Ravitch is Wrong Week, Day #3

April 7, 2010

[Editor’s Note — This is the third installment in Stuart Buck’s critique of Diane Ravitch’s new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” Over the last two days he documented how Ravitch ignored or selectively cited scholarly literature and then often misinterpreted the evidence she did cite. Today he focuses on how Ravitch frequently attacks straw man arguments rather than seriously addressing opposing views. Below is a guide to what you can expect (with hyperlinks as they become available) for our entire Ravitch is Wrong Week.

1)  Ignoring or selectively citing scholarly literature;
2)  Misinterpreting the scholarly literature that she does cite;
3)  Caricaturing her opponents in terms of strawman arguments, rather than taking the best arguments head-on;
4)  Tendering logical fallacies; and
5)  Engaging in a double standard, such as holding a disfavored position to a high burden of proof while blithely accepting more problematic evidence that supports one’s own position (or not looking for evidence at all). ]

(Guest post by Stuart Buck)

STRAW MAN:

Ravitch’s book often caricatures her opponents’ arguments. For example, she writes (p. 229): “There are no grounds for the claim made in the past decade that accountability all by itself is a silver bullet, nor for the oft-asserted argument that choice by itself is a panacea.” She claims that choice and accountability were sold as “panaceas and miracle cures,” as an “elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems.” (p. 3).

Apart from one line that two authors (Chubb and Moe) wrote some 20 years ago, Ravitch does not identify anyone who has ever claimed that “choice by itself is a panacea.” Describing this claim as “oft-asserted” is simply untrue. Nor does Ravitch identify anyone who has ever claimed that “accountability all by itself is a silver bullet.” (I wonder if anyone has ever claimed that anything was a “silver bullet” — it’s a phrase that seems to be universally used only in denial.)

Another example: Ravitch writes that “reformers imagine that it is easy to create a successful school, but it is not.” (p. 137). She identifies no one who thinks that such a task is easy.

Another example: “Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction.” (p. 111). Who ever said it was? And why can’t we have both?

Ravitch also claims that NCLB “assumed that higher test scores on standardized tests of basic skills are synonymous with good education.” (p. 111). Ravitch doesn’t cite anyone who has argued that test scores are literally “synonymous” with good education. The point of testing is that even though it’s not synonymous with good education, it can be a useful proxy that gives a quick determination of whether children have received any education at all. For example, if 8th graders can’t decipher a few written paragraphs and can’t solve straightforward math problems, then it’s a pretty good bet that they haven’t learned any higher skills either. And if schools couldn’t even teach simple math and reading skills — despite, according to Ravitch, focusing like a laser beam on those skills for several years now — can those schools really be trusted to teach the broad and rich curriculum that Ravitch wants?

Ravitch claims that “unionization per se does not cause high student achievement, nor does it cause low achievement.” (p. 175). Opponents of teacher unions do not argue that unionization “per se” causes some absolute value of low or high achievement, but that unions — by protecting the jobs of bad teachers or by opposing the high academic standards that Ravitch herself favors– can depress academic achievement from what it otherwise would have been. What’s worse, Ravitch supports her claim by noting that “ Massachusetts , the state with the highest academic performance, has long had strong teacher unions.” But as Ravitch well knows, the very academic improvement that she admires in Massachusetts was won only over tenacious union opposition. As Robert Costrell says, even if unions failed to prevent academic achievement in Massachusetts , “it was certainly not for lack of trying.” (By the way, we have here yet another example of Ravitch ignoring contrary scholarly literature even when it was specifically brought to her attention nearly a year ago.)

2 Comments | school accountability, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Ravitch is Wrong Week, Day #2

April 6, 2010

[Editor’s Note — This is the second installment in Stuart Buck’s critique of Diane Ravitch’s new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”  Yesterday he documented how Ravitch ignored or selectively cited scholarly literature.  Today he focuses on how she misinterprets the research she does cite.  Below is a guide to what you can expect (with hyperlinks as they become available) for our entire Ravitch is Wrong Week.

