores. As if standardized tests were not designed to maintain power by the privileged whose families had money and test scores to begin with.

• Elitist and conservative in nature.  These standardized tests, even going back to the first IQ tests, have been used as "scientific" confirmation of elitist assumptions that even precede social Darwinism.  History tells us that those who are in controlling power positions are there because of a divine, an evolutionary, or a psychometric reason, and the modern the testing system has been devised to reward the privileged and the elite and to punish everyone else by keeping them in their places.  (The current value-added fad adds a balm for the liberal conscience by at least acknowledging that the poor who will always be behind can at least receive smiley faces for making "progress").  Oh yes, progress.

• Based on maintaining inequality.  Based on a hypocritical and self-serving notion of meritocracy that embraces institutional inequality, the most able are identified as those who have the resources from birth that are needed to grow or buy the highest scores through whatever means necessary, whether it is a 30k a year pre-school, a 40k a year private school, thousand dollar tutoring sessions for the SAT, or just daily doses of an unending supply of the cultural and social capital that provide the needed boost when occasion requires it. 

Decisions now about school curriculum and student assessment are handled by national consortia composed of hired academic and technical guns paid by corporations and their foundations to shape what is taught in schools based on the stupid and arrogant conceptions of a handful of oligarchs and the CEOs of the Business Roundtable.  To enforce the teaching of this emerging national curriculum and national test are teachers whose jobs will depend upon how well their charges do on these tests.  This is called teacher evaluation, or half of it, anyway.  The other half is based an instructional catechism designed and place in a rubric (scoring guide) to incentivize the creation of miniature and identical autocracies in every classroom of America, where learning to handle knowledge (test scores) is Job 1.

And so I was thinking about all this as I drifted off to sleep last night, and I had the craziest dream.  I dreamed that the hacker group, Anonymous, had shut down every data port that handles test score data and had posted these demands on the Arne Duncan's Facebook page and on every state department of education webpage:

1. Stop using test data to keep students from receiving their diplomas or moving to the next grade
2. Stop using test data to evaluate teacher effectiveness in any way
3. Stop using test data to close down public schools
4. Stop using SAT or ACT test data to make admissions decisions for college
5. When students graduate from high school, all test scores and collected psychometric data will be handed to each student and all other records will be expunged from the data system.
6. If these demands are met, your data systems may continue to operate.  If these demands are not met, your data systems will be made useless.  You have until summer vacation to make these changes at state and national levels. Welcome back to the real world.

Wow, what a dream!

Oh yes, the piece from the Texas Tribune via NYTimes:

By MORGAN SMITH

When Christopher Chamness entered the third grade last year, he began to get stomach aches before school. His mother, Edy, said the fire had gone out of a child who she said had previously gone joyfully to his classes. 

One day, when he was bored in class, Christopher broke a pencil eraser off in his ear canal. It was the tipping point for Ms. Chamness, a former teacher, and she asked to observe his Austin elementary school classroom. What she saw was a “work sheet distribution center” aimed at preparing students for the yearly assessments that they begin in third grade and that school districts depend upon for their accountability ratings. 

Now, with Christopher in fourth grade, Ms. Chamness will take a more drastic step: She intends to pull him out of standardized testing altogether this spring, in protest of the system that she said had sapped her son’s love of learning. 

Ms. Chamness’s approach is more radical than what most parents are willing to do — and district officials are quick to point out that school policy does not permit students to miss test days for any reason. But it is part of a budding backlash against standardized testing in the state that spawned No Child Left Behind and its assessment-driven accountability requirements. 

It is a precarious time for Texas school districts. Faced with roughly $5.4 billion less in state financing, districts this year will administer new, more rigorous state exams called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or Staar. And for the first time in high school, the assessments are linked to graduation requirements and final grades. 

There is anxiety among school leaders, educators and parents about meeting the increased standards with fewer resources. In the Panhandle, the Hereford Independent School District superintendent may withhold her district’s test scores from the state. An Austin parent is considering a lawsuit to stop the rollout of the tests. Some legislators are mulling how to postpone some of the tests’ consequences for students. 

