The Fordham Report Drinking Game

April 12, 2011

Next week the Fordham Institute is supposed to release a report that will attempt to explain their support for a nationalized set of standards, curriculum, and assessments while also embracing local control and federalism.  If past is prologue, I expect that they will attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable with a variety of oxymorons and otherwise empty phrases.

As a public service, I will try to ease the pain of reading this sort of DC edu-babble by suggesting a drinking game. Every time you see one of the phrases below in the forthcoming Fordham report, just follow the instructions:

Tight-Loose — The Fordham folks will say that they favor being tight on the ends of education, but loose on the means.  Never mind that dictating the ends with a national set of standards, curriculum, and assessments will necessarily dictate much of the means.  My instruction for the drinking game is that every time you see the phrase “tight-loose” you can take a shot of your choice.  We are loose about the means but tight on the requirement that you numb yourself to this edu-babble.

Smart-[Blank] — Every time you read a phrase beginning with the word “smart” such as “smart regulation,” “smart options,” or “smart accountability” (all phrases that have actually been used by Fordham) you will need to consume a Smartini, which is 1 part vodka, 1 part vermouth, and a splash of ginseng and gingko biloba.  The smart drink ingredients, ginseng and gingko biloba, don’t really make you smarter, but then again neither do empty slogans in think tank reports.

Common Core — Common sounds so nice and co-operative, as if all states happened to have the same standards in common by an amazing and voluntary set of circumstances.  In keeping with the true nature of the Common Core, down whatever drink the U.S. Department of Education and the Gates Foundation financially coerce you to consume while declaring “I do this of my own free will.”

Race to the Bottom — Fordham imagines that states and localities only “race to the bottom,” while we all know the national government guarantees that everyone is equally close to the bottom.  Every time you read this phrase “shotgun” a Pabst Blue Ribbon, which is as darn near the bottom as you can get.

Race to the Top — If only titles made things true, Race to the Top would be the opposite of racing to the bottom and would ensure the very best.  To remember the Orwellian manipulation of phrases like Race to the Top, drink a Milwaukee’s Best every time you see RttT.  It says it is the best, just like RttT says it is the top.

Marble Cake — This well-worn metaphor for the blurred responsibilities between federal, state, and local levels of government is likely to make an appearance in next week’s report.  Just to remind yourself that the Constitution does not contain such a blurred description of state and federal responsibilities, have a black and tan.  Yum.

Since we only suggest that you get loose without getting too tight, you may have to be lax in following the rules of this drinking game. Remember, drink and make education policy responsibly.

In the comment section please give me your over/under on how many times each of these phrases will appear. Nothing goes with drinking like some gambling.

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

Nationalized Education Nonsense

April 11, 2011

(Guest Post by Ze’ev Wurman)

The betamax post about national curriculum reminded me of two incidents that illustrate the dangers of a sweeping centrally controlled policy. Both have to do with NCLB and its laudable — in my opinion — goal of making sure states are testing all kids on grade-level material and cannot game the system by testing more challenging demographics on assessments with lower expectations.

First is the case of Idaho and Computer Adaptive Testing. In the early 2000s Idaho initiated a computer adaptive statewide assessment, under a contract with NWEA. It was educationally sound and on the cutting edge of testing. No longer were kids assessed on content their grade level expected, but on what they actually knew. The test did not have the large ceiling or floor effects that made typical annual state assessments insensitive to what was actually happening with the best and the worst students, and that caused the somewhat justified attacks on NCLB as targeting the “middle kids” and neglecting the large edges of the achievement distribution.

Yet this smart and educationally sound initiative ran smack into NCLB’s inflexible rules that demand that all kids at every grade level are tested on exactly the same content. ED also argued that because kids are tested on individually-tailored assessments, this doesn’t allow perfect comparison between various educational units (schools, districts, or even classes) as NCLB requires. Under strong federal pressure Idaho folded and replaced its excellent test with a more conventional and much less educationally helpful one. But the feds in Washington were happy. Some time later ED allowed Oregon to use CAT in its testing but only after Oregon committed to use only grade-level items in the test, neutering much of the advantage and flexibility of CAT. You can read about it here (p. 29-49), here (p. 1-2) and here, as well as the poignant recollections of an Idaho Assessment & Accountability Commissioner here.

