Education – Page 4

February 3, 2014

Did the NECAP requirement make a positive difference?

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What’s likely to happen to the number of students receiving diplomas in Rhode Island at the end of this year?

Even after RIDE’s release of the latest NECAP results, it’s hard to accurately predict the impact of the standardized test requirement for graduation. Historically, we know that over the past four years the percentage has averaged out to slightly less than 92%, with approximately 1,000 seniors dropping out, opting for the GED, or transferring out of state.

But last year 4,159 students failed the NECAP and needed to retake the test to try to get a passing score. Of those students, RIDE reported 1,370 succeeded. Of the remaining 2,789, RIDE reports 154 dropped out. Regardless of these drop-outs, the fall enrollment count for this fall was 10,403, which seems in line with previous fall enrollments. In other words, as RIDE stated, the impact of the testing requirement on grade 11 drop-outs was not much.

If 4,195 students failed last year and 1,370 passed this year, our best guess is that 2,789 students in this class of seniors will not graduate with diplomas. For the sake of simplicity, this number assumes that all students dropping out, moving away from the state, or getting a GED are also students who failed the NECAP on their first try.

This is what that number does to the number and percentage of seniors graduating with diplomas: it decimates them.

[* Estimates based on number of students from the class of 2014 failing NECAP for the second time (2,789)]

Of course, 2,789 is the number before students begin to take the numerous alternative tests available, including the “min-NECAP”, and activate whatever waiver process their districts have in place to compensate for a failing NECAP score.

Hopefully, the 2,789 number will go down. If districts adopt liberal waiver policies, if could go down considerably.

But from this point on, the picture for these 2,789 students looks like a form of mayhem—they will be searching out opportunities to take a variety of tests, only one of which (SAT math) has its cut-score connected to the NECAP by more than air-thin logic. Or they will be trying to get admitted into a “non-open enrollment college”. Or they will be navigating whatever waiver requirements their district has put in place, which requires them to assemble whatever evidence of academic achievement their district has decided to accept.

It’s not a pretty picture for students from here on, and that’s the larger point.

Students who come from organized, well-resourced districts and have organized, well-resourced parents will do best of all and from there on it’s downhill until the devil take the hindmost.

This is as vivid a picture as possible of why the testing policy fails the mission of our education ideal—to educate all children well and to provide an education that will be the entrée to a productive life and career. Our education system has slowly been moving in this direction by including more and more academically vulnerable students into our enrollments–students with learning disabilities, students who do not speak or write English well, students from families with little of no literacy background.

These students pose a challenge to our traditionally structured education system.

They require especially skilled teachers, special lesson plans, more time, smaller classes and, in general, more resources. But, with more adequate and equitable funding, better teacher professional development, and innovative programming, we have slowly been learning how to help these students be more successful in our schools.

The testing requirement threatens to erode this progress. The scenario most likely to emerge in the next few months–as students try to save themselves–will probably be what happened on the Titanic—most of First Class is saved and most of the others go down with the ship. The irony, and it’s bitter, is that all this is being done in the name for what’s good for kids. Anyone who speaks out against it is branded as being against high standards.

This is truly an Orwellian twist, where what is disastrous for many kids is labeled as good for all kids and where condemning some kids is the prerequisite for saving the rest. And we know who those sacrifices will be, our already vulnerable kids. Go get the low hanging fruit.

January 30, 2014January 30, 2014

The State of Education, in Deborah Gist’s own words

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I missed Deborah Gist’s speech at the State House tonight (read RI Future alum Dan McGowan’s coverage on WPRI here), but I did put the text of her speech into Wordle and it spit out this pretty neat word cloud of her remarks:

Here are a few words you won’t see in the above graphic depiction of her speech, which I think belong in any talk about the state of education in Rhode Island:

achievement gap
NECAP
Common Core
27 percent

A few other observations:

“Students” was the most prominent word, along with “Rhode Island”
“STEM” seem to have the same prominence as “learning”
“Technology” seems to have a greater prominence than “teachers”

I’d love to hear from our readers in the comments about what observations you all have about her speech, or this depiction of it.

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014

Jim Vincent: 40 percent of ‘youth of color’ ages 18 – 24 are unemployed

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“Over 40 percent of the youth of color between the ages of 10 and 24 are unemployed,” Jim Vincent, executive director of the Providence branch of the NAACP. “That’s a recipe for disaster.”

Because of this, the lack of good public schools in the urban core and the general feeling that the streets there have become less safe has inspired he and others who fight for social justice to hold a press event today at 4:30 in front of the Garrahy Judicial Complex in Providence today.

Vincent told me some 12 community organizations are coming together to advocate for a safer city, better education and a firmer commitment that Rhode Island’s urban core will not be left behind.

Listen to our conversation here:

January 17, 2014January 18, 2014

PVD City Council unanimously asks Ed Board to stop NECAP policy

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The Providence City Council officially urged the Board of Education last night to suspend its controversial NECAP policy.

The Council passed a unanimous resolution last night asking the appointed board that makes education policy in Rhode Island to abandon its waiver policy and instead suspend the high stakes graduation requirement. It says:

There will remain many children are unable to qualify for a “waiver”, but whose academic achievement is no better or worse than other children who do qualify, including but not limited to such ineligible populations as children who plan to work after graduation, children who plan to attend the Community College of Rhode Island and children with individual education plans…

The population of children who cannot qualify for the “waiver” will be skewed towards the populations of disadvantaged children, including those in poverty, those with special education needs, and those learning the English language…

Here’s a link to the resolution.

Before the vote, Councilman Sam Zurier said,”The advocates of high stakes testing claim that they want to bring an end to ‘social promotion,’ but the new policy represents the worst kind of social promotion possible, sorting children with low test scores into two groups, namely a group with a college admissions letter and one without, giving a diploma and social promotion to the first group, and damaging the future of the second group even though both groups have the same test score.”

Here’s text of his full comments:

While the high school years bring many challenges, our children look forward to the milestone of graduation. At a ceremony with caps and gowns, and pomp and circumstance, an educational community and their families gather to reflect upon past accomplishments and to think of future possibilities, how we all can change our lives for the better with hard work and vision. When high school routines drag on, the image of graduation can inspire, like a shining beacon at the end of what at times may seem to be a four-year long tunnel.

On a single day in February last year, more than 1,000 eleventh grade students in Providence and more than 4,000 children State-wide saw their hopes for graduation diminish when they learned that they had attained a score of 1, or “substantially below proficient” on either or both of their NECAP tests, putting them at risk of being denied a diploma even if they passed all of their high school courses under the State’s new “high stakes testing” policy.

The simple fact that 4,000 kids, or 40% of our State’s 11th deemed ineligible for a diploma should have given the State Department of Education a reason to question the new policy. In fact, there were many other reasons, including that the authors of the NECAP test published instruction manuals specifically stating that the test should not be used for this purpose. If we viewed our education program as an ocean liner, we knew in February that the NECAP requirement was steering it towards peril. The February test result revealed the iceberg looming in the distance, but the captain of the ship refused to change course.

Instead, the State doubled down, reaffirming that the NECAP test was a valid standard for the minimum level of education every Rhode Island child should have, and those 4,000 students could still get their diploma by doing better on the next test. Despite its optimistic tone, this response contained a second, more ominous message: If any of those 4,000 children did not get a higher grade on the next test, they and the rest of the world would know that they had failed to gain an adequate high school education, and that they could take personal blame for that failure.

