REFORMERS! Watch This Video! It Will Change Your Life and Open Your Mind! | Diane Ravitch's blog

REFORMERS! Watch This Video! It Will Change Your Life and Open Your Mind! | Diane Ravitch's blog:

REFORMERS! Watch This Video! It Will Change Your Life and Open Your Mind!

This is a message to the billionaires, the hedge fund managers, and the politicians–and their paid spokespersons in think tanks and academe— who continually complain about our public schools and their teachers. They think that the solution to America’s education problems is to privatize public schools. They are wrong. They need to expand their horizons and look elsewhere for the causes and the solutions to the problems in our schools and our communities.

Please urge any reformers you know to watch this video. It will change their world view.

It is a TED talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. Dr. Harris is a pediatrician in California who has a master’s degree in public health in addition to her M.D. She is an expert on the relationship between childhood trauma and life outcomes.

Listen to her wisdom. She is on the frontline of addressing our nation’s must urgent problems.REFORMERS! Watch This Video! It Will Change Your Life and Open Your Mind! | Diane Ravitch's blog:

La. Supt. John White Asks Private Schools to Take Voucher Kids for Free | deutsch29

La. Supt. John White Asks Private Schools to Take Voucher Kids for Free | deutsch29:

La. Supt. John White Asks Private Schools to Take Voucher Kids for Free

Louisiana has a voucher program. It is not working test score wonders. In December 2015, Danielle Drelinger of the Times-Picayune noted, “If the voucher schools were their own school system, it would be the fifth-worst of 76 in the state.”

Most Louisiana voucher students (41 percent, it seems) come from New Orleans, a city where school choice already reigns in the form of charters.

Based on Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) data, only 1,420 new students applied for the program for the 2016-17 school year.

No definitive, positive research exists to justify the continued existence of Louisiana’s voucher program, which is supposed to provide low-income students with the option to attend private school using public money in order to escape the so-called failure of public schools, where failure is determined via school letter grades of C, D, and F. However, there is plenty of negative research (see here and here andhere, for example) to show that in Louisiana, sending public money to private schools isn’t delivering on the corporate-reform payout of higher test scores. Louisiana’s voucher program is not outdoing local public school systems– yet Louisiana state superintendent John White wants that voucher program to live.

As it stands, LDOE does not have enough money to pay for all 7,807 students seeking vouchers for 2016-17. It has to cut 362 students. Thus, White is asking private schools to accept the students for free– as a foot-in-the-door to goad the state into later paying the private schools for the remaining students. As Melinda Deslatte of the Associated Press reports, White reasons that the cost to educate these student will be “nearly the same amount” and that he has written legislators to try to convince them to pay the extra $2 million even as he is asking private schools to enroll the students for no cost. Though that issue of voucher cost effectiveness is in dispute, the greater question concerns why Louisiana taxpayers should continue footing the bill at all for a voucher program that does not do what it purports: “save” students from failing schools.

Still, the school choice arm of the University of Arkansas (UArk) is attempting to come to White’s rescue by publishing a working paper advancing the idea that eliminating Louisiana’s voucher program would increase state costs. (Co-author of the La. Supt. John White Asks Private Schools to Take Voucher Kids for Free | deutsch29:

Project-based Learning Needs More Learning (Gisèle Huff) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Project-based Learning Needs More Learning (Gisèle Huff) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Project-based Learning Needs More Learning (Gisèle Huff)

Gisèle Huff is the executive director of the Jaquelin Hume Foundation. This post appeared on Flypaper, August 3, 2016

After almost eighteen years in the field of education, I have become convinced of the need to transform the way our children learn so that they can confront the unknowable challenges of the twenty-first century. I applaud any effort aimed at changing the mindset of those involved in the education system so that they can leave behind the traditional twentieth-century paradigm, which was (and in most places still is) an industrial model. Today’s enthusiasm for project-based learning (PBL) fits into the paradigm-shifting category, helpfully emphasizing that we learn best by doing. As a complete educational philosophy or strategy, however, it falls short on many fronts.

