Standardized Tests & Progress Reports ==> Less Challenging, Enriching Curriculum?

This dovetails really nicely with the more general critique I posted of curricular standards a month or so ago:

Getting an F or a D led schools to assign fewer essays, projects

by Elizabeth Green

When the Bloomberg administration announced it would assign every public school a letter grade, based largely on test scores, critics worried the grades would lead to a “drill and kill” approach to teaching. Forced to raise test scores, they said, schools might avoid teaching creativity and problem-solving in favor of focusing on basic skills. New research suggests that the critics worries may have come true — but the researchers don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Bad Science in Education

Deborah Meier from Bridging Differences has a good post about painting a picture of what education could be, as a means of motivating society to put forth the necessary resources to attain it.  She references Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, a book claiming that differences in education achievement are function of innate intelligence, or IQ, and that white kids achieve more than black kids because they are innately smarter.

We both know that on the biggest question—of human potential—Murray is dead wrong. It takes only one example to prove that point. It is no longer a matter of hope or faith for me, but experience. Although one example doesn’t demonstrate how it can be done on a larger scale.

But this post - by a pretty big figure in the education community - makes an elementary statistical error.  Murray claims that the white kid bell curve is shifted several points to the right of the black kid bell curve, so that the typical white kid is smarter than the typical black kid; he does not say all white kids are smarter than all black kids.  In fact, the graph below demonstrates that his own argument requires that almost 50% of black kids are smarter than almost 50% of white kids.

Now, I happen to think Murray is wrong too.  But when people make mistakes like Meier, it makes people like Murray appear more credible, and I think all of this underscores the lack of attention the education community places on mathematical or scientific literacy (perhaps because so few of us have math and science backgrounds).

The more compelling argument against Murray is one mentioned by cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker in The Blank Slate: which is that while population sub-group IQs can be different at a given point in time, they tend to converge in the long run.  And in fact, this is what has happened to most American immigrant groups, suggesting that differences in sub-group IQs are environmental rather than innate.

Klein and Sharpton Write Obama

In today's WSJ Joel Klein and Al Sharpton give the President-Elect two education policy recommendations: develop national standards and devote most of the federal money we have now to recruiting and retaining high quality teachers in high-need areas.

First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests. Even when students manage to graduate from today's inner-city high schools, they all too frequently are still wholly unprepared for college or gainful employment.

Second, the federal government should take most of the more than $30 billion it now spends on K-12 education and reposition the funding to support the recruitment and retention of the best teachers in underserved urban schools. High-poverty urban schools have many teachers who make heroic efforts to educate their students. But there is no reward for excellence in inner-city schools when an outstanding science teacher earns the same salary as a mediocre phys-ed instructor.

Neat Anti-Testing Summary

Quoted from Schools Matter:

As Cal State professor, Art Costa, has said, "What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value."

Comment on Scarsdale and AP

I got a new comment on Scarsdale's decision to ditch the Advanced Placement curriculum that I want to respond to. Here's the comment:

No offense, but this post misses some important points. Scarsdale is one of the most well off school districts in the country.
...
I agree, at a very high level of academic achievement, standardized testing winds up inhibiting the very best teachers and students.
...
But most schools aren't Scarsdale. These schools are not hitting the ceiling that standardized tests create.

The problems with the AP curriculum and other breadth-intensive standardized tests isn't limited to just the best schools. To see why, think about why we even want students to study, say, history. Here's my short and inexhaustive list:

• It allows them to draw lessons from the past to inform the present
• It develops their critical thinking, analytical, and writing abilities
• It helps them become better citizens
• It develops a foundation of historical and cultural literacy that enhances and informs future learning

Standardized tests and the curricula they impose are inconsistent with these ends. These exams cover an incredible amount of information and offer little opportunity to "do history" in depth. This in depth work is what meets those four objectives.

The problem with standards requiring mastery of hoards of facts is that students spend too much time on remembering and understanding information, and too little time analyzing, evaluating, and creating it. This comic from xkcd illustrates my point:

Most people learn the most and learn most meaningfully when engaged in deep and interesting material, and when they learn by doing I learned more about politics and government from high school debate and mock trial than I did in US History or Government; I learned more about statistical analysis doing my undergraduate research than I did in econometrics or my political science research course.

History as an academic subject is valuable largely because of its applicability to the present. Robert Samuelson reminds us that the seemingly obscure theory of mercantilism informs current international trade behavior; a recently declassified history of the use of nuclear weapons informs our analysis of nuclear deterrence. And Thucydides' history of the Melian dialogue is still probably the best explanation of how states behave in the international system.

Learning history is not nearly as exciting or applicable when kids spend most of their time "remembering" and "understanding" facts. Granted, higher level analysis requres a foundation of knowledge, but the point is that current curricula have these out of proportion.

Many kids come in to high school with literacy skills too low to both (a) remember enough facts to pass the test and (b) engage in more meaningful learning. Student creativity, student led learning, and higher order thinking become the province of rich suburban kids. I think it's a worthwhile trade off to require a narrower breadth of knowledge for the sake of deeper learning.

But suppose that all kids came into high school with Scarsdale-like literacy levels. I know that at least for me, I would have preferred history classes that were student-driven and project-oriented. I would gladly give up 50% of the AP Euro fact-regurgitation requirement for projects allowing me to explore cool parts of history. Its easy to make the argument that this is what electives are for; but if you visit at an at-need school, you'll see that its hard to do this when there's so much institutional pressure to focus on the test.

When opponents of standardized tests come up with a better way to accurately and consistently assess student performance across schools, I'll gladly embrace it. Til then, I'll continue to support AP, SAT, ACT, NCLB, etc. - Dank

I agree we need easily comparable measures of student performance for accountability and resource sharing. I like how the AP Art exam requires a portfolio of student work; I think something comparable should exist for other classes. Standardized assessments can be modified to accommodate the outputs of constructivist learning in an objective fashion. As an idea of what this would look like, think about how theses and creating writing classes are graded. At my school, student project grades are determined by an average of many different teachers' rubric scores.

No Child Left Behind

A recent article in NEA Today highlights some important trends in national test scores and argues that NCLB hasn't made anything better. Take a look at these 2 graphs:



Some thoughts on how this happened:

What happened to make that possible? The War on Poverty? School desegregation? Shrinking class size? Head Start and other new school programs? Maybe all of the above.

Now compare that to education reform in the era of NCLB:

Letter to a Marxist

I recently had a discussion about systemic explanations for education inequality with someone who said that a main (or the main) reason why we have systemic education inequality is that the ruling class does not want an educated proletariat for fear of it disrupting the social order. In other words, if poor people were educated, they would uproot the social structure, make it more equal, and cut into the wealth of elites. We both stipulated that America has the resources to radically improve education, but isn't doing it. This is part of an email I wrote in response:

My problem with this claim is that I think it doesn't have the same evidential support of more simple, competing theories: namely, subtle racism, the self-interest of taxpayers, and structural policy failure.

At the most simple level, we can observe visible incidences of racism: racial epithets, lynchings, hate crimes; and we reasonably infer that less visible racism exists. I grew up in very blue collar communities, and I got the general sense that a lot of blue collar white people feel they get taxed for working hard so minorities can get handouts for being lazy. There is also a solid body of economic research explaining wealth redistribution vis-a-vis welfare on racial terms: people of race A are more likely to support wealth redistribution if the recipients are also people of race A. I also think you underestimate most Americans' dislike of the taxes requried to improe education. Finally, I think think there are also systemic or structural forces that undermine good education policy. For one, the money needed for the reforms you cited is only available at the national level, but the structure of education is that its locally controlled. Many people oppose uprooting local control on the grounds that locally controlled schools allow for flexibility, or on federalism grounds. Up until recently, any such federal intervention would have been vigorously opposed on federalism grounds to protect federalism so states could be racist. And many, many conservatives in congress philosophically oppose the broad reach of the federal government (it's why most of the legal support for the medical marijuana case Gonzales v. Raich came from the conservative legal community on 10th Amendment and interstate commerce clause grounds).

Having said all this, I have never heard anyone "corporate" explicitly say or otherwise indicate that they don't want poor kids to be educated; but I have heard people say "black people are lazy,"; and Rush Limbaugh has publicly broadcast that America's drug problem is the product of weak-willed minorities. On the other side, many corporations and figureheads give back to education. The President of Goldman Sachs (Jon Winkelried), for example, is personally very involved with education because his son is special-ed. Small schools - for better or worse - are partially funded by the Gates Foundation. And corporations systemically donate to education over many other philanthropic causes.

Now, it's possible that these are all features of the superstructure and that Winkelried and Gates have deluded themselves with a false consciousness, but I can't help but be sceptical of such a non-falsifiable proposition (however meaningful the narrative or elegant the theory) in the face of simpler, empirically supported theories.

I guess my question to you is, what reasons do you have for believing that this Marxist oppression hypothesis is a better explanation of education inequality than these other simple - and it seems to me better evidenced - explanations?

Teach for America and Teacher Quality

Over the last 3 years my school hired 6 Teach for America teachers and 2 left before completing their two year commitment (one after a year, one after a semester).  Many education reformers believe the quality of education is inadequate because the best and brightest choose other professions over education and so the remaining pool of teachers is less than what we need.  TFA recruits and accepts people largely based on GPA and extracurricular achievement; the best and the brightest will be the best teachers.  And it's a compelling argument that an ivy graduate will learn a new skill faster than someone from a community college.

The two teachers who quit were truly cream of the crop: great schools, great achievements, great resumes.  (I don't know if other teachers quit at lower or higher rates.)  TFA in NYC averages about a 90% retention rate over the 2 year committment.  While external achievement may proxy successfuly for teaching achievement in the aggregate, there is a lot of variation too.

Many educators say that it takes 5 years to be a good teacher, and despite all of the public rhetoric on intrinsic ability determining teaching quality, both the Obama and McCain education plans focused on speeding teachers' ascent of the learning curve. 

Here is the text from the Obama plan:

• Expand service scholarships to underwrite high-quality preparation for teachers.
• Support ongoing improvements in teacher education to enable teachers to meet the challenges of their demanding jobs,
• Provide mentoring for beginning teachers so that more of them stay in teaching and develop sophisticated skills.
• Create incentives for shared planning and learning time for teachers.
• Support career pathways in participating districts that provide ongoing professional development and reward accomplished teachers for their expertise.

And here is the text from the McCain Plan (go figure the McCain website is down, but I still had his education platform saved as a pdf):

Provide Funding For Needed Professional Teacher Development. Where federal funds are involved, teacher development money should be used to enhance the ability of teachers to perform in today's technology driven environment. We need to provide teachers with high quality professional development opportunities with a primary focus on instructional strategies that address the academic needs of their students. The first 35 percent of Title II funding would be directed to the school level so principals and teachers could focus these resources on the specific needs of their schools.

One of the things that makes me uncomfortable in the education community is that these two approaches to maximizing teacher quality are often seen as mutually exclussive.  I hardly ever hear people in the TFA camp acknowledging the importance of experience and professional development, or education traditionalists even acknowledging the existence of intrinsic human capital (excpet indirectly when complaining about other teachers).

Even supposing an extreme version of the alternative-certification narrative (read: teaching achievement is primarily determined by intrinsic ability as measured by traditional indicators), there is still an upper limit on the amount of the "best and brightest" we can lure away from other fields.  To wit: even if we get all the best and brightest, they will still be only a fraction of the overall community of teachers, and the traditional focus on teacher quality improvement, classroom-size reduction, etc. still seems necessary to close the achievement gap.

Groundbreaking Charter School Research

There isn't a lot of rigorous scientific research in education.  A big problem is an inability to conduct truly randomized studies; another problem is that ed schools don't really train teachers in scientific research and statistical analysis.  So when stuff like this comes around it deserves our attention.  A Harvard Education Professor teamed up with an MIT Economics professor to come up with one of the better studies I've seen.

