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07 Jul 09

Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report | Edutopia

www.edutopia.org/k-education-report-nation-risk - Preview

nclb businessroundtable

22 May 09

Heard on the Tour: Vermont Coffee House - ED.gov Blog

www.edgovblogs.org/...-the-tour-vermont-coffee-house - Preview

duncan nclb

Before arriving in Vermont last week, we contacted a teacher at Colchester High School and asked where her teacher friends hang out. She mentioned a café in nearby Burlington, a few blocks from the university.

That’s where 10 elementary and high school teachers stopped in right after school got out, grabbed a coffee, and sat down for an hour with Secretary Duncan for an open-ended conversation. Teachers talked about everything from their personal reasons for becoming teachers, to experiences with their students, dealing with discipline, pressure to “teach to the test,” national standards, media perceptions of teachers, parents who are intimidated by teachers and schools, cooking for their families after working all day, class sizes, what to wear to school, music, support for teachers who want to be principals, “loan forgiveness” and more. The conversation kept running for a couple hours, even after the Secretary had to leave for his next appointment.

20 May 09

Bridging Differences: Data-Driven Nonsense

Powerful.

blogs.edweek.org/...datadriven_nonsense.html - Preview

duncan obama joel_klein merit_pay nclb standardizedtests

Regarding accountability, I am on board with your suspicion about the use and mis-use of high-stakes testing. One of the virtues of NAEP is that it is low stakes. I would even say that it is no-stakes. No child, student, or teacher has ever suffered the consequences of doing poorly because of NAEP because the assessment does not identify individual students, teachers, or schools. It gives results for the nation, states, and some cities (that volunteered).
I think our society is in dangerous territory on this subject of accountability. The so-called "reformers," the guys (yes, guys) who call themselves the Education Equality Project, would have the world believe that accountability is the key to improving American education. They think it can be done fast, not incrementally. They think the key to improvement is punishing the bad students, the bad teachers, and the bad schools. Their latest formula, as enunciated by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is to close down 5,000 schools and re-open them. I wonder where he plans to find 5,000 new principals and thousands of new teachers, or does he just intend to reshuffle the deck?

This approach rests squarely on the high-stakes use of testing. One only wishes that the proponents of this mean-spirited approach might themselves be subjected to a high-stakes test about their understanding of children and education! I predict that every one of them would fail and be severely punished.
2 more annotations...
- I think that testing is important and can be valuable, as it helps to spotlight problems and individuals in need of help. But the determinative word here is "help." The so-called reformers want to use accountability to find people in need of termination and schools in need of closure. Let's hope this punishment-obsessed crowd is never put in charge of hospitals!
- Unfortunately, events are not breaking in the direction we both prefer. The stimulus bill includes millions so that every state can create a data system. This system will track the test scores of every student, from pre-K to college, and attribute their test score gains (or lack thereof) to their teachers. When the information is available, it will be used and misused. Every teacher (at least those who teach the tested subjects) will have a public record detailing whether his or her students made gains or not. This information will be used to establish calibrated merit pay schemes, so that each teacher will get more or fewer dollars depending on the scores of the year. Is this piecework?
  
  The federal government seems ready to impose a Dr. Strangelove approach on our schools to turn them into "data-driven systems." Not, as you suggest, "data-informed" systems, but data-driven systems. Teachers will certainly teach to the tests, since nothing else matters. The only missing ingredient from this grand data-driven scheme will be education.

01 May 09

PISA Sample Questions

Now I need to find some NCLB tests to compare.

pisa-sq.acer.edu.au/index.php - Preview

pisa nclb standardizedtests

30 Apr 09

NCLB is not working - The Daily Voice - Black America's Daily News Source

thedailyvoice.com/...nclb-is-not-working-001849.php - Preview

nclb naep

Proponents of NCLB, which started in 2002, claimed that the big gains from 1999 to 2004 were evidence that the Act was working. Research by the Civil Rights Project showed that the increase in test scores were likely due to factors other than NCLB. The fact that the gains in test scores have stalled from 2004 to 2008 while NCLB has continued supports the Civil Rights Project argument. NCLB isn't working.
Still, what can be done to eliminate the black-white test-score gap?

The scholarly evidence continues to mount that economic disparities cause educational disparities. It seems unlikely that we will be able to eliminate the test-score gap while economic inequality between blacks and whites remains so great. The black-white income and wealth gaps are large. In 2007, for every dollar of income the average white household had, the average black household only had 62 cents. For every dollar of assets the average white household held, the average black household only held 10 cents.

Researchers have found that more than half of the achievement gap can be attributed to economic and educational differences between black and white parents. Other factors relating to the differences in the educational opportunities provided to black and white children account for much of the remaining gap.
1 more annotations...
- We need to increase job opportunities in poor black communities and see that black workers earn equivalent salaries to comparable white workers. A new Urban Institute study finds that in the low-wage labor market, black workers earn 12 percent less than similar white workers. Until we address the black-white income and wealth gaps, I have little hope that we will be able to reduce the black-white test-score gap.
  
  Algernon Austin is director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute.

