Duncan, the Bizarro Ed Secretary

February 14, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Hammer’s National Standards Will Save Us!

February 6, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

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

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

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

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

But don’t worry!

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

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

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

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Posted by Greg Forster

Nationalization Train Starts Going Off the Tracks

December 19, 2011

Let the in-fighting begin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Choice Is Not Chaos

December 14, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

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

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

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

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

To revisit an old post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HT People vs State

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Posted by Greg Forster

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

December 13, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Rise of the Zune Monopolists

December 12, 2011

(Guest Post by Jim Stergios)

image002.jpg

“Understand, I am not for monopoly when we can help it,” Louis Brandeis said in 1912. “We intend to restore competition. We intend to do away with the conditions that make for monopoly.” (Wikipedia)

Brandeis had some inkling of what hare-brained schemes philanthropists could come up with. Remember the Simple Spelling Board Andrew Carnegie set up in 1906?

The New York Times noted that Carnegie was convinced that “English might be made the world language of the future” and an influence leading to universal peace, but that this role was obstructed by its “contradictory and difficult spelling.”

105 years later, Sam Dillon of The New York Times produced a terrific piece of journalism in a May 2011 Sunday article on the overweening ambitions of the Gates Foundation and its list of DC-based clients, vendors and trade organizations like the National Governors Association; the Chief State School Officers; the Fordham Institute; Achieve, Inc.; as well as the Gates Foundation’s strategy to leverage, really to drive, federal policy in the Obama Administration’s US Department of Education. In the May article, Dillon wrote:

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies…In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups…[The Gates Foundation] is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

Dillon continued:

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy…Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency.

Yup. The Gates Foundation and the enormous financial interests associated with the Washington education lobby have decided that the U.S., despite its 222-year history to the contrary, needs a nationalized K-12 education system. No matter that the arguments for it are flimsy:

  1. Nations with national curricula do better than ones without on international tests

    2. . Not true.

  2. The national standards raise the bar set by states. For some, for some it’s a wash, and for some it is a step backwards. Prominent researchers and subject experts (Stotsky, Wurman, Milgram, Porter and others) find the standards lacking in comparison to international benchmarks. Basically the Gates folks are setting up a community college readiness set of standards.
  3. The new national standards will give us the ability to craft better tests. No one knows. They are not complete. And we have no idea where proficiency levels will be set, whether they will build off of Massachusetts’ content frame or the frame of other state tests, which are more skills-based.
  4. The new national standards will be serious content-based standards. Uh, no. The fact that one of the Gates Foundation allies, the Council of Chief State School Officers, absorbed the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is more than a whiff of evidence to the contrary.
  5. The new national standards will save money. Implementation of the standards, through textbook purchases and professional developments, as well as technology and other actions necessary to implement the tests will cost tens of billions of dollars. States and localities will pay for 90 percent of this if history is any guide.
  6. The new national standards will improve accountability. The reset of state standards means a loss of longitudinal data on student performance and will take at least half a decade to amass. Again, without the knowledge of where proficiency will be set and what the tests look like, this is fanciful thinking.
  7. The new national standards will help improve teacher quality. Huh? Not sure how they came up with this one. Perhaps it will cure the common cold as well. The fact for Massachusetts is that the new national test and standards will undermine one of the “secret sauces” of the Bay State’s success: the teacher test (MTEL) is aligned with student tests and the standards to ensure that teachers are able to teach the materials required in the state test. We will now have to refight that battle with the unions based on the new national standards – and it will be a tough battle drawing in national lobby groups. That’s going to be hard to win.
  8. The new national standards will drive innovation. Yeesh. I hear this from virtual learning providers all the time. Of course, if you set one set of standards, then your product development is easier and less costly in the short run. But this is the Zune argument (see below) and it’s stupid. Think about this: Most of the countries with national standards (think Finland) are the size of a state in the U.S. and often relatively homogeneous. Instead we are forging standards for 53 million kids from very diverse backgrounds.

