Fordham Responds on Nationalizing Education

March 30, 2011

Over at Flypaper, Fordham’s Kathleen Porter-Magee responds to my post yesterday about the mistake of the current Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE effort to nationalize key aspects of our education system.  She writes:

Of course, many people agree that Betamax had the superior technology (the picture was sharper, the cassettes were smaller, it was better at high-speed duplication, etc.). So, in effect, market forces standardized the inferior technology.

But rather than belabor the VHS-Betamax analogy, let’s talk about the actual case of state standards. Is Greene correct in his contention that the market was on its way to standardizing high-quality state standards? Not even close.

In fact, for more than a decade we have been conducting a natural experiment where we let market forces drive standards setting at the state level. The result? A swift and sure race to the bottom. A majority of states had failed to set rigorous standards for their students—and had failed to create effective assessments that could be used to track student mastery of that content. In fact, the whole impetus behind the Common Core State Standards Initiative was to address what was essentially a market failure in education.

That said, I do agree with Greene that too much government intervention will stifle innovation. That’s precisely why I think government “standardization” should begin and end with standards. Let the government define what students should know and be able to do.  Then let market forces determine which curricula and pedagogy will best help students master that essential content.

To which Ze’ev Wurman replies:

I have a lot of respect for Kathleen and hence I am stumped.

She writes that the results of the NCLB’s “natural experiment” with states setting their standards are clear: “A swift and sure race to the bottom.”

Yet just a few years back no other than the Fordham Institute itself examined this exact issue,the behavior of proficiency standards under NCLB, and declared:

“These trends do not indicate a helter-skelter ‘race to the bottom.’ They rather suggest more of a walk to the middle.”

Perhaps Kathleen meant to write about the rigor of content standards rather thanproficiency standards. But there, too, many states have improved their standards, rather than lowering them. This can be clearly visible in — yet again — Fordham’s own recent “State of the Standards” report that shows that in 2010, 27 state ELA standards were graded worse than in 2005 and 11 improved (with 12 grades unchanged). In math only 10 state standards were graded worse and 29 improved, with 11 graded the same. I might add that grading criteria in 2010 were more demanding than in 2005 as can be clearly seen from Massachusetts’ standards that did not change between 2005 and 2010, yet were graded lower in 2010 than in 2005. In other words, by Fordham’s own analysis — of which Kathleen must be aware as she co-authored it — state content standards have improved somewhat over the years.

So which one is it? Is there a race to the bottom, or isn’t there? Based on Fordham’s own research there was an improvement in content standards and no race to the bottom in proficiency standards. Yet Kathleen is unequivocal in claiming a race to the bottom. Is it a simple error, or has Fordham started to twist its own findings in its push to support national standards?

And I add:

In addition to the misleading claim of “race to the bottom” that Ze’ev notes, Kathleen’s post is in error on two other points:

1) VHS was not the “inferior technology.” It was cheaper, had longer tapes, and the market clearly preferred those things over whatever qualities Betamax possessed. Kathleen’s conviction that she and some central government-backed committee of like-minded people know what is best for the country regardless of what the market says is precisely the problem with the Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE effort to nationalize key aspects of education policy.

2) The claim that Kathleen and Fordham want no more than to nationalize standards without touching curriculum, pedagogy, or assessment is simply disingenuous. For example, Checker once again made common cause with the AFT, Linda Darling-Hammond, etc… in backing the Shanker Manifesto, which calls for “Developing one or more sets of curriculum guides that map out the core content students need to master the new Common Core State Standards.” Checker may claim that this effort is purely voluntary, but that would only be credible if he and Fordham clearly and forcefully opposed any effort by the national government to “incentivize,” push, prod, or otherwise require the adoption of national curriculum based on the already incentivized national standards. And of course, USDOE (without any opposition from Fordham that I have noticed) is already moving forward with developing national assessments even before national curriculum has been developed. One does not need to be from one of “the more feverish corners of the blogosphere” to recognize the odd coalition of Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE as coordinating an effort to nationalize key aspects of our education system.

11 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Mandating Betamax

March 29, 2011

I just returned from the Association for Education Finance and Policy annual conference in Seattle, which was a really fantastic meeting.  At the conference I saw Dartmouth economic historian, William Fischel, present a paper on Amish education, extending the work from his great book, Making the Grade, which I have reviewed in Education Next.