NAEP Results Produce More Evidence of NCLB's Failure; | CommonDreams.org

www.commondreams.org/...28-9 - Preview

naep assessment nclb

"NCLB is demonstrably unable to produce sustained and
significant improvements even on a standardized test in the two
subjects on
which it focuses, reading and math. It also fails to make a real dent
in the
wide gaps between whites, African Americans and Latinos," said Monty
Neill, Ed.D., FairTest's Deputy Director. "It is time to completely
overhaul this educationally destructive law. The Forum on Educational
Accountability has produced a blueprint to rewrite the law to focus on
improving schools not just inflating state test scores." Neill chairs
the
Forum, whose Joint Organizational
Statement on NCLB is endorsed by 150 national education, civil
rights,
religious, disability, parent, labor and civic groups.

Since NCLB, state test scores have typically increased, but
NAEP results have failed to show similar increases. "This is a clear
sign
that schools are pressured to narrow curriculum and teach to the state
tests.
That inflates state test scores but the inflated scores don't mean real
learning has improved," explained FairTest's Lisa Guisbond. "NCLB has
proven to be counter-productive. The Obama administration and the
Congress must
take the necessary steps to craft helpful, not harmful, federal
legislation."

Numerous research reports have shown NCLB has led to narrowed
curriculum, teaching to the test, organizational chaos, educator
resentment,
and other educational damage. Public opinion surveys have shown
increasing
public dislike of the law and strong opposition to the law's emphases
on
testing and sanctions.

26 Apr 09

Tutoring program not hitting its marks - Las Vegas Sun

WaPo makes most of its money from SES profits along these lines - Kaplan, above all.

www.lasvegassun.com/...-program-not-hitting-its-marks - Preview

nclb corruption businessroundtable

A federally mandated after-school tutoring program, which has cost the state more than $20 million over five years, has had no effect on Clark County student achievement in reading while bringing slight gains in math, according to researchers.

While noting that the researchers’ findings are not definitive, Keith Rheault, Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction, said the federal dollars spent on reading tutoring appear to have been “a waste of money,” which he intends to correct.

“We should have spent that money on programs during the academic day instead of 30 or 40 minutes after school a couple times per week,” Rheault said. “We need to figure out why the reading (tutoring) has failed.”

Nearly all the funding was spent in the Clark County School District, which has about 70 percent of the state’s K-12 enrollment. To evaluate the tutoring, which is provided by private companies at schools serving large numbers of students from low-income households, researchers at the University of Memphis compared test scores of students who received the assistance during the 2007-08 academic year with their peers who did not.

25 Apr 09

Stephen Krashen Letter to Los Angeles Times: A Waste of Time and Money

susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php - Preview

standardizedtests nclb race gender

Recent research done by scholars at Indiana

University, UC Davis and

the University of Minnesota has shown that in

general state high

school exit exams do not lead to higher

employment, or higher earnings

by graduates, nor does the presence of high

school exit exams result

in improved academic achievement.

24 Apr 09

Gerald Bracey: Getting the Word Out, Countering Fear-Mongers

The best response to the fear-mongers and stats-distorters I've read.

www.susanohanian.org/show_commentaries.html - Preview

businessroundtable nclb history education assessment statistics

Congressman Miller seems to have forgotten that economic cycles have come and gone in the past independent of what 4th graders were doing in math and science. The economies of developed nations will continue to rise in fall independent of test scores. Japan, with some of the highest scoring students in the world, has been in the economic doldrums for almost 20 years. Iceland, with high scoring students, has become an overnight basket case with national debt equal to 850% of its GDP.
Kids in Wyoming are 70 points ahead of kids in Mississippi. On WHAT? I cannot think of any common test kids in WY and MS take except NAEP and in 2007, Wyoming 4th graders scored 225 and Mississippi 4th graders scored 208. That’s 17 points, not 70, but I don’t think the President misread his teleprompter or suffers dyslexia. Whatever the differences, are they due, as the President claims, to the different standards in the two states? How about, differences in poverty. Thirty percent of the students in Wyoming are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. In Mississippi it’s 68 percent. My forthcoming book has a chapter "Poverty is Poison," a title I stole from Paul Krugman, with credit, and that, along with Dave Berliner’s new monograph on out-of-school factors in achievement should finally shut up the "poverty-is-no-excuse" crowd. (But they won’t).
31 more annotations...
- What about those 13- and 14-year olds, only one third of whom "can read as well as they should?" This is NAEP data. This is one of the critics’ favorite statistics for stirring up anxiety. Roy Romer and Bob Wise use it all the time. About one third of these kids score at the NAEP "proficient" level. When the Center for American Progress, an organization that claims to be progressive, rolled out Leaders and Laggards, its joint venture with the Chamber of Commerce in 2007, CAP executive director, John Podesta declared that he found it "unconscionable" that no state had a majority of its students scoring at the NAEP proficient level. Unconscionable!
  
  But, let’s ask, "If 13- and 14-year olds in other nations sat for America’s NAEP, how many of those countries would have a majority of students scoring at the proficient level?"
  
  The answer, in reading at least is: Zero.
  
  That’s what Richard Rothstein and colleagues found using a method first developed by Bob Linn. The highest scoring nation, Sweden, (Finland did not participate in this reading study) would have about one third of their students at or above the proficient level. The U. S., which scored very high, had 31%. Gary Phillips, former acting commissioner for statistics at NCES and now with the American Institutes for Research made similar estimates for math and science using TIMSS data. Only 5 of 45 nations would have a small majority of their students proficient in math and only two would clear that barrier in science. Further evidence, I would argue, that the NAEP achievement levels are set far too high.
- The 'Fastest Growing Occupations'
  
  What about those 30 fastest growing occupations? I’ve never seen that statistic presented in quite that way, but it also means that half of the 30 fastest growing jobs DON’T require a B.A. or better. But, the signal point about this statistic is that the 30 fastest growing jobs don’t account for many jobs. And the few that do are occupations like personal care aides, home health aides, nursing aides — low-paying service sector jobs needed in and for an aging nation.
  
  Retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing occupations combined. For every systems engineer needed by a computer firm, Wal-Mart needs about 15 people on the floor. The ten occupations accounting for the largest NUMBER of jobs in a Bureau of Labor Statistics projection from 2006 to 2016 were retail sales, cashiers, office clerks, registered nurses, janitors and cleaners, bookkeeping clerks, waiters and waitresses, food preparers and servers, customer service representatives, and truck and tractor drivers. I will show the falsity of Miller's and Duncan's linking of education and economic crises in detail later in the talk, but it terrifies me that our new President and Secretary of Education have apparently bought into the old falsehoods.
  
  Little wonder that Diane Ravitch said that in education Obama was a third term for Bush and that Duncan was Margaret Spellings in drag.
- The real causes of the current economic mess
  
  I think one of the reasons we see so many such comments is captured a bit in the first two quotes. Neither Miller nor the President could bring himself to actually blame the schools for today’s economic catastrophe, but they laid on them some of the responsibility for any recovery. There is a long history of trying to link test scores to a nation’s economic health. That notion needs to become extinct
  
  Let’s take a moment to reflect on the causes of the current mess. Banks used very little capital of their own to buy extremely risky real estate assets, granting subprime mortgages and mortgages on overpriced houses, often without even making credit checks. Then they used virtually unfathomable instruments such as credit default swaps to insure against loss. But insurance companies that insured those risks, like AIG didn’t have the capital to pay off the swaps when the banks’ bets went bad. The situation has produced a slight reworking of the opening rhetorical flourishes of that landmark document, "A Nation At Risk:"
  
  We feel compelled to report to the American people that the business and financial foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—companies that extolled themselves as models of excellent practices have deceived the American people with sloppy, undisciplined, and greedy practices that are driving Americans out of their homes, threatening their retirements, and dashing their hopes of a financially secure future. Indeed, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre corporate financial performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
- Looking again at The Manufactured Crisis, I found all the myths that David [Berliner] and Bruce [Biddle] debunked [in their book The Manufactured Crisis] are still hanging around. They are just overlaid with another 15 years worth of data. I have a different perspective, plus the advantage of those 15 years of data. David and Bruce took each myth and demolished it individually. They organized their debunking around a collection of myths. I take a temporal approach. I organize around time and, while "A Nation At Risk," their signal event, was important, I think it all started earlier.
- Bashing public schools in the USA since World War II
  
  I see bashing schools as a longstanding predisposition that really took its current form just after World War II and I’d like to lay out today how that predisposition became an everyday habit. While Arthur Newman in his 1978 book, In Defense of the American Public School, has a section on “The always abundant criticism,” his reports are largely episodic into the Thirties and then he skips to the 70’s. In so doing, I think he misses the most important period of the rise of scapegoating.
  - So what is that period? Tease! - on 2009-04-24
  Add Sticky Note
- most influential of all at the time, Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Public Schools.
  
  Note the use of the word “Retreat.” I think this is the first title ever that suggested that things had once upon a time been better, that there had been some golden age of American public education which we had somehow tarnished. In 1956, Bestor was interviewed by U. S. News & World Report. The interview ran under the headline, "We Are Less Educated than Fifty Years Ago."
  
  Bestor made some remarkable historical errors, mostly by failing to take into account differences in the proportion of students finishing high school in 1906 vs. 1956 and changes in the socioeconomic status of those getting a diploma over that 50-year period. I say remarkable because Bestor was a historian and you’d think a historian would have noticed such things.
- The schools never recovered from the criticism unleashed by Sputnik, and quickly became society’s scapegoat of choice for perceived social crises. Since Sputnik, the driving force behind school reform efforts has been fear of the future with fear often serving as a means to gain power and control over the schools.
- When America’s cities went up in flames in the 1960’s schools once again were blamed. This time, at least one person saw the scam for what it was. Fred Hechinger, writing in the New York Times in 1967 observed
  
  Almost 10 years ago, when the first Soviet Sputnik went into orbit, the schools were blamed for America’s lag in space. Last week, in the Senate, the schools were blamed for the ghetto riots.
  