We need one set of standards as much as we need one exclusive operating software, one keyboard for the world, and one Zune. You remember the Zune, right?

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Thankfully, because consumers have the freedom to choose the products they buy, it got killed by the iPod. Curtis Cartier of The Seattle Weekly blog noted even this past March that the Zune, Microsoft’s signature paperweight, hasn’t seen a significant upgrade, or really anything in the way of marketing or promotion, in almost two years . . . No, really, they still make the Zune. I know, right? Microsoft bloodhound Mary Jo Foley writes at ZDNet about “Project Ventura,” a music- and video-based service that seems to be exactly what Zune and the Zune Store is, but thankfully, not the Zune.

Ventura, from what my tipsters tell me, is the name of a set of services being developed by Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices (E&D) unit. These services are focused on music and video discovery and consumption.

Wikipedia notes:

On October 3, 2011, Microsoft announced that it has discontinued all Zune hardware, encouraging users to transition to Windows Phone.

Aw, shucks. And I was waiting for the new and improved Zune. Just holding my breath. And I know we all have such high expectations for Ventura.

Then there is # 9. Experts creating the standards have built off state successes. That’s hardly the case with the Massachusetts standards or the California standards, which were among the best in the country. So, maybe they built off Bob Wise’s West Virginia standards, Gene Wilhoit’s Kentucky standards, Jeb Bush’s Florida, and Checker Finn’s Ohio state standards. These are all people who promote national standards. And their state standards were mediocre and worse. No wonder they look at the community college readiness standards as a step forward.

Make no mistake about it, this is an effort built from the mainframe developed in 1992 by Marc Tucker, then president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, who in his famous 18-page “Dear Hillary” letter called for

a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone,” coordinated by “a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by counselors “accessing the integrated computer-based program.

Such words may please Bill Gates, given his less than warm view of the liberal arts. The drive to nationalize education is so important to the DC lobbying crowd and the Gates Foundation that they are willing to overlook some “niceties,” such as the fact that it violates provisions in three federal laws (including the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the US Department of Education’s 1979 enabling legislation, and No Child Left Behind). Perhaps understanding the rule of law is a 20th-century skill.

Only this time, the DC advocates for this sort of educational lobotomy (which places workforce development above the formation of free citizens) have learned lessons from the past, when national standards efforts died off because they were done in the light of day. As Pioneer’s Jamie Gass noted a year ago in The Providence Journal:

When it comes to the national standards, the line dividing public officials and trade organizations has become so murky that Pioneer Institute recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence between state education officials and organizations like NGA, CCSSO, the Gates Foundation and the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It’s particularly unfortunate that public education is the setting for this circumvention of democracy and the public trust. Even as we teach our children about the sanctity of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, they watch adults develop ever-more-clever ways to brush aside the principles those documents exemplify.

Those comments are based on experience. A year after Pioneer submitted a basic Freedom of Information Act search of the national standards in Massachusetts we’ve received more delays and stonewalling than any concrete FOIA results.

What I want is a debate on the merits of this effort before we call the game over. And when we have that argument, the national standards folks lose. Consider the fact that in August the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an association of conservative legislators, debated the merits of model legislation to pull out of the national standards at their quarterly meeting in New Orleans. Given the fact that most state legislatures and legislators are Republican, this is an influential group.

At the last minute, as Kris Amundson of Education Sector noted, Jeb Bush wrote “to the ALEC delegates urging them to table the resolution.”

They did and instead set up a series of sessions debating the issue at the end of November in Scottsdale, Arizona. The debate was open and frank. And as Catherine Gewertz of EdWeek reported, and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation notes in her blog, the ALEC Education Task Force debated model legislation that would aid states seeking to “exit the national standards project and regain control over what is taught in local schools.”

