Duncan and the Abuse of Research (As Well As Power)

February 24, 2012

Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s press statement on South Carolina was a bizarre display of the opposite of what it intended.  As Greg pointed out, the statement’s harsh and threatening tone did nothing to support the claim that  Common Core national standards and assessments are a purely voluntary consortium of the states.  Instead, the statement was a not so veiled threat that South Carolina would lose out on the opportunity for federal grants like Race to the Top and lose the opportunity to receive waivers from impossible to satisfy NCLB requirements if it followed through with a proposal to withdraw from Common Core.  If it is purely voluntary, why the need for threats and intimidation from the Education Secretary?

In addition to this abuse of power given the legal prohibitions on the US Department of Education from establishing national standards, testing, and curriculum, Duncan’s statement also displayed an abuse of research.  He distorted the findings of a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) analysis to suggest that South Carolina had particularly weak performance standards when the research had not shown that.  Duncan claimed:

[Prominent Republicans] have supported the Common Core standards because they realize states must stop dummying down academic standards and lying about the performance of children and schools. In fact, South Carolina lowered the bar for proficiency in English and mathematics faster than any state in the country from 2005 to 2009, according to research by the National Center for Education Statistics.

South Carolina did significantly lower its performance standards between 2005 and 2009. But they did so because they had earlier raised those performance standards to well-above the national average.  In the end, South Carolina had math and reading performance standards that were close to the national average and close to the NAEP standard for Basic.

One of the potential benefit of state control over performance standards is that they can raise or lower them so that they are not too easy so that everyone passes or so hard that everyone fails. You have to hit the sweet spot between these points to motivate students and educators to improve without crushing them. Each state may have a different sweet spot and needs the flexibility to adjust in case they miss the mark (as SC initially did) or in case achievement improves (as has occurred in FL).

We actually had Jack Buckley, the Commissioner of NCES, out to give a lecture in Arkansas during which he presented this analysis. You can see a summary and the slides here.

Compared to what we could have had as an education secretary, Duncan has been pretty good.  He’s shown some independence from the teachers unions and supported some promising reforms, like charter schools.  But he’s ignored his own department’s research in seeking (multiple times) to kill the DC voucher program.  And he seems oblivious to the limits of power that he and the federal government have over education policy.  When people abuse their power they may also be more likely to abuse research.

3 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

This Deal Is Getting Worse All the Time

February 23, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Shorter Arne Duncan: The U.S. Department of Education is not pressuring states to adopt Common Core. However, any state that takes action to resist Common Core will be immediately singled out by the Education Secretary for an extremely harsh public denunciation of its education system – which will obviously make it effectively impossible for the Department to look favorably upon that state when doling out grants and waivers for the foreseeable future.

17 Comments | National Standards, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Lance Izumi on Nationalizing Education

February 21, 2012

Lance Izumi has a new mini-book coming out as part of the Encounter Broadsides series arguing against the effort to build a nationalized education system through centrally imposed Common Core standards, assessments, and curriculum.  Be sure to check out the cool video Encounter has made to promote the mini-book.

6 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Common Core Chickens

February 20, 2012

Last week I put up a post praising a debate in Education Next over the quality and desirability of Common Core math standards.  I was pleased that after many months of trying the editors at Ed Next had finally found a supporter of Common Core to defend the math standards in a forum with established critic Ze-ev Wurman.

It turns out I was mistaken.  Stephen Wilson, who appeared to be taking the pro side of the debate, clarified in the comment section of last week’s post that he is not a Common Core supporter and has no general opinion about the desirability of imposing Common Core standards nationwide.

Wilson did praise the fact that “Common Core is vastly superior—not just a little bit better, but vastly superior—to the standards in more than 30 states.”  But he also acknowledged “There is much to criticize about them, and there are several sets of standards, including those in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Indiana, and Washington, that are clearly better.”  He also acknowledged that Common Core math standards are “certainly not up there with the best of countries…”

I thought Wilson was trying to argue that being better than 30 states represented a good first step and that Common Core would be improved over time.  That was me inferring something that he did not actually say and that he explicitly objected to having attributed to him.

Rather than being the Common Core supporter, it appears more like Wilson was damning the Common Core movement with faint praise.  In the forum Wilson emphasized that even if Common Core were comparable to the best state and international standards, it may have little effect on math instruction or achievement:

So, let’s just pretend for a moment that Common Core is just as good as the very best. Who, in education circles, will agree with that enough to put it all in practice? The standard algorithm deniers will teach multiple ways to multiply numbers and mention the standard algorithm one day in passing. Korea will say “no calculators” in K–12, a little extreme perhaps, but some in the U.S. will say “appropriate tools” means calculators in 4th grade. We, in this country, are still not on the same page about what content is most important, even if everyone says they’ll take Common Core. Without a unified, concerted effort to teach real mathematics, there isn’t much chance of catching up.

In other countries, if you say “learn to multiply whole numbers,” no one questions how this should be done; students should learn and understand the standard algorithm. In the U.S., even if you say “learn to multiply whole numbers with the standard algorithm,” some people will declare wiggle room and try to avoid the standard algorithm.

This echoes Tom Loveless’ conclusion from the annual Brookings report released last week:

The Common Core will have little to no effect on student achievement. The quality or rigor of state standards has been unrelated to state NAEP scores, Loveless finds. Moreover, most of the variation in NAEP scores lies within states, not between them.  Whatever impact standards alone can have on reducing within-state differences should have already been felt by the standards that all states have had since 2003.

So, let’s review where things stand.  Despite a withering public scolding from Rick Hess, Common Core still can’t produce anyone to strongly defend national adoption of those standards based on their quality.  Common Core supporters are either too chicken to engage in the debate over the quality of the standards or too arrogant to think they have to defend the standards intellectually before they cram them down all of our throats.

13 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Common Core Quality Debated

February 16, 2012

Last fall Rick Hess complained about his inability to find anyone to participate in an Education Next debate about the quality of Common Core standards who would argue in their favor.  As Rick put it:

Rather, I think the reluctance to contribute [to a debate in support of Common Core] is due to hubris, impatience to focus on implementation, political naivete, and disdain for what they see as mean-spirited carping….

There are long rows of argument and persuasion still to be hoed. And, if you’re eager to overhaul what gets taught in forty-odd states serving forty million or more students, that’s probably as it should be. If Common Core-ites don’t have the patience or stomach for that task, they should let us know now–and save everyone a whole lot of grief.

The notion that Common Core proponents needn’t make their case is an affront to democratic values.

Well, Ed Next managed to find someone to argue for and against the quality of Common Core standards, producing a really excellent and illuminating exchange.  W. Stephen Wilson took the pro side and Ze’ev Wurman was on the con side.  I would encourage you to read the entire debate yourself, but here is my takeaway:  They were mostly in agreement about the quality of Common Core.  Both seemed to agree that Common Core was better than the standards previously in place in most states but worse than in a non-trivial number of other states.  They also agreed that Common Core standards are significantly weaker than the ones in most high-achieving countries.

So if they agree that Common Core is sort of mediocre, why does Wilson support them while Wurman oppose them?  Wilson sees the improvement on the standards of 30 or more states to be substantial progress.  He sees this as a first step toward developing stronger national standards that would be comparable to those of our overseas competitors and better than all previously existing state standards.

Wurman sees Common Core as significantly lowering the bar relative to several previously existing state standards, including very large states like California.  More importantly, he sees Common Core as the end of progress in improving standards rather than the beginning.  Once put in place, he sees no incentive for anyone to toughen national standards since no state will be competing to offer a more rigorous education in order to attract residents and businesses.  He also sees national standards as more easily captured and dummied-down by teachers unions and other entrenched interests who would prefer to have their members (and students) jump over a lower bar.

19 Comments | National Standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Duncan, the Bizarro Ed Secretary

February 14, 2012

We recently highlighted how the Gates Foundation has done the exact opposite of what their own research has shown by ditching a small schools reform strategy (that rigorous, random-assignment research showed to be effective) while embracing a strategy (unsupported by research) of discovering the “science” of effective teaching and then cramming it down our throat through a system of national standards, curriculum, and assessments.

Now the Obama administration’s Education Secretary is playing out of the same Gates playbook by doing the exact opposite of what their own research has shown in eliminating funding for the D.C. voucher program in the proposed budget. (Saying that Obama and Duncan are playing out of the Gates playbook is actually unnecessary since as far as I can tell they are the same exact team.  Have you ever seen them both at the same time? : ) )

Obama and Duncan yanked funding from the DC voucher program despite the fact that the random-assignment evaluation sponsored by their own Department of Education found that the program increased high school graduation rates by 21 percentage points for students who used vouchers to attend a private school.  Duncan must be the Bizarro Secretary of Education because he is doing the exact opposite of what the evidence says.

Instead, Obama and Duncan are pursuing a reform strategy that could be best described as Evidence-Free Top-Down Righteousness.  Rick Hess did such an excellent job of articulating his disgust with this approach that it is worth quoting him at length:

First, setting aside my reservations about Sec. Duncan’s right to not merely grant selected waivers but to impose wholly new requirements that exist nowhere in federal law, I was struck by the sheer number and scope of conditions that Duncan cheerfully imposed. These new requirements included, according to the White House release: “States must adopt and have a plan to implement college and career-ready standards. They must also create comprehensive systems of teacher and principal development, evaluation and support that include factors beyond test scores, such as principal observation, peer review, student work, or parent and student feedback…they must set new performance targets for improving student achievement and closing achievement gaps. They also must have accountability systems that recognize and reward high-performing schools and those that are making significant gains.”

Second, maybe it’s just me, but I have trouble reconciling this list with the President’s proclamation yesterday that, “We want high standards, and we’ll give you flexibility in return…Because what might work in Minnesota may not work in Kentucky.” Indeed, one only had to read Duncan’s complicated, jargon-laden, finger-wagging letters to the ten approved states to see just how prescriptive the process is. In fact, I don’t think the extent of the new demands–and the limited flexibility granted–will be clear for weeks, at best. It’ll require patient observers to wade through the requests, letters, conditions, and so on. Just for starters, it would appear that the waiver “winners” just promised to adopt narrow, prescriptive teacher evaluation and school improvement policies that apply to charter schools as well as district schools–but not even charter authorities are entirely clear on how this will play out in reality or if these commitments should be taken any more seriously than so many empty promises in the Race to the Top applications.

Third, I found remarkably graceless the way in which the administration chest-thumpingly blamed the waivers on congressional inaction, while taking no responsibility for the slow pace of ESEA reauthorization (much less acknowledging that it dawdled for 14 months with a Democratic Congress before ever introducing its initial ESEA “blueprint.”) The White House gleefully declared, “The administration’s decision to provide waivers followed extensive efforts to work with Congress to rewrite NCLB.” This may come as news to those GOP edu-staff who complained persistently throughout 2009 and 2010 that they couldn’t get the Department to give them the time of day. The history added irony to the President declaring, with less respect for the U.S. Constitution than I might expect from a law professor, “After waiting far too long for Congress to act, I announced that my administration would take steps to reform No Child Left Behind on our own.”

Fourth, I was unimpressed by the way in which the administration–even as it criticized Congress for failing to act–went out of its way to steal attention from House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline’s long-scheduled introduction of two bills crucial to moving NCLB reauthorization. It’s hard to take seriously an administration that complains about congressional inaction and then counter-programs so as to minimize attention to congressional action. (If you want to hear more about what Kline has in mind, check out what he had to say when he previewed the bills at AEI. You can find the event here.)

Fifth, I was struck (and not favorably) by the “Stockholm Syndrome”-ness of it all. Watching governors and state chiefs go to the administration on bended knee and hustle to comply with its various demands, out of desperation to escape the more destructive elements of NCLB, doesn’t strike me as good for democratic government or school improvement. And I thought the celebratory press releases would’ve felt more authentic if they’d been read into a camera and recorded on grainy videotape. I’m sure it’s just my skeptical nature, but I couldn’t help flashing on those old Soviet show trials when the President opened by declaring, “I want to start by thanking all the chief state school officers who have made the trip from all over the country. Why don’t you all stand up just so we can see you all, right here.”

Finally, and maybe it’s just me, but I found it patronizing when the President mused yesterday, “So Massachusetts, for example, has set a goal to cut the number of underperforming students in half over the next six years. I like that goal!” Or, “Florida has set a goal to have their test scores rank among the top five states in the country, and the top 10 countries in the world. I like that ambition!” I’m sure it makes me old-school, but I prefer it when the President doesn’t treat governors or respected state chiefs as so many ruddy-cheeked toddlers competing for his approval.

2 Comments | National Standards, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Captain Hammer’s National Standards Will Save Us!

February 6, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Michael Winerip had a doozy of a column over the weekend, exposing what look like some really seriously dumbed down state standards in New York. But don’t worry! Just like Captain Hammer, national standards are here to save us.

There’s no doubt Winerip has what looks like a pretty damning indictment of the NY English Regents exam. Here are some actual student responses that the state grading guide says should get middling or even higher scores:

  • These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create Art.
  • In the poem, the poets use of language was very depth into it.
  • Even though their is no physical conflict withen each other. Their are jealousy problems between each other that each one wish could have.
  • In life, “no two people regard the world in exactly the same way,” as J. W. von Goethe says. Everyone sees and reacts to things in different ways. Even though they may see the world in similar ways, no two people’s views will ever be exactly the same. This statement is true since everyone sees things through different viewpoints.

Bear in mind that these are not just examples pulled from student exams that actually got middling or higher scores. These are examples held up in the state scoring guide as examples of answers that should get middling or higher scores. In effect, the state is mandating low standards from the top.

But don’t worry!

They are also counting on a new set of national learning standards, known as the common core, which are currently being developed in more than 40 states. The hope is that more sophisticated standards detailing what children should know, coupled with more sophisticated curriculums and exams, will result in a more rigorous public education system.

“The D.O.E./Board of Regents position on the passing score for this exam, with attention to college and career readiness, will be re-examined in conjunction with administering a revised exam in this subject area aligned to the Common Core State Standards,” a spokesman for [New York State education commissioner] Dr. [John] King wrote.

Thank heaven! The exact same people who produced the current mandatory dumbing down are now going to produce a new set of standards. Surely that will result in a lifting of standards!

8 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Nationalization Train Starts Going Off the Tracks

December 19, 2011

Let the in-fighting begin.

Supporters of digital learning, many of whom were among the strongest supporters of national standards, have organized in opposition to the imposition of a single test on the nation’s schools.  As it stands, the federal government is dumping several hundred million dollars on two testing consortia to develop assessments based on the federally “incentivized” Common Core standards.  A choice of two tests is not the same as a single test, but it is darn close.  It’s like the old joke where you have a choice between death or roo-roo.

The backers of digital learning organized by Innosight issued a group letter in which they express their desire for a multitude of testing options because they (finally) recognize the connection between choice and innovation:

Create a dynamic testing ecosystem, not another one-size-fits-all assessment. Rather than a single common test, the federal-funded opportunity offers the potential to create a vibrant assessment ecosystem comprised of multiple platforms, open-item banks, and multiple testing options that encourages deeper learning. An assessment ecosystem, rather than a single common test, will give states the flexibility to take advantage of innovations in digital learning over time while maintaining interoperability and comparability.

Signatories to this anti-national testing statement include Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Gisele Huff, Terry  Moe, Tom Vander Ark, Bob Wise, and Julie. E. Young in addition to dozens of others.

I’m not sure why backers of digital learning have taken so long to recognize the threat posed by the nationalization movement.  And I really can’t understand why some of them have been ardent supporters of national standards.  The adoption of national standards only has the possibility of having an effect if it is tightly connected to national testing and curriculum.

