Tag Archive for 'accountability'

Transparency is the New Accountability

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 17, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and accountability. 2 Comments

A meme on the march:

“Republicans that want to kill No Child Left Behind in its entirety should also propose to eliminate its $25 billion or so dollars for k-12 education. If that sounds like a poison pill, here’s an idea: push for transparency, via national standards and tests, instead of “accountability” via the heavy hand of Washington.”  — Mike Petrilli, Fordham Foundation.

“A Republican education agenda should have three key elements: decentralization, transparency and parental empowerment.”  — Lance T. Izumi, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy

“The federal role should be to provide accurate information about student performance. It should be left to states and districts to devise sanctions and reforms.”  — Diane Ravitch

Getting Value-Added Right

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 17, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Opinion and accountability. 4 Comments

Moving to the growth or “value-added” model of assessment, seems to be the favorite education reform of the incoming Obama administration, notes the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, who seems to favor the idea.  ”The growth model appeals to parents because it focuses on each child,” he writes.  “It gives researchers a clearer picture of what affects student achievement and what does not…The next step would be to use the same data to see which teachers add the most value to their students each year,” he writes before noting the objections to value-added among teachers and unions.

Go ahead. Blame the teacher unions. They make no apology for their opposition to this approach. But they have good arguments. Congress will have to revise the No Child Left Behind law to install the growth model, and most support for the idea there extends only to rating schools, not teachers. Assessing instructors by how much their students improve seems reasonable to people like me who have never taken a psychometrics course, but nobody has sufficiently tested the statistical devices for doing that, and they might prove to be expensive.

I’ve never taken a psychometrics course either, but at the elementary school level, it’s the rare teacher who would be comfortable having his or her fortunes tied to value-added measures for the simple and obvious reason that there are too many variables impacting student achievement that an individual teacher cannot control, or even influence.  Try this analogy: 

Let’s say you’re a waiter working the lunch shift at a restaurant with lots of repeat business.  The owner  wants to make sure that sales per diner and customer satisfaction are going up.  That’s perfectly reasonable.  But instead of looking at the average sales and customer satisfaction, the owner wants to hold you accountable for every single diner you serve.  They all need to go up.  If even a single diner leaves unhappy and spends less, you’ve failed.  Your job is to make sure that every customer is happier today than they were with yesterday’s lunch and spends more, even if they ate at a different restaurant.  Since yesterday, the customer may have had a tough day at work, argued with his spouse, or got in an accident in the cab on the way over.  He may not even be very hungry today.  It doesn’t matter.  If you’re really good at what you do, you should be able to overcome every obstacle since studies show the most important variable in customer satisfaction is the waiter.  You have no control over the menu, the meal, the seating, the decor, or the customer’s interactions with the hostess, the bartender, the busboy and every other staff member.  By the way, if you work at Denny’s your customers are expected to be just as happy as they are at Le Cirque. 

After the appetizers are cleared – not even at the end of the meal – the customer satisfaction survey is dropped on the table.  Meawhile, at a different waiter’s table, another customer is having a terrible time.  The waiter is rude, the food is cold, and the busboy spilled water on him.  He’s filling out a survey too.  Half of his evaluation will be charged to you, since you served him lunch yesterday. 

Fair?

None of this should be taken as an attack on the idea of accountability, or even value-added.  I’m a firm believer that as teachers, we need to hold ourselves to very high standards and be accountable to the taxpayers who pay our salaries.  Accountability matters a great deal.  But poorly designed and executed accountability measures will set back the cause of accountability, perhaps irrevocably.  We’ve got to get this right, not engage in another round of ready-fire-aim.

“Schools Can’t Fix Poverty. And That’s OK”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 13, 2008 in accountability. 2 Comments

Enfant terrible edublogger Alexander Russo strikes a measured and reasonable tone, rewarding us with a terrific piece at scholastic.com arguing against efforts to introduce a range of health and human services into schools (think “Broader, Bolder“).  Such efforts “may stretch schools’ abilities to make a real difference,” he cautions, “and may take you and your team’s eyes off quality classroom instruction and academic improvement.”