  1. Ignoring or selectively citing scholarly literature;
  2. Misinterpreting the scholarly literature that she does cite;
  3. Caricaturing her opponents in terms of strawman arguments, rather than taking the best arguments head-on;
  4. Tendering logical fallacies; and
  5. Engaging in a double standard, such as holding a disfavored position to a high burden of proof while blithely accepting more problematic evidence that supports one’s own position (or not looking for evidence at all). ]

(Guest post by Stuart Buck)

MISREADING OR MISDESCRIBING SCHOLARLY LITERATURE

Another source of bias is that Ravitch’s book is often inaccurate or selective in how it interprets particular scholarly studies. What follows are several examples:

1. Ravitch cites a paper by Cecilia Rouse and Lisa Barrow that supposedly reviewed “all the existing studies of vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and the District of Columbia.” (p. 129). Ravitch’s description is untrue: Rouse/Barrow did not even purport to review “all the existing studies,” instead stating that they would “present a summary of selected findings from publicly-funded voucher programs with formal evaluations.” Sure enough, Rouse and Barrow left out several studies, as this site has previously documented.

2. In describing an evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program, Ravitch writes, “In the first year of the study, they found that students in the regular public schools and those in the voucher schools had similar scores.” (p. 129). It seems that Ravitch must have read only the newspaper account that she cited, which was so misleading that the study’s co-authors were forced to write a lengthy letter to the Milwaukee newspaper refuting the claim that Ravitch is now repeating:

To start the five-year study, we had to place the voucher and MPS students in our sample on an equal footing, academically. The test scores of the two groups were closely matched to each other, by design.
We have essentially placed the two groups at a common starting point. It would be absurd to determine the winner of a race based on the positions of the competitors at the starting line. Similarly, no one should draw conclusions about the performance of the voucher program based on information from the initial baseline year of a longitudinal study.

3. Ravitch cites a 2007 Center for Education Policy study as having found that “62 percent [of school districts] had increased the time devoted to reading and mathematics in elementary schools, while 44 percent reported that they had reduced the amount of time spent on science, social studies, and the arts.” (p. 108).

What the CEP report actually found was that 44 percent of districts claimed to have cut “time from one or more other subjects or activities (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess) . . . the decreases reported by these districts were relatively large, adding up to a total of 145 minutes per week across all of these subjects, on average, or nearly 30 minutes per day..”

It’s a bit different, isn’t it, to know that out of a 6-7 hour school day, these schools were actually reallocating merely 30 minutes per day away from 4 academic subjects plus physical ed, lunch, and recess? And why is this necessarily so bad anyway? If these schools were failing at the minimal task of teaching kids how to read and do basic math, then why shouldn’t they spend just a little more time on those subjects and a little less time on recess or even “social studies”?

[UPDATE: What I have in mind here are kids who can’t decode but are wasting time in other classes making posterboards and the like.  If the kids actually do know how to decode, then I agree that a substantive curriculum like Core Knowledge would be much better than more hours of “reading” instruction . . . but then again, I’d bet that the schools reallocating time like that aren’t competent enough to have such a curriculum in the first place.]

4. Ravitch discusses Florida’s practice of assigning letter grades (A to F) to schools. She says that she “abhor[s]” the practice, and notes with seeming disapproval that the state “sanctioned F-rated schools by giving vouchers to their students, who could use them to attend a private or better-performing public school.” (p. 164). Notably, she cites the Rouse/Hannaway/Goldhaber/Figlio paper on the Florida voucher program, but without mentioning the crucial fact that Rouse et al. found that “student achievement significantly increased in elementary schools that received an “F” grade by between 6 to 14 percent of a standard deviation in math and between 6 to 10 percent of a standard deviation in reading in the first year. Three years later the impacts persist.”

This finding directly contradicts Ravitch’s arguments against accountability systems, not to mention her skewed and inaccurate claim that vouchers fail to pressure public school systems to improve (pp. 129-132).

5 Comments | school accountability, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Education Reform and Colored Maps

April 5, 2010

 (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I read Paul Johnson’s book Modern Times as an undergraduate, and I’ll never forget his description of the Age of Colonial Empire.

Johnson said that while indeed there were vast fortunes to be made for some, that Empire also entailed enormous costs.

In the end, he said, European Empires were about colored maps.

Well, here’s a colored map for you- 4th grade reading scores for Hispanics in Florida compared to statewide averages in other states, via our friends at the Heritage Foundation.