The “tight-loose” idea that we can nationally impose standards but allow a wide range of assessments, curricula, and teaching methods is just an empty slogan used to conceal the inevitability of nationalizing all of these aspects of the education system if the standards are to mean anything.  If we don’t have a common way of assessing, how can we be sure that everyone is adhering to the national standards?  And if the national standards are more than vague generalities, they inevitably drive  what is in the curriculum and how it must be taught.  You can have a little bit of nationalization about as much as you can be a little bit pregnant.

Despite the intellectual incoherence of some of these digital learning backers of national standards but opponents of national testing, it is nice to see the nationalization train starting to go off the tracks.  As the train moves further along and the full implications of nationalizing key aspects of the education system become more obvious to everyone, more and more people will jump that train.  Without significant coercion it will be very hard to keep everyone on board until they reach the station where standards, assessments, and curriculum are all centrally imposed.

5 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Choice Is Not Chaos

December 14, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Commenters on Jay’s outstanding post seem to be under the impression that the only alternative to national standards is chaos. If the national government doesn’t impose standards, there will be no standards at all. I think this is really what lies behind a lot of people’s support for that policy.

But, as we’ve discussed at some length here on JPGB, there are two ways to create order. One is to impose an order by raw power. The other is to allow people to organize their own orders around what they think works best (within just boundaries – your order isn’t allowed to include killing me, for example). Some forms of order need to be imposed – theives need to be locked up, not permitted to construct an alternative theiving order.

But content standards ought to follow the choice model. Currently, schools can’t create any kind of order or standards because they have to accomodate a great number of contituencies who don’t choose to be there. If every school were a school of choice, each school would have not only the freedom, but also the social support, to organize around a clear standard and impose it in every classroom. All the constituencies would be aligned.

Different schools would select different standards, of course. But that is not chaos. That is what ordered freedom looks like. The pretense that there is one clearly correct best approach to education, such that any deviation is illegitimate, looks a lot like religious fundamentalism – and that’s because it is religious fundamentalism. And it has the same dangerous tendency toward political authoriarianism that religious fundamentalism often creates.

To revisit an old post:

People need to be persuaded to adopt reform as part of their truth – something they experience as legitimate, necessary, and empowering.

“But wait!” I hear you cry. “That’s what we’ve been trying for decades, and it hasn’t worked!”

That’s right, so let’s ask why it hasn’t worked. I mean, isn’t it a little odd that 1) the system is so overwhelmingly dysfunctional that it’s destroying millions of children’s lives, 2) the people in the system are normal people, not psychotic or anything, people who by all accounts care about children’s education at least as much as the average person if not, you know, a lot more, and yet 3) the people in the system can’t be brought by any means to see reform as necessary?

What is it about the system as currently constituted that ensures reform is never embraced as something legitimate, necessary and empowering?

The system is moribund because it is a monopoly. When any institution has a captive client base, support for innovation vanishes. Reform requires people and institutions to do uncomfortable new things. Thus it won’t happen unless people are even more uncomfortable with the status quo than they are with change. So we need institutional structures that make the need for change seem plausible and legitimate. A captive client base ensures that such structures never emerge. An urgent need for change never seems really plausibile. An institution with captive clients can – or at least it will always feel like it can - continue to function, more or less as it always has, indefinitely. So why change, when change is uncomfortable, even painful?

This is why even small reforms that seem like they would be easy to implement have consistently failed to scale, and the attempt to impose such reforms through national command structures will fail even more spectacularly. Institutional culture in the existing system is hostile not just to this or that reform, but to reform as such, because it excludes the only institutional basis for making the need for change seem plausible and legitimate: the prospect of losing the client base.

This is what school choice advocates are talking about when they talk about the value of competition. “Competition” does not mean a cutthroat, ethics-free environment where individuals and institutions seek their own good at the expense of the good of others. Rather, competition is the life-giving force that drives institutions to become their best and continuously innovate, because it is the only way to hold institutions accountable for performance in a way that is both productive (because it aligns the measurement of institutional performance with people’s needs) and humane (because it creates accountability in a decentralized way rather than through a command-and-control power structure)…

This is the most important reason school choice has consistently improved educational outcomes for both the students who use it and for students in public schools. Studies of school choice programs consistently find that students using choice have better outcomes, and also that public schools improve in response to the presence of school choice. The explanation is simple: school choice puts parents back in charge of education, freeing the captive client base and creating an institutional environment in schools that makes the need for change seem plausible and legitimate.

Educators experience the urgency of the need for change when families not being served can leave for other schools – and they will never experience it any other way. Discomfort with change is also reduced for parents, because school choice restores their control over their children’s education.

HT People vs State

2 Comments | National Standards, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Checker’s Case for World Government (and Common Core)

December 13, 2011

In the current issue of the Education Gadfly and on the Education Next blog Checker Finn offers an unusual argument for adoption of K-12 national standards.  He likens opposition to national standards to rooting for the Euro to fail:

If you hope the Euro crashes, that this week’s Brussels summit fails, and that European commerce returns to francs, marks, lira, drachma, and pesetas, you may be one of those rare Americans who also seeks the demise of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in U.S. education.

It’s odd that Checker should pick the Euro as a way to make the case for national standards since the Euro’s difficulties wonderfully illustrate the problems with national standards.  The Euro is in trouble because it was an attempt to impose a common currency on countries that were too diverse in their economic needs and political traditions.  The Euro is too strong of a currency for countries with un-competitive labor forces and undisciplined budget deficits, like Greece, Italy, and Spain.  But if the European Central Bank significantly loosens the currency to bail out these countries, it will create serious inflation problems in countries like Germany and others with more skilled labor forces and reasonable deficits.

The Euro is not in trouble because some people “hope the Euro crashes.”  It’s in trouble because it is a centralized institution that does not fit the diversity of its members.

Similarly, national standards will fail because it is not possible to have a centrally determined set of meaningful standards that can accommodate the legitimate diversity of needs, goals, and values of all of our nation’s school children.  To have an effect national standards inevitably drive the assessments that are used to measure student achievement as well as the methods of instruction that are used to produce that achievement.  ”Tight-loose” is just an empty slogan (or part of a drinking game).  In reality standards, assessments, and instruction are closely connected unless they are just irrelevant things.

In a country as large and diverse as ours there is no single, right set of knowledge for all students to possess, no single, best way to assess that knowledge, and no single, best method for teaching it.  The attempt to impose a nationalized system onto this diversity is doomed to fail just as the Euro is doomed to fail in imposing a common currency on such diverse economies and political systems.

The fact that the Euro is in such trouble and creating such political and economic turmoil ought to scare us away from trying to impose a centralized solution on too much diversity.  The Euro crisis is an argument against national standards, unless we are eager to have similar difficulties here.

No one is rooting for those failures, per se.  Some of us just recognize that reality is not created by repeating slogans to each other over catered lunches at DC think tank conferences.  Reality actually exists out there in the world and no matter how many chardonnays I’ve had while listening to the keynote speaker and no matter how many grants the Gates Foundation sprinkles on me and my friends, centrally imposing institutions on too much diversity is doomed to fail.

Of course, there is a way to overcome that diversity and improve the chances for centrally imposed institutions to succeed — force.  If European countries relinquish power to make their own budgets to a central authority, the Euro might work.  Similarly, if individual schools, school districts, and states relinquish power over daily operations to a central authority, the nationalized education movement might succeed.

But achieving that type of centralization in the face of diversity requires an enormous amount of coercion.  People who disagree have to be suppressed, or at least denied the ability to do anything about their dissent.  Local folks no longer get to make the meaningful decisions.  They can just implement the decisions that are centrally made.

This could work but it would be awful.  Some people say they would favor a World Government if only it were possible to do it.  I’m not one of those people.  World Government would be awful because it would require an enormous amount of coercion to overcome local diversity.  To a much lesser degree, a nationalized education system in the US could be done but it would run roughshod over the needs and legitimate interests of many individuals.

But some people are nevertheless attracted to centralized solutions.  I think Tears for Fears has a song that might explain why.

23 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

« Previous Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 839 other followers