Archive for the 'accountability' Category

Give Me Harvard or Give Me Death

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 10, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Parents and accountability. 0 Comments

Parental anxiety is ruining playtime, notes the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss.  It’s not news that lots of preschool parents have become “super-anxious trying to give their kids a leg up on kindergarten,” Strauss writes at The Answer Sheet.  “But I didn’t realize just how nutty things had become until I talked to several dozen preschool program directors.”

Among the examples she cites: parents begging school directors to let their 1 1/2 -year-olds into programs for 2-year-olds “because Danny and Olivia are so incredibly advanced”; demanding to know why 2-year-olds aren’t being given the alphabet to copy over and over and memorize; and enrolling their kids in so many activities that three year olds fall asleep at their desks.

“People! This is the only time your child has to be a child!” she writes.  I was in complete agreement until I got to this line:  “The reason for all of this is No Child Left Behind, which has pushed curriculum down into the earliest grades and put the focus on high-stakes standardized tests that start as early as third grade.”

“I’m sorry, but blaming NCLB for elite parents pushing preschoolers too hard on academics and activities is BS,” says New America’s Sara Mead on Twitter.  Agreed.  A generation ago, New York Magazine wrote a cover story about the fierce competition among Manhattan parents to get Danny and Olivia into just the right preschool, just the right prep school, just the right college–and the relentless pressure on even the youngest kids.  The legendary cover line: “Give Me Harvard or Give Me Death.”

There’s plenty wrong with NCLB and blunt-force accountability.  But if it disappeared tomorrow, Danny and Olivia would not suddenly be kickin’ it on the playground.  Well, maybe for 1o minutes after piano lessons and before the gourmet cooking class…

Can Schools Be Sued for Failure to Educate?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 9, 2009 in accountability. 3 Comments

The ACLU is suing Florida’s governor, Board of Ed and other officials for “failing to ensure that students in Palm Beach County receive a high quality education.”   The state’s constitution requires Florida to provide a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality education.  “Palm Beach County is clearly not upholding its responsibility to provide a quality education to all of its students when so many of them are not graduating,” said the ACLU in a statement.  According to the suit, up to one-half of the county’s students do not graduate on time.

Such lawsuits are not unheard of, but I’m not aware of any successful suits where students have sued schools or teachers for educational malpractice.   A frequently cited precedent is 1976 case Peter W. vs. San Francisco Unified School District, where a high school graduate who could not read or write unsuccessfully sought damages from the school district for providing “inadequate instruction.”  According to the decision:

Unlike the activity of the highway or the marketplace, classroom methodology affords no readily acceptable standards of care, or cause, or injury. The science of pedagogy itself is fraught with different and conflicting theories of how or what a child should be taught, and any layman might–and commonly does–have his own emphatic views on the subject. The ‘injury’ claimed here is plaintiff’s inability to read and write. Substantial professional authority attests that the achievement of literacy in the schools, or its failure, are influenced by a host of factors which affect the pupil subjectively, from outside the formal teaching process, and beyond the control of its ministers. They may be physical, neurological, emotional, cultural, environmental; they may be present but not perceived, recognized but not identified.”

In short, the courts have taken a broader view of accountability than many in ed reform.  I’d love to hear from those in the legal community, however, about whether the “no excuses” mantra is enforceable as a contract–and if suits alleging failure to educate might be successful in the future.

I Caught California Being Good!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 5, 2009 in Educational Policy and accountability. 3 Comments

It’s the oldest trick in the elementary school classroom management book:  using positive reinforcement to get children to behave in the hope of earning a reward or recognition.  When it’s time to clean up before lunch the teacher says, “Let’s see who’s ready to line up first.  I’m looking to see who has their desk cleaned up and is sitting up nicely.”  Suddenly 25 kids are racing to sit up straight with their hands folded on their spotless desks.  Works like a charm on seven-year-olds. 

State legislatures, too. 

President Obama’s education speech in Wisconsin reinforced the criteria the Adminstration wants to see in order for states to qualify for a piece of the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” fund.  What’s remarkable, however, is how much change in behavior is occurring in states just  hoping for a reward.  Like a first grade teacher, the President is essentially looking across the country and asking, “Who wants to be my special helper?  I’m looking for states that are doing the right thing and making good choices!”

