Memphis Politicians Wring Hands About Reading Scores as They Create More Corporate Charter Schools Without Libraries

Having handed over 29 public schools to charter reform schools without libraries or librarians, and with 8 more on the way by 2015, Superintendent Dorsey Hopson and the Shelby County School Board all of sudden have noticed that these children are far behind in reading.  Since poor children get their books more often from libraries, and since the research has demonstrated over the past 25 years that schools with library programs and librarians have more proficient readers than school that don't (go figure!), it should not come as a surprise to anyone that Shelby County's plan to cut librarians to pay for corporate charter schools without libraries is about the worst policy decision that the Gates Foundation could come up with for the rubber stamps on the school board to implement.

And yet there is much gnashing of teeth and beating of chests at the school board, not to mention new "moral imperatives" around literacy.  Superintendent Hopson has even gone so far as to notice “there’s a parade of horribles that goes along with kids who can’t read by the time they leave third grade.”  What Hopson apparently has not noticed is the parade of horribles (no jobs, hope, respect, housing, safety, etc.) that predict the future of impoverished three-year-olds long before they even enter school in the segregated Bluff City of King Cotton where politicians continue to thump their chests about "moral imperatives" while ignoring the vestiges of slavery.

When you read the reporter's account below, you have to wonder how deep the disconnect can get and how ethically blind and humanly callous the corporate ideology can express itself.  Is autonomy within schools really the answer to literacy problems, or is it an easy way of washing your hands clean of the problem when you know the newly "autonomous" charter schools will get rid of the school librarian to put more money into the school CEO's pocket?  Are "literacy coaches" with clip boards and fascist efficiency goals preferable to caring, mature librarians who know how to connect children with great books?  What can we expect from "pilot" interventions by the University of Memphis, where the Gospel According to Gates rules? And which slime balls from the education industry are selling their oppressive scripted bullshit lessons to the newly-concerned Shelby County School Board?  How much stupider to the effects of segregation and poverty can politicians get?

. . . .“We have a problem,” Deputy Superintendent David Stephens, who is leading the literacy effort, told school board members last month at their first briefing on the plan that is still taking shape. “To me it’s a moral imperative for every one of us to say that every one of our third-graders, by the time they leave third grade, they are going to be proficient or advanced.”

The first look was also Superintendent Dorsey Hopson’s first indication that the pursuit of that goal will mean changes in the school system’s budget that starts to take shape in the spring.

Hopson has repeatedly made a simple statement of a basic problem even more basic.

“Our kids can’t read,” he has said numerous times since this year’s Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program test scores showed that on average only 36 percent of students in the district are proficient in reading and language arts.

“When you dive deeper in the numbers and look at the areas with a higher poverty rate … the numbers are more like 28 percent proficient,” Hopson told the school board last month. “There’s a parade of horribles that goes along with kids who can’t read by the time they leave third grade.”

And Hopson has been equally blunt about the price tag for a comprehensive intervention in classrooms to raise the percentage as well as efforts outside classrooms and that bring volunteers into classrooms.

“At the end of the day, the school district has resources to do some of this, but it’s going to take much more,” he said. “We need everybody to roll up their sleeves.”

School board member David Pickler urged the board in its upcoming budget season to use “a different lens and decide what business we are in.”

“Clear the landscape and put sufficient resources into making this a reality,” he added. “This has got to be a focus that brings everyone together. It’s got to transcend urban and suburban.”

School board member Billy Orgel said there should at least be an assistant for teachers in every school. But he also said budgets to carry out the goal of third-grade proficiency shouldn’t be the same from school to school.

“The pushback that we’re going to get is we can’t fund that,” he said. “Why do we have the same treatment at a 2 percent proficient school that we do at an 80 percent proficient school? All budgets for these schools should not be equal.”

Hopson agreed, citing the need for more autonomy at schools.

“Teaching reading is rocket science,” said Dr. Linda Kennard, Shelby County Schools director of curriculum and instruction. “This is tough work.” [Very interesting meeting minutes here involving Dr. Kennard]

The move toward more specific instruction for teachers on how to teach a classroom of students with varying levels of reading proficiency began this past summer. From the teachers who took part in that summer training, the school system is now offering the same training at all of its Innovation Zone Schools and 23 high priority schools where student achievement levels remain low. When the current school year ends, the same training will be offered to all Shelby County Schools teachers.

