Accountability, Responsibility, and Enron

Sherman Dorn notes the upcoming release of Collataral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools, a collection of anecdotes about educators making morally dubious choices when faced with the pressures of test-based educational accountability. Dorn says:

The plural of anecdotes is not representative data, but there are enough concerns over the past 5 years that we can say those who ignore test preparation and other side-effects of high-stakes testing are ignoring reality

... unless any of those happened to say that the fraud at WorldCom and Enron wasn't a reason to be concerned about corporate misdeeds. Then at least they can say they were consistent.

The Enron analogy comes up a lot in these conversations. It's worth examining, because it says a lot about the way people think about educators and public schools.

The people who ran Enron worked in an environment of high-stakes accountability. In their case, accountability was based on their financial performance, as reported in mandatory filings to a federal government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the numbers were good, their stock price went up, the company grew, and they all got rich. If the numbers were bad, the stock price went down, the company was damaged, and they could lose their jobs.

Unfortunately for the employees and shareholders of Enron, the people running the place made a series of spectacularly bad business decisions (Kurt Eichenwald's book, Conspiracy of Fools, has all the sordid details and is well worth reading). Even more unfortunately, they chose not to own up their incompetence. Instead, they tried to cover up their misdeeds with accounting shenanigans. They got caught, the company was destroyed, and a bunch of them went to jail.

In response, numerous pundits blamed the federal government for creating the financial accountability system, arguing that the otherwise-honest businessmen at Enron had been corrupted by the high-stakes pressure of filing quarterly SEC reports about their performance....

Oops, forgot we weren't talking about education.

Of course, nothing of the kind happened. People called for more accountabilty, not less. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act over the objections of big business. And even as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, et. al., were excoriated far and wide as liars and thieves, they were at least given the respect implict in being held responsible their moral choices.

College Rankings Dirty Tricks

Richard Vedder of Ohio University, an outspoken member of the recent Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education, has a higher education blog called "Center for College Affordability and Productivity." It's smart, provocative and well worth reading. If there's ever an award for "Least Bland Blog With the Most Bland Name," it would definitely be a contender.

In this post, Vedder comments on a recent Wall Street Journal article$ from the invaluable Dan Golden about the way some colleges are manipulating the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. This says it all:

ALBION, Mich. -- Adrian Jean Kammerer hasn't given Albion College a dime since she graduated in 2004. "I don't have money to be giving to Albion," says the law-school student. "I'm living off student loans."

Yet Albion counted Ms. Kammerer as an alumni donor to the school in 2004, 2005, and 2006. School officials keep her on the donor roll by treating the $30 she gave as a college senior as a $6 annual gift for five years. Ms. Kammerer isn't scheduled to drop off Albion's donor list until 2009.

Such fiddling -- which helped boost the percentage of donating Albion alums to 47% in 2006 from 36% in 1998 -- paid off handsomely. U.S. News & World Report's annual higher-education survey puts Albion's alumni-giving rate at 14th among liberal-arts colleges, contributing to an overall ranking of 91st among 215 such schools. In 2003, Albion boasted of its alumni-giving rate, among other credentials, in a cover letter for a grant application to the Kresge Foundation, which ultimately awarded the school $4.7 million.

This kind of shameful book-cooking is nothing new; a few years ago it was all about dropping low-scoring students out of the average SAT numbers (the WSJ busted colleges on that one too). Implicit in all of this is a certain "it's all just a game" ethic--most colleges think the U.S. News rankings are illegitimate to begin with, so by that logic there's no harm in looking for an edge. Sort of like Gaylord Perry throwing spitballs or Michael Waltrip cheating in NASCAR.

Which is exactly why the college rankings need to be more aligned with what actually matters in higher education -- teaching, learning, things like that.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This past Saturday, the Washington Post ran a pointed op-ed by Colbert King describing the dismal state of disrepair in one of the district’s elementary schools. With a proper amount of outrage and incredulity, King correctly asks, who is responsible for this and how do we hold them accountable?