  In each case, the politicians’ motives were suspect. Their reflex reaction, when faced with a national crisis, is to assign guilt to persons with the least power to hit back. The schools, which are nonpolitical but dependent on political purse strings, fill the bill of emergency whipping boy.
- Earlier critics did not have the hammer of tests to pound schools with. NAEP did not exist until the 1970’s and it remained largely invisible until the 1990’s. SAT scores were stable up to 1963. Most states did not have state testing programs until the 1970’s. All Norm-Referenced tests except the various Iowa’s had floating standards so there was no way to tell if the 50th percentile in 1960 represented the same level of achievement as in 1950. International comparisons began in the 1960’s but the early ones contained too many methodological flaws to make them credible.
- Testing was now firmly cemented in place as THE instrument for measuring kids, teachers, and schools. A report to add steel reinforcement to that notion would come along soon. President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell, hoped for what he called a "Sputnik-like event" to shock Americans about the terrible state of their schools. Lacking such an event, Bell in 1981 reluctantly formed the National Commission on Excellence in Education. One of the driving forces of that commission, Harvard Physicist, Gerald Holton, at first refused the invitation to serve because Reagan was moving to dismantle some science and education programs that Holton supported and he was surprised and dismayed by the makeup of the commission—not a single national expert in education. It was an omen—the control of education would, over the next 20 years be stripped from educators.
  
  But Holton was coaxed in and "Reagan gave us our marching orders: Bring God back into the classroom. Encourage tuition tax credits for families using private schools. Support vouchers. And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education. As we left, I detected no visible dismay in our group. I wondered if we were all equally stunned."
  
  The report, "A Nation At Risk," did not mention any of Reagan’s "marching orders" and that caused a schism in White House. Adviser Ed Meese and other conservatives implored Reagan to reject it because it ignored Reagan’s marching orders. Moderates Jim Baker and Mike Deaver urged acceptance because it contained many issues Republicans, including Reagan, could campaign on.
- After the Cold Warrior rhetoric came 13 indicators of the risk. All reflect test scores. All accentuate the negative, even when they don’t have to. One of the indicators could have said "Scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and Iowa Tests of Educational Development have risen for seven consecutive years," but that information was not among the 13 pieces of data.
- Some of the indicators were highly selective. For example, one says, "There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U. S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments." If you look at NAEP trends, you will indeed find such a trendline for 17-year-olds. But not for 13-year-olds or 9-year-olds, the other two ages assessed. And the trends in reading and math show no hint of a decline at any age. Thus the commission had 9 trendlines, only one of which could be used to support crisis rhetoric and that was the one it used.
- "A Nation At Risk" brought together two assertions that have become gospel: educational quality can be measured by standardized tests and we must raise our test scores to compete in the global economy. High test scores = healthy economic nation. Those are the leitmotifs of the 26 years since the report appeared. You can hear them reflected over and over again in the quotes from President Obama and secretary Duncan that opened this talk, but they took their current form in 1983.
- Bell dispatched a team of educators headed by assistant secretary Chester Finn to Japan to see if we could import their education system. One of the team members, Herb Walberg, declared to the Washington Post, "I think it’s portable. Gumption and willpower, that’s the key." Otherwise Japan would eat our lunch. In the article, there is no indication that people perceived Walberg’s assertions as absurd.
  
  You remember Japan. Its economy was a miracle. Its students aced the tests in international comparisons. Then, about 1990, the Japanese discovered that the Emperor’s Palace and Grounds really weren’t worth more than the entire state of California, and its economy sank into the Pacific, soon taking the other Asian Tiger nations with it. The Japanese now speak of the 1990’s as the lost decade. They’ve never actually had a particularly good year since 2000 and they’re back in a heap of economic hurt: They officially declared themselves in recession again in 2007 and in 2008, the Japanese economy shrank three times as much as the U. S. economy. Their kids still ace tests.
- In 1987, reviewing a proposal to revamp NAEP, Bob Glaser, writing for the National Academy of Education said,
  
  Most of those personal qualities that we hold dear—resilience and courage in the face of stress, a sense of craft in our work, a commitment to justice and caring in our social relationships, a dedication to advancing the public good in communal life—are exceedingly difficult to assess. And so, unfortunately, we are apt to measure what we can, and eventually come to value what is measured over what is left unmeasured. The shift is subtle and occurs gradually.
- Well, maybe there’s hope.
  