Key findings below:

For elementary Pilot School students, a significant impact was seen in English Language Arts scores, but not for math scores.  In middle school, the observational results suggest Pilot School students may actually lose ground when compared to their peers in traditional schools, while the lottery-based results showed no difference between Pilot School and traditional school performance. At the high school level, observational results showed significant improvement of performance by both charter and pilot school students, compared to student performance in traditional schools. The lottery-based study, however, showed no significant difference between high school students in Pilot School and high school students in traditional schools.

Among other key findings of the report: the impact of charter schools was particularly dramatic in middle school math. The effect of a single year spent in a charter school was equivalent to half of the black-white achievement gap. Performance in English Language Arts also significantly increased for charter middle school students, though less dramatically. Charter students also showed stronger performance scores in high school, in English Language Arts, math, writing topic development, and writing composition.  Students in pilot high schools also made measurable progress.

Recession Hits Detroit Elementary School

Maybe education needs a bailout:

DETROIT -- A Detroit elementary school is asking for donations of toilet paper and light bulbs to keep their school functioning.

The principal of the Academy of Americas sent a letter to staff, parents and partners asking for donations of items "that are of the utmost importance for proper school functioning and most importantly for student health and safety."

In the letter, Principal Naomi Khalil cited budget constraints within the district as the reason why the school could no longer stock the items.

Obama in the Center

As we move forward into the Obama administration, I am increasingly happy about his actual practice of post-partisan politics.  We should all hedge against a confirmation bias and critically examine whether his actions match his language, but it looks like the President-Elect is walking the walk.

Here's a great example from his announcement of his next Education Secretary, Arne Duncan.

For years, we've talked our education problems to death in Washington. But we've failed to act, stuck in the same tired debates that have stymied our progress and left schools and parents to fend for themselves -- Democrat versus Republican, vouchers versus the status quo, more money versus more reform -- all along failing to acknowledge that both sides have good ideas and good intentions.We can't continue like this. It's morally unacceptable for our children and economically untenable for America.

It's great to hear this coming from our nation's policy leader, and it's harder for me to understand how easily people dismiss arguments from the other side.  This is partially why it's hard for me to identify as a Democrat, even though I functionally am. There is a natural human desire to belong in something greater, and psychologists have produced a lot of evidence that we really like being around people who share our values and agree with us.  It's not hard to see the logical next step, which is that this emotional connective tissue undermines our ability to step back and criticize when criticism is warranted.  And when we spend so much time on demonizing the other party, it gets hard to reach out and talk.

The pettiness that undermines policy is also what makes it tougher for the kids I see every day.  It sounds absurd, but we still don't have a comprehensive education reform policy because... adults can't sit down and talk?  Really?

Here's hoping for a new beginning.

More Student Reaction to Slavery Book

"Mister, I really like this book.  I was reading it on the train like a white person."

More on Scarsdale's Decision to Cut AP

Education Notes Online has a good post on Scarsdale's move to nix Advanced Placement in favor of a more constructivist, student-centered curriculum.  Ed Notes responds to Joel Klein's position that kids need to develop basic skills before they can enjoy the benefits of an enriched education:

The primary motivation in reading development is a need to read and many kids who struggle don't feel that need. Reading in a world of test prep equals tedium and with the pressure and threats of being left back added, becomes an often joyless exercise.

Build an enriched curriculum and they will come. And improve their reading in surprising ways. Of course, there are often some techinical issues, like poor phonics, that may interfere in the process, but those are relatively easy to solve.

Michelle Rhee and TFA-style Education Reform

A good way to understand Teach For America and the standards based education reform movement is by reading this Time article on DC Superintendent and TFA Alum, Michelle Rhee.  Her approach to reform is summed up in a few key ideas:

• the quality of teachers is the most important factor for student success
  
• the quality of current teachers is low because unions make bad teachers unfireable and good teachers unrewardable
  
• students must be rigorously tested to make sure they are learning
  
• teachers must be rewarded and punished for their students' performance
  
• ed schools don't create good teachers; intelligent, competent people do
  

The article explains how Rhee has enacted her accountability based agenda:

In the year and a half she's been on the job, Rhee has made more changes than most school leaders--even reform-minded ones--make in five years. She has shut 21 schools--15% of the city's total--and fired more than 100 workers from the district's famously bloated 900-person central bureaucracy. She has dismissed 270 teachers. And last spring she removed 36 principals, including the head of the elementary school her two daughters attend in an affluent northwest-D.C. neighborhood.

It also showcases some good research backing Rhee's approach:

The data back up Rhee's obsession with teaching. If two average 8-year-olds are assigned to different teachers, one who is strong and one who is weak, the children's lives can diverge in just a few years, according to research pioneered by Eric Hanushek at Stanford. The child with the effective teacher, the kind who ranks among the top 15% of all teachers, will be scoring well above grade level on standardized tests by the time she is 11. The other child will be a year and a half below grade level--and by then it will take a teacher who works with the child after school and on weekends to undo the compounded damage. In other words, the child will probably never catch up.

But the article also reveals Rhee making some very polarizing comments.  Teachers unions often complain that standards reform people disparage the profession.  Rhetoric like this characterizes the debate:

"The thing that kills me about education is that it's so touchy-feely," she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn't respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. "People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job." [emphasis added]

This tone is problematic for standards based reform people and TFA.  I don't know in what other professional setting you can publicly and derisively mimic others in the workplace.  Many New York City teachers, including alternatively certified ones, already resent an implicit message they see in the program: that teaching is a 2 year volunteer stint before you start your real job, and that learning is poor because teachers are bad.  For a political platform premised on the deficient quality of existing teachers, its people don't exercise a lot of tact.

If you want to get a skewed but decent overview of the major education policy debate, this is a good read.

Standardized Testing in America's Best Schools

Conservatives like to say that teachers unions oppose standardized testing because they don't want to accept accountability or set high expectations.  Teachers do this because, like any other trade union, they want to maximize their wages and job security.  Rigorous state standards with tough tests mean more work and stress for the teachers.  It might even put their jobs at risk.  So they oppose it.  By doing so, they lower expectations and foster academic failure, especially for low-income minorities.

But conservatives miss the pedagogical point that the volume of standards and testing actually diminishes the quality of education.  This article from the New York Times discusses how Scarsdale High School - one of the best in the country - has abolished it's Advanced Placement curriculum.  These are some of the best students and teachers in the country, and they have determined that the AP standards were actually hurting how much kids learned.

Scarsdale criticized the AP curriculum for testing too much breadth of content.  When the material is so vast, students are drilled into memorizing an amazing amount of superficial knowledge.  This sacrifices opportunities to learn in depth, which is when students can develop analytical skills, become critical thinkers, and make deeper connections.  One way of thinking about the trade off of depth and breadth is to consider what you would want your child to be: an independent analytical thinker, or an encyclopedic repository of superficial knowledge?  Like the AP standards, state standards tilt learning toward the encyclopedic end of the spectrum.  Most educators think this is a lower quality education: we want our kids to think and write more than recite, not the other way around.

Scarsdale's move is politically important.  It demonstrates that great teachers who want the best for their students understand that current AP and state standards undermine their effort.  It undermines the conservative narrative that opponents of NCLB-style testing are lazy teachers unions putting their interests first.

Education Theory

To all my friends not in education, if you want to get a glimpse at what ed school is like and get an overview of some basic but important ideas in education theory, I am posting my term paper for my grad class this semester.  I'm doing this not because I think it's especially good, but I might be curious of what all this was about if I weren't a teacher.

John McCain said that "Education is the civil rights issue of this century," and Nobel Prize Winning Economist Ed Glaeser has called for a "Marshall Plan" in eaducation so America can not only cope with, but be at the frontier of new knowledge and technology.  The two ideas I discuss in the paper are, I think, central to the pedagogical dimension to this enormous challenge.

You can view it here.  Any comments or feedback are welcome.