Standardized Tests
Pharmer's Market: The Cost of Producing "Successful" Students
Published June 26, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
[A big welcome to William Farren with this first guest-post. Bill has long struck me as one of the most original and piercing critics of education around. You can see his "Did You Ever Wonder?" video in the left sidebar, below, for a taste. Bill writes at the radically sane Education for Well-Being. - Clay]
Not long ago, I finished reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, a book about the high price of cheap food and the disconnected thinking that produces it. It made me think that the way we produce food today--that is, ignoring nature's logic in the quest for efficiency--is very similar to the way we produce "educated" citizens. Ignoring millions of years of evolutionary design has resulted in some interesting (if not disconcerting) similarities between the two camps. Both industrial schooling and industrial agriculture seem to have developed pathological ways of looking at pathology.
Whether in the field, the feed lot, or the classroom, issues of low productivity and dysfunction are commonly attributed to the individual, rarely the larger system that controls it. When a farmer curses a corn plant's inability to repel a particular pest, he does so without reflecting on the fact that the plant has been taken out of its natural environment and placed into a man-made monoculture--a hotbed of disease. Plants grown in isolation lose the defenses and nutrients that neighboring species once freely provided. In homogeneous rows designed for the convenience of machinery, a plant's exquisite defense systems become ineffective. "Corrective measures" in the form of herbicides and pesticides end up coating the plants and sterilizing the soil.
Pigs are faulted for biting other pigs' tails as a result of being weaned prematurely and packed together tightly. Animals living in stressful conditions, denied the expression of their once useful behaviors, lose the will to protect themselves in the face of danger. As a consequence, when infection sets in on a chewed tail, pigs are put down. (It's not profitable to nurse them back to health.) Forward thinking hog farmers, in an attempt to stamp out this "vice", noticed that by docking the pigs' tails they could produce a sensitive nub that would force even the most demoralized pig to fight back.
Cows, ruminants which have evolved to eat grasses and fibrous vegetable matter, are today mostly fed a diet of government-subsidized corn. Here again, we ignore nature's design. Not having evolved for such a diet, cattle end up living in a state of permanent illness, propped up and kept in the system by a permanent cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma is only too happy to fill in when nature is ignored.
Our education systems, seeking efficiency through standardization and conformity end up creating students who, just like their agricultural counterparts, are no longer well-adapted to their environment. Michael Pollan reminds us that, "Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over." Like corn planted in a monoculture, removed from the diversity that protects it, or cattle fed an unnatural diet of corn, students today are fed a standardized diet of procedures and reproducible facts. This educational monoculture does nothing to nourish minds that have evolved to seek diversity, novelty and stimulation.
Those numbed by disconnected ideas unrelated to their needs are soon labeled attention-deficient, unmotivated, substandard. Stimulants, antidepressants and impulse inhibitors are used to conform the human mind to a deformed system the same way herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics are used in agriculture's great disconnect. Like the corn-fed cow raised on an unnatural diet of corn, constantly anemic and never well but kept alive through the use of drugs, students raised on disconnected facts, numbing routines, and endless testing often find themselves on the receiving end of a medical prescription. Those who don't have the stomach for such unsatisfying fare, who prefer not to be chemically altered, who'd rather have a more free-range existence, are eventually "counseled out". Simply put: they have not met the required production quotas of a system designed for scalable throughput.
In standardized environments, students with a high tolerance for monotony and the ability to repress their curious gene are deemed the fittest of the bunch. Strangely, curiosity, a trait nature has selected for and which has served us well, seems to be selected against in schools. Blue ribbon students grow their grade point averages en route to graduation and a chance to compete in the "real world". Their farm analogues, purposed for industry, have been selected to tolerate crowding, pesticides, sameness--but most importantly--to be high yielding. The corn farmer with the most bushels per acre is acclaimed for his skill at converting petrochemicals into grain. The feedlot operator's profits depend on how efficiently he can turn grain into meat. The highest ranked schools floss in the knowledge that they can efficiently convert standards and routines into high test scores. Along the way, little thought is given to the soil that is depleted in the field, to the groundwater being spoiled by the feedlot, or to the creativity and innovation being extinguished in the classroom. How productive is all this productivity?
It seems that despite (or maybe because of) our fetish with productivity, many of humanity's most pressing issues seem to be getting worse. The unnatural selection playing out in schools creates what every educational institution's mission statement pledges against: the creation of uncritical, passive, challenge-averse individuals, unwilling and unable to tackle the challenges of the 21st-century. It's simple to blame the students for being unproductive or unmotivated, for lacking curiosity. Indeed, they often are seen as the problem, especially by those who've designed the system. Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, however, reminds us that "the seed of poverty is in the institutions we have made, not in the person." With more effort and an inward gaze we'd see the deeper connections. We'd see students acting rationally in environments that ignore their evolutionary history. We'd understand that avoiding challenges and dropping out are simply logical responses to a system that discourages risk-taking and too often treats curiosity as a challenge to authority.
In their quest for efficiency and value, consumers have failed to notice the creation of false economies. We are now using more energy (in the form of oil and gas) to produce a calorie of food than we ever have in our history. What nature used to do for free through biodiversity and solar power, now requires pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. In the bargain, our industrial agriculture is destroying our two most important environments: our bodies and our planet. Cheap food has led to obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease. Meat marinated in medicine and the effects it has on people (never mind the animals) never seems to make it into the cost-benefit analysis. Polluted air, toxic water and soil depletion are not billed at the supermarket register. Taxpayers, subsidizing the food that malnourishes them, complain little. Taxpayers, supporting educational systems that miseducate them, complain little. What's the true cost of an educational system which "through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over", causes mind and spirit to atrophy, suffocating students' natural desire to know? Maybe the biggest loss comes from the creation of generation after generation who cannot tell the difference between a bargain and a heist.
Michael Pollan writes, "Our food system depends on consumers' not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing." Education today requires the same relationship. Educational policies seem to display a meager understanding about the importance of curiosity, awareness, or how we fit into larger systems. Education's checkout scanner--tuition and taxes--provide only a partial accounting of its true costs. Similar to industrial farming, industrial education produces no bargains while diminishing itself in the process. The price of producing a "successful" student may be higher than we think.
-
William Farren: Interested in making education an instrument of well-being. Believes that schools, as the most important shapers of mental models, need to seriously retool in an effort to address the problems caused by dysfunctional economic models, biophobia, “nature-deficit disorder” and an immense lack of planetary situational awareness.
Keeps asking himself, "How is preparing students to enter a system that is at war with itself, preparing them for the future?"
More Duncanisms
Published June 17, 2009 @ 07:53AM PT
Do I like reading and writing about our Secretary of Education's words and performance? Depressingly, for this once-hopeful Obamaniac, no. I don't. Here's another example of why:
In a recent interview, Secretary Duncan discussed how he went about assembling his team, targeting people like Ms. Melendez who came from modest backgrounds, had a passion for the work, and showed an entrepreneurial spirit—and were willing to take what was likely a big pay cut to work in a federal job. No education policy or district superstars with big egos were welcome, he said.
“If they’re scared off because they won’t make more money ... or if they wanted a certain job title, ... that’s not the kind of person we want,” Mr. Duncan said. “We want people for whom this is a real passion. This is mission-driven work. Everyone is taking pay cuts.”
Ms. Melendez, by the way, is Duncan's appointee for K-12 chief. Her experience?
She got her superintendent’s job, in California’s 30,000-student Pomona Unified School District, through a nontraditional route: She spent a year and a half at a private education foundation before winning a spot in the 2006 Broad Superintendents Academy, which trains emerging district leaders.
So she takes a "pay cut" in the "entrepreneurial spirit" - can we start a wiki of Duncanisms? - via her shortcut to the top on the tuxedo coattails of billionaire AIG crony and ed meddler Eli Broad. Call me crazy, but you'd think people who were "education policy superstars," who spent their lives in classrooms and later in research, would qualify as "passionate" more than the "missionaries" with an "entrepreneurial spirit." People like, you know, Linda Darling-Hammond, who's devoted her life to knowing through research how to improve education, rather than taking a left turn from entrepreneurialism out of some "money + passion = change you can believe in" zeal.
[Update: Tom Hoffman comments that Melendez has decades of classroom experience before her stint as a superintendent, and suggests she deserves a chance. We wish her well. The point I was trying to make here is that Duncan's rhetoric smacks of a sort of anti-intellectualism and pro-entrepreneurialism, and his staff picks reflect that as well. His DoE staffers are overwhelmingly connected more to Eli Broad and Bill Gates than to universities and classrooms.]
In light of all of this, it's no surprise that the new national standards in the works for math and reading are being written not by teachers, not by academics, but by
Achieve, a Washington-based group made up of state policymakers and business leaders; act Inc., the Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit organization that runs the college-entrance exam of the same name; and the College Board, the New York City-based sponsor of the sat admissions exam and the Advanced Placement program.
--ed businesses all. Achieve* is run by politicians and businesspeople; Iowa City and the College Board need no introduction, as we've all filled bubbles for them in our careers to show our learning. You can bet none of these entrepreneurs are thinking pay cuts in the long term. Think of the new tests possible with national standards.