  One way of chasing out the fear mongers, maybe, is to show them that there’s so much more to education than any test can measure. The Sunday, April 5, 2009 New York Times carried a page 1 article about activities that the Scarsdale district is using teach empathy. The hook for the article is probably that it’s in Scarsdale, but it also reports on major efforts in Los Angeles and 18 states. "Empathy lessons are spreading everywhere amid concerns over the pressure on students from high-stakes tests and a race to college that starts in kindergarten."
- The Educational Testing Service is adding a "Personal Potential Index" to the Graduate Record Examination with ratings by instructors on “knowledge and creativity; communication skills; capacity for teamwork; resilience; planning and organizational skills; and ethics and integrity.” ETS says that students need these qualities to succeed in graduate school. Why limit them to graduate school? Somebody should tell Arne about ETS’ plans.
- From my experiences living in East and Southeast Asia and from what I’ve read, I cannot imagine students in any of those nations asking questions, or any employee suggesting to a supervisor that there’s a better way of doing something.
  - After 5 years in Shanghai and three in Seoul, I can attest to that. - on 2009-04-24
  Add Sticky Note
- People, though, especially the media and those who would like to take advantage of one of the largest untapped markets anywhere—the public schools—still make the connection between test scores and the economy.
- The schools cannot buy a good headline. The Progress in International Reading Study gets very few headlines. That might be because the US does well in that international comparison. In 2001, three countries scored higher, 9 were not significantly different, and 23 were lower. In 2006, with 45 countries, 10 scored higher, 13 the same and 30 lower. The U. S. score was 542 in 2001 and 540 in 2006. That difference is the same as a two-point difference on the SAT and well above the international average of 500. But the headline in Education Week, the only outlet I know of that even covered the results at all, was "America Idles on International Reading Test?" Why not "America Continues To Do Well On International Reading Test?" In any case, if America idles, the rest of the world is in neutral, too. Only 10 of the 28 countries that were in both assessments changed more than 10 points in either direction.
- One way of countering the fear mongers is to determine whether or not they are using the right statistic or whether there are statistics that are more meaningful. The international comparisons, TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS, all come to us mostly in terms of average scores and how those scores affect a country’s ranking among other countries in the world. But as Hal Salzman the Urban Institute and Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown pointed out in a paper in Nature last May, the average scores don’t mean anything. They write "If as we argue, average test scores are mostly irrelevant to as a measure of economic potential, other indicators do matter. To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy. These are students who can enter the science and engineering workforce or are likely to innovate whatever their field of study. Remarkable, but little noted, is the fact that the United States produces the lion’s share of the world’s best students."
  
  I would temper that by pointing out that they define "world’s best" terms of test scores, but that’s the currency of the day and in that currency no one else even comes close. It is very difficult to attain Level 6 on the PISA tests, the highest on the scale. New Zealand tops the world with 4% and Finland is second with 3.9%. But that 3.9% for Finland only translates into 2000 warm bodies. The U. S. has 67,000. Japan is second with about 34,000. The UK has 21,000.
- The bad news is that we have the most lowest-performing students aside from Mexico. So there’s plenty of work to be done on the system, but we don’t have to say, as Duncan just did and as hundreds have across the years, we have a "crisis" in education.
- If test scores were so important to global competitiveness, you’d think our ranks on global competitiveness would be comparable to our ranks in the international test comparisons. But they’re not. There are two organizations that make it their business to rank nations on global competitive, the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland and the better known World Economic Forum which had its annual do recent in Davos, Switzerland. Now it is really going to be interesting to see what the current debacle does to the rankings, but as of 2008-2009 reports, the U. S. was number one.
  
  The IMD ranks 55 nations and the U. S. took over from Japan in 1994.
- The IMD wonders how much longer the U. S. can keep the lead. It notes that Singapore has been rising fast. But who cares? As Sam Dillon of the New York Times observed recently, comparing a diverse nation of 300 million with tiny city states such as Hong Kong and Singapore makes little sense. Which reminds me, seldom do the fear mongers take the cultural context of schools into account when discussing test scores. They seldom mention that everyday thousands of poor Malaysians cross into Singapore to do the dirty work. The long-term “guest workers,” mostly Filipinos, are forbidden to bring their families. These factors save Singapore a lot of work in educating children of the poor.
- What is important about the IMD rankings and even more so the WEF rankings is that they reveal how complex the idea of competitiveness is. Education is only one aspect of those rankings.
  
  The WEF has established what it calls "The Twelve Pillars of Competitiveness." I don’t have time to go into detail, but one way of countering the fear mongers is to try to make them aware of this complexity.
  
  First comes institutions which has to do with bureaucracy, corruption, transparency, trustworthiness, accountability, etc. As I say, it will be interesting to see what this year’s report looks like.
  
  The second pillar is infrastructure. We hear a lot about that these days, but before Katrina blew into town and that bridge collapsed into the Mississippi, I imagine few Americans thought much about infrastructure. Especially in terms of competitiveness. We took our roads, rails, ports, and airports for granted.
  
  Third is Macroeconomy. This is where the US does worst because the WEF hates deficits—that means money that could be used to increase productivity has to be used as interest on loans.
  
  I’ll just name the others, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labor market efficiency, financial market sophistication (our financial markets sophisticated themselves right out of business), technological readiness, market size, business sophistication and, most important, innovation. Innovation, where the U. S. is #1, is the most important because it is the only pillar that does not at some point yield diminishing returns. You can only gain so much by, say, making planes bigger and faster, but innovation has no limit. I this connection, I would point out the Bob Sternberg, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts has observed that our obsession with testing has given us our most successful tool for stamping out creativity.
- The WEF ranks 134 nations and the U. S. has been #1 for most of the last decade, occasionally slipping to #2. If the forecasts of A Nation At Risk had been correct and if, as the critics claim, the schools never improved, how then did we get ranked #1 in global competitiveness and enjoy the longest sustained expansion in the world, an expansion that was real—productivity soared in the 1990’s.
  - QUOTE. - on 2009-04-24
  Add Sticky Note
- Finally, let me return to NAEP, but rather than inundating you with numbers of numbers, I’ll just say this: Because of the changing ethnic makeup of this nation, and because of the fact that black and Hispanic students score still lower than whites, analyzing NAEP data simply at the national level makes no sense. In fact, it makes you the victim of Simpson’s Paradox. Simpson’s paradox shows up whenever the whole group analyzed shows one pattern but the subgroups show a different pattern.
  