Good questions that need to be answered immediately. Part of the trouble with facilities maintenance is that it gets little political play (compared to, say, a jump in test scores), meaning that few politicians give facilities upkeep the attention it deserves. Schools aren’t the only places this happens—the Post’s recent series of articles about Walter Reed show that our veterans also suffer from a lack of political attention to facilities maintenance.

The facilities we ask our students to learn in (and our teachers to work in)—like the facilities we ask our veterans to recover in—are a sign of respect. If we ask children to attend schools with broken tiles, unusable bathrooms, and peeling paint, what are we telling them about how much we value their education? Can we honestly expect them to respect the education system when we provide them with buildings that we, ourselves, wouldn’t work in?

Tenure Wars

Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame has some sensible ideas about tenure for college professors ("Let's Just Get Rid of Tenure (including mine)"). He notes that instances where professors might be unjustly fired for politically unpopular views--one of the main justifications for tenure--"rarely" occur. My father--formerly the chairman of the computer science department at a mid-sized public university and therefore somone who had to deal with the hassles of unfireable bad professors on a day-to-day basis--made the same point to me a few years ago. "What could be politically controversial," he asked, "about designing integrated circuits?"

Sherman Dorn responds to Levitt's post by citing a case where people really did try to sack an economics professor for standing up to business interests--in the 1940s. I'm sure he's right, but doesn't that still qualify as "rare"?

Levitt is too dismissive in saying that someone who gets unfairly fired can just go back into the job market and find another job elsewhere. Most professors don't have the juice that comes with being a best-selling author and frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, etc. But as with any policy, there's a basic utilitarian standard that has to be addressed here. Tenure has benefits and costs. Levitt is saying the former outweight the latter. I don't think Dorn's reply really refutes that.

The Wonder Woman Movie That Will Never Be

IGN Comics: Wonder Woman. What was your take on the movie?

Joss Whedon: My take on the movie was simply the story of somebody who saw the world with fresh eyes. Somebody who saw that the Gods were still keeping us down, even though they might have changed their names or become companies. And the world is horribly out of balance and not as good as it should be. It was sort of her journey to understanding what makes us the way we are, because she wants desperately to help and be a hero. It was basically her journey towards becoming a human being, without which no heroism is truly worthy. So it was about the ability to stand up and do the best you can, and to learn about the strength that comes out of weakness, which is what I often write about... but I'm not going to be writing about that anymore. I don't honestly know what turned the studio off. They never told me, so I can't say what you can expect to see should they make the movie, because I don't know what they're looking for.

That's just sad. They're going to make some kind of weak Fantastic Four-like movie instead of this?

What's that? What does this have to do with education? Hey, you can learn a lot from Joss Whedon.

The Myth of the 1,000-page No Child Left Behind Act

I've been reading the posts in Bridging Differences, the new Diane Ravitch / Deborah Meier blog over at Ed Week. It's interesting so far, but Meier makes one minor point that's worth debunking, just because it gets said a lot and is completely wrong:

The Senate passed the latest version of Title I (NCLB)—all thousand unread pages—without considering the side effects of their grandiose ideas.

I bought my copy of NCLB in 2002, in the store on the first floor of the Government Printing Office headquarters on North Capitol Street, here in Washington, DC. It's 669 pages long, front to back. Other editions might be longer because of page and font size or what have you. In any case, it's long.

But here's the thing: the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001," as it's officially called, reauthorized the entire Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That includes nearly every federal K-12 law outside of special education and vocational education (which are covered under separate Acts) passed by Congress since ESEA was originally enacted over forty years ago, in 1965.

Meier refers to ESEA Title I, the biggest and most important federal K-12 program serving low-income students. But ESEA has nine other Titles. They authorize a wide array of programs, from big initiatives focused on teacher quality and school technology to little programs like "Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners," which is designed to "develop innovative culturally based educational programs, cultural exchanges and internships and apprentice programs to assist Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and children and families of Massachusetts linked by history and tradition, to learn about their shared culture and tradition."

