(Guest Post By Matthew Ladner)
Sun Tzu: A victorious general wins and then seeks battle. A defeated army seeks battle and then seeks victory.
Paris Hilton: OMG that’s HOT!
Mike Petrilli: Sorry, no time to talk, I’m in the middle of fighting. We’ll figure out how to stop the great national dummy down later!
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instructional reform | Tagged: Mike Petrilli, Paris Hilton, Sun Szu | 
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Posted by matthewladner
I am shocked – shocked! – to discover that political manipulation of education is going on in here!
Your NCLB and RTTT grants for supporting national standards, monsieur.
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Over on NRO, Heritage’s Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall warn that the Obama administration is finding even more ways to use federal influence to push “voluntary” national standards on the states.
So much for Checker’s apparently serious assertion that the standards “emerged not from the federal government but from a voluntary coming together of (most) states, and the states’ decision whether or not to adopt them will remain voluntary.” Bwa ha ha!
9 Comments | instructional reform, politics | Tagged: Best of Greg, Checker Finn, Chester Finn, common core, common core standards, Greg Forster, Jennifer Marshall, Lindsey Burke, NRO | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The NAEP released the 2009 Urban District NAEP results recently, which of course was an invitation to go exploring the data. I thought it would be interesting to look at the results for 4th grade reading.
So Charlotte, Miami and Austin come out looking pretty good among urban districts. Oh, and Oregon too. Silly me, I must have accidentally slipped the statewide average for all kids in Oregon into the comparison of urban school districts. When you throw in all the rich kids in Oregon into the mix, they look like a decent urban school district, although not, I will note, the best urban school district.
Perhaps a bit of control for demographic differences between these jurisdictions is in order. After all, some districts like Austin (and I suspect Charlotte) have quite a few affluent kids attending them. So in the next chart, I only look at free and reduced lunch eligible children in the districts for more of an apples to apples comparison.
So Miami wins overall with a score of 215 for FRL kids, followed closely by NYC at 214. Both of these scores exceed several statewide averages for all students- such as California’s. Miami not only was the low-income reading champion for 4th grade, but the both the low-income and the overall reading champion for 8th grade.
Oregon low-income kids perform **ahem** like a mid-tier urban district despite the inclusion of suburban kids, and approximately a grade level behind both Miami and NYC. Some might also find it interesting that the Miami school district is 91% minority, while Oregon is 72% Anglo.
I certainly do. Quite a bit actually.
When I read Bernard Lewis’ book What Went Wrong? about how the Islamic world went from being the premier civilization to an economic backwater, it seemed to me that Lewis had asked the wrong question. Most of the world, after all, is a backwater. The real question is What Went Right? with the West more than what went wrong in the Islamic world.
It behooves us to ask both questions in this case: what in the world is wrong with Oregon, and what is going right in Miami? I have a very good idea of what is going right in Miami. Good standards and testing, transparency, letter grade rankings for schools, parental choice, alternative certification, curtailment of social promotion. I don’t know what Oregon has been doing, but it looks to me like they should make some rather dramatic changes.
Leave a Comment » | competitive effects, instructional reform | Tagged: NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment, The best urban school districts, Urban school district performance | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Schools across the country are banning the Silly Bandz bracelets. The problem? As one Houston teacher put it: “They are a distraction, students are slapping them, trading, and checking out who has what on their arm instead of taking care of the business of school.”
It may well be the bracelets are distracting from school work in many places. But the ban is also an ironic twist on the progressive Dewey-21st Century Skills education philosophy that is fashionable among educators. According to Dewey, school should both reflect life and prepare the student for adult life:
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school. That is the isolation of the school–its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests and activities that predominate in his home and neighborhood. So the school being unable to utilize this everyday experience, sets painfully to work on another tack and by a variety of [artificial] means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies …. [Thus there remains a] gap existing between the everyday experiences of the child and the isolated material supplied in such large measure in the school.
Collecting and trading desired items sounds just like the kind of thing Dewey would embrace. Students would learn about commerce and the potentially mutual benefits of trade. But schools not only refuse to take advantage of these opportunities to teach students useful lessons about the world, they insist on banning the items altogether.
Maybe schools are preparing students for the world as they wish it would be — with a lot of collaboration but little commercial trade — rather than the world as it is and almost certainly will continue to be.
4 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: Silly Bandz | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Someone please explain to Jim Stergios why it is such a great idea for the federal government to force his state to dummy down its standards and tests. Money quote from the press release:
“These proposed national standards are vague and lack the academic rigor of the standards in Massachusetts and a number of other states,” said Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios. “The new report shows that these weak standards will result in weak assessments. After so much progress and the investment of billions of tax dollars, it amounts to snatching mediocrity from the jaws of excellence.”