As the ship drew closer to the iceberg this summer, the State introduced a new, case-by-case waiver program that would require hours of paperwork by each individual student and his or her teacher to certify that they had received an adequate education notwithstanding their failure on the NECAP test. This onerous waiver process reaffirmed the NECAP’s role as the key indicator of adequate education, while creating a bureaucratic nightmare for schools and students that would divert massive resources into the new certification process while taking them away from the work of learning in the classroom, thereby reducing the quality of every student’s education.

Last month, all of this changed, when the State announced that any child who got only a “1″ on the NECAP could still get a diploma if they were accepted into a “selective” 2-year or 4-year college. While this change offered relief to thousands of children, the intellectual bankruptcy of this new “batch” waiver cannot be overstated. Everywhere else in the United States of America, colleges require students who gain admission during their senior year to graduate in good standing in order to preserve their seat at the college – if you do not get your diploma, you are not welcome to go to college next year. Here in Rhode Island, however, the cart has been placed before the horse; namely if a selective college admits you contingent upon your getting the diploma, the State will give you the diploma even if you fail the test. In contrast, students who plan to attend CCRI next year, will not have this opportunity if they get a “1″ on the test; while their wealthier suburban peers will be declared worthy of a diploma despite their low test scores, the children who wish to attend CCRI will be denied a diploma because of it.

The ironies only multiply from here. On Monday, the State Department of Education released a report stating that children who received a score of “1″ on the NECAP were unlikely to graduate from college. If the State truly believes this finding to be significant, then why in the world would it want to encourage children to attend college as a substitute for passing the test?

The advocates of high stakes testing claim that they want to bring an end to “social promotion”, but the new policy represents the worst kind of social promotion possible, sorting children with low test scores into two groups, namely a group with a college admissions letter and one without, giving a diploma and social promotion to the first group, and damaging the future of the second group even though both groups have the same test score. As the iceberg and shipwreck come closer and closer, the captain has issued life preservers to the passengers in the first group, while leaving the passengers in the second group to go down with the ship.

Here in Providence, we have a larger population of disadvantaged children, who deal with the challenges of poverty, learning the English language, special education plans, and the like. While the new “batch waiver” has brought relief to affluent families in the suburbs, in the urban core, the previous feeling of anxiety and dread intensify, all in the name of a mistaken policy that people refuse to change because they are unwilling to admit that they might have made a mistake.

We all make mistakes, and we can sympathize with the human reluctance to admit errors once they are made. What is sad, however, is that the State’s face-saving adherence to this invalid, non-policy riddled with arbitrary exceptions will bring even greater harm to the teachers and students in the Providence Public Schools. For this reason, I ask you please to vote in favor of tonight’s resolution, which asks the State to steer the ship of education away from danger by postponing its high stakes testing policy until the time when all Rhode Island children will have a fair and reasonable opportunity to meet a worthwhile academic standard.

January 14, 2014January 17, 2014

The NECAP graduation requirement is dead. Long live the NECAP graduation requirement.

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Once again, the RI Department of Education has amended its graduation requirements on the fly, surprising districts and education observers with broadly-expanded parameters for the granting of “waivers,” or ex post facto exemptions from the controversial high-stakes testing requirement. The changes made front page news, and rightly so: with 4000 students’ diplomas at stake this year—and presumably a similar number at stake every following year in perpetuity—RIDE had little choice but to either severely amend the requirement or face a renewed firestorm of opposition from both persistent advocates like the Providence Student Union (disclosure: I am a staff organizer for PSU), and also parents from suburban and more affluent communities whose children had come face-to-face with the unforgiving nature of standardized testing.

However, I fear that discussion on the expanded waiver parameters has ignored its most radical component. Thus far, public attention has focused almost exclusively on a provision called “batch approval.” Reports and analyses by Linda Borg; Scott MacKay; Providence Councilmember Sam Zurier; and the ACLU, the Providence Student Union and Senator Adam Satchell (here at RI Future) have all emphasized the surprising provision that districts may automatically grant, or batch approve, waivers of the NECAP graduation requirement for students who have been accepted to a “non-open-enrollment” college. (General admission to CCRI, for example, would not qualify.) Senator Satchell summed up the critics’ responses well:

Basically they are saying you need this [test] to show us you are ready for college, unless you are ready for college. It kind of baffles me.

And as Providence School Board President Keith Oliveira said at last night’s meeting, https://twitter.com/pvdstudentunion/status/422899860174819328.

Yet while I agree that the college exemption is a theoretical head-scratcher, for the lives of students the college provision is in all a good one, as high-stakes testing opponents have long argued that no one who is accepted to a college should be prevented from attending because of a such a test. However, if this is a “victory”, it is a very small one, for two reasons. First, it is in my mind ridiculous that general enrollment colleges like CCRI are not included in the batch waiver—shouldn’t the state support students who demonstrate their determination to receive higher education? Second, and more importantly, Providence Councilmember Zurier and others have expressed concerns that this specific batch waiver provision does little for the underprivileged, ELL students, and students with special education needs. Likewise, Nina Pande, another Providence School Board member said, “[I suspect] this batch waiver process was really designed for the suburbs and the more affluent districts.” For the approximately 1000 students in Providence who did not meet the cut score in the first go-around, one frankly suspects the college provision will have little relevance.

Quietly undoing the testing requirement

However, a different piece of the new waiver policy still has the potential to allow hundreds of students in Providence in the state to waive the state assessment and receive a diploma. The power lies in each district’s ability to create a “waiver review team” to individually review each application from students who have not met the bar on their first or second test retakes. RIDE has diagrammed and explained the process themselves, but I’ve captured the essence in my own flowchart to the right (click to enlarge).

Simply put, students who a) have taken both exam retakes, and b) are able to satisfactorily demonstrate 9th and 10th grade proficiency will receive a waiver. Evidence for the latter (cf. page 5) includes “course performance in academic content,” “portfolio work,” and “outside activities/projects”. What’s stunning about this is that students are already to have submitted performance-based evidence in the second of their three topline graduation requirements. A portfolio of strong work, or a researched and well-written project with presentation—both already suffice to show, at the most initial stage, that a student merits a diploma. Now however, the waiver process allows for districts to review performance assessments again to determine diploma status. And as far as I can tell, there are so many accepted means to demonstrate 9th and 10th grade proficiency that the waiver’s standard is actually weaker than the top-line graduation requirement.

In RIDE’s mind, adopting high-stakes testing as part of the graduation requirements had meant setting a hard, quantifiable line that would force increased college readiness statewide. Yet to now allow a qualitative process to supersede a quantitative requirement would seem to obviate the stated purpose of high-stakes testing entirely.

Stress on districts

Implementing a process run by human beings and not test scanners means that school districts statewide must commit serious amounts of resources (read: money and time) to building the new escape hatch. Check out this quote from the RIDE waiver process regulations:

Under our regulations, LEAs [school districts] are responsible for developing and implementing a waiver process. As part of this responsibility, LEAs must:

Adopt, publish, and communicate a waiver protocol, as part of their graduation policy;

Establish roles and responsibilities; and

Evaluate the fairness and consistency with which they apply the waiver protocol to all eligible students.

That’s quite a bit of work to do. And yet, because of RIDE’s make-it-up-as-we-go graduation policies, the Providence Public School District did not approve its own version of the waiver policy within RIDE parameters until yesterday, January 12. Providence now only has a few months to create an entirely new bureaucratic structure. It’s not surprising then that PPSD largely admits that it has neither the staff nor the financial flexibility to implement the waiver policy to full integrity, cf. Superintendent Sue Lusi:

https://twitter.com/pvdstudentunion/status/422900854258417665

And a third Providence School Board member, Nick Hemond, called the waiver process “nonsensical bureaucracy, a burden on administrators…and a waste of time and resources.” It’s no wonder then that some cities and towns have chosen not to adopt the full waiver process, avoiding considerable financial and administrative headaches, but creating vast and inequitable inconsistencies in graduation requirements across the state. Providence, facing the possibility of at most 65% of its students not graduating, hardly had the option to decline RIDE’s offer.

So what have we accomplished?

Challenges of implementation aside, one has return to the above flowchart and wonder what exactly the high-stakes testing requirement achieves, now that its graduation-inhibiting power has been almost fully gutted. The Rhode Island graduation requirements for the approximately 12,000 seniors statewide per year retain little to none of the enforcement power of high-stakes testing post-waiver, but they still maintain the façade of high-stakes, and the exorbitant financial and psychological pressures on districts to implement the waiver process will ensure that all of the most negative effects of standardized testing continue. The most rational (if incorrect) part of RIDE’s adoption of the graduation requirements—raising standards for graduation—is gone, while all of the negative externalities—widespread text anxiety, teaching to the test and curriculum narrowing, unfunded de facto mandates on districts—remain. In the chess game of Rhode Island education politics, Commissioner Gist and the Board of Education just forced a stalemate, to the ultimate detriment of our students.

…or perhaps the graduation requirement has finally achieved its exact purpose. As I guessed from the beginning, the graduation requirement was never about raising student achievement; rather, it was a tool to force districts to dramatically raise students’ seriousness about taking standardized tests, primarily to improve the statewide data set in advance of the expensive PARCC test’s adoption. The increased ‘validity’ of the data then opens the door to value-added teacher evaluation and all sorts of other “reforms”. That RIDE has essentially removed all content from the testing graduation requirement seems to support this hypothesis: it’s not about how high a hoop you can jump through, just about whether or not you take those hoops really seriously. And so the statewide education circus continues.

January 8, 2014

Maria Cimini on tax equity, her education policy agenda and a plastic bag ban for RI

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Progressive Providence Rep. Maria Cimini is probably best known for leading the charge for tax equity in the General Assembly. This year, she said, education will also be high on her priority list. In fact, she said she may earmark new revenue raised by her tax equity legislation to better fund education.

But when asked what she would focus on if she could only have one issue this session, she said education.

“I would want to focus on really widespread and broad education policy that would involve pre-K, solid care for children, looking at the GED changes that I think are going to be really difficult for low income individuals,” she said. “It’s beyond test taking and beyond even workforce training. It’s about preaparing people to work creatively and work in teams and respond to careers that we can’t even imaine exist at this moment and I’m concerned that the trajectory of public education is more focused on the jobs that exist right now and very finite skills and a world that changes.”

She also said she’ll be reintroducing her plastic bag ban bill. Please listen to our entire conversation here:

December 17, 2013December 18, 2013

Possible vs. probable

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In my last post, I talked about Clarence Thomas and his truly remarkable rise to a position that his father could never, ever have achieved. Indeed, even a slightly older Mr. Thomas would probably not been able to attain such a truly lofty height.

This all sort of gets to the idea of social mobility. If someone were born into conditions like those into which Mr. Thomas was born, how likely is it for that person to improve his level of economic security? Or, how likely is it for someone born into the upper echelons, such as Mr. Thomas’ children (does he have any?) to fall out of the exalted perch onto which she was born?

America has long perpetuated the ideal that everyone can improve their status. This is still true. It is still possible. But how likely is it? Or, how probable is it? And here, I use ‘probable’ in the technical sense of “Probability and Statistics”, the name of a book on my shelf. “Possible” and “Probable” are two very different words, with enormously different implications. The right wing continues to flog the notion of possibility. Sure, it’s possible. It’s possible that I can throw a ball through a solid wall, too. Or that all the air molecules in a room will suddenly rush into one corner and leave the rest of the room airless. But are these events likely to happen? No. According to the technical definition, that means, that they have an extremely low probability of occurring. Could a high school basketball team beat the Celtics? I suppose it’s possible. But the probability of this occurring is darn close to zero. It may not be exactly zero, but it’s probably (!) close enough to be considered zero in any real-world scenario.

Let’s set this up. Suppose you have been put into a situation in which you must choose one of two balls. One is yellow; the other is green. If you choose the correct ball, you will be given $100 million. If you choose the wrong one, you will have to spend the rest of your days working at a minimum wage job. Of course, you don’t know which ball gives the desired outcome, so you have to guess. And hope. And, as any fool knows, you have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. And an equal chance of getting it wrong. In other words, it’s a coin flip.

But let’s say we change the scenario, and introduce a blue ball. But even given the extra ball, there is still only one ‘correct’ choice. One ball will get you the $100M; either of the other two will get you consigned to the minimum wage. What has happened to your chance of success? It has been diminished. It has gone from 1 in 2, to 1 in 3. That is, rather than a 50% likelihood of success, you have a 33% chance.

For the next iteration, we’re back to two colors, red and green. The red ball gets you the $100M; the green results in the minimum wage job. But you have to pick either of the two balls out of a basket in absolute darkness, so you can’t see which ball is which. We’re back to 50/50. But let’s start adding green balls. If we add two more green balls, for a total of three green, one red, your chance of success has been cut in half. It’s now 1 in 4, or a 25% chance of success. Starting to look grim, isn’t it? Now let’s bring the total of green balls up to ten. This is a 1 in 11 chance, and suddenly your chances of success drop below 10%.

This is what tax cuts, cutbacks in social spending, cuts in education have been doing: they have been adding green balls into the system. At least, they’ve been adding green balls into the basket from which those on the lower end of the scale have to choose. At the same time, these policy choices—tax cuts, cuts in social spending, cuts to education—have been adding red balls into the basket from which those born into the upper echelon get to choose. In other words, we’ve been increasing the odds against success for those in the bottom half, while increasing them for those at the top. Put another way, we’ve been rigging the game in favor of those at the top. How would you feel about entering the game with the odds of success sitting at 11 to 1 against you? Would you want to take a chance on winning the $100M if there were a 9o% chance of being consigned to the ranks of minimum wage workers? Kinda stinks, doesn’t it?

This is what I meant in my previous post about my good fortune. I got to pick from a basket that was probably 75% red (good) balls. Yes, I could have failed, made a lot of bad choices, and ended up dropping. But the game was rigged in my favor from the start. Yes, I had to work for what I got, but that does not change the fact that I had an enormous head start over a lot of people.

And that, I think, is the clearest difference between a liberal and a conservative. A liberal recognizes—or never forgets—where she or he started. A liberal is aware that there were, there are always extenuating circumstances. Had Clarence Thomas worked twice as hard, but lived in the wrong place or time, all his effort may have been in vain. A conservative, from what I see, becomes convinced that they made it solely on their own merits. They fail to contextualize their success. They remember the work they put in to getting where they are, and nothing else. Yes, this is not the whole story of the differences between the two, but I think that it may be the single key difference. Clarence Thomas, or Rush Limbaugh, or—the golden example—George W Bush are all convinced that they did it on their own. No one helped them. They don’t think that the stable family environment, or the genes or temperament that put the grit into their belly to succeed was an advantage that, perhaps, other people don’t have. They don’t see that being in a semi-decent school with semi-decent parents who instill values gives them a big leg up on a lot of other people. They forget that they happened to be born at a good time, or a good place.

So conservatives don’t see why other people might need help. Perhaps growing up they did not have the advantage of government assistance (but they did; they just fail to recognize this, or to acknowledge this), so why should other people get this help? So we continue with the aforementioned policy choices—tax cuts, cuts in social spending, cuts to education— and what we’re doing is increasing the number of people who have to choose from the basket of mostly green (bad) balls. Each cut to Head Start, or SNAP, or job training, or education, we’re both adding to the number of green balls and increasing the number of people choosing from this basket. In other words, we’re stacking the deck against them. Such behavior would get you shot in a lot of gambling establishments. Ask Wild Bill Hickok.

If you don’t believe me, here’s some evidence.

http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Economic_Mobility/PEW_Upward%20EM%2014.pdf

Take a look at the chart on page 10 of the report at the link. For someone born into the bottom income quintile, there is more than a 33% chance that they will end up there. For someone born into the top quintile, the odds are over 37% in favor of them remaining. But it’s worse than that. There is a cumulative probability of 60 percent that someone born in the bottom quintile will stay in one of the bottom two quintiles. That is, they will never be above what the lowest 40% of the country makes. That is, they only have a 40% chance of making it to middle class.

BUT: for each percentage point you move up in the scale, your chances of remaining in the top levels goes up. That is, someone born in the 95^th percentile, their chances of staying there are about 75%.

As for where the most people make it, or remain stuck where they are, check out the second link.

http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/

What you find is that the places with single-digit movement from the bottom to the top are largely in the South. You know, the area of the country where low taxes, low union density and small-but-business-friendly government is attracting lots of Good Jobs. Just gobs and oodles of them! Charlotte, North Carolina is a great example of how this works. Remember, MetLife was planning to move several hundred jobs from RI, and a thousand (or more) from the Northeast to Charlotte, that land of opportunity. See! Charlotte attracts Good Jobs! But, per the second link, of the top 50 metropolitan areas in the US, Charlotte is #49 in inter-generational upward mobility. There, only 4% of those born in the bottom quintile can be reasonably expected to reach the top quintile. And note, that means the 81^st percentile. Admission to this is a salary of about $78k per year. We’re not talking about top-flight surgeons, or anything such. We’re talking a solid job, something around what a teacher with ten years experience makes here. So the chance of someone being born into the bottom quintile of ending up with a job with a teacher’s salary is less than 5%, or 1 chance in 20. How would you like to pick from that basket?

As for the idea of talent, well, it ain’t what it used to be. An average student born into a family in the top quintile is several times more likely to graduate college than a bright student born into the bottom three quintiles. What this means is that the uninspired student from wealth is picking from a basket with lots of red (good) balls in it. And even if someone from the bottom 40% does beat the odds and finish college, that’s not the guarantee of success it once was. Average wages for college grads have been falling over the past 10 years, so I don’t want any nonsense about how all people have to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work their way through college, blah, blah, blah.

Is this the kind of country we want? Where most people are pretty much destined to fail?

December 5, 2013December 7, 2013

Math error in Taveras’s pre-K plan

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I believe I have discovered a math error in Angel Taveras’s pre-kindergarten plan. Instead of $24.6 million, the total annual cost should actually be $55.2 million.

The “Ready Rhode Island” plan is only designed to provide one year of preschool, right before kindergarten, and the math error centers around confusing the figures for all preschoolers with the figures for just four-year-olds. Here are the key passages:

About 10,800 students are enrolled in public first grade, and we can expect a similar number of enrollees in Pre-K. Subtracting the number of students enrolled in Head Start and Preschool Special Education implies that approximately 5,200 children can benefit from state sponsored pre- kindergarten.

The plan then continues:

We will start by creating slots for 2,650 children to enroll in a high-quality, full-day pre-kindergarten program. Accounting for the percentage of Rhode Island four-year-olds already served by another public program, Rhode Island would achieve a 76% pre-kindergarten enrollment rate, among the highest in the nation.

Unfortunately, the critical assumption here–that public preschool programs cover slightly more than half of Rhode Island’s four-year-olds–is not correct. However, from the links, it is clear what mistake Taveras’s policy team made. They subtracted the total number of preschoolers, ages zero through four, enrolled in Head Start (2,966), Preschool Special Ed (2,565), and the Rhode Island Prekindergarten Program (108) from the expected number of four-year-olds (10,800). Essentially, they confused figures for four-year-olds with figures for all preschoolers.If you just look at four-year-olds, only 21% are covered by a public program, leaving 5,940 new pre-kindergarten slots needed to meet Taveras’s goal of 76% coverage. Using the plan’s assumed annual per child cost of $9,300, correcting the numbers raises the real annual cost to $55.2 million, up from the original $24.6 million.

Universal preschool for four-year-olds is a fantastic idea that would meaningfully improve the lives of thousands of Rhode Island families. Unfortunately, Angel Taveras’s “Ready Rhode Island” plan does not present a realistic proposal for achieving that goal. Because of a math error, it understates the cost by more than a factor of two.

It is disappointing that this admirable idea was presented to Rhode Island in the form of a proposal that was not yet ready for prime time. Hopefully, the Taveras campaign will release a new proposal that corrects the math error and includes a viable revenue stream to pay for the true cost.

I spoke with Taveras’s team about this yesterday morning, but as of press time, they have yet to get back to me with their response.

December 1, 2013December 1, 2013

Last one in shut the door

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A few weeks ago, my church had a Sunday sermon devoted to stewardship. Translated, that means how much are you going to pledge to donate to the church for the coming year? This year, the priest asked people in the congregation to stand up and explain why they gave. Now, I was a coward and did not speak in public. But I had thought of something that I thought clever, and that’s why I didn’t say it out loud: cleverness often comes across as something unpleasant.

My point was that I give to a church because I can. As a friend of mine describes it, I hit the cosmic lottery. Of all the places and times I could have been born into, I had the supreme good fortune to be born at a time, in a place, and to a family that gave me an enormous chance at being successful. In fact, the odds were stacked so far in my favor that I more or less succeeded despite my best efforts to screw it up. I have attained a level of physical comfort that 99% of the people who ever lived–royalty included–could only have dreamed about attaining.

That’s rather appropriate for a post-Thanksgiving thought. I am darn grateful for this opportunity. I’ve been on the underbelly of prosperity. I won’t say I was poor, because I wasn’t. But I was in a situation where money was in short supply, even if my basic needs were always met.

But the point. I was skimming a blog that has a strong right-wing bias. One of the entries was a review of a book about Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court Justice who also has a decidedly right-wing bias. Apparently, Thomas spent a childhood of difficult poverty, and difficult family circumstances. Yet, he overcame these to become a member of SCOTUS. That is one huge accomplishment. It’s difficult enough for a child of privilege and opportunity to attain such a height, let alone someone from a background like the one Thomas had.

Now, of course, Thomas is convinced that he made this on his own efforts. Be if far from me to disparage or belittle what Thomas has achieved. And yet…time and circumstances matter. Had Thomas been born as few as ten years earlier than he was, and certainly had he been born twenty years sooner, no amount of Herculean effort would have gotten him to where he is. He could have worked twice as hard and been lucky to get half as far.

Thomas benefited, to an enormous degree, from the era in which he was born. He reached the peak of his career when the idea of an African-American Justice was not an alien, or a laughable, concept. He became a member of SCOTUS in 1991. In 1981, I think it would be highly doubtful that he would have been nominated. This was Reagan’s first year in office; would he have nominated Thomas? Would Reagan have made Thomas his first appointment? Probably not. And too, let’s face it, the country was not ready for someone as conservative as Thomas is. Now, this last statement is a matter of my opinion, but it took a long time for the right wing to gain the control it did. We were just coming out of the 70s; hedonism was still cool and it seemed like marijuana legalization was going to happen. And if he had been at the same point in his career in 1971, there is virtually no chance that he would have been considered for such a post. Thurgood Marshall was on the Court; another African-American would have been out of the question for any Republican president, let alone someone like Nixon.

And yet, he and the right wing would have us believe that the people at the top made it solely on their own efforts. Their own effort is certainly a necessary condition, but it’s nowhere near enough. Effort has to be matched with time and circumstance. The conditions that made it possible for Thomas to reach the pinnacle that he did are the same ones derided as giving Sonia Sotomayor an unfair advantage. Thomas made it on merits; Obama was a creation of affirmative action.

Do we see the hypocrisy?

Again, I do not mean to detract from Thomas’ accomplishment. I disagree with the man about 95% of the time, and I sincerely wish he was not on the Court, but that he has overcome obstacles he has is truly impressive. I only wish he would realize that he did not do it on his own, that the time and circumstances under which he came of age had an enormously beneficial effect on his efforts. More, I wish he would stand up for those who still languish under horrific impediments to accomplishment. I wish he would not continue to boast of his achievements while standing on the heads of those who would follow him.

More, I wish the entire right-wing apparatus would stop pretending that anyone and everyone who tries can “make it”. Yes, it’s possible for every child born in this country to become president, or a CEO, or whatever. It’s possible. A lot of things are possible. But difficult circumstances are holding a lot of people back. And not just from rising to become a member of SCOTUS. But from simply rising into–or staying in–the middle class. Thomas and his right-wing cronies are standing on people’s heads, or even their necks, holding them down, destroying the sorts of opportunities that Thomas and the rest of them enjoyed. They hold Thomas out as an example of what can be, even when they’re trying to ensure that there won’t be any more like him.

I applaud Thomas for doing what he has done. I strenuously object to the way he is trying to pull up the ladder behind him.

October 9, 2013

Toxic schools in Rhode Island still a concern

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Because of Rhode Island’s industrial history (we invented industrial industry, after all) we’ve inherited a wealth of old mill and factory sites that are loaded with toxins and contaminants. Such land is very difficult to develop or sell, because the cost of cleaning up these sites can be extraordinary.

One solution to this problem is to pretend the contaminants don’t exist, and then erect schools on or near the site of the extinct factories. The land is cheap and no one would want to build their home or business there, so it makes perfect sense to turn the places into schools, right?

And if people are still worried about contaminants and toxins, we can install elaborate chemical detection systems that might not actually do anything, but will mollify the parents. These chemical detection systems are expensive to install and tricky to maintain, which eats up a lot of the money saved in placing schools on such land in the first place, but what the heck, it’s only our children and those valueless public servants we call “teachers” who are put at risk. No big deal.

I covered this issue back in May when the Environmental Justice League of RI brought Lois Gibbs, renowned toxics activist from Love Canal, to speak out against weakening a recently passed bill that protects schools from being built on toxic sights. Now a great video from PressPassTV talks about this problem and highlights the actions of the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island to combat it. Check it out:

October 9, 2013October 9, 2013

Midwestern superintendent plagiarizes Mayor Taveras

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While many Rhode Islanders wish the state would have followed Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’ lead on pension politics, at least one man in Indiana surely wishes he would have strayed from the progressive mayor’s message. That’s because the Indiana school superintendent is accused of plagiarizing from a letter Taveras wrote about teachers.

“At least three memos or emails released to staff and the school community by [the superintendent], appear identical in many parts to communications from other school districts and, in one case, a letter from the office of the mayor of Providence, R.I.,” reports the Journal and Courier of Lafayette, Indiana.

The superintendent, who was fired, apologized to Taveras on Tuesday, though in the article he denied plagiarizing from him.

According to the article, the superintendent wrote this in a letter for Teacher Appreciation week this year:

“Public school teachers have played a pivotal role in my life. As a fourth grader at Washington Elementary School, it was my teacher, Mrs. Diane Lane, who encouraged me to work harder towards my education than my social life. I know first-hand how a public education and quality teachers can change a life. It changed mine!”

This is the very similar words that Taveras wrote for Teacher Appreciation Week last year:

“Public school teachers have played a pivotal role in my life. As a third grader at Mary Fogarty Elementary School, it was my teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Donaldson, who encouraged me to join a gifted program and chase my dream of becoming a lawyer. I know first-hand how a public education and quality teachers can change a life. It changed mine.”

Mayor Taveras’ letter comes up on the first page of a Google search for “teacher appreciation letter.”

Some may find irony in a midwestern superintendent copying Taveras’ words on teacher appreciation since the one chink in the popular mayor’s progressive resume is that he sent lay-off notices to public school teachers. Taveras has also supported charter schools, which effectively funnel already-scarce resources for education away from traditional public schools and the vast majority of students and teachers.

May 23, 2013May 24, 2013

Gist, education reform blasted at BoE meeting

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Neither Dr. Gist nor the education reform movement came off very well at the Board of Education meeting earlier tonight. She only had one supporter among those who gave testimony. I was unable to speak, time ran out, so later in this post I’ll write what I was planning to say. Before I get to that, a few notes about the meeting.

Important: the BoE is accepting written comments on the Gist renewal up until June 1. No vote was to be taken tonight. Submit early, submit often.

For those of you who want a blow-by-blow account of the early part of the meeting, look at my Tweets: @gusuht

Those who did get to speak were outstanding. The vast majority of the speakers were teachers with lots to say. Chairman Mancuso, noticing the lack of time, bumped up parents and students to the front of the line. By far the most telling and moving testimony was given by a student who graduated from a RI High School a year ago, and has since been in college. Roughly, he said that in high school, with all of the testing and teaching to the test and test practice he had lost his love for learning. Once in college he was freed from the dehumanizing testing regime and regained this love. The Gist reforms had hindered his learning, not helped it. It had emptied his spirit, not nurtured it. I hope Bob caught his name. Interestingly, he was the only one who came without a prepared text, but I think he had the most impact. Or I hope so.

OK, my almost-testimony. Actually, the major part of it was a Letter to the Editor, by someone else, in a New Yorker issue late last year. The Letter was in response to an article in an earlier issue (“Public Defender,” by David Denby, the New Yorker, November 19, 2012). That article was about the famous reformed education-reformer Dr. Diane Ravitch. Briefly, up until ten years ago she was a leader of the education reform movement, pushing testing, charter schools, etc. What happened? Ten years ago she looked at the results and they stank. So she switched 180 degrees and is now speaking out around the country against the education reform movement.

Here’s the Letter; it’s from the December 24 & 31, 2012 issue of the New Yorker, in the Mail section, page 8. I have not modified it in any way.

As Ravitch argues, reform strategies based on extensive reading and math tests, followed by rewards and punishments for teachers and schools based on those test scores, along with the encouragement of vast charter-school expansion, have not brought about significant improvements in student performance. Tellingly, no nation, state, or district that has gone from mediocre to world-class in the past twenty years — including Ontario, Canada; Massachusetts; Finland; Singapore; and even the Aspire charter schools — has followed this strategy. Successful schools and districts have supported the development of professional teamwork, and have completely revamped how they attract, train, and support teachers. Building the teaching profession around what is known about quality teaching, and allowing teachers the time and giving them the support to continually get better at what they do, has been the secret of educational success around the world.

Bill Honig, Chair, Instructional Quality Commission, California Department of Education, Mill Valley, Calif.

On an historical note, the New York Times columnist Gail Collins has written in her recent book ( “As Texas Goes….,” Liveright Publishing, 2012) about the origins and history of “No Child Left Behind.” That is/was former President George W. Bush’s signature education reform program that is the major source of all of the fuss today. Bush actually started an equivalent program in Texas when he was governor there, before becoming president. Going on to Washington he foisted his miracle cure onto the entire nation. Unfortunately, back in Texas they discovered that the program didn’t work. Somehow that never visibly appeared in the national conversation. And the bad idea spread throughout the land.

May 21, 2013May 21, 2013

Do you care about the show or about results?

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There was apparently quite a party in Cranston yesterday, with several hundred teachers coming together to, well, you wouldn’t say they were there to praise the state Education Commissioner, Deborah Gist. In a poll out a couple of weeks ago, 85% of teachers say they don’t approve of the commissioner or the current policies of the state Department of Education.

I think a number of friends I’ve spoken to about this poll don’t appreciate how remarkable a result it is. One of the little secrets of unions is that they don’t usually have unanimous support of their members, and independent polling generally bears that out. It is the rare union that has 85% support on most of what it does. In other words, Commissioner Gist has given a remarkable boost to union solidarity.

On the same subject, there was an interesting letter last week, written to the Board of Education and signed by the directors of 20 different business organizations, like the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council. The writers praised Commissioner Gist’s “admirable leadership” and begged her contract be renewed in June.

To be honest, I was being kind and it actually wasn’t that interesting a letter. It mostly consisted of the usual boilerplate, reciting familiar facts about our state’s economy and the educational condition of our citizens. Then it goes on to praise Gist for the mere establishment of policies and the winning of grants, and her willingness to “take bold action for reform.” These are nice things, to be sure, but who would mistake them for actual achievements? The policies, you might have noticed, are fairly controversial, and the evidence that they will work is, well, thin. Bold action certainly sounds nice, but invading Iraq was pretty bold, too. How did that work out for us? If you care more about results than about show, the letter showed some curious priorities.

The thing that came closest to being interesting about the letter was that it referenced our lag behind neighboring states on the national NAEP test scores. This is true, but it is not the only thing shown by those scores and I wonder how many of the letter’s signers have spent time examining Rhode Island’s NAEP results.

To review, the national NAEP tests are widely described as the “gold standard” of testing. They are administered nationally and the data are considered quite reliable, largely because no one has an incentive to game the results. They are administered in the 4th and 8th grades, in reading and math. (I gather there will be high school tests in the future, but there is no past data for now.)

NAEP average figures are shown in the figure, where you can see that Rhode Island scores (red lines) have been steadily climbing for several years. For simplicity, these are averages of the 4th and 8th-grade test scores in the two subjects, but there are similar stories in all the disaggregated scores. Yes, Massachusetts students (blue lines) score higher than ours, but are the red lines in the graph a record of dismal achievement rescued by Governor Don Carcieri’s 2009 appointment of Deborah Gist? That’s not what they look like to me.

To me, the NAEP results seem somewhat encouraging. They say we still have some hard work to do to catch up to our neighbors, but we embarked on an upward path several years ago. The last data point belongs to the current commissioner, but there is no story to tell here of the triumph of her policies: some categories see a slight uptick and some are slightly down. If she wants to take credit for the accelerating improvement in 8th-grade math scores, she’ll also have to take blame for the slowing improvement in 4th-grade reading scores. In all cases, the encouraging trends were underway years before her arrival.

Monday also saw the release of another letter, from 25 community groups, including the Urban League, the ACLU, RI Legal Services, and the Providence Student Union, urging the Board of Education to reconsider the Commissioner’s disastrous revamp of the high school graduation requirements. Unlike the business leaders, who praised the show of establishing policies and talk about “bold action”, this letter focused on a specific policy — the change in graduation requirement — and its bad effects on students. In other words, these guys are paying attention to the facts on the ground, not the nice words about them. Which one matters more?

The truth is that policy is where rubber meets road. It’s not about the show and about who cuts the most vigorous figure as a leader. It’s not about the hair or the smile, the cut of a suit, or the right kinds of friends. Debates like these ought to be about facts and the policies to address those facts. Policy is what the government does — for you and to you. To focus on the personalities behind it is entirely to miss the point. You’d think this is something folks who think of themselves as business leaders would understand, but the evidence is, well, thin.

May 21, 2013May 21, 2013

Teacher: RI biz community is ‘below proficient’

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This was one of the more interesting statements made at the teacher rally last night – and not because it shows why Deborah Gist isn’t an effective education leader. Rather, because it shows the inherent hypocrisy in our political debate and how varying interests can employ widely divergent logic depending on the situation and where they want the blame to fall.

Is a business to blame if it can’t attract customers, or is it part of a larger societal problem? Is a teacher to blame if they can’t reach their students, or is it part of a larger societal problem?

Imagine if your small business could only attract customers from one community: would you want it to be from Barrington or Central Falls? If it was Central Falls, would you want to be held accountable for the same profit margins as the Barrington business?

May 17, 2013May 17, 2013

Report shows education reform isn’t working

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A new Economic Policy Institute report that is highly critical of the so-called “education reform” movement reads like an indictment of Deborah Gist’s tenure as commissioner of public schools in Rhode Island.

The report compares large urban school districts with New York, Chicago and Washington DC – three cities that have implemented strategies almost identical to Gist’s – and discovers “the reforms deliver few benefits, often harm the students they purport to help, and divert attention from a set of other, less visible policies with more promise to weaken the link between poverty and low educational attainment.”

Here in Rhode Island, the achievement gaps have increased as well as we’ve implemented the same agenda as New York, Chicago and Washington D.C. In fact, Gist is a protege of Michelle Rhee, the DC-area reformer whom the report was specifically critical of.

While Rhode Island and/or Gist were not cited, the report deals with almost every controversial decision Gist has made during her tenure: teacher firings, school closures, high stakes tests, charter schools, poor educator morale, poverty. It even addresses the rhetoric so-called “reformers” use to dodge questions about actual results:

Some reformers position their policies as higher minded than the policies advocated by others. Rhee and Klein advance a “no excuses” response to those who say poverty is an impediment to education, and frequently label those with whom they disagree as “defending the status quo” (StudentsFirst 2011). Others, such as Duncan, acknowledge the impact of poverty and promote a larger range of policies, while still emphasizing the same core set of reforms. But the question most critical for the millions of at-risk students and their families—and the nation as a whole—is not whether one group or another is “reforming” or “making excuses,” but what works and what does not.

May 16, 2013May 17, 2013

Dump Deborah Gist

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Deborah Gist is nothing if not polarizing.

Nearly 90 percent of local teachers want a new leader. But the Chamber of Commerce supports her. She backed the firing of Central Falls teachers, but she has the backing of the East Greenwich School Committee. Tom Sgouros and the Providence Student Union have twisted her in knots over high stakes testing; Travis Rowley and John DePetro think she deserves a raise.

This week I’ve been writing a lot about how there are two very different Rhode Islands: the suburbs and the cities. Deborah Gist’s management of public education has unequivocally exacerbated this divide. And more to the point, education has gotten worse not better under her leadership. Even by her own preferred metrics, student performance has decreased since she’s been in charge.

Her critics argue that her policies and philosophies are designed to apply the Grover Norquist approach to public education: slowly shrink it down until the best option is to outsource whatever is left over. This is what progressives fear about the so-called education “reform” movement, and it is what conservatives like about it.

It needs to be noted that she does not have coherent ideas for how to improve education in urban areas or how to improve teacher morale. (See my interviews with her on both issues here and here.) And these are the biggest issues facing public education in Rhode Island.

Teachers hate her. Even the Providence Journal, which loves to belittle issues as being driven by unions gives a nod in print today to the “rank and file” educators opposed to her (though it’s wildly unfair to their readers that the ProJo covered the business communities support for Gist more than teacher’s lack of it) You can’t get a lot done at the office with 9 of 10 employees wanting you fired. She’s the Bobby Valentine of Rhode Island public education: smart as hell, really engaging personality, great resume but just couldn’t get the team to play ball for her.

