I've written a new explainer for Slate on the indictments of 35 Atlanta educators for inflating students' test scores: What does it tell us about national education reform? For previous coverage of my thoughts on Atlanta and standardized test-based accountability, see this 2011 piece.
And here is my Martin Bashir segment on the same topic, from yesterday:
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I'm seeing some off-the-mark responses to the news--first reported by Education Week's Stephen Sawchuck, and then picked up by the New York Times--that many of the new, high-stakes teacher evaluation systems are rating only 2-6 percent of teachers ineffective. This is being greeted by some supporters of numbers-driven teacher reform as a disappointment, while skeptics, like American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, are suggesting this proves the vast majority of teachers are great performers, after all.
I don't think we can jump to either conclusion. First of all, the goal of these systems is not necessarily to fire large numbers of teachers, it is to help them improve their practice, since previously, most American educators received little constructive feedback on their work. Most new evaluation plans include more classroom observations, which means teachers are not just receiving number ratings, but actual notes and suggestions on their instruction. Of course, whether that feedback is helpful or useless depends entirely on the quality of the administrator.
Contra Nicholas Beaudrot, it's not true that education reformers have a "hazy" idea of how many bad teachers they'd like to see lose their jobs after this overhaul. I've asked a number of prominent accountability hawks that question over the past six years and the answer I've heard most frequently is "5 to 10 percent." As Matthew DiCarlo explains, that estimate is culled from the research of the ubiquitous Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, and by that standard, these evaluation systems are already half way to where they are intended to be, a reasonable outcome for something so new.
That said, I'm still quite skeptical that the new evaluation plans will transfrom the teaching profession, in part because of the lessons from history I'm learning as I research my book. For over a century, school reformers have been dissatisfied with how teachers are evaluated, yet overhauling rating systems has not, historically, been an effective way to improve educational outcomes for kids. This is like hoping to lose weight by buying a new, high-tech scale, without changing your diet or exercise routines.
During the late nineteenth century, the New York City schools used an "excellent-good-fair-bad" rating system for teachers. When reformer William Maxwell became superintendent in 1898, he complained that 99.5 percent of teachers were rated "good" and instituted a plan to grade teachers on an A-D scale instead. The city distributed intricate tables for judging teachers’ output. First, teachers would be measured by evidence of their students’ learning, which could be demonstrated through test scores or examples of children’s essays, penmanship, and drawings. Teachers would also be judged on their personal characteristics and given numeric ratings in largely subjective categories, such as “obedience,” “honesty of work,” “dress,” “voice,” and “force of character.” A teacher’s command of classroom discipline could be assessed by counting the number of students who were late or unruly, and even by timing the number of seconds and minutes it took for a teacher to distribute or collect worksheets.
By the late teens, the vast majorty of teachers were earning perennial ratings of B+, the exact sort of slightly-better-than-average rating that had predominated under the previous plan. In prominent education journals, dissident principals like Alexander Fichlander, a Brooklyn leftist, explained that the paperwork involved with implementing the system was so burdensome that administrators rushed through it; what's more, there was little incentive to spend a lot of time rating teachers if the district provided no extra funding or training to those who needed to improve. Additionally, when managers find it is difficult to replace low-performing teachers with workers who are more effective--another likely outcome--they may decide evaluation systems are not worth their time.
Because of these problems, by mid-century, detailed evaluation systems were being replaced by simpler "satisfactory-unsatisfactory" plans, which today are being replaced by value-added measurement and frequent observation notes. But if the new evaluation systems end up being more about paperwork than about improving practice, then they, too, will fail to improve instruction and will lose their political palatibility.