At some level, doing must be based on knowing. Yet in almost every PBL model that I’ve observed—Summit Public Schools being the main exception—little or nothing is said about the acquisition of knowledge. Instead, these models emphasize the completion of the project, and whatever knowledge students may actually acquire seems incidental and not clearly assessed. Of course, it’s true that knowledge alone is insufficient for today’s economy. Skills and dispositions must be developed in the learner for content to be relevant and engaging. But it is that “content” (a.k.a. knowledge) that students must master in order to apply it to hands-on projects. There is no need to sacrifice the rigor of content. Only its delivery and assessment must be changed to move from Carnegie units and seat time to competency-based learning.

The second problem with PBL as the main vehicle for students’ learning experience is that it is not nearly as personalized as its adherents would have us believe. One of the big problems that personalized learning seeks to solve is the “Swiss cheese” problem.  Because we all learn differently, moving along at a one-size-fits-all pace means that slower students are left with big gaps of knowledge and skills—gaps that will come back to haunt them later on. That is of particular concern when PBL occurs at the elementary level, when youngsters are building their knowledge base.

When PBL is deployed, knowledge acquisition is driven by the demands of a given project. The object may be “deeper learning,” but the outcome is definitely narrower, potentially excluding other critical knowledge and skills. This should be solvable, yet the PBL instructional models make no specific reference to mastery. In other words, students can complete a project without mastering the skills in that project or the knowledge underlying its successful completion.

PBL also suffers from a significant “free rider” problem. Because most PBL schools have students work in groups and do little tracking of individual performance, some students naturally coast on the work of others. In his five-minute “commencement speech” on the Getting Smart website, Tom Vander Ark encourages listeners to develop skills in team leadership and project management in order to succeed in the new economy. But each team has only one leader and one manager. Where does that leave the other members? In Most Project-based Learning Needs More Learning (Gisèle Huff) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Noticing and Helping Our Poorest Children and Their Public Schools | janresseger

Noticing and Helping Our Poorest Children and Their Public Schools | janresseger:

Noticing and Helping Our Poorest Children and Their Public Schools

If you take a driving vacation and you use a laptop instead of a smartphone, you soon learn that the best place to find Wi-Fi in little towns is in the parking lot of the public library.  You don’t have to arrive during the hours when the library is open, and you can even sit in your car to check your e-mail or the news as long as you park very near the building, because the library’s Wi-Fi service is accessible beyond the walls of the building. I know this from long experience looking at e-mail in public library parking lots from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to Red Lodge, Montana, to Laurelville, Ohio.  In our family, of course, we have broadband service at home and we need to use the library parking lot only on special occasions. But what about the people who lack this basic service?

In the New York Times last week, Anthony Marx, president of the New York Public Library wrote about internet access as a necessity. He explains that last year, the Federal Communications Commission declared: “Access to broadband is necessary to be a productive member of society. In June, a federal appeals court upheld the commission’s authority to regulate the internet as a public utility.”  But Marx, writing from New York City, describes what life is like for children in families who cannot afford the internet: “Here in the world’s information capital, New Yorkers are still scrounging for a few bars of web access, dropped like crumbs from a table. With broadband costing on average $55 per month, 25 percent of all households and 50 percent of those making less than $20,000 lack this service at home.”  Marx describes New York City’s children from his perspective at the library: “All summer, kids have been hanging out in front of the Morris Park Library in the Bronx, before opening hours and after closing.  They bring their computers to pick up the Wi-Fi signal that is leaking out of the building, because they can’t afford internet access at home. They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter—it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework… People line up, sometimes for hours, to use the library system’s free computers. Go into any library in the nation and you’ll most likely see the same thing. They come to do what so many of us take for granted: apply for government services, study or do research, talk with family or friends, inform themselves as voters, and just participate in our society and culture—so much of which now takes place online.”

I thought about Marx’s column in conjunction with two other articles in the New York Timeslast week.  In The Millions of Americans Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Barely Mention: The Poor,  Binyamin Appelbaum explains that the presidential candidates’ “platforms are markedly different in details and emphasis, (but) the candidates have this in common: Both promise to help Americans find jobs; neither has said much about helping people while they are not working.”  Appelbaum quotes Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond: “We aren’t having in our presidential debate right now a serious conversation about the fact that we are the richest democracy in the world, with the most poverty. It should be at the very top of the agenda.”

Then there was Susan Dynarski’s piece that explores the way our society uses imprecise data Noticing and Helping Our Poorest Children and Their Public Schools | janresseger:

FBI Program to Stop Violent Extremism in Schools Blasted by Ed. Advocacy Groups - Politics K-12 - Education Week

FBI Program to Stop Violent Extremism in Schools Blasted by Ed. Advocacy Groups - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

FBI Program to Stop Violent Extremism in Schools Blasted by Ed. Advocacy Groups

Several education advocacy groups have harshly criticized a Federal Bureau of Investigation program designed to prevent the spread of "violent extremism" in American schools, saying it will harm the schools and students it's targeting.

The American Federation of Teachers, AASA (the School Superintendents Association), the League of United Latin American Citizens, and other organizations expressed their concerns to FBI Director James Comey in an Aug. 9 letter. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. was also copied on the letter. They expressed specific concerns about Muslim students and those with Middle Eastern backgrounds.

The issue of discrimination against those students in particular, and more generally how they are viewed and treated in schools, is a growing issue.

At the start of this year, our coworker Evie Blad wrote about the U.S. Department of Education's efforts to safeguard Muslim, immigrant, and other students from bullying and other forms of harassment. And Corey Mitchell of Education Week also wrote about how the St. Cloud district in Minnesota is helping a sizeable share of students from Somali backgrounds. 

Concerns About Bullying, Discrimination

"The goal of this site is to help you better understand the destructive nature of violent extremism and learn to recognize the deceptive recruiting strategies of violent extremists who seek to turn you into "puppets" to carry out their orders," the FBI's "Don't Be a Puppet" home page states.

There are several sections of the website, including one that deals with the definition of violent extremism, how extremists make contact with individuals using the internet or cell phones, and a "test your knowledge" section asking students, for example, where the Al Shabbab terrorist group is located (Somalia), and the typical targets of extremist groups. And it urges students to contact teachers, police officers, and others if they know someone who is reading a lot of content from these sources or researching how to make explosives.

But those education advocacy groups we mentioned aren't having it. 

"Increasing ideological policing and surveillance efforts like the 'Don't Be a Puppet' campaign will have a chilling effect on our schools and on immigrant communities, jeopardizing children's sense of safety and well-being and threatening the security and sense of trust of entire communities," the FBI Program to Stop Violent Extremism in Schools Blasted by Ed. Advocacy Groups - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

Macroaggressions: Next Level School Culture | The Jose Vilson

Macroaggressions: Next Level School Culture | The Jose Vilson:

Macroaggressions: Next Level School Culture

When I go down the list of things that I have had to endure as a Black woman in the classroom as a teacher as well as in an office as an administrator I think the offenses are fairly common.

Has a parent or teacher called me a racist? Check.

Has a colleague told me my curly hair didn’t look as ‘professional’ as when it was straightened?Check.

Have I been summarily dismissed when I try to bring up race as connected to discipline or lack of representation? Check.

School culture can, however, be far more nefarious than those obvious and jarring examples. It took me a long time to notice that how we talk about work ethics and what makes a ‘good’ educator are actually damaging parts of the cog in the institutionally racist school systems. To tell that story, I have to go back a good decade.

When I began working at a middle school that was mostly white and middle class I was teaching 8th grade Language Arts on a team of teachers who had common planning times and we met regularly to do themed units in order to connect our learning. Our school had two guidance deans in charge of schedules: one was white, and one was Black. Both were lovely women with whom I enjoyed working, but the way the staff discussed the two of them was starkly contrasted.

Mrs. White (for ease of names, okay?) ran the master schedule for the building which I later learned how to do and it’s like playing a game of Jenga with student and teacher names. Actually, it’s more Macroaggressions: Next Level School Culture | The Jose Vilson:

Report: The Teacher Pay Penalty is Growing More Severe

Report: The Teacher Pay Penalty is Growing More Severe:

Report: The Teacher Pay Penalty is Growing More Severe

Last week, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) released a reportthat warned in no uncertain terms that the U.S. education system was falling behind those of other nations. The study was the result of a bi-partisan working group that traveled to high-performing countries to determine what policies and practices could serve as a model back home.

Their conclusion? Much of what was succeeding in these systems could and should be replicated in the United States, including the necessary work around building a world-class teaching force. This entails more rigorous recruitment strategies, embedded professional development, career ladders for educators — and better pay:

In high-performing countries, teachers are compensated more generously than American teachers, typically earning pay similar to that of senior civil servants and professionals such as engineers and accountants. They are expected to be the best in the world and are compensated accordingly. Many nations view their teachers as “nation builders,” preparing the country’s next generation.

Educators in the United States are also expected to be the best, but are nonetheless asked to withstand a severe “teacher pay penalty” –  the loss of income when choosing teaching over an alternate profession. While no one believes a career in the classroom will bring unbridled wealth, at least high-performing nations, as the NCSL study emphasizes, minimize the pay gap between their “nation builders” and other workers with similar education levels.

How teacher pay stacks up to other fields is a major factor in the decision  whether to become an educator. Many parts of the country are facing crippling teacher shortages, retirements are ratcheting up, and the number of college students considering teaching as a profession is at an all-time low,

As Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University wrote in a 2016 paper:

“Even if teachers may be more motivated by altruism than some other workers, teaching must compete with other occupations for talented college and university graduates. … Teachers are more likely to quit when they work in districts with lower wages and when their salaries are low relative to alternative wage opportunities, especially in high-demand fields like math and science.”

In the bid to make a teaching a viable and attractive career option, the United States has a lot of ground to make up. The Economic Policy Institute recently analyzed the wages of educators relative to other workers and found that penalty teachers endure has become more severe.

“In order to recruit and retain talented teachers, school districts should be paying them more than their peers,” said Lawrence Mishel, co author of “The Teacher Pay Gap is Wider Than Ever.” “Instead, teachers face low wages, high levels of student debt, and increasing demands on the job. Eliminating the teacher pay penalty is crucial to building the teacher workforce we need.”

According to EPI’s analysis, in 1994, educators earned 1.8 % less than similarly-trained workers in other fields. By 2015, that gap has widened to 17%. Since 1996, teacher pay has decreased $30 per week, while for others, average weekly wages have increased more than $100 – from $1,292 to $1,416 in 2015.

The gap remains stubbornly large even if you factor in some of the benefits many Report: The Teacher Pay Penalty is Growing More Severe:

Policies of Cruelty | educarenow

Policies of Cruelty | educarenow:

Policies of Cruelty

So the word is out that the state of Michigan, through its School Reform Office, is aggressively looking to close schools that it calls “chronic failures.” It measures so-called “failures” as those that are mired in the bottom 5% of state schools as measured by test scores.

With that background in mind, there are many, many problems with this approach to “school improvement.” (Of course, one place to begin might be to question the logic of improving a school by closing it. I’m a Lions fan, but, then again, they make money.) I could write about the fact that in 2015 Michigan’s Governor Snyder moved the School Reform Office from the Michigan Department of Education into the Department of Technology, Management and Budget.

Yes. That’s weird.

I could write how many of the so-called “failing” schools are under the auspices of the Educational Achievement Authority (EAA), a state-run school district that was created to turn around so-called “failing schools.” We know how that has worked.

Etc., etc. (See other excellent critiques here and here.)

But most interesting to me are the assumptions that go into what we call“failing.” These assumptions represent the core of the problem with “school improvement.”

Viewing at schools as “failing” allows us to perceive these schools outside of the context in which they exist. It allows us to see school performance as a problem that lies within the control of adults working within that school. It sees school failure as a “people problem,” and thus the teachers and children within these schools as lesser than those schools that aren’t failing. As Dan LaDue, Assistant Policies of Cruelty | educarenow:

Schools Matter: Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools: Part 5

Schools Matter: Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools: Part 5:

Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools: Part 5



Below is next installment from Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through "No Excuses" Teaching.  Please share widely.

Chapter 5

KIPP and the Teaching Profession

. . . our teachers have normal lives, and many have families and children. --Richard Barth, KIPP CEO (Philanthropy News Digest, 2009)

The KIPP Foundation has no requirements for professional preparation, and certification requirements are governed by the state charter school statutes where each of the 183 KIPP schools is located.   While a few KIPP advertisements state a preference for teaching credentials, no ads could be located that required anything more than what the state charter laws stipulate.  The KIPP Foundation website (2015d) states,

the primary requirement for teaching at a KIPP school is a belief in a very simple concept: that we will do whatever it takes to help each and every student develop the character and academic skills necessary for them to lead self-sufficient, successful and happy lives. 

The Foundation leaves it to each school to determine the qualifications required for new teachers. While many KIPP schools list two years of experience as a requirement in their ads, the necessity of replacing teachers who quit or who are fired make these requirements less applicable in real life.  The KIPP website (KIPP Foundation, 2015d) points out that some schools have special programs for teachers with no prior experience. 

In 2008, David Levin joined another charter school operator, Norman Atkins, and hedge fund mogul, Larry “L-Train” Robbins to found a non-profit corporation, the Relay Graduate School of Education, which focuses on preparing prospective teachers for the No Excuses charter school environment.  Begun as Teacher U in 2006 by KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, Relay requires evidence that degree candidates can raise test scores before receiving their Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree. 

In one of the first cohorts, “seven out of 110 teachers did not receive Master’s degrees because they could not show that their students had made at least a year’s worth of academic progress” (Green, 2011).The “pedagogical content” curriculum at Relay is based largely on the Doug Lemov’s (2010; 2015) text,Teach like a champion…  Lemov holds an MBA from Harvard and is founder and Board member of Uncommon Schools, a charter chain that largely emulates the KIPP organizational model. 

Showing steady growth, Relay has campuses in New York, Newark, New Orleans, Houston, and Chicago, with plans in 2015 to open a location in Memphis.  Prominent among Relay’s philanthropic investors are the Gates Foundation, Credit Suisse, the Walton Family Foundation, the New Schools Venture Fund, and the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund. These same organizations and many others with them channel millions of dollars of tax-exempted donations through their corporate foundations to supplement the hundreds of millions of dollars in public education funds that go to KIPP each year. 

When Bill Gates delivered a TED talk in 2009 on two of the world’s most pressing problems, malaria and bad teachers, he provided a copy of Work hard, be nice…, to all attendees, and in 2014 Gates told an interviewer from the American Enterprise Institute that he had concluded “the greatest cause of inequity” in America comes from “the failures of the education system” (American Enterprise Institute, 2014, p. 3).  Gates’ preferred solution, for poor urban children at least, is the KIPP Model.

KIPP has an attrition rate among teachers that would be unsustainable if it were not for the large numbers of recruits from Teach for America that replace the 30-40 percent of KIPP teachers who leave KIPP each year.  When David Levin and Mike Feinberg founded KIPP in 1994, it is likely that they envisioned TFA, with its two-year service contract for inexperienced teacher candidates who are heavily recruited from top-tier colleges and universities, as a prime source of new teachers to sustain, perhaps, the heroic demands and test performance standards that the KIPP Model imposes (Horn, 2010).

While former TFA corps members make up between thirty and forty percent of KIPP teachers nationally, some schools have a much higher concentration.  At the KIPP Endeavor Academy in Kansas City, for instance, 80 percent of KIPP teachers were TFA corps members in 2014.  Even though TFA has always attracted more applicants than it has teaching slots, the organization regularly spends more money for advertising and recruitment (Teach for America, 2007, p. 29) than it spends on pre-service training, which lasts for just over four weeks. 

One would-be recruit from a few years back (Chernicoff, 2006) wrote this assessment in the Yale Daily News:

In just a few years, TFA has established itself as one of the smart-people-who-just-graduated-with-liberal-arts-degrees-and-now-have-no-idea-what-they-want-to-do-with-their-lives-but-are-pretty-sure-it-isn’t-remain-in-the-spin-cycle-of-academia-or-move-on-to-the-next-preset-hierarchy-in-the-finance-world demographic. Used to be those poor souls could only go to law school or move to New York and “go into, like, publishing or something.” But TFA positioned itself in such a way that it gets the lost souls who have an impulse to do something to help the world immediately upon graduating (para 12-13). 

New TFA recruits who are not assigned directly to KIPP are commonly harvested after two years into KIPP teaching and leadership positions. As KIPP school leaders, they are given CEO power in the principal’s office to make policy and rules that were once the responsibility of public school boards.

KIPP’s teacher turnover rate became a public fact in 2008, with the publication of the SRI evaluation report San Francisco Bay Area KIPP Schools. . .  (Woodworth, David, Wang, & Lopez-Torkos, 2008). SRI researchers found KIPP’s teacher annual attrition rate ranged from 18 to 49 percent at the five Bay Area KIPP schools that researchers studied:

Since 2003-04, the five Bay Area KIPP school leaders have hired a total of 121 teachers. Of these, 43 remained in the classroom at the start of the 2007-08 school year. Among teachers who left the classroom, at four of the schools they spent a median of 1 year in the classroom before leaving; at one school, the typical teacher spent 2 years in the classroom before leaving (p. 32).

While SRI found KIPP teachers committed, they also found them clearly doubtful of their capacity to continue under the stress of 60-80 hours of school-related work per week (includes 2 hours per night for Schools Matter: Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools: Part 5:

Teachers are experiencing the biggest pay gap since 1979 - Business Insider

Teachers are experiencing the biggest pay gap since 1979 - Business Insider:

Teachers are experiencing the biggest pay gap since 1979

The pay gap between public school teachers and workers in comparable professions is at the widest point ever, with wages for educators falling woefully behind.

Teachers earned 17 percent less than other college graduates in 2015, according to a new research report from The Economic Policy Institute. That’s the largest gap since 1979, when teachers’ weekly wages were 5.5 percent less than those of college graduates.

The analysis adjusted for education, age, gender, marital status, geographic region and race/ethnicity. When benefits including insurance and pensions were factored in, the gap was still 11.1 percent.

The findings come as the number of teachers in the U.S. is falling due to high turnover among new and mid-career teachers, a large volume of retirements and fewer people choosing teaching careers.

“At the same time, many factors are increasing the demand for teachers, including shrinking class sizes, the desire to improve diversity, and the need to meet high standards,” the report said. “In short, the demand for teachers is escalating, while simultaneously the supply of teachers is faltering.”

The pay gap is biggest for teachers between 35 and 44 years old, who earn 21.7 percent less than their peers in other lines of work; male teachers (24.5 percent less); and non-union teachers (25.5 percent less). Male teachers have always experienced a huge pay gap, even in 1979 when they earned 22.1 percent less than comparable workers.

Female teachers and the most experienced educators have seen wages go from being in their favor to negative territory. In 1979, female teachers earned 4.2 percent than similar female workers, while teachers aged 45 to 54 received 1.9 percent more in wages than comparable workers. In 2015, female teachers earned 13.9 percent less, and older teachers get 17.8 percent less.

Compared to workers in general, teachers don’t fare as well as they used to, either. In 1996, teachers earned $231 more a week than the average for workers across all levels of education, including those without college degrees. By 2015, the difference was only $59 because the average weekly wage for teachers fell during that time while the pay for all workers increased.

“It is good news that teachers are able to bargain a total compensation package — as it seems they may have forgone wage increases for benefits recently,” the report said, noting that teacher wages have stagnated since the mid-1990s. “This makes the wage gap, on its own, critically Teachers are experiencing the biggest pay gap since 1979 - Business Insider:

CPS students rally against 'racist and discriminatory' layoffs | Chicago Sun-Times

CPS students rally against 'racist and discriminatory' layoffs | Chicago Sun-Times:

CPS students rally against ‘racist and discriminatory’ layoffs

A small group of Chicago Public Schools students gathered in front of the Thompson Center on Monday, Aug. 15, 2016, to protest the firings of CPS teachers and staff. | Lou Foglia/Sun-Times

Chicago Public Schools students protested Monday the “racist and discriminatory” firing of district teachers and staff, which they said disproportionately affect low-income schools.

At a rally held outside the Thompson Center, about a dozen young protesters called for quality education and funding to be provided in all schools. The district fired 508 teachers and 521 support staff earlier this month.

Sabah Hussain and George Vassilatos, the rally organizers from the Chicago Student Union group, criticized the district’s cuts for contributing to “systematic oppression.”

Hussain, a senior at Lane Tech, said CPS “targets marginalized communities” and “justifies perpetuating the cycle of poverty under the guise of lack of resources.” The 17-year-old urged the district to find alternatives to layoffs for reducing the district’s $1.1 billion deficit, such as re-allocating surplus money in tax increment financing funds; taxing corporations on LaSalle Street; and cooperating with the Chicago Teachers Union.