“Oh, I like the way California is linking teachers and test scores!  You too, Indiana and Wisconsin! What an excellent job you’re doing!  Uh-oh, Nevada is definitely not ready!  Let’s see who else is doing the right thing?   Oh, look! Illinois and Tennessee must really want Race to the Top money. Look how they have lifted their charter caps!   Louisiana is ready!  Delaware is ready!  New York?  Are you making good choices? Let me see…”

“The administration has done a good job of having a lot of states make a long-odds bet that they’re going to win Race to the Top funds, so they’ve shaped their behavior a lot in advance of a single dollar being awarded,” Russ Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution tells the Christian Science Monitor.  “Most of what the administration is going to get [in terms of reform] it will get before the competition is actually completed.”

There must be some very shrewd former teachers at the DOE.

I Am Shocked, SHOCKED, To Find Gambling Going On Here

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 29, 2009 in Research and Reports and accountability. 5 Comments

Researchers at the National Center for Education Statistics have found evidence that “a majority of states may have lowered student-proficiency standards on state tests in recent years.”

“Reverse Engineering Academic Upbringing”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 19, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Higher Education and accountability. 1 Comment

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is launching an ambitious research project to figure out why so many of its freshmen need remediation in reading and math.  Every incoming student will be evaluated “to reverse-engineer his academic upbringing,” UNLV president Neal Smatresk tells the Las Vegas Sun.  Since eighty percent of UNLV’s undergrads come from a single source, the state’s own Clark County School District, Smatresk hopes to gain particularly vivid insights.

Data gathered from the academic assessments would be shared with school districts and could help educators identify and correct patterns of weakness, whether it be general flaws in teaching philosophies or student study habits.  Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes said the research findings could offer important insight into the root causes of the problems requiring remediation.

“The possibility that the district will be able to identify clusters of underachieving students, and trace them to not only individual campuses but individual classrooms, has Clark County’s teachers union on edge,” the paper notes. 

Last year, more than a third of Nevada’s high school graduates who enrolled at the state’s universities and colleges required remedial classes in English and mathematics, at a cost of over $2 million.

Do NAEP Scores Have Legs at the Polls?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 15, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Education News and accountability. 1 Comment

In New York, 80 percent of 8th graders met the state’s standards in math this year, up from 59 percent two years ago.  But the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results released yesterday paint a different picture.  Only 34 percent of the state’s 8th graders are considered proficient, a modest increase from 2007 levels.  NAEP scores for the Empire State’s 4th graders actually declined, while the percent passing the state’s own test went up.  This renewed charges that New York is making itself look good by lowering standards.   Diane Ravitch puts it plainly: ”The fabulous ‘gains’ reported last spring, we now know, were based on dumbed-down tests and dubious scoring of the tests in Albany,” she writes in today’s New York Post.

On the one hand, there is nothing new here, and New York is not alone in this boat.  Disconnects between the results for NAEP and state tests have been well known and much discussed for years.  The open question is whether state tests have now been sufficiently discredited in the minds of voters to make them a political liability.  The even larger question is whether the failure of test-driven accountability to move the needle will feed voter resentment, turning testing into a legitimate campaign issue in state and local races this November and beyond.

“There’s a palpable backlash against testing across much of the great American middle class,” Fordham’s Checker Finn recently observed.  ”We need to face the fact that testing, particularly high-stakes uses of test results for students and teachers alike, are deeply unpopular outside policymaker circles and could well lose rather than gain political traction in coming years.” 

The first test case may come in New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg is up for a third term and campaigning on his education record. The New York Times points out this morning how the NAEP results are ”sharply contradicting the results of state-administered tests that showed record gains.”  NAEP results for the city itself will not be available for several weeks, but Bloomberg’s opponent, Democrat Bill Thompson, is attempting to make political hay nonetheless.  A spokesperson quoted in the New York Times today calls the Bloomberg administration the “Madoff of the American education system” and a “national disgrace.”  Bloomberg has a commanding lead in the polls, but his opponent is clearly trying to turn the Mayor’s record on education, a perceived strength, into a liability.  Will it play?  A Marist poll last Spring showed New York voters approved of the Mayor’s handling of the schools by a 51-to-41 percent margin.  It bears watching to what degree, if any, the testing issue moves those numbers.

No Child Left Behind, it has been widely observed, is a “tainted brand.”  But is “accountability” still a winner at the polls?  What NAEP seems to be telling us is that we’ve had a whole lot of test-driven accountability (and a whole lot of education spending) without a whole lot of results.  That said, it’s not an easy issue for voters to wrap their heads around.  I suspect it will be easier and more efficacious to get voters cranky about their kids education being reduced to a joyless grind.  “Prep and test schooling” does not roll as trippingly off the tongue as “tax and spend liberal” but it probably resonates more with voters than trying to explain cut scores.

Why Send Kids To School?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 27, 2009 in Educational Policy and accountability. 5 Comments

“The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why we educate,” observes Diane Ravitch. ”Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores.”  Ravitch’s comments come in a forum published by the New York Times Magazine, which also features input from Tom Vander Ark, Geoffrey Canada, Charles Murray and others.  Ravitch writes:

Why do we educate? We educate because we want citizens who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives and for our democracy. We want citizens who understand how their government works, who are knowledgeable about the history of their nation and other nations. We need citizens who are thoroughly educated in science. We need people who can communicate in other languages. We must ensure that every young person has the chance to engage in the arts.

Reflecting on the theme of “How to Remake Education,” Vander Ark stumps for more attention to technology.  “By 2020, I believe most high-school students will do most of their learning online,” he writes.  “It shouldn’t take that long, but it will.”  Charles Murray argues we should “discredit the bachelor’s degree as a job credential”; while Canada believes we should lengthen the U.S. school year, which is “one of the shortest school years in the industrialized world.”

I’m with Diane. There is a clear failure of vision in American education at present, especially in poor, urban schools.  We have narrowed the definition of what it means to be educated in America.  When affluent parents choose a school for their children—when they enroll in a private school or buy a home near specific schools–reading scores are simply not part of their calculus.  It is assumed that in a good school every child will learn to read, and then read to learn.  That’s simply what schools do. When policy makers, education reformers and even teachers and administrators evaluate what makes schools in poor, urban neighborhoods good or bad, however, a single litmus test applies: performance on standardized reading tests.  For the children of the poor, a good grade on a state reading test has become what it means to be educated.  The contrast could not be clearer:  we set the finish line for other people’s children where we set the starting line for our own.

“An Unavoidable Element of Subjectivity”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 10, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and accountability. 3 Comments

Schools need much more than merit pay to recruit and retain good teachers, argues Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed.  “They need strong leadership, good facilities, safe working conditions, and the right kind of organizational culture,” he writes. “You can’t paper over the lack of those things by simply tacking on a salary bonus, even a big one, to the existing steps-and-lanes pay scale.”

Carey’s reasoned (and reasonable) take on merit pay feels like a welcome departure from the teacher-quality-and-test-scores über alles refrain more commonly sung by accountability hawks.  Especially in his recognition that “we need to build schools great people want to teach in, and that means fully recognizing their value in all ways, including pay.”

The great schools of the future will be professional meritocracies in a way today’s public schools are not, but not by adding test scores to the mechanistic logic of an industrial-age salary scale. Rather, they’ll spend a great deal of energy on getting the conditions and culture right, and then negotiate substantially higher and substantially more variable salaries with individual teachers. It will be an expensive, time-consuming, imperfect process with an unavoidable element of subjectivity. It will also be much, much better than what most schools use today.

Agreed.  I’d also wager there isn’t one teacher in a thousand who wouldn’t welcome merit pay in a school that spent “a great deal of energy on getting the conditions and culture right.” 

The phrase “unavoidable element of subjectivity” also strikes me as a recognition of the infinite complexity teachers face in working with our most disadvantaged students (any attempt to move past mindless “teachers fear accountability” sloganeering is a welcome development).  Guest-blogging over at Joanne Jacobs, the always insightful Diana Senechal captures the dilemma of nuance-averse accountability well.  “With dumbed-down tests, vapid literacy programs, an overwhelming focus on test prep at the exclusion of essential subjects, and unreliable rating systems, we end up taking a yardstick to a void–and declaring miracles whenever we please,” she wrote.  The flip side of that — the thing that teachers reasonably fear — is that it is too easy to declare failure whenver we please, and hold teachers solely responsible when they are too often reduced to foot soldiers with no control over what or even how they teach. 

This cannot be said often enough: teachers are not by nature accountability-averse.  They are, however, sensibly averse to having an extraordinarily difficult and complex task measured by crude and simplistic tools.

Update:  John Thompson, a vocal teacher advocate who also viewed Carey’s post favorably, takes up a similar theme at This Week in Education.  “I’ve never understood why ‘reformers,’ who are angered by the terrible results of policies set by principals and central offices, respond by attacking teachers who do not set those policies. But the answer, which the New Teacher Center makes clear, is not to attack principals but to use ‘contextual data’ to enhance teacher and principal quality and create a learning culture which attracts and retains educators.”

I’m Confused

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 4, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and accountability. 6 Comments

When 97% of New York City schools get As and Bs on their report cards, it’s proof accountability works.  When 98% of teachers get satisfactory ratings, it’s proof there’s no accountability.

Observations on Observations

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 27, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy, Teaching and accountability. 32 Comments

If you’re a teacher, would you rather be judged by a 200-page list of indicators of highly skilled teaching, or by a principal who shares your philosophy of teaching and learning, supports your approach and pretty much leaves you alone–but has the power to fire you at will? 

This question occurred to me after reading a long and excellent post by John Merrow over at Learning Matters on teacher observations. He concludes that the observation process is “changing for the better in some places, but that, unfortunately, it’s still mostly useless.”

In the old days, teachers closed their doors and did their thing, for better or for worse. As long as things were quiet, administrators [rarely] bothered to open the door to see what was going on, and teachers never watched each other at work. That’s changing, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. In some schools today, teachers are actually expected to watch their peers teach, after which they share their analysis. In other schools, however, principals armed with lists sit in the back of the class checking off ‘behaviors’ and later give the teacher a ‘scorecard’ with her ‘batting average.’

“Whether these observations are diagnostic in nature and therefore designed to help teachers improve or a ‘gotcha’ game is the essential question,” Merrow perceptively observes.  Teacher observations, like test scores, will undoubtedly loom ever larger as the issue of teacher quality bubbles to the top of the nation’s education agenda.  Like test scores, there’s a lot to learn from observations.  And like test scores, we’re equally likely to learn the wrong lessons.

Of all the “best practices” that have migrated to education from the business world, the one that didn’t make the trip is the idea that good managers hire excellent people, empower them with real decision-making authority, then get out of their way.  The closest thing to that in education is “close your door and do your thing,” as Merrow puts it.  That goes against the grain in the Age of Accountability, but it is undeniable that for many excellent and experienced teachers and their students, it works perfectly.   And while that approach is endangered, it has not disappeared.  Nor should it.  The point of any accountability system should be to help bad schools and teachers look and act like good schools and teachers, not the opposite.  Our schools still have plenty of brilliant iconoclasts who do things their own way to great effect. 

For such  teachers nothing could be worse than “observation by checklist,” where the adminstration wants to see what it wants to see: aim and standard on the board?  Check.  Students sitting in groups?  Check.  Updated work on the bulletin board?  Check. A “print rich” environment in “kid-friendly language?” Check.   Ask why these items are important and you’ll invariably hear that it’s what the principal’s supervisor expects to see.  What they are indicative of is lost.  The consummate irony is this kind of evaluation seems rigorous, but it is more likely — much more likely — to create a civil service mentality than to foster excellence.  It’s another variation of the Cargo Cult Education phenomenon.   Teachers and administrators spend all their energy manufacturing the visible markers of learning, often not knowing (and after a while no longer caring) what the “indicators” indicate. 

Indeed, this is the thing the every teacher knows, that every armchair expert does not: it is simple (but time-consuming) to create an environment that gives all the appearances of being a high-functioning classroom and still be a lousy teacher.  Among the very first survival skills a new teacher learns, either through the advice of a kindly colleague or through a series of administrative reprimands, is the art of the dog and pony show.   In some schools, it’s the quid pro quo that earns you the right to close your door and practice your craft.  In more punitive environments, it’s the tail that wags the dog.   But the aim of observation-by-checklist is not great teaching, it’s plausible deniability–and it’s the enemy of accountability, for both teachers and administrators.  Miss Jones’ classroom demonstrates a high degree of student engagement and all of the indicators of high quality teaching, but her students are still not making progress.  Why? Miss Jones’ energy is misdirected.  She’s learning to play the game, not become a great teacher.  After a few years, she gets tired of it and quits.  Mediocrity wins again. 

The bottom line is that great teaching is like Potter Stewart’s definition of hard-core pornography.  It’s hard to define but you know it when you see it.  Unfortunately, that’s never going to cut it in our data-mad, accountability-obsessed age. 

So which would you rather?  Find a school and work with a principal who shares your philosophy and approach, trusts you and supports you, but has the power to fire you at will?  Or a school where your duties are codified to the letter, where you know what’s on the checklist and spend all of your time ‘working to rule‘ and playing “gotcha.”  Where are you going to be happiest and most productive?

Am I the only one who thinks this is what the teacher quality debate is really all about?