That’s quite an empire that Florida’s Hispanics are creating, don’t you think? Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to joke that high performance on NAEP was directly correlated with proximity to the Canadian border, but notice the long list of predominantly Anglo states on the map: Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, South Dakota, etc. etc. etc.

Notice also the presence of some states that have been very proud of their K-12 reforms in the past: North Carolina and Texas for instance. Oh, and one of the winners of the Race to the Top, Tennessee. I don’t need to write a sardonic comment, because you’ve already thought of one on your own. Feel free to share it in the comments section.

Here’s another smaller, but rapidily growing empire:

Florida’s African Americans tied or outscored two statewide averages on the 2007 NAEP, but their empire extended to 8 states in 2009. The Deep South may want to pull their heads out of the sand, because they are next on the list unless they pick up their games.

Yes, I’m looking at you Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina and Tennessee. Florida’s African American students have their hands on the Risk dice and are ready to invade you with their plastic armies. Florida’s Free and Reduced Lunch Eligible kids already outscore your statewide average for all students in your states.

2 Comments | research reports | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Ravitch is Wrong Week, Day #1

April 5, 2010

Diane Ravitch’s new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” has been burning up the charts. Ravitch has been ubiquitous, writing op-eds in support of her book, doing lectures and interviews all over the place, and being reviewed in all sorts of high-profile venues.

As an overall matter, the book says little, if anything, that is actually new on the subjects of testing and choice. What Ravitch is really selling with this book is the story of her personal and ideological conversion. Not so long ago, she was writing articles like “In Defense of Testing,” or “The Right Thing: Why Liberals Should Be Pro-Choice,” a lengthy article in The New Republic that remains one of the most passionate and eloquent defenses of school choice and vouchers in particular. Now she seems to be a diehard opponent of these things. But she’s not saying anything that other diehard opponents haven’t already said countless times.

The book does score a few points in critiquing the charter school movement (e.g., charter schools have an unfair advantage in competing with Catholic schools in the inner cities, and charter test results haven’t been as promising as might have been expected), or in critiquing testing and accountability (e.g., states have been watering down their standards, as shown by wide discrepancies between NAEP and state tests).

But these few good points are outweighed by the bad arguments and leaps of illogic that permeate much of the book. The book’s faults fall into five general categories, each of which will be the subject of a blog post this week:

  1. Ignoring or selectively citing scholarly literature;
  2. Misinterpreting the scholarly literature that she does cite;
  3. Caricaturing her opponents in terms of strawman arguments, rather than taking the best arguments head-on;
  4. Tendering logical fallacies; and
  5. Engaging in a double standard, such as holding a disfavored position to a high burden of proof while blithely accepting more problematic evidence that supports one’s own position (or not looking for evidence at all).

IGNORING SCHOLARLY LITERATURE

An endemic problem with Ravitch’s book is the tendency to cite only one or two studies on a disputed empirical question as if that settled the matter, while ignoring other (often better) studies that undermine or refute her claims.

For example, Ravitch claims that vouchers don’t pressure traditional public school systems to improve (pp. 129-32), even though the scholarly consensus is precisely the opposite. Ravitch also highlights a couple of studies that failed to find achievement gains from vouchers, but ignores the fact that “9 of the 10 [random assignment studies] show significant, positive effects for at least some subgroups of students.“

One of the most egregious examples arises from Ravitch’s repetitive claim that charter schools tap into the most “motivated” students. This claim appears practically every time Ravitch mentions charter schools. See, e.g., p. 145 (“charter schools are havens for the motivated”); p. 156 (“A lottery for admission tends to eliminate unmotivated students”); p. 212 (“two-tiered system in urban districts, with charter schools for motivated students and public schools for all those left behind”); p. 220 (“Charter schools in urban centers will enroll the motivated children of the poor, while the regular public schools will become schools of last resort for those who never applied or were rejected.”); p. 227 (“Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students”).

Notably, Ravitch doesn’t highlight any actual evidence for this claim. She treats it as definitionally true (“by definition, only the most motivated families apply for a slot,” p. 135). But that is wrong: The only thing that could be true by definition here is that parents who sign up their children for charter schools are the most motivated to sign up their children for charter schools, which is a trivial observation (and one that probably isn’t true anyway: some motivated parents might easily fail to hear about a charter school opportunity, while other parents might sign up on a whim).