Fischel’s basic argument is that our educational institutions have largely evolved in response to consumer demands.  That is, the consolidation of one-room schoolhouses into larger districts, the development of schools with separate grades, the September to June calendar, and the relatively common curriculum across the country all came into being because families wanted those measures.  And in a highly mobile society, even more than a century ago, people often preferred to move to areas with schools that had these desired features.  In the competitive market between communities, school districts had to cater to this consumer demand.  All of this resulted in a remarkable amount of standardization and uniformity across the country on basic features of K-12 education.

Hearing Fischel’s argument made me think about how ill-conceived the nationalization effort led by Gates, Fordham, the AFT, and the US Department of Education really is.  Most of the important elements of American education are already standardized.  No central government authority had to tell school districts to divide their schools into grades or start in the Fall and end in the Spring. Even details of the curriculum, like teaching long division in 4th grade or Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, are remarkably consistent from place to place without the national government ordering schools to do so.

Schools arrived at these arrangements through a gradual process of market competition and adaptation.  Parents didn’t want to move from one district to another only to discover that their children would be repeating what they had already been taught or were  inadequately prepared for what was going to be taught.  To attract mobile families, districts informally and naturally began to coordinate what they taught in each grade.  Of course, not everything is synced, but the items that are most important to consumers often are.

That’s how standardization in market settings works and we have a lot of positive experience with this in industry.  VHS became the standard medium for home entertainment because the market gravitated to it, not because some government authority mandated it.  If we followed the logic of Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE we would want some government-backed committee to decide on the best format and provide government subsidies only to those companies that complied.

Instead of ending up with VHS, they may well have imposed Betamax on the country, even though market competition would have shown that approach to be inferior.  Sony was the industry leader and if a government-backed committee were in charge they almost certainly would have had the most influence.  The Fordham folks might want to keep this in mind.  A government-backed committee is almost certain to prefer what the AFT wants over what Fordham may envision since the teacher unions are like Sony except only 100 times more powerful.

Even worse, once government-enforced standardization occurs it becomes extremely difficult to change.  If we had a government-backed panel decide on Betamax, we may have been stuck with that format for decades.  We almost certainly would have stifled the innovation that led to DVDs and now Blue-Ray.  Once Sony had entrenched their format, what incentive would they have had to change it?

Similarly, once the Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE coalition settles on the details of nationalizing standards, curriculum, and testing, it will become extremely difficult to change anything about education.  Terry Moe and Paul Peterson’s dreams of technology-based instruction may never leave the dream stage because it may fail to comply with certain provisions of the national regime.  If I were the AFT, I’d almost certainly insert those details into the regime to prevent the reductions that technology may bring to the need for teaching labor.  No one should be naive enough to think the Edublob won’t figure out how to use nationalization to block that and other threatening innovations.

I’m also sure that Bill Gates would have preferred being able to get a government-backed committee to enshrine Microsoft-DOS or Windows forever.  But thanks to market competition we have Google innovating with cloud computing.  And I’d bet that Google would love to get government backing for their approach if they could.  Dominant companies almost always favor government regulation.

So I understand why the AFT, USDOE, and Gates favor the current effort to nationalize education.  The mystery to me is why Fordham is protecting the right-flank of this movement or why some conservative governors have gone along.  Don’t they realize that it will enshrine arrangements that favor the teacher unions and are bad for kids?

8 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Fear the Win-Win!

March 25, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

At the beginning of a very kind column praising my new report on the empirical evidence on vouchers, Jay Mathews indicates that for some strange reason, he’s afraid of me and my school-choice posse:

Do I really want to get beaten bloody again by school vouchers devotees?

Come on, Jay. I’m not a dangerous man. I would never beat anyone bloody. I’m soft and harmless. I’m a perfectly ordinary bunny rabbit. A cute, fluffy, harmless bunny rabbit.

Well, okay, I have been known to bite. With big, sharp, pointy teeth. But just to stretch my repertoire, I’ll take the soft approach this time.

Jay acknowledges the evidence:

Greg Forster, a talented and often engagingly contrarian senior fellow at the Foundation for Educational Choice, has expanded a previous study to show that nearly all the research on vouchers, including some using the gold standard of random assignment, has good news for those who believe in giving parents funds that can be used to put their children in private schools. Students given that chance do better in private schools than similar students do in public schools, the research shows. Public schools who are threatened by the loss of students to private schools because of voucher programs improve more than schools that do not have to worry about that competition, the research also shows.