3 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: common core standards, Pacific Research Insstitute, Pioneer Institute | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Today is the final day of session in Arizona, and I am thrilled to say that it looks like major pieces of the Florida reform cocktail will be passing. These include grading schools A-F based on student test scores and growth, alternative teacher certification, 3rd grade social promotion curtailment, expanding sources for charter school authorization, and increasing the size, transparency and accountability for our scholarship tax credit program. Arizona lawmakers also passed a provision specifying that school districts cannot use length of service as the sole criteria when laying off teachers during a reduction in force.
Governor Bush and Patricia Levesque spent their valuable time here in Arizona last October in a series of events, and Patricia came back a few months ago to do followup meetings with key players. Key philanthropic leaders stepped up to the plate with both their money and their personal time. Governor Brewer and her staff prioritized Florida reforms in her State of the State address, and the Chairmen of the Senate and House Education committees, Senator John Huppenthal and Rep. Rich Crandall, personally introduced the centerpiece bills. Many of the bills gathered strong bipartisan support.
We have many miles to go in Arizona. Our NAEP scores have been below the national average 36 out of the last 36 exams. We aim to change that, and we know it isn’t going to happen overnight, and that much hard work lies ahead. We’ve taken the first steps to turning our illiteracy crisis around, and I am enormously grateful to all of the many people who helped make this happen!
1 Comment | instructional reform | Tagged: Arizona K-12 reform, Florida K-12 reform, Jan Brewer, Jeb Bush, John Huppenthal, Patricia Levesque, Rich Crandall | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
I think I’ve discovered a new medical disorder that I call Reformer’s Disease. Good and smart people involved in education reform can easily be stricken with this disorder in which they visualize a desirable reform policy and then imagine that they can simply impose that policy on our education system and that it will come out as they want.
In particular, I’ve noticed instances of Reformer’s Disease in discussions with folks over national standards as well as in Mike Petrilli’s recent post on Flypaper about teacher tenure reform. Advocates for national standards tend to imagine that the national standards that will be adopted are the ones they prefer. And they further imagine that people whose vision of national standards they oppose will never take control of the standards in the future. National standards advocates don’t seem to have any theory about how political systems operate, what kinds of standards those systems are likely to adopt, or how those systems are likely to alter standards in the future. Instead, these victims of Reformer’s Disease have grown tired of politics and simply imagine that they will be the puppeteers who will get the educational system to do the right things without having to think about how the incentives and structure of that system may well thwart or pervert their efforts.
Similarly, Mike Petrilli shows signs of Reformer’s Disease in his post on teacher tenure reform. He asks, “Rather than use choice to set in motion a chain reaction that ends with the removal of bad teachers from the classroom, why not go right at the bad teachers themselves?” Why focus on structures, incentives, and politics when we can just get schools to do the right thing — remove bad teachers, adopt the right standards and curricula, etc…?
Perhaps Mike’s question can best be answered by transplanting this discussion to a different industry. Why should we bother with all of this choice and competition among restaurants when we can just get right at ensuring that bad chefs are removed? Why have all of these different restaurants with their varying style and quality when we can just ensure quality through national restaurant standards?
Of course, when we transplant the discussion to restaurants the answer to Mike’s question seems obvious. We need choice and competition because it helps impose the proper incentives on decision-makers within the educational system to make the right choices. With stronger choice and competition bad teachers are more likely to be removed because keeping bad teachers would harm the interests of their bosses by causing schools to lose students and revenue. The main barrier to removing bad teachers is not tenure, per se; it is the lack of incentives to remove bad teachers that allows the tenure system to be adopted and continue. Just removing tenure would not rid the system of bad teachers because principals, superintendents, and others up the chain have little to no incentive to fire bad teachers.
Yes, schools need to get rid of bad teachers and the tenure that protects them. Yes, schools need solid standards and curricula. But people need to avoid Reformer’s Disease and remember that they can’t simply impose solutions on an unwilling system governed by perverse incentives. Choice and competition are not at odds with tenure reform or standards reform. Competition is a necessary part of how one actually accomplishes and sustains those other reforms.
1 Comment | competitive effects, instructional reform, vouchers | Tagged: Mike Petrilli, national standards, Teacher Tenure | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Interesting piece by Jay Schalin on an internal study by the University of North Carolina on teacher preparation. Part of the UNC study involved a comparison of the value added scores of UNC ed school grads compared to those of Teach for America teachers. Money quote:
In some cases, the Teach for America participants’ results were quite dramatic. For instance, middle school math students with Teach for America teachers tested as if they had an additional 90 days of instruction—when the entire school year is only 180 days of instruction.
Let’s just say if Ed Schools were publicly traded companies, I’d raise billions in a hedge fund to short their stock.
5 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: Jay Schalin, Teach for America, University of North Carolina | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(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
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
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
3 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: Florida NAEP scores, Oregon NAEP scores | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
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