But that’s not the “motivation” that Ravitch means. What Ravitch tries to imply — and what she lacks any evidence for — is that charter schools all over the country are over-enrolling those students who are the most motivated to succeed academically. That’s the only thing that could possibly lead to an unfair charter school advantage. To be sure, there are undoubtedly some charter students who are the most academically well-prepared and who are leaving the public school to seek a greener pasture elsewhere. But, Ravitch has zero evidence that these children are in the majority.

Nor would such a contention be consistent with the actual evidence, which Ravitch doesn’t bother to investigate (having presumed to settle the motivation issue “by definition”). In fact, a recent paper by Zimmer et al. analyzed data “from states that encompass about 45 percent of all charter schools in the nation.” They found: “Students transferring to charter schools had prior achievement levels that were generally similar to or lower than those of their [traditional public school] peers. And transfers had surprisingly little effect on racial distributions across the sites.” Similarly, Booker, Zimmer, and Buddin (2005) found that in California and Texas — both huge charter states — students who transferred to charter schools had lower test scores than their peers at public schools.

Given this evidence, it is more plausible to suspect that many charter school entrants have been struggling to get by in the public school, and they (or their parents) are “motivated” only in the sense that they’re trying to find something that might work. It’s hard to see how that sort of motivation would create an unfair advantage on the part of charter schools, as Ravitch wants the reader to believe.

There are numerous other examples of Ravitch ignoring scholarly literature that she finds inconvenient:

1. Ravitch focuses on a few studies about whether charter schools increase test scores. Leaving aside the fact that this is completely incoherent (given that Ravitch’s whole point elsewhere is that test scores shouldn’t be used to tell us the worth of a school), Ravitch ignores the recent study showing that charter schools increased the likelihood that a student will graduate and go to college. These are worthy goals.

2. Ravitch cites Walt Haney’s study asserting that “dramatic gains in Texas on its state tests” were a myth. (p. 96). But she ignores the Toenjes/Dworkin article contending that Haney’s article was biased and unreliable.

3. Ravitch attacks NCLB for failing to bring about its intended goal: improved test scores. For this argument, she relies on snapshots of NAEP scores during the 2000s. (pp. 109-10). But one looks in vain for Ravitch to cite Hanushek and Raymond’s paper noting that it is “not possible to investigate the impact of NCLB directly” — that is, it is not possible to do exactly what Ravitch purported to do. This is because “the majority of states had already instituted some sort of accountability system by the time the federal law took effect . . . 39 states did so by 2000.”

Hanushek and Raymond went on to find that “the introduction of accountability systems into a state tends to lead to larger achievement growth than would have occurred without accountability. The analysis, however, indicates that just reporting results has minimal impact on student performance and that the force of accountability comes from attaching consequences such as monetary awards or takeover threats to school performance. This finding supports the contested provisions of NCLB that impose sanctions on failing schools.” This finding is similar to Carnoy and Loeb 2002 (another paper left uncited by Ravitch), who found that “students in high-accountability states averaged significantly greater gains on the NAEP 8th-grade math test than students in states with little or no state measures to improve student performance.”

30 Comments | charter schools, school accountability, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Random Pop Culture Apocalypse: Video Mix Tape

April 3, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So Mrs. Ladner once again took the Ladner children to visit their relatives in New Mexico, and once again, rather than pile up pizza boxes and watch a bunch of college basketball, I have taken off to hang out in NoZo at the Raven Cafe in Prescott.  When this happened last year, a mocha overdose resulted in the first Random Pop Culture Apocalypse post on cover songs.

As my blood caffeine level once again reaches dangerous levels, I’ve decided to make a tradition of this. This year’s model: mix tapes.

Just to begin with a “in my day we had to walk to school 5 miles in the snow uphill both ways” story, it used to be difficult to make a mixtape. Back when they were actually tapes, that is. I remember going to libraries to check out cds, raiding the collections of my friends, buying used cds, recording the one song I wanted and then selling it back at a loss, etc. etc. etc.