The second case turns around one of California’s brightest success stories of math education reform. In 1997 California set for itself probably the most ambitious educational goal in the nation: to make Algebra 1 the target for all its eighth graders, the same as our leading international competitors in the Far East. California was wise enough to realize such a major change cannot happen overnight and it installed a system of incentives and supports that encouraged preparation and placement of algebra-ready kids, but discouraged the placement of  unprepared students, in algebra classes; unprepared students were encouraged to take another year of algebra prep in eighth grade. The system worked remarkably well and between 1999 and 2010 algebra taking by grade 8 quadrupled from 16% to 64%, with the fraction of proficient or advanced tripling between 2002 and 2010 from 11% to 32% of the cohort. More importantly, the achievement of minority and disadvantaged students increased at even higher rates during that period. By 2005 California also embarked on an effort to design a completely new program to assist even more students to prepare for algebra in grade 8 and in 2007 it adopted multiple series of innovative algebra-readiness texts developed by publishers at its request.

Yet, again, this successful and educationally brave effort ran smack into ED bureaucracy and its central-command mindset. In 2007 ED started to send Californian threatening letters (such as here and here) trying to force it to abandon its successful transition process and adopt Washington’s one-size-fits-all solution: either all eight graders will be tested on Algebra 1, or none will. ED pressure caused a battle to erupt in California between supporters and opponents of algebra in grade 8. A lawsuit ensued that stopped the successful program, and the cherry was ED fining California for non-compliance. The losers? California students and publishers, whose innovative algebra-readiness programs and textbooks languish on the shelves of their stockrooms.

It is worth noting that all the players in those events believed they were acting in the best interests of children. There are no evildoers in this story. What these incidents illustrate is what happens when centralized decisions are made in far-away Washington, DC, and the implementation is left to unaccountable bureaucrats.

1 Comment | instructional reform, school accountability | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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

Utah and New Mexico Pass A-F school grading

March 19, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The New Mexico legislature approved a proposal to grade schools A-F by a wide bipartisan margin late last night, providing a key reform win for Governor Martinez.  Utah passed a similar measure last week. Governor Sandoval has made school grading a key feature of his education agenda in Nevada, and Arizona passed the measure last year.

The Appalachia of the 21st century prophecy is not taking us here in the Southwest without a fight. At least, outside of California. Someone get Jerry Brown on the line stat!

3 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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

74.2

February 25, 2011

My colleague, Bob Costrell, has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal that tells you the one number you need to know to understand the dispute over collective bargaining and public employee compensation in Wisconsin.  It is 74.2.  That is how many cents the public pays Milwaukee Public School (MPS) employees for retirement and health benefits  for each dollar of salary.  The comparable figure for private sector employees is 24.3.

Bob explains exactly how benefits in Milwaukee could cost nearly as much as salary.  In short, it has to do with the fact that the public pays the employee as well as the employer contributions to the pension.  Teachers actually were given a second, additional pension by MPS.  And the public pays for the entire cost of a gold-plated health plan for current and retired employees.  All of this was obtained in collective bargaining negotiations.

Leave a Comment » | school accountability | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

How to Avoid Dumbing High Schools Down in Re-authorizing ESEA

February 22, 2011

(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)

President Obama wants all states to adopt Common Core’s standards for mathematics and English language arts and reading . He also wants states to use tests based on these standards in the re-authorization of ESEA. The feds are also funding development of not only these tests but also curriculum and instructional resources tied to these standards.  Despite the questionable legal basis for all of this, it is hard to find legislators commenting on the implications of the language the feds want in a re-authorized ESEA, perhaps because they have been mesmerized by the glib phrase that states should use standards “that prepare all students for college and career”?  Who would oppose that?  Yet, there are good reasons why Congress should remove wording in the re-authorization of ESEA that implicitly requires states to adopt or use Common Core’s standards, or leaves states no choice but to adopt or use them.

At present, states must report student scores yearly to USDE to show Adequate Yearly Progress.  States now use scores from state assessments based on their own state standards and cut scores.  However, most states’ standards and tests are of poor quality, embed low academic expectations, and do not allow comparison of results.  As a result, about 44 states have already adopted CCS as their own state standards (some enticed by the prospect of RttT funds), even though many fear the loss of local control of curriculum and instruction, and are worried about the costs they will incur from administering the high-tech tests USDE wants.   Beggars can’t be choosers.  USED promises to make the tests free to all states (though not the costs of administering them).  Texas, Virginia, Minnesota, and a few other states have not officially adopted the CCS because they judge their own state standards in math or reading to be better or also fear losing  local control of curriculum and instruction.

The USDE makes a reasonable case for standardizing academic expectations across all states and using the same tests across states to enable us to compare results. We have a highly mobile school population.  Having national standards and assessments sounds like the way to address 50 sets of mostly low quality standards and tests. However, national standards and tests do not necessarily lead to high academic expectations and a high-achieving population. Most countries already have national standards, but most do not have high-achieving students.  Much depends on the quality of their national standards and tests (as well as the quality of their teachers).  If standards and the tests based on them are not first-rate, they guarantee mediocrity for the whole country at the same time that they remove local control of curriculum and instruction.

The blackest mark CCS gets is for the low level of the academic expectations built into their definition of, and standards for, college-readiness.  Besides the legal questions, Common Core’s “college- and career-readiness standards” are not rigorous enough to prepare American high school students for authentic college-level coursework.  Nor can they make this country competitive in mathematics and science.  Despite the claims of the many organizations that were funded by the Gates Foundation to develop, praise, promote, and evaluate them positively, CCS are neither internationally benchmarked nor research-based.

Readers can find this out in critiques by independent researchers or content experts, such as Diane Ravitch and William Mathis’s report for the National Education Policy Center on the lack of a research base for CCS, R. James Milgram’s explanation of why, as a member of the Validation Committee, he could not sign off on Common Core’s mathematics standards; and (3) Sandra Stotsky’s explanation of why, as a member of the Validation Committee, she could not sign off on Common Core’s secondary English language arts and reading standards (all public documents).

It is not surprising that CCS do not prepare high school students for authentic college-level, credit-bearing freshman courses. They were shaped chiefly by the same special interests that gave us the poor state standards they were designed to replace. CCS were deliberately not built on the best state standards, those once in California, Indiana, or Massachusetts. The people who had shaped those standards were purposely kept at arm’s length.

Language for a re-authorized ESEA has not yet been finalized, but it will be hard for legislators to oppose using scores from tests based on “standards that prepare all students for college and career” for accountability.  How many legislators know that the only set of standards that would satisfy this wording would be Common Core’s?  Who remembers that state high school standards have never been designed to prepare students for credit-bearing college freshman courses.  Their legitimate mission has always been to prepare students for a meaningful high school diploma.

By law, a state test must be based on state standards. ERGO, those states that have not adopted CCS would be compelled to do so in order to use tests based on standards with such a description.  On the other hand, those 44 states that have already adopted CCS would feel compelled to use the common tests for financial reasons because the standards on which these tests are based are now their state standards and there are no other tests readily available. If states must use tests based on standards claimed to “prepare all students for college and career” in order to get their Title I money, USDE would end up in control of public education in every state in this country.

ESEA should give states a choice of the high school standards and tests they use for accountability–but insist that those they use are internationally benchmarked and research-based. Language could be inserted wherever needed to allow all states to use standards  and tests based on them that satisfy state high school graduation requirements so long as they are internationally benchmarked and research-based.  Such a qualification could be used instead of language requiring use of standards “that prepare all students for college and career.”  In this way, states would maintain control of curriculum and instruction and decide what tests satisfy their high school diploma requirements.  They may prefer objective end-of-course tests in algebra I, geometry, algebra II, U.S. history, chemistry, physics, and biology instead of “performance-based” subjective tests.  Policies built  into ESEA wording should strengthen, not weaken, the high school curriculum and prevent federal control of the content of public education.

5 Comments | school accountability | 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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »