Karen Lewis on RTTT, Charters, and More

One can hope we are looking at the next President of the AFT:

Get Duncan a Tutor

Duncan is claiming a 26-point jump in average scores on state RTTT applications is evidence of extraordinary reform.

Any chance someone has some extra SES money to get this guy a stats tutor?

Michele McNeil explains a bit about why linking the 26-point jump to extraordinary reform is a bit silly. Comparing the average scores of round one applicants to round two applicants is hardly an apples to apples comparison - the struggling round one states didn't apply for round two, so it's not a surprise to see the average scores jump. A comparable example would be Gary Miron's recent critique of a KIPP study that pointed out KIPP doesn't fill the slots emptied by leavers. This is pretty basic stuff (and chapter 1 of a Bracey great).

Add in big jumps like AZ and you can explain some of the other gains (even though other states could have been "static" while one or two big movers shifted the entire average). And, of course, Duncan's "gains" include tying teacher evaluation to "student achievement" (code word for test scores), expanding charters, etc, not to mention criticisms that this kind of scoring systems is pretty subjective.

Oy vey.

For-Profit Diploma Mills: 15 of 15 Crooked in GAO Undercover Investigation

When the oligarchs decided for Obama that the U. S. would be #1 in college graduates by 2020, they knew that such a goal would be as meaningless as the paper handed out by the Wall Street U's to the most exploited students whose K-12 non-preparation leaves them with no option for a college education except for a fraudulent one paid for by the taxpayer with Pell Grants. 

But students and taxpayers just keep getting the business by big business as Arne does the rope-a-dope on cracking down in any significant way on these whale donors who can afford the big corporate donations.  Why shouldn't they--they have an endless revenue stream from the federal treasury.  From the NYTimes:

Undercover investigators posing as students interested in enrolling at 15 for-profit colleges found that recruiters at four of the colleges encouraged prospective students to lie on their financial aid applications — and all 15 misled potential students about their programs’ cost, quality and duration, or the average salary of graduates, according to a federal report.

The report and its accompanying video are to be released publicly Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, at an oversight hearing on for-profit colleges by the Senate Committee on Health, Education Labor and Pensions.

The report does not identify the colleges involved, but it includes both privately held and publicly traded institutions in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D.C. According to the report, the colleges in question were chosen because they got nearly 90 percent of their revenues from federal aid, or they were in states that are among the top 10 recipients of Title IV money. . . .

Do read on.

The Summer Slump in Reading: An Obvious First Step

Sent to Time Magazine, August 2, 2010

Time says that "well-off American students may be falling behind their peers around the world" ("The case against summer vacation," August 2). Not so.

Studies show that American students attending well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore students in nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores are mediocre because the US has the second highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (22%, compared to Denmark's 2.5%). This strongly suggests that our educational system has been successful; the problem is poverty.

The summer slump in reading among children of poverty has been linked to lack of access to reading material. Children from low-income families read less because they have little access to books at home, at school and in their communities. Public libraries in high-poverty areas are not well-funded, and have fewer materials and are open fewer hours than those in low-poverty areas.

The most obvious, important, and economical first step toward eliminating the summer slump in reading is better funding of public libraries in high-poverty areas and more support for librarians who know what children really like to read.

Stephen Krashen

Sources:

American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore all or nearly all other countries on international tests:
Bracey, G. 2009. Education Hell: Rhetoric Vs. Reality. Alexandra, VA: Educational Research Service.
Martin, M. 2009. Eggs or eggheads: Which does the U.S. economy really need? Arizona School Boards Journal, Winter. Available at: http://www.susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=688
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.

Percentage of children in poverty: figure 1.1, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being. UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre. Report Card 7

The summer slump in reading among children of poverty has been linked to lack of access to reading material:
Heyns, B. 1975. Summer Learning and the Effect of School. New York: Academic Press.
Kim, J. 2003. Summer reading and the ethnic achievement gap. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 9(2): 169-188.