Vassilatos, a senior at Whitney Young, reiterated a list of demands for the city and CPS, including a moratorium on charter expansion, an end to “racist and neighborhood-based budget cuts,” and an elected board of education.

“Education is the strongest tool against systematic oppression and systematic disenfranchisement of our communities, yet Rahm Emanuel and Forrest Claypool continue to close schools, fire teachers and refuse to engage in meaningful dialogue with CTU and the people of Chicago,” said 17-year-old Vassilatos.

Chicago Public Schools students concluded the rally by chanting, “People over profits” and “They say cut back, we say fight back.” | Lou Foglia/ Sun-Times

August Greenberg, who also attends Whitney Young, said after the rally that his selective enrollment school hasn’t had more than a couple of layoffs but all students should feel more of an obligation to fight for equal funding.

“The schools that are affected the most are the low-income schools, the schools on the South and West Sides. The students in those schools don’t have other places to go,” said the 16-year-old. “I do feel cuts in my school, but not the way that those people do, and those are the people I’m fighting for.”

CPS has said the majority of those teachers and staff laid off would be rehired in different CPS students rally against 'racist and discriminatory' layoffs | Chicago Sun-Times:

How schools that obsess about standardized tests ruin them as measures of success - Vox

How schools that obsess about standardized tests ruin them as measures of success - Vox:

How schools that obsess about standardized tests ruin them as measures of success

The video changed everything. The surreptitious recording of a teacher berating a first-grader for failing to explain a math problem correctly, ripping up her paper, and then inexplicably telling the subdued child to go sit in the "calm down chair" went viral and jump-started a long-running national debate over the "no excuses" charter school model — a pedagogical approach marked by heavy workloads, rigid zero-tolerance discipline, and a relentless focus on metrics, particularly standardized tests.

The Success Academy Charter Schools are arguably the best-known institutions that follow this model. The storyline its proponents push is that no-excuses schools may be tough but they prepare students well: They represent a kind of educational tough love.

In real life, though, the data seems to show that Success Academy thrives by a combination of kicking out poorly performing students and training the remainder to perform well on tests that kids at other schools don’t really care about — or don’t care as much about.

Other critics have focused on how Success Academy focuses on excluding students who are not likely to perform well on tests — an option public schools don’t have. A parent of a kindergartener with a speech disability complained to the New York Daily News that the academy tried to force her son back into the public schools by framing his frustration in class as a disciplinary problem and repeatedly suspending him. The New York Timesrevealed that one principal at a Success Academy school had a list of low-performing students labeled "Got to Go."

The statistical problem with test score obsession

When a school uses selection and attrition policies that effectively filter out many of the extremely poor, students speaking English as a second language, and the learning disabled, that clearly calls into question test score advantages that such a school might have over an ordinary public school.

But the problems run even deeper than most critics realize: A look at the data combined with some basic principles of social science suggests that the practices of no-excuses charters are undermining the very foundation of data-based education reform.

As statisticians with experience teaching at the high school and college level, we recognize a familiar problem: A test that overshadows the ultimate outcomes it is intended to measure turns into an invalid test.

Back in the old Soviet Union, factories would produce masses of unusable products as a result of competition to meet unrealistic production quotas. Analogously, many charter schools, under pressure to deliver unrealistic gains in test scores, are contorting themselves to get the numbers they've promised. They're being rewarded for doing so. But that monomaniacal focus on test scores undermines the correlation between test scores and academic accomplishment that originally existed.

Thus, when there is a policy of teachers berating poorly performing students, it’s not tough love in the service of preparing students for future academic success. Rather, it’s consistent with a metrics-driven strategy that’s about looking good but not necessarily performing well.

In short, a statistical perspective can help reveal how behavior that seems like an How schools that obsess about standardized tests ruin them as measures of success - Vox:

 

Counting 'Proficient' Students Creates Bad Accountability - On California - Education Week

Counting 'Proficient' Students Creates Bad Accountability - On California - Education Week:

Counting 'Proficient' Students Creates Bad Accountability

Consider two California schools. Both schools have 40 percent of students scoring proficient on state tests.  Because both schools are well short of the state's accountability targets, they are subject to intervention.  According to the accountability classifications used under No Child Left Behind and those proposed for the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act, these two schools look exactly the same.