That would be Title V, Part D, Subpart 12. Page 420 in my copy. In other words, the vast majority of NCLB's 1,000 or 669 or whatever pages aren't devoted to new law; they're devoted to reprinting old laws, many of which were enacted a long time ago.

Title I, Part A--which is what most people mean when they refer to "NCLB"--runs 91 pages. The really controversial testing and accountability provisions are only a subset of that.

If you take Meier's assertion at face value, you'd think that in a fit of hubris, Congress invented some kind of absurdly mammoth and complex education law out of whole cloth in 2001. NCLB detractors often cite the law's length as prima facie evidence against it.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize NCLB, but size really isn't one of them.

Bogusness Questioned

Over at This Week In Education, John Krupa, an education reporter from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, questions my recent criticism of the Wall Street Journal's alleged trend story($) about how more parents are supposedly uprooting their entire lives so their kids can attend private school. Here's John's take, in its entirety:

I agree we need to be mindful of turning isolated anecdotes into trend stories. But it's not obvious to me that the Journal reporter committed this sin after reading her story. I feel like she did her homework. She cites examples of 10 families — attending three separate schools in three separate states — who moved to put a child into a private school. She gets anecdotal confirmation that the phenomenon is happening from admissions officers, principals and school consultants (I'll acknowledge all are biased to answer affirmatively). She gets anecdotal confirmation this is happening from the president of the National Association of Independent Schools (Again, I acknowledge the potential for bias). Ideally, the story should present data to back up the sources' anecdotal claims, but frankly, I don't think anyone is collecting this information. And there should have been a public-school voice saying that the story's premise is bunk. But I think the reporter gathered ample evidence to write what she did: "A small but growing number of parents .... are dramatically altering their families' lives to pursue the perfect private school for their children.

I'm not persuaded.

First, the article says that the 10 families in question simply "moved to the area," in order to attend the private schools in question. That's not necessarily the same thing as "dramatically alterning their families' lives." People move so their children can attend certain schools, public and private, all the time. That can mean significant sacrificies in terms of housing prices, longer commutes, etc. What makes the article interesting is that the anecdote family went waaay beyond this typical behavior, quitting their jobs, selling their house, and moving to the other side of the country without any certain means of employment or financial support once they arrived. The article only provides one other example of anything similar, and even that family was much less radical.

Moreover, the article provides even less evidence for its key assertion, which is that the phenomenon is small but growing. It's one thing to say that a few parents are doing something that seems kind of extreme. It's a big country, after all, people are always doing strange things. It's something else entirely to say that such extreme parenting is becoming more common. That's the difference beween News of the Weird and real news.

John notes that the President of the National Association of Independent Schools says he "hears about it all the time." But issues of potential bias aside, that's not at all the same thing as saying "I'm hearing about this more often." The only person in the entire article who speaks to that issue is the admissions director of a private school in California, who says "It's been a little more frequent in the last two or three years."

If all you've got is one killer anecdote, no data, and someone who thinks such instances are "a little more frequent," you don't have a trend, and shouldn't say you do.

Uniting Differences

In the latest entry in an extended back-and-forth between Edwize and The Quick & The Ed on teacher policy, Leo Casey holds forth on the limitations of standardized testing. Some of it is quite thoughtful, particularly in distinguishing the union position--pro-standards, pro-standardized testing in limited contexts--from the absolutist anti-standards & testing people here.

But it seems like a strange response to my original question, which Leo helpfully includes right at the top of his post. Namely:

How good does student assessment information--from standardized tests or any other source--have to be before it would be appropriate for use in determining teacher salaries?

Note the words "or any other source." I think their meaning is clear--I don't think that standardized tests are the only measure of student learning. In fact, I think it would be wrong to base teacher salaries solely on growth in student standardized test scores, or even solely based on any measure or combination of measures of growth in student achievement. (I'd note that the Aspen Commission seems to feel the same way; they recommended that "Student achievement can count for no less than 50 percent of the determination of [Highly Qualified Effective Teacher] status.") Teachers do lots of important things, like help other teachers. All of them should be considered in any high-stakes definition of "merit."

So if it's true, as Leo says, that:

standardized achievement tests can provide useful data to be considered as one piece of evidence, weighed together with performance assessments, classroom performance and teacher observations, in making important decisions on a student’s promotion or graduation

Why don't the same principles hold for making important decisions on a teacher's promotion, or how much they get paid? Why can't we combine standardized test data with information from the other, more complex qualitative assessments that Leo describes, as well as principal evaluations, peer evaluations, etc., and come up with a responsible way to assess teacher effectiveness--and thus determine an element of teacher pay?

The answer, I think, is that such assessments, if done fairly, would reveal something that everyone already knows: there are huge differences in effectiveness among classroom teachers, even teachers with very similar credentials, experience, etc. And that seems "divisive," to use a word often employed by teachers unions opposing merit pay.

The distinction is important--there are many very legitimate technical concerns about merit pay plans, including the limitations of standardized tests. But this isn't one of them. It's a principled objection, one that seems to rest on the conviction that labor unity requires a certain level of uniformity, that making differences in effectiveness clear, obvious, and meaningful would undermine a larger cause. If that's the real argument here--and I think it is--then Leo should acknowledge it and defend it.

Also, I'd note that in conceding that "There is no reason, as least in principle, why a standardized test could not provide reasonably accurate measures of basic reading comprehension, basic computational skills or the ability to recall and use discrete pieces of information," Leo seems to be suggesting that we really could use those test scores appropriately as part of determining the performance of elementary school teachers, since they're more focused on teaching basic, testable skills.

Finally, Leo asserts that "Carey, Finn and Hess know, without doubt, a large number of ‘hard nosed,’ no nonsense politicians and elected officials of the center to right." I won't speak for Finn and Hess, but all the politicians I know and have worked for have been of the left. This isn't just a Republican thing. Ted Kennedy had kind words for the Aspen Commission report that makes Leo so unhappy--I wonder why that is?

Immigrant Tuition Debates in Maryland

Immigrants and immigrant rights advocates in Maryland are meeting in Annapolis today to rally Senators and Delegates in support of a measure that would grant in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrant students who have graduated from a Maryland high school. Critics of the measure, House Bill 6, argue that offering these kids in-state rates would take away slots from documented residents and citizens, and that it would serve as an incentive for more illegal immigrants to move to Maryland. Gov O'Malley supports the bill. As he should.

Granting in-state tuition rates to these students is in Maryland’s best interest, financially and otherwise. Most of these kids have been in Maryland for most of their lives and have attended Maryland elementary and secondary schools. The state's already invested resources in the education of these kids. It makes no sense to pay for their K-12 schooling with state resources and then make it prohibitively hard for them to go to college in MD. And, no, this isn't a hand-out- it's hard enough to pay in-state tuition, which runs $8K to be a Terrapin. UMD's out-of-state tuition--at more than $22K-- is a definite deal-breaker for these kids, who are ineligible for government-funded financial aid and have few legal options for work. Sure, higher ed is competitive these days. But the smartest thing for Maryland to do is to let these Maryland-educated kids compete for a chance to advance their own futures and eventually work, live and contribute to our state.

The education of undocumented immigrants is a hot issue across the country, and extends beyond just in-state tuition debates. Take a look at Education Sector's solution, one of eight ideas included in our ed policy guidebook for pres candidates, "Eight for 2008".

Q&E Post-Oscar Special

Every year, I sit down to watch the Oscars, and every year I come to my senses four hours later swearing not to do it again. Do they really need separate awards for sound editing and sound design? Couldn't they relegate one of those to the minor league awards that Maggie Gyllenhaal gave out last last week, and promote something cooler, like best CGI? Sort of like the English Premiere League does? Also, the best movie of 2006, Children of Men, wasn't even nominated.

