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Texas schools outperform Chicago

August 21, 2011 By

Don’t mess with Texas’ schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan claimed Texas schools have “really struggled” under Gov. Rick Perry, now a GOP candidate for president. “Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college,” Duncan said in a TV interview, adding he feels “very, very badly for the children there.”

Texas’ fourth- and eighth-graders “substantially outperformed” students in Chicago, the district Duncan ran before going to Washington, notes Andrew Rotherham in Time. The Texas high school graduation rate of 73 percent is slightly below the national average, but way above Chicago’s 56 percent graduation rate.

Overall, Texas scores are “right around the national averages” in reading and math on  NAEP, despite educating many immigrant students with poorly educated, non-English-speaking parents.  ACT reports Texas high school graduates only narrowly trail national averages for college readiness.

Duncan’s response to Rotherham:

“Texas has challenges. The record speaks for itself. Lots of other states have challenges too. But there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done in Texas and a lot of children who need a chance to get a great education.”

The statement is meaningless: All states have challenges that require hard work. The question is whether Texas is shirking.

Duncan’s claim of “massive increases in class size in Texas” is untrue, responds the Dallas Morning News. Primary classes, capped at 22 students, have remained stable. Secondary classes in core subjects are getting smaller.

. . . secondary math classes averaged 20.3 students in 2000-01 and dropped to 18.5 by last year. Average size of secondary English/language arts classes fell from 20.2 students in 2000-01 to 17.8 by last year.

In an e-mail to Duncan, TEA Commissioner Robert Scott added:

– Texas is ranked 13th in Ed Week’s Quality Counts report. Quality Counts gave Texas an “A” in “Standards, Assessment and Accountability,” and an “A” in “Transitions and Alignment” of the Texas system with college and career readiness. . .

– The Texas class of 2011 posted a record-high math score on the ACT college entrance exam. The Texas average math score was 21.5 and was higher than the national average of 21.1. ACT scores from 2007 to 2011 showed increases in all four subjects.

Texas fourth- and eighth-graders aced the 2009 NAEP science exam, Scott wrote. In eighth grade, black Texans were first in the nation compared to other blacks, white Texans tied with whites in high-scoring Massachusetts and Hispanics ranked eighth.

Perry has resisted Race To the Top, so perhaps Duncan’s antipathy is all about education policy. But it looks as though the education secretary is playing presidential politics. That’s not the way to build bipartisan consensus.

 

 

 

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Duncan waives NCLB

August 8, 2011 By

With Congress stalled on revising No Child Left Behind, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will do it himself. Duncan will waive NCLB requirements, such as achieving 100 percent proficiency by 2014, if states adopt Duncan-approved school reforms. It’s a huge expansion of executive power, notes the New York Times.

Under the current law, every school is given the equivalent of a pass-fail report card each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve, and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.

Expect suburban schools to get a pass, even if minority or low-income subgroups do poorly.

To receive a waiver, states must adopt “college- and career-ready” standards (just Common Core Standards?), work to improve teacher effectiveness, develop evaluation systems based on student test scores and other measures, turn around the lowest-performing schools and adopt  accountability systems to replace No Child’s pass-fail system.

“It sounds like they’re trying to do a backdoor Round 3 of Race to the Top, and that’s astonishing,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. He called Mr. Duncan’s plan “a dramatically broad reading of executive authority.”

If Republicans take the White House in the next election, the administration’s power play will set a dangerous precedent, adds Hess.

NCLB identifies too many schools as needing intervention, writes Russ Whitehurst at Brookings. Duncan should waive impossible goals — but not abuse the waiver authority to make federal law.

It is one thing for an administration to grant waivers to states to respond to unrealistic conditions on the ground or to allow experimentation and innovation. Similar waiver authority has been used to advance welfare and Medicaid reform going back to the Reagan administration, and to allow a few districts and states to experiment at the margins of NCLB in the Bush administration. It is quite another thing to grant state waivers conditional on compliance with a particular reform agenda that is dramatically different from existing law.

Duncan will create a backlash against Common Core Standards, if he forces all states to adopt them, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper.

Politics K-12 has a round-up of reactions. States are very eager to get out from under NCLB’s expectations, but not so eager to sign up for the administration’s version of education reform.

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Duncan could waive No Child Left Behind

June 13, 2011 By

If Congress doesn’t update No Child Left Behind, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he’ll waive key requirements “in exchange for states agreeing to adopt other efforts he has championed, such as linking teacher evaluations to student achievement, expanding charter schools and overhauling the lowest-performing schools,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

“Principals, superintendents and children cannot wait forever for the legislative process to work itself out,” Mr. Duncan said in a conference call with reporters. “As it exists now, No Child Left Behind is creating a slow-motion train wreck for children, parents and teachers.”

Revising the law, which requires states to test students in math and reading, was supposed to be this year’s bipartisan achievement. But leading Republicans want to reduce the federal government’s growing role in K-12 schools. Progress has been slow.

Both Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate education committee, and Rep. John Kline, Republican chairman of the House education committee, criticized Duncan’s threat to do an end run around Congress.

Update:  Duncan “is not permitted to remake federal law on the fly,” even if he thinks it’s a really good idea, writes Rick Hess.

After barely convincing Congress to keep Race to the Top on life support, Duncan is intent on unilaterally pushing his same pet priorities through the back door? He’s planning to offer regulatory relief only if states adopt reforms that are utterly absent in the relevant legislation? Facing backlash on the right and left over concerns that the administration coerced states to embrace test-driven teacher evaluation and the Common Core through Race to the Top, Duncan’s strategy is to double down?

Republicans won’t go along, Hess predicts. It’s not clear Democrats will either. Duncan’s favored ed reforms aren’t popular with the teachers’ unions, for example.

“Was the Constitution changed over the weekend abolishing the House of Representatives?” asks Charles Barone, director of federal policy for Democrats for Education Reform.

Waive the worst parts of NCLB, but “don’t try to tie this stuff to new, made-up mandates,” advises Mike Petrilli.

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Core standards are very different

June 3, 2011 By

The new Common Core Standards are dramatically different from the state standards and tests now in place, writes Rick Hess. UPenn Ed School Dean Andy Porter and grad students analyze the new standards’ content, looking at topics covered and cognitive demands, in the April Educational Researcher.  The new standards “represent considerable change” from state standards and what U.S. teachers report they’re currently teaching, they write.  The Common Core Standards “are also different from the standards of countries with higher student achievement.”

The alignment between the Common Core and state standards was 0.25 in math (where 1.0 would be perfect alignment and 0.0 would be no alignment) and 0.30 in reading. Because those low correlations could be due to the fact that the Common Core is just addressing material in a different grade than in a given state, the researchers then aggregated across grades 3-6 and 3-8. That boosted alignment slightly, to 0.35 in math and to 0.38 in reading.

The stark differences between state standards and the Common Core are partly due to differences in topics addressed, but also to the fact that the Common Core emphasizes somewhat different cognitive skills: devoting less time to memorization and performing procedures, and more to demonstrating understanding and analyzing written material.

Massachusetts is the nation’s top-performing state on NAEP, so the team compared Common Core to Massachusetts standards for seventh grade. Alignment was only 0.19 in math and 0.13 for English Language Arts.

“The Common Core puts considerably more emphasis on operations, less on basic algebra and geometric concepts, and more on probability.” In English language arts, the Common Core places “substantially” less emphasis on memorization and “somewhat” less on performing procedures, less on reading and language study, and more on writing processes, writing applications, and oral communication.

The new standards are supposed to be internationally benchmarked. Yet Common Core’s eighth-grade math standards don’t match Finland (o.21), Japan (0.17) or  Singapore (0.13), primarily because these countries stress performing procedures. On language arts and reading, alignment ranges from 0.09 with Finland to 0.37 with New Zealand.

Should we be worried? Common Core Standards represent “a change for the better” when it comes to “higher order cognitive demand,” Porter concludes, but the “answer is less clear” when it comes to the topics that are covered.

States rushed to adopt the new standards in hopes of qualifying for federal Race to the Top money, Hess writes. Only now are we discussing whether the new standards are solid enough to become the new national norm.

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Paradox of the pink slip

May 23, 2011 By

I was just thinking about the ancient Greek logic problem, “Paradox of the Court.” It is as follows (in the version told by Aulus Gellius in his Attic Nights). The sophist Protagoras has taken on a student Euathlus. He asks Euathlus to pay him half of the money up front and the other half after he wins his first court case. But Euathlus, after a long period of study in which he shows progress and prowess, does not take on any court cases at all. Protagoras then sues him for the amount owed.

When they appear before the judges, Protagoras offers the following argument: If I win the case, then I will be paid for the instruction. If I lose the case, then I will still be paid, as you will win your first court case and will therefore owe me the money.

Euathlus counters: Not so. If I win the case, then the court will relieve me of obligation toward you. If I lose the case, then I will have no obligation, as I will not have won a case.

The court finds itself unable to make a decision and postpones its decision to a distant date. (In a note to the story in the 1795 edition of Attic Nights, the translator Reverend W. Beloe commented, “This notion of deferring a decision to a distant period of a perplexing and difficult question, is ridiculously followed by our houses of parliament. It is common to defer the discussion of a question in the house of commons to a period when it is well known the parliament will not meet.”)

To resolve this paradox, we have to assume that we have all the necessary information. That is, we have to exclude the possibility that the agreement might have been invalid in the first place or that some other circumstance might have rendered it null and void. (Otherwise the argument becomes trivial.)

Assuming, then, that the agreement between Protagoras and Euathlus is valid, and that Euathlus has not won a court case so far, then Protagoras’s first scenario, in which he wins the case, is implausible if not impossible. The only condition under which he might win the case would be a misjudgment of the court or the emergence of new information.

Protagoras neglected to include in the agreement a provision that Euathlus would actually take on court cases. Had that provision been included, Protagoras might have stood a chance. But Euathlus is not under any obligation to plead a case, and it appears that he’s enjoying his ongoing studies. It’s possible (though it seems far-fetched here) that the judges could decide that the “essence” of the agreement included an implicit understanding that Euathlus would take on cases after a certain period of study. But once one gets into essences, all sorts of things are possible.

So, the overwhelming odds are that Protagoras will lose the case. It is true that, once the court has made its ruling, Euathlus will have won his first case. But until the court makes this ruling, Euathlus still has not won. Thus, Protagoras cannot claim that he is owed money for something that had not taken place yet at the time of his claim. In fact, he may owe money to Euathlus for causing such a stir in the first place.

Protagoras might decide, after the ruling, to sue for the money, and in that case he’d be entitled to it. But the costs of the previous lawsuit (assuming there were any) could diminish his final returns.

Protagoras’s tactical approach is to sue preemptively, as it seems it can only benefit him. But his logic is flawed, because one option really doesn’t exist, and the other won’t be as profitable as he thinks.

In addition, he commits a moral error, which does not come up in the logic problem. It is an error of indifference to his rightness or wrongness. His attitude is: “It doesn’t matter if my case has basis or not, so long as I get the money.”

It seems that a similar tactic (though different logic) is involved in firing at least 50 percent of the school staff (one of the school turnaround options under Race to the Top). Someone might reason, “If this helps the school improve, we win, because the school improves. If it doesn’t help the school improve, we still win (funds, anyway), because we have shown that we are taking the required steps toward improvement.”

But, just as Protagoras neglected to consider the sequence of events, so those who recommend the firing of a school’s staff neglect the discrepancy between taking “required steps” toward improvement and doing something that might actually help. Although the reasoning in the two situations is different, the moral error is similar: it consists in taking action regardless of whether it is right or wrong, with the assumption that it will pay off in one way or another.

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Obama on testing: Huh?

April 1, 2011 By

Annual testing may not be necessary, said President Barack Obama at a town hall meeting on education for Hispanics.

” . . . let’s find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let’s apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let’s figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let’s make sure that that’s not the only way we’re judging whether a school is doing well.”

That left a lot of people confused, writes Michele McNeil on Politics K-12. After all, Obama’s Education Department strongly favors annual testing.

Teacher Anthony Cody piles on: Obama is attacking his own education policies. For example:

  • Race to the Top requires states to tie teacher pay and evaluations to student test scores? If ever there was a recipe for teaching to the test, this is it!
  • his Secretary of Education is proposing to evaluate teacher preparation programs by tracking the test scores of the teachers they produce?
  • his administration’s plan for the new version of No Child Left Behind continues to place tremendous pressure on schools attended by the poorest students, ensuring that there will still be extremely high stakes attached to these tests? This creates the most invidious inequity of all — where students most in need of the sort of wholistic, project-based curriculum the President rightly says is the cure to boredom remain stuck in schools forced to focus on test scores.
  • that his Department of Education is proposing greatly expanding both the number of subjects tested, and the frequency of tests, to enable us to measure the “value” each teacher adds to their students?

    • Progressives should stop “wringing their hands about the limited ability of a standardized test to capture the full range of learning experiences,”  argues Matt Yglesias. He gives the definition of “basic” reading competence for NAEP Grade 8:

    Eighth-grade students performing at the Basic level should be able to locate information; identify statements of main idea, theme, or author’s purpose; and make simple inferences from texts. They should be able to interpret the meaning of a word as it is used in the text. Students performing at this level should also be able to state judgments and give some support about content and presentation of content.

    Nationwide, 26 percent of  eighth graders — 30 percent of boys, 40 percent of low-income students, 44 percent of blacks — test below this level. “They can’t identify statements of main idea, theme, or author’s purpose; and make simple inferences from texts,” writes Yglesias.

    This kind of basic reading competency is definitely something we can measure on standardized tests. And it’s important.

    If these students are tested occasionally by their teacher, but don’t take the same tests as other students, if nobody outside the school monitors their progress, will they learn more? That’s not what happened before No Child Left Behind. I also lack faith in a holistic, project-based curriculum to teach the children of poorly educated parents.

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    Race to Top winners slow down

    March 31, 2011 By

    States made big promises to win Race to the Top money. Most can’t meet their targets, reports Education Week.

