Rotherham spins TFA stats

Andy Rotherham likes to portray himself as a voice of moderation and reason in the rough & tumble world of education debate.  But he is anything but.

Here he complains about a recent study by the Great Lakes Center which finds, among other things, that Teach for America (TFA) participants don't stay in the teaching profession for long.

In fact, in a study that delineated the leaving issue more effectively, a 2008 study by Harvard’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, found that 61 percent of Teach For America corps members stay in teaching beyond the two-year commitment. Teach For America surveys its alumni regularly and the most recent survey found that 65 percent of Teacher For America’s 20,000 alumni remain in education, with 32 percent continuing as teachers.

Let's take the second source of opposing evidence first.  TFA's own reported percentages of almuni who are still teaching is not exactly a reliable source.  But leaving sceptism aside, it's not clear what "32 percent continuing as teachers" really means.  The report suggests, and Rotherham interprets it to mean, that 32 percent of all alumni are teaching now, that is, currently.  If so, the following little note found at the very end of the report would be pertinent:

Percentages that reflect current data—as opposed to cumulative data—are drawn from our 2008 alumni survey, which received a 57 percent response rate [my emphasis] and went out to our alumni from corps years 1990-2006.

So, 32 percent of the 57 percent we know about, or 18 percent, are still teaching.  Maybe some of the other 43 percent are, too, but it's probably less than 32 percent since the non-respondents are probably less likely than respondents to still be teaching -- or to still be in education for that matter.  If a TFA alum is still teaching, it's a feel-good thing to respond to the survey.  But if she's in business consulting?  Well, maybe not so much.   In any event, a survey with a 57 percent response rate is highly unreliable, and Rotherham wouldn't treat its results as worth much if he were the stickler for hard facts that he presents himself to be.

As for the Harvard Study, his second source, this, too, had a response rate problem: with only 62 pecent of TFA alums responding. Which way does that bias the results? As with TFA's own survey, the most plausible story is that non-respondents tended to be earlier leavers, since they wouldn’t be quite so proud, so this would bias persistence rates upwards.

Besides failing to note the potential bias, Rotherham cleverly cited only the 61 percent of TFAers that the study found continued teaching more than two years.  He failed to mention subsequent attrition.  The study found that only 35 percent of the sample of TFAs continued after 4 years, and only 25 percent were teaching after 6.  Given the likely bias, that 25 percent is probably an upper bound estimate.

It seems that either Rotherham is not such an astute and critical consumer of research, or he is not such an honest broker, after all.

Nowhere man

Eric Alterman has a long-winded piece in The Nation arguing that progressives should give Obama a break.  In a nutshell, he says that the right wing has become so loud, has so much money, and has so poisoned the discourse that it is virtually impossible to pass progressive legislation, whether Obama wants to or not.  Alterman does a suberb (and exhaustive) job detailing all the right wing evils.

The problem with this argument is that we already knew Republicans, business elites, and other assorted wackos had concocted a toxic political brew before Obama was elected.    Obama should have known it too, or at least we thought he did.  We elected him to change it!  Of course, he gave all those nice speeches about seeking compromise and shared interests among those with divergent views  -- but noboby with an shred of common sense believed that bullshit.  That was just happy talk to get himself elected ... like his predecessor's "Compassionate Conservatism."  We didn't expect him to govern like that.  We expected that once in office, he start banging Republican heads.  And we expected that he would start working on changing the political playing field immediately.

So what could he have done differently?  His first order of business should have been to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, strengthening union organizing.   This would have been an easy lift. Second, he should have converted his massive supporter email list into an active force within the Democratic party.  Neither of these would have had immediate political payoff, but they would have strengthened progressive forces in the longer run (like, now).  But our Community Organizer in Chief forgot to organize, or maybe he really wasn't so progressive after all.  But in any event, he took the first opportunity he had to squander his considerable political capital on a Big Policy (healthcare), because, it seems, he thought that would look better on his resume.

Of course, if he pushed for the Employee Free Choice Act, right wingers would have been calling him a socialist and fascist and all kinds of other bad things.  But wait, aren't they doing that now? 

Pollsters read Obama's latest slide in the polls as an effect of the bad economy.  But FDR governed through a much longer depression and maintained his popularity.  I think Obama's slide reflects the failure of his post-partisanship.  Of course, governing is the art of compromise, but you don't sit down to the bargaining table telling people that.  At any rate, that approach has not served Obama well.  The backroom deals with drug companies were a stain on healthcare reform.  He conceded on offshore drilling in order to get Republican support for a climate change bill, and we see where that went: Deepwater Horizon and no climate change bill.  And 2 days ago, we learn from Politco that he has been pushing an education agenda that is deeply unpopular among teachers in order to win US Chamber of Commerce support.  (This must be the worst strategy ever: alienate your key supporters to woo those who will never vote for you.) 

A few days ago, I heard Obama come on the radio and just flipped the channel.  Can't even be bothered to listen any more.

RttT Follies

The Race to the Trough continues to grow more entertaining with each passing day.

It simply passeth understanding how many newspaper editorialists use the looming budget crunch to argue for the necessity of doing whatever Arne Duncan wants in order to enhance their state's chances of getting Race to the Trough funding.  Cash from the Trough cannot be used to plug budget holes; it must be used to enact the state's promised "reform" package; and if states don't use it for that, Duncan has repeatedly said he will claw it back. 

It should be great drama to see whether he actually will or not.  One thinks he must be sweating bullets over the prospect of not getting Congressional authorization of an additional $23 bn to fend off teacher layoffs.  The irony is that this is his and Obama's teacher-trashing talk coming back to bite him.  After all, it's hard to credibly say we shouldn't be laying teachers off after stumping the country speechifying about how we need to fire bad teachers.  But that tends to happen when you say stupid things.  It's going to be terrible PR if Dunc tries to take RttT cash back from some state that uses it to avert teacher layoffs (and it's going to be hard for them not to, since that's what our most enlightened newspaper editors and probably broad swathes of the public think the money is for -- it is, after all, part of the ARRA economic stimulus plan). 

Then there are states like New York that legislated major -- and expensive (and stupid) -- re-vampings of their teacher evaluation schemes in order to earn their spot at the Trough.  What if after all this legislative heavy-lifting, they come up empty-handed, but with this expensive new law on their books to evaluate and fire teachers -- and they have to implement directly following budget-forced teacher layoffs?  Boy, is there going to be back-peddling or what?  Stuck with a law on the books that nobody now wants or can pay for, I predict that yet greater hilarity will ensue when the billionaire-backed DFER types start suing states to implement.  It will make such a lovely, ironic twist on the education finance adequacy lawsuits.

And Sarah Palin will no doubt occupy the White House by then.

So much to look forward to.

Hopeless

Obama has infuriated lots of progressives for a whole lot of reasons, and of course teachers' frustration with the clown he installed to run the Education Dept and his NCLB II policies grows daily.  So the question one asks oneself is whether one would actually sit out the next election or even pull the lever for some profoundly disturbed Republican who would actually be worse?

No, probably not.  Despite the disappointment, one has to admit that BO has done a decent thing or two,  which is probably more than one will be able to say for any conceivable Republican opponent.  So one will stifle one's sighs and desultorily slunk off to the polls and vote the Democratic party line.

But that scenario does not bode well for the Democrats.  BO and the Democrats rode into power  on a wave of popular enthusiasm.  As far as I can tell, that enthusiasm has pretty much fizzled out.  People gave lots of money and worked hard to put BO & co into office.  Most of that energy came from the progressive wing.  They won't get fooled again.  I know for sure I won't give them another dime, and I'll be talking trash about them at every turn.  That sentiment seems to be fairly widespread, and if it is, it's curtains for Barack -- even if he still gets our forlorn vote.

Ravitch rocks

Amen.

Why I'm at peace with the latest crop of teacher evaluation schemes

Despite their appearance to the contrary, I don't think the deformers are quite so stupid to base everything on standardized test scores. Most people without Joel Klein's bloated ego would have hung their heads in shame long ago if they were met with the same hoots of derision (not to mention the devastating dissection from academics) that annually accompany the release of NYC’s school report cards. As is well-known to every neophyte psychometrician, year-to-year changes in test scores – and even on a decent test – are almost completely noise. The unsteady bobbing on NYCs school progress rankings are a crystal clear empirical demonstration of that to anyone without ideological pinhole vision. With teachers, the randomness in year-to-year changes would be even starker. And I think at some level in their reptilean brains, the deformers are aware of this, and they know that coming up with a teacher rating scheme demonstrably even stupider than Joel Klein’s school rating scheme would not bode well for them.

This puts the deformers in a bit of a pickle, because their goal is really to do the whole evaluation thingy as cheaply as possible. They really don’t care if it’s done well or accurately; they just want a new deform accomplishment they can brag about in their bios and in conversations with other deformy types. Unfortunately, however, because any scheme they come up with would be such a big deal, it might come under lots of scrutiny (at least, they hope it's a big deal and comes under scrutiny, as long as it's the friendly type of scrutiny they get from other deformy types), so it must have at least the ambience of reasonability and thoughtfulness.

Besides 100% on changes in test scores, the other option is administrative fiat, the principal-as-CEO shtick. But this, of course, has the potential to go very badly wrong as well, because – though many might be shocked to hear it – not every school principal is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Empowering them too much could lead to serious blowback.

So deformers are backed into a corner of having to make an appearance of doing what they really don’t want to do, namely, conducting a real evaluation that takes multiple factors into account. And so you now hear about how many states are yammering about instituting annual multifactor evaluations to get their paws on RttT money. Which is where things start to get really humorous.

Evaluating teachers is now part of principals’ job description. But everybody knows that principals are overwhelmed with administrivia and discipline, and many are not really instructional leaders anyway. So they do their drive-bys and assigned their ratings, and the deformers hate it because the principals do not rate enough teachers badly – which would require documentation and paperwork that principals don’t have time for. So who is going to do all the newfangled annual multifactor evaluations, and where is the money to pay for them going to come from? How are states going to pay for these new armies of "experts" roaming around doing annual reviews? And for what? To ding a few hundred more teachers per year? My guess is that they'll end up paying a full year's admin salary for every incompetent they flush out of the woodwork. We'll see how long that lasts.

Three years, max, before the next governor or state ed head comes in a pulls the plug on such "an outrageous and ill-conceived waste of taxpayers' dollars." 

Arne "BubbleBoy" Duncan

NY Times. May 3, 2010:

Mr. Duncan says he encounters no public opposition.
“Zero,” he said. “And as hard as we’re pushing everybody else to change, we’re pushing the department to change even more. There’s just an outpouring of support for the common-sense changes and the unprecedented investments we’re making.”

Politico.  May 14, 2010.  Headline: President Obama's school plan riles lawmakers

Philanthrogovernment

Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic's literary editor, is a serious thinker.  He writes the "Washington Diarist" column on the last page of each issue, and it is always weighty and thought-provoking. It was from him that I first grasped the lightweightness of Obamism in international affairs.

This week he takes on philanthrogovernment, aka Bloombergism.  Worth the price of the issue (non-subscribers can't get the piece online).  Short summary here.

He begins with the article in the NY Times last winter about hedge fund operators getting involved in funding charter schools.   Initially it gives him a warm fuzzy feeling, then his blood starts to run a bit cold.  He catches a whiff of the hubris of these operators, of their data-driveness, and it worrries him.

From there he seques into a discussion of philanthrocapitalism, of the ability of wealthy philanthropists to address public problems governments have trouble with.  Bloombergism, he dubs this phenomenon, after New York mayor and bazillionaire Michael  Bloomberg.  All well and good, but, he notes, concerns rise when philanthropy creeps over the line and begins to subvert the democratic process -- as it manifestly has in New York, and especially in the operation of its public education system.

And then:

The signature contribution of the philanthrocapitalist to the American political tradition is the idea that social problems have market solutions. In the midst of our present troubles, however, there is much evidence to justify a new look at the grip of American business upon the American policy imagination. Isn’t it now ruefully clear that it all depends? In her exhilarating and deeply humane new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch exposes some of the fallacies of the business paradigm, and insists (in a valiant chapter called “The Billionaire Boys’ Club”) that “there is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people,” who “represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions.” To whom, really, are they accountable?

It's great to see someone like Wieseltier paying attention to this.  Buy or get a copy of the magazine and read it for yourself.

Ssh! Don't let Arne see this!

Sometimes the education deformers are so stupid you think they are deliberately parodying themselves.  Case in point, Forrest Hinton's modest proposal at the Quick and the Ed.  After spelling out  why none of Duncan's 4 school improvement (sic) turnaround options will work well for rural schools (of course, there's no reason to think they'd have much success with urban schools, either, but Hinton slides past that), he offers a 5th option: replace staff with machines.

Yeah, that'll work.

My question is: why limit this wonderful new option to rural schools?  Why not be really bold and start replacing ALL teachers who don't show a test score bump with machines now?

What a wondeful idea!  I think I'll go start a consultancy called BellBanger or BongWeather Associates, line up my Gates Foundation funding and start pushing it now.

Mark my words.  In a week's time, Dunc is going to announce it as a 5th school improvement option.  You heard it here first.

If there were more Republicans like this, I'd switch

Joshua Dunn provides the necessary background on the Kansas City story.

This guys is uneducated

The Quick and the Ed has been running a five-part series on smarter data systems.  Amusing how the final installment ends: 

We believe that when combined together, data intelligent teachers, data intelligent students, and data intelligent technologies will help us all finally realize the real benefits of all this data.

Oh, yes, we do so believe after spending all that money doing all those things, we will finally (!) start seeing real benefits.  Funny how the article doesn't quote a single teacher on the benefits of ARIS, New York City's student data system, which is featured in the article.  Also most amusing how the authors (and this is a common mistake among the folks who run our education systems, including those most "data-driven") are unaware that "data" is the plural of "datum."

To win in Afghanistan we must get rid of bad soldiers

"Teacher quality" is high on the agenda these days as the key to fixing what ails us in education.  I would submit we need to look at who's running the system.   The blather that comes out of Arne Duncan is so typical of the bloated, pompous promises  that every high-ranking educrat must master if he wishes to advance his career.  For example:

We expect the states that win Race to the Top will lead the way and blaze the path for the future of school reform for years and even decades to come. They will make education reform America's mission.

It's embarrassing to work in a public institution where the highest-ranking person is such a bonehead.   If this is an example of the finest critical thinking skills our nation's top educator has to offer, we are certainly doomed.  Anybody with a shred of common sense can list many reasons why the Race to the Trough may end up a flop.  And for anybody with the least familiarity with all the education policy fads that come and gone over the past 30 years, the handwriting is clearly on the wall.

But put that aside, something interesting here is Duncan's idea of "reform."  When you reform something, you take it and transform it into something else.  Usually, before you get started, you have some idea of where you are heading.  But Duncan has no goal in mind behind perpetual reform, for "decades to come," stretching as far as the eye can see.  "Education reform," not simply good education for all children, should be America's mission.  A ceaseless process of change has become the goal.

Harlem Children's Zone Study

The National Bureau of Economic Research has released a paper on effects of the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) by Willian Dobbie and Roland Fryer.  I haven't read the paper, but the abstract suggests that it confirms what the hated teachers' unions have been saying for quite some time: children from poor families can catch up with their wealthier peers, but it requires intensive (and expensive) extra-academic interventions and supports.  They find that HCZ has good results, but spends 19% more per student than the median New York State school district and 55% more per student than New York City charters to achieve them.  This is pretty much the same (and obvious) conclusion that Richard Rothstein drew several years ago in Class and Schools: additional money, well spent, is required to close the achievement gap.  Of course, the "no excuses" crowd are going to use it as yet another opportunity to pound on teachers for the terrible job they are doing.

In the NBER Digest, Linda Gorman writes:

In Are High Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Social Experiment in Harlem (NBER Working Paper No. 15473), Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer find that in the fourth and fifth grade, the math test scores of charter school lottery winners and losers are virtually identical to those of a typical black student in the New York City schools. After attending the Promise Academy middle school for three years, black students score as well as comparable white students. They are 11.6 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level in sixth grade, 17.9 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level in seventh grade, and 27.5 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level by eighth grade. Overall, Promise Academy middle school enrollment appears to increase math scores by 1.2 standard deviations in eighth grade, more than the estimated benefits from reductions in class size, Teach for America, or Head Sta rt.

The benefits accrue to all subsets of students in the middle school including those entering above or below median test scores, those eligible for free lunches, and those who were and were not eligible for the Harlem Children's Zone's student-family service bundles of nutritious fruits and vegetables, advice, pre-made meals, and money and travel allowances. The total cost of the Promise Academy charter school was about $19,272 per student including after-school and "wrap-around" programs. The New York Department of Education funded every charter school at $12,443 per student in 2008-9, and the median school district in New York State spent $16,171 per student in 2006.

Greed is good

A commenter on a blogpost here nicely captures the mentality of the corporate, philanthrocapitalist education deform crowd:

The evidence seems to suggest is that our society’s most highly educated people are turned away from teaching because of conditions which the teacher unions continue to support, namely: differentiated pay, differentiated status among teachers, and high stakes accountability tied to evaluation. Think about the professions that our most highly educated citizens prefer (the Ivy League graduates in the U.S.).

Let’s see: Investment Banking, Finance, Law, Entrepreneurs. What is the common denominator here? Making a lot of money, but doing so under differentiated terms and market pressures in which pay is tied to performance as judged by the employees clients. It’s not fair to say on the one hand that our society’s smartest people avoid teaching because of the conditions of that profession, when the very conditions that non teacher reformers want to implement (e.g. pay for performance; more accountability/high risk reward pay) are precisely the conditions the union opposes but that top college graduates want as demonstrated by the careers they currently choose

There is much to quibble with here.  I would not equate having an undergraduate or MBA degree from an Ivy League school as necessarily being "highly educated."  Investment banking, law, finance, and business do not, as far as I can see, require any brains beyond what it takes to become a doctor, scientist, engineer, policy analyst, or liberal arts professor.   The most distinct feature of the people I knew who went to business school was that they wanted to make a lot of money.  They were quite unapologetic about that.  They were not motivated by any particular curiosity to know something or a desire to contribute to a better world.  This is not to say that they weren't smart in a certain reptilean way, but one would be hard-pressed to have an intelligent discussion with them about art or literature or politics.

In this week's New Republic, Anthony Grafton reviews a recent book by Louis Menaud on the plight of graduate students in the humanities, who spend 10 or more poverty-stricken years working on the PhDs only to find slim job prospects awaiting them when they finish.  Grafton asks whether something should be done to deter them from ever attempting such a foolish endeavor.   His answer is that, although the poor souls should be informed from the start about the difficulty of the quest, in some sort of crazy way the system works:

One might say that you need a vocation.   And the vocation of scholarship is hard ... One reason graduate school demands so much time, so much effort, and so much difficulty is that it is designed -- badly and clumsily, but not insanely -- to attract and then to test people who think they have this sort of calling.

The commenter who thinks our "most educated" citizens gravitate towards banking, law, and business -- and others of his ilk who are the powers behind the current deformation of public education -- have never had a taste of this calling.  They no inkling of what it means to be driven to seek truth and beauty for their own sakes, not for the large salaries they will command.  

I once had an English professor who said that the most educated man he ever met was a crane operator who kept a shelf of books in his cab.  He didn't say whether the crane operator had gone to an Ivy League college or not.

Too bad the current crop of education deformers will never understand how or why a highly educated man could end up driving a crane.

The beatings will continue until morale improves

Or as a commenter on a NYT article about how Joel Klein has failed his avowed goal of expediting the teacher-removal process puts it:

There’s an old joke about a man who planned to have a cat pull a piano up four flights of stairs. “How can you make that tiny animal do a job like that?” he was asked. “Easy”, he replied, “I’ll use a whip.”

Because staff at the only high school serving the small, poor community of Central Falls RI did not comply with the superintendant's demand to do more work for no more pay, she fired them all.

Our dimwitted US Secretary of Education commended the board for “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.”

“This is hard work and these are tough decisions, but students only have one chance for an education,” he is quoted as saying. 

Uh, yeah, that makes sense.  The way to give them a great education is to fire all their teachers.  Brilliant.

Valerie Strauss has the best and most pithy analysis.

Huberman pressured into putting brakes on Duncan's homicidal policies

Correlation is not causation, but youth violence spiked in Chicago in the years following Arne Duncan's reckless school-closing spree -- now going national with big bucks behind it.   Coincidence?  Maybe.  Duncan's heavy community opposition repeatedly warned him that his policy would produce violence.  And when the beating death of honors student Derrion Albert was caught on video, even the mainstream media speculated that there might be a connection with school closings (fancifully named "Renaissance 2010").  Of course, when asked about it, Duncan bristled at the suggestion, calling the notion “absolutely ridiculous".  And we know he is right because everything he does is for the kids, and we did not, after all, see him wielding a club in the video.

Now, in an apparent flash of community concern, Ron Huberman, Duncan's replacement as Chicago school boss, is backing off (a little) on his plan for closing more schools, citing "safety concerns."  In other words, the political powers that rule Chicago have realized that: (a) the suggestion that closing schools may contribute to violence is not -- sorry, Arne -- quite so ridiculous  and (b) youth violence is not good for the image and reputation of the city, and hence it is bad for those who own much of its real estate. 

Huberman spins it as a "the community spoke, we listened" story, which is patent nonsense, since he always turned a deaf ear to the community before.

Huberman said Wednesday his latest plans show he listened to the community. He said he took very seriously concerns about gang conflicts, arguing that it's tough to foresee some potential problems until the shake-ups are announced.

"Tough to foresee potential problems."  Let's transcribe that: "I was being a good boy and going ahead with the plan.  How was I to know that the political winds were going to shift and that Ren10 was suddenly going to become a problem for the rich and powerful who are calling the shots?"

Smarick praises Huberman for pulling down his pants to pee

Andy Smarick, who was Deputy Assistant Something in the Bush ED, and is now a visting fellow at the Fordham Institute (I guess they won't give him a permanent job) must be one of the sillier characters in the education blogosphere.  Case in point:  Thoughful Administration.

When a Chicago study came out last year [showing that Arne Duncan's expensive school closure policy was largely ineffective because most students whose schools were closed ended up going to schools that were no better] there was mega hand-wringing and lots of “I-told-you-sos” from opponents of closures... Rather than throwing away the closure option, Chicago schools CEO Ron Huberman learned from previous efforts and adjusted the strategy. Now, all kids displaced by closures will have access to higher performing options.  Not brain surgery for sure...

I don't know how much Arne Duncan was paid as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, nor how much Huberman makes.  Considering their stunning lack of credentials or experience, it was and is certainly too much.  My guess is probably in the neighborhood of $250,000 plus perks.  So maybe I'm just hardnosed, but when a public servant sucks up that much of my taxes, I kinda expect they should be able to make commonsense decisions like not shutting kids out of a school unless there is a better alternative. 

Being a performance-driven conservative, you'd think Andy would too.  You'd think he'd hold Duncan's feet to the fire a bit for such stupid implementation of a (maybe) decent policy.  You would also think he wouldn't find anything especially laudable in Huberman's (maybe) improved implementation.  You might even think Smarick would be a wee bit sceptical of Huberman when he says he's going to insure that students of closing schools get better options (like asking questions like, "Gee, Ron, how are you going to make sure that happens, since so far you seem like a martinet, a liar, and a nitwit?")  But you'd think wrong.

Teachers are always the most eloquent

A teacher commenting on the Houston's School Board pushing use of test score inflation (aka "valued added) to measure teacher effectiveness:

I'd like to introduce myself to Mr. Grier and the Members of the School Board. I'm one of the good teachers in HISD. I have high test scores, lots of technology, awesome projects hanging on the walls, good evaluations, well behaved students and very high academic standards in my classroom. I've even received an ASPIRE bonus two years running.

And I want you to know that I'm turning in my resignation in May. In fact, it was difficult to come back this Fall, it made me ill, but I decided to tough it out one more year.

I am leaving public education as disillusioned and disgusted with the system as my colleagues who have been dumped on for years. I am tired of listening to students scream obscenities at teachers and then hide behind smirking assistant principals who see nothing wrong with the student's behavior. I am disgusted with the retaliatory tactics, bullying and lies that come from our main office everyday. I have no faith in the Union as it too is corrupt and entangled in the deceit. Sorry, Ms. Fallon, but you know how horrible it is and you've not been able to do any thing about it. I'm powerless and only protected for now by my scores and a childish kind of campus popularity. I can only cringe as I hear my friends and colleagues insulted, targeted and harassed by students and administrators. There's no ASPIRE bonus big enough to make me stay in a poisonous place where talented teachers' lives have been turned into living hells because of misanthropic and dangerously ignorant principals, blatant favouritism, irresponsible parents just as eager as our new superintendent to jump on the blame wagon and ultimately a society that fails to appreciate the value of an education. With all my heart I'll miss my students, but I have too much self respect and too much self worth to continue working in a profession as corrupt and misguided as this one. I guess that makes me no better than all of those "bad" teachers Mr. Grier and board can't wait to fire.

Congratulations HISD, you won.

The power of belief

Profuse declarations of one's confidence in the ability of all children to perform at the highest level are de rigueur for high-level education administrators.  Admission that some children may be bound for careers as plumbers, cosmetologists, or automotive technicians is a major faux pas, met with cries shock and horror -- particularly if one fails to speak with hushed voice and lowered eyes to suggest deep shame in bringing up unmentionable possibilities   To profess mild skepiticism, much less engage in critical thinking, with the wares of the latest educational snake-oil peddlars will banish one forever from the chambers where key decisions are made.

Michelle Rhee's latest bit of nonsense is emblematic of this evangelical bent.  Rhee firmly believes (but, note, does not provide evidence) that the only thing preventing urban schools from overrunning the classrooms of the Ivy League is (drum roll please) ... belief.

Rhee first sounds her theme thus:

I believe we can solve the problems of urban education in our lifetimes and actualize education’s power to reverse generational poverty. But I am learning that it is a radical concept to even suggest this.

Actually, if there is anything radical about this concept, it is that education alone is sufficient to eliminate the intergenerational transmisson of poverty.  Rhee's sweeping suggestion that somehow she alone has glimpsed the light brushes aside the work of hundreds of thousands of dedicated researchers, social workers, teachers, psychologists, and activists who have dedicated their lives to addressing the problem of poverty in the U.S..  But we have seen this attitude from St. Michelle -- returned from the caverns of Baltimore schools grasping the hold grail and cup containing all the answers to our society's most deep-rooted and intractable problems -- many times before.

And the answer according to St. Michelle?  Simply believe:

Examples of extraordinary success also exist here in Washington, DC ... At the successful schools, the primary difference was the team of adults who decided it was possible for lives and outcomes to move in other directions.  What is keeping us from bringing such examples to scale is not a lack of solutions but a frailty of belief.

That's pretty much it.  If kids don't do well, it's because teachers lack courage and don't believe.  The one concrete suggestion she gives is a plug for evaluating teachers based on student's test scores -- despite no evidence whatsoever (which is not required in a faith-based world, of course) that it is a good idea that could work  Then, in a nice bit of irony, she applauds Obama's education policies while decrying adults who play politics in the same breath.

And she concludes with an effort to seem MLK-esque:

There is no doubt that poverty drags multiple obstacles into schools with children, and these obstacles are extremely challenging to overcome. It can feel like climbing a mountain every day, both for children and the adults who are teaching them. But there are successful mountain climbers. As we follow their examples in larger numbers, we will create well-worn paths of success. Mountains will be reduced to hills, and hills to level ground as all children become poised for life choices that can compete with their imaginations

Curious that she doesn't mention who those mountain climbers are, what exactly they doing, by what measure she deems them a success in reaching the pinnacle, or what specifically she is doing to follow their lead.  But perhaps she is merely being humble in not telling us directly that the fearless climber scaling the peaks is her and hers is the lead we should follow.  But we would probably know that ... if we only believed.

Let's move (those pencils)!

I listened to Michelle Obama's launch of a new national campaign to attack childhood obesity last night on C-SPAN radio last night.  It's a critical problem, because overweight children face significantly increased risk of health problems over their lifetimes, not to mention a host of potential social and psychological issues.  MO's tackling of the problem is all well and good, but it focusses almost exclusively on the nutrition side, with no acknowledgement of the fact that recess and phys ed are among the first things to be cut under the pressure-cooker NCLB's test-prep regime -- which her husband's policies only intensify.  From ABC News:

But many physical education programs across the nation's school systems are among the first to fall victim to deeper budget cuts.

In fact, only 4 percent of elementary schools, 8 percent of middle schools, and 2 percent of high schools offer daily physical education, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"What we're trying to really encourage school districts to think about is even when things are very, very tough, don't cut those extracurricular activities," said Duncan.

Of course, Duncan's policies do nothing of the kind.  Do Race-to-the-Trough applicants get extra points for assuring that their students get at least an hour of vigorous physical exercise every day?  I don't think so.  Perhaps Duncan is referring to his penchant for closing schools, which will force students to walk farther and often through gang-patrolled streets to get to class -- as occurred in Chicago under his reign, with lethal results.  Hey, nothing like scurrying along for fear of one's life to get the heart pumping!

Politics, Ideology, and Education

I've been reading Elizabeth DeBray's book of that title (subtitle: Federal Policy During the Clinton and Bush Administrations).  I learned 2 things.

First, we have Osama bin Laden to thank for NCLB.  Many of the elements of NCLB were championed by the Clinton Administration.  But the Republicans hated it.  Abolition of the Dept of Education was a plank in the Republican platform in the 1996 election.  After 9/11, education was Bush's top domestic priority, and Republicans went along with it in a show of party loyalty with their wartime president.  Kennedy was initially sidelined (Bush's guys were negotiating with the New Democrats, like Lieberman), but then got involved, softening the bill a bit and extracting a bit more funding.  Only Paul Wellstone, bless his soul, took an active stand against all the standardized testing and draconian punishments.

Second, both researchers and educators were completely locked out.  In other words, everyone who actually knew something was excluded.

Plus ca change we can believe in.  We still have terrorists and nitwits in charge of setting our education policy.

"The worst is one who is despised"

When the Master governs, the people

are hardly aware that he exists.

Next best is a leader who is loved.

Next, one who is feared.

The worst is one who is despised.

- Tao Te Ching

Poor Joel Klein has been taking quite a beating lately.  First he gets booed and shouted down for 5 minutes straight by parents and teachers while trying to make a speech.  Then he gets hammered by the New York State Senate Finance Committee:

Klein was roasted by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn) for ignoring the concerns of parents and lawmakers and treating them as "annoyances."

"You come to us for money, but you don't come to us for involvement," Kruger said.

Kruger also referred to Klein's tenure as "nine years of torture, nine years of acrimony, nine years of nail biting and hand twisting."

Of course, Klein is unfazed.  He knows exactly why this is happening to him: "When you do tough things, you are going to get pushback and resistance."

Note, Joel, you might also get pushback and resistance for doing stupid and dishonest things.  Difficult though it may be for you to fathom, not everybody who disagrees with you is necessarily wrong.

Great ideas still not coming from Washington

Arne Duncan gave a speech at the National Press Club last May, wherein he said: "You know, when I was in Chicago, I didn’t think all the good ideas came from Washington. Now that I’m in Washington, I know all the good ideas don’t come from Washington. The good ideas are always going to come from great educators in local communities."

I guess that explains why his ideas for ESEA re-authorization, outlined in the Obama administration's 2011 budget proposal, are a federal bureaucrat's wishlist: national standardized tests, cradle-to-career child surveillance systems, and a big pot of discretionary dollars for the US Secretary of Education to dole out to states that do his bidding. 

Given the sea of red ink we are embarking upon, I think the notion that Congress will give Arne another big pot of playmoney is fantasy -- even if his ideas for reform had some currency outside the small gang of thugs driving the deformation of American education, which they don't.  No Republican is going to risk his seat to support such federalization of education policy, however attractive its union-bashing elements might be.

Arne wants to replace NCLB accountability with national standardized tests that measure growth toward "College and Career Readiness."  It's a brilliantly stupid idea that will eventually lead to the complete discreditation of the test-driven accountability train.  Any national testing regime is going to invite widespread scrutiny, and under such scrutiny it will collapse.  The reason why it will collapse is quite simple: as is well-known among psychometricians, year-to-year changes in student test scores are almost completely random.  Aggregating these bits of randomness to the class or school level mostly results in more randomness.  This is what New York City does for it school progress reports, and, because the results are meaningless junk, why nobody believes them any more.  (As an indication of how bad they are, New York City Department of Education ignored its own reports in making its recent school closing decisions.)

It's evident that there is going to be no real national dialogue on the issue.  Duncan has resolutely ignored the eminently sensible alternatives proposed by the Broader, Bolder Agenda -- even though  he two-facedly signed onto it.  So I say, let the test-o-maniacs have their way.  A national testing regime couldn't possibly be worse than all the ridiculous state tests we have now,  and, sad to say, an accoutability metric that produces meaningless junk would actually be an improvement -- because what we have now produces toxic junk.  Argument is not going to sway these obsessed clowns who have never spent a day in the classroom as a teacher, but think they know best.  Let them have their way and fall on their faces.  The sooner we let them demonstrably fail, the sooner we might move onto something that makes sense.

US Secretary of Education: Total devastation good for education

Poor Arne.  His fortunes were riding high.  It looked like in the aftermath of Obama's State of the Union speech, education was the one policy arena where is might not be too difficult to get bi-partisan agreement.   (Not exactly a heavy lift.  Teachers' unions are traditionally strong Democratic supporters, so a Democratic president willing to undermine them must have seemed a little bit too good to be true to the just-say-no Republicans.  Of course, there was the usual posturing.    Can't appear too gleeful, you know. ) 

Along with the opportunity to impose policy, it looked like Arne was going to get another big pot of play money to toss around.  And the New Yorker had the courtesy to profile him with a nice little puff piece.

Yep, things were going along swimmingly for ole Arne.  He had managed to escape any questions about the emerging news of his seven-year failure as Chicago Public Schools CEO, and the pummelling of his chief flack Peter Cunningham by the evil Richard Rothstein in a radio interview had escaped widespread media scrutiny.

But then a mutant virus tunneled into Duncan's mindware, causing him to say this:  "Let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster..."

The red alert immediately sounded in mission control room as programmers scrambled to fix the rogue program and get Duncan back on script -- but it was too late.  The US Secretary of Education had pronounced that total destruction of their schools and communities was the best thing that could have happened for thousands of poor, black children.

I think you should have kept doing what you're best at -- being considerably less honest -- Arne, chum.

Arne's trough problem

A few days ago, I wrote about the political calculations Arne Duncan would have to make in doleing out the Race to the Trough dollars.  It seems like the editors of the Wall Street Journal were also vexed that Duncan might not be heartless enough to keep sufficient numbers of little piggies away from the slops.  After all, they did go to all the work of filling out those great big applications!  And they do so need the money!

"Courage, Arne!" cry the WSJ editors, "Don't waver!  Stand firm!  Allow only the truly deserving to gorge!  Damn the rest!"

But Arne, think.  Wall Street Journal, Arne.  Republicans.  Elections.  Not your friends.  Will never be your friends.

Lest there be any doubt who WSJ's readers are, it is illuminating to peruse the readers' comments on this editorial.  I particularly fancied this gem:

And the real problem is the low quality of "inner city" students that no amount of federal legerdemain will ever cure. Hint! High dropout rates are good. It gets rid of the deadbeats so motivated kids won't have their classrooms disrupted.

Yep, this commenter perfectly encapsulates the current school reform strategy promoted by Duncan and praticed in Chicago and New York.

Person of the Year!

Michelle Rhee has finally gotten herself into deep doo-doo over a remark to Fast Company about teachers let go in October for what she claimed were budgetary reasons  "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" 

Just imagine, if she says stuff like that to a journalist, what demon spawn emerges from her mouth when speaking to her closest staff behind closed doors?  Perhaps one or two of her top lieutenants might realize that now is a good time to save themselves from the sinking ship and come clean about all the shenanigans that are no doubt going down in DCPS HQ.

In an ironic twist, as a perfect illustration of how clueless such groups are, some business/politican outfit called Federal City Council announced Rhee as their person of the year.  Nice move guys.  I'm sure that will be a great comfort to her as she's packing her bags for Sacremento.

Race to the Trough as political stupidity

So I guess something like 40 states put in the effort to send in their troughside applications in round 1.  And you just know it was a big pain in the butt for them, and hopes are riding high.  So here's how it's gonna turn out:

As with most things in nature, the quality of the applications (according to whatever criteria DOE comes up with) is going to be distributed along a bell curve.  There's going to one really outstanding, a few pretty good, a whole bunch of so-so, and some real stinkers.  And they're all going to have to be graded, and Arne Duncan is going to have to set  a cut score.

What a miserable job.  

Of course, he repeatedly said that there are going to losers, but nobody who went to all the trouble to complete the application was sitting around thinking, "Geez, I bet I'm a loser."  So Arne had 3 choices.  He sets the cut score really high and awards grants to the indisputably superior applications, but then he makes lots of enemies, lots of disgruntled governors phoning in and whining and complaining about how in these cash-strapped times Duncan made overworked state ed depts waste their time.  That would probably be a bad move.

Or he sets the bar somewhere in the middle, in which case you'd be hard-pressed to find a hair's-breadth difference between some of the winning applications and some of the losing ones.  Then Duncan wouldn't make a lot of enemies, but the few he made would be extremely vocal and annoyed.  It will be like trying to explain to Mr & Mrs Smith why you gave Johnny at 89 on his history paper instead of the 90 he needed to get into the gifted program.  "You've gotta be kidding me!  You're telling me he lost by a misplaced comma?!?  But you said yourself he was a wonderful writer!"

Or Dunc is going to do what he has repeatedly said he won't do and make almost everybody happy by giving them a little taste.

Given Obama's current political fortunes, I'm betting on option 3.

Race to the Trough as stealth policy

Mike Klonsky provided a link to a KCRW Public Radio show featuring Richard Rothstein, former New York Times education reporter and co-author of the important book Grading Education, and Peter Cunningham, chief flack for the US Department of Education.  As Klonsky notes, it was like punching a marshmellow (for Rothstein), because Cunningham came across as a nitwit with nothing coherent to say in defense of the Race to the Trough.  Cunningham basically says, yeah, most state's standardized tests suck and the NCLB accountability scheme sucks, but to change those, we'd have to change the law, and we have to spend this money quick, so we don't have time to change the law yet.  You could charitably say that his argument amounts to a pathetic version of "When you're stuck with lemons, make lemonade," although it comes across more like, "We're stuck with PCBs, so we we're making pickles."

Although Rothstein communicates very well, most of critical points he raises (and this is not meant as a dig at him) about the stultifying, curriculum-narrowing, damaging effects of ever-greater reliance on standardized testing are not really new.  (It was surprising that Cunningham hadn't seen these criticisms coming and prepared to address them better -- after all, that is his job -- but he's a nitwit.)

One point Rothstein brought up that hadn't occurred to me (around minute 39 of the show) was that Race to the Trough really should not even exist.  RttT was part of the ARRA economic stimulus/jobs creation bill.  An objection of ARRA opponents to the bill was that it would be used as an underhanded means of pushing Obama's preferred policies.  And RttT is certainly that.  Oh, yes, it is providing jobs for plenty of  educational snake-oil salesmen, but they probably rank only slightly below bankers and lawyers in popular esteem.  Now admittedly, $3.5 billion does not seem like a whole lot of money in comparison to the bank bailout -- but I would think it could be used to create quite a few jobs. 

And Cunningham, of course, simply missed Rothstein's point and said  that using ARRA funds to drive policy was a fine and noble thing to do.  That sentiment should make him an honored guest at a Tea Party or two.

There may be some hope, after all

After Scott Brown's election to Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat, there was lots of chatter about how Obama would need to move to the center to shore up flagging support from independents.   That didn't seem right to me.  Clearly, that election was an early referendum on Obama's leadership, but the problem was not that he was too leftist.  Instead, it seemed like BO had long neglected what might be fundamental law of politics: Dance with the one that brung ya.  In BO's case, that meant energetic youngsters as well as older, less robust progressives like myself who made up for what we lacked in energy by dropping dollars into BO's warchest like we'd never done for any candidate before.  Barack had charmed us all and we were swooning to glide away in his arms.

The Tea Partiers are livid about Obama and healthcare, sure, but he ain't never gonna make them happy anyway.  Heck, they voted for Palin.  What he's sorely missing is any enthuthiasm in his base.  Massachusetts voters, like many of us, have failed to see the change we could believe in. So I suspect good numbers of progressives sat on their hands.  You certainly didn't see them rocking the streets, knocking on doors, dialing the phones, to rouse up support for Obama's girl.  If they had, there's no question Scott Brown would have been a brief, unmemorable flash. 

So today's NY Times story about Obama finally taking on the banks, promoting Volcker and sidelining Geithner and Summers, comes as wonderful good news.  I especially liked the hints about how Geithner and Summers might soon be shown the door. 

Maybe, just maybe, with all the bad news coming out of Chicago about Arne Duncan's failure, universal disparagement of the Race to the Trough, Bloomberg faced with parents protesting outside his house, Michelle Rhee's luster noticeably tarnished -- BO might come to realize that those 3 million teacher votes and voices and energy and 30 million fingers and 6 million feet could be more useful to his political longevity than all Broad's bucks.  And Flunkin Duncan will maybe start looking for a job doing something he could do well -- coaching high school basketball somewhere.

Among other insightful comments on what the 2010 education priorities of the Obama administration might be, Steve Peha has offers this:

Our Secretary of Education has remarked many times that our tests are inadequate and that the language of the current ESEA encourages states to lower their standards over time. Appropriately, he calls this process, “the race to the bottom”. Mr. Duncan has the issue pegged. But fixing it doesn’t seem to be at the top of his agenda. I find that strange. Finally, someone in Washington has identified the fundamental problem with the fundamental element of reform, and yet he doesn’t seem to want to do much about it. ... I'm baffled.

Mr. Peha is right.  Not only is it nowhere near the top of Duncan's agenda, he is pushing states hard to use those same crappy tests to evaluate teachers.  To help Mr. Peha with his bafflement, I would submit that Duncan is a master of doublespeak, defined in George Orwell's 1984 as:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfullness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it ... to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.

Also known as "speaking with a forked tongue," it is critical skill for high-level education policymakers and administrators.