Urban education, on the other hand, is the single most important issue we need to work on to solve every nearly every vexing issue in Rhode Island. The same kids that aren’t getting an adequate public education in, say, Woonsocket, where schools are running out of money and not improving education, are growing up to be one in three people who accept public assistance, which makes CNBC think we’re a bad place to do business which, allegedly, the upper crust bases their real estate decisions upon.

On May 23, the state Board of Education meets to discuss whether or not to renew her contract.

While her policies have not been popular with the public, she seems to enjoy some support with Chairwoman Eva Mancuso and while was recruited to Rhode Island by Don Carcieri, Linc Chafee seems to have some loyalty to her. But eight days can be an eternity in politics.

You can sign a petition to “Dump Gist” here.

May 7, 2013May 8, 2013

More illogic from RIDE

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In a reply to my post about sneaky changes in the NECAP documentation, the RI Department of Education spokesman wrote this:

“The NECAP assessment is designed to measure whether students have attained the knowledge and skills expected at each grade level, that is, whether students have met grade-level standards.”

This, of course, is the heart of the matter, isn’t it? I claim the test is a poor measure of the mastery of a body of knowledge, and therefore it is, shall we say, an outrageous act of irresponsibility to use it for a graduation test. RIDE, of course, says otherwise. This is precisely what is at issue in this whole controversy, and simply stating it as fact at the head of a reply doesn’t really address the point at all, but simply seeks to override it with the voice of authority.

In truth, as was pointed out by the psychometricians I’ve spoken to, RIDE has done little or no work to demonstrate the “validity” of the test, this very question. For an employment test, by contrast, the laws insist that the employer demonstrate — with real data — that good performance on the test is a good way to identify good employees. RIDE relies on correlation between NECAP scores and survey questions that ask piffle like “how much homework do you do in a week?”

The NECAP test was designed with the grade-level expectations (GLE) in mind, and it uses questions relevant to those GLEs. Does that make it a good measure of whether a student has mastered those or not? Tom Hoffman, who runs tuttlesvc.org, a great education resource, showed us at a Senate hearing that performance in Massachusetts and Rhode Island is not so very different on the 8th-grade math NAEP tests (administered by the federal Dept of Education and widely considered the “gold standard” of testing). Overall, Massachusetts does do better than Rhode Island on that test, but they’re not in a different league. But performance is dramatically different on the 11th-grade math tests administered by each state (NECAP in RI, the MCAS in MA). Can anyone explain this? Do our kids get dumber in the 9th and 10th grades? Or are the tests different in ways that haven’t been adequately explained?

“NECAP was not designed to provide, in isolation, detailed student-level diagnostic information for formulating individual instructional plans.”

This is a quote from the NECAP documentation, earlier in the paragraph that they “clarified.” According to RIDE, then, we should read “in isolation” in the sentence above as “only taking it once”? This is comparable to the way RIDE claims that “multiple measures” is to mean that you can take the NECAP more than one time. This is silly. What the above means is that NECAP is a clue to student achievement, but should only be used as one of several measures, as was policy under the previous commissioner. Making passage a graduation requirement is contrary to the meaning of the NECAP designers’ instructions.

Let’s end with a brief but important digression.

One hundred years ago, Henry Goddard, who went to school at Moses Brown and was a member of the first generation of psychological testers, persuaded Congress to let him set up an IQ testing program at Ellis Island that eventually proved that most immigrants were “morons.” (He coined the term.) During World War I, intelligence tests used to select officers were later shown to have profound biases in favor of native-born recruits and those of northern European extraction, which is another way to say that lots of Italian-American soldiers were unjustly denied promotions. For decades, misused IQ tests classified tremndous numbers of healthy children as disabled, or mentally deficient — well into the 1960s and 1970s. The history of testing in America is littered with misuses of testing that have had profound and unjust effects on millions of adults and children. Does the available evidence about the NECAP test persuade you that we are not in the middle of one more chapter of this terrible history?

A graduation test is not a trivial thing. The results of a test can have a significant impact on a young person’s life. It seems to me that the burden is on the people who think a high-stakes graduation test is the only sensible way forward to demonstrate — with a great deal more rigor than they have so far bothered to do — that a test measures what it is supposed to measure. The IQ tests at Ellis Island, in the officer corps, and in the schools, did not measure what they claimed, and thousands upon thousands of lives were changed, few for the better.

If these policy changes are being made for the sake of our children, then can’t we stand to have a little more compassion while we’re making them? This means intellectual honesty, and it also means being careful not to ruin lives you say you’re trying to help.

April 3, 2013April 4, 2013

How RIDE Undermines Their Own NECAP Test

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If I had to pick one thing to complain about with the high-stakes NECAP testing regime it wouldn’t be the pressure on the students, the deformation of the curriculum, or any of that. If it was just one thing, it wouldn’t even be the misguided policy to use NECAP as a graduation test. It would be that RIDE policies have taken a tool they could be using to understand what’s going on in our schools and deformed it so it can never be useful for its intended purpose.

What’s the problem? Just this: the NECAP test was intended to gather data about our schools, but the high stakes — teacher evaluations, potential school closings, high-school graduations that all depend on NECAP scores — have guaranteed the data we get from the test are not trustworthy. It has been turned from a useful tool to a gargantuan waste.

As any scientist knows, it’s hard to measure something without affecting it. But if you affect it, then what have you measured? So you measure gently. If you really want a measurement of how a school is doing, a sensible testing regimen would at least try to be minimally intrusive. Testing would be quick and not disruptive. Test results might be used to monitor the condition of schools, teachers, and students, but important decisions about them would depend heavily on subsequent inquiry.

The NECAP test itself is more intrusive than is ideal, but it could easily meet these other conditions, if scores were kept quiet and not directly tied to any sanction or punishment. The federal NAEP tests are like this, and they provide good data in no small part because there’s no incentive to push scores up or down. By contrast, the state Department of Education trumpets school scores, encourages school departments to adjust curricula to game the test designers’ strategy, and creates the conditions that virtually ensure that some school administrators and teachers will at least consider ways to cheat on the test.

To be completely clear, I know of no evidence at all that any teacher or administrator in Rhode Island has cheated on the NECAP tests. However, though it’s hard to find cheating, it’s easy to identify incentives to cheat. In a climate where professional advancement or even keeping one’s job as a teacher or principal requires improvement every single year (no matter how good you are already) the incentives are obvious. And in school system after school system, across our country, similar incentives have led to completely predictable action.

Lately, we’re hearing from Atlanta, where the former superintendent — the 2009 superintendent of the year of the American Association of School Administrators — and 45 principals and teachers are now under indictment for orchestrating a huge conspiracy that apparently involved locked rooms full of teachers pressured into “correcting” student tests and administrators wearing gloves while handling doctored test papers. But before Atlanta, we heard about DC schools. Before that, there were similar scandals in Texas, Maryland, Kentucky, Wyoming, Arizona, North Carolina, Illinois, Florida, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Connecticut, California, Michigan, Virginia, Utah, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Kansas, New Mexico, Tennessee, New York, and Massachusetts. This list doesn’t count all the mini-scandals that might have just been misunderstandings about test procedures, or maybe weren’t.

This is hardly all. Last year, when the Atlanta scandal broke, reporters at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution surveyed testing data from a few thousand school districts around the country last year, and found 196 of them showed statistical inconsistencies similar to the ones that led to the Atlanta investigation. That doesn’t exactly imply that Atlanta is an exception.

Predictably, the policy responses to these scandals have been simply to tighten security requirements, not to rethink the testing policy. Unfortunately, it’s not as if this is new territory. Let me acquaint you with an observation made by Donald Campbell, a past president of the American Psychological Association. He published an article about measuring the effects of public policy in 1976 that stated what has come to be known as “Campbell’s Law”: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

He wasn’t the only one to notice this. A banker named Charles Goodhart made the same observation around the same time, as did anthropologist Marilyn Strathern who put it succinctly: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Cheating on high-stakes tests is only one manifestation of this. You saw the same thing when Barclays and UBS conspired to rig the LIBOR interest rate (an index rate meant to be a market indicator), or when stock prices become the focus of company policy rather than just a measure of how they were doing. Enron became (in)famous for this, but they were far from unique. If you want to read a detailed (and uncharacteristically entertaining for an academic) account of how the principle affects testing, try “The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing” by researchers at the University of Texas and Arizona State. (Where I ran across that list of testing scandals above.)

All of these are observations about how the world actually works. ignoring them won’t change them. You might complain that if Campbell’s Law is true then we can’t use testing as a valid measure of teaching and then where’s the accountability. Sadly for you, your complaint won’t change the world to something you prefer. This gets to a fundamental distinction between sensible policy and the other kind. Sensible public policy takes the actual, real, world — the one that you and I live in — and finds ways to work within the contraints of reality, be it physical, psychological, economic, or diplomatic. The other kind posits a world as the policy maker would wish it to be and careens forward regardless of the consequences.

In other words, if we know that applying high stakes to a test distorts the data we get from that test, then sensible policy dictates that we don’t use it that way. There are lots of creative and intelligent people out there capable of finding ways to use the valuable information this test could have provided in constructive and useful ways. But that’s not the way we’ve played it.

So here in Rhode Island, we now have the worst of both worlds: a test that can no longer do what it was designed for, while at the same time it has a deeply destructive effect on students, teachers, and the curriculum. Plus it costs millions of dollars to develop and administer, not to mention lost instruction time and wounded lives. Congratulations.

March 20, 2013

Gist Offers Logical Fallacies On NECAP Value

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psu testing rally — Photo by Sam Valorose.

I was on the radio ever so briefly this afternoon, on Buddy Cianci’s show with Deborah Gist. Unfortunately, the show’s producer hadn’t actually invited me so I had no idea until it had been underway for an hour. I gather they had a lively conversation that involved belittling the concerns about the NECAP test that I expressed here.

While I was on hold, I had to get on a bus in order not to leave my daughter waiting for me in the snow. Then Buddy said the bus was too loud but he’d invite me back on. So I was only on for about five minutes, long enough to hear Gist say I may be good at math, but I’m no psychometrician.

Guilty as charged, but somewhat beside the point.

I’ve heard the commissioner speak in public in a few different ways since I published my letter last week. She tweeted about it a couple of times last week and over the weekend. She was quoted in the paper this morning about how it was an “outrageous act of irresponsibility” for adults to take the NECAP 11th grade math test at the Providence Student Union event on Saturday. And today she spent a while on the WPRO airwaves insulting me.

But I have yet to hear any of the points I’ve made taken on directly.

Only what is called the argument from authority: I’m education commissioner and you’re not. Or in this case: I’m education commissioner, and you’re not a psychometrician.

As a style of public argument, this is highly effective, especially if salted with a pinch of condescension. It typically has the effect of shutting down debate right there because after all, who are you to question authority so?

The problem is if you believe, as I do, that policy actually matters, this is a dangerous course to take.

After all, the real point of any policy discussion is not scoring debate points, but finding solutions to the problems that beset us. This is a highly imperfect world we live in, filled with awful problems, some of which we can only address collectively. If you don’t get the policy right, here’s what happens: the problems don’t get solved. Frequently, bad policy makes the problems worse, no matter how many debate points you scored, or how effectively you shut up your opponent.

So, do I care that Deborah Gist thinks I’m an inadequate excuse for a psychometrician? It turns out that, upon deep and lingering introspection, I can say with confidence that I do not. But I do care about the state of math education in Rhode Island, and I believe she has us on a course that will only damage the goal she claims to share with me.

Now I may be wrong about my NECAP concerns, but nothing I’ve learned in the past week has made me less confident in my assessment. On the one hand, I’ve seen vigorous denunciations of the PSU efforts, and mine, none of which have actually addressed the points I’ve raised. These are specific points, easily addressed. On the flip side, I’ve quietly heard from current and former RIDE employees that my concerns are theirs, but the policy is or was not in their hands.

Those points again: there are a few different ways to design a test. You can make a test to determine whether a student has mastered a body of knowledge; you can make a test to rank students against each other; you can make a test to rank students against each other referenced to a particular body of knowledge. I imagine there are lots of other ways to think about testing, but those are the ones in wide use. The first is a subject-matter test, like the French Baccalaureate or the New York State Regents exams. The second is a norm-referenced test like the SAT or GRE, where there are no absolute scores and all students are simply graded against each other on a fairly abstract standard. NECAP is in a third category, where it ranks students, but against a more concrete standard. The Massachusetts MCAS is pretty much the same deal, though it seems to range more widely over subject matter.

The problem comes when you imagine that these are pretty much interchangeable. After all, they all have questions, they all make students sweat, and they all require a number two pencil. How different could they be?

Answer: pretty different. If your goal is ranking students, you choose questions that separate one student from another. You design the test so that the resulting distribution of test scores is wide, which is another way to say that lots of students will flunk such a test. If your goal is assessing whether students have mastered a body of knowledge, the test designer won’t care nearly so much about the resulting distribution of scores, only that the knowledge tested be representative of the field. (The teacher will care about the distribution, of course, since it’s a measure of how well the subject has been taught.) The rest was explained in my post last week.

The real question is, if you don’t know what the NECAP is measuring, why exactly might you think that it’s a good thing to rely on it so heavily as a graduation requirement?

Deborah Gist is hardly the first person to call me wrong about something. That happens all the time, as it does for anybody who writes for the public about policy. But like so many others who claim I am wrong, she refuses to say — or cannot say — why.

March 19, 2013March 19, 2013

Kids, Schools, Twitter, Profanity, WPRO And Gist

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There’s so much to blog about in this WPRO story about how a Warwick high school suspended a couple kids for sending rude and profane tweets to Education Comissioner Deborah Gist about high stakes tests as a requirement of graduation.

In no particular order:

Say what you will about Gist’s education policies, she should be commended for engaging with the people – and especially her critics – through social media. I think it’s her best attribute as a public official and she deserves tons of credit for it.
But we don’t need all adults to agree with Gist’s ideas, as she suggested in the ProJo this morning. In fact, we need a debate about this and the Providence Student Union found a way to engage in it.
Say what you will about the tweeting students’ thoughts on high stakes testing, or their effectiveness in communicating them, they should be commended for being politically active and engaged.
Rhode Island is seeing a trend of local high school students organizing and speaking out against high stakes testing as a graduation requirement. I wonder if the offending tweeters were familiar with the Providence Student Union’s Take the Test event this weekend? There’s also this story from GoLocal about honor roll students in Coventry who are opposed to the high stakes test.
I’m not certain that students have a free speech right to swear at education officials, either on school time or off. But here’s what the ACLU of RI said about it in a statement released yesterday:
“…the school superintendent’s involvement with the families of students who tweeted off school property and during non-school hours is a different matter. It is simply not the school’s business what students tweet on their own time where the messages had nothing to do with the Warwick schools, or with students or adults at those schools. Local school officials are not 24 hour a day nannies or Twitter etiquette enforcers.”
Pot calling the kettle black: Who better than John DePetro to break a story about ridiculous and legally-questionable speech about education professionals.
Prediction for today: DePetro will blame the student’s actions on the ACLU and the teachers’ union, and will be equally as foolish as the teenagers he is chiding!

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