Ah, and then Napster came along. The great thing about Napster was that they had all kinds of random stuff that you couldn’t buy, like Sammie Davis Jr. singing the theme song to Shaft (I love Sammie, but it sounds like a SNL spoof) or Ozzy Osbourne goofing around in the studio and covering the Bee Gees Staying Alive with Dweezil Zappa. Now the mashup artists are doing cool stuff.

High Fidelity memorably included a discussion of the dos and don’ts of mixtaping. In my opinion, the key to a good mixtape is awkward transitions between songs. Often this can be achieved by juxtaposing songs from completely different genres, but this is not always the case. For instance, I had the following two songs on a mixtape from the mid 1990s:

Followed by:

Ah Rednex, it’s so hard to find a good Swedish electronica/hillbilly band these days! But I digress. Electronic music that takes itself seriously followed by purposely absurd electronic music = awkward mixtape transistion, a delight to be savored.

Mixtapes can tell stories by matching particular songs. I found an old mixtape I made back around 1998, which contained two songs which spoke to a certain political scandal of that era. First the desperately pathetic intern begs for affection:

The male, a practiced liar with an air of menace, responds:

For some reason I used to like to pair Rancid:

with ABBA:

Well, it made sense to me at the time. Still does. Here’s another awkward pairing  of the beautifully elegant Stacey Kent:

with the delightfully inelegant Joan Jett:

So you get the idea, now it is your turn. Post your favorite video mixtape pairings in the comment section, and tell me why it works for you. Person submitting the best pairing wins a JPGB No-Prize.

12 Comments | random pop culture | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

National Standards Post from Jim Stergios

April 2, 2010

(Guest post by Jim Stergios from the Pioneer Institute)

It will take more than Good Friday to bring the public comment period on the proposed national standards to a graceful end.  It will take a “turnaround” scenario, and Andy Smarick has shown us pretty clearly how much of a miracle that is in the education sector.

Friends have come out in favor of the public comment draft of the national standards.  The Fordham Institute, for example, came out with an analysis that gave the draft Common Core K-12 education standards an A- for math and a B for English language arts.  The implicit arguments were that the proposed standards are better than those in many states, and that we cannot let the moment pass (it “represents a rare opportunity for American K-12 education to re-boot”) because we could actually “get it right” (implement the standards effectively).

Fordham and others who have long lamented the low-quality of state standards are right: The proposed standards are better than those in some states.  And those states should jump at the opportunity if they so choose.  But the argument that this is a rare opportunity is not terribly different from the argument made by folks who held their noses and voted to pass the recent health care fix.  No, it’s not a great piece of legislation but maybe we can fix it later – the urgency of health care insurance is too much to let it pass by…

A bad idea is a bad idea.  They rarely turn out well, and that is especially so because the likelihood of “getting it right” is not appreciably better than the chances of getting NCLB right were. 

We are releasing today Fair to Middling: A National Standards Progress Report, a view of the standards from the perspective of the number of states that have actually done the hard work of crafting, over years, and implementing, over years, curricular standards that are significantly better than the proposed national standards. 

Perhaps we are used to better students so our grading is more severe – Sandy Stotsky, of good ol’  U or Ark, and Jim Milgram, emeritus at Stanford, give the proposed standards a “B-” in math and a “C-” for English language arts. The new study, Fair to Middling: A National Standards Progress Report, is the second in-depth analysis of the standards, and is jointly published by my organization, Pioneer Institute in Massachusetts and Pacific Research Institute in California.

Fair to Middling provides a detailed comparison of the March draft standards being proposed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) and standards currently in place in states recognized to have high standards—California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas.

Fair to Middling finds that in mathematics CCSSI’s March drafts may be better than the math standards in some states, but that they don’t match up well with the top state standards in this country or with the best international standards, because they

  • Include expectations that are too low by the end of the elementary grades
  • Delay the development of pre-Algebra skills that are a top priority in high-achieving countries and states, resulting in fragmentary treatment of algebra in the later grades
  • Include an idiosyncratic and unproven approach to geometry in grades 7 and 8
  • Feature a widely scattered and disorganized treatment of Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry

Progress has been made in addressing the deficiencies in the January draft of Common Core’s grade-level standards for reading and English language arts, but much more work remains to make its ELA standards as good as those in California, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Texas. The authors write that the most serious problem with Common Core’s ELA standards remains its organizational scheme.