Yet he thinks we shouldn’t support vouchers because . . . well, I’ll let him explain:

I see nothing morally, economically or politically wrong with vouchers. I have never thought that they drained public schools of vital resources. I think a low-income family that gets the chance to choose a private school that suits their child should do so.

But I think such programs have limited growth potential because there are never going to be nearly enough empty spaces in private schools to help all the students who need them. Forster and other voucher advocates say this will change when voucher programs become universal. Then, entrepreneurs will be able to convince investors that they can create a new generation of private schools with the new wave of voucher students.

I think they are wrong about that. The young educators who have led the robust growth of charters prefer to work in public schools. Many voters will continue to resist sending their tax dollars to private schools, particularly with the pressures to cut back government spending that are likely to be with us for many years.

So that’s two arguments. Entrepreneurial startups won’t attract talented education refomers, and voters won’t support the programs.

It’s true that the leading-edge school reformers, the people Matt calls “the cool kids,” prefer to work in public schools. As I’ve written before, you can already see how that strategic choice is leading to dead end after dead end. The school choice movement needs to start building bridges to these people and showing them that in the long run, only school choice can provide the institutional support they need to sustain the kind of reforms they want.

As for politics, school choice has always polled well (for a discussion of the research and methodological issues, see here). The American people are not, in fact, uncomfortable with allowing religious institutions to participate in publicly funded programs on equal terms alongside other institutions. There was a time when they were (see “amendments, Blaine”) but that bigotry has receded.

Oh, and as for pressure to cut spending, school choice saves money. Tons and tons of it. That has always been one of our biggest assets in the political fight – that’s why the Foundation for Educational Choice produces state-focused fiscal studies year after year, to show each state how school choice would save taxpayer money while delivering better education.

The political obstacle to choice has never been the public at large. It has always been the blob, with its huge piles of cash fleeced indirectly from taxpayers, and (perhaps more important) its phalanx of highly disciplined volunteers and voters. A minority of the voters can control the outcome if they are single-issue voters when the rest of the public takes into account the whole panoply of problems confronting the body politic. And when you threaten to derail a gravy train, it tends to make the passengers into single-issue voters.

But the tide is changing. The cynical selfishness of the blob is more and more visible to more and more people. Reform has already won the war of ideas. That does not mean the ground war is won. The unions are still big, rich, and powerful. But they are no longer sacred. They have lost their mystique. No one thinks the unions speak for kids anymore; no one even thinks the unions speak for teachers anymore. And in the end, that’s what counts.

As Jay has put it, the unions are now the tobacco lobby. Or, as I have put it, they’re Bull Connor. That’s why school choice is now poised for a series of big political wins.

Jay is skeptical – pointing to the greater success of charters, he thinks vouchers won’t make big gains this cycle. As readers of JPGB know, the answer to the charter argument is that vouchers make the world safe for charters. As for whether vouchers make big gains this year, we’re about to find out.

Tell you what, Jay. Let’s make a bet. You say there won’t be “a wave of pro-voucher votes across the country.” Me and my posse at FEC will go back and count up the number of school choice bills (private choice, not charters) that passed state chambers in 2008-2010. Then we’ll set a mutually agreed on bar for the number of voucher bills passing chambers this year. If we hit the bar, you have to buy me dinner at a Milwaukee restaurant of my choice. But if we don’t hit the bar, I buy you dinner at a DC restaurant of your choice. That’s pretty lopsided in your favor, dollar-wise. How about it?

HT

11 Comments | competitive effects, instructional reform, politics, research reports, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Odds and Ends

March 23, 2011

WordPress was down most of yesterday, preventing me from posting.  Here are some of the topics I was considering for a post:

  • I finally saw The Social Network.  As always, I enjoyed Aaron Sorkin’s clever, rapid-fire dialog, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how creepy it was to write a fictionalized and unflattering account of real, living people.  There is no evidence that Mark Zuckerberg is the status and girl-craving jerk that Sorkin made him out to be, but there is plenty of evidence that Sorkin behaves that way.  I guess the film is really a fictionalized autobiography of Aaron Sorkin, except that Sorkin didn’t create a multi-billion dollar enterprise that tens of millions enjoy using and that has helped topple despots in the Middle East.
  • I saw that my fellow Manhattan Institute-refugee, Walter Olson, has a new book out on how law schools perpetuate a political ideology that gives more power to lawyers and government. Schools of Misrule sounds like it has a fascinating thesis except I suspect that the same argument could be made about almost every department at universities.  I can assure you that the social sciences are filled with people who sit around in their offices dreaming about how the rest of the world should be structured if only the world would listen to them.  I guess the difference is that law school grads are actually more likely to have to power to put their dreams into action.
  • Jim Stergios has a great post over at Pioneer comparing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on their visions for education.  He writes:

So Bill Gates lets us all know what he really has in mind on standards and the liberal arts. In a speech to the National Governors Association in late February, he suggests that higher education spending be devoted largely to job-producing disciplines.

In his view we should drop funding at the higher ed level for the liberal arts, because there is not much economic impact/job creation impact from the liberal arts.

Compare that to Steve Jobs, who during his release of the iPad 2 (admittedly not the most successful launch I’ve seen of an Apple product), trumpeted the liberal arts.

Be sure to read the full thing because the quotations from Gates and Jobs are illuminating.

7 Comments | higher education, instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Fordham Zig-Zags Again

March 3, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Back on September 9 of last year Jay told you to mark your calendars so you’d remember exactly when Fordham began its inevitable backtracking on the rush to fix education through the iron fist of federal power.

Check this out from the latest Gadfly. Here’s the key part:

But as the two federally funded assessment consortia go about their work and flesh out their plans to develop tests aligned to the Common Core, danger lurks. One big challenge arises from their enthusiasm for “through-course assessments”—interim tests that students would take three or four times a year in lieu of a single end-of-year summative assessment…[O]nce a state adopts a new testing regimen that compels instructional uniformity, only private schools will be able to avoid it. This is particularly problematic for public schools—like charters—that were designed to be different. We still favor the Common Core effort and the trade-off of results-based accountability in return for operational freedom. (We also favor the development of high-quality curricular materials that help teachers handle the Common Core.) But it’s time to ask whether the move to high-stakes interim assessments will make that trade-off untenable.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Fordham position now appears to be:

  • A single national standard is OK.
  • A single national curriculum is OK.
  • A single national assessment test at the end of each year is OK.
  • Attaching “high stakes” to that single national test is OK.
  • Having the federal government fund and “co-ordinate” all the above is OK.
  • But if you give the national high-stakes test more than one time per year, THE WORLD IS ENDING and the whole package of national standards/curricula/assessments may need to be called off entirely!

Those of us who saw all this coming and were called cranks and paranoiacs for predicting it are still waiting for our apology.

2 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Have I Lost My Counter Culture Street Cred?

March 2, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Teacher Beat Blog over at Ed Week has written on the Bill Gates endorsement of the Rock Star Pay for Rock Star Teachers concept. Teacher Beat notes that the Goldwater Institute published a study promoting this concept a couple of years ago, noting:

But the endorsement by Gates, reinforced by his NGA presentation, will presumably push the class-size proposal into mainstream thought, given the level of support shown him by his primary audience.

Wait, I thought I was mainstream. Does this make me a crossover?

Or someone who sold out?

Maudlin existential crisis alert!

I need to let Mr. Gates know about Carpe Diem. I still think this idea has merit, but practioners have already advanced beyond this concept.

Leave a Comment » | class size myth, instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Jack Jennings Has Questions. We Answer with More Questions.

February 15, 2011

Jack Jennings, the former Democratic staffer for the House Education and Labor Committee and current head of the Center on Education Policy, has a piece on Huffington/AOL/whatever that thing is.  In case you aren’t familiar with his oeuvre you can read Greg’s “Check the Facts” on Jennings in Education Next a few years back.

In making the case for more federal spending on education and for national standards and assessments, Jennings asks:

How can the country raise academic achievement if 14,000 local school districts are each making their own decisions on most key aspects of education?

I thought about answering with evidence on how choice and competition among school districts improves educational outcomes from people like Caroline Hoxby, Henry Levin, and yours truly.  But then I remembered that evidence is not really Jennings’ thing.

It might be better to answer Jennings’ question by slightly re-wording it to fit different contexts and see if it still seemed like a reasonable question.  Here we go:

How can the country raise gross domestic product if 29.6 million businesses are each making their own decisions on most key aspects of the economy?

Or how about this:

How can the country reduce crime if there are more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies each making their own decisions on most key aspects of crime-prevention?

This is getting easy.  Here’s another:

How can the country make good laws if 535 members of Congress are each making their own decisions on most key aspects of public policy?

Why would Jennings think that he is making a persuasive argument with a rhetorical question that is rebutted by rigorous research and seems silly when transplanted to other situations?  Sadly, Jennings rhetorical question may win some converts and it does so not by being reasonable or by being consistent with research findings.  Jennings uses this rhetorical question because it appeals to people’s desire for power, not their desire for evidence or logical consistency.  When Jennings asks how we can make schools better with so many independent school districts, he is appealing to the reader’s fantasy that they or their allies might be able to dominate the enhanced central authority that would substitute for so many independent school districts.

Inside most public policy wonks is a mini-dictator, waiting to come out.  They dream about how things ought to be organized… if only they were in charge.  The drive for Common Core national standards is built on appealing to these mini-dictator fantasies.

Of course, if the mini-dictators realize that others are striving to control the central authority, they may turn against the idea if they think they are unlikely to be the ones in charge.  That is our best hope.  It is impossible to remove the thirst for power, but it is possible to (as the Founders realized) pit ambition against ambition in the hope that it will prevent tyranny.

(edited for typos)

16 Comments | instructional reform, money myth, politics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Education in Obama’s State of the Union

February 2, 2011

(Guest Post by Bill Evers)

President Obama said the United States is currently having a Sputnik moment and wants to rally us to support his education programs and spending on that basis. With that in mind, it is worth recalling that the launching of the pioneer Russian space satellite back in the late 1950s had a quite important impact on American school curriculum.

American panic over Sputnik led directly to the unteachable New Math of the 1960s – an approach (set theory, number systems not based on 10) that baffled parents, teachers, and students alike and was wittily satirized in a song by comedian Tom Lehrer.

President Obama’s Sputnik moment has led his administration to push untried national academic-content standards and national tests on American schools.  For example, these standards would impose methods of teaching key components of geometry (similar and congruent triangles) that have never succeeded in any country, state, or local district.

These national standards, which the President promoted in his State of the Union address, have retreated from the decades-long consensus that we should strive to match top-performing countries by teaching Algebra I in eighth grade to as many students as we successfully can.

In contrast, the new national standards endorsed by Obama’s Education Department expect Algebra in ninth-grade and have, for example, thrown a monkey wrench in California’s longstanding effort at eighth-grade Algebra (now reaching 64% of students). California’s eighth-grade math teachers will in future be impossibly burdened with trying to teach two years of subject-matter content in one year — No thanks to President Obama’s Sputnik moment.

In the State of the Union address, President Obama misleadingly described his administration’s heavy stimulus spending on education. He said that his administration didn’t “just pour money” into the existing system that, as he said, is “not working.” But in fact, that is exactly what Congressional Democrats and Obama’s administration did. Close to eighty percent of that stimulus spending has been spent to shore up the status quo and relieve states and districts from having to make changes – under financial pressure – in ways that would improve productivity.

The Obama Education Department has awarded reform grants to states, and these grants deserve credit for encouraging states to remove caps on the number of charter schools and for encouraging school districts that need to improve to look at test scores of low-performing students and at who their teachers have been.  But his reform grants plainly went to some states that didn’t deserve them (Hawaii, Maryland, Ohio) and didn’t go to some states that did (Louisiana and Colorado). The formula for choosing the winning states was weighted in favor of teacher-union “buy-in” and thus was a formula for maintaining the status quo.

Before the State of the Union address, Republican U.S. House Speaker Boehner endeavored to test President Obama’s calls for bipartisanship by asking the President to join in a bipartisan effort to continue the opportunity scholarship program in Washington, D.C, — a program that rigorous studies have shown is improving the schooling of African-American students. But President Obama did not take up this offer.

In sum, the President set forth many of his old, usual rhetorical themes in education, pushed more spending and dubious reforms (national standards and tests), and missed an opportunity to advance reform in new and substantive ways.

=====

Bill Evers is a research fellow at Stanford University’ Hoover Institution and member of the institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.  He served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education from 2007 to 2009 and was a member of the California Academic Standards Commissions in the late 1990s and again in 2010.

4 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Education’s Long Forgotten Vision

January 28, 2011

(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)

An illuminating essay titled “Education’s Forsaken Vision,” by Avner Molcho, an Israeli historian, appeared in the Autumn 2010 issue of Azure, a publication of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. In it he presents an assessment of the shift in educational philosophy he has observed in Israeli public education since Israel’s founding. Evolving from a mission to serve the civic needs of a new nation as well as the mathematical, scientific, and other intellectual needs of a modern society—a mission that enhanced social cohesion despite wide differences in student achievement–the reigning view he sees today emphasizes student rights instead of shared civic values and promotes upward social mobility for students from low-income families as the chief purpose of public education.

Molcho’s purpose is to suggest that Israeli society would benefit from a revival of the central features of a classical education—its stress on intellectual goals and civic virtues. As justification, he points to the failure of the new mission for education to stimulate academic achievement in poor students or their upward mobility, despite increasing resources dedicated to these ends. In fact, he notes, achievement gaps between children of low- and high-income parents seem to have grown even as they all learn less, according to international test scores.

However, Molcho omits mention of the most recent expression in U. S. public policy of this problematic mission for public education, an expression that is likely to have undreamed-of negative effects on the school curriculum, academic achievement, and American society as a whole. U.S. educators have long looked for ways to improve the academic achievement of students from low-income families and, hence, their social mobility. The American public needs to learn what signposts U.S. education policy makers are following on the yellow-brick road to Oz. Otherwise, “Education’s Forsaken Vision” may soon become “Education’s Long Forgotten Vision” in both countries.

As is well-known, the original formulation of “equal educational opportunities” did not imply equal outcomes or the repudiation of intellectual and civic goals by the schools. Equity was understood to mean a fairer distribution of resources to raise poor children’s achievement. But as it became clear by the late 1990s that the increasing flow of federal and other funds to improve their “basic skills” was not changing the demographic profile of low achievers quickly, if at all, U.S. educators and policy makers redefined equity to mean equal outcomes for all demographic groups (except for boys and girls) and altered the goal line.

Stressing the “closing of demographic gaps” as the supreme goal of the schools, the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act set forth a utopian goal: proficiency for all students by 2014 as determined by state assessments. An additional accountability criterion required “adequate yearly progress” for each demographic group. However, no practically significant increases in achievement at higher grade levels resulted for low-performing groups after accountability was added to the formula (although there has been progress on basic skills in the early grades). And serious problems elsewhere were ignored by policy makers.

Not unexpectedly, schools focused on what mattered to NCLB–getting low-performing students to pass state tests. But NCLB offered no reward at the same time for, for example, increasing the number or percentage of students, regardless of demographic category, who moved from Proficiency to Advanced, or completed an authentic Algebra I course in grade 8, or passed more advanced mathematics courses in high school. Yet, the need to pay attention elsewhere was clear. On TIMSS 2007, only 6% of U.S. students were at the advanced level in grade 8 mathematics, compared to, e.g., 40% of the students in South Korea. As a November 2010 report noted, “the U.S. trails other industrialized countries in bringing its students up to the highest levels of accomplishment in mathematics.”[1] The report did not identify “any single cause of the relatively small percentage of students in the U.S. who are performing at a high level of accomplishment,” although the shortage of academically qualified mathematics teachers looms as a major cause.

Despite the stunning comparisons of percentages at the highest performance level, no alarm bells were set off and no policies incentivizing increases in mathematics and science achievement at higher performance levels were forthcoming. Instead, the new mission for education drove public policy in the Obama administration to higher utopian heights than the Bush administration had aimed for, with an even more intense focus on low-achievers and little attention to anyone else.

While early advocates of “equal educational opportunities” wanted more poor students reaching high academic goals, not a change in these goals, supporters of the goal of social justice were quick to see an idiosyncratic and shrunken secondary curriculum (as content-free as possible), accompanied by changes in pedagogical practices and classroom organization, as a quicker means to their desired ends. If academic credentials (i.e., a college degree) are what promote social mobility, then what needed fairer distribution to get low-achieving groups moving upward were the credentials, not necessarily what they were designed to reflect.

The first step in facilitating a more equitable allocation of academic credentials was development of national standards in English and mathematics loosely tethered at the secondary level to their traditional content. That step was completed with the help of the Gates Foundation, which paid for the development, review, post-facto validation, and promotion of the reading and mathematics standards Common Core released in June 2010, and which also influenced the selection of most of the personnel involved. Public officials and the media were repeatedly told by the developers of the standards that they were research-based and internationally benchmarked, even though independent subject matter experts and researchers indicated this was not the case.[2] To clinch the first step, the U.S.D.E. ensured state adoption of these skills-oriented standards (about 45 states so far) with the lure of Race to the Top competitive funds.

The next crucial step is the development of tests based on Common Core’s standards and the working out of important matters such as the quality and difficulty of the test items and the level of the passing scores. The U.S.D.E. is funding and supervising this step directly. So far as we now know, the U.S.D.E. also wants, in a re-authorization of NCLB, schools to ensure that all their high school graduates are “college ready” as determined by the passing score on high school level tests. If so, schools will be held accountable for a greater utopian reach than was expected in 2001.

