New York City education officials are developing up to 16 new standardized tests for 3rd through 12th graders. But these tests, unlike other standardized tests, will rank teachers, not students.
Costing roughly $25 million to create, these tests will be added to the battery of standardized taks that US students already take. In The New York Times' current "Room for Debate," editors ask, What have we learned about tests as accountability tools for teacher performance? Why do school systems believe that tests are the answer to reforming education?
Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of Education at Stanford University, kicks of the debate by reminding us that there's long been a saying that "US students are the most tested, and the least examined, of any in the world." She also reminds us that top-scoring countries in student achievement, like Finland and Korea, have eliminated crowded testing schedules and improved their scores by doing so. And the inevitable result? Not higher scores, smarter kids, or better teachers. Rather, teaching and curriculum further narrowed further, as teachers — and the surrounding system — focus more intensely on these tests.
All true, but as Michael J. Petrilli, another debater and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, point out, at least New York City is trying. Granted, as he puts it, city officials are pretty much "attacking a fly with a sledgehammer." Still, as Petrilli explains, "it’s only common sense that one element of [teacher] evaluations should be an assessment of how much students are learning under the teacher’s charge." For Petrilli, the answer isn't a move "to centralized, rules-based, bureaucratic evaluation models, as indicated by New York City’s decision to add a dozen new tests to collect more teacher performance data." Rather, the approach out to be to simply trust the principal.
An article in The New York Times this past weekend tried to make sense of all the Gates Foundation funding for education (and, really, there's millions out there). Essentially, Gates' giving is all over the map, though The Times's initial hook zeros in on Teach Plus, a national organization largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that works to improve outcomes for urban children by — in the organization's own words —"ensuring that a greater proportion of students have access to effective, experienced teachers."
But the article points out that members of the group — promoting themselves simply as "local teachers who favored school reform" — helped persuade Indiana state lawmakers to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star, according to Times reporter Sam Dillion. One state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, explained in the article that the Teach Plus teachers “seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” Still, their efforts were largely financed by the Gates Foundation.
While the article points out that yes, indeed, Bill Gates has an agenda with education and the money to back it, he has spread his giving widely for education. In fact, his foundation has given to the two national teachers’ unions, as well to groups whose mission seems to be to criticize them. Interestingly, Randi Weingarten, a union president, offered a balanced statement regarding Gate's giving:
“Unlike some foundations that would rather just scapegoat teachers and their unions, Gates understands that teaching is a profession, that you have to invest in and support teachers. That doesn’t mean we agree with everything they do.”
The foundation’s 2009 tax filing, according to the article, runs to 263 pages and includes about 360 education grants. Clearly, it's tough to track all the money and organizations. Still, two other Gates-financed groups, Educators for Excellence and Teach Plus, have worked to increase the voices of newer teachers as an alternative to the official views of the unions.
So, the questions to consider: Is assertive philanthropy really all that new, and how would teachers, parents, and others feel if Gates simply stopped giving?
Joel Klein, the prosecutor who took on the software giant Microsoft, writes in The Atlantic about his lessons learned during his eight years as chancellor of New York City's school system, the nation's largest. His key pain points: "feckless politicians, recalcitrant unions, mediocre teachers, and other enduring obstacles to school reform."
For me, Klein's spot on when he explains the net effect: "The net effect is that we're rapidly moving toward two Americas—a wealthy elite, and an increasingly large underclass that lacks the skills to succeed." He also echoes others in the education realm: the Kafkaesque system is run for the adults. He even includes the well-known quote from UFT's late, iconic head Albert Shanker: "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren." (In fairness to Mister Shanker, Klein also quotes him from 1993 as saying that "The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system. As long as there are no consequences if kids or adults don't perform, as long as the discussion is not about education and student outcomes, then we're playing a game as to who has the power." In his 1993 Pew Forum speech, Shanker also said "we are at the point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product...."
Also, Klein mentions Michelle Rhee for making similar noises as he, and indeed their views are quite similar (and, no doubt, equally controversial and pretty much at odds with anything from Diane Ravitch). I actually think Klein is way wrong in saying "Collaboration is the elixir of the status-quo crowd." Instead, I think there needs to be way more collaboration. The education realm is way too insular for societal success. But I do think's on to something with the idea that we need to do three key things: rebuild the entire K–12 system, attract top teachers and reward them accordingly, and rethink the use of technology in instruction.
Interesting stats pulled straight from Klein's article:
"Our high-school graduation rate continues to hover just shy of 70 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, and many of those students who do graduate aren't prepared for college.
"ACT, the respected national organization that administers college-admissions tests, recently found that 76 percent of our high-school graduates 'were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.'"
"From 1960 to 1980, our supply of college graduates increased at almost 4 percent a year; since then, the increase has been about half as fast."
"The two national unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—together have some 4.7 million members, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars in national, state, and local dues, much of which is funneled to political causes. Teachers unions consistently rank among the top spenders on politics."
"Sure, money, a stable family, and strong values typically make educating a child easier. But we also now know that, keeping those things constant, we can get dramatically different outcomes with the same kid, based on his or her education. Texas and California, for example, have very similar demographics. Nevertheless, even though Texas spends slightly less per pupil than does California, it outperforms California on all four national tests, across demographic groups. The gap is around a year's worth of learning. That's big. And the gaps are even bigger when we compare similar demographic groups in large urban districts. Low-income black students in Boston or New York, for example, are several years ahead of those in Detroit or Los Angeles on the national exams."
"McKinsey estimates that the benefits of bringing our educational levels up to those of the highest-performing countries would have raised our gross domestic product by about $2 trillion in 2008. By the same token, every year we fail to close that gap is like living with the equivalent of a permanent national recession."
Science reporter Jeffrey Mervis writes about a new study suggesting that college students may learn better through — surprise! — an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor.
The study, by a team at the University of British Columbia led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman, that students in the "deliberate" practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. The research also showed that students were also more engaged and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.
The New York Times reporter Benedict Carey points out that study is far from perfect: "More than 150 of the students were absent from the test, most of them from the comparison class. The researchers had no way to know how those students, if they'd come, would have changed the overall findings."
Experts said, according to Carey, that it was "problematic" for a study to offer an intervention (in the form of enthusiastic teachers) that could sway results. "This is not a good idea, since they know exactly what the hypotheses are that guide the study, and, more importantly, exactly what the measures are that will be used to evaluate the effects," James W. Stigler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "They might, therefore, be tailoring their instruction to the assessment — i.e., teaching to the test."
I've been reading David Brook's Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, with mixed feelings. For instance, Harold and Erica, the author's fictional characters devised to hang all sorts of far-flung data, simply do not work for me. Actually, they annoy me. That said, Brooks does trot out interesting stats. Of course, as Thomas Nagel points out in The New York Times, Brooks seems way too willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic. Nagel's case in point: that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates.
Still, Brooks, a columnist with The Times, offers or, as in the marshmallow case mentioned below, reminds us of some truly interesting findings, particularly in the realm of education. (Oh, and of course, there are simply some nice Brooksisms, typically inspired by the British Enlightenment. Here's one: "Emotion assigns value to things," Brooks writes, "and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations." Here's another: "The adult personality — including political views — is forever defined in opposition to one's natural enemies in high school," Brooks explains.)
But let's get back to Brooks' interesting findings in the realm of education. Consider financial aid programs, for instance, designed to reduce college drop-out rates are based on the assumption that the main problem for students is material. "When in fact," Brooks explains, "only about 8 percent of students are unable to complete college for purely financial reasons. The more important problems have to do with emotional disengagement from college and lack of academic preparedness, intangible factors that the prevailing mindset found it hard to factor and acknowledge." While Brooks goes too far when saying that "the government had tried to fortify material development but ended up weakening the social and emotional development that underpins it," I do think people — parents, in particular — blame the costs of college for many students' failure to graduate (or graduate in a timely fashion) when other factors are at play.
Brooks also highlights the classic — and hilarious — marshmallow test from the 1970s, which suggests the value of self control. His point: Kids from "disorganized, unstable communities have a much harder time acquiring the discipline to succeed in life." The experiment showed 4-year-olds asked to postpone gratification by leaving a marshmallow uneaten for a time as a condition of receiving a second marshmallow. According to Brooks and others, this test of will was a "very good predictor of success in life": "The kids who could wait a full 15 minutes had, 13 years later, SAT scores that were 210 points higher than the kids who could wait only 30 seconds. . . . Twenty years later, they had much higher college-completion rates, and 30 years later, they had much higher incomes. The kids who could not wait at all had much higher incarceration rates. They were much more likely to suffer from drug- and alcohol-addiction problems." (Note: Most kids actually ate the marshmallow right away, but I'm not sure if "right away" was less or more than 30 seconds.)
Below is a video clip from a modern-day marshmallow experiment, and here's an excerpt from Brooks' book on decision making via The New York Times.
Recently, The New York Times has been running several op-ed article on how to redesign — er, save — American public schools.
Nínive Clements Caliegari and Dave Eggers, founders of the 826 National tutoring centers, compare what happens in the US when we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors to what happens when we get similar poor results in the classroom. The gist: Teachers get blamed, but the military typically gets better support.
Most interesting, however, is the info the two pull from the McKinsey report that looked at how the US might attract and retain talented teachers. The study looked at the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea. Here's the takeaway:
Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don't.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don't.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do. And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it's 1 percent per year. In Finland, it's 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.
While there's no magic number when it comes to teacher pay, McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Eggers and Caliegari point out that teacher salary is currently on par with that of toll takers and bartenders.
An earlier Times article by Barker Bausell puts forth some ideas about evaluating classroom success. While Bausell's recipe for success is easier said than done and overly general (keep close to the curriculum, maintain strict discipline, and minimize noninstructional activities), he does highlight the need for more online learning outside the classroom:
...schools could make online tutoring programs covering the entire elementary school curriculum available, both in school and at home.
This approach could mimic the characteristics that make human tutoring so effective, including the ability to immediately ascertain what a student needs to learn, to tailor instruction to those needs, and to provide immediate feedback regarding student progress.
Image: McKinsey, highlighting videos from the consultancy's report
The Economist recently highlighted the efforts of John Mockler, an expert in Californian education who has been trying to make sense of the state's public school morass since the 1960s.
Mockler calls the whole ballot initiative process "mob rule," and his preference for redesigning the entire system is relatively simple and oddly refreshing to anyone who's voted in California. "If you put an initiative on the ballot that repealed every initiative of the past 40 years, I'd vote for it," says Mockler.
The Economist goes on to point out the obvious, but far from helpful: Who's accountable for California's mediocre (at best) schools? Everyone, which is really to say nobody. True enough, but far from a solution.