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

National Standards Shows Cracks

December 5, 2011

Last week the education task force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) endorsed measures urging states to oppose adoption and implementation of the federally “incentivized” Common Core standards.  According to Catherine Gewertz at Ed Week:

A package of model legislation opposing the common standards gained ground yesterday at the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The organization’s education task force approved the package, we learned from a couple of folks who attended those sessions of ALEC’s meeting this week in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Gewertz added that the measures do not become official ALEC policy until they are approved by the board of directors.  A similar proposal was proposed last summer by members of the education task force but was tabled until the recent meeting.  Allies of Jeb Bush and the long, gilded arm of the Gates Foundation pulled out the stops to block the measure and may yet succeed at the board level.

I fear that even if the measure is approved by ALEC’s board, the battle over adoption may effectively be finished.  An effort to repeal Common Core standards in Alabama failed despite the fact that the governor proposed the repeal and votes on the state board of education.   If you can’t repeal national standards in Alabama under such favorable conditions, it may be very hard to repeal it in any of the other 40-some states that have signed on.

But just because the adoption debate is winding down doesn’t mean the national standards war is over.  Far from it.  So far states have done the costless and non-constraining step of adopting a set of standards.  Once the nationalizers try to make the standards concrete and binding by incorporating them into newly designed high-stakes testing, we are likely to see a lot more resistance.  And adopting those new tests, revising teacher training, professional development, and textbooks to fit the national standards and testing will require considerable effort and expense — causing more states to rethink their initial support for Common Core.

The ALEC anti-Common Core measure will be important for mobilizing opposition as those next hurdles have to be jumped.  Even if the nationalization effort successfully runs this gauntlet, which they may do, the probability that national standards and assessments will actually produce the end goal — significantly improved student achievement over the long term — is near zero.  If nationally setting goals and ordering progress toward those goals were the path to success, the Soviet Gosplans would have produced their economic triumph over the West.  We all know how well that turned out.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

My Testimony on National Standards before US House

September 21, 2011

As I mentioned yesterday, I testified before the US House Subcommittee on Early Education, Elementary, and Secondary Education.  Here is the written testimony I submitted:

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for having me here to testify today.  My name is Jay P. Greene and I am the 21st Century Professor of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.  I am also a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute located at Southern Methodist University.

I am here today to talk with you about how we can best achieve high standards and improve outcomes in education.  There is a large effort underway to change educational standards, curriculum, and assessments by centralizing the process.  This effort is based on the belief that we will get more rigorous standards and better student outcomes if standards, curriculum, and assessments are determined, or at least coordinated, at the national level.  It began with the use of Race to the Top to push states to adopt the Common Core standards, but will also require national curriculum and assessments to be fully implemented.

I believe this centralized approach is mistaken.  The best way to produce high academic standards and better student learning is by decentralizing the process of determining standards, curriculum, and assessments.  When we have choice and competition among different sets of standards, curricula, and assessments, they tend to improve in quality to better suit student needs and result in better outcomes.

One thing that should be understood with respect to nationalized approaches is that there is no evidence that countries that have nationalized systems get better results.  Advocates for nationalization will point to other countries, such as Singapore, with higher achievement that also have a nationalized system as proof that we should do the same.  But they fail to acknowledge that many countries that do worse than the United States on international tests also have nationalized systems.  Conversely, many of the countries that do better than the United States, such as Canada, Australia, and Belgium, have decentralized systems.  The research shows little or no relationship between nationalized approaches and student achievement.

In addition, there is no evidence that the Common Core standards are rigorous or will help produce better results.  The only evidence in support of Common Core consists of projects funded directly or indirectly by the Gates Foundation in which panels of selected experts are asked to offer their opinion on the quality of Common Core standards.  Not surprisingly, panels organized by the backers of Common Core believe that Common Core is good.  This is not research; this is just advocates of Common Core re-stating their support.  The few independent evaluations of Common Core that exist suggest that its standards are mediocre and represent little change from what most states already have.

If that’s true, what’s the harm in pursuing a nationalized approach?  First, nationalized approaches lack a mechanism for continual improvement.  Given how difficult it is to agree upon them, once we set national standards, curriculum, and assessments, they are nearly impossible to change.  If we discover a mistake or wish to try a new and possibly better approach, we can’t switch.  We are stuck with whatever national choices we make for a very long time.  And if we make a mistake we will impose it on the entire country.

Second, to the extent that there will be change in a nationalized system of standards, curriculum, and assessments, it will be directed by the most powerful organized interests in education, and probably not by reformers.  Making standards more rigorous and setting cut scores on assessments higher would show the education system in a more negative light, so teachers unions and other organized interests in education may attempt to steer the nationalized system in a less rigorous direction.  In general, it is unwise to build a national church if you are a minority religion.  Reformers should recognize that they are the political minority and should avoid building a nationalized system that the unions and other forces of the status quo will likely control.

Third, we are a large and diverse country.  Teaching everyone the same material at the same time and in the same way may work in small homogenous countries, like Finland, but it cannot work in the United States.  There is no single best way that would be appropriate for all students in all circumstances.

I do not mean to suggest that math is different in one place than it is in another, but the way in which we can best approach math, the age and sequence in which we introduce material, may vary significantly.  As a concrete example, California currently introduces algebra in 8th grade but Common Core calls for this to be done in 9th grade.  We don’t really know the best way for all students and it is dangerous to decide this at the national level and impose it on everyone.

I understand that there is great frustration with the weak standards, low cut-scores, and abysmal achievement in many states.  But this problem was not caused by a lack of centralization and cannot be fixed by nationalizing standards, curriculum, and assessments.  Instead, the solution to weak state results is to decentralize further so that we increase choice and competition in education.  If school systems have to earn students and the revenue they generate, they will gravitate toward more effective standards, curriculum, and assessments.

This decentralized system I am describing of choice and competition producing improvement is not purely theoretical.  It actually existed in the United States and helped build an education system that was the envy of the world.  Remember that public education was not created by the order of the national government.  Local communities built their own schools, set their own standards, devised their own curriculum, and evaluated their own efforts.  At one time there were nearly 100,000 local school districts operating almost entirely autonomously.

When people became convinced that students needed a secondary education, these districts started consolidating to be large enough to build high schools.  No one ordered them to consolidate and build high schools.  They did it because they recognized that people would be reluctant to move into their community unless it offered a secondary education.  That is, in our highly mobile society people had choices about where to live and communities had to compete for residents and tax base by offering an education system that people would want.  Standards were raised and outcomes improved through this decentralized system of choice and competition among local school districts.

The progress we were making in education, however, stalled when we started significantly centralizing education and reducing the extent of choice and competition among districts.  The policies, practices, and funding of schools has increasingly shifted to the state and national governments and greater uniformity has been imposed by unionization.  The enemy of high standards and improving outcomes is centralization.

We can see this same process of setting better standards through a decentralized system in other domains.  For example, in the video cassette industry there were competing standards: Betamax and VHS.  If we had simply imposed a national standard through the government or by a committee of experts, we almost certainly would have ended up with Betamax.  Sony, the producer of Betamax, was larger and more politically powerful than the consortium backing VHS.  And experts were enamored with the superior picture quality offered by Betamax.  But instead we had a decentralized system of determining the standard, where consumers could choose which standard they preferred rather than have it imposed by the government or a committee of experts.  As it turns out, consumers overwhelmingly preferred VHS.  It was cheaper and the tapes could play longer videos.  Consumers were willing to trade-off a reduction in picture quality for the ability to watch an entire movie without having to get up in the middle to change tapes.  Centralized standards-setters can’t know the best way and impose it on everyone.  It takes a decentralized system of choice and competition for us to learn about the better standard and gravitate toward it.

In addition, if Betamax had been imposed by a centralized authority, we almost certainly would have been stuck with that technology for a long time.  We would have stifled the innovation that produced DVDs and now Blu-Ray.  Choice and competition not only allows us to figure out the best standard for today, but leave open the possibility that new standards will be introduced that are even better and that consumers may prefer those in the future.