Efforts are already underway to make sure that all “college ready” students can be successful in their freshman college courses. Public colleges are being asked to “align” entrance requirements and the content of freshman courses to Common Core’s secondary standards, not the other way around. And, to ensure that “college ready” students can graduate from a college degree program in record time, all of their freshman courses must be credit-bearing, not tagged as remedial. (Otherwise, these students could not be called “college ready.”)

This means, in effect, that those who pass the national high school tests, which are to be first given at the end of grade 10, can go right to a college that accepts them and earn college credit for the content of the grade 11 or 12 courses they skipped, if the content is deemed necessary for their degree program.

Does anyone doubt that public colleges will be under pressure to admit “college ready” students and produce equal group outcomes in retention and graduation rates? Like high school teachers, public college instructors will find it in their interest to produce equal group outcomes no matter how the outcomes are related to the content of what individual students know.

Once upon a time, making students “college ready” meant strengthening, not weakening, the high school curriculum. Selective colleges in the U.S. will likely be able to fill their freshman classes with students from schools in, say, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. But how long can any modern society sustain itself if it ignores both the intellectual and civic goals of public education and believes that able students come only in a few colors.

[1] http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_HanushekPetersonWoessmann.pdf

[2] See http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/college-and-career for a critical review of the research base for Common Core’s standards, by Diane Ravitch and William Mathis for the National Education Policy Center.

See also the letter sent by Sandra Stotsky explaining why, as a member of the Validation Committee, she could not sign off on the final draft of Common Core’s secondary English language arts and reading standards, at http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/docs/0710/item1.html?printscreen=yes&section=stotsky;

See also Appendix B, an analysis by mathematician R. James Milgram of the problems he sees in the final draft of Common Core’s mathematics standards, at http://www.pioneerinstitute.org/pdf/common_core_standards.pdf

6 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Educationist View of Math Education

January 23, 2011

(Guest post by Barry Garelick)

In Jay Greene’s recent blog post, “The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism,” he points out that Vicki Phillips, head of education at the Gates Foundation misread her Foundation’s own report.  Jay’s point was that Vicki continued to see what she and others wanted to see: “‘Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests.’ Science had produced its answer — teachers should stop teaching to the test, stop drill and kill, and stop test prep (which the Gates officials and reporters used as interchangeable terms).”

I was intrigued by the education establishment’s long-held view as Jay paraphrased it.  This view has become one of the “enduring truths” of education and I have heard it expressed in the various classes I have been taking in education school the last few years.  (I plan to teach high school math when I retire later this year).  In terms of math education, ed school professors distinguish between “exercises” and “problems”.  “Exercises” are what students do when applying algorithms or routines they know and can apply even to word problems. Problem solving, which is preferred, occurs when students are not able to apply a mechanical, memorized response, but rather have to apply prior knowledge to solve a non-routine problem.  Moreover, we future teachers are told that students’ difficulty in solving problems in new contexts is evidence that the use of “mere exercises” or “procedures” is ineffective and they are overused in classrooms.  One teacher summed up this philosophy with the following questions: “What happens when students are placed in a totally unfamiliar situation that requires a more complex solution? Do they know how to generate a procedure?  How do we teach students to apply mathematical thinking in creative ways to solve complex, novel problems? What happens when we get off the ‘script’?”

As someone who learned math largely though mere exercises and who now creatively applies math at work, I have to question this thinking. I believe that students’ difficulty in solving new problems is more likely to be because 1) applying prior knowledge to new or non-routine problems is hard for everyone, and 2) it is even harder for students who may lack the requisite knowledge and/or mastery of skills—not because they possess such knowledge and mastery.   So while the educationists distinguish between “exercises” and “problems”, the view refuses to distinguish between novices and experts.

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist who teaches at the University of Virginia, finds the distinction between novice and expert to be quite important.  He maintains that it takes time and effort for knowledge to accumulate to the point that connections between learned material and new and difficult problems can be made.  Willingham refers to the difficulty that novices have with thinking critically as “inflexible thinking.”  In fact, he characterizes such difficulty as perfectly normal and to be expected among students.  Willingham argues that understanding the deep structures of a discipline such as mathematics is an important goal of education, “but if students fall short of this, it certainly doesn’t mean that they have acquired mere rote knowledge and are little better than parrots.” Rather, they are making the small steps necessary to develop better mathematical thinking. Simply put, no one leaps directly from novice to expert.

I was therefore extremely interested to see the sample problem of the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics (BAM) in Appendix 1 of the Gates Foundation’s preliminary report. The BAM is to be used to assess teacher effectiveness and according to the Gates Foundation’s preliminary report, “In comparison to many other assessments, BAM is considered to be more cognitively demanding and measures higher order reasoning skills using question formats that are quite different from those in most state mathematics achievement tests. There is also some evidence that BAM is more instructionally sensitive to the effects of reform-oriented instruction than a more traditional test (ITBS).”

The sample problem is reproduced below and is from the 8th grade mathematics assessment:

The diagram makes it clear how one is to count the number of tiles needed, so the first question is relatively easy.  Question 2 requires more thought, and the student must be able to extend the counting algorithm for the 4ft pond in question 1 to ponds of other sizes; i.e., they must understand that 4 is added to the product of the number of one foot long squares that fit on one side of the pond times 4, or 4n + 4 where n is the length of one side of the square pond in feet.

There are four additional questions that become increasingly difficult:  “How many paving stones are needed to surround a fish pond that is 20 feet by 20 feet?”, “Chris has 48 paving stones.  Find the size of the largest square pond the paving stones can surround.”  “The garden center sells many different sizes of square fish ponds. Write down a rule that will help Chris figure out how many paving stones are needed to surround square  ponds of different sizes.”  “The garden center decides to sell rectangular ponds.  Find a rule that will help Chris figure out how many paving stones are needed to surround rectangular ponds of different sizes.”

This set of questions is fairly challenging to beginning algebra students. (It is even more challenging if they have had no algebra at all, but since this is a problem for 8th grade students, I am assuming that they have had some experience with algebraic expressions and equations. This is not always a safe assumption but that’s a topic for another article.) The sample problem is illustrative of the type of problem that the education community deems coach-proof since it appears that memorization of problem solving techniques and “drill and kill” exercises will not work here.  But in fact, practice with some exercises would help students in tackling such a problem—specifically, having students express in mathematical terms certain situations described in English.  For example, “Three more than two times what John’s age will be in five years” (3 + 2(x + 5) ).  These types of exercises are frequently deemed by the education establishment to be inauthentic and irrelevant to the deeper underlying concepts of math unlike “reform oriented instruction” which purportedly provides such deep understanding through so-called authentic problems and a minimum of “exercises”.

Interestingly, the TIMSS exam—an international exam given every three years—also contains questions of this sort, as well as more straightforward problems.  For comparison’s sake, I looked at TIMSS eighth grade questions in algebra (found at http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/TIMSS8_Math_ConceptsItems_2.pdf ) and found a similar type of problem:

This problem requires students to understand and ultimately express the relationship between the number of smaller squares on each side of the larger square, and the number of triangles contained in the square.  Question C, in fact, requires the student to be able to express the relationship mathematically in order to calculate the number of triangles.  The TIMSS report in which this appears provides some interesting data related to this question; namely the percent of students taking the test in each country that obtained the correct answer:

The top five scoring countries for this question ranged from 44 to 49% correct.  For the more straightforward problems the top five scores tend to be in the 70 and 80 percent range.   The US students obtained 19 percent correct for this problem; on more straightforward problems, the US scores in the 50 and 60 percent range. Thus, for all students, regardless of country, non-routine problems prove to be difficult.  Of interest, however, is that the five top scoring countries for this particular problem are Asian,  frequently criticized for using drilling and “inauthentic” exercises which they maintain do not properly prepare students for solving non-routine problems.

If Vicki Phillips’ statement about teaching to the test is any indication, however, the educational establishment will see what they want to see.  They will likely proclaim that the higher scores obtained by Asian countries on non-routine problems serves as evidence that the Asian countries use “reform-oriented instruction”.  Either that, or they’ll shrug their shoulders and say “It’s the culture; what can you do?”  (See http://www.educationnews.org/commentaries/104502.html )

In any event, whether the education establishment realizes it or not, the new generation of coach-proof tests that will be used to evaluate teachers, appear to be measuring the skills students are expected to be learning.  And by teaching what should be taught, teachers are teaching to the test, whether the Gates Foundation and its look-alikes realize it, like it, or not.

BIO: Barry Garelick is an analyst for a federal agency and is cofounder of the U.S. Coalition for World Class Math. (http://usworldclassmath.webs.com/ )  He plans to teach math later this year.

9 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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