Fair to Middling finds that in English language arts, the March drafts continue to be weakened by the focus on ten culture- and content-free College- and Career-Readiness Standards that are incapable of defining readiness for college reading and generating coherent grade-level academic standards. Moreover, they

  • Are organized in a way that renders them unable to serve as a valid or reliable basis for common assessments from grade to grade.
  • Include a formula to Help English Teachers Judge the complexity of the literature they teach that is unusable by the average teacher
  • Include vocabulary Standards in Grades 6-12 that are a recipe for reading failure at the high school level.
  • Are not benchmarked against high-performing countries

The Race to the Top was fun in as much as it leveraged some state actions to lift charter school caps, but it is getting bogged down in some really bad ideas.  The focus on turnarounds, when so few have worked, is a sign of Washington seeking to move ahead without good empirical data.  The insistence on adoption of unproven standards of questionable quality is another sign that the effort is getting a bad case of the “encroaching” spirit of power.

The best ideas come from empirical evidence, so why is Arne Duncan insisting on union buy-in, turnaround scenarios and poor-quality standards?  Why not look at the states, like Massachusetts, which have topped the nation, which have narrowed race- and poverty-based achievement gaps. As ED Hirsch noted in 2008, “If you are a disadvantaged parent with a school-age child, Massachusetts is . . . the state to move to.”

The problem is that the administration’s current course on standards, if they do not undergo serious revision, will actually encourage states to turn their backs on proven reforms.  Given the quality of the current product, the process and its lack of transparency, the scoring, and so on, I have to admit that where I was open to national standards before, I am pretty soured now. 

Give us incentives to improve on NAEP or TIMSS, and just let us do the work at the state level.

7 Comments | instructional reform | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Coulson in the WSJ

April 2, 2010

Cato’s Andrew Coulson has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal today eulogizing Jaime Escalante.  Andrew correctly identifies the lesson from Escalante’s experience.  The dysfunction of our educational system is caused by perverse incentives, not ignorance of effective techniques or the complete absence of effective people.

Here’s the meat of the argument:

In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied. Instead, Escalante’s success was resented. And while the teachers union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring himself to turn students away, packing 50 or more into a room and still helping them to excel. This weakened the union’s bargaining position, so it complained.

By 1990, Escalante was stripped of his chairmanship of the math department he’d painstakingly built up over a decade. Exasperated, he left in 1991, eventually returning to his native Bolivia. Garfield’s math program went into a decline from which it has never recovered. The best tribute America can offer Jaime Escalante is to understand why our education system destroyed rather than amplified his success—and then fix it.

A succinct diagnosis of the problem was offered by President Clinton in 1993 at the launch of philanthropist Walter Annenberg’s $500 million education reform challenge. “People in this room who have devoted their lives to education,” he said, “are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can’t seem to replicate it everywhere else.” Our greatest challenge is to create “a system to somehow take what is working and make it work everywhere.”

The most naïve approach has been to create a critical mass of exemplary “model” schools, imagining that the system would spontaneously reconstitute itself around their example. This was the implicit assumption underlying the Annenberg Challenge and, with donor matching, more than $1 billion was spent on it. As a mechanism for widely disseminating excellence, it failed utterly.

President Obama wants a government program for identifying and disseminating what works. In his blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act released in March, he proposed the creation of “‘communities of practice’ to share best practices and replicate successful strategies.”

He’s not the first to advocate this approach. The secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education pursued the same idea—in 1837. Horace Mann, father of American public schooling, thought that a centrally planned state education apparatus would reliably identify and bring to scale the best methods and materials in use throughout the system. Despite a century-and-a-half of expansion and centralization, this approach, too, has failed. Without systematic incentives rewarding officials for wise decisions and penalizing them for bad ones, public schooling became a ferris wheel of faddism rather than a propagator of excellence.

3 Comments | school accountability, tributes | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Gibbons Throws the B.S. Flag on RTTT Scoring

April 1, 2010

http://www.bigkidcollectables.com/catalog/senanigans.jpg

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Things that make you go HMMMMMMMMM….

1 Comment | school funding | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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