Secretary Duncan, if you want "passion" and "mission-driven," why are you excluding the exemplars of those qualities - the people who've devoted their lives to the work, and never had much room in their salaries for pay cuts because it was never about the money for them? They offer value-added qualities that your entrepreneurs don't: life-long experience, knowledge, and dedication.
--
*A previous error has been corrected here, which mistook Achieve for a different Achieve. "Achieve" is a popular name for folks in the education business.
Newsweek high school rankings: invalid money-makers
Published June 11, 2009 @ 02:43PM PT
Newsweek Magazine has once again compromised both credibility and ethics by releasing its annual high school rankings feature. The "rankings" are based on one single measure - one that is invalid as a gauge of quality and simply does not measure how "good" a high school is. They also violate journalistic ethics, as the gauge is one that directly promotes increased profits for an enterprise run by Newsweek's parent company.
The rankings are based entirely on the single criterion of how many AP (or two other similar) tests are taken by the students in the school. That's it. How the students perform on the tests is not part of the equation.
Newsweek's description: "Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by [reporter/editor] Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate (IB) and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors."
This is so clearly not a valid gauge of a school's quality that it's hardly worth wasting words explaining. The criterion is also subject to easy manipulation, needless to say.
Here's why this feature compromises Newsweek's ethics. Newsweek's parent company, the Washington Post, also owns Kaplan, the test prep powerhouse. It's also hardly necessary to explain that encouraging more students to take AP tests directly correlates with increasing Kaplan's business.
Standard journalistic ethics call for avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest. The Newsweek high school rankings emblazon the appearance of conflict of interest across the heavens.
An increasing chorus of dissenters complains each year about this feature - including some of the "winners." In May 2008, the superintendents of 38 high-performing school districts signed a letter to Newsweek protesting the feature and requesting that their districts be excluded (a toothless request, but a meaningful gesture). This year, a top education reporter in Dallas - the location of two of the top-ranked schools - questioned the rankings' credibility.
It's not just time-wasting but also harmful to pass authoritative-looking judgments on schools based on invalid criteria. Meanwhile, with the very survival of the news media under threat, journalistic credibility is one asset the media should struggle to keep. Newsweek is making a big mistake to compromise its ethics so shamelessly. The magazine needs to eliminate and renounce this corrupt and damaging feature.
Charters Erase Achievement Gap through Innovative ... Cheating
Published June 10, 2009 @ 07:38PM PT
Three cheers for this charter school network's silver bullet to erase the achievement gap: cheat on the standardized tests. Or so the evidence suggests:
In the past, parents languished on waiting lists before enrolling their kids in Hernandez's [Cesar Chavez Network] schools. Regularly recognized for excellence in serving mostly low-income kids, Hernandez's schools earned a nod from President George W. Bush in 2007 for "closing the achievement gap." The Chavez network was considered innovative, even inspiring.
Is it? Here are some things to consider before enrolling your kid.
Possible CSAP abuses
Cesar Chavez schools in Pueblo are part of Pueblo City Schools (PCS). Elsewhere, they're members of the Colorado Charter School Institute. All of them, like most public schools, are assessed to a large degree on students' test scores.
Robert Vise, PCS executive director of assessment and technology, says he stumbled upon some eyebrow-raising information regarding the 2008 Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) test scores at Pueblo's Cesar Chavez Academy. According to data Vise received from the state, more than 60 percent of the Academy's 684 third- through eighth-grade students were given special accommodations for the test, such as extra time to complete it. These accommodations normally are afforded only to children with established physical or developmental disabilities.
All 220 students in fourth and fifth grades were given special accommodations in the test's reading portion, Vise says, and all but two also received special accommodations on the math portion.
"I've never had a whole grade level at a school have accommodations," Vise says.
The figures were jarring, particularly because Vise's own records suggested a small fraction of the children had qualifying disabilities, and a significant number were actually classified as being "gifted."
[....] In 2005, [John] Brainard, then the Pueblo district's director of assessment and research, documented four phone calls from concerned parents of CCA third-graders, all relating the same story: Their children said CCA staff had brought them into a "CSAP review" following the test, and encouraged them to change some answers.
Along with staff from CTB-McGraw-Hill, CSAP's creators, Brainard was allowed to examine written answers on CSAP reading tests for Chavez's third-graders. Although no one ever accused the Chavez kids of cheating, significant erasures or changes were found in 62 percent of the tests, and some new answers appeared to be done in different handwriting.
Despite the evidence, the test results were never revised. (Read the rest...)
Silly Colorado. Instead of cheating to boost test scores, they could boost them honestly, a la New York, by dumbing down their state tests.
Oh never mind. As Joel Klein and Arne Duncan never tire of telling us, the fact that parents are on waiting lists to get their kids into these schools is proof not of their successful and highly-financed marketing campaigns, but of their quality.
(h/t Susan Ohanion)
Photo by Mr_Stein
A Sliver of Hope re: Arne Duncan
Published June 02, 2009 @ 08:39AM PT
From the "I Sat Through an Hour-and-a-Half of Education Wonkery at the Brookings Institution So You Wouldn't Have To" Department:
EdSec Duncan was the guest of honor at a Brookings Institution discussion on May 11. I watched the video last week. He only stayed for about 25 minutes, long enough to give a speech and answer a couple of questions before excusing himself, and leaving his senior advisor to field the tougher questions over the next hour. I wish he'd stayed to answer them himself.
Duncan outlined his four priorities for ed reform, which is old news by now, but still significant.
I'm going to go out on a limb and argue that there's a bit of hope in all the gloom, because a) I do see glimmers; and b) I'm tired of the gloom. Set me straight if you think I'm being a pollyanna.
Here are the first two, straight from the secretary's mouth, followed by commentary. I'll finish the last two in a follow-up.
1. "We must build data systems that measure growth, link student achievement to teacher quality, and tell us whether students are on track to graduate ready for college." "
Duncan notes later that these data systems can also link teachers to their colleges of education. All of this disturbs the bejeesus out of many of us who think it will "incent" teachers to teach to the test - "down-dumbing the students while up-pumping their scores," as e.e. cummings might put it. It's also a warning shot that colleges of education that don't pump out teachers able to pump up those scores will be punished or shut down, which again disturbs because it "incents" those colleges to stop training teachers, and instead train test-prep coaches. One last bejeesus: students themselves will be incented to either hate school for turning into a Kaplan center, or to conceive of intelligence and learning as getting high grades on tests - or both. The testing and scripted curriculum industries, though, must be feeling tingles up their legs and having visions of sugarplums as they listen to this talk. Merry Christmas to them all.
But that glimmer of hope against this worst- (and, I fear, probable-) case scenario comes in the second priority:
2. "We must improve the quality of standards and assessments so that students are leaving our schools ready to succeed in college and prepare to contribute in the workforce."
Again, scary: national standards can go wrong in a million ways. They can ignore the local profile of student populations that make achieving a standard in, say, a predominantly middle-class, native English-speaking suburb reasonable, but unreasonable in, say, a school or district in an area of high poverty or major refugee populations. They can sacrifice rigor and relevance to political expediency or ideology, as happened in the '90s when national history standards were attempted. Add your own trainwreck below.
But... Duncan has elsewhere fleshed out his idea of "improved" standards in ways similar to Linda Darling-Hammond, emphasizing a desire for "fewer" and "leaner" standards along the lines of Finland and other high-performing countries. If the initiative moves in that direction, and leaves room for local decisions and curriculum choices beyond those "few" national ones, maybe disaster is not a foregone conclusion.
And the inclusion of improved "assessments" alongside "standards" is also good to see - if Duncan's ideas of good assessment are sound. Again, Linda Darling-Hammond's research in best (performance-based) assessment practices around the world would be a great thing to see Duncan promoting with his deep federal pockets. It he does that, then the whole "teach to the test" scenario mentioned above could go from bejeesus - teaching to timed bubble-sheets measuring knowledge of inert data topped off with 20-minute essays written on stupid canned prompts - to hosanna: teaching problem-solving, applying knowledge, and honest-to-god thinking, analyzing, evaluating, and even, god help us, creating.
So we wait and see and - what else can we do, at this point? - hope.
More on priorities three and four soon - and a funny moment of egg-in-the-face on a Brookings "expert" who pooh-poohed technology's promise at the end of that discussion.
Let's Standardize This Marshmallow Test for Kindergarteners
Published May 30, 2009 @ 01:06PM PT
Marshmallows are sort of bubbly, so don't let your bias for bubble-tests dissuade you, College Board: there may be a way to mark up the marshmallows and make a pretty penny off this. We can use it to look 2nd-graders in the eye and tell them they're not on track for college.
(Seriously, this 5-minute video is worth a watch for both its psychological suggestions and its comedy. Kids do the darnedest things.)
.
Video: Six Reasons Value-Added "Growth Model" Teacher Evaluations are Unfair
Published May 28, 2009 @ 06:29AM PT
University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham tipped me off to his latest video, on one of EdSec Arne Duncan's pet subjects: "Merit Pay, Teacher Pay, and Value Added Measures." Willingham gives "six reasons in three minutes" that the idea of evaluating teachers by the value-added "growth model," as reasonable as it sounds, is still unfair. Worth a watch, and good for a couple of chuckles to boot. (I wonder if Perez Hilton plans to sue.)
Besides Dan's six, what other flaws in this idea can you add?
.