  In 2002, the College Board lamented that there had been no change in the SAT verbal score since 1982. This was true for the national sample. But when I analyzed the trends by ethnicity, I found gains for all groups, some of them quite large. The reason for the apparent paradox was simply the changing demographics. In 1981, whites made up 85% of all SAT testtakers, in 2005, when I conducted the analysis the figure was 63%. The minorities were improving. But because the scores were still lower than whites and because minorities were making up an ever increasing share of the total pool, their lower scores attenuated the overall average.
- The same thing is true of NAEP. While there have been some areas of gain overall, if you look at the NAEP trends by ethnicity, the only place you see stability is in 17-year-old white kids. Everybody else is up and in groups up dramatically. For example, in mathematics, black 9-year-olds gained 34 points between 1978 and 2004, black 13-year-olds gained 34 points and black 17-year-olds gained 15 points.
- And just as you must cannot speak of "American" scores without looking at ethnic breakouts, neither can you speak of American schools without looking at breakouts by poverty. Yes, other countries have poor kids but many fewer. In one UNESCO study, the U. S. was 20th among 20 developed nations. Here’s an example of what poverty does to test scores taken from PIRLS.
  
  Top country Sweden, score 561
  
  U. S. overall 542
  
  International Average 500
  
  The 14.5% of American students in schools with less than 10% of their students in poverty 589
  
  The 19.5% of students in schools with 10% to 25% in poverty, 567. The 29.8% of students in school with 25-50 in poverty 551—if this group constituted a nation it would rank 4th among the 35 countries.
  
  That’s 64% of American students scoring at the top.
  
  The 21.3% of American students in schools with 50-75% in poverty, 519, still above the international average.
  
  Only the 15.1% of students in schools with more than 75% of their students in poverty score below the international average at 485.
- I fear that there is no way to counter the fear mongers directly. They have an agenda most of which revolves around controlling the curriculum and instruction and/or replacing the public schools with a private system.
  
  They are subject to shame, however. About 10 years ago Alex Molnar put together a loose confederacy of people to act as an underfunded countweight to the Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, etc. At the first meeting I looked around at the 25 or so people in the room and said "This will never work." The reason, I thought, was that the people in the room already had very full lives without taking on additional efforts on behalf of the schools. But, ten years later, now co-headquartered at the University of Colorado and Arizona State, there are about 120 "fellows" as we are called engaged in a number of endeavors. Among the more successful, I think, is the Think Twice project known internally as the Think Tank Review Project. The Heritages and Hoovers of the world along with some professors like Paul Peterson at Harvard and Jay Greene at Arkansas had taken to publishing un-peer reviewed papers which, on close examination, presented selective data leading to pretermined conclusion. The Think Twice project hires scholars to review these advocacy research papers as one would a manuscript submitted to Ed Researcher or AERJ and publishes the results. The originals are credited for sound conclusions, faulted for overreaching, which is a common theme in the papers.
- It is said that if you tell a lie often enough people will believe. One can only hope that the same applies to the truth.

Podcast55: High Stakes Testing is the Enemy » Moving at the Speed of Creativity

David Berliner, cited by Gerald Bracey, on out-of-school factors affecting the achievement gap.

www.speedofcreativity.org/...gh-stakes-testing-is-the-enemy - Preview

assessment nclb

23 Apr 09

THE PROPAGANDA OF "A NATION AT RISK": Gerald Bracey

A good analysis of ANAR.

www.america-tomorrow.com/...EDDRA8.htm - Preview

businessroundtable propaganda nclb

"If only to keep and improve on the slim c
ompetitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system."

This theory became very popular a few years later when the nation slipped into recession. "Lousy schools are producing a lousy workforce and that is killing us in the global marketplace" went the refrain. Larry Cremin, in Popular Education and Its
Discontents, debunked the theory, but no one was listening: "American economic competitiveness with Japan and other nations is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade, and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and
Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Departments of the Treasury, Commerce and Labor. Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform, especially educational reform defined solely
as school reform, is not merely utopian and millenialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools. I
t is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education."

ASCD Annual Conference: The Commercial Assault on Children and the School Environment

2003.

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nclb businessroundtable

At the same time, of course, the corporations were supporting the ideology behind "A Nation at Risk" and demanding that schools improve, they were also demanding a whole host of economic development strategies which had the effect of knocking the pins out from public funding for public schools. Economic development strategies, like tax incremental financing, industrial revenue bonding, equipment and inventory tax exemptions, and so on, all had the effect of transferring the tax liability, to a very large extent, from corporations to individual homeowners. And with the predictable consequence that, by the mid- and late-eighties and early-nineties, there were tax limitations measures on the ballot in many States, as homeowners found that they were literally sometimes, particularly fixed-income senior citizens and blue-collar workers, who saw their income declining throughout the eighties and into the nineties, that they literally had a choice to pay their ever-escalating public school tax bills or cap the amount of money. The only way they could give themselves a raise was to lower their taxes.

