All posts in Education Policy

With all of the talk of education reform that has been swirling around over the last few years, we wanted to put together a glossary to help the uninitiated through the coded language of education reform. Our hope is that this handy guide will help laypeople and expert alike become more proficient in reform-speak.

• educational expert - any person used as a source in any mainstream media story. One can tell true experts because the names of the experts are always followed by the words, "Educational Expert." This helps distinguish them from the pandering, amateur class, also known as "educational bloggers."

• disruptive innovation - fire teachers, replace them with technology
• bold reformer - any administrator at the district level or higher who advocates any combination of weakening collective bargaining, closing schools, turning schools over to for-profit charters, increased use of standardized assessments to measure academic progress, and firing anyone who disagrees. Bold reformers usually require a good PR team to publicize their boldness, and to blunt the inevitable charges of testing scandals that follow these bold reformers like flies on carrion
• visionary leader - see bold reformer.
• group of thought leaders - millionaires/billionaires with no educational experience, but lots of ideas on how to fix the broken educational system. See also: the educational system is broken
• the educational system is broken - I have a product to sell that will make a lot of money, and if I can convince enough people that the educational system is broken, people will buy it
• robo graders are just as accurate as human graders - if we reduce all writing down to the scripted essays required on standardized assessments, then mechanical graders can be used to grade mechanical writing. See also: disruptive innovation; and the educational system is broken
• all students deserve access to the same educational opportunities - if we narrow the curriculum down to the common core standards (thank you, textbook companies!), and use prefabricated standardized assessments (thank you, textbook companies!) to evaluate students, and we get policymakers to agree that this is what public education reform looks like (thank you, lobbyists for textbook companies!) then all public schools will no longer have the time or resources to teach arts, health, music, physical fitness, or any other enrichment programs, and all students will have the same access to the same insufficiently narrow set of educational resources. Except, of course, for the rich kids.
• all high school students must take at least one online course in order to graduate - a new form of corporate welfare where legislators require that students take some of their classes online. This creates millions of new potential customers for existing online schools, and drains money from districts.
• teachers must be held accountable - teachers need to be fired if standardized test scores don't increase.
• policymakers, pundits, and think tanks must be held accountable for ludicrous policies and ideas - just kidding! I threw that in to see if you were paying attention.

This short glossary is far from comprehensive. If there are additional terms that should be added, please leave them in the comments.

Image Credit: "Dictionary Treeson" taken by Nina Helmer, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has done a review of cheating on tests in school districts across the country. The results aren't pretty.

A tainted and largely unpoliced universe of untrustworthy test results underlies bold changes in education policy, the findings show. The tougher teacher evaluations many states are rolling out, for instance, place more weight than ever on tests.

And, cue the folks who miss the point entirely:

Daria Hall, director of k-12 policy with the nonprofit The Education Trust, said education officials should take steps to ensure the validity of test results because of the critical role they play in policy and practice.

“If we are going to make important decisions based on test results — and we ought to be doing that — we have to make important decisions about how we are going to ensure their trustworthiness,” she said. “That means districts and states taking ownership of the test security issue in a way that they haven’t to date.”

No. This is not about test security (read: another unfunded mandate for schools to enforce a system of assessment that has never worked all that well, even before it was pushed front and center into education policy. Read: another "growth opportunity" for "educational services providers" who will supply a that guarantees your tests are completely, totally secure).

This is about designing assessment that can't be cheated, and about not tying pay - for both teachers and administrators - to performance on flawed, oversimplified assessments. Portfolios come to mind as an option that would reflect the experience of learners within their class, provide a clear and accurate representation of growth and learning.

However, the argument against portfolios would have us believe that they are just too expensive and time consuming.

But what's more expensive? Running a good portfolio system that works, or paying for tests that are imprecise measures of a small subset of what people actually learn.

What's more time consuming? Running a good portfolio system that works, or dedicating class time to teaching the test, taking the test, and trying to catch the cheaters after the fact.

To all the people who get a lot of attention for saying that our educational system is broken: please stop, and consider that our assessment system is broken, and is getting in the way of student learning.

You're not saving money or time when what you buy is broken. You're not assessing more efficiently when people can sidestep your efficiency measures. You're not measuring good performance when people cheat their way to the top.

Image Credit: "What the hell is a cheater pen anyway?" taken by DigitalCellulose, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.

In his most recent Sunday column, Nicholas Kristof again wades into discussing education. This week, Kristof discusses the story of Olly Neal; When Neal was in high school in the 50's, he described himself as a "troubled high school senior" turned reader turned law student turned judge turned member of the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

Kristof opens his piece with a link to a study that used value-added methodology to determine that good elementary school teachers can make a difference.

He then goes on to the story of Olly Neal - and the story of Olly Neal is a great story.

Earlier in his high school career - as recounted in the Kristof article, Olly Neal

remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.

“I was not a nice kid,” he recalls. “I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry.”

Later in his high school career, Neal cut another teacher's class and went into the school library, where Mildred Grady also worked. While there, he saw a book with a picture of a scantily clad woman on the cover - The Treasure of Pleasant Valley by Frank Yerby - and, as he didn't want to be known as someone who actually checked out books from the library, he stole the book. He brought it home, read it, and loved it, and returned to the library, where he found another Yerby novel.

And he stole that too.

And then, another.

And then, another.

According to the story on NPR about Olly Neal, Neal "read four of Yerby's books that semester — checking out none of them."

Later, at one of his high school reunions, Grady let Neal know that the supply of Yerby books was no accident. As described in the NPR story:

"She told me that she saw me take that book when I first took it," Neal said.

"She said, 'My first thought was to go over there and tell him, boy, you don't have to steal a book, you can check them out — they're free.'

"Then she realized what my situation was — that I could not let anybody know I was reading."

Grady told Neal she decided that if he was showing an interest in books, "she and Mrs. Saunders would drive to Memphis and find another one for me to read — and they would put it in the exact same place where the one I'd taken was."

And this is one of the ways that great teaching manifests itself: in meeting a kid where they are at, and by providing them opportunities that they are able to reach. At times, great teaching also means taking a look at the rules that are in place, and understanding that the potential success of one particular kid means breaking or ignoring those rules.

Kristof takes the story of Olly Neal and attempts to bend it to support a preconceived narrative.

The implication is that we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers.

Unfortunately, this interpretation doesn't align with Olly Neal's story. In fact, Olly Neal's story illustrates the weaknesses of the exact types of evaluations that Kristof celebrates.

Mildred Grady was interacting with Neal in her role as a librarian, not in a teaching capacity. In a value-added assessment, Neal's other teachers - and NOT Grady - would receive the credit for any improvements made by Neal.

In fairness, Kristof also says, "there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer." But, no one is really arguing that. We can burn that straw man. This is about the same as someone declaring, "Reducing poverty is predicted to improve the nation's financial well-being."

Of course good teachers are part of the answer. And, of course, fair and rigorous teacher evaluations are part of the process of determining what makes teachers more effective. But, the successes of Mildred Grady - and the thousands of teachers who do similar things in difficult situations - don't fit into the types of evaluations that are being pushed as the cornerstones for measuring teacher effectiveness. Driving to Memphis to buy books for one kid to steal doesn't translate directly into a kid having success on the scantron - but this type of thoughtful, targeted attention is essential to the success of individual people.

I recently talked with another teacher who works in a high poverty school. This teacher works in special education, and their school has been on the cusp of not making Adequate Yearly Progress (or AYP) for several years.

In this teacher's class, there were three children who were on the verge of passing the test. Two of these children had diagnosed special needs, and had a primary language other than English. A third student also had a diagnosed special need and had a primary language other than English, but also had a physical disability, was on the free and reduced lunch program, and had been placed in foster care.

This teacher's principal approached the classsroom teacher around six weeks before the test with some explicit instructions: focus on the kid with the physical disability, and don't worry about the other two.