There is an unfortunate tendency in public policy to stifle this decentralized process of setting standards.  Policymakers are often tempted to identify the best approach, often through a panel of experts, and then impose that approach on everyone.  After all, if something is the best, why would we want to allow people to do something else?  This is a temptation I urge you to resist in education.  Even the best-intentioned experts have a hard time recognizing what the best approach would be.  And once it is set by experts, there is no mechanism like the one we get from choice and competition for improving upon that whatever “best” standards, curriculum, and assessments are identified.  Essentially, what we are talking about is the danger of central planning.  It doesn’t work in running the economy any more than it would in running our education system.

Fortunately, the nationalization effort is still in its early stages and there is time for Congress to exercise its authority and preserve a decentralized system for setting standards, curriculum, and assessments.  I should emphasize that the movement toward a nationalized system has not been voluntary on the part of the states.  It was coerced by the U.S. Department of Education as a condition for receiving Race to the Top funds and I fear that coercion may be continued with the offer of selective waivers from No Child Left Behind requirements.

I hope that you will help restore our decentralized system of setting standards, curriculum, and assessments, which is a far more effective way of producing progress in student learning.

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

Testimony on National Standards, Curriculum, and Assessments

September 20, 2011

I’ll be testifying tomorrow (Wednesday) at 10 am ET in front of the US House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education on national standards, curriculum, and assessments.  You can go to the Education and the Workforce Committee’s web site to watch it live-streaming.

I’ll post my written testimony later.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Rick Hess Nails National Standards on Their Stealth Strategy

September 6, 2011

I’ve been complaining that the advocates of national standards, curriculum, and assessments have generally been unwilling to articulate and defend their view.

Rick Hess confirms the existence of this stealth strategy, given that Education Next has been unable to get a single expert to step forward and defend the rigor of the national math standards in a forum in the magazine.  Ed Next has asked six leading people and all have turned the offer down, complaining that they are too busy.  Rick isn’t buying it.  He writes:

I’ll be blunt: I don’t believe them. After all, the leading thinkers who have found the time to contribute to Ed Next forums have included such seemingly busy people as Richard Elmore, Kati Haycock, Diane Ravitch, Hank Levin, Andy Rotherham, Joe Williams, Rick Hanushek, Checker Finn, Jay Greene, Bruno Manno, Chris Whittle, Bryan Hassel, Eva Moskowitz, Susan Eaton, and Howard Fuller. Rather, I think the reluctance to contribute is due to hubris, impatience to focus on implementation, political naivete, and disdain for what they see as mean-spirited carping….

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

The notion that Common Core proponents needn’t make their case is an affront to democratic values. When seeking to make substantial changes to public institutions, the burden is supposed to be on the would-be reformers. After winning a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, civil rights advocates spent decades making and re-making the case for school desegregation. Charter school advocates have spent two decades arguing their case. That’s normal and healthy. The “we’re really busy now” stance of the Common Core-ites is akin to the NAACP having decided in 1956 that it had done plenty to make its case, that everyone understood its arguments, and that it should just buckle down and focus on “implementation.” It’s akin to charter advocates having decided in 1993 that they’d adequately made their case and could move on….

As I’ve said many times, I’ve much sympathy for the Common Core effort, but am skeptical that it will turn out well. To have even a shot at working as intended, this requires bipartisan support from a range of state officials and buy-in or acquiescence from educators, parents, and voters. If the Common Core’s architects are done explaining its virtues–if they think that eighteen months of explaining its merits to a moderately attentive audience of self-selected elites amidst tumultuous debates over health care reform and the stimulus is sufficient–and that everyone needs to just sit down and get with the program, then I feel comfortable predicting that this whole exercise will end real poorly.

Hmm.  I’ve been hearing a lot of predictions lately about the pending collapse of national standards.  Maybe the tide is starting to turn.

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

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