    North Carolina says it needs more time and to devote more money—about $2.9 million more—to plan and implement a new “instructional improvement system” that aims to use technology and data to drive continuous academic improvement in the classroom. And the state wants to scale back a plan to make “every new teacher” in its low-performing schools eligible for retention bonuses, as its application originally said, turning it instead into a pilot program in which 181 teachers are eligible each year.

    Via The Quick and the Ed.

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    White House: More racing to the top

    February 16, 2011 By

    Race to the Top will be a model for an updated No Child Left Behind law, says the Education Department, which considers the competitive grants the most successful education reform since sliced bread.  National Journal, unsure exactly what it would mean to have left-behind children racing to the top, asks its education experts what they think about the use of competitive education grants.

    Most of the education experts who’ve weighed in so far dislike Race to the Top for its priorities, the competitive process and federal bossiness.

    “Race to the Top is a terrible precedent for federal funding,” writes Diane Ravitch.

    For one reason, it replaces the principle of equity (funding the students with the greatest needs) with the spurious notion of a “race,” with winners and losers. We want a generation of winners, not a few states that reap the rewards of federal funding because they hire slick grant writers.

    . . . nothing in the Race to the Top is based on evidence, research, or practice.

    Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado and Monty Neill of Fair Test also dis the Race.

    Jeanne Allen of Center for Education Reform complains the Race “lost momentum when guidelines regarding teacher accountability and charter schools were diluted to the point of inconsequence.”

    One of the rare Race fans, Sandy Kress thinks it’s way too early to tell if it’s going to improve student achievement.

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    Obama: 4% more for K-12 education

    February 15, 2011 By

    The Obama administration is proposing to spend 4 percent more on education, excluding Pell Grants, in fiscal 2012, reports Ed Week. That includes small boosts to Title I grants for disadvantaged students, special education funding and School Improvement (to be renamed School Turnaround) Grants.

    And, as part of its proposal for revising the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka the No Child Left Behind Act), the administration is asking for $300 million for a program called Title I rewards, to help give a pat on the back to schools that are making progress in boosting student achievement.

    Race to the Top will be directed at districts, not states. And Obama proposes to create an education R&D institute like the Defense Department’s DARPA.

    Counting Pell Grants, which go to low-income college students, K-12 and higher education spending would go up by 22 percent.

    It’s about the 2012 election, not the kids, grumps Mike Petrilli.

    House Republicans want to cut education spending, reports Politics K-12.

    The measure, which would continue federal funding for rest of the fiscal year, takes aim at some programs that were previously considered untouchable, including special education spending and Pell Grants to help low-and-moderate income students pay for college. Overall it would cut $4.9 billion from the U.S. Department of Education’s fiscal year 2010 budget of $63.7 billion.

    Curriculum Matters lists the Republicans’ proposed cuts in adolescent literacy, math and science education, teaching U.S. history and more.

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    Myths of testing

    February 7, 2011 By

    The U.S. never was first in the world on international achievement tests, according to the latest Report on American Education from the Brown Center at Brookings. The report also debunks the “myth” that “Finland leads the world in education, with China and India coming on fast.”

    Finland has a superb school system, but, significantly, it scores at the very top only on PISA, not on other international assessments. Finland also has a national curriculum more in sync with a “literacy” thrust, making PISA a friendly judge in comparing Finnish students with students from other countries. And what about India and China? Neither country has ever participated in an international assessment. How they would fare is unknown.

    Finnish students scored very well in 1964, “decades before many of
    the policies targeting professionalism, equity, decentralization, and de-streaming were adopted,” the report notes. Cultural and societal factors “may be the real drivers of success.”

    Shanghai’s success on PISA proves nothing about Chinese students, researchers argue.

    For centuries, Shanghai has been the jewel of Chinese schooling, far ahead of its urban peers and light-years ahead of rural schools. Shanghai’s municipal website reports that 83.8 percent of high school graduates enter college; the national figure is 24.0 percent.

    The report also asks: Which states are racing to the top? Judging by National
    Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, it’s not necessarily the ones that got federal Race to the Top grants.

    Brown looked at both short- and long-term gains on NAEP and controlled for changes in the demographic characteristics of each state’s students.

    Eight states—Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, District of Columbia, Kentucky, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Pennsylvania—stand out for making superior gains. At the other end of the distribution, Iowa, Nebraska, West Virginia, and Michigan stand out for underperforming. Five of the eight impressive states won grants, but three did not.

    A previously part of the report looks at how well NAEP’s eighth-grade math exam matches up with the Common Core Standards adopted by most states. NAEP’s test covers math concepts that are supposed to be learned by eighth grade; the average question is two to three years below Common Core’s eighth-grade content.  The new core-based exams are expected to test whether students have learned the standards for that grade. Scores will be much, much lower, researchers predict.

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