So, on the one hand, you have the explosion of school-business partnerships; on the other hand, you have the embrace of economic development strategies, which have the effect of constricting the resources available for public education.
Let me suggest to you that what has happened is not the triumph of democracy so much as the triumph of an idea called the market and the translation of the idea of a citizen into the idea of a consumer.
1 more annotations...
- We are much more likely to talk about our constituents in public education as consumers than as citizens. And that, in my mind at least, is a telling transformation. Because, you see, the market doesn’t care and is not set up to do something that public schools, as democratic institutions, must do. And that is to attend to the idea of equity and justice for all. The market doesn’t care.

KNOWLEDGE & POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: The Effects of School Reform in a NeoLiberal / NeoConservative Age | New Teacher Network

Good backgrounder on the origins and effects of A Nation at Risk.

www.newteachernetwork.net/neoliberal-neoconservative-age - Preview

nclb history

As Eric Haas points out, we can trace the origins of the high stakes testing and accountability model of school reform back to 1981 and the formation of the National Commission on Excellence in Education that launched a national propaganda campaign that actually preceded its release of A Nation at Risk in 1983. This campaign constituted an early expression of the now classic neoconservative propaganda technique of unifying public loyalty to elite power by arousing the public’s hatred and fear of democracy and what we hear called “liberalism.”
- The Overton Window in education shifts rightward from here. - on 2009-04-23
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Policy, in this case, had to deflect public attention away from the real causes of economic recession—neoliberal globalization resulting in the deindustrialization and de-unionization of America—while turning public sentiment against the sources of the most predictable resistance to what the policy actually intends to achieve (i.e., teachers unions and other “liberal” causes that might have ‘funny’ ideas about schools becoming the seedbeds of a more vital democracy by cultivating active citizenship skills and other means of intellectual self-defense against the abuses of elite power).
3 more annotations...
- The solution to America’s educational disarmament, as presented in A Nation At Risk, entailed restoring the schools’ commitment to “high standards,” which Susan Ohanian reveals here as a code word imposing tighter controls over the work of teachers in order to counter what elites regard as the “threat of democracy.” What A Nation At Risk did not satisfactorily address was the means of enforcing the restoration of “high standards.” As Sandra Mathison reports, an increased focus on “assessment” would supply not only the means for greater plutocratic—corporate dominated—control over both instruction and curriculum, but also greater opportunities for corporations to enrich themselves at the public’s expense. Neoliberals have no objection to public subsidies when those subsidies go to corporations, but when public funds go to increase teachers’ salaries, hire more teachers, build more schools, or otherwise improve the learning conditions of students, they scream about the horrors of the “nanny state.”
- what used to be the work of teachers—deciding what to teach, how to teach it, and how to assess it—has now become the work of corporations (i.e., the publishing and testing industries). Teachers, it seems, can no longer be entrusted to carry out their duties. As Felecia Briscoe and I describe in our respective chapters, they must be held “accountable” to elite power and “disciplined” to obey. Karen Anijar helps us recognize how this “evidence-based” approach to education takes “evidence-based medicine” as its model, revealing a disturbing analogy between the way in which publishing companies and testing agencies define and drive and proletarianize the work of teachers and the manner that the insurance industry now dictates the work the medical professionals.
- All the while, Kathleen Rhoades informs us, the media plays a very useful role in this process, reporting only that information that the architects of the business take-over of schools wants the public to know.

10 Apr 09

Opting Out of NCLB: Two Reports from a Growing Movement « Education Revolution

Interesting. Didn't know England was suffering too.

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nclb

09 Apr 09

Has No Child Left Behind Improved Public Education?

www.opposingviews.com/...hind-improved-public-education - Preview

nclb

06 Apr 09

The 'Texas Miracle' - CBS News

www.cbsnews.com/...main591676.shtml - Preview

nclb cheating duncan

eduwonkette: A Texas Tall Tale Remembered, and Demolished, One More Time

On Rod Paige's Houston SD, winner of 1st Broad Prize via cheating, model of NCLB and Obama-Duncan's NCLB II.

blogs.edweek.org/..._tall_tale_remembered_a_1.html - Preview

NCLB ron_paige joel_klein cheating eli_broad

Houston, the commentators cooed, was nothing short of a miracle. In 2002, the district won the first Broad Prize for Urban Education.
Take home lessons? If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
- Click the link :) - on 2009-04-06
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Poor schools' TAKS surges raise cheating questions: Dallas Morning News

Houston SD wins Broad Prize by administrative cheating.

www.dallasnews.com/...121904dnmetcheating.64fa3.html - Preview

nclb eli_broad

A Dallas Morning News data analysis has uncovered strong evidence
of organized, educator-led cheating on the TAKS test in dozens of Texas
schools – and suspicious scores in hundreds more.