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The following was written by the Princeton sociologist Melvin Tumin, in 1973. Tumin was thinking about the Teacher Corps, a Great Society program that was a sort of lefty precursor to Teach for America, in which intern teachers arrived in disadvantaged schools eager to close achievement gaps and -- because it was the sixties -- also build racial pride, improve student self-esteem, and overhaul the curriculum to better reflect African American history and culture. Most Teacher Corps interns grew frustrated by the slow pace of change within schools; most veteran educators were suspcious of the interns' intentions and ideology. As Tumin points out, this inevitable culture clash is a key finding of research in organizational theory, and helps explain why it is so difficult for small social programs to impact bureaucracies:
...one of the most important factors that made the Program difficult to implement was that it could not promise the members of agencies and institutions whose cooperation was needed that it would be worth their while. Innovation is a charming word, beguiling and rousing. But it is like other terms such as relevance, concern, sensitivity. One cannot be against these on principle. But they are almost always privately read as warning signs that there is trouble ahead for those who are fulfilling their accustomed routines. Moreover, since most innovation efforts fail sooner or later, wise masters of ongoing enterprises have learned to live and wait until such innovations speed themselves to their ultimate demise. While not many other earthly travails can be safely waited out, with any hope of relief, innovative programs do have that special quality of a high probability of failure, so that “this too shall pass” is a reasonably sound prediction about most of them.
I read this just after I returned from SXSWedu, and it seemed particularly relevant to the (almost total lack of) dialogue between social entrepreneurs who want to use software to disrupt traditional classroom practices in ways that are supposed to benefit poor children, and the majority of teachers and administrators who might be enthusiastic about specific technologies, but who simply do not see the lack of technology as the key barrier preventing schools from better serving all students. Educators are more likely to point to teacher quality, or to the content of the curriculum, or to factors stemming from the home and family. And sure, technology may be able to address many of these challenges. Yet tech-hypers lose credibility when they ignore the fact that inequalities outside the realm of access to technology remain the primary drivers of disparate educational outcomes.
Evgeny Morozov's recent essay on technological "solutionism" is certainly applicable to the tendency to mistake the technocratic measurement of educational problems, using software, as the very same thing as coming up with solutions to those problems. It should be obvious--yet at SWSWedu, it rarely was--that the quantification of inequality, whether in student achievement scores or ratings of teacher effectiveness, is only a jumping off point for complex political, policy, and social debates over how to use such data, and whether and how to close achievement gaps. The collection of "Big Data" does not, in and of itself, guarantee the formulation of effective solutions to problems.
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In a Nation podcast, Bryce Covert interviewed me about Obama's new early childhood proposals. Listen here.
And on Jane Williams' BloombergEDU show, I participated in a panel discussion of education writers. We each got to discuss two education issues to watch in 2013. I named preK (before Obama's annoucement!) and school diversity/integration. Listen here.
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map via Andrei Scheinkman and Timothy Wallace, The Huffington Post
Like a lot of other folks, I was amused by yesterday's Times style section piece proclaiming the birth of "Hipsturbia": a supposedly new cluster of affluent, creative-industry white people who have moved from Brooklyn to the lower Hudson River Valley after procreating, mostly to the suburbs of Irvington, Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, and Tarrytown. As Jess Grose (Irvington's finest) notes at Slate, upscale white families have been moving from the city to those particular towns for many, many decades. The changes are really around the margins; now those emigrants are arriving not only from Manhattan, but also from the gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, which means they're bringing all the associated cultural tics with them, like foodie snobbery. (And trust me, Westchester County could use a few more interesting restaurants.)
If we look at actual data, however, we'll notice that American suburbs are not becoming hipper and younger, but are in fact becoming poorer (as young adults with economic means increasingly choose to live in cities), browner (as immigrants and African Americans are priced out of central urban neighborhoods), and grayer (as the suburban population ages). I grew up near the Times' "hipsturbia" in a gorgeous riverfront town that illustrates all these trends: Ossining, New York. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the town fathers dreamed of building commuter-friendly luxury condos to attract more Wall Street workers, while farmer's market types hoped developers would instead renovate our downtown's historic warehouses and loft spaces, to attract artists. We all argued a lot and screamed at each other, because we wanted our town to have a broader tax base and be more culturally vibrant. But very little downtown development of any sort ever happened, and the reasons why demonstrate why the Times piece is so facile.
First, Ossining was experiencing a massive influx of immigration from rural Ecuador, along with some of the visible social challenges -- such as day-laborers on the streets, and bilingualism in the public schools -- associated with immigration. Second, with a socioeconomically-mixed population, a maximum-security prison, and one of Westchester County's few clusters of public housing, many affluent, white parents were never interested in moving to Ossining, because the public schools simply can't boast the stratospheric test scores that are typically a feature of more homogenous school systems.
Most of the towns mentioned in the Times story buck the grayer-browner-poorer trend exactly because they have been so uniformly affluent for so long that they are able to resist the demographic tides overtaking the majority of suburbs. They do so, in part, by deliberately excluding affordable housing. (Tarrytown is an exception, with a more diverse population. And it's a very charming town.) In other words, there is nothing remotely counter-cultural about these Brooklynites moving to these specific Westchester villages. They might wear cooler glasses, but they are following the well-trodden paths of the Baby Boomers and World War II veterans before them.
Are these denizens of "hipsturbia" among the first in a new wave of defectors to the suburbs, or are they outliers? It remains unclear. One of the big questions demographers have about Generation Y and Millenials is whether our much-noted preference for city life will persist as we age and reproduce. We don't have great numbers on this yet, but if many more families make the same choice the Times is noting--moving to heavily white suburbs--both cities and suburbs will miss a lot of opportunities to create more racially and socioeconomically-integrated communities, which are great for kids, great for schools, and (in my opinion) great for society.
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Via Twitter, I'm seeing a lot of anxiety about the part of President Obama's new universal preschool proposal that calls for "comprehensive data and assessment systems" to track student progress and program quality. I know what you're thinking: Standardized tests for 4-year olds? And I agree, it is absurd to imagine toddlers filling in Scantron bubbles. But that isn't at all what the administration has ever meant when it talks about assessing pre-K quality. Instead, a big part of the Obama/Duncan vision is for statewide data systems that link students' early elementary school performance back to the preschool programs they attended, so those programs (not individual teachers or students) can be judged on whether they adequately prepare children for school.
As I reported for Slate in 2011, the potential best part of this Big Data for Little Kids push is that the accepted best practices for early childhood assessment include "testing" not only literacy and numeracy skills, but also the sorts of social, emotional, motor, and creativity skills that have gotten such short shrift since the onset of No Child Left Behind. For the youngest students, those skills include whether a child is confident asking questions, whether she can fasten her Velcro shoes and zip her jacket, whether she can hum a song and draw, and whether she plays cooperatively with peers. One widely-respected model for early-childhood assessment is the Work Sampling System, in which teachers observe students over the course of weeks or months, and then assign them a numeric rating in each of these categories. Again: Unlike assessment systems in use for older kids, these numbers are not meant to punish or reward individual teachers or students. Instead, the idea is to use the data to help teachers identify where students need to grow -- and to help schools, districts, and states figure out how to improve teacher training and program management at the system level.
Testing for older students, I think, has a lot to learn from the best practices in early-childhood assessment. One lesson is that we have to look at the whole child over time, not just at his reading and math scores during a specific hour. Another lesson is that, as psychometricians have been warning us, the most accurate use of a test is as a diagnostic tool for the person who is taking it, not as a human resources tool to punish or reward the test-taker's teacher or principal.
Now. I don't want to be too optimistic, because early-childhood assessment can certainly get screwed up. In the Slate piece, I describe how Ohio managed to turn a good idea for longterm holistic assessment into a 10 to 15-minute, one-time, sit-down, scored literacy test for 5-year-olds. Most child development experts laugh at the idea that you can tell very much about any kindergarten student in a specific, short block of time like that, since 5-year olds don't typically have the self-control to put aside immediate concerns like hunger or boredom to focus on a Very Important Task.
A colleague of mine is working on a large paper about early-childhood assessment, so there will be much more to report in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned.
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In his State of the Union address, President Obama promised to create a new federal funding stream to provide high school students with technical education, to help them prepare for the workforce. This is promising. As I've reported, during the first term, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan talked about vocational education almost exclusively in the context of post-secondary schools. That allowed the administration to dodge controversial, historically-freighted debates over K-12 "tracking," a practice that, throughout the twentieth century, pushed non-white students, girls, and the intergenerationally poor into lower-paid professions and away from college. But this political dodge also ignored some important research and innovation at the K-12 level.
For one thing, surveys of high school drop-outs show a leading cause of their leaving school is the belief that nothing they are learning in the classroom will help them get a job. What's more, a number of innovative new high schools across the country are pioneering a model for career and technical education that has little to do with the narrow vocational classes of yesteryear, in which kids were taught how to sew or operate a printing press -- skills that technological change can render less relevant over time. Instead, at the MET schools in Rhode Island, Linked Learning schools in California, and at Tech Valley High outside Albany, high school students complete externships in real workplaces, exploring fields as diverse as baking, engineering, biotechnology, and train conducting. Students have the opportunity to dip into more than one profession, because the idea is less to train for a specific job than to see how adults use their own educations in the workplace each day. That helps students stay motivated to earn a degree, and introduces them to the behaviors and practices specific to the working world.
A few notes of caution. First, the school Obama referenced in his address is P-Tech here in Brooklyn -- the Pathways in Technology Early College High School. Like a lot of celebrated educational arrangements in New York City (ex; the Harlem Children's Zone), P-Tech is special; it is a partnership between the New York City schools, IBM, and the City University system. To earn the combined high school diploma/associate's degree P-Tech offers, students must commit to a six-year course of study, which is time-consuming and expensive, requiring extra resources that most school districts simply don't have, especially absent the deep-pocketed corporate partners present in a city like New York. Obama's promise of more funding is desperately needed if we want to recreate schools like this one. But since the Republican Congress has demonstrated a specific interest in cutting job-training programs, I'd like to hear more about exactly where the president believes this new money will come from. (Same goes for his pipe dream of universal pre-K, by the way.)
There are certainly discomfiting curricular trade-offs at many vocationally-oriented schools, and we shouldn't overlook them. P-Tech doesn't offer foreign languages or Advanced Placement courses, for example. So I found it interesting that Obama praised the German secondary school system in his address, saying, "Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they’re ready for a job." German "dual track" vocational education has been hotly debated among American school reformers for over a century. Why? Because this system is radically different from our own. It separates students after the 10th grade and places them on a vocational, academic, or mixed vocational/academic track. The result is that in Germany today, only about one-third of all upper secondary school students are enrolled in a course of study that leads directly to a liberal arts university. That reality deeply challenges American notions of "college readiness" for all, a major priority of the new Common Core -- shared national curriculum standards that the Obama administration also supports.
The truth, of course, is that despite our romanticization of college, only about one-third of Americans under 30 have earned a bachelor's degree. Where we actually do differ from Germany is what happens to the other two-thirds of young adults. In Germany, they typically hold an occupational certification by the age of 20, while in the United States, non-college grads are often left without marketable skills or qualifications.
More on vocational education in the US and Europe:
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This is the text of a loyalty oath New York City public school teachers were expected to take in 1917 and 1918. Over the next three decades, teachers across the country were periodically subjected to these sorts of jingoistic fevers. For Quakers and antiwar activists, a particular problem with the pledge was the vow of unquestioning obedience to American military policy, as well as the promise to inculcate such obedience in one's students:
"We, the teachers of the public schools of the City of New York, do solemnly pledge our unqualified loyalty to the President and Congress of the United States in this war with the imperial governments of Germany and Austria.
"We pledge ourselves actively to inculcate in our pupils by word and deed love of flag and unquestioning loyalty to the military policy of the government and to the measures and principles proclaimed by the President and Congress.
"We declare ourselves to be in sympathy with the purposes of the government and its efforts to make the world safe for democracy, and believe that our highest duty at this moment is to uphold the hands of the President and Congress in this crisis.
"We believe that any teachers whose views prevent them from subscribing to such sentiments should not be permitted to teach the youth of our city.”
Related: Texas state senators object to a curriculum that supposedly sympathizes with socialists, critiques founding fathers.
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If there were endless hours in the day, I'd blog about the news much more regularly. But since my book project is pretty much all-consuming at this point, I'm not posting here as much as I'd like. I do want to let you know that over at my Tumblr, Popular History, I'm posting occasional tidbits I find as I research the political and social history of American public schools and teachers, including some fascinating newspaper and magazine reports, photos, and drawings.
Here's today's offering, which displays the paranoid rhetoric surrounding leftist educators during the WWI, WWII and Cold War Years. Though just a few hundred of New York City's 80,000 teachers at mid-century were social activists, those who lost their jobs during periodic red scare witch hunts were some of the district's most inspiring and dedicated teachers, including early advocates for school integration and a black history curriculum. Chapter five of the book will tell their stories.
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Yesterday I got to meet and interview Bill Gates, along with five other writers and reporters. We sat around a conference table at a midtown Manhattan hotel. Gates, wearing a totally unassuming gray suit and sipping Diet Coke out of a glass bottle, was business like and to the point. His passion flared up a few times during the hour-long conversation. He vehemently pushed back against economist and blogger Tyler Cowen's suggestion that macroeconomic and population growth, as well as better roads and other infrastructure, could bring faster humanitarian relief to Africa than more direct health interventions like vaccinations or contraceptives, which the Gates Foundation funds. Discussing the bleak living conditions in the Central African Republic and Yemen, Gates said, "If you don't invest in health there, you're a cold-hearted bastard." In a rare personal comment, he discussed how one of his daugthers was moved by video footage of a child survivor of polio limping down a dirt road. "What did you do to help her?" she asked her dad -- an insightful comment, since Gates said he feels growing concern about the survivors of once-deadly childhood diseases like malaria and polio, who often arrive at school with cognitive delays that make it difficult to learn.
On education, I think a few of Gates' comments broke news. He hinted that his foundation may soon invest resources in alternate rankings of American colleges, saying the true metric for success in higher education should be whether a school accepts a student "with a combined SAT score of 600, and they got $100,000 jobs, and they're super happy." In response to several questions from yours truly, he also discussed standardized testing and teacher evaluation at length, particulary in non-traditional subjects such as art and music. Gates said he isn't sure if good tests can be created in the arts, and he called Florida's plan to move forward quickly with such non-traditional testing "crazy," as well as something that could create a popular backlash against education reform.
In response to Jason Kottke, Gates briefly addressed his reputation as one of the world's most celebrated college drop-outs, and I thought his comments were interesting considering the backlash against college coming from Peter Thiel and some other Silicon Valley luminaries, who tend to imagine upper middle class kids and the Ivy League when they hear the words "higher education." First, Gates correctly pointed out that community colleges and four-year public universities make up "the heart and soul of education in America," and that those schools are currently operating under severe budget constraints, which hinder their ability to move the working poor into the middle class. Second, he said the number of successful tech entrepreneurs or programmers without a college degree is "a rounding error, that's why it's so mythic," and added that he had enjoyed college and "I'm just about as fake a drop out as you can get," since he loves lectures and left Harvard only to pursue the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to launch Microsoft.
Lastly, in response to Jacob Weisberg, Gates addressed the potential of MOOCs--massive online open courses--to transform higher education, saying such classes would not live up to their full potential unless they enroll more low-income students and provide some sort of counseling or support to guide students through completing the MOOC and ultimately attaining some sort of credential. Currently, most MOOCs are seeing drop-out rates of up to 80 percent, and are reaching a fairly privileged audience.
Head on over to The Atlantic to read my full report.
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