But hopefully seeing Ryan Gosling lose for Best Actor will cause a few more people to Netflix Half Nelson, a very, very good movie about a troubled middle school teacher and one of his students that grossed about $79.95 at the domestic box office last year. In addition to being worthy in its own right, Half Nelson also raises an interesting question: why are movies about schools and education so generally terrible?

To be clear, many worthwhile movies have been partially or mostly set in schools, but they're nearly always comedies and satires--Heathers, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Election--and none of them are really about schools and education. As a rule, the more the focus turns to education, the worse the movie--see for example Dangerous Minds, Take the Lead, the worst moments of Dead Poets Society, etc. etc.

Those movies all fail in the same way. The filmakers take a real, important thing--the lasting inspiration that great teachers can create with their students--and over-dramatize it to the point of deadening cliche. By not focusing on this, Half Nelson actually makes education much more real and thus compelling.

All Deliberate Speed?

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board that school segregations is unconstitutional. The NAACP asked that desegregation should proceed "forthwith," but in 1955, the Court instead required states to desegregate with "all deliberate speed." In 1957, the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, used the national guard to block black students from entiring Little Rock High School, causing President Eisenhower to call in the 101st Airborne. From there, desegregation in Little Rock was supervised by the federal courts, until such a time that the courts decided the job was done. Which finally happened.

Last week.

Seriously, this is all deliberate speed? And Little Rock isn't the last holdout, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice department is still litigating desegration, two generations later and counting.

Ed and Virginia Fighting Over the Kids Again

If you want your money for the kids, Virginia*, you better listen up.

Have you been following the drama between these two? Today's Post explains Ed's most recent threat to withhold more than $17 million from Fairfax County schools if the system continues to defy a federal mandate to give reading tests to thousands of English language learner children.

Naturally, both Ed and Virginia are arguing for what's best for the kids. Ed says the ELL kids won't get the attention and resources they deserve if they're not tested the same way as other kids. Virginia says it's not fair to test these kids on content when they don't yet understand the language. Ed argues that if we don't assess their content knowledge, we won't know how to serve them. Virginia counters that the tests won't give us good information anyway. Virginia wants to develop an alternative test in time for next year's assessments. Ed says no- it's gotta happen before the Cherry Blossoms (those beautiful warm and sunny days set aside for testing). Ed's holding the purse strings. Virginia's with the kids all day. Who's to decide?

That's the gist, although there's much more to it than this. Education Week's Mary Ann Zehr has been covering this story and other big debates over English language learners. Check out her new blog, which is sure to stay on top of the Virginia/Ed chronicles.

It's an important story to follow b/c it's not just about Virginia. Ed's got kids all over this country.

*Education Sector co-founder Andrew Rotherham is a member of the VA Board of Ed.

Dubious Education Trend Signifiers, Continued

Earlier this week, we discussed how the words "small but growing" indicate the likely presence of a dubious education trend story, in this case about parents uprooting their entire lives to put their kids in private schools. (Alexander Russo follows up here.) Sure enough, the meme has been spreading like wildfire, at least according to this anecdote and an unconfirmed email a friend sent me last night.

The New York Times offers another example this morning, in a story about how parents in an affluent suburb have gone kinda overboard in organizing their local PTO. While there are no assertions of a "small but growing" trend, the piece uses three other words to accomplish roughly the same thing: "across the country." As in:

The transformation of Livingston’s pizza lunch reflects how parent groups across the country, especially in affluent suburbs, are undergoing a kind of corporate makeover, combining members’ business savvy, technological prowess and negotiating skills to professionalize operations.

"Small but growing" and "across the country" (variants: "across the nation," "across America," etc.) are both used for a similar transformational purpose: to turn the specific into the general, anecdote into trend, story into news. "Pay attention," they're saying, "this kind of thing is happening everywhere. It could happen to you." Which is fine, as long as by "everywhere" they mean "possibly in a few more of the small number of wealthy suburban communities located near the handful of large coastal cities / media centers where, not coincidentally, this reporter's editor happens to live."

It's certainly not a coincidence that both of these stories focus on the anxieties of privileged parents. And it's surely only a matter of time before we wake up to find this story on the front page of a major news daily:

DARIEN, C.T. -- Elizabeth Winterhouse just wants what's best for her little boy.

A slender, slightly nervous woman of 37 dressed in tasteful but expensive jewelry and the latest Talbots fashion, Mrs. Winterhouse keeps a watchful eye over her six-year old son Miles as we sit in the airy, light-filled living room of her suburban Connecticut home.

While her husband Jim works 18-hour days managing a hedge fund in nearby Greenwich, Mrs. Winterhouse has a lot of time to think about Miles' future. And what she sees has her worried. The warning signs came early--amniocentisis results put Miles' prenatal verbal skills in only the 97th percentile. Despite being three months younger, Miles' playmate, neighbor, and best friend Parker has already memorized Pi to 30 digits. Twice-weekly tutoring hasn't helped Miles overcome his difficulties in conjugating French verbs. Meanwhile, admission to Yale University in nearby New Haven is getting tougher every year.

So Mrs. Winterhouse did what she believes any responsble parent in her situation would do. She had an advanced microprocessor surgically implanted in Miles' brain.

And she's not alone. Across the country, a small but growing number of parents are taking advantage of new cyber-enhancement technologies to give their children a leg up in the ever-tougher rat race for admissions to the Ivy League. Other examples include Cynthia Fairhaven, who lives 200 yards away from the Winterhouses on the same Darien street, and Allesandra Stassinopoulis, the wife of a Greek shipping magnate living in Beverly Hills.

Leading national experts confirm this rapidly growing trend. A spokesman for Cyberdyne Systems, manufacturer of Miles' implant, said that "More and more parents are giving their children the educational tools they need, for only $22,995, six months same as cash." Jack Jennings, Director of the non-partisan Center for Education Policy confirmed that "What you said is true, no doubt because of the pressures caused by No Child Left Behind." And as University of Virginia Professor Larry Sabato recently noted, "Stranger things have happened."

I Was Right

Okay, I promise I'll only use that post title like, once a year (or less, if I turn out not to be right about things). But in this case, I am forced to succumb to the temptations of self-aggrandizement. On Tuesday, I wrote this post about a middle-income California couple who quit their jobs and moved from Los Angeles to Boston just to put their teenage daughters in a super-expensive private school they couldn't afford. Rather than simply note the utter craziness of this (see Matt Yglesias here), the Wall Street Journal spun it as evidence of some kind of alleged larger trend, so they could characterize the story as "news." The problem with doing that, I wrote, is that:

people believe what they read in the newspaper. If the Wall Street Journal says it's a trend, it's a trend, and soon enough this meme will be become part of the larger narrative about education, influencing what people believe and thus what decisions they make. And it will be wrong, but nobody will know that.

Sure enough, there was a press conference this morning announcing the latest 12th grade NAEP scores. They're not good, prompting former Michigan governor and current National Association of Manufacturers President John Engler to note that just the other day, he read about how more and more parents are moving across the country to put their kids in private school, and how this is just further evidence that our public schools are basically going to hell in a handbasket. That's not a direct quote, but you get the gist.

As a public service, the Quick and the Ed will henceforth be tracking the spread and use of this little nugget of conventional non-wisdom. Feel free to email examples to kcarey at educationsector.org.

Second rate nation?

12th grade NAEP results were released this morning (see here and here) at a press conference filled with gloom and doom. The results aren't good--despite high school students taking more classes, harder classes and getting better grades, NAEP performance overall is down slightly and the achievement gaps aren't closing.

Panelists John Engler (former governor of Michigan), David Driscoll (Massachusetts Commissioner of Education), and David Gordon (Superintendent of Sacramento County Office of Education) all lamented the low standards that exist in some states, argued that courses must increase rigor and alignment with standards, and successful schools should be replicated. Driscoll in particular argued that states are taking positive actions and that there will be a lag before scores start to show the results. All the panelists used pretty strong language in talking about the results, with Driscoll asserting that we are "sleeping through a crisis."

After the presentation of the education morass came press questions, which were thankfully far more lively. My favorites:

1) From NBC: Has 12th grade performance peaked, and are we at risk if becoming a second rate nation?

2) From unidentified reporter: Why are Asian students outperforming others? Are they just smarter?

Other interesting nugget: Although advanced course-taking is strongly associated with higher NAEP performance (students taking more advanced math/science have higher NAEP scores), even among students in the same courses, performance varied by subgroup. White students had higher math scores than Black and Hispanic students taking the same math course. For example, Black students taking Algebra II scored an average of 127, while white students taking geometry (a lower level class), scored an average of 133. These results suggest that some courses are simply not as rigorous as they are labeled and/or some students may be receiving inferior instruction in their courses. See an interesting example of this in data from Illinois that Kevin analyzed recently. Look for more research to come on this "rigor gap."

Without actually advocating national standards, these scores do provide some ammunition to those who argue that many states have set standards too low. Then again, all NAEP results (and other education data) are used to show support for whatever position/reform/idea a group or individual advocates.

A few important caveats:

• These results are from a test administered 2 years ago (January-March 2005)
• The 2005 NAEP Math test is on a new scale and scores cannot be compared to previous years. The average score of 150 was set by design this year.
  
• NAEP is not actually the ultimate test of everything in education. While the results are bad and merit serious attention, a panel composed entirely of current and former members of the NAEP oversight Board cannot be expected to provide any critiques of NAEP or its standards. Others can and do.
  

Hot for Mayors

Edspresso, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Chalkboard all have the vapor's over Newark Mayor Cory Booker's hopes to take over that city's troubled schools and expand school choice (specifically, vouchers and recruiting a KIPP school) there. Booker is indeed dreamy, but he does seem to face a daunting uphill battle on this stuff, not to mention myriad other problems in the city he runs.

Meanwhile, D.C.'s own Mayor McDreamy, Adrian Fenty, has elaborated what he will do to fix the District's royally messed up special education programs if--looking increasingly less iffy--he gets control of the schools. This is important because failure to serve special education students effectively, and the enormous cost of private special education placements this leads to, may be the single biggest discrete problem facing DCPS. James Forman, writing at Edspresso, has some more advice for Fenty about engaging the community to improve the schools.

Illiteracy Kills

A slightly more important issue than rich kids moving from LA to Boston, this article highlights the health consequences of low literacy skills. It's another depressing reminder of the high social costs of failing schools.

Bogus Education Trend Stories, Part MCMXLVII

One of the basic tensions in journalism comes between what's news and what's a good story. The best journalism combines the two, using the power of narrative to communicate vital, relevant information about the state of the world. Sometimes, however, journalists find good stories that aren't really news. Unfortunately, they frequently try to make news out of them anyway, by pretending that interesting but isolated incidents represent broader trends.

This happens a lot in education journalism, and there's an easy way to spot these bogus trend stories. Three or four grafs in, after the lead anecdote, you will read three words that should say, loud and clear, "there is less here than meets the eye."

Those words are "small but growing."

As in this article($) in today's Wall Street Journal, which tells the story of a husband and wife who found the perfect private school for their high schools daughters, a tony prep school near Boston. Unfortunately, they lived in Los Angeles. So, naturally, the husband quit his job, they sold their house, and they moved to small apartment in Boston. It took him three months to find a new job, so they had to run through most of their savings and the money they made on the home sale in order to live and pay the $56,000 school tuition. Their furniture is still in L.A., because they can't afford to move it, and the wife, who used to stay home, is now looking for work. But it was all worth it, because their daughters are learning Greek.

Sensibly, this should be a feature story highlighting the fact that this decision looks, in retrospect, to be pretty insane, maybe with some added comment about how some people take devotion to their children's education to almost fetishistic extremes. But it's not. Instead, it's framed as a trend story. The headline is "Anxiety High: Moving For Schools," which is fair enough. But the subhead is "A growing number of parents are choosing where to buy a home based on its proximity to the private school where they want to send their children." And upon coming to the fifth graf, we find this:

Across the country, a small but growing number of parents like the O'Gormans are dramatically altering their families' lives to pursue the perfect private school for their children. While past generations of parents might have shifted addresses within a town to be near a particular school, or shipped junior off to boarding school, these parents are choosing school first, location second. "I hear about it all the time," says Patrick Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools, or NAIS, in Washington, D.C.

In other words, what should be a standard man-bites-dog human interest story is instead alleged to be evidence of some kind of trend. A small trend, of course, backed up in this case by exactly two more anecdotes and a few quotes from private school folks and a psychologist. But a growing trend. How do we know it's growing? Because some person the reporter called on the phone said so! The guy from the private school association, he hears about it all the time. How much more data do you need?

The problem is that people believe what they read in the newspaper. If the Wall Street Journal says it's a trend, it's a trend, and soon enough this meme will be become part of the larger narrative about education, influencing what people believe and thus what decisions they make. And it will be wrong, but nobody will know that.

All for the sake of a good story.

Special Education for Teachers

The Washington Post magazine has a very interesting article this week written by a special education teacher in DC.* Samantha Cleaver's story is not unusual--it's really hard being a first year teacher, probably harder still if you're alternatively certified, and even harder yet to teach special education.

What makes her story powerful is the painstaking detail of the challenges she faces as a new teacher serving students with significant disabilities. The lack of resources are a big problem, but almost a backdrop to the enormously challenging learning and behavioral challenges that her students face. The showdown with 5 year-old "Spidey" exemplifies exactly how difficult each day can be.

I think overall the story raises several important policy lessons.

One is that I think we need to consider carefully the type of training alternatively certified teachers who are placed in special education settings receive. There is extensive research on teaching students with various types of disabilities and that is a lot to master in a summer. I know there is a teacher shortage in special education and we need to fill those slots, but sending hastily prepared people to help kids with the greatest needs seems unfair to all involved. At the very least, school level mentors with special education experience seem essential.

Two is that classroom management is critically important, not just for special education teachers. I think policymakers often fail to recognize how essential this is and teacher training programs (both traditional and alternative) similarly fail to emphasize it. Yes, it is not student achievement focused, but go into a classroom with poor management and you are hard pressed to find much if any learning. The best lesson in the world goes untaught if no one is listening.

Three, I'm not sure many of the education policy proposals on the table right now will address the situation raised in the article. Not that any individual situation necessitates a policy intervention, but this one is far too common to be ignored. New teacher + challenging school situation + inadequate support = teacher attrition. From the article, it seems that the most effective intervention was support from the school guidance counselor who was able to both provide advice and model effective techniques in the classroom--ideally the role of a mentor.

To me, an important and overlooked area is how to help teachers become better teachers. I fully support requiring teachers to be highly effective as opposed to highly qualified, but the reality is that clearly everyone is not. Pushing out the worst and most apathetic teachers makes sense, but considering the size of the teaching force, helping mediocre, new, and struggling teachers improve is a lot cheaper, politically feasible, and more sensible than trying to radically overhaul the teaching force.

Professional development has a well deserved bad reputation and is totally not en vogue, but if done well, it can improve teachers' feelings of preparedness, including how to work with special populations. If teachers don't know how to raise achievement they need support, whether professional development, mentoring, or something else--carrots and sticks are not going to make them magically improve.


*Disclosure: The Post article author is a DC Teaching Fellow, an alternative certification program for which I interview applicants.

Presidential Ideas

If you're a kid, February is a great month. It's short and sweet and snowy enough to get days (and days) off school, and then comes the wonderful combined birthdays of George and Abe for a three-day weekend.

With our nation's Presidents in mind, Education Sector is soon to release its Eight for 2008: Education Ideas for the Next President. It's got solutions to some of our nation's most pressing education problems. And it's all there for you to see Tuesday morning when you get back to work. Check it out.