The analysis found a poor urban school where third- and fifth-graders
are among the state's weakest readers – but the fourth-graders beat out
the state's most elite schools. That's despite the fact that many of its
students have trouble speaking English.

It found a desperately impoverished school where the fourth-graders have
trouble adding and subtracting – but nearly all the fifth-graders got
perfect scores on the math portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge
and Skills.

And it found schools where in one year's time – if the scores are to be
believed – children devolved from top students to barely being able to
read.
The investigation raises serious questions about the ability of the
state's accountability system to reliably measure how schools are
performing. The Texas system provided the model for No Child Left
Behind, the federal law that measures the quality of all U.S. public
schools and punishes those that don't meet standards.

"My sense is that we're seeing a change in culture," said Jim Impara, a
former state assessment director in Florida and Oregon. "When you have a
system where test scores have real impact on teachers' lives, you're
more likely to see teachers willing to cheat."
- Why does he say "teachers" instead of the equally likely "administrators"? - on 2009-04-06
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- Take Sanderson Elementary, a school in a poor Houston area.
  
  In 2003, after years of mediocre performance, it reached what has
  traditionally been the pinnacle for American schools: The U.S.
  Department of Education named Sanderson a Blue Ribbon School because of
  rapid improvement in its test scores.
  
  But the News' analysis raises questions about the validity
  of Sanderson's TAKS performance, particularly in fifth-grade math.
  
  Sanderson's fourth-graders scored extremely poorly on the math TAKS
  test. Their average scale score was so low that it ranked Sanderson in
  the bottom 2 percent of the state: No. 3,173 out of 3,227 schools.
  
  That's roughly what might be expected from a school where 98 percent of
  the student body is poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunches.
- Hundreds of research studies have found that student poverty is the
  single most important factor in student academic achievement.
- But Sanderson's fifth-graders had astonishing success on the math test.
  They had the highest scale scores of any school in Texas, beating every
  magnet school, every wealthy suburban school and every high-performing
  school in the state.
  
  Sanderson didn't just finish No. 1. No other school in the state was
  even close. In scale-score points, the distance between Sanderson and
  the No. 2 school was as large as the gap between No. 2 and No. 116. More
  than 90 percent of Sanderson's fifth-graders got perfect or near-perfect
  scores.
- The score swings at Sanderson and Budd were the two most extreme of any
  of the 7,700 Texas schools whose scores The News analyzed. But
  they weren't the only ones.
  
  More than 200 schools had large, unexplained score gaps between grades
  or between tests. In statisticians' lingo, these schools had at least
  one average scale score that was more than three standard deviations
  away from what would be predicted based on their scores in other grades
  or on other tests.
- A recent Harvard study of testing in Chicago schools found organized,
  educator-led cheating in about 4 percent of classrooms, 6 percent when
  schools with low scores faced consequences.
  
  In an anonymous survey of Arizona teachers by Dr. Haladyna, 11 percent
  said they improperly helped students on 1991 state tests.
  
  Dr. Impara said that when he started in the testing business in the
  1960s, cheating on standardized tests was barely a concern.
  
  "There were almost no stakes attached," said Dr. Impara, who with Dr.
  Fremer has formed a private test-security company. "The test was
  intended to provide information on student performance."
- he News' method of looking for unusual test scores does
  not catch all cheaters. It does not, for instance, detect schools that
  cheat consistently across multiple grades and multiple subjects.
  
  It also doesn't catch more subtle cheaters. A teacher who gives students
  a few correct answers on test day could raise her students' scores
  enough for them to pass, but not enough for a huge score increase that
  might draw attention.
  
  "You're catching the dumb cheaters," Dr. Haladyna said of the analysis.
  "The smart cheaters you're not going to be able to detect."

18 Mar 09

NCLB's focus on failure prompts similar attitude in students - Related Stories - ASCD SmartBrief

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assessment students nclb schooliness webroundup

27 Feb 09

Content vs Concept: The winner is… « Organic Classroom

Well-written and -argued.

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nclb assessment webroundup

Standardized testing changes the whole argument. Over at Change.org Clay Burell talks about “spoons for feeding or spoons for digging”. He wonders if teaching less content but in a more meaningful way helps a students to learn more. I feel it does. The problem comes when the students sit down for a content based test and have only covered 50% of the content. Sure, the students might have a deeper understanding of the content that they did cover, but the students are at a huge disadvantage when they encounter test questions that contain content that was never covered in class. Maybe the type of testing is the problem.

When I was going through university in the 90’s the state of Maryland school system had just put into place something that seemed to me quite groundbreaking at the time, performance assessment. The big state wide tests were not grading content, but asking students to demonstrate problem solving skills and a deeper understandings of subject areas. The hope was that changing the test would change the way in which schools instructed. Maryland stopped administering these performance assessment tests in 2002. The tests were replaced with tests that met the requirements of No Child Left Behind. We need more tests that show what a student can do, not just what a student knows.

So who is the winner, content or concept? I think if our tests focused more on thinking and doing and less on knowing ’stuff’ we could all start getting our students ready for the information age.