This administrator had done the math: according to the metric that determined a school's progress, the school would get more points toward AYP if the one student with more pronounced learning disabilities passed than if the other two students passed. In short, if the one kid passed and the other two failed, the school would look better on paper. This administrator had broken down the math on a class by class basis, and was giving his teachers - schoolwide - instructions on how to "succeed."

The teacher, who had tenure, told the administrator where to go. The teacher paid for this "disobedience" in the form of less than stellar evaluations.

So, when people like Nick Kristof call for more rigorous teacher evaluations, we need to be clear that one aspect of tying teacher evaluations to test scores leads to some people attempting to game the system.

Nick Kristof justly celebrated the creativity and caring of Mildred Grady. What types of evaluation measure the excellence of people like her? Portfolio-based professional development comes to mind as one option, but accurate, reliable, rigorous teacher evaluations involves improved education policy.

Improved education policy needs to look at education, poverty, and health as equally important elements to be addressed.

Nicholas Kristof has a piece in today's NY Times titled The Value of Teachers. In this piece he points to a recent comprehensive study that looks at the earning gains for students who have "good" teachers.

The money quote comes in the third paragraph:

That’s right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year’s students, just in the extra income they will earn.

Kristof buries the fact that the study is based on value-added methodology and conflates student performance on test scores with good teaching. He alludes to value-added in the 11th paragraph, but never actually addresses the fact that test scores and value added analysis aren't infallible.

The study authors (and this piece shouldn't detract from the worth and value of the study, which merits a read) are clear on this, even though Kristof is not. The executive summary (pdf download) of the study leads with a discussion of value added analysis:

Researchers have not reached a consensus about the accuracy and long-term impacts of VA because of data and methodological limitations.

The researchers conclude that, for their study, value-added analysis is a valid tool, as they look at over a million students from 4th grade to adulthood. As I said earlier, the study is a good read.

However, in his article on the study, Kristof uses false equivalencies:

Conversely, a very poor teacher has the same effect as a pupil missing 40 percent of the school year. We don’t allow that kind of truancy, so it’s not clear why we should put up with such poor teaching.

Truancy and the quality of a teacher are two very separate things. Conflating them here serves a rhetorical purpose (truancy = bad; bad teaching = truancy) but aside from being an interesting rhetorical gimmick, it just doesn't make sense.

The piece also commits one of the standard mistakes made in many pieces about teacher quality: it assumes that there is an objectively "good" teacher that will work for every kid in every class. The reality is (and people who have worked in school with kids can attest to this) different teachers connect with different kids. Sally's great teacher will be Jimmy's average teacher. We're dealing with human beings here, and human experiences differ.

However, the main (intentional?) oversight in the piece is the complete inattention to the elephant in the room in the school reform debate. If a kid comes from an upper middle class or higher in the socioeconomic ladder, they will attend one of the best schools in the world, in the United States Public School System. The "crisis" in public education is not present in high-rent zip codes. So, when we talk about the problems facing public education, let's situate them honestly. They are connected to issues of poverty, and issues of health, and in many cases, to problems surrounding food insecurity.

Kristof alludes to the importance of poverty, but then dismisses the importance of the issue as something that can be undone by good teachers:

we need an array of other antipoverty measures as well, especially early childhood programs. But the evidence is now overwhelming that even in a grim high-poverty school, some teachers have far more impact on their students than those in the classroom next door.

In the piece, Kristof declares that the problems facing education have an "obvious" solution:

The obvious policy solution is more pay for good teachers, more dismissals for weak teachers.

Wouldn't it be awesome if it was that simple? Unfortunately, the realist in me has a hard time believing that poverty and inequal access to quality education can be solved just by giving good teachers a raise. Until we start talking about education, poverty, and health together, as three related issues, the "obvious" solutions will obscure our vision of the hard challenges we need to overcome.

And part of that discussion needs to include what happens to education when good teachers are forced to work under the limits of bad policy.

Image Credit: "Ms. Powaga - Fifth Grade, an Oasis in the Desert" taken by Michael 1952, published under an Attribution license.