The other measures being considered include adding a literacy coach to the school system’s coaching model and coming up with a common assessment every three weeks or so focused on the literacy skills of students in kindergarten through third grade.

Classroom observations of teachers that are part of teacher evaluations could shift to make half of the observations in reading for teachers who teach all subjects and the observation standards would include specific “look fors” in the way the teachers tackle reading.

A small-scale “team read” program at Treadwell Elementary School in which volunteers help with vocabulary could expand. [Suggested additions to vocal list: exploitation, oppression, apartheid, marginalization]

Outside the teacher-student relationship, Kennard said the school system is considering items like sponsors to provide incentives to students for meeting reading goals, a literacy calendar for parents and nonprofit literacy organizations to show activities for each week of the year and parental training on literacy outside the school day.

Kennard said the University of Memphis education college is proposing a partnership on literacy efforts that could begin as a pilot program. . . .

Grasping at Straws and the Impending Value-Added Trainwreck

We are just beginning to implement value-added evaluations, but it is already becoming clear that a trainwreck is coming. Already, we are reading stories about good teachers being fired for failing to meet their test score growth targets. We are also reading about surrealistic cases, such as the New York Teacher of the Year who earned 60 of 60 points on the observation component of her evaluation, but only 6 of twenty points on its made-up quantitative component. Tom Kane’s “Presumed Averageness” makes it seem like he is already grasping at straws defending his contribution to the fiasco.

Kane posits a heart attack victim on the way to the hospital. Should he go to Hospital A, with a 75% mortality rate for heart attack patients or Hospital B, where the mortality rate is 20%? Of course, he is correct that the patient would not ask a social scientist friend to help decide in that particular case. Social scientists make evaluations based on the rules of classical hypothesis testing, which requires tests of statistical significance and they are slowed down by the burden of proof. The circumstances Kane cites in this metaphor do not apply in regard to school reform. And, as Kane knows, different medical institutions serve diverse populations, making it difficult to determine how much of their outcomes are determined by the variety of preexisting conditions they encounter.

An intellectually honest analogy would provide a better illustration of the value of social science methodology versus Kane’s utilitarianism. Of course, society would demand that health care reformers accept the burden of proof before closing hospital B and firing its doctors. Respected medical professionals, as opposed to disposable teachers, would make sure that data would be used in a more sophisticated manner before laws were passed requiring the mass firings of cardiologists. Civil rights activists would demand proof that data-driven hospital closures would not have a disparate impact in poor communities, leaving them without access to essential services. It shouldn’t be that hard to explain to reformers that this data-driven accountability would result in services being denied to unhealthier populations. Treating them would invite lower medical outcomes. This would likely produce an overall decline in well-being, with most harm being inflicted on poor people of color.

Kane then attacks the “hypothesis testing paradigm” (the scientific method?) as it applies to education. He then seems to deny that economists like him have the burden of proving that their preferred solutions would do more good than harm. He presents two ways of looking at teacher tenure. The first approach would be “only deny tenure when that presumption was beyond a reasonable doubt.” He calls it the “average until proven below average” formulation. Under this scenario, Kane concludes, only 1% of teachers would be denied tenure.

Kane then proposes the “better than an average novice” paradigm where “we would turn down any teacher with predicted effectiveness less than the average novice teacher.” By “turn down,” I presume, he means fire.

His characterization of the first scenario might not be absurd if we ignore the definition of tenure. Tenure, however, is due process. It is the teachers’ protection against arbitrary misuse of power. It is our buffer against the “Fire, Aim, Ready” nature of ill-conceived hypotheses that are repeatedly imposed on our powerless profession.

Moreover, he proposes a radical, technocratic solution when there are plenty of alternatives that make far more sense. Rather than create a grand and dangerous experiment, we could merely create a capacity where schools could fire bad teachers for being bad teachers. There is nothing hard about citing an employee’s bad behavior as proof he should be terminated. There is no need to social engineer a system for mass firings that is guaranteed to pollute educational values and incentivize teach-to-the-test malpractice (and create huge amounts of busy work making up bogus metrics for the majority of teachers of untested subjects.)

What would happen to inner city education if we rejected the rules of evidence, jumped the conclusion, and adopted Kane’s opinions about school improvement? He would “turn down” (dismiss) the bottom 25% of teachers and replace them with novices. He gives no evidence that we could find enough rookies to replace so many terminated teachers. Does Kane believe that urban education would be in such a sorry state if there was a surplus of talent willing to put up with the conditions that we face in the inner city?

Kane seems to assume that the bottom quarter of teachers, identified by his metrics, would actually be the least effective 25%. Actually, Kane’s value-added is systematically biased against high poverty schools, especially secondary schools with high percentages of English Language Learners, students on special education IEPs and low-income students. This means that a much higher percentage of inner city teachers would have to be replaced. Kane gives no evidence that this would be possible. On the contrary, his approach makes sense only if we assume that the imposition of collective punishment i.e. firing teachers because they chose to teach in schools where it is harder to raise test scores, would make the teaching profession more – not less – attractive.

Similarly, Kane would fire inner city teachers who are less effective than the average of all teachers. If he is serious, I would think Kane would propose an apples to apples approach and fire teachers who were less effective than novices in comparable schools. If he were to do so, however, Kane would have to learn far more about schools than he seems willing to consider. Would he expect neighborhood school teachers to increase test scores as much as teachers in No Excuses schools that drive out low-performing students who don’t meet their behavioral standards?

Kane argues that the hypothesis testing paradigm, or the retrograde idea that systems should have proof before taking punitive actions against teachers, would save the jobs of the 14% who “began” as below average performers. (Of course, Kane has no idea of how many of those teachers were always above average, but his metrics began by erroniously categorizing them.) He claims that it damages the students of the 86% percent “who were below average.” Again, he should have been more careful with his wording. He should have acknowledged that he was just estimating the effectiveness of those teachers and he was doing so with a statistical model that cannot determine whether those individuals were ineffective, or whether they were merely guilty of teaching in ineffective schools. He doesn’t consider the harm that would be done to many more students if (when?) his radical experiment fails.

Whether he understands it or not, the corollary effects of his proposal would be far more damaging in the inner city. By now, it should be clear even to the most ideological of non-educators that test-driven accountability has disproportionately damaged poor schools. Fear is the natural result of demanding the impossible of inner city administrators. When they are required to raise student performance as much as their competitors in schools where it is easier to increase test scores, under-the-gun administrators are more likely to impose primitive teach-to-the-test basic skills instruction. This would make it even harder for good teachers in high-poverty schools to produce above-average outcomes and avoid termination.

Moreover, Kane is proposing the firing of teachers who are below average. How could any policy advocate propose something as grandiose as that? Even the disgusting “stacking” corporate approach, where the bottom line is profits and not improving the lives of children, doesn’t contemplate something that extreme. Even Eric Hanushek only proposes the firing of the bottom 5 to 10%. Would Kane propose such a standard for firing of the bottom 25% of doctors? Of course not. Who would expend the time and money becoming a physician if he had an x% chance of his career being unfairly destroyed?

Kane should ask himself the key policy question. Would he make a commitment to teaching in the inner city if he had a y% chance, per year, of having his career being unfairly ended by the model he proposes? Since we have no idea of how many careers would be unjustifiably destroyed by his hypothesis, perhaps we should borrow Kane’s 14% for a rough estimate. Would he start a career, buy a house, start a family and commit to a career in a school where his value-added will always be lower when he would have about a one in seven chance of being unfairly terminated? If he objects to using that figure (after all, everyone is just guesstimating “effectiveness”) would he accept a 5% chance, per year, or a 15% chance, or a 10% chance (depending upon the conditions of his school) of being falsely indicted as ineffective?

Above all, Kane seems oblivious to what it actually takes to improve schools serving neighborhoods with intense concentrations of generational poverty and trauma. The key to school improvement is trusting relationships. What sort of collegiality could survive in schools where everyone would have a colleague, widely known to be a good teacher, who was fighting for his career due to being inaccurately identified as a poor performer? Now, think of the resulting culture where everyone has to compete to be identified as being above-average. The most likely scenario would be that a dog-eat-dog culture would result.

I would not be surprised if many corporate reformers would prefer to be equally abrupt in closing hospitals and firing doctors, or whoever they chose to micromanage. But, people value their health care services too much to leap ahead so brazenly. It is only in education where the big boys' opinions immediately became law, without even a brief discussion of the human costs. Reformers should consider the idea that a ruthless shoot-from-the-hip approach might or might not be an effective corporate policy for maximizing profits. We need a far higher burden of proof for the hypothesis that it is a good tactic for educating children.

Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline By Making Schools More Like KIPP (Kids in Prison Program)

Following Columbine and 9-11 came No Child Left Behind, which together created a perfect storm of oppressive school practices that would play out most harshly among the poor.  With NCLB’s impossible testing targets, urban schools in particular were actually incentivized to identify and root out any testing recalcitrants, low scorers, or other threats to making the testing targets. 

Here is a clip from the NYTimes story on Tuesday on the beginning of the end to zero tolerance school policies that have been flooding the school-to-prison pipeline for over a decade now:

. . . . Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.

These alternative efforts are increasingly supported, sometimes even led, by state juvenile justice directors, judges and police officers.

In Broward, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, the school district entered into a wide-ranging agreement last month with local law enforcement, the juvenile justice department and civil rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P. to overhaul its disciplinary policies and de-emphasize punishment.

Some states, prodded by parents and student groups, are similarly moving to change the laws; in 2009, Florida amended its laws to allow school administrators greater discretion in disciplining students.

“A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.

“What you see is the beginning of a national trend here,” said Michael Thompson, the director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center. “Everybody recognizes right now that if we want to really find ways to close the achievement gap, we are really going to need to look at the huge number of kids being removed from school campuses who are not receiving any classroom time.” . . .

The achievement gap, really?  Are we still pretending that schools, alone, are going to close the poverty gap, the health care gap, the racism gap, the opportunity gap, the safety gap, the crime gap, the hope gap, the housing gap, and all the gaps that are expressed in universal symptom of low test scores by the poor and oppressed? 

Are we really going to end the inhumane and racist practices of locking up black and brown teenagers for the most minor offenses, not for the sake of human rights or even common sense, but for the benefit of yet another futile round of penal interventions that will be meted out now in the schools to “close the achievement gap?”

As the national campaign led by the Advancement Project begins to put the squeeze on the school to prison pipeline, which is a very good thing, will these human rights and civil rights organizations now begin to focus on the total compliance corporate reform charter schools and their public school emulators that, unless challenged, may be expected to become more prison-like as another generation of racist high stakes tests opens up the “achievement gap” even further?

Will we begin to see, as former KIPP teachers see, how the total compliance KIPP-TFA Model is deeply implicated with deeply racist school practices?  As I continue to re-read interviews with former KIPP teachers, it becomes clear that they understand that KIPP and its emulators sanction the kinds of treatment that white middle class parents would never at all allow for their own children.

A brief clip from former KIPP teacher:

Q: I just have one other question for you and that is do you have anything that you want to say that I haven’t asked you about? Anything that you thought you wanted to talk about, that you wanted to get off your chest that you wanted to say?

A:  I have no agenda.  There are things I really liked about my time at KIPP; there are things that I wish I had changed.  Yeah, I think KIPP, I’m Caucasian, and depending on the school—KIPP Houston is mostly Hispanic, KIPP in _________ was mostly African American. 

I think there’s a broader question when you look at the heavy discipline of KIPP.  Would we let this happen if the students were white middle class?  Would we be okay with the yelling?….I think that’s a pretty valid question.  Is part of the reason that KIPP is allowed to get away with things that couldn’t be done in a traditional [school].  I mean the things I did at KIPP would get me fired at my school now.

Q:  What’s that?

A:  The yelling, I’ve watched a teacher slam a door and the glass broke.  I think that’s a question worth analyzing, how much is race in terms of we want to save our, ah -- I don’t know if I’m saying that right.  But I know it’s a criticism I’ve heard that I thought myself and that came to my mind when you said would you put your daughter in a KIPP school and I thought probably not. I don’t know if that has anything to do with your research but sometimes it’s perhaps a broader question I think.

The New Bob George Website: Schmaltz Stirred with Obfuscation

"About Us"

For those who did not get enough of Bob George and Betsy Angert at those marathon online meetings during that interim when Bob George was turning a dynamic activist group (SOS) into a navel-gazing society to block resistance and civil disobedience against CorpEd, well, Bob and Angie are back with, yet, a milder and mushier version of activism on Prozac.

Their new website, empathyeducates.org, looks and reads like the latest edition of  "New Age Education for Dummies."  There's loads of feel-good photos, pages and pages of links to news articles, blogs, books, videos, and unending streams of soft-focused verbiage that takes us back to when New Age was, well, new.

I kept looking through the site for some plan of action, but the closest I came was this on the "Outrospection" page, under "Engagement through action:"

To Engage is to take action! That is what we do! We immerse ourselves in civic engagement. We advocate for policies that nurture the commonweal. Education, the environment, ethics, the economy, and energy – each is of interest to us. Jobs, freedom, peace and justice too are tangibles in our view. Empathy Educates is actively engaged in all that establishes and ensures that formal and informal Education is a Human Right! 

Introspection is grand and actually essential for greater growth. Outrospection, on the other hand, expands us. Therefore, we exchange, engage, are respectful of and sensitive to all others. We recognize that none of us is here alone; no one of us can change the world for the better unless and until we understand the other. We believe that “Empathy is the best Educator.” Let us exchange and be engaged!.

If you are still feeling around the inside your mouth for something to chew on before you swallow their sweet wad of grease, don't bother.  There is nothing to lead one to think that a specific action against corporate ed reform could ever happen in this new medicated retreat where "exchanging" and "engaging" have replaced demanding and resisting.

My last stop at empathyeducates.org was to see what Bob and Angie had to say about Common Core, and I found them as thoroughly amorphous and ambiguous as an NEA or AFT press release on the subject.

If we are to believe their thumbnail imitation of a 7th grader's report on the history of Common Core, it was sort of good when it started in 1971?, and then it got sort of bad in 1983?, and then it got sort of good again, and then bad once more, and now--who can say??  All so confusing.  From the closing:

Announced on June 1, 2009, the Common Core State Standards were officially delivered to the nation-at-large. In truth, the concept was introduced just over forty years ago in 1971. As a country we crept closer to what we see today. [This Introduction to Common Core State Standards presents the history.] The stated purpose is to “provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.” However, as is often true, unsolicited help [directives and guidance] is not welcome, nor is the notion that a national standard might best serve every single child. Thus, the debate continues. 

The topic, CCSS, is not a simple one. Nor is there one Standard, Common, or universal point of view. Educators disagree. Does the program have value? Is there a price to pay, and if so, who bears the brunt of the costs?

If you are confused, too, then welcome to Bob and Angie's world, where exchanging and engaging are all that matters, even if you can never figure out which end is up and which is down.  So judgmental, some people are, about direction.

Do we need a new test for teacher-candidates?

Sent to Education Week, Dec 4, 2013

Developing and requiring a new test for teacher-candidates is based on the belief that something is wrong with teacher preparation ("Performance-Based Test for Teachers Rolls Out," Dec. 4).
The evidence suggests the opposite is the case.

When we control for the effects of poverty, American students rank near the top of the world on international tests. Also, graduates of American schools go on to perform impressively in the real world: According to the 2013 Global Innovation Index, which is based partly on new patents and the publication of scientific and technical journal articles, the US economy ranks 5th in the world out of 142.

It is hard to conclude from these results that we have a problem in teacher education or teacher quality.

Stephen Krashen



http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/12/04/13assess_ep.h33.html?tkn=XRYFSeS0Qu0nNWa2txmYvMpdQ3ME%2FxpV1lu3&cmp=clp-edweek

What Does the PISA Report Tell Us About U.S. Education?

When the OECD releases the PISA report every three years, many people use the ranking to claim public education in the U.S. is failing and push their corporate education reform agenda. But looking at the data, lessons that can be learned from the highest performing countries point in a completely different direction. For more information: http://go.aft.org/pisa #ReclaimIt

PISA Day: Two Charts, No Comment