But a glance under the hood shows that the two schools are not at all the same. School A has performance that looks like the following: 20% below basic, 40% basic, 20% proficient, 20% advanced. School B has performance of 40% below basic, 20% basic, 40% proficient, 0% advanced.  In terms of average achievement levels, School B is clearly worse off than School A.  If the goal of an accountability system is to target resources and support to the lowest-performing schools, it would be a mistake to treat these two schools the same.

NCLB All Over Again

Yet that is exactly what NCLB did through its Adequate Yearly Progress calculation, and which the draft regulations of ESSA would continue.  All that mattered for school performance was the proportion of students in a school at or above the state-defined proficiency threshold. Research showed that this design led to negative unintended consequences:

• It encouraged schools to focus their energies on students just below this proficiency cut score, since improving student achievement for already-proficient (or very-far-below-proficient) students would not help the schools' accountability ratings.
• It is statistically a very poor measure of school performance because the relative rankings depend heavily on where the proficiency score is set.
• It is a very poor measure of achievement gaps—actual changes in achievement gaps can sometimes be opposite to changes identified by comparing proficiency rates, again because of where proficiency levels are set and the distribution of student achievement.

There are more arguments about the problems of this accountability policy design, which I detail in the letter I wrote to the US Department of Education. (It was signed by nearly 100 scholars and practitioners, including former presidents of the American Educational Research Association, former Commissioners of The National Center for Educational Statistics and the Institute of Education Sciences, and more than a dozen K-12 educators and school district data and accountability officers. The letter was also covered by news media here, here, and here.)

There's Time To Fix This

Fortunately, there is a window of opportunity for the U.S. Department of Education to address these issues in ESSA through its regulation process. The regulations being developed by the Department will have profound consequences for the kinds of accountability policies that are actually written and implemented under ESSA.

Based on the research evidence, I argue in the letter that the Department should interpret the law to allow states to use alternative measures of performance.  In particular, I recommend one of two options:

1. The simple average of students' scores on the assessment (what's known as average scale scores).
2. A "proficiency index" that gives schools credit for performance all along the achievement distribution (for instance, 0 points for far below basic, 25 for below basic, 50 for basic, 75 for proficient, and 100 for advanced).

In the letter I recommend the first approach because it uses the most information available in the assessment data. However, both approaches would be far superior to rating schools according to the percent of students who achieved at least a "proficient" score.

So how would this work for our two example schools? In either of the two approaches sketched above, School A would come out on top of School B, as it should. For instance, using the proficiency index described above, School A would score a 65 and School B would score a 50 on the 0-to-100 scale, a dramatic difference reflecting the fact that the students in School A are higher-achieving on average than those in school B. An average scale score approach would even more precisely reflect the performance of kids in each school.

Why am I so concerned about such a seemingly esoteric design feature of accountability policy?

Incentives Matter

In short, incentives matter. Educators understandably pay attention to the design of accountability systems. Given the stakes involved, which can sometimes include reconstituting schools, it is not surprising that educators would shape their instructional responses based on the incentives of the policy even if they are educationally unsound.  Given the once-in-a-generation opportunity that a new federal law offers, it's important for its accountability policies to encourage good practices, not bad ones.

The letter, however, did not describe my ideal accountability system, which would be one based heavily on student achievement growth. That kind of policy would encourage schools to focus on growing ALL students, and it would be much fairer to schools that serve large proportions of low income and other historically underserved students. Unfortunately, such a policy would not be allowable under ESSA as I read the statute.

I sincerely hope that the Department takes my letter seriously, because such a simple change could have profound effects on the incentives in ESSA. Others have written letters that make the same or similar points, so there will be ample voices behind these policy changes. Regardless, it is encouraging that so many researchers, educators, and advocates are interested in improving accountability policy for the next generation.

Morgan Polikoff is associate professor of education at the University of Southern California. His areas of expertise include K-12 education policy; Common Core standards; assessment policy; alignment among instruction, standards and assessments, and the measurement of classroom instruction. He blogs at https://morganpolikoff.com, and this article was adapted from his earlier post.Counting 'Proficient' Students Creates Bad Accountability - On California - Education Week: