Archive
We Can’t Learn From Failures We Don’t Know About: Report Showing The Test-and-Punish Regimen Beloved by Reformers Cost Billions, Accomplished Nothing.
I entered the phrase “Move fast and break things” into Goggle and got this explanation:
“Move fast and break things” is a saying common in science and engineering industries. In that context, it means that making mistakes is a natural consequence of innovation in a highly competitive and complex environment.
“Move fast and break things” was one of several mantras thrown in the face of educators in the early 2000s as a wave of disruptive change swept through public education. Charter schools and No Child Left Behind were rooted in the notion that if public schools were subjected to market forces, freed from regulations, and measured with precision using standardized tests they would improve over time. Like corporations in the private sector, they could systematically examine the results of their counterparts, identify the practices and elements of instruction that were “successful” in boosting test scores, and replicate them in their own schools. To help them in this mission, the federal government would offer competitive grants.
As one who immediately and urgently argued against this idea when it was presented in the form of Race to the Top, I was not surprised to learn of it’s abject failure as a strategy. But as one who believes that it is possible AND necessary to learn from mistakes, I was disappointed to learn of its documented failure from a recent Common Dreams article by Diane Ravitch. Ms. Ravitch’s devastating critique of Race to the Top ends with these paragraphs:
What NCLB, Race to the Top, and SIG demonstrated was that their theory of action was wrong. They did not address the needs of students, teachers, or schools. They imposed the lessons of the non-existent Texas “miracle” and relied on carrots and sticks to get results. They failed, but they did not prove that money doesn’t matter.
Money matters very much. Equitable and adequate funding matters. Class size matters, especially for children with the highest needs. A refusal to look at evidence and history blinds us to seeing what must change in federal and state policy. It will be an uphill battle but we must persuade our representatives in state legislatures and Congress to open their eyes, acknowledge the failure of the test-and-punish regime, and think anew about the best ways to help students, teachers, families, and communities.
The findings of the report were devastating, not only to the SIG program, but to the punitive strategies imposed by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which together cost many more billions.
Worse, as future blog posts will indicate, we just came away from a once in a generation opportunity to rethink the way we provde schooling, the way we measure “success” in schools, and the way we pay for schools and, in part because this refusal to look at evidence and history is blinding us to the changes we need to make if we ever hope to improve the ultimate goal of public education: to provide every child with an equitable opportunity to thrive in our democracy.
NYTimes David Leonhardt Continues to Disappoint by Reinforcing the Bipartisan Support for Test and Punish
I subscribe to “The Morning”, David Leonhardt’s daily newsletter from the NYTimes that offers an overview of the news of the day. As readers of this blog may recall, I often found myself in disagreement with Mr. Leonhardt’s perspectives on public education, particularly his sustained and continued support for the “reform” movement that swept the country following No Child Left Behind. Here’s an excerpt from today’s newsletter that was especially disappointing given all that has transpired over the past two decades:
One example: Democrats are not the only ones with constructive ideas about education. Republicans sometimes put more emphasis on school accountability, while Democrats assume — incorrectly — that adequate funding ensures high quality. If the two parties were negotiating over a bill, it might include a mix of both sides’ best ideas.
I invite readers to click on the link… and read an article from 2004 that offers the conclusion:
The accountability mechanism implemented by the No Child Left Behind Act highlights the use of standardized test scores to measure education quality. Although such scores may be imperfect measures of education quality, their use is meant to shift attention to outcomes and to avoid reliance on input measures, such as student-teacher ratios or spending per pupil. Some economists believe this is important because an accountability system opens the door for additional reforms that would help provide parents and school officials with the right incentives to make socially optimal choices on education investment.Incentives based on students’ outcomes are more likely to be effective and to have a long-term impact on academic achievement than the incentives provided by merely increasing spending in education.
This implies that these scores, which the author acknowledges are “…imperfect measures of education quality” are nevertheless important tools for parents to make socially optimal choices on education investment.
Here’s my question for David Leonhardt: How on earth does one make an optimal choice based on a set of imperfect quality metrics? He’s definitely had too many sips of the kool-aid of spreadsheet driven venture capitalists who, in an effort to find a cold objective metric settled on standardized testing. I would hope that the failure of this concept would have dawned on Mr. Leonhardt and the “reformers” after 16 years… but it appears that we will continue doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
NYC Chancellor Carranza’s Resignation Underscores the Insidious Link Between Standardized Tests and Segregation… and the Political Peril When That Link is Broken
I was dismayed to read that NYC Chancellor Richard Carranza submitted his resignation to Mayor De Blasio today. Despite the pushback he received from tabloids like the NYPost and many politicians and most affluent parents, he continued advocating for the end of the tyranny of standardized testing, tests that are used to ostensibly to dispassionately and objectively sort and select students based on their “merit”. Moreover, after some initial hesitancy he seemed endorse the community schools movement whose success and failure defied could not be readily identified by the conventional measures used in public education. In a system based on the premise that “choice” was the only way White parents would remain in the schools and “choice” was limited for those who scored poorly on standardized tests, Mr. Carranza stood firm in his opposition to the use of test scores as a gatekeeping mechanism because the effect of that system was the re-segregation of schools.
Unlike most businessmen, politicians, and parents, Mr. Carranza understood that standardized tests are not the ultimate metric. He understood that using a single standardized test to identify “gifted and talented” 4 year olds has no basis in psychometrics and led to highly stressed childhoods for any children who aspired to enter those programs, especially if the parents of those children saw the scores on those tests as evidence that their child might not get accepted to a “brand name” college or university. Mr. Carranza also understood that use of standardized tests to sort-and-select rising middle and high school students re-segregated schools in the city and rejected the notion that standardized test scores are a valid proxy for “successful schools”. This stance made him a pariah to those who wanted to maintain the status quo and an especially fearsome opponent to the parents who believed that high test scores were evidence of merit on the part of their children.
We’ve use standardized test scores to “measure” students from the time I entered elementary school in the 50s, to “measure” schools since the passage of No Child Left Behind, and— had the “value added mentality of Race to the Top prevailed, would be using them now to “measure” teachers. Standardized tests are not useful for any of the above. They are a crude measure of student performance in any content area, of no use in determining “school quality”, and are absolutely wrong for the purpose of measuring teachers. Yet they persist. Why? Because they are a cheap, fast, and seemingly exact means of setting normative standards for cohorts of students based on age.
Formative tests, the ones developed by independent publicly funded research-based organizations or classroom teachers, provide a means of determining if an individual student has mastered a skill. They are valuable for teachers to use to identify where an individual student is encountering difficulty and to explain to parents how their child is progressing in a particular content area. How an individual student compares to his ager cohorts is immaterial in the learning process. What is important that the student is mastering skills he or she will need to progress.
Using standardized tests for anything else is absurd. Maybe Richard Carranza’s departure will lead to a dialogue on this issue.
Vote even if you think it doesn’t matter…. and be grateful you still can!
Network Schools - Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for 