There’s no doubt that students’ home lives play an important role in their school success. The question is whether schools are really the best vehicle through which to address deeper social issues such as poverty, lack of childcare or health insurance, inadequate access to transportation, and adult illiteracy. My view is that they’re not.  Let schools try and do what they are supposed to do. If more is needed—few argue that it isn’t—let’s address those problems separately and head-on, rather than making them something schools have to do.

“Schools can’t fix poverty,” he concludes.  “And that’s OK.”

Even if you like the Broader, Bolder approach, it’s going to be tough to make the case that schools are well-positioned to do more as long as questions exist about how well they execute their primary function.  And accountability hawks across the political spectrum question whether such an approach is really a way to deflect a focus on results.

Taking the “Count” Out of Accountability

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 23, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and accountability. 1 Comment

Thousands of Ohio students who take state standardized tests aren’t part of the final grades reported by school districts, reports the Columbus Dispatch.  And the state says it has no way of knowing whether school districts are removing students from the testing rolls appropriately.  The paper reports an average of 4,000 students fell off the rolls for each of the 23 Ohio Achievement Tests given last school year. 

Here’s how the process works: Students take a standardized test. A testing company grades their work, then sends scores to the school district.  At that time, districts can remove students’ scores if they have withdrawn from the district or never attended in the first place. Even more students are stripped when districts report their scores to the state, because the Department of Education removes students who didn’t spend the entire academic year in the district.

Columbus schools dropped, on average, 11.4 percent of students from its test results, the paper reports.  ”In doing so, passing rates climbed at every grade level, sometimes dramatically.”  No surprise there, since students who don’t stay in school for the entire year tend not to do as well as those who stay put.  But then there’s this line in the story:  “Columbus schools cut fewer test scores from its rolls than its mobility rate would indicate it could.”

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

The Rent Comes Due on NCLB

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 13, 2008 in Educational Policy. 3 Comments

Even successful schools in California are suddenly having trouble keeping up with mandated AYP, thanks to the performance equivalent of a mortgage balloon payment that kicked in this year, requiring all tested subgroups to make a sudden big leap. 

The New York Times looks at one such school, Prairie Elementary School in Sacramento, which has steadily improved each of its student groups — Hispanics, blacks, Asians, whites, American Indians, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, English learners, the disabled — toward higher proficiency under NCLB.   But this year, they were required to jump by 11 percentage points. 

Across the nation, far more schools failed to meet the federal law’s testing targets than in any previous year, according to new state-by-state data. And in California and some other states, the problem traces in part to the fact that officials chose to require only minimal gains in the first years after the law passed and then very rapid annual gains later.

“And they’re asking for another 11 percent increase next year and the next, and that’s where I’m saying I just don’t know how,” says Fawzia Keval, Prarie Elementary’s principal. “I’m spending sleepless nights.”

“Part of the reason for the troubles was that the states gambled the law would have been softened when it came up for reauthorization in 2007, but efforts to change it stalled,” notes the Times’ Sam Dillon. ”This year Congress made no organized attempt to reconsider the law. With the nation facing urgent challenges, including two wars and economic turmoil, it could be a year or more before the new president can work with Congress to rewrite the law.”

Translation: Expect to hear this story over and over and over again.

Priceless

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 1, 2008 in Humor. 0 Comments

Michael Goldstein, the founder of Match Charter Public School in Boston weighs in with the last word on the Louisiana rerouting scandal:

In other news, the Red Sox reported today that they were re-routing 3 victories from the Dodgers back to Boston. “Those Dodger wins were generated by Manny Ramirez,” said team president Larry Lucchino. “If Mannywood hadn’t demanded a trade from Boston, those wins would have been ours.” This development belatedly makes Boston the AL East Division Winner.

What’s Yours Is Mine

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 30, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Education Practice. 13 Comments

In Louisiana, some school districts are giving credit for high test scores to schools the students don’t attend.  It’s called “re-routing.”  East Baton Rouge, Jefferson and Iberville Parishes, “re-route” the test scores of students from seven magnet schools to the public schools those kids would have otherwise been assigned to.

Jefferson School Board member Judy Colgan, defends the practice, arguing the magnet schools were draining neighborhood schools of their brightest students and lowering their test scores. “I’m not saying magnets shouldn’t have their own set of scores,” she tells the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “They do have their own scores, and they are always at the top of the list. But we felt that because the neighborhood schools were losing those higher achievers to the magnet schools, it was only fair that their scores go back to the home-based schools.”

Huh??!?

Barry Erwin, the head of Council for A Better Louisiana, a Louisiana think tank, blasts the practice, calling it “pure deception” and “a sham.”

“Re-routing” scores in this fashion has a number of bad consequences. First, it allows school districts to create a false and inaccurate impression that some schools are performing better than they are. That’s not transparent and it’s not right. It also hurts the magnet schools because it makes it impossible to track their performance and could prevent them from receiving rewards they might earn from the state’s accountability plan. Perhaps even worse, it artificially raises the scores of some schools that may be in danger of takeover by the state because they are low-performing – and in doing so bypasses the intent of our school accountability system.

It’s hard to view this as anything other than a way to evade accountability, and state education officials are said to be examining the practice.  Woody Allen said it best: No matter how cynical you are, you can’t keep up.

Making a Mockery of Accountability

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 12, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Curriculum. 9 Comments

The drumbeat for national curriculum, standards and assessments gets a little bit louder today with a strongly worded New York Times editorial.

Congress has several concerns as it moves toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Whatever else they do, lawmakers need to strengthen the requirement that states document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid.  The states have made a mockery of that provision, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress — or its absence — over time.

“The country will have difficulty moving ahead educationally until that changes,” opines the Times, noting that complete lack of a relationship between states that report strong performances on their own tests and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  The Times concludes:

Congress needs to take the testing issue head-on. It should instruct the NAEP board, an independent body created by the government, to create a rigorous test that would be given free to states that agreed to use NAEP scoring standards. Then the federal government could actually embarrass the laggard states by naming the ones that cling to weak tests. Without rigorous and consistent testing, there is no way to know whether our children are getting the education they deserve and need.

Sounds an awful lot like what Diane Ravitch was talking about last week.

Battle Lines Being Drawn

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 1, 2008 in Educational Policy. 1 Comment

“Civil rights groups have begun a welcome attack on a House bill that would temporarily exempt the states from the all-important accountability requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act,” editorializes the New York Times this morning.  The attack, led by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, was unexpected notes the paper, ”given that the nation’s two big teachers’ unions actually hold seats on the conference’s executive committee.”

“Recent events suggest that the civil rights establishment generally is ready to break with the teachers’ unions and take an independent stand on education reform,” the paper notes, viewing ed reform as a civil rights issue.

A Grand Education Bargain

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 14, 2008 in Educational Policy. 1 Comment

Newsweek pundit Jonathan Alter wants Barack Obama to call for a Grand Education Bargain—much higher pay for teachers in exchange for much more accountability for performance in the classroom.

“Good teachers need to be rewarded with more pay and respect for being members of our noblest profession, says Alter.  “They need more resources. But they also need to be removed from the classroom when they fail to improve. Obama occasionally says as much, but goes fuzzy when it comes to how.”  Here’s how it will work in this Alter-nate universe:

Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage “thin contracts” free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance—or face extinction.

Love national standards, but Alter loses credibility when he grandly pronounces in the piece that “we know what works to close the achievement gap.”  The answer, natch, is KIPP which, in Alter’s telling, has solved the problem of dealing with teachers unions–apparently the only thing standing between every kid and a Rhodes Scholarship.  Don’t misunderstand me, I love KIPP schools.  Love ‘em.  Did I mention I love KIPP, because I do.   But until we have a lottery for every school (act of volition=involved parents), compulsory longer days and Saturday classes, and expel kids who are not down with the program and the school culture, can we PLEASE stop saying KIPP is the true and only heaven.  KIPP is a first-rate solution for motivated students and families.  And that, by the way, is enough, even if it’s not The Answer.

Update:  See Joanne Jacobs on all of this: ”Poor kids need good teachers in well-organized, safe schools using sound curricula. Measuring teacher performance fairly is very difficult. What about good teachers who can’t be effective because their schools are so horribly dysfunctional? What about good teachers who specialize in untested subjects such as history, science, music and art?”