National Council of Teachers of English continues to support LEARN (sic) Act

The NCTE website contains an action alert urging us to tell our legislators to vote for the LEARN Act (HR 4027; S2740). http://www.ncte.org/action/alerts.
I think the LEARN Act is a disaster. It will work against everything NCTE has ever stood for. It extends the painful and failed methodology of Reading First to the entire language arts curriculum and calls for even more testing than we are doing now. Please see my analysis at: http://www.elladvocates.org.

The announcement on the NCTE website that promotes the LEARN Act also, in the same sentence, asks us to "Support Teachers as Professionals in Defining Teacher Effectiveness."

What does this mean? By supporting the Learn Act the NCTE and its emphasis on direct instruction and massive testing, the NCTE is NOT "supporting teachers as professionals." Under LEARN, teachers simply administer a detailed set of exercises for all aspects of literacy, and prepare students for frequent testing. LEARN would interpret "teacher effectiveness" as faithfully following the prescribed program.

You don't believe me? Take a good look at the LEARN Act.

ETS Report: Achievement Gap Static During Last 20 Years of Test and Punish

So Obama and the Oligarchs are launched on another generation of the same edu-diversions and privatization schemes that pretend to treat the symptom, while ignoring the problem of poverty, racism, and the corrosive effects of capitalism run amok.  Will it matter that the f-ing Educational Testing Service is now waving the red flag?  What will it take? 

From the ETS Press Release today (my bolds):

After a long period of progress in narrowing the Black-White educational attainment and achievement gaps, that progress has stalled, according to a new report from Educational Testing Service titled, "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped." Moreover, some research indicates that reaching equality could take 50 to 100 years if current patterns continue.

It has been 45 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his landmark and controversial report on the deterioration of low-income Black families, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," and evidence gathered over the past several decades supports the assertion that deteriorating family structure, neighborhoods, and schools threaten to undermine the development of disadvantaged children.

This report, written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of ETS's Policy Information Center, examines the periods of progress and stagnation over the past several decades in closing the achievement gap; looking for the factors that contributed to the progress and the reasons for why it stopped.

Coley, Director of the ETS Policy Information Center explains, "National Assessment of Educational Progress data starting from the 1970s reveal a steady narrowing of the gap until the late 1980s. The last 20 years have essentially yielded a period of stability in spite of a lot of national attention to the gap, and measures taken that were expected to narrow it. We want to know, 'why?'"

The report focuses on three time periods beginning with the 1970s and 80s during which a substantial narrowing of the gap was seen in the subjects of reading and mathematics. Next, the research shows that the decades since the late 1980s have produced a sustained period of no change in the gap. Finally, the authors go back to the beginning of the 20th Century when the gap in educational attainment levels first started to narrow with progress halting, ironically, for those born in the mid-1960s when landmark legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act created optimism for educational and societal equality.

Furthermore, Coley and Barton describe a number of developments that could be implicated in blocking continued progress — including sensitive ones — such as inadequate care in early childhood, the decline of communities and neighborhoods, the explosion of single-parent families, the employment plight of Black males, and stalled intergenerational mobility out of seriously disadvantaged neighborhoods. These areas are important because family, demographic and environmental factors can have a large positive or negative effect on student achievement.

The report points particularly to the lack of movement of succeeding generations out of seriously disadvantaged neighborhoods so the effect becomes cumulative as successive generations remain in these areas. "The data show that many Black people have been stuck in neighborhoods deprived of social and economic capital for several generations. Although only 5 percent of White children born between 1955 and 1970 grew up in highly-disadvantaged neighborhoods, 84 percent of Black children did so."

"Approaches to restart progress will require addressing this problem on multiple levels," Coley says. "Entire neighborhoods may have to be uplifted in terms of their economic capital, school quality, safety and health structures."

Barton, a senior associate with ETS's Policy Information Center adds, "The challenges to be faced in restarting progress in closing the gap are indeed daunting. However, the prospect of waiting 50 or 100 years — as economist Derek Neal of the University of Chicago has projected based on past trends — is simply unacceptable."

Download "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped" for free at http://www.ets.org/research/perc/pic/. Purchase copies for $15 (prepaid) by writing to the Policy Information Center, ETS, MS 19-R, Rosedale Road, Princeton, NJ 08541-0001; by calling (609) 734-5949; or by sending an e-mail to pic@ets.org. . . .

Allergy to libraries continues

Posted in reaction to: "Summer Must-Read for Kids? Any Book" (NY Times blog). Article is in favor of self-selected reading over the summer, but as usual, neglects to mention libraries.
My post:
This article confirms that providing children greater access to interesting reading material results in more literacy development.
The article also points out that children from low-income families are particularly unlikely to read over the summer. That’s because children of poverty have little access to books at home, at school and in their communities. Public libraries in high-poverty areas are not well-funded, and have fewer materials and are open fewer hours than those in low-poverty areas.
As the Times notes, programs that give books to children are part of the solution. But the most important and obvious step is better funding of public libraries, especially in high-poverty areas, and more support for librarians who know what children really like to read.
— Stephen Krashen

The Fearsome Facts that Threaten Power

When racists on the Texas School Board proposed last spring that the Slave Trade be changed to the "Atlantic Triangular Trade," they offered a perfect example of power, paranoia, and stupidity rolled into one smelly package.  In attempting to re-write the past to minimize our ancestral crimes against humanity, America's children could grow up even dumber than their parents in dealing with history's unpaid debt to those who never even got a mule and 40 acres.

Same goes for the Texas Teabaggers' attempt to change today's poisonous moniker, "capitalism," to "free enterprise." Free of any moral or political constraint, perhaps.  There is the presumption that no one will notice such blatant propagandizing, or no one will notice for long, anyway. But these are the kinds of facts that play prominently in the historical record set down by humanist hero, Howard Zinn, who never feared to recount the stories of victims of Lynn Cheney's version of history or the one approved by the conservatives on the Texas School Board.

Zinn's history was and is, then, a socially just one, i. e., one that does not forget the voices of the oppressed and the discarded, and the victimized, voices speaking bravely in haunting echos to the inheritors of power. That's what made him "political," as the official historians of domination now label Zinn--or anyone else whose well-researched facts rub the elite the wrong way or cross the path of least resistance.  And that's what made him subversive to officialdom's Chief Nametaker and Terrorist, J. Edgar Hoover, who kept a dossier of over 400 pages on Zinn--just released July 30.

From Chris Hedges at Truth.dig:

Posted on Aug 1, 2010

By Chris Hedges

On Monday I will teach my final American history class of the semester to prison inmates. We have spent five weeks reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The class is taught in a small room in the basement of the prison. I pass through a metal detector, am patted down by a guard and walk through three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We have covered Spain’s genocide of the native inhabitants in the Caribbean and the Americas, the war for independence in the United States and the disgraceful slaughter of Native Americans. We have examined slavery, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the occupations of Cuba and the Philippines, the New Deal, two world wars and the legacy of racism, capitalist exploitation and imperialism that continue to infect American society.

We have looked at these issues, as Zinn did, through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, slaves, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. As I was reading out loud a passage by Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, I have heard students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.”

The power of Zinn’s scholarship—which I have watched over the past few weeks open the eyes of young, mostly African-Americans to their own history and the structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and gluttony and privilege for the elite—explains why the FBI, which released its 423-page file on Zinn on July 30, saw him as a threat.

Zinn, who died in January at the age of 87, did not advocate violence or support the overthrow of the government, something he told FBI interrogators on several occasions. He was rather an example of how genuine intellectual thought is always subversive. It always challenges prevailing assumptions as well as political and economic structures. It is based on a fierce moral autonomy and personal courage and it is uniformly branded by the power elite as “political.” Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth.

The cold, dead pages of the FBI file stretch from 1948 to 1974. At one point five agents are assigned to follow Zinn. Agents make repeated phone calls to employers, colleagues and landlords seeking information. The FBI, although Zinn is never suspected of carrying out a crime, eventually labels Zinn a high security risk. J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal interest in Zinn’s activities, on Jan. 10, 1964, drew up a memo to include Zinn “in Reserve Index, Section A,” a classification that permitted agents to immediately arrest and detain Zinn if there was a national emergency. Muslim activists, from Dr. Sami Al-Arian to Fahad Hashmi, can tell you that nothing has changed.

The file exposes the absurdity, waste and pettiness of our national security state. And it seems to indicate that our security agencies prefer to hire those with mediocre or stunted intelligence, dubious morality and little common sense. Take for example this gem of a letter, complete with misspellings, mailed by an informant to then FBI Director Hoover about something Zinn wrote.

“While I was visiting my dentist in Michigan City, Indiana,” the informant wrote.  “This pamphlet was left in my car, and I am mailing it to you, I know is a DOVE call, and not a HOCK call. We have had a number of ethnic groups move into our area in the last few years. We are in a war! And it doesn’t look like this pamphlet will help our Government objectives.”

Or how about the meeting between an agent and someone identified as Doris Zinn. Doris Zinn, who the agent says is Zinn’s sister, is interviewed “under a suitable pretext.” She admits that her brother is “employed at the American Labor Party Headquarters in Brooklyn.” That is all the useful information that is reported. The fact that Zinn did not have a sister gives a window into the quality of the investigations and the caliber of the agents who carried them out.

FBI agents in November 1953 wrote up an account of a clumsy attempt to recruit Zinn as an informant, an attempt in which they admitted that Zinn “would not volunteer information” and that “additional interviews with ZINN would not turn him from his current attitude.” A year later, after another interrogation, an agent wrote that Zinn “concluded the interview by stating he would not under any circumstances testify or furnish information concerning the political opinions of others.”

While Zinn steadfastly refused to cooperate in the anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, principals and college administrators were busy purging classrooms of those who, like Zinn, exhibited intellectual and moral independence. The widespread dismissals of professors, elementary and high school teachers and public employees—especially social workers whose unions had advocated on behalf of their clients—were carried out quietly. The names of suspected “Reds” were handed to administrators and school officials under the FBI’s “Responsibilities Program.” It was up to the institutions, nearly all of which complied, to see that those singled out lost their jobs. There rarely were hearings.  The victims did not see any purported evidence. They were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively locked out of their professions. The historian Ellen Schrecker estimates that between 10,000 and 12,000 people were blackballed through this process.

The FBI spent years following Zinn, and carefully cutting out newspaper articles about their suspect, to amass the inane and the banal. One of Zinn’s neighbors, Mrs. Matthew Grell, on Feb. 22, 1952, told agents that she considered Zinn and another neighbor, Mrs. Julius Scheiman, “to be either communists or communist sympathizers” because, the agents wrote, Grell “had observed copies of the Daily Workers in Mrs. Scheiman’s apartment and noted that Mrs. Scheiman was a good friend of Howard Zinn.”

The FBI, which describes Zinn as a former member of the Communist Party, something Zinn repeatedly denied, appears to have picked up its surveillance when Zinn, who was teaching at Spelman, a historically black women’s college, became involved in the civil rights movement. Zinn served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He took his students out of the classroom to march for civil rights. Spelman’s president was not pleased.

“I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled. “Which happened to be true.”

Zinn in 1962 decried “the clear violations by local police of Constitutional rights” of blacks and noted that “the FBI has not made a single arrest on behalf of Negro citizens.” The agent who reported Zinn’s words added that Zinn’s position was “slanted and biased.” Zinn in 1970 was a featured speaker at a rally for the release of the Black Panther leader Bobby Seal held in front of the Boston police headquarters. “It is about time we had a demonstration at the police station,” Zinn is reported as telling the crowd by an informant who apparently worked with him at Boston University. “Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception.”

“America has been a police state for a long time,” Zinn went on. “I believe that policemen should not have guns. I believe they should be disarmed. Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and themselves.”

Agents muse in the file about how to help their unnamed university source mount a campaign to have Zinn fired from his job as a professor of history at Boston University.

“[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to have ZINN removed from BU. Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [Redacted] with public source data regarding ZINN’s numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted’s]  efforts for his removal.”

Zinn and the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan had traveled together to North Vietnam in January 1968 to bring home three prisoners of war. The trip was closely monitored by the FBI. Hoover sent a coded teletype to the president, the secretary of state, the director of the CIA, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force and the White House situation room about the trip. And later, after Berrigan was imprisoned for destroying draft records, Zinn repeatedly championed the priest’s defense in public rallies, some of which the FBI noted were sparsely attended. The FBI monitored Zinn as he traveled to the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut to visit Berrigan and his brother Philip.

“Mass murders occur, which is what war is,” Zinn, who was a bombardier in World War II, said in 1972, according to the file, “because people are split and don’t think … when the government does not serve the people, then it doesn’t deserve to be obeyed. … To be patriotic, you may have to be against your government.”

Zinn testified at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, who gave a copy of the Pentagon Papers to Zinn and Noam Chomsky. The two academics edited the secret documents on the Vietnam War, sections of which had appeared in The New York Times, into the four volumes that were published in 1971.

“During the Pentagon Papers jury trial, Zinn stated that the ‘war in Vietnam was a war which involved special interests, and not the defense of the United States,’ ” his FBI file reads.

By the end of the file one walks away with a profound respect for Zinn and a deep distaste for the buffoonish goons in the FBI who followed and monitored him. There is no reason, with the massive expansion of our internal security apparatus, to think that things have improved. There are today 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in an investigation by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. These agencies employ an estimated 854,000 people, all of whom hold top-secret security clearances, the Post found. And in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together, the paper reported, they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet.

We are amassing unprecedented volumes of secret files, and carrying out extensive surveillance and harassment, as stupid and useless as those that were directed against Zinn. And a few decades from now maybe we will be able to examine the work of the latest generation of dimwitted investigators who have been unleashed upon us in secret by the tens of thousands. Did any of the agents who followed Zinn ever realize how they wasted their time? Do those following us around comprehend how manipulated they are? Do they understand that their primary purpose, as it was with Zinn, is not to prevent terrorism but discredit and destroy social movements as well as protect the elite from those who would expose them?

Zinn’s book is revered in my cramped classroom. It is revered because these men intimately know racism, manipulation, poverty, abuse and the lies peddled by the powerful. Zinn recorded their voices and the voices of their ancestors. They respect him for this. Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write history, not myth.  And he knew that when these myths implode it is the beginning of hope.ch

“If you were a Native American,” one of my students asked recently, “what would have been the difference between Columbus and Hitler?”

Children, Parents, and Teachers Pushed to the Bottom in "Race to the Top"

From Tennessee to New York: Welcome Back to School--You Fail!

Jim Horn

When Tennessee children left school in early June, the majority of them were proficient in reading and math.  When they return to school later this month, most of that majority of children will not be proficient or even close to it.  From Saturday's The Commercial Appeal:

Friday, the State Board of Education passed new "cut" scores for the state tests, retooled last year to match more rigorous curriculum and standards the state began adopting in 2007.

Based on the new scores, more than 52 percent of third-graders flunked math in the just-finished school year.

And the news gets worse with each grade. In grade six, for instance, nearly 70 percent flunked math; in grade eight, 75 percent failed.

Reading in most grades was slightly better, with the failure rate at 52 percent for fifth-graders and moving up to 57 percent for eighth-graders.

"I think that everyone in the room fully realized that tough work lies ahead and that there would ultimately be real consequences for students, our districts and our state," said Memphian Teresa Sloyan, a member of the State Board of Education.

"For the first time we will know where our children are in terms of their academic preparedness."

In the test taken in the spring of 2009, 91 percent of Tennessee students scored advanced or proficient. . . .

So the new mass failure, thank goodness, doesn’t have anything to do with all the video games or hours of TV watching that filled students’ time this summer.  For the majority of children to become failures overnight, it took coordination from a set of policy recommendations by Achieve, Inc. (the education arm of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce’s Business Roundtable), a lame duck governor, Phil Bredesen, who sits as Co-Chair of Achieve, Inc., and a Tennessee State Board of Education willing to toe the line of the corporate education reformers who now run the U. S. Department of Education, which paid out $500 million to Tennessee last spring in the Race to the Top.  In short, it is time for Tennessee school children, parents, and teachers to suffer the consequences of Tennessee’s acceptance of the RTTT money and corporate governance of schools.

This most recent “standard setting process,” then, that culminated July 30 with the establishment of new cut scores, or passing scores, for TCAP will, no doubt, cause much confusion and not a small amount of anxiety and heartbreak for children and their parents.  The confusion and misinformation can already be seen in one of the first editorials on the subject in The Commercial Appeal:

Huge drops in scores are predicted as the questions get harder in an effort to match tests administered to students in the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP].

The truth of the matter is that there are no tougher or harder questions responsible for the testing sledgehammer that has just come down.  The failure fever that will set in over the next few weeks as parents learn of the new “standard setting” by the State comes, in fact, from moving back the goalposts after the ball has been kicked.  (The same thing happened Friday, by the way, in New York).  The students who would have split the uprights under the TCAP rules last Spring when they took the test will now see their effort fall way short of the goalposts, which have suddenly been moved as a result of the new cut scores just established while the ball was still in the air.

According to the State Board of Education’s “independent” expert hired to oversee the “standard setting” process, Dr. Wayne Camara, who, by the way, sits on the Board of Directors for the Association of Test Publishers, the new cut scores were greatly influenced by consideration of external data from NAEP and ACT, even though panelists were instructed NOT to use NAEP or ACT as evidence in establishing cut scores for the TCAP.  NAEP and ACT were to inform but not influence.  It is as if a judge were to allow a load of evidence he knew to be prejudicial ahead of time, while telling the jury to disregard it in arriving at a verdict.

Now if Goldilocks would have found Tennessee’s former TCAP surely too soft prior to the most recent “standard setting” by the State, there is no doubt that she would find the new NAEP-influenced TCAP much too hard.  For the cut scores for NAEP, which have shaped by the Tennessee jury’s verdict despite the complicit judge’s instruction to the contrary, have been failing the Goldilocks test on the hard side for a long, long time, as leading academics and psychometricians found in 1991, when they were hired by the governing board of NAEP (NAGB) to make recommendations about NAEP’s own “standard setting” process. From a 2008 article in The School Administrator by Gerald Bracey:

The governing board hired a team of three well-known evaluators and psychometricians to evaluate the process — Daniel Stufflebeam of Western Michigan University, Richard Jaeger of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Michael Scriven of NOVA Southeastern University. The team delivered its final report on Aug. 23, 1991. This process does not work, the team averred, saying: "[T]he technical difficulties are extremely serious … these standards and the results obtained from them should under no circumstances be used as a baseline or benchmark … the procedures used in the exercise should under no circumstances be used as a model."

NAGB, led by Chester E. Finn Jr., summarily fired the team, or at least tried to. Because the researchers already had delivered the final report, the contract required payment.

The inappropriate use of these levels continues today. The achievement levels have been rejected by the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing and the Brookings Institution, as well as by individual psychometricians.

I have repeatedly observed that the NAEP results do not mesh with those from international comparisons. In the 1995 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, assessment, American 4th graders finished third among 26 participating nations in science, but the NAEP science results from the same year stated that only 31 percent of them were proficient or better.

If anyone from Pearson, Inc. or Achieve, Inc., the two outfits now running education in Tennessee, had bothered to ask either the scientific or academic community about using NAEP as inspiration“NOT” for TCAP’s new cut scores, they would have been told to steer clear.  Did I mention that Dr. Camara notes in his report that there were no representatives from higher education and no college faculty included as part of Tennessee’s recent “standard setting” process?  Seems that could have been important input to add to Achieve’s panel, since one primary purpose for the new cut scores is purportedly to better prepare Tennessee student for college.   But I digress.

Achieve, Inc. and Pearson, Inc. didn’t even have to ask a scientist or a professor. NAEP, in fact, includes its own warning sign to users at its website:

The National Assessment Governing Board, as directed by the NAEP legislation, has been developing achievement levels for NAEP since 1990. A broadly representative panel of teachers, education specialists, and members of the general public help define and review achievement levels. As provided by law, the achievement levels are to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted and used with caution.

If you click on the link just above, “used on a trial basis,” you will get the text described here by Bracey (2005):

Even the NAEP reports themselves contain a disclaimer quoting from the NAS study: "NAEP's current achievement level setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters' judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results."

Fundamentally flawed? Judgments inconsistent? Validity evidence lacking?

Can you imagine the howls of outrage that would greet ETS or CTB/McGraw-Hill [or Pearson, who now has the Tennessee contract] if they dared bring to market an instrument with such basic failures? So why are we still using the achievement levels? The official story from the U. S. Department of Education is that "a proven alternative to the current process has not yet been identified." That was written in 1998. One would think that a Department as obsessed with applying "scientifically based research" as the current one would have screamed in horror at the flawed achievement levels and rushed to fix them.

The truth is, though, neither the Department nor anyone else is trying to develop a "proven alternative." Indeed, many observers believe that the NAEP achievement levels, created by the National Assessment Governing Board under its then-president Chester Finn, were deliberately set too high in order to sustain the sense of crisis created by 1983's "A Nation At Risk." There is no rush to develop new achievement level setting procedures because much political hay can be made by alleging that American students are performing poorly.

Conspiracy theory, you say.  Bah humbug, etc. Not quite. Again, from Bracey (2008), who cites a study done by Gary Phillips that examined how well top-testing students from other countries would do if they had to sit for the NAEP:

Phillips, now at the American Institutes for Research, had asked: “If students in other nations sat for NAEP assessments in reading, mathematics and science, how many of them would be proficient?”

Because we have scores for American students on NAEP and TIMSS and scores for students in other countries on TIMSS, it is possible to estimate the performance of other nations if their students took NAEP assessments.

How many of the 45 countries in TIMSS have a majority of their students proficient in reading? Zero, said Phillips. Sweden, the highest scoring nation, would show about one-third of its students proficient while the United States had 31 percent. In science, only two nations would have a majority of their students labeled proficient or better while six countries would cross that threshold in mathematics.


So why, then, did the U. S. Department of Education and the Gates-Broad acolytes who run it find such comfort in Tennessee’s plan to drastically increase its numbers of failing schools? So much so that they would cough up $500 million in RTTT funds?

Well, think about it.  Whose interests are served in expanding failure on a grand scale?  Could it be the charter school CEOs of the CMOs and the EMOs will have years more of school turnaround opportunities?  Will lower scores benefit the corporate enemies of the teaching profession like Gates and Broad and the Business Roundtable, especially since job security and pay in Tennessee, thanks to the RTTT deal, are now to be determined significantly by test scores?  Will standardized testing remain the reason we have schools for another generation of children who, meanwhile, become less capable of thinking as a result? Will the general public remain distracted by the continuing "failure" of schools while the oligarchy continues to ship our jobs and wealth abroad? As Bracey notes at the end of a 2007 op-ed at WaPo, “A Test Everyone Will Fail,”

If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase "failing schools" in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

Caryl Crowell: Why don't all schools want scripted test prep?

Sent to the Arizona Star

The Star is right to encourage parents to scrutinize school report cards, but not for the reasons you cite. While you noted that Catalina Foothills, Vail and Tanque Verde districts earned excelling labels, I wonder how many of your subscribers read between the lines and recognized that those are, not coincidentally, the wealthiest areas in the Tucson valley.

Nationally, schools that have 70% or more middle-class or affluent students do well on state, national and international comparisons. Schools that have 70% or more low-income/minority/English language learners do poorly. Low-income students have less access to books and enriching learning experiences outside of school and are more likely to receive highly scripted, low-level, test preparation activities as a mandated substitute for meaningful learning in an effort to “reform” the schools and raise test scores.

If this kind of learning is so wonderful, why don’t the parents of excelling districts clamor for it?

Caryl Crowell
TUSD

Link to Star editorial:
http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_09829645-d346-5404-82fc-576c192b84ad.html