CURMUDGUCATION: What Failing Schools?

CURMUDGUCATION: What Failing Schools?:

What Failing Schools?

Education Next is trotting out its Big Fat Survey of Educational Stuff for 2015, and for eduwonks it's twenty-three pages of interesting stuff. I'm sure many of us will be parsing, mining and massaging the results, as well as discussing how much the reform-loving sponsors of the survey can be trusted. But as I poked through it, two results jumped out at me immediately.

So, where are the failing schools?

The whole premise of our ongoing onslaught of reformy forces against public education is that we are awash in a sea of terrible schools. So where are they? Where are all the people saying, "Yes, my school is failing."

Even the folks grading Other People's Schools-- it's a regular thing in these surveys that folks think their own schools are better than the national picture, but the difference here is a blip (the only interesting blip is that more African-Americans think their local schools are failing than think the nation's are).

I mean, we can expect a certain percentage of people to think schools are failing for the usual cranky reasons-- school doesn't teach cursive, or it let's pregnant ladies teach, or it didn't play Chris enough on first string, or school officials kept fining them for truancy, or teachers kept flunking Chris just cause Chris never did assigned work and flunked all the tests. Add to that the constant barrage over the last fifteen years that US public schools are terrible, that they must be reformed, that students must be rescued from these deep pits of failing failure.

So why aren't more people convinced? Why aren't more people giving schools a failing grade?

What about teachers?

This, unfortunately, is a less clear data set. Note that the question is different, so I'm not sure how CURMUDGUCATION: What Failing Schools?:

CAP Flubs Again

I'm pretty sure that CAP has lost its collective mind. This months has been marked by a pair of CAP offerings (here and here) that seem to indicate the august allegedly lefty thinky tank is running its PR wing out of a time machine parked in 2013.

Now they are touting the result of a poll they commissioned from Public Policy Polling under the Lesley Knope-ish press release headline:

New PPP Poll Shows that the Development and Aims of the Common Core Are More Popular Than Baseball, Kittens, and Bacon—But Misinformation About the Common Core Pervades

It is hard to know how to take the last part of that header, since the press release that follows it champions a brace of undead misinformation that apparently did not die the last sixty gazillion times it was put to rest. No, here it is, still searching for brains. Let's go shambling down memory lane, shall we?

It's Just the Brand

Remember this one? People totes love the ideas behind Common Core-- they've just been turned off to the branding. Why, 90% (of the 675 people we asked) love the idea of higher standards that would make us competitive in the world, 82% think we should develop standards with teachers and states, 79% think we should have high quality English and math standards while letting local schools 

CAP Flubs Again

Doctor VAM

Periodically you will hear teachers complain about VAM and similar test-and-punish versions of evaluation by saying, "Imagine how ridiculous it would be if they did this to doctors. That would be so stupid they'd never even consider it." These are teachers who don't have friends and family in the medical field. Because (bad news alert) the Powers That Be have totally been doing the same crap to doctors that they've been doing to us.

The idea has been kicking around since the eighties, but one backbone of the Affordable Care Act (and many other proposed health care reforms) is an informed customer base that is able to choose physicians based on solid ratings. This would also, not coincidentally, allow the behemoths whomanage the highly-profitable non-profit health care providers to have a data-based means of deciding which doctors to keep and which to boot.

Of course, the key here is coming up with a metric-- or metrics-- to determine which doctors are effective and which are not effective. And that turns out to be hard.

You know the arguments-- you've already made them. Can we judge a doctor on how effective he is with a patient who is high risk and who insists on engaging in risky behavior? Is it fair to give a 

Doctor VAM

Is New Orleans a Success?

With the release of the latest bundle of number crunching, Doug Harris and the Education Research Alliance have once again launched the Debate of the Decade-- is the New Orleans privatization experiment a success or a failure?

The Argument for Success

The ERA is a project of Tulane University where Harris is a professor of economics, and I want not to hold that against him, but the number of economists who have declared themselves educational experts over the past couple of decades is staggering and worthy of its own study.

Harris's argument for success is fairly simple. Before Katrina, test scores in NOLA were really low. Now they are performing at the level they "ought to be" performing as compared to models of imaginary similar students.

So. Test scores were low. Now they're not. Success!

What else?

No, that's it. That's the whole argument. Students in NOLA are getting better scores on standardized math and reading tests. That's the whole thing.

So. Any reasons we shouldn't be excited about this news?

Glad you asked. We could get into a long and involved discussion of ERA's data and the crunching thereof. But if that's your cup of tea, I recommend the work of Mercedes Schneider and Crazy Crawfish, just for starters.

But for the sake or argument, let's go ahead and accept Harris's numbers as accurate and move on. Can we still call the Great NOLA Privatization Experiment a success?

Yes, even if we accept that the numbers are correct, Harris acknowledges that the pursuit of test scores has led to some dicey practices, and NOLA does seem rife with tales of push-outs and creaming, as school principals strive to make their data points.

But there's a bigger question (though no less important) than whether or the numbers are legit. The bigger question is, even if the numbers are legit, are they worth the cost?

Disenfranchised public

Journalist Jennifer Berkshire's recent trip to New Orleans provides a vivid picture of how thoroughly NOLA reformsters have pushed locals aside-- even locals who agree with the 

Is New Orleans a Success?