In a high-level turnaround, Robert Scott, the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, said Tuesday that student testing in the state had become a “perversion of its original intent” and that he looked forward to “reeling it back” in the future. Earning a standing ovation from an annual gathering of 4,000 educators that has given him chillier receptions in the past, Mr. Scott called for an accountability process that measured “every other day of a school’s life besides testing day.” 

Many viewed the speech as a reversal for Mr. Scott, who has rarely spoken publicly against the role of standardized testing in public schools. He declined to talk about his remarks for this article. 

“I think he sees that we are at a cusp of philosophical changes in the Legislature and across the state over what we’ve been doing the past few years with accountability and whether there’s been any worthwhile gain from all the testing we’ve done,” said Joe Smith, a former superintendent and an education community fixture who runs the Web site
TexasISD.com, a clearinghouse of school-related news. 

Kelli Moulton, the superintendent of Hereford I.S.D., is considering an outright rebellion. She said that she was still exploring the repercussions of refusing to send her students’ test scores to the agency but that she was encouraged by Mr. Scott’s remarks. 

“We talk a lot, but nobody’s stepped off to do anything really bold,” she said. “Clearly now as a state, at least with a leader who is willing to say testing has gone too far, when do we put a stick in a wheel and say, that’s enough, stop? Because we are going to spend the next 10 years trying to slow that wheel down, and we’ve got 10 years of kids that are suffering.” 

It also may be a sign of shifting political tides. State Senator Florence Shapiro, the powerful chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee and a primary architect of the legislation that enacted the new assessment system, announced in September that she would not seek re-election. Ms. Shapiro, Republican of Plano, has been a staunch opponent of any retreat from the standards established by the 2009 bill. But her House colleagues, particularly Rob Eissler, the chairman of the Public Education Committee, have been more receptive to changing course. 

During the last legislative session, Mr. Eissler, Republican of The Woodlands, attempted to ease some of the more stringent requirements of the new assessments, including how many exams high school students had to pass in order to graduate and how the tests had to count for 15 percent of their final grades. Mr. Eissler recently held a hearing on how school districts were fulfilling the requirements, and many parents and educators in attendance asked for a delay in the effects on students. 

“I am very concerned about performance on the test. My expectation is for most students this would have the effect of lowering their grade,” said Dineen Majcher, a high school parent who has called on lawmakers and the education agency to find a way to waive the 15 percent rule for the first year of testing. 

School districts have been given a one-year reprieve from having the test scores factor into their accountability ratings, and Ms. Majcher said it was “completely unreasonable and inappropriate” that the same was not happening for students and their grades. Ms. Majcher, an Austin lawyer, said she and other parents were considering a lawsuit, but she declined to elaborate on its grounds because she still hoped for a resolution outside the courtroom. 

That may not come in time. Mr. Scott’s Tuesday speech, while popular with the state’s superintendents, inspired a flurry of reaction from members of the education community who favor moving forward with the new assessment system. Bill Hammond, the president of the Texas Association of Business and an accountability advocate, said he was disappointed in the commissioner’s remarks. 

“It’s not going to be the end-of-the-world scenario,” he said. “The kids and educators in Texas are up for it. Every time we’ve gone through this, the standard has been met, and it’s resulted in a better-educated work force.” 

Ms. Shapiro said that once the transition to the new exams occurred, students would be left with a much better assessment system, one that eliminated the need for educators to teach to the test because it was based on courses, not subjects. It was never lawmakers’ impression that they would have to change anything about the rollout of the exams, she said, because the planning had been in the works for the past five years. 

She also questioned what Mr. Scott meant by calling the testing system a “perversion.” 

“That’s a direction I’ve never heard him take,” she said. “He’s been the one that’s been talking about school accountability over the years. We’ve all been a part of this. School accountability is something we started many, many years ago, and we believe in it.” 

Meanwhile, Ms. Chamness, who praised Mr. Scott’s remarks, said she has reached out to other parents at her elementary school about opting their children out of standardized testing — to mixed results. 

“They are waiting to see what happens to us,” she said. “Nobody wants to get on the outside of the administration. I’m not excited about being out there alone, but that’s not going to dissuade me from doing what I